> Are your utterances here helping the cause of trans liberation, or hurting it?
I get that it's been a rough couple of weeks for trans people, and immigrants, and people who due import and export, and grant-writers--but perhaps you should take a moment to reflect on how comments like this reflect on you and trans people to the general populace (which is adjacent to the point made by the comment you were replying to).
All you had to write was "Do you think this state of affairs works for or against trans people?", or even "I'm not sure I understand which direction you're going with this, could you elaborate?"
Instead, you picked an us-vs-them phrasing and were shitty.
Let me give some blunt feedback:
Trans people (the ones that are clockable) are a relative novelty outside of urban areas, and most of the voting public (much as the gays faced before) don't have any familiarity with them outside of either: scaremongering from the conservatives and tabloids, excessively fawning presentation in movies and shows and liberal/progressive media, or spicy tweets and posts on Twitter and Facebook.
Normies don't really know about the boring, relatable parts of being trans--finding clothes that fit correctly, struggling to feel that your body is right, dealing with stupid bureaucracy that doesn't match your needs, being unable to get competent or affordable healthcare, looking for a partner that loves you for being you and not because of how you look or what they think you are. (You'll note: these are, modulo some biological issues, exactly the same things that they face too.)
The trans people aren't doing themselves any favors (especially the ones in tech, who are incredibly privileged and until recently inhabited a rarified atmosphere of good pay and performative catering) when interacting with normies, though. When people like you act like assholes it confirms every negative stereotype.
Honestly? It's exhausting. It's tiring. It's enough to drive away the allies and friendlies that aren't already getting driven away by those of you with personality disorders.
The trans friends and partners I've had that are decent and capable of relating on a normal level are vastly outnumbered by the catty, annoying, neurotic transgendered men and women I've encountered in my career and schooling.
Go on Mastodon, go onto the Fediverse, and tell me with a straight face that your average trans poster isn't at least as likely to be as toxic as somebody on Twitter. Go look at the self-congratulatory bullshit to own the MAGA folks...all the way up until the election that has so many of you freaking out. Go look at the immediate closing of ranks and decrying "transphobe! transphobe!" when one of your group does something shitty and gets called out for it--even when they deserve it.
If you want to know why the popular support for trans people isn't great, look in the mirror and consider if you want to double down on a losing strategy for behavior.
The current swing of the pendulum is not good, it is not kind, it is not entirely fair--but it sure as hell isn't inexplicable. Good luck to you in the coming years.
I'm aware that the vast majority of cis people have incorrect empirical and moral beliefs about trans people. I try to be kind and empathetic, and I have personally spent a lot of my time educating the cis people in my personal life (to some success). But the crisis we are in right now is created by cis people, not by trans people.
> I get that it's been a rough couple of weeks for trans people
Trans people are the most hated subgroup and were for years. Literal physical attack against them were going up for years now. It was not rough couple of weeks, it is systematic campaign of hate again and again and again.
> Trans people (the ones that are clockable) are a relative novelty outside of urban areas, and most of the voting public
The reason for that is violence they are and were targets of in those areas. It is also that if a kid outs itself as trans, they will likely be kicked off out of house. If not kicked, they will be mocked in those areas all the time.
> The trans friends and partners I've had that are decent and capable of relating on a normal level are vastly outnumbered by the catty, annoying, neurotic transgendered men and women I've encountered in my career and schooling.
And it did not helped those people at all. The hate is preexisting and has nothing to do with how trans actually act.
> If you want to know why the popular support for trans people isn't great, look in the mirror and consider if you want to double down on a losing strategy for behavior.
Hate for trans has nothing to do with what trans to. Conservative people feel massive disgust over crossing gender lines. It is that bad feeling they have when they hear the idea itself. And literal campaign of hate they themselves feed.
I used to go out in drag in Halloween before things got so polarized. Many people thought I had a great costume but I'd always seem some microexpressions of disgust enough to know I was doing something that wasn't completely safe.
I was very inclined to think positively of transgender people ten years ago but my own experience with them on Mastodon and in other places has led me to agree with the person you're replying to. It was when I started reading their words as opposed to reading about them in the media that I became more negative. People were sharing so many hateful memes on Mastodon that I had to put in a large number of filtering rules so that I can't see anything they post except for the hateful image memes that can't be filtered because the only text is in the filter.
It's almost as if some of these people have a fascination with assholes like Kiwi Farms and see it as a template for activism, like they build their whole lives and find all their meaning out of hating and being hated. See that "Witch Hunt of J.K. Rowling" podcast -- yes, there are jerks online who say horrible stuff like that to them, but that doesn't make it a righteous cause to that to other people; by fighting for territory that they couldn't defend they may have turned people against them and lost rights that they could have kept. They mirror the hatred and intolerance of the people they hate.
So I don't agree that "Hate for trans has nothing to do with what trans to (sic)" -- they do have to overcome some hate which is intrinsic but there is a lot which is a mirror of the hateful view that many of them have about the world.
Paul, I agree with most of the points you've raised in this thread and share your concerns about the way troubled people may be manipulated online in ways that make their problems worse. However I just want to caution you on the point of your experiences on Mastadon. As people in technology industries, it is natural for us to spend a lot of time online, particularly in places which are off the mainstream beaten path like HN, Mastadon, IRC, etc. But for much of the general public this isn't normal, they spend less time online and when they do go online it's usually in mainstream places like Facebook. People who are "very online" and off the beaten path, if not in a tech field, are very often people who have a lot of problems IRL and retreat to online spaces as a refuge of sorts. So there's a selection bias in play here, the trans people you encounter online, particularly outside of mainstream social platforms, are less likely to be socially healthy than the average trans person IRL.
In short, nerds and nutjobs are overrepresented online so any conclusion you reach about groups of people using experiences you've had online need to be taken with a massive grain of salt.
Hate toward trans predates mastodon tho. Where I live, it is very normal to make fun of trans and gays. It is simply accepted that they are disgusting. People who talked to me about trans being disgusting were definitely not reading mastodon nor any other trans bubble. Trans being killed for being trans and then local politician using the situation to push anti-gay legal agenda is a very real thing.
I do not think it goes both ways symmetrically, really. What I think is that any misconduct by any trans person is used as excuse to mistreat all of them. And when they do not do misconduct, well, it wont help them either.
The attacks toward trans last years were not about ugly memes on mastodon. It was literally about beer can having minor ad with trans person. It is about making gender affirming care illegal, full stop. It is about transsexuality itself being disgusting. It is about pushing polite respectful trans people out of any visible situation.
Like, OP complains about people not knowing relatable things about trans. But, if they are visible, say on beer can, the hate campaign is very very real. You cant harass someone for being visibly trans and then complain you do not know about day to day trans people.
I can say personally my feeling thermometer went from maybe 75 to 15 as a result of being on Mastodon and other online forums in the last tow years. I like trans people as individuals but I hate the movement. It's not the only place where that kind of negativity leaks out.
For instance the men's rooms in my building are stuffed with menstrual products for "men who menstruate" with a preachy card that talks about it in a reductive, narrow minded frame the same as the worst conservative Christians. This is for the benefit of 0.6% of the population at best, maybe 3 or 4 people benefit from it, out of 8 men's rooms in that building it is probably less than one person per bathroom.
It seems to me that this sucks all the air out of the room to discuss anything else. Young men are struggling. Maybe you only see the survivors in higher ed, but the K12 system is not built with boys in mind, particularly if you are in a racial minority, see
Instead of messaging aimed at, say, 20% of people who are struggling we get this stridently minoritiarian discourse that leaves many people feeling unheard, erased, and resentful.
> It seems to me that this sucks all the air out of the room to discuss anything else.
You understand that this state of affairs has been created by the bigoted side? I just want to live in peace and build stuff that makes the world better, not worry about the federal government coming after me and pretending I don't exist. Please try not to get so fooled next time.
No. This is the black and white thinking that I'm talking about. Yes, the federal government has deteriorated, but some of that is that progressives haven't had a message that reconciles the rights of 0.6% of people with many concerns that the 99.4% have
Start taking responsibility. Bigotry is a real thing but you can have a large impact on how other people treat you based on how you behave.
Organized transgenderists in my view have a reducivist, moralist, my-way-or-the-highway approach that initially exploited 'progressive' people who were inclined to think they were acting in good faith but are in the process of driving those people away. (I was really inclined to think of transsexual people positively because my best friend in college was a really awesome person who happened to be transsexual)
J.K. Rowling picked an issue where public opinion was far away from what transgenderists wish it was. (Where do violent sex offenders in prison get housed?) She thought the vast majority of transgender prisoners were safest in prisons that corresponded to their identity but that authorities had to have some latitude for people acting in bad faith.
She got jumped on because she agreed with them in most cases but not all.
Normal people will call you an ally if you agree on 7 out of 10 issues but organized transgenderists come across as people who will treat you as an enemy if you disagree about anything.
On some issues (workplace discrimination) public opinion is on the side of trans people. On other issues (sports participation) public opinion is the other ways. A year ago questions involving access to health care tended to split down the middle, the one recent poll I looked at seems to have moved far to the right in the last year on the issue of transgender care for minors.
A healthy political movement accepts that it's won on certain issues, that it can't win on other issues, and that there are some issues in the middle where you can persuade people and win.
On top of that there is the whole "egg hatcher" thing where you find there are people who are looking for people who "march to the beat of a different drummer" and sell transgenderism as an answer to their problems, almost certainly a false answer. If somebody knew their gender identity of a child I'm inclined to believe them (e.g. they certainly aren't going to change their mind based on whether people 'affirm' them or not) but if somebody discovered a variant identity as a teen I'm skeptical. As a schizotype
I am already frustrated with the bandwagoning of 'neurodivergence' by an autism industrial complex and an ADHD industry that pushes addictive medicine. Neurodivergent people are already 'bully magnets' and the last thing they need is to take on an identity which will get them further targeted and be surrounded by people who will reinforce their feelings of victimhood. (see 'impulsive nonconformity' in the article I link above)
I see the current movement as something that centers the activism of its enemies as a template for its own activism [1] [2] and that thrives on bigotry. It looks like a pernicious cult that is all about 'othering' other people and sees any and all pushback they get from people whether it is primary preexisting feelings of disgust, fear and hatred or the learned feelings of exasperation you might see on the face of a otherwise bleeding heart socially progressive HR manager who has just dealt with too many people who see a fascist under every bush and wants the whole cake yesterday.
[1] see anti-fascism
[2] transgenderists say it was OK to treat J. K. Rowling the same way Kiwi Farms treats them
> progressives haven't had a message that reconciles the rights of 0.6% of people with many concerns that the 99.4% have
It is an objectively true moral statement that minority rights ought not depend on majority opinion (that is the whole point of constitutionalism). To the extent that minority rights depend on majority opinion in reality, that is a deficiency of political systems. All of us exist in deficient political systems.
> if somebody discovered a variant identity as a teen I'm skeptical
What is your expertise in this matter? Why do you think your opinion is worth anything? People figure things out on their own pace.
If you think your opinion carries any weight here, you've been fooled.
> She got jumped on because she agreed with them in most cases but not all.
JK Rowling signed the so-called "Women's Declaration International" which has the exact same policy proposals as what Trump is doing. Again, you've been fooled.
> A year ago questions involving access to health care tended to split down the middle, the one recent poll I looked at seems to have moved far to the right in the last year on the issue of transgender care for minors.
Yes, because people's brains have been cooked through immersion in social media.
If you surround yourself with virtue, you will become virtuous. If you surround yourself with vice, you will become vicious. Social media rewards vice, so people have become more vicious.
> I am already frustrated with the bandwagoning of 'neurodivergence' by an autism industrial complex and an ADHD industry that pushes addictive medicine. Neurodivergent people are already 'bully magnets' and the last thing they need is to take on an identity
I have ADHD (according to my psychiatrist one of the most obvious cases they've ever seen), and autism, and I'm trans (both -sexual and gender). So I guess in your eyes I'm a bully magnet (??) who has taken on an identity (???????). In reality, despite the horrible discrimination, my neurodivergence gives me a pretty nonstandard insight into things, and an ability to explain concepts, that I've been able to turn into something valuable to others. (The last 4 technical blog posts I wrote were all front page on HN, with 100-300+ upvotes.)
This has nothing to do with paranoia or delusions. My work is valued for its correctness and attention to detail.
> It is an objectively true moral statement that minority rights ought not depend on majority opinion (that is the whole point of constitutionalism). To the extent that minority rights depend on majority opinion in reality, that is a deficiency of political systems. All of us exist in deficient political systems.
No constitution is an absolute guarantee of the rights of any minority. Constitutions contain roadblocks to slow down the majority when its desires conflict with the rights and interests of minorities, but a sufficiently determined supermajority retains the ability to overcome all those roadblocks. At the end of the day, almost all constitutions can be amended, even if with some difficulty – no matter how many constitutional provisions you have to protect minority rights, if the constitution can be amended, then those provisions can be altered or repealed.
The alternative is a constitution which is impossible to amend, no matter how large a supermajority of the population wants it amended. That's fundamentally antidemocratic, and could be described as a form of constitutional tyranny.
I should have said "interests" rather than rights, although one thing I know is that when this civilization collapses people will turn their back on everything it stood for and the idea of individualism and rights will be gone ("my carbon my choice"), the next culture will have a bill of responsibilities.
Sports is a clear example. Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.
On the other hand, there are many benefits to participation in sports. I don't want the state to decide who can play in what league. I want leagues to decide that. My school is part of club leagues where teams have a mix of men and women in them and I think there's a lot of room for innovation. Different leagues want different things: I want trans people to be able to participate in some sports, it's important.
J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.
As for social media, I deleted my Twitter account in 2016, I don't hang out in places with right wing nuts, rather I am on Mastodon and Bluesky with the left wing nuts. I need lots of filters to keep out hateful content posted by trans people on both of those platforms.
'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other. See [1]
It took me 40 years to get my diagnosis; I've had numerous psych evals and today I can get enough signs and symptoms to get a diagnosis looking at the first paragraph of any of them, even if that paragraph stated it was inconclusive.
I have a small amount of the thought disorder of schizophrenia, enough that I can't win at chess because I'll screw up. I max any test of verbal intelligence I take, I write long posts like this that have bizarre typos, the harder I try to fix them the more my keyboard turns into a Ouija board. On a bad morning I have a paranoia towards objects that seem to jump out and grab me. At one point of my life I was wrapped up in a system of delusions.
I also can do detail oriented work and systems thinking. (I've compensated for my condition very well) Sometimes my work is highly valued. Yet I graduated from elementary school the same way Ender Wiggin did. The child post of this one (where I tell the story of my son's incel and trans friends) [4] got upwards of 37 votes so "my opinion does hold some weight here" (But so does yours, and one difference between me and you is that I'm not going to tell you that your opinion has no weight)
Sometimes I feel angry that I wasn't served by the mental health community and that about 5-10% of the population is similarly underserved. On the other hand I was lucky that I was only under the spell of a charlatan for about 9 months of my life and I'm glad I didn't get drugged the way they wanted to drug me in school because a friend of mine who's the same age as me and did get drugged got all his teeth pulled at the age of 40 and might suffer from osteoporosis soon [2] [3] if he lives that long.
[4] My son's friend went through a period of near complete social isolation during the pandemic where just about the only person he talked to was an 'egg hatcher' for months. It is not a clinical study or even a case report but my son and I both have notes on our experiences of knowing this person from elementary school to the present day that we're going to consolidate and turn into a real write-up some day. I'm going to support this person as an individual to the maximum that I can because those are my 'family values', I can still think they're making a mistake.
> when this civilization collapses people will turn their back on everything it stood for and the idea of individualism and rights will be gone ("my carbon my choice"), the next culture will have a bill of responsibilities.
I agree that Americans don't think enough about their responsibilities. I fully support a bill of responsibilities paired with rights. Several countries have that kind of list already. They're not mutually exclusive.
> Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.
Yet women's sports are still second-class, outside of exceptions like tennis. Is it trans people who have caused women's sports to be second-class, or the patriarchy enforced by cisgender men?
FWIW, I think it's reasonable to require that trans women be on HRT for a while before playing professional women's sports. But categorical bans are horribly unjust—making a class of women inherently lesser. So yes, as a kind of woman, trans women ought to have the right to be on women's sports teams.
> J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.
True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.
I am a very firm believer that there is no free will. We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments. Social media creates extraordinarily bad environments.
> 'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other.
Well, no, it just makes it clear that (a) morality is objective and (b) societies are better when people are more virtuous. The solution is to not make people talk to or past each other, the solution is to effect environmental changes such that people are less exposed to vice and more exposed to virtue.
> Is it trans people who have caused women's sports to be second-class, or the patriarchy enforced by cisgender men?
Is there any possible other reason than these two things, do you think, for this state of affairs?
> making a class of women inherently lesser.
A sort of Morton's fork here would be that transwomen are lesser women because they have to assume that identity instead of starting there (to say nothing of the intuitive biological differences), or that women (and thus trans women) are lesser because they are a subset of the functionality offered by men (because they can be emulated by men choosing to do so). I don't particularly agree with either point, mind you, but both could be made. The trivial solution to avoid this is to simply acknowledge that trans women are neither men nor women (nor trans men) and are a category unto themselves worth valuing on their own merits and characteristics.
> True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.
If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place? Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?
> We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments.
If that's the case, it suggests something odious: there is no virtue in being trans--you're a medical and social anomaly, and if we can remove the factors that cause trans folks to occur all that suffering goes away in a generation or two and the system does better (on the metric of suffering).
And before you go off on how this is unethical or not virtuous or whatever, by your own assertion...
> I am a very firm believer that there is no free will.
...such a solution is admissible and without blame, because no moral agents would be involved in its occurrence.
(You don't get to claim there is no free will and then hold anybody accountable in any moral way. Morality does not exist unless free will does; otherwise, it's just the dull observation of iterated cost-benefit analysis and reactions to an environment.)
> The trivial solution to avoid this is to simply acknowledge that trans women are neither men nor women (nor trans men) and are a category unto themselves worth valuing on their own merits and characteristics.
The forcible third-gendering of trans women is one of the greatest crimes of the culture I grew up in, so I'd rather we move past all traditionalism entirely.
> If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place?
Constant exposure to virtue makes you more likely to be virtuous.
> Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?
See the obvious what? The normies are simply wrong about a lot of this.
> Morality does not exist unless free will does
This is simply false. Free will is linked to moral responsibility, not the existence of morals. How moral we are is out of our control (Thomas Nagle called this moral luck).
> The forcible third-gendering of trans women is one of the greatest crimes of the culture I grew up in, so I'd rather we move past all traditionalism entirely.
I think one issue is – do "man" and "woman" have some objective essence? I think most progressives would say "no" – that kind of essentialism is more associated with conservatives and traditionalists. But if "man" and "woman" don't have an objective essence, their definition is ultimately conventional – which means if different people want to define those terms differently, how can we say one definition is ultimately more right than the other?
That has a benefit for transgender people – if transgender people and their allies want to adopt trans-inclusive definitions of "man" and "woman", nobody can say they are objectively wrong to do so, if we accept these concepts are ultimately cultural constructs.
But then comes the downside – if conservatives and traditionalists (and various others, such as a significant number of radical feminists) want to adopt trans-exclusive definitions of those terms, how can we say they are wrong to do so? If these are cultural constructs and conventional definitions, as opposed to naming objective realities which exist independently of culture and language, how can one say their definition is objectively incorrect? It's just different.
Maybe the answer is a form of "live and let live": let progressive people have their spaces governed by their definitions, let conservative/traditionalist people have their spaces governed by theirs, and where the two have to overlap or intersect or coexist, try to find a way to be neutral between the competing definitions.
Of course, if you are growing up in one of those conservative/traditionalist spaces, and end up identifying as LGBT, that solution isn't exactly pleasant, at least until you become old enough to cross over to a space more welcoming to your identity. But I don't know what the alternative is. Progressives like to imagine that conservative/traditionalist viewpoints will eventually wither away and disappear, but looking at trends in the real world, it seems unlikely that dream will be fulfilled, certainly not in the lifetime of anyone currently alive. Finding a way to peacefully coexist seems preferable to interminable cultural and political conflict over the issue.
> I think one issue is – do "man" and "woman" have some objective essence? I think most progressives would say "no" – that kind of essentialism is more associated with conservatives and traditionalists. But if "man" and "woman" don't have an objective essence, their definition is ultimately conventional – which means if different people want to define those terms differently, how can we say one definition is ultimately more right than the other?
So "essence" isn't the right word, but there absolutely are affinities and anti-affinities towards gender in brain wiring, as reflected in people's internal psychology. There is no better explanation for the vast majority of people being cisgender, and having gender dysphoria when misgendered. The traditionalists are somewhat correct about this!
A lot of traditionalist freaking out about gender is extrapolating their own internal experiences onto everyone. Many cis people feel quite bad when they are misgendered! This is a commonality with trans people, not a difference.
> That has a benefit for transgender people – if transgender people and their allies want to adopt trans-inclusive definitions of "man" and "woman", nobody can say they are objectively wrong to do so, if we accept these concepts are ultimately cultural constructs.
But I am saying that the traditional model of gender is objectively wrong! Gender is not just a cultural construct, there is clearly an inherent aspect to it.
"Gender is binary and immutably assigned at birth" and "gender is entirely social" are two positions that are both incorrect in their own ways. The truth, as expressed in the modern scientific model of gender, is more complex. Gender is not binary, but there is quite clearly an inherent (likely biological) component to it -- otherwise HRT wouldn't have the psychological effects it does on trans people. There is also a social component: we are a social species, and our biologies and sociologies are intertwined.
> But then comes the downside – if conservatives and traditionalists (and various others, such as a significant number of radical feminists) want to adopt trans-exclusive definitions of those terms, how can we say they are wrong to do so? If these are cultural constructs and conventional definitions, as opposed to naming objective realities which exist independently of culture and language, how can one say their definition is objectively incorrect? It's just different.
Right. This is the downside of the kind of "model relativism" that you're describing. This is very explicitly not my position, and I think the progressives who have promoted this position have done a bad job. I'm saying that the traditional definition is objectively incorrect, in the sense that the traditional model doesn't describe reality nearly as well as the modern scientific model of gender. It's as incorrect as a belief that the sun revolves around the earth.
> Maybe the answer is a form of "live and let live": let progressive people have their spaces governed by their definitions, let conservative/traditionalist people have their spaces governed by theirs, and where the two have to overlap or intersect or coexist, try to find a way to be neutral between the competing definitions.
That is fine when the two definitions are equally correct. They're not! One is more correct than the other.
> Of course, if you are growing up in one of those conservative/traditionalist spaces, and end up identifying as LGBT, that solution isn't exactly pleasant, at least until you become old enough to cross over to a space more welcoming to your identity. But I don't know what the alternative is.
The alternative is to use objective reality, as determined by evidence and study using modern methods, to determine public policy. Traditional and religious beliefs should have no role here.
edit: I want to add that at a meta level, I believe relativism destroys credibility. One of my big issues with the left has been that people intuitively feel certain things are true, and if progressives show up saying "oh neither of us really are correct, live and let live," it's easy to stay attracted to traditionalism -- or even worse, descend into far-right paranoia. I think a much more robust response is "your intuitions aren't completely incorrect, but reality is more complicated -- our views are more correct than yours, because we have modern methods of learning on our side which are better than traditional ones." But this response really implies a scientific, evidence-based mindset. Inculcating that is a generational challenge, though one that must be done for society to survive.
> So "essence" isn't the right word, but there absolutely are affinities and anti-affinities towards gender in brain wiring, as reflected in people's internal psychology.
I have some scepticism about all this. There is evidence for some group differences in neurobiology between men and women, but they are group differences, they don’t operate at the individual level-meaning, for some brain features, there is a statistically significant difference in the male average and the female average, but the distributions are overlapping, so there are some males with brains at or near the female average, and vice versa.
There’s also some evidence that LGBT people are more likely to belong to those “overlapping” groups (males with brains closer to the female average in certain respects, and vice versa). But, again, it is a group rather than individual difference: not every person who has such an “overlapping” brain is LGBT, and not every LGBT person has such an “overlapping” brain-and we still can’t explain why. Plus, I don’t believe we have found any reliable biological difference between different LGBT subgroups (e.g. some gay cismen have rather ‘female’ neuroanatomy, as do some transwomen, but I’m not aware of any high quality evidence for distinguishing those two groups at a neurobiological level)
For most transgender people, we can’t point to any specific neurobiological factor as an explanation for why they are transgender. And even for the minority for whom there is something specific to point to, there will be other people who share that factor yet aren’t transgender, so that factor can’t be a complete explanation-and the rest of the explanation we just don’t know. All I think we can confidently say is that biological factors are in the mix, but we can’t rule out the possibility that psychosocial/sociocultural/etc factors also have some role to play-plus, the respective contributions of the biological vs the non-biological may differ from person to person.
Also, I don’t know if everyone actually has a “gender identity”. I mean, I don’t think I do. Yes, I have XY chromosomes with a typical male phenotype, a male-coded given name, my legal documents all say M, I’m married to a woman and father of two children with her, and I suppose “male” describes a social role I play. But, I don’t have some internal “identity” as “male”. Maybe this is an autistic trait, but deep down inside I don’t identify as anything at all. Well, maybe as pure consciousness, and everything else about me (including my sex/gender) is just a contingent chance accident of what that consciousness happens to experience.
> There is no better explanation for the vast majority of people being cisgender, and having gender dysphoria when misgendered.
Do non-trans people have gender dysphoria when they are misgendered? Some of them don’t really care. And even if a person reacts negatively, is that due to gender dysphoria? Or could it be they feel upset because you’ve got a fact about them wrong, and they might be just as upset if you’d got any other fact wrong instead? And even if they experience some special upset at being misgendered, how do we know that isn’t just due to cultural conditioning, as opposed to an innate psychological factor?
I’ve personally experienced being misgendered more than once, and my reactions have varied from amusement to irritation to equanimity, depending on how I was feeling at the time. But I don’t think those varied reactions convey any deep fact about “who I am”, and I’m not convinced any of those reactions had anything to do with gender dysphoria
> I think a much more robust response is "your intuitions aren't completely incorrect, but reality is more complicated -- our views are more correct than yours, because we have modern methods of learning on our side which are better than traditional ones." But this response really implies a scientific, evidence-based mindset.
The problem I see: I think there’s often a substantial gap between what the science actually says, and what people claim the science says (including even many scientists themselves, especially when addressing a lay audience.) I think when you look at the actual research, it is obvious that there are still massive gaps in our knowledge, along with widespread problems with replication, methodology, sample sizes, etc. It is obvious that biology has a significant role to play in issues of gender and sexuality-but saying much more than that involves rather high epistemic uncertainty. Yet a lot of the public discourse on this topic makes the scientific picture sound a lot firmer than it actually is. And I think many scientists think it is more important to publicly present the science as clearly supporting a progressive social agenda, than be completely open and honest about just how much we still don’t know, and how patchy the evidence actually is for some of the conclusions they endorse
> For most transgender people, we can’t point to any specific neurobiological factor as an explanation for why they are transgender. And even for the minority for whom there is something specific to point to, there will be other people who share that factor yet aren’t transgender, so that factor can’t be a complete explanation-and the rest of the explanation we just don’t know. All I think we can confidently say is that biological factors are in the mix, but we can’t rule out the possibility that psychosocial/sociocultural/etc factors also have some role to play-plus, the respective contributions of the biological vs the non-biological may differ from person to person.
I was careful to word that as "as reflected in internal psychology". I don't think we're going to pinpoint any specific pieces of brain wiring any time soon, but there are quite clearly profound internal psychological differences -- since supernatural phenomena don't exist, they must be either due to internal brain wiring or another property of the internal body, or due to social factors, or a mix of both.
A survey I've done of trans people near me is whether they'd still want to transition on a desert island. Some say no, but the vast majority say yes. To me, this demonstrates that there's at least some inherent characteristic at play.
> Also, I don’t know if everyone actually has a “gender identity”. I mean, I don’t think I do. Yes, I have XY chromosomes with a typical male phenotype, a male-coded given name, my legal documents all say M, I’m married to a woman and father of two children with her, and I suppose “male” describes a social role I play. But, I don’t have some internal “identity” as “male”. Maybe this is an autistic trait, but deep down inside I don’t identify as anything at all. Well, maybe as pure consciousness, and everything else about me (including my sex/gender) is just a contingent chance accident of what that consciousness happens to experience.
Strength of internal gender identity does vary -- agender people demonstrate that. But would you be able to transition (especially medically) and live day in and day out as a woman?
Dr Will Powers, a cis male, has a description of how taking an excessive dose of estrogen gave him gender dysphoria for days [1].
David Reimer, another cis male, was forcibly transitioned by his doctor after a botched surgery as an infant [2]. He suffered lifelong dysphoria as a result, and tragically took his own life at a young age.
What trans people go through is quite similar to what these people went through, just in reverse. Reimer was lied to about his gender for years, which led to tremendous distress. Trans people are falsely informed (though not as a lie since this isn't intentional at first) about their gender for years, which also leads to tremendous distress. A lot of people want to openly and proudly lie about it, in a way that is documented to cause distress.
> Do non-trans people have gender dysphoria when they are misgendered? Some of them don’t really care. And even if a person reacts negatively, is that due to gender dysphoria? Or could it be they feel upset because you’ve got a fact about them wrong, and they might be just as upset if you’d got any other fact wrong instead? And even if they experience some special upset at being misgendered, how do we know that isn’t just due to cultural conditioning, as opposed to an innate psychological factor?
Gender culture is created primarily by cis/het people, so it's hard to separate the two out. Being upset at misgendering is a cross-cultural phenomenon -- I've asked cis people across American, European and a couple different Asian cultures about this.
> The problem I see: I think there’s often a substantial gap between what the science actually says, and what people claim the science says (including even many scientists themselves, especially when addressing a lay audience.) I think when you look at the actual research, it is obvious that there are still massive gaps in our knowledge, along with widespread problems with replication, methodology, sample sizes, etc. It is obvious that biology has a significant role to play in issues of gender and sexuality-but saying much more than that involves rather high epistemic uncertainty.
To be clear, we don't actually need to know the causes of some people being trans. There is a vast amount of scientific evidence regarding the efficacy of gender-affirming care (astonishingly low regret rates!) [3], and anthropological evidence that every society with a recorded history has had some notion of gender variance [4]. It also tracks with my own experience transitioning after spending years detached from my body [5].
> Yet a lot of the public discourse on this topic makes the scientific picture sound a lot firmer than it actually is. And I think many scientists think it is more important to publicly present the science as clearly supporting a progressive social agenda, than be completely open and honest about just how much we still don’t know, and how patchy the evidence actually is for some of the conclusions they endorse
What specific conclusions is the evidence patchy for, in a way that distinguishes GAC specifically? The evidence is often observational rather than RCT, but that's because RCTs are impossible when changes are visible within days. There is less evidence for pediatric care than for adult care, but extrapolating from adult to pediatric care is very common across all of medicine. (Some reports like the one by Cass claim otherwise, but they have a number of shockingly incorrect statements which indicate a lack of basic familiarity with the field [6].) The evidence is often based on self-reporting, but that's true for many other interventions as well, like when I fill out a DASS-21.
[4] Again, not an endorsement of the particular gender structures of each society -- many of them forcibly third-gendered all trans people, which is a kind of misgendering like any other.
[6] https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/0... -- for example, p. 14 has the statement "medication is binary", which is plainly false. There are several ways to medically transition in a non-binary manner, and every doctor in the field knows about them. The fact that a statement like this made it all the way to publication calls into question the basic competence of the people involved. The statement is quite material as well, since it essentially makes the argument that nonbinary people may not want to medically transition. Maybe, but certainly not based on the false idea that medical transition is binary.
Women's sports just took time. I do sports photography for a lot of events which gives me some input for an opinion.
When it comes to soccer at Ithaca College the men play a very physical but kinda stupid game which has a lot of hard running and kicking and headers but very little sense of space. The women play much smarter soccer that looks more like good pro soccer, where, ideally everybody knows where their team mates are supposed to be and what to do to confound the opposition. More people turn up for a women's game in the rain than turn up for a men's game in the shine. They're both entertaining in their own way.
At Cornell I think the men play better than the women categorically but that's not about men or women, it's about the coaching staff, the recruiting, the priorities of the schools, etc.
Last Friday I went to a double header of women's and men's basketball at IC. The women's game was unequal but I was focused on getting good shots of the players and not thinking about the quality of the play. One of the men from the away team promised me that if I stuck around I'd see a much more entertaining game, I said I wouldn't miss it. It was 12-0 for Ithaca at the beginning so I was getting worried they wouldn't come but Hobart did and it was like 63-60 at the end. Side by side the men were so much bigger, so much faster, so much more intense. Still I like the competition and teamwork of women's ball and would rather show up in person at any college game of either gender and watch the NBA on TV.
I think time will tell what's right about fair competition, in the meantime women's soccer and basketball at the pro level is becoming a big business in the US.
In my mind 'patriarchy' is a thought stopping word. We picture the Hebrew god as an old man on a throne with a beard. One take on it is that it's got nothing to do with woman at all except as tokens, it's really a game of status where young men and poor men are dominated by rich men and old men. It's particularly harmful when it comes to discussing the 'incel' phenomenon which mainly affects straight men (slightly more likely to be black or asian!) but also affects women and gay men.
People like J K Rowling don't have a choice but to get cooked by right wing social media because there isn't a sensible discourse from the left.
I do believe in free will. If you think moral agency matters, you have to believe we have a choice. I think genes and epigenetics matter more than people want to admit and hell yeah there are bad environments. But in the end you've got a choice. The 'bad' thing I see is not so much virtue or vice but more like inflammation, as in the medical condition.
I get that it's been a rough couple of weeks for trans people, and immigrants, and people who due import and export, and grant-writers--but perhaps you should take a moment to reflect on how comments like this reflect on you and trans people to the general populace (which is adjacent to the point made by the comment you were replying to).
All you had to write was "Do you think this state of affairs works for or against trans people?", or even "I'm not sure I understand which direction you're going with this, could you elaborate?"
Instead, you picked an us-vs-them phrasing and were shitty.
Let me give some blunt feedback:
Trans people (the ones that are clockable) are a relative novelty outside of urban areas, and most of the voting public (much as the gays faced before) don't have any familiarity with them outside of either: scaremongering from the conservatives and tabloids, excessively fawning presentation in movies and shows and liberal/progressive media, or spicy tweets and posts on Twitter and Facebook.
Normies don't really know about the boring, relatable parts of being trans--finding clothes that fit correctly, struggling to feel that your body is right, dealing with stupid bureaucracy that doesn't match your needs, being unable to get competent or affordable healthcare, looking for a partner that loves you for being you and not because of how you look or what they think you are. (You'll note: these are, modulo some biological issues, exactly the same things that they face too.)
The trans people aren't doing themselves any favors (especially the ones in tech, who are incredibly privileged and until recently inhabited a rarified atmosphere of good pay and performative catering) when interacting with normies, though. When people like you act like assholes it confirms every negative stereotype.
Honestly? It's exhausting. It's tiring. It's enough to drive away the allies and friendlies that aren't already getting driven away by those of you with personality disorders.
The trans friends and partners I've had that are decent and capable of relating on a normal level are vastly outnumbered by the catty, annoying, neurotic transgendered men and women I've encountered in my career and schooling.
Go on Mastodon, go onto the Fediverse, and tell me with a straight face that your average trans poster isn't at least as likely to be as toxic as somebody on Twitter. Go look at the self-congratulatory bullshit to own the MAGA folks...all the way up until the election that has so many of you freaking out. Go look at the immediate closing of ranks and decrying "transphobe! transphobe!" when one of your group does something shitty and gets called out for it--even when they deserve it.
If you want to know why the popular support for trans people isn't great, look in the mirror and consider if you want to double down on a losing strategy for behavior.
The current swing of the pendulum is not good, it is not kind, it is not entirely fair--but it sure as hell isn't inexplicable. Good luck to you in the coming years.