Based on the reaction from defenders of the new gender orthodoxy, you would have thought Bailey were a Cossack leader announcing a pogrom. “This is frightening and nasty. There is no LGB without the T,” tweeted Owen Jones, who is perhaps Britain’s best-known gay journalist. (This is not new behaviour for Jones, who often starts pile-ons against anyone he regards as transphobic—especially women.) Anthony Watson, an advisor to the opposition Labour Party, said he was “horrified and disgusted,” and described the Alliance as a “#hategroup.” Linda Riley, the editor of Diva, a lesbian magazine that proclaims itself “trans-inclusive,” adapted Martin Niemöller’s famous 1946 confession, First They Came, Tweeting, “First they came for the T…”—thereby suggesting that refusing to prioritize the artifice of gender ideology over inborn sexual orientation is the first step toward some kind of real or metaphorical Holocaust.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the dayNovember 5th, 2019 |
 80 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
No. No no no.
Fuck no.
You do not get to use me as a weapon against trans people.
No. Don’t do this.
Why not? Identity politics uses everybody against everybody in the end……. Sadly.
I’m thinking of the fights engendered by the North Carolina (USA) bathroom laws that limited public bathroom use based on birth-gender. This new group is now coming out on the opposite side that the LGB organizations did back then.
I’ve been expecting this split for some time. The two questions – “who am I” and “to whom am I attracted” – are only slightly related (if at all) and was a poor basis for an alliance. The two groups are not each other’s natural constituency.
I read an article recently, I’ll have to dig it up. It was talking about the split burgeoning in the LGBT community, where it was LGB split from T. It posited (or perhaps alluded) to an interesting idea. It is noticeable that the focus on trans rights really started to gain traction round about the time the USSC decided that gay marriage was to be legal in all states.
The observation is that all that infrastructure that had been built for advocacy of gay rights had to be used for something, and trans-rights seemed a good candidate. It is the conflict between an organization’s goals and organizational goals. When these sorts of organizations achieve their goal, what do they do then? Just shut down? After all building all that infrastructure is extremely time consuming and challenging, and a lot of people’s livelihoods depend on it.
This is something I think you see a lot. For example, March of Dimes was started to cure polio, Oxfam was started to relieve poverty in Nazi occupied Greece and so forth.
FWIW, I’m not saying they are wrong to do this. Having an effective organization is a good tool, and if you can retarget your goals then it does make certain sense (Amazon, after all, used to just sell books.) But I think it is interesting just as an expository to understand what is going on.
One of my kids actually asked me about the trans-rights movement and what I thought. As many of you know I have an opinion on everything, but truthfully I really haven’t manged to put this one together. Of course people have an absolute right to be whoever they want to be, and to cut off or add whatever parts of their bodies they want. But there is a dark side to it that concerns me a lot. A demand to impose a viewpoint on others (such as the aforementioned bathroom issue and of course the pronoun issue), a deep intolerance of people who are uncomfortable mainstreaming that which only five years ago was considered on the extreme fringes, a basic denial of science, the utter destruction of women’s sports, and perhaps, most troublingly this idea that kids can “transition”, and the utter intolerance of good people, including medical professionals, who hold up their hand and say “wait a minute”. But it grates against every fiber of my soul to be unaccepting of such people, or to feel that I am judging or moralizing against their legitimate choices.
Mr. Orr:
You have described the dichotomy of both LGB and Trans communities. I fully agree that each individual should be free to choose their identities and make whatever physical changes they desire (once they’ve reached legal adulthood). Their identities should be free of threats and discrimination. I simply ask that they respond in kind. They should not doxx, threaten, or demand censorship of those who disagree with them or feel uncomfortable using the same facilities.
The LGBT community is only about 5% of the overall U.S. population, and trans people less than 0.5% of the population. They have every right to be left alone. The rest of us have every right not to be required to cheer, praise, and rework society on their demands. Live and let live.
“It was talking about the split burgeoning in the LGBT community, where it was LGB split from T.”
The split dates from near the start of the LGBT movement. The community of gays and cross-dressers initially came together in the gay bars – the only places they were tolerated. When the Stonewall riots kicked off, it was actually the cross-dressers that started it – as the most visible and obvious representatives, the ones least able to just fade into the crowd or claim ignorance, they were leading targets for police enforcement. But when society started taking notice and they got more political influence, there was a conscious decision on the part of the leaders to drop the trans group as they thought they would be the hardest sell, the public wouldn’t understand or accept. There has always been a certain amount of bitterness about that.
“But there is a dark side to it that concerns me a lot.”
There is about most things. What do you think about equal rights for women? When it comes to votes and being allowed to drive and get jobs and so forth, I think everyone nowadays is fine with that. But when the radical feminists demand state-funded free tampons and special days off work for menstruation cramps, not so much. When you’re talking about “women’s rights”, which bunch are you talking about? And it’s the same with trans.
90%+ are still not ‘out’. Their main desire in life is to be anonymous and invisible. They spend their lives terrified of discovery and exposure. The ones you can see are the activists, and as with the radical feminists, they often have other political agendas besides just standing up for the rights of their group, that most people in the group wouldn’t agree with. Ask Natalie whether she considers herself ‘feminist’. It’s the same issue.
“A demand to impose a viewpoint on others (such as the aforementioned bathroom issue and of course the pronoun issue)”
Some do. The bathroom issue can be seen as an imposition the other way – of a certain group in society imposing its gender norms on others by force.
The tiny number of exceptions make hardly any difference, it’s harmless, it’s been the rule in many places for 20 years without problems, often without anyone even noticing, and most people don’t care anyway. In the UK, 72% of women and 64% of men are quite comfortable with the idea of sharing bathrooms.
“a deep intolerance of people who are uncomfortable mainstreaming that which only five years ago was considered on the extreme fringes,”
Those are the activists. Like most women don’t *like* sexist pigs, but they tolerate their existence.
“a basic denial of science,”
Science supports the trans. (It was the right-winger Matt Ridley who I first saw present it, in answer to the feminist blank-slaters.)
“the utter destruction of women’s sports,”
That has more to do with the pressures to cheat and win in sports. Most trans people would never dream of participating.
“and perhaps, most troublingly this idea that kids can “transition”, and the utter intolerance of good people, including medical professionals, who hold up their hand and say “wait a minute”.”
Remember, you’re putting up your hand to say “wait a minute” about other people’s kids, other people’s bodies. You’re asking the state to intervene. In any other arena, (should parents be allowed to raised their kids in nutty religions? Or with particular political views?) you’d object. It’s the kid’s choice first, and their parents whose role it is to exercise judgement and have the final decision. The state can only intervene over a parent if there’s obvious harm being done, and the medical consensus here is that there isn’t. So this is a case of political nanny-statism. Society preventing you doing what you want to do “for your own good”, as *they* judge it.
The basic problem there is that puberty makes changes to the body that are very hard to ever reverse, so if you wait until after, they can never fully fix it and fit in. But the current official medical guidance is only to delay puberty until they’re old enough to make a decision, not to start irreversible surgery etc. before. (Although of course with private cosmetic surgery they can often do whatever the customer wants.)
It’s a tricky subject. But libertarian principles still apply.
Once the left were about, they sincerely believed, building a wonderful new society – the ideas of Karl Marx were crazy, but he believed in them (at least when he was young). Now the left is just about destroying society – they do not really want to put anything in its place.
People like Owen Jones do not really think that a wonderful new society will emerge from the ashes after they have done their little bit to help destroy the West – they just want to destroy the West. They know that all that will be left is ashes and dried blood – but that is what they want.
The first generation of the Frankfurt School of Marxism thinkers (basically from the 1920s on) may really have thought that by destroying the West (destroying the family, pushing XYZ and so on) a wonderful new society would emerge from the ashes – but this bunch now (the Owen Jones types), no they do not believe in creating any wonderful new society. They are interested in destruction – and that is all they are interested in. Destruction for the sake of destruction – not to put anything in the place of the Western Civilisation they so hate and despise.
Actually it goes back before the Frankfurt School – H.G. Wells (see “The Coming of the Comet” – the end bit, even traditional buildings and art to are be destroyed) and the other Fabians and, allied, Bloomsbury types may really have thought that by destroying the West (destroying such things as the traditional family) they would get a wonderful new society rising from the ashes. But a century later I do not believe that the leaders of the modern left still think that – I believe they just want to destroy for the sake of destroying.
The entire position sort of sinks or swims based on this assertion. How sure of this are you?
I ask because I’ve read in varying places statements that support what you say, that say the scientific opinion is muddled or mixed, and that say it’s very strong in the opposite direction, and all of this science lies outside of anything I’ve ever trained for, which means I can’t judge it very knowingly.
It sounds a lot like “97% of climate scientists . . . ” so I have to wonder.
That has been claimed in recent years – and has also been denied as a piece of transparent special pleading. It is another of those frictions between the two groups that the OP discusses.
Nullius in Verba (November 6, 2019 at 7:53 am ), I agree with bobby b’s point (bobby b, November 6, 2019 at 8:39 am). I also observe that there is not an observable “scientific consensus” despite the efforts of the woke to make it seem so by sacking dissenters where they can and vilifying them otherwise. However there is a deeper point.
Science depends on a healthy culture of scepticism and challenge. Even if it appeared there was a consensus, how could we believe in it? In the absence of alternatives to the MSM, I might not know of researchers long established in this area (so not, at first glance, the most obvious candidates for having a phobic reaction to those who question their gender) who dispute the alleged consensus, but I would see the MSM’s enforcement of correct-think (so marked a change in so short a time is a bit obvious even within their own pages) and therefore know that this was not science – that the asserted consensus could be correct only by coincidence, not by the scientific method.
Freedom is not the only thing that needs free speech. Science needs a healthy culture of scepticism, of welcoming challenge. This is obviously not what today’s PC seek to encourage in the areas touching their narrative.
It is important in this sort of discussion to begin by defining terms in this case the difference between sex and gender.
Sex refers to the biological differences between the two kinds of people needed for natural human reproduction. This includes both the universal ones i.e. the organs of reproduction, and the associated differences which are often statistical tendancies. Sex is binary you either have the male or female reproductive organs.
Gender is about how language, and by extension of ideas society, deals with the fact of sex. This includes the sexual division of labor etc. This is broadly successful, however, since many of the secondary characteristics are by no means universal it does not always work out and some people are understandably unhappy.
The real issue is the need to both set a norm that makes most people happy, while tolerating difference. Thus we should both encourage traditional gender norms while being kind to those such as tom boys, gay men etc. who do not conform to those norms.
That kindness should of course include people with gender dysphoria. Adults for example have a right to take powerful hormones and IMHO mutilate their body. We should treat them with the respect we give to all people who do not wrong us. It is kind and right to call people by the given name they prefer even if it is gender inappropriate.
However it is not kindness to punish those who think (rightly) that there are only two sexes and use pronouns acordingly. It is not kindness to insist that sexual desire must conform to trans ideology. It is not kindness to stunt childrens natural development with powerful drugs without their informed adult consent.
Yes to trans people, no to the ideology.
I am rather old-fashioned and do not think that starting a riot is something to be proud of.
The social pendulum can only be pushed so far, before the backswing comes. The further and harder you push it off center, the harder and faster that backswing will come.
I suspect that there is a solid reason why most societies have historically marginalized their LGB populations, and it has little to do with “justice” or “fairness”, and a lot more to do with the essential accompanying mental instability that many of that ilk demonstrate. The “normies” can be browbeaten into a sullen acceptance, but the problems come in when you start demanding more and more, that you not only tolerate, but actively encourage the perversion. The LGBT crew doesn’t just want to live in peace with the normies, they want far more–They want validation, approbation for their depraved sexual behaviors. The end state for this state of affairs is likely to be far worse than the prevailing conditions before “liberation” took place.
I’m sure that many will laugh at the idea, but the day is coming when they’re not only going to go back into the closet, they’re going to be actively crammed in there, with the doors nailed shut on them. Every period of libertine debauchery in public life has been followed by a pursuing era of straight-laced morality, generally also accompanied by a healthy dollop of hypocrisy. If you want to understand the Victorian, you have to first examine the Georgian and Regency eras. Once enough people have their fill of the social chaos surrounding the current state of relaxed sexual mores, they’re going to go rushing back the other direction, and you’ll see a neo-Victorianism take over that will quite take your breath away.
As an observer, I can’t find much sympathy for the majority of the people involved. They’re predominantly depraved creatures, regardless of sexual orientation–Witness the number of homosexual Democratic Party donors, here in the US who’ve been caught up in child molestation or murder, of late. Like as not, there are just as many “socially conservative” straights (well, outwardly, at least…) who did just as much, like our lovely Mr. Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the House.
A reality of all this is that the shadowy “powers behind the scenes” prefer that the political class be sexually compromised–Makes them much easier to manage. The general public will eventually reach a point where they’re unwilling to tolerate things, and we’re going to have a widespread 1848 or 1968 sort of thing take place, which will likely result in a major dislocation for the status quo. Epstein did not kill himself, and his death isn’t going to be enough to silence the plebs he preyed upon. His peers are going to be called to account, one day, like it or not.
@Nullius in Verba
Science supports the trans. (It was the right-winger Matt Ridley who I first saw present it, in answer to the feminist blank-slaters.)
I don’t even know what that means. What is “the trans”. What I was alluding to is the plain fact that people either do or do not have a Y chromosome and are consequently biologically either male or female. (There are a very small number of people who have a trisomy on their sex chromosomes, but whether a person is biologically male is entirely determined by the presence of at least one Y chromosome, irrespective of how many other sex chromosomes there might be. This is evidenced in the physical manifestation of the sexual characteristic features being entirely dependent on this. The centrality of the Y chromsome is not a definition thing, but simply it is how the body grows and develops; it is the one key difference that makes little girls and little boys directly because of the proteins that are expressed from that chromosome and its DNA. Of course those with a trisomy can be quite handicapped, but these conditions are rare, and those who are symptomatic are rarer still.)
One’s chromosomal configuration is not a matter of opinion, it is directly measurable.
Where it becomes fuzzy is when you end up in fuzzy sciences like psychiatry. Gender dysphoria is not directly measurable. There is no gene for it[*], no physical test for it, it is entirely due to how people feel, and that is deeply influenced by environment. And ESPECIALLY so with children who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, and are utterly unequipped to make these determinations. The comparison with CAGW science is apropos. Any psychiatrist who deviated from the new thinking on GID would be drummed out of polite society. It is PC wokeness overcoming scientific rationality.
And we are left with the insane idea that deeply disturbed and confused children think their problems will be solved by pumping them full of dangerous steroids and cutting off parts of their body. And we do this with barely any evidence whatsoever as to what the long term effects of such a thing will be.
That has more to do with the pressures to cheat and win in sports. Most trans people would never dream of participating.
Well insofar as most people don’t compete in serious athletics you are right, but you must have your television set turned off, and your browser closed if you have not heard over the past year the dozens of stories of where biological men competing as women are smashing records, winning all the medals, trashing girls’ ability to win sporting scholarships (and ironically in the case of Caster Semenya, a biological female who, because of her natural advantages is denied the ability to compete in women’s sports simply because the international sporting bodies are squirming to deal with this issue and remain in the good graces of the PC woke crowd.)
Remember, you’re putting up your hand to say “wait a minute” about other people’s kids, other people’s bodies.
And this is where the libertarian principles hit rocky ground. Although the idea of “your body, your choice” is central to libertarianism (and we don’t just mean abortion) that is NOT what we are talking about. Children are not competent to make decisions on their own, and so we delegate that decision power to their parents or guardians. However, we do so conditionally, requiring that they make these decisions in the best interest of the child. If parents are sexually abusing their children, or keeping them in an extremely unsafe environment, or sending them up the chimneys to pay their way, we, as a community, rightly step in and revoke that delegation.
This is a tricky, slippery slope, because it needs some definition of “best interest of the child” that is, in a sense, imposed by the community on the parents. There are no bright lines, and few Schelling points, and the idea that we should make these restrictions as few as possible and give the parents as much latitude as possible is slowly eaten away by the inevitable presence of self appointed do-gooders. Unfortunately, instead of “community” what actually happens is “governments”, “petty bureaucrats”, and “bleeding heart social reformers” tend to usurp that mantle and lead us to all sorts of horrifying outcomes.
However, as I said originally, I have mixed feelings about this subject. Here I am just trying to address your comments. That should not be taken to think that I oppose the trans political agenda. I don’t, not the personal liberation part. But some parts of that agenda I do find quite troubling.
[*] there are a twin studies that suggest a genetic link, however, the sample size is so minute it is a classic case of fishing for the right answer.
This article by Brad Polumbo, also at Quillette, may be the one that Fraser Orr was referring to above. At least, his description fits. It’s good, and pretty much sums up my own evolving thinking on the subject.
Coincidentally, while looking for Polumbo’s article I came across another one at Quillette entitled, ‘What Is Autogynephilia? An Interview with Dr Ray Blanchard’. It describes Blanchard as “an adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto who specialises in the study of human sexuality, with a particular focus on sexual orientation, paraphilias, and gender identity disorders.” Autogynephilia, it turns out, is one of the two categories into which Blanchard divides male gender disphorics. It’s worth reading the whole article for insights it gives into how they understand themselves and their gender indentity.
But this bit in particular stuck out for me:
As chance would have it, my Twitter timeline this morning was loaded with tweets tagged #BoycottM&S. There were two reasons given for the boycott. The first, which smells a bit hinky to me, was on animal cruelty grounds, as Marks & Spencer sells halal meat (I see the same calls to #BoycottSubway). The second reason is M&S’s recent decision to open its changing rooms to trans women in an effort to be more inclusive. It turns out, however, that there are a fair number of women who are less than happy with the idea of dressing and undressing in the same space as men.
Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that those women’s hesitation would be, as Jacob Rees-Mogg might call it, ‘common sense’. So why would M&S risk alienating the decreasing number of cis women willing to shop there in favour of a a vanishingly small number of trans women? It’s because they have, in Blanchard’s formulation above, surrendered to the culture warriors.
It’s always good to hear the Wahhabi point of view. Thanks, Kirk.
Wut? Who is starting a riot?
/Thread winner 😆
Bloody good way of putting it, that.
You mind if I steal that for when my more “identity-politics” minded acquaintances start with the “you’re either with us or against us” shtick? It would be much appreciated, as I can’t stand identity politics.
Personally, I’m currently less certain of that than I used to be. I certainly used to consider that the two were largely unrelated, but only based on my own feelings about myself. I was never uncertain about my gender, I like grrr manly stuff like cars, engines, cooking large pieces of meat over fires, Conan The Barbarian books, drinking beer and punching people (joking about the last part…I prefer wine).
(Alright, hands up, I did the eyeliner thing in the 90s, but that was more to do with the mod-revival/glam/David Bowie thing that was going on in music at the time. Plus, I was trying to bed this bisexual girl who liked guys in eyeliner. Successfully, too)
I did note, in a vaguely disinterested fashion, transvestites and cross-dressers, in the gay-friendly was bars and clubs that I’d go to, back in the day when I felt the need to go somewhere that I wouldn’t get punched for flirting with a bloke, or when me and my boyfriend at the time just wanted to go somewhere we could be comfortable.
Now, I sometimes wonder if my stance back then was a just a reaction – a “fuck you” to the idea that being attracted to blokes was somehow “girly” – I have a large “fuck you *smirk*” streak running through me – you do the whole “Was I born this way? Am I broken? Am I abnormal? Or am I just some kind of sexual pervert?” thing, until you’re wise enough to understand that “It doesn’t matter, either way. Also, fuck you.”
However. There’s some research (NIV introduced me to it, a little while ago) that says that people have biological markers that position them as male/female (not just the obvious ones!), and not all of them line up. On average, they do, but there’s so many, that the odd deviance from the mean doesn’t notice or count. In some people, it does notice – attraction to the same gender – in other people, it really really notices – that they’re born in the “wrong” body.
So it seems like (and NIV’s research tends to be pretty sound and thorough), that I have to re-evaluate my previous thoughts. If he’s right (is he a he? just a thought), then I probably need to accept that several of my “markers” are far more abnormal than I’d previously considered.
So maybe, there’s more crossover with LGB and T than one would think, me included, even if I would like to exclude myself from either designation.
My stance on the T has generally been a statistical one – I don’t personally know any T, more than peripherally. I’m more in a space of looking at the stats of self-harm, suicide rates, instances of crime against, and thinking “that must be really shitty. Like, really shitty. I have some experience – different to yours – of being hurt because of something I am, so I’m on your side, even though I don’t exactly know that it’s like.”
NiV has already said all the stuff about Stonewall that I was also planning on saying, about why the T was so important – trans people were the instigators of the move towards acceptance – the LGB owe the T an enormous debt. Niall has countered by saying that history is disputed. I’d point out the motivations of those who dispute that history. They’re not sound, they’re bigoted. In favour of us “queers”, and against the “trans”.
Which brings me back to my initial reaction: you’ve lost the war against the queers. Don’t use us against the trans.
Call it what you like, the reality is that today’s misbegotten excesses will eventually be answered with a like return of the pendulum, and that backswing will be going at least as far off center in the other direction as we can observe it having progressed today all around us.
Or, do you think that the child-victims of all this crap are going to look at the ruin of their lives, and not take retributive steps? When some poor unbalanced soul looks at her destroyed reproductive organs, and says she wants a balancing against those that enabled her immature decisions?
I don’t speak to say that these things should happen, or that I agree with them, but to point out that they’re the inevitable result of history happening. There are reasons that traditional societies have certain forms; like Chesterton’s Fence, you ignore them at your peril. Sexual excess in one generation is always, inevitably answered by sexual repression in the next. You can observe that throughout history, back to the beginnings of it all.
The sad thing is, the same class of people now stamping on the faces of the reasonable middle in support of the trans-nazis are going to be the same ones doing the same things from the other end, when the worm turns. It’s always, always so–The Revolutionaries of today glibly shift over to the Counter-Revolutionaries of tomorrow, for their main goal is to be the oppressor-in-power.
Heh.
Am interesting experience, between starting my reply, and finishing it, and the comments in between.
@Philip Scott Thomas
This article by Brad Polumbo, also at Quillette, may be the one that Fraser Orr was referring to above.
It is, thanks for digging it up.
@bobby b
It’s always good to hear the Wahhabi point of view. Thanks, Kirk.
I’d hate to go up against you in a court room Bobby… a concise knife to the gut, delivered with an impeccably good mannered smile.
I’m big on continuums. Not so much on absolutes.
I picture one continuum – affectional preference – along which we all slide, some being at the ends, some being somewhere between them.
I also picture a different, separate continuum – gender identity – along which, again, we fall onto our own spot, which is not necessarily at one of the ends.
I see overlap – because where you are on one can surely affect where you are on the other – but I do see them as being separate things.
If every gay couple I knew was split with one masculine and one feminine partner – of whatever gender – then maybe I could see the two axes as being tied together, but that’s not been my experience. And the fact that a masculine person can partner with another masculine person – or a feminine person with another feminine person – that fact makes me think that preference is affected by identity, but not controlled by it. Even if you’re away from one of the ends of the gender ID line, you can still fall anywhere on the preference line.
Which is where my “they’re only tangentially related” comment comes from.
Who are you speaking to here? Because this seems very much to me to be a gay versus trans controversy, with everybody else just grabbing popcorn.
If it’s any consolation, many many people go through life with this feeling, usually unrelated to issues of sex. Whatever factor in your life pushes you out of the mean can drive these feelings.
“The entire position sort of sinks or swims based on this assertion. How sure of this are you?"
On who does the burden of proof lie? Do *you* need solid evidence before you can have the nanny state overrule the way a parent brings up their own child? Or do *I* need solid evidence before I can stop the state interfering?
Nothing is absolutely certain in science, and the deeper you go into any subject, the more complicated it turns out to be. But I’m more confident of this than I am about the evidence for a lot of things doctors and surgeons do routinely and uncontroversially. It meets the standards of evidence medical services normally use before recommending a treatment.
The evidence for it is a lot stronger than it is for things like dieting as a route to long-term weight loss, for example.
“It sounds a lot like “97% of climate scientists . . . ” so I have to wonder.”
Yes, it does. But then so does the second law of thermodynamics. Just because something is the prevailing scientific opinion doesn’t mean it’s wrong, either.
When it came to climate science, my sceptical views were formed when I first read Steve McIntyre, who did more than just vaguely allude to the fallibility of experts, he showed us the data and algorithms and explained in precise detail exactly why they were wrong. I downloaded the data myself. I checked his maths. I checked his reasoning. I agreed. So I became a sceptic.
On the science of sex and gender, there doesn’t appear to be any equivalent of Steve McIntyre. A lot of the science is basic biology and uncontroversial. Some of it is still cutting edge, with plenty of unknowns. We don’t know how the brain works, for example, so some of it is a reasonable and quite plausible (IMHO) extrapolation from the bits we do know. Nobody seems to have been able to come up with any clear and simple explanation why it is wrong – and I have looked! A lot of those who argue against seem to be either ignorant of the details of the proposed mechanism or about 50 years out of date on their biology. A lot argue from unrepresentative anecdotes, or appeals to alternative authorities, traditional or religious values, beliefs, or practices, or to what they call ‘common sense’. A lot of them fall down when you start talking about other varieties of intersex biology, clearly never having heard of any of the other sexual oddities nature occasionally throws up. Most, I think, are down to simple disagreements about definitions rather than anything to do with questions of objective science. There’s no clear scientific counter-argument that addresses the actual scientific arguments made in its favour.
So as far as I’m concerned, the balance of evidence currently rests in favour of TGs, until someone can come up with a better argument against it.
(And one of the reasons I argue about the science is in the hopes that someone can provide me with a good one! Scientific hypotheses gain credibility only by surviving all attempts to knock them down. I welcome argument.)
“Science depends on a healthy culture of scepticism and challenge. Even if it appeared there was a consensus, how could we believe in it?”
Agreed. And exactly the same applies to claims that it’s wrong as to claims that it’s right. The default scientific position on any subject, in the absence of knowledge, is “I don’t know!”
“Sex refers to the biological differences between the two kinds of people needed for natural human reproduction.”
There are a lot more than two kinds of people!
“Sex is binary you either have the male or female reproductive organs.”
Or neither (eunuchs). Or both (hermaphrodites). Or a mixture (intersex). Or first one set and then the other (Guevedoces).
“Gender is about how language, and by extension of ideas society, deals with the fact of sex.”
In the modern sense of the word, what they’re referring to is what sex the brain is. Many parts of the brain can develop along two different patterns of ‘wiring’, one far more common in females and the other far more common in males. Much of this wiring develops in the womb before birth, the developing brain cells responding to a complex cascade of hormones and signalling molecules. Some of it develops later at puberty. But the complexity of the signalling pathways is such that the process often goes wrong. Some molecular switches get jammed on, some get jammed off, some signals go missing when a bit of the mechanism is broken. So most people’s brains have a few bits with the ‘wiring’ appropriate to the other sex. A lot of these are no big deal. It’s like sometimes you get a woman who can read maps, and sometimes a man who can ask for directions, but it’s regarded as just part of the normal range of human variation. There’s a lot of overlap. But there are a very small number of brain modules that are hugely significant, socially and culturally.
For example, everyone has a brain module that does sexual attraction. It recognises the sex of other people, and triggers the libido when it sees the right pattern. So what do you think would happen if a man got the version of the circuit diagram for that bit of the brain designed for women? I think we all recognise what that is.
And then there are other brain modules that define your personality, your likes and dislikes, your social preferences, and so on, and that are gender linked. Kids at play naturally segregate into groups. There are girl games, and boy games, and neither side likes or wants to associate with the activities enjoyed by the other. Again, that’s implemented by hardwired brain differences, and again, you can wind up being born with the wrong set.
Kids can be geeky, or arty, or sporty. They have particular likes and interests that they feel internally and which can’t be changed. You can’t make a sporty kid like maths, or a geeky kid like sports. Kids can be introverted or extroverted, it’s hardwired into the brain, and again it can’t be changed. (It’s due to differing responses to the dopamine and acetylcholine neurotransmitters.) And they can be mentally masculine or feminine. It’s not a cultural thing, it’s biology.
“It is not kindness to stunt childrens natural development with powerful drugs without their informed adult consent.”
The problem is that the natural development is irreversible, and if the child is right about what they are, horribly damaging. If you’re mentally a girl but born with the external genitals of a boy, you can take the right mix of hormones at puberty and develop into a natural-looking woman. But if you wait until you’re 16 or 18 and then take hormones, you’ve already got the hair, bone structure, and muscles of a man, and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it. You’re screwed. You’ll always stand out as a physical freak. Although post-puberty surgery considerably reduces the incidence of bullying, misery, and suicide, it doesn’t eliminate it.
So there are costs and risks with either decision – either to act, or to not act. And statistically, the bad consequences of not acting are far more common. Which is why the recommendation is a fairly reversible delay to puberty so that an informed adult decision can be made, rather than allowing an irreversible ‘natural development’ that is considerably more likely to turn out to be utterly disasterous.
“I am rather old-fashioned and do not think that starting a riot is something to be proud of.”
Every liberty you have, you have because someone started a riot to get it. Civil wars and revolutions are the foundation of freedom.
It all depends on your reasons for starting the riot.
“The social pendulum can only be pushed so far, before the backswing comes. The further and harder you push it off center, the harder and faster that backswing will come.”
Only if there’s a restoring force, pushing it back to the centre. In this case there isn’t. Most people today support the transgender, like they support equal rights for women.
That’s not the same thing as supporting the radical activists. Don’t get the two groups mixed up. ‘Women’ are not the same as “man-hating lesbian radical Marxist ultra-feminists”. ‘Transgender’ are not the same as ‘TERF-hating radical Marxist trans-activists’.
“I suspect that there is a solid reason why most societies have historically marginalized their LGB populations, and it has little to do with “justice” or “fairness”, and a lot more to do with the essential accompanying mental instability that many of that ilk demonstrate.”
I believe the same argument used to be made about women.
“’m sure that many will laugh at the idea, but the day is coming when they’re not only going to go back into the closet, they’re going to be actively crammed in there, with the doors nailed shut on them.”
That’s not the way it works. One side build an authoritarian system, that allows society to impose its norms on its members ‘for their own good, and for the good of society’. They impose a particular set of rules. Then society changes, and the rules change, but the system doesn’t. You get a new elite, who impose their norms on the rest of society, using the same enforcement mechanisms the old elite did. Then there’s another revolution and the rules change again, but not back to the way they were. Each generation revolts against the outmoded norms of their parents, and then finds their children revolting against their own norms.
Each revolution wanders further and further away from where it started. But they all have this in common – that the ruling elite thinks their own norms natural and essential, and that they’re utterly convinced that they’re totally justified in forcing everone else to conform to them.
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” It’s just that we take turns wearing the boot.
“What I was alluding to is the plain fact that people either do or do not have a Y chromosome and are consequently biologically either male or female.”
It’s a lot more complicated than that!
“This is evidenced in the physical manifestation of the sexual characteristic features being entirely dependent on this.”
It isn’t! The Y chromosome usually (but not always) contains a gene called SRY, which triggers the development of testes, which by means of a variety of enzymes created by another set of genes produce dihrotestosterone, which is converted by dozens of different enzymes made by dozens of different genes into dozens of different sex hormones each of which spreads around the body triggering biochemical switches on the cells (made by more genes) which tell the cell to grow one way or another. It’s all hugely complicated!
“This is a tricky, slippery slope, because it needs some definition of “best interest of the child” that is, in a sense, imposed by the community on the parents.”
Yes! And that’s what every single authoritarian who wants to ban anything says! They all believe in the rightness of their own cause. What makes you think you’re any different?
“Coincidentally, while looking for Polumbo’s article I came across another one at Quillette entitled, ‘What Is Autogynephilia? An Interview with Dr Ray Blanchard’.”
Yeah. He’s well known. The bit nobody has managed to explain to me is how a sexual paraphilia can apply to 7 year olds, who have no such sexual interests? Gender dysphoria starts several years before this proposed mechanism could have any effect.
“It turns out, however, that there are a fair number of women who are less than happy with the idea of dressing and undressing in the same space as men.”
I’ve seen stats showing that about 40% of women don’t like undressing in front of other women, either. MtoF TGs certainly don’t like undressing in front of men. In my personal experience, a lot of men don’t like undressing in front of other men. Racists don’t like sharing a changing room with blacks. Non-smokers don’t like sharing the same air with smokers. The Woke don’t like sharing a ‘safe space’ with Trump-supporting Republicans. Muslims don’t like sharing a country with Jews. Where do you stop?
By what right does Party A get to say that because they are offended/triggered/uncomfortable with the presence of Party B, they get to order them around, say where they are and are not allowed to go? Why doesn’t Party B get the same right to exclude Party A? This is naked segregationist authoritarianism. And why only toilets and changing rooms? Shouldn’t women be kept in purdah permanently? And I thought we didn’t like the way Muslims treat their women…
(PS. Apologies for the length. But it’s such a good debate I can’t resist.)
@bobby b
That evisceration of Kirk was so cleanly and elegantly done that I have to ask: are you a member of the Guild of Assassins?
@neonsnake–
Which brings me back to my initial reaction: you’ve lost the war against the queers. Don’t use us against the trans.
Don’t allow your inability to understand math and demographics to distort your understanding of reality. At most, the actual LGB portion of the general population is around 5%. A tail can only wag the dog for so much before the dog’s owner grows tired of the damage it does, and then there’s a trip to vet for a docking. It’s an unpleasant feature of being a minority population, and when one is in that position, it’s best to keep an eye on the horizon for a shift in the winds of things. One thinks that the transient victory won over the last few generations is permanent, then one might want to go back and look over the history of it all, and wonder if what shifted once might not shift again, and back the other direction.
The current state of affairs does not have to last, and it may not. The daughters of tolerant gay-positive mothers who watch their athletic opportunities dwindle down to irrelevance underneath the grandstanding of males transitioning to female for the sheer ego-enhancement of finally being able to achieve competitiveness against women? Do you think that they’re going to retain the tolerant attitudes of their mothers, when the time comes for them to make political decisions affecting the other sexual minorities? Or, do you suppose they’re going to lump you all in together as the benighted perverts that stole their chance at athletic notoriety?
Either way, I really don’t have a dog in this fight. I could care less about the entire realm of sexual confusion–But, I can see what’s happening around me, and the “activists” are storing up a vast reservoir of reaction that will inevitably spill over the dam of tolerance you imagine you’ve won. I’d recommend not living in the village below the dam, to extend that metaphor.
5% will not rule 95%, no matter how vocal, no matter how righteous they might think they are. That’s the mathematics of it all–When you are the 5%, you are a tolerated thing only on the sufferance of the majority, and it would be wise not to push that majority too far, lest the recoil shift tolerance to pogrom.
The other thing I’d point out is that the lesson of the Jew in regards to identification with Communism in Eastern Europe might be educational to today’s sexual activists–Once the connection was made between Bolshevism and Jewry, it became all too easy to gin up the hatred for them as an ethnic group. Today’s enlightened sexual/gender minorities are identifying far too closely with the dysfunctional left, and once people grow tired of the constant cry for more money and more ineffectual social programs, who do you suppose is going to be the “fall guy” for it all, when the powerful seek to shift blame for it all? Do you think that they’re going to take responsibility for turning the cities of the West into open-air sewers, or are they going to go looking for someone to point at and say “It’s those damn gentrifying freaks! Get them! It was all their idea!”. Same-same when the public notes the prevalence of what they’ll call the perverse in the social media realm–It will be guilt by association, and the devil will take the hindmost.
Watch and see. You could feel a twinge of it all, right there during the beginnings and middle of the AIDS crisis. With things like Epstein and everything else surrounding that corrupt world of the elites, I can easily see a counter-reaction coming down the pike, and the easy early victims are going to be the ones they always have been–The visual ones. Don’t expect the current media position on these things to remain the one you’ve become accustomed to. At all.
I honestly think there’s going to be a huge swing sometime in the next 10-20 years, and I have no idea where that’s going to go, or where it will end. I can just say it’s coming. It always has before, and it always will. The only thing that will change will be the forms and the participants.
I honestly don’t think there’s ever been a successful marginalization of a majority in history, and that’s exactly what has been going on with the so-called “straight white male” for the last forty years or so. At some point, the chumps are going to catch on, and when they do? Someone is going to do the exact same trick with them that every demagogue in history has come up with, and the current situation is going to go up in flames. Might be some Islamic sect, might be something else, but it will come. Trump and Johnson are symptoms of an overheating boiler, and I would strongly urge that people quit throwing fuel into the fire beneath it while simultaneously closing off the safety valves…
I kind of feel sympathies for the foresters of places like California, pointing out the excessive growth of fuel in the understory, knowing damn well what’s going to happen when the inevitable fire comes through. Y’all just keep right on keeping on, though… I’m sure you’re right, and there will never, ever be a price to pay for all this social excess.
Not.
Gee, thanks, guys!
I place it firmly on the shoulders of the adults contemplating cutting off the boy’s cock.
I understand that this debate is muddled between how we should approach an actual well-functioning adult making decisions for themselves, and applying those standards to those who lack the proper capacity to make such decisions. Can one cause severe permanent harm to a confused alienated person searching for why he feels so confused and alienated through permanent medical amputation? Certainly. I recognize that your statement about the medical view probably wasn’t meant to deal with that group – but we’re at a place where it seems we’re only going to get one allowable view that we’re going to need to apply to all, and so I think the burden is much higher than a simple libertarian outlook.
I have no issue with your pendulum theory of history. It’s your “misbegotten excesses” that scare me.
Back when I was married, did I have sex with my wife frequently enough? Too often? In the wrong rooms, in unapproved positions? With the lights on? Which factor makes me a subhuman to you?
“At most, the actual LGB portion of the general population is around 5%. A tail can only wag the dog for so much before the dog’s owner grows tired of the damage it does, and then there’s a trip to vet for a docking. It’s an unpleasant feature of being a minority population, and when one is in that position, it’s best to keep an eye on the horizon for a shift in the winds of things.”
Bear in mind that according to the stats, only about 2% of the British population are strongly prejudiced against the transgender, and only 15% a little bit. 72% of women and 64% of men are quite comfortable sharing a toilet with a TG. 53% say anti-TG prejudice is always wrong, and another 19% say it’s mostly wrong.
https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39147/bsa34_moral_issues_final.pdf
So it looks like you’re the one that’s in the minority! Look out for that trip to the vet!
🙂
But seriously – everyone is in a minority of some sort. Being in a majority doesn’t justify authoritarianism, even when you’re not just imagining you’re still in a majority…
—
Apologies for mis-spelling ‘dihydrotestosterone’ earlier. I was in too much of a hurry…
“I place it firmly on the shoulders of the adults contemplating cutting off the boy’s cock.”
Well, that’s fine then, because they’re not. They only delay puberty (reversibly) until the child is old enough to decide.
“Can one cause severe permanent harm to a confused alienated person searching for why he feels so confused and alienated through permanent medical amputation?”
Sure. Can one cause severe permanent harm by refusing them the treatment they’re desperately asking for? Yes, that too. So it’s not simply a question of “can the proposed option cause harm?” but “which option causes least harm?”
‘… everyone is in a minority of some sort. Being in a majority doesn’t justify authoritarianism, even when you’re not just imagining you’re still in a majority…’
Yep.
“Primum non nocere.”
“Primum non nocere.”
And wouldn’t life be wonderful if that was always an option?
Oh, like I should listen to someone who can’t even properly spell dihydro . . . dihydrotest . . . ah, crap.
@Nullius;
Your choice of screen name is appropriate; reading comprehension is not your forte.
I’ve got no dog in the fight, and I’m not making any value judgments. Y’all can boink who you like, when you like, and how you like. I could care less.
What I am pointing out is what is happening in the social commons, as the arsonists stack fuel around everything. Of that? I disapprove. I do not want to have to be sheltering my mother’s gay mechanic in the attic when the mobs come baying for his blood. I’d rather he was still minding his own business, as I mind my own.
The problem, however, is what’s going on in public space around us. Watch the Epstein thing, and what’s happening with regards to Harvey Weinstein, Nvixm, and everything else that is lumped in with matters of sexuality. If you think that it’s not all connected, and that there won’t be a price to be paid for it all, think again.
It’s pushed to the point now where a UK doula has been forced into a resignation because she had the temerity to point out that only women can give birth! Just how long do you suppose that the minority of a minority is going to be allowed this sort of social power, given the irresponsibility with which they are wielding it? Do you think that the general population is going to look at a nutbar divorcee who has decided her 7 year-old son should start transitioning to female because he liked the movie Frozen, and still remain “tolerant”?
The whole thing with LGBT acceptance was shifted off-center through some very questionable means–Judicial rather than legislative. Most of the public buys off on the idea of tolerance, for now, but the trans-activist cohort seems hell-bent on making them reconsider the idea. It’s not going to end well, at all.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s going to be bunch of “fling them under the bus” going on, as this Epstein/Weinstein/Nvixm concatenation plays out. ABC exemplifies the things I see coming–They’re going to want to divert attention and public madness away from their malfeasance in covering these things up, and what better scapegoat to use than a tiny strange minority that a lot of people still find distasteful?
A lot of people seem to forget that what was done to increase tolerance can just as easily be undone; for a long time, it was in the interest of the powerful to kowtow to the minority, just as it was convenient to have the Jews around to handle money. Times of trouble come, and you need to conveniently off the people you owe money to, all of a sudden a different set of motivations come to the fore. People need to remember what was behind the pogrom cycle, and what actually motivated all of that. It’s like the classic spousal abuse cycle–Right now, we’re in the honeymoon phase of things, and the pressure is building.
Neon, help yourself. 🙂
Just addressing the science of how trans people ended up trans people doesn’t not in anyway address the best approach for them or society. Just like global warming, even if you accept the premise, there is then, economics, engineering/medicine and morality to answer to. At least one of those sits firmly with all of society.
We aren’t being scientific or clever with how new treatments are being developed. There is no control and no treatment groups.
Drugs followed by surgery seems to have poor outcomes. Counselling alone doesn’t seem to cut it either. That’s with the politically most unacceptable results being memory-holed.
How much does all this cost and who is paying? Ordinary folk being expected to share the cost are always gonna be irritated. Having all bathrooms set out like disabled loos may have some upsides if expensive.
Morality? Come near any infant age kids of mine with those drugs and that propaganda and I may take the Ecksian option upon them. Introduction at late childhood or young adulthood seems less inappropriate and I don’t claim any rationality on this topic, just the urge to keep my family safe. At some point the kids pathologised, drugged and performed surgery on are gonna comeback with some very difficult questions, both those now adults that think it was right and those that think it was wrong.
Ultimately this renders these kids infertile not to mention the crazy high rates of suicide blamed on “society” for lack of acceptance or the interactions with the drugs given.
What I don’t see is those same activists going into the strongholds of socially conservative Islam and looking for potential trans-children, which is always a suspicious look to me.
The Neo-Victorianism mentioned by Kirk is well within the realms of potential reactions to all the forces internal and external upon society. Christianity seems to be undergoing a bit of a revival at the grass roots level in some countries. I say that as a godless heathen with zero capacity for personal faith. Gen Z seem a radical departure from Generation Boomer, X and y. For a big zig towards more socially liberal approach we would probably need to see a softening of the non-Christian religions or the non-western strands of Christianity.
While I would in very broad terms agree that the current situation is not naturally stable, I had occasion to quote in a recent thread
as exemplifying how SJWs enforce their dictats. (It remains true if one updates the language to “ten persons of fluid gender”. 🙂 ) There is also Lenin’s well-known quote that if two hundred thousand nobles could rule Russia then two hundred thousand communists could rule it. So while
is by no means impossible, other futures are possible. The very faults of a given system can be the means whereby it prolongs itself – and does a lot of damage to bystanders, the idea of free speech and etc., in the process.
Supposing any counter-swing comes, one lesson I would take from it is the desirability of seeking to slow the pendulum, once it has returned to vertical. If such a counter-swing occurred, it would be an example (yet one more example) of how a successful movement, by indulging its excesses and refusing the dampening effects of free speech, can reverse its own victory. The lesson to learn would therefore be that those who would be most happy to see an end to current excesses can best ensure against their return by being moderate in how hard they themselves pull the pendulum up the other side – or, as Churchill put it, “In victory, magnanimity.” (But, as my remarks before suggest, right now I don’t think that’s the issue at hand. 🙂 )
As for the ‘Wahhabi’ comment of bobby b, by a not-too-opaque process of association, it had me thinking about the experience of immigrants from the middle east two or three decades ago versus now. There was a time when they would encounter a free-speech Britain, tolerating alternative lifestyles without these obviously threatening anyone else’s freedom, etc. Today, they see police visits for ‘dead-naming’, suspension from school if a pupil questions the teacher’s statement that there are 100 genders, etc. It all makes for a rather more startling contrast and so does less to encourage assimilation. Were I a Wahhabist preacher in the UK, eager to make converts and maintain my followers’ commitment, I’d certainly prefer an audience convinced that the only alternative to agreeing with everything I said was agreeing with every jot and title of political correctness (or face some risk of arrest), over an audience who thought that a free-speech UK, with PC excesses sensibly moderated by that, was an available alternative to either.
@Niall,
“Ten men acting together can make a hundred thousand tremble apart.”
That’s an interesting idea, one that’s been seen to be true in a lot of our history, but the thing about that all is this: Like the Spartans keeping down the Helots, that group of ten “acting together” has to perform a bit of legerdemain in order for it all to work. Once, that was easy to do–You got yourself a bit of expensive kit, and you and your buddies set yourselves up as lairds of ye olde feudal manore, lording it over the peasantry who were mostly unarmed and lacking skill at arms.
Later, the aristocracy performed another bit of mumbo-jumbo, and convinced the now less-helpless peasants that they were morally and intellectually superior. That lasted until… Oh, about the point that the fact that the aristocracy possessed no particular virtue, and that many of them were indeed, dumb as posts.
In both historical cases, the key point is that the minority had to actually possess and demonstrate some actual virtue in order to keep on top of things. If the early aristos had been shit at providing security, then they’d have been pulled down by those who could, one way or another. And, do note the fate of their descendants, once the masses lost respect for them. The rape by the estate tax authorities in England was a relatively painless revenge–You don’t want to know what happened to the incompetent nobility when Rome fell.
Nobody has those advantages today, either. The unwashed masses are perfectly capable of discerning that the Emperor’s ass is buck-naked, and they’re noting that fact more and more every single day. Time will come when the SJW types try to overawe the masses with their soi disant virtues, and those masses are just going to point out the essentially naked nature of things. From there, the best-case scenario is that the masses just cease participating in what they see as the madness, and the worst-case is that they decide it is time to introduce their self-declared social betters to the local lamp post scene, via the utility of whatever cordage or piano wire comes easily to hand.
Given the behavior of these “betters”, along with their naked lust for power and the contempt they hold for the masses? I don’t think a polite withdrawal, censure, and social ostracism is going to be what happens. Instead, the boni are going to keep pushing, pushing, pushing until they finally elicit the violent response they think they want, and then they’re going to find out two things: One, that the organs of state security are mostly manned by their opponents, down in the ranks, and that two, the boni are not so good at fighting. I expect they’ll have to subcontract out to others, such as the Mexican cartels, and once that happens…? Oi. The end state of that is entirely unknowable, but I wouldn’t discount a civil war like we haven’t seen since the end of the Romanov dynasty. No bets taken on where that one ends, either.
You might, given your previous paragraphs, want to amend that opinion. She has Y chromosomes and testicles (internal, but there nonetheless). By any reasonable definition she is not a woman.
Chester Draws
You might, given your previous paragraphs, want to amend that opinion. She has Y chromosomes and testicles (internal, but there nonetheless). By any reasonable definition she is not a woman.
Thanks for the feedback. I’m not sure if you are right or not. I have two different sources that say two different things on this. Her wikipedia article seems to agree with you, but the article that originally brought her to my attention says this:
“It’s worthy to note that neither the regulations or the ruling are about trans women. It doesn’t address athletes with gender dysphoria who take hormones. Caster Semenya is not trans — she was born a woman, and has lived as a woman her whole life. Her body naturally produces more testosterone than is considered normal in women. …” Link Here
So, I had assumed the article I read was correct, but I could be wrong.
“What I am pointing out is what is happening in the social commons, as the arsonists stack fuel around everything.”
The firewood was already stacked high, when the arsonists spent the last 3000 years persecuting gays, trans, and anyone else who didn’t fit into their picture of perfect morality. What society used to do to gays, it now does to homophobes. Nothing has changed.
“Caster Semenya is not trans — she was born a woman, and has lived as a woman her whole life.”
See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
Her diagnosis has never officially been released, but the leaks indicate something like this condition.
There is on big difference, NIV.
It’s not one of morality, fairness or justice.
It’s one of numbers. Traditional male female pairings with “promises” of monogamy for life created children at or above replacement rate and thereby harnessed the biological urge to reproduce, not just have sex, but have kids.
Current Western society is not achieving that.
Where Kirk’s Boogaloo civil war scenario has real risk is the potentially many many disaffected white straight men whose reproduction options in this generation are vastly lower than recent history.
Revolution has usually been fuelled by that demographic. Even if every LGBT person committed to rebellion, society as it is would likely survive. The kindling of angry lonely straight white western men being promised a wife and kids is vastly bigger than that and who could stop them? They are an easy 45% of the population and everyone alive today is the descendant of people who had kids in significantly greater adversity than we live in now.
The establishment is clearly terrified of the reproduction motivated white male of today.
Short version, if LGBT and other minority interest issues cross the interests of young white men who desire to breed in too authoritarian a manner the resulting reaction will be epic. And very many minority activists seem to like brinkmanship.
@Nullius,
“The firewood was already stacked high, when the arsonists spent the last 3000 years persecuting gays, trans, and anyone else who didn’t fit into their picture of perfect morality. What society used to do to gays, it now does to homophobes. Nothing has changed.”
Oh, please. Your overwrought persecution complex is not supported by history, at all–The facts are, I am afraid, that most if not all of the persecution you ascribe to the “homophobe straights” is actually sourced from other homosexuals. The straights simply don’t care, so long as you shut up about it and don’t frighten the horses. The majority of the crap you ascribe to them comes from other, closeted homosexuals who are simultaneously enraged at the “out” being brave enough to be out, and because they’re confused, conflicted, and afraid of their own natures.
It’s an odd fact, but every single one of the supposed “straight” gay-bashing homophobes I knew in my youth? By the time we hit middle age, they all came out of the closet themselves. That includes the ones who used to go off to the big city to go “gay bashing”, although I have come to wonder if they weren’t actually talking trash to explain why they might have been in those areas and clubs as a cover… The incidence of actual bashing events was nowhere near what it should have been, if those assholes had actually been doing what they said they were.
Actual straights don’t give a rip who you boink; the ones who are threatened most by the openly homosexual are the closeted, all the way down the line. I’ve yet to run into an exception in my personal life, and what I’ve discovered as a truism is that when someone makes an issue of homosexual behavior, that’s a sign they’re threatened in some way by it, which carries the implication that they’re at least somewhat attracted to it. The vast majority of straights I know that are actually straight are merely amused by the whole thing–We don’t feel the attraction to it, and really don’t care. Sleep with another male? Not feeling the interest. My reaction to the whole thing has always been “Wait… You want to do what with that thing? Why would you do that?”.
It’s all of a piece with the general mental illness that goes along with the confusion about sexual identity. The guys and girls who are straight, and who are confident in their sexual identity as gay and lesbian aren’t the problems–It’s the ones in the confused middle ground who do most of the persecution and get up to the really damaging stuff.
Most people whose lives are not focused solely on their sexual identity really just don’t care–It’s the mentally unwell who make their sexual obsessions the central focus of their lives who create and have the problems. And, that goes for the straights and all the rest who can’t seem to get past their genitalia in life. I’ve got equal contempt for all of that lot, whether it’s the serial philandering straight male who can’t hold to a marriage vow, or the guys marching naked in San Francisco. Get lives outside your “sexual identities”, and quit letting your hormones run your lives for you. It’s just not that big a deal.
Here’s a news flash for those folks: Sex is not the only thing in life, and when you’ve made it the sole focus of it all, you’re the aberrant one. The rest of us normies just don’t care enough–Tell me you’re gay, and that’s a feature of sublime indifference to me. Tell one of your still-closeted fellows? He’s the one you need to worry about, and he’s the one who is going to be leading the mob with torches. I simply don’t care about your sexuality, and it’s a matter of trivial interest to me. Mind your business, I’ll mind mine, and we won’t have a problem.
What does matter to me is the effect it all has on the social commons that are in the process of being wrecked in the name of God alone knows what real benefit. In the final analysis, what matters isn’t anyone’s sexual gratification or persecution complex, but whether or not society functions well enough to keep running for the benefit of the majority.
Tear enough of the machinery apart, and you’re all going to learn the lesson of Chesterton’s Fence the hard way. I have my suspicions that there are reasons we have these social features that we do, because no society maintains such things without cause over the generations.
We listened to the libertines during the 1960s, unleashed a “sexual revolution”, and what we got in return was a net increase in sexually transmitted disease and general misery as people tried to “have it all”. You can’t, not yet–Perhaps once we’ve managed to increase lifespan and can manage biology well enough to actually execute real germ-line sexual swaps, we’ll be able to do something to satisfy these wants and desires. Or, not–I suspect that even once we reach that point, there are still going to be people who can’t quite cope with things, and who will still be obsessed with their ding-dongs and hoo-hahs.
Until then, however, the immutable laws of natural biology are what matter, along with the necessary social structures that recognize them for what they require in the way of circumspect behavior. There are reasons why successful societies do what they do, and it boils down to the same factors that go into what the civil engineers call a “desire path”. The natural features of something tend to influence the structures that come into being around it all, as the participants make their way through life.
We could reach a mutually satisfactory compromise to all this idiocy, but the mentally deranged activists won’t shut up, they won’t leave well enough alone, and they won’t mind their own damn business, leaving everyone alone to run their lives for themselves–So when those torches get thrown into the piled up fuel around the bases of our social institutions, you need to go talk to them. I’m not going to be anywhere in the mob coming after you or anyone else–But, I’m going to be damned angry that the lot of you sexually obsessed little children collectively brought us to this point.
It’s all so Goddamn unnecessary, and in the final analysis, so damn trivial. But, so many have made their sexuality and its gratification the central focus of their lives, so here we are. Much joy may you have of it all, as you caper among the coming flames.
*Nods* that’s what I always thought, with me being somewhere along the continuum. And then, and the other continuum, firmly at one end.
What NIV suggested was a matrix, I think (NIV can presumably clarify), which defined how “male” or “female” one is. Somewhere, I’ve a couple of 0s where I should have 1s, but mostly I have 1s where they should be, but I think the suggestion was that everyone has a few scrambles, but generally in less obvious ways – maybe they’ve a 0 in the bit that regulates a properly manly ability to grow a beard (whereas I, of course, have a solid 2 😉 ).
I found it an interesting paradigm shift, anyway!
I hope so. I have a concern that people, not us, will use the “support of LGB” to continue or ramp up their attacks on Ts, or to push the idea that *all* T are militant activists. I rather think, like NIV, that the majority of T, like the majority of LGB, just wanna be left alone to live, and aren’t attempting to invade our bathrooms or sports; I suspect the outliers get the news, because, well, that’s the stuff that gets clicks. And then people associate the whole group with the outliers.
One wonders what we thought about Germany in 1919. A won war does not preclude another war.
Niall’s pendulum has swung, and is beginning to swing back. There are those who will try to halt it, those who will attempt to stop its backward swing, and those who are joyously pulling on it backward.
We would do well to attempt to stop its swing in the middle.
I rather agree with Itellyounothing. I’m not sure it’s consciously about reproduction, as such, but your young straight white males certainly seem to be feeling a touch left behind right now, and are reacting, in big or small numbers (I’m uncertain of the seriousness of the problem) by turning to identity politics of one extreme or the other.
So, yes, Kirk, I’m well aware of the truth of this statement:
And I’m well aware of the fragility of that “sufferance” that I am afforded, and the implied threat it contains.
Can I buy you a drink, darling?
😉
“The facts are, I am afraid, that most if not all of the persecution you ascribe to the “homophobe straights” is actually sourced from other homosexuals.”
It’s an interesting theory – that Moses was secretly a homosexual. I can see it causing controversy with the religious folks, though. 🙂
We used to have the death penalty for homosexual practices. We used to have jail, and chemical castration. Within living memory, we had outright torture being used in so-called ‘aversion therapy’, and there was that stuff in the history books with the pink triangles… I think the persecution used to be a whole lot worse than you suggest.
And does that mean, then, that the people here shouting loudest in protest against it are all closet cross-dressers? That’s an even more interesting theory…
“It’s all so Goddamn unnecessary, and in the final analysis, so damn trivial.”
Agreed. For most cases, it’s nobody else’s damn business.
So they’re wearing a dress – so what? Women wear trousers, and nobody cares.
So they’re going in the ladies toilets – so what? They go in, do their business, wash their hands, go out. They mind their own business. It does no harm to anyone. What’s the fuss about?
They’ve changed their name and their pronouns – so what? People do it when they get married, too. Nobody makes a fuss over being asked to switch from using ‘Miss’ to ‘Mrs’.
They have cosmetic surgery to correct perceived defects – so what? It’s their body. Lots of people have cosmetic surgery not only for fixing things like scars and deformities, but just to look more attractive. It’s nobody else’s business.
So some people cheat at sports – so what? I think the reaction of most people to this sort of thing is to wearily roll their eyes. Given the number of doping scandals and drugs and growth hormones and steroids and ‘herbal dietary suplements’ that sportsmen routinely get into trouble for, with most people in the business saying cheating is virtually universal at the top levels of any sport, it’s par for the course. Everyone cheats. It’s just another method. This is nothing new, and nothing very different, and there are a bunch of gender-neutral ways to change the rules to stop it if you want.
So why is there this big fuss about it? Why are people arguing and opposing change like it’s the end of civilisation? Why are there normally-sensible libertarians calling for the state to forcibly intervene in other families’ private medical matters, or their toilet arrangements?
People are irrationally attached to the enforced cultural norms they grew up with – it’s an instinctive mechanism. And when those social norms change, it’s very distressing.
“So why is there this big fuss about it? Why are people arguing and opposing change like it’s the end of civilisation? Why are there normally-sensible libertarians calling for the state to forcibly intervene in other families’ private medical matters, or their toilet arrangements?”
It’s about balancing things. I don’t object to you or anyone making a personal and private accommodation to your needs, but when you start out on the societal scale and enabling the sexual predators like our transsexual hero Jessica Yaniv trying to force someone to literally wax her/his/its scrotum…? When they’re trying to place male rapists into women’s prisons, like David Thompson at HMP New Hall? That all is stemming from people pushing things far past the point of mutual accommodation and right into insanity.
And, if you think that those cases aren’t going to be what tilts the preference cascade into reversing it all, well… I think you’re naive.
When you’re a part of a group whose culture and conduct are at best merely tolerated, it is not wise to go rubbing the majority’s face in what makes you different. Remember that the very definition of “perversion” is that it “…is a type of human behavior that deviates from that which is understood to be orthodox or normal.”.
When you start wagging it in the normie’s faces, and frightening the horses, that’s where the conventions of accommodations are being violated. And, when you, as a group, keep doing it and aren’t bothering to keep it all to yourselves, that’s when the majority is going to shove all of you back into the closet–Including the libertine heteros.
I hear more than a few people that are looking at Epstein, the Nxivm complex of scandals, and all the rest as part of a spectrum of excess that direly needs reining in. The rumbling is starting up, and I think that there is going to be a general upheaval in response to it all. Shape and form of said upheaval? No idea, but I can feel the ground tremors under my feet. Given how far off center things have been pushed, I don’t have a lot of confidence that the backswing isn’t going to be just as far in the opposite direction. And, every single person of “alternative sexual persuasion” is going to feel the repercussions of what the excessives have done over the last few decades.
“People are irrationally attached to the enforced cultural norms they grew up with – it’s an instinctive mechanism. And when those social norms change, it’s very distressing.”
See, here is the thing: The way you’re framing it, it sounds trivial and childish. But, it is neither of those things.
Social systems, the customs, mores, and values that set the rules of what is acceptable and desirable in social behavior are what they are because they work, and have worked for rather a long time.
Yeah, nobody sat down and worked them all out from first principles on paper, designing them, but the “desire path” methodology and the sheer winnowing effect of survival have shaped society into what works, and has stripped away that which is unnecessary. If you look around you, and see some feature of your society that’s “always been there”, and think to change it? Think again, if you don’t understand why it is there, and why it is so.
The thing a lot of smart people fail to comprehend is that they actually aren’t smarter than the last thousand generations or so of their predecessors, and that overturning things that they see no point to isn’t either safe or wise. Chesterton stated an excellent rule, that too many ignore. If you don’t understand why something is so, don’t change it until you do understand it, and even then… Prepare for it not working out the way you thought it would.
The average person sees other people around them changing things for the sake of change, they’re disturbed by it all for good reason. Most of them feel on an instinctive level that the rules are there for a reason, and that violating them or changing them in any sort of will he, nill he manner is dangerous. This is merely common sense asserting itself, and the intellectual should take pause in it, and wonder if he’s really reasoned his way into an entirely new and far less tractable set of problems.
Outliers.
Honestly, it’s fine, sweetheart.
I’m here for you.
*ahem*
Sorry, Niv. You’re trying to make a seriously point, and I’m being a twat. It’s just, he’s so delightful 😳
Carry on. I’ll hush now.
Ever see the movie “Soylent Green”?
The majority ate well.
“Ever see the movie “Soylent Green”?
The majority ate well.”
Your point being…? What, precisely?
Society is like a lifeboat, in some metaphoric respects. There’s margin, during good times, to let some people “do their own thing”, but when that starts to include drilling holes in the hull to let in the water? Don’t be real surprised when that nasty, nasty majority takes away the toys and sets people to work bailing out the water.
‘Tis not a pleasant set of facts, for those who like playing about with drills, but it is nonetheless a reality. You reach a point where everything is the same as it always was, and you go to sleep in one world, waking up in another one entirely the next morning.
I’m sure that there were a lot of the denizens of Berlin’s debauched Weimar scene who thought that since Ernst Rohm was one of them, that all would remain as it had become, forever and ever. I imagine they were shocked and dismayed when the worm turned, and they woke up in the camps while the boringly bourgeoisie majority averted their eyes at the whole sad scene. You ride the seesaw up, you’re gonna have to be aware that it will go down, eventually.
As well, the point that their excess had contributed greatly to the social situation that enabled the rise of the extremists in the first damn place totally escaped them all. You can call it blaming the victims, but there is the unfortunate fact that without the dissipation and excess on display, many of the extremist’s arguments would have fallen flat.
Which, with everything else that was going on at the end of Weimar Germany, might not have meant much at all, but it is something to consider. Social excess always calls up the reactionaries, and once they have enough traction with the center? Watch out, because it won’t end well. That’s how we got Prohibition, here in the US, along with the rest of the Progressive programs, many of which we’re still dealing with.
Your entire argument rests on the idea that the minority are doing some damage – drilling holes, as you say.
But so far as I can see, the only damage they do is to be different from the majority.
If you are going to say something about harming public morality, then you cede the argument – that would be the basest of tautologies. You think it’s bad, and therefor when they do it it’s harming you. You’re the one drilling holes.
My point being, so what if the majority doesn’t like it? Do you live in the USA? Do you appreciate our Constitution? If so, you must understand that one of its main emphases is to protect from the rule of the majority – to protect the minority that is endangered simply because of its minority status.
It all sounds as if your point is, we should keep them down and quiet because the people who really really hate them will snap if we don’t.
Let them snap. If I’m only offered a binary choice – keep using some people as fodder, or put down some sick dogs – well, sorry, dogs.
“Let them snap. If I’m only offered a binary choice – keep using some people as fodder, or put down some sick dogs – well, sorry, dogs.”
Your telling characterization and projection points to why things are going to turn. You’re the minority view, pointing at the majority, and calling them the “sick dogs”. Purely from a pragmatic standpoint, how do you presume that’s going to work out? Can you math?
It would appear that you can’t. Once you’ve outraged enough of the normals you hold in contempt, don’t be real surprised when they return the favor and abandon tolerance for you and your positions.
The amusing thing is, I really don’t care. The only thing I’m annoyed by is the damage to the social fabric I have to share with you idiots, and I’m trying to point out that playing with matches isn’t to anyone’s benefit. But, no… I’m the bigot, I’m the bad guy for pointing these things out to your purblind lot.
Y’all got to this point not via a natural process of structural agreement and mutual accommodation; you got here because you pushed the Overton envelope to the point where you got what you wanted.
But, the point you fail to understand is that what you’ve achieved is not an organic growth from mutual agreement–It was a surrender by the majority, an admission that you had a point. Now that the activists are spreading out over the metaphoric battlefield and shooting the wounded, the fact that surrender hasn’t earned the majority any return respect is becoming increasingly clear–Which, as in all wars, means that the conflict is probably going to flare back into life, and this time be fought without restraint or quarter. That’s how these things go, I’m afraid.
“It’s about balancing things. I don’t object to you or anyone making a personal and private accommodation to your needs, but when you start out on the societal scale and enabling the sexual predators like our transsexual hero Jessica Yaniv trying to force someone to literally wax her/his/its scrotum…? When they’re trying to place male rapists into women’s prisons, like David Thompson at HMP New Hall? That all is stemming from people pushing things far past the point of mutual accommodation and right into insanity.”
I don’t particularly support either of those things, but neither has got anything to do specifically with being transgender. If you go into a shop and ask for a service they don’t offer, whether that’s icing a cake or specialist grooming services, the provider is entitled to say ‘We don’t offer that’. And it makes no difference whether a prisoner, or the prisoners you propose to keep them with, is man or woman. The requirement is to keep everyone safe. If you put a male rapist in a cell with another male they rape, that’s just as bad. If you don’t think so, you make it obvious it’s not the rape you actually care about, it’s just another deceptive excuse.
“When you’re a part of a group whose culture and conduct are at best merely tolerated, it is not wise to go rubbing the majority’s face in what makes you different.”
And what you’re persistently not getting is YOU’RE NOT THE MAJORITY ANY MORE. The majority of people support the transgender. The majority of people DON’T LIKE the people who don’t like the transgender. They’re not entirely averse to the idea of putting the boot in to transphobes.
So all your warnings about the dangers of bucking the majority opinion APPLY TO YOU.
This is the root justification for libertarianism – everybody is part of a minority, so creating a society that tolerates minorities to the maximum possible creates a society that will tolerate YOU.
“See, here is the thing: The way you’re framing it, it sounds trivial and childish. But, it is neither of those things.”
No, it’s not. It’s human. It’s an immensely difficult problem. But the problem it’s at the root of most of the political atrocities and disasters of the past few centuries. Everyone builds and supports an enforcement system assuming that their rules and norms are going to be enforced forever. But then the next elite takes over and puts on the boot, and the enforcement mechanism you built to enforce your own wise and sensible and ‘normal’ norms is suddenly put to use enforcing crazy norms on you! Quelle horreur! We must immediately grab back the boot and begin stamping on the enemy’s face again. The cycle repeats, endlessly, because nobody can ever bring themselves to simply throw away the boot.
“The thing a lot of smart people fail to comprehend is that they actually aren’t smarter than the last thousand generations or so of their predecessors”
The last 120 generations or so of our predecessors (a thousand generations puts us deep in the last ice age) have spent that time believing in an imaginary evil sky fairy who threatened to bomb any city who disobeyed his rules with incendiaries and chemical weapons, and who promised to torture all his enemies in a pit for all eternity (in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions). The last 120 generations were made up of humans, exactly like our generation. They were stupid, and ignorant, and misguided, and authoritarian, just like us. Moses – the genocidal mad bastard who gave us this anti-trans rule – was a classic authoritarian SJW type, who routinely executed those who didn’t follow his norms. He just had a different set of rules. (Pro-slavery, etc.)
“If you look around you, and see some feature of your society that’s “always been there”, and think to change it? Think again, if you don’t understand why it is there, and why it is so.”
We know why it’s there. It’s because people are idiots.
Case in point – people keep on going on about how terrible it would be if you allowed the transgender into the other set of toilets. You tell them that the transgender are already allowed into the other set of toilets, and have been for the last fifteen years. They hadn’t even realised, so great was the devastation and ruin it caused.
“Most of them feel on an instinctive level that the rules are there for a reason, and that violating them or changing them in any sort of will he, nill he manner is dangerous.”
Yes. That’s how authoritarians think. Ya gotta obey the rules!
Right. Well now the rule against transphobia is there for a reason. Disobeying it is dangerous. This is how the next generation will think, just as the last generation did.
“Your telling characterization and projection points to why things are going to turn. You’re the minority view, pointing at the majority, and calling them the “sick dogs”. Purely from a pragmatic standpoint, how do you presume that’s going to work out? Can you math?”
Can you? Less than 20% of the population don’t support the transgender. That 20% are a MINORITY. And they keep on acting like they think they’re still in the majority. How do you think that’s going to work out?
Every generation invents a new set of rules to enforce, but makes the same old mistake of thinking that enforcing the rules is necessary. That’s why authoritarianism refuses to die, why every generation is condemned to go round the same cycle. The old majority becomes a minority, as the new majority takes over. The new majority is doomed too, when they’re superceded by the next generation.
Nobody ever learns, until it’s too late. You only find out how the world works after you lose power, and it’s too late to change it.
“Can you? Less than 20% of the population don’t support the transgender. That 20% are a MINORITY. And they keep on acting like they think they’re still in the majority. How do you think that’s going to work out?”
There’s a word for people that believe what they are told by poll takers, and who trust in the things people say when they talk to them, and that word would be, charitably, “naive”. Less charitably, the word would be “stupid”.
Never, ever pay attention to what people say. Ever. Watch what they do. That’s the only thing you can rely on, and in matters like these, you’re not going to get the warning sign that things have turned on you until it’s too damn late.
Anecdote time, to illustrate the pertinent issue: I went to school with a girl, back in the day. Typical lovey-dovey sort, full of care and compassion for her fellow man. Uniquely, she was the only girl in our small school who was really fully accepting of our “alternative” crowd, among what passed for the “elite” in the school.
Time passes, she’s got three kids, two daughters and a boy. Youngest daughter was a soccer star, sought after and respected as a potential college and even Olympic hopeful. Right up until there was a little run-in with a transgender male-to-female on the field, who proceeded to shatter her knee and her athletic future simultaneously. Would you care to guess her mom’s newly shifted attitude? How she feels after being told she’s being a bigot, for thinking that the 160lb transgender that wrecked her daughter’s athletic career shouldn’t have been there on the field with her? Care to guess how many friends she has in the “alternative” community, these days, and what her opinion of them is?
Yeah, keep comforting yourself with those surveys. Keep thinking that you’re the morally ascendant, and that that will never, ever change. All y’all are going to be in for a shock when the masks drop. I felt the shift in things back in the 1990s, and when I told fellow soldiers that we’d be accommodating the “alternative” community in our ranks, they laughed at me. Ten years later, not so much.
I feel the same shifting ground under my feet right now, and it’s not in favor of what those surveys you so glibly quote.
That’s a very different argument. If last year 19% of people didn’t support transgender people and it’s 20% of people this year, that still leaves in you very much in the minority.
And if you’re going to use anecdotes to prove that surveys are wrong, that’s not really helping your case, anymore than the tired old false trope of how homophobes are really closeted gays.
This cycle always happens. It works like this:
Group A that has previously been discriminated against gains enough public favour that it’s not “fashionable” anymore to hate on them, and movements in their favour become more noticeable. Often, especially when the treatment of Group A has been very bad indeed, laws will be passed to make such treatment illegal (this is where libertarians start to get quite agitated*).
The old guard, the anti-Group A, feel their power slipping away, so they publicise the worse excesses they can find in Group A (which is exactly what you’re doing by bringing up Jessica Yaniv and your anecdote), while quietly ignoring the overwhelming majority of Group A, and by only publicising the worst excesses, are able to scream loudly about the poor effect that Group A has on society.
Look! Transgender people want to force women to wax their hairy bollocks! Ergo all trans people are dirty perverts! Why are we, as society, pandering to them??
And then someone hunts down the instances where expressing anti-Group A feelings gets someone fired, and publicises them, further adding fuel to the fire. And then they publicise the instance where someone isn’t fired, because they belong to Group A. And Group A begins to lose the favourable public opinion, because the normies, often characterised as straight white males, start to wonder if the fact that they can’t get a job is because someone else has been unfairly elevated. And then they start fighting back, and the cycle continues.
And all of these instances are outliers, statistically small in the grand scheme of things. In almost all instances, the fact that you can’t get a job (or a house, or an appointment with the GP, or you’ve had your benefits cut because of all the immigrants, or whatever) has nothing to do with Group A. But as long as some of these instances are true, and they’re the only ones that are being publicised, that’s enough to get people worried, who otherwise wouldn’t give a flying one about Group A, and would quite happily co-exist alongside them.
Some of the people publicising these instances are doing so in good faith, but some are doing it in bad faith, deliberating fanning the flames. And it works.
It works especially well when they can point at Group A, and show how they’re harming Group B (another historically persecuted groups) – Group B being LGB in this case, or Muslim women in the Jessica Yaniv case – because by sticking up for Group B, they can pretend that they’re not persecuting Group A being they’re bigoted – perish the thought! No, no, it’s because they really care about Group B (in some instances, of course that can be genuine. But often they’ve been busily persecuting Group B as well)
And then the end result is that instead of trying to work out why you really can’t get, say, a house (overbearing regulations preventing additional stock from being built), you think that the supply is static, and that if only Group A weren’t being given special treatment at your expense, then everything would be dandy.
So you don’t bother fighting against the rules, regulations, systems, whatever – you concentrate on fighting Group A. And nothing changes.
*As I said elsewhere – if those laws didn’t exist, it would be much more difficult to publicise abuses of them, and the backlash would be more difficult to encourage. Most of the time, existing laws already cover everything needed, if they were applied correctly. In my darker moments, I wonder if such laws were enacted knowingly, to foster the cycle of persecution and keep us fighting each other rather than the government that makes such laws.
Government does love passing laws and pretending to have purpose, setting up laws to foster an on going need for government would require a cynical deep state style civil service familiar with Machiavelli.
I doubt the elected could do it except with deep state guidance. Too short sighted.
Samizdatans have been discussing the role of science regarding transsexuality. Having had some experience, I can firmly state that gender scientists are the only group I consider more determinedly purblind than climate scientists. Their studies will always show what they want them to show. I’ve heard stories from people who fell into Blanchard’s hands in Toronto. I’ve heard stories about Johns Hopkins. My own experience was with Walter Bockting at the University of Minnesota. Hosers, every one of them.
Ranked below gender and climate scholars are futurists and ethicists. This is, of course, my own opinion – but it’s an opinion with some experience behind it. Remember, too, that people are more diverse than many ‘scholars’ are willing to see.
At least (some of) the surgeons have learned how to do a better job.
Samizdatistas
Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe.
Ellen (November 8, 2019 at 4:25 pm), I agree with your comment. I see today as being worse than ever (elite society’s hostility to free speech and tendency to increase the power of arrogant administrators over the professionals both contribute, over and above the politicisation as such) but I gather from my medical connections that there was a consistent tendency long before for medics in this field (not only in this field of course) to present as knowing much more that they did – to offer treatment and prognoses as if scientific certainty, even when in fact sometimes research mingled with debatable part-guesses – and that phrasing is my courtesy, not actual dissent from your stronger way of putting it.
Not every motive that makes medicos act confident is bad: the placebo effect is real and a confident doctor is part of that effect, but, alas, that plays into the temptation of all professionals to exaggerate (sometimes a lot!) what they know, both absolutely and relative to the public (especially their clients).
My family can be pretty insider-frank about shortcomings in the medical profession.
I also think it is samizdatans, not samizdatistas 🙂 (but have a very vague memory that Perry is not that wild about either).
Well, harrumph!, obviously it should be “samizdatists,” but this -ista thing was all the rage IIRC, maybe aping the Fashionable Word “Sandanista” (but that was taken from the guy’s name:
per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front ).
However, Evil Hippo Leader definitely did mandate “Samizdatistas” as the nombre oficial de esta organización (pls to note that my Spanish is just as good as Babelfish’s*, at least on this phrase). I know onaccounta I asked flat out several millenia ago and was straightened out on the matter forthwith and forthrightly.
*(Meaning, I cheated.)
I guess if the Sudan can get away with calling the country Sudan, the Ukrainians with calling theirs Ukraine, and so forth (if there is a so forth), then I guess Evil Hippo Leader can call his malt shoppe whatever he likes.
So, I honor the request/mandate for the moniker “Samizdatista.”
P.S. Just teasing, Perry. But yes, you did tell me that long ago, and more power to you.
I have to agree with Kirk about Nullius’ opinion poll. We live at a time when the police may visit for a remark questioning a single aspect of very recent trans orthodoxy and when Mr Ed can, alas quite rationally, advise neonsnake (advise neonsnake*, of all people) to settle promptly if ever sued by a PC grievance-monger. A poll can be what people are willing to say (knowing it is recorded) to a caller who presents convincingly as a pollster. Under these circumstances, preference falsification is certain and the only question is, how much? Kirk is speculating (in both senses, maybe 🙂 ) that a reverse preference cascade is on the cards in a decade or two. I, more cautiously, call it a possible future.
Kirk is less than clear in some later comments whether his ‘you’ refers to commenters who disagree with him in this thread or the hypothetical ‘you’ of a generic PC activist. Nullius, debating him, does not clarify the different roles of the PC and of their proteges. Enough MeToo torpedoes have circled around to tell us that many a powerful PC enforcer of the narrative is a white male and as straight as the most orthodox believer in whom Nullius calls ‘a sky fairy” could possibly wish. These people are “the trans lobby” whose power today is noted – by such as dare to.
I would guess the percentage of trans in the narrative-enforcer ranks somewhat exceeds the percentage of trans in the general population but obviously they are very far from being all trans nor all trans with them. Nullius tells us most trans are not engaged in anti-free speech conspiracies. – but the PC MSM do not feature off-narrative trans, any more than off-narrative members of other groups they patronise. They hate “traitors to their identity group”.
Kirk argues that if (he would say ‘when’) a reaction comes, not just the PC but also their proteges may be targeted. I see that possibility too – hence my first comment in this thread with its readying of a self-interested argument to offer the (counter-)revolutionaries (but also its “chance’d be a fine thing” assessment of how soon and how certainly needed 🙂 ). The PC control of the narrative has the natural (and intended) side-effect of risking their proteges in their overthrow.
As regards another point of this debate, long ago, a discussion Natalie and I had while walking a dog was written up by me and posted by her. FWIW, I don’t see either Nullius’ or Kirk’s characterisations of anti-LGBTQUERTY sentiment as having central rather than peripheral application.
—-
* Although I wrote ‘neonsnake of all people’ above, writing that reminded me of the sad story of the US professor who was a freedom rider in the old days and in many other ways made anti-racism central to his understanding of himself. More recently, he was hired by the Kenyan government to advise on cultural factors to guide helping native businessmen be competitive with the resident Asian community, with its strong business traditions. Back home, he discussed this in a lecture and two affirmative-action-entry students in the back row looked up from surfing their laptops long enough to misunderstand a fragment. Two lawsuits later, after the university had spent $100,000 to get him fired for ‘racism’, he committed suicide. A more conservative colleague, admitting he had gutted his own history lectures’ discussion of things like the three-fifths compromise precisely from fear of such ‘misunderstandings’, said that his liberal colleague, because he felt how anti-racist he was, had “failed to recognise the dangers” of the brave new world.
😥 😥 😥 😡 😡 😡
“I have to agree with Kirk about Nullius’ opinion poll. […] A poll can be what people are willing to say (knowing it is recorded) to a caller who presents convincingly as a pollster.”
🙄 If the evidence contradicts what we know to be true, then so much the worse for the evidence!
All evidence is subject to question. The same goes for polls conducted in person, of course. You talk to your family, friends, and neighbours, who know your views. Are they going to contradict you, and start an argument/fight? No, they’re going to nod and smile, and go ‘Tch!’ in all the right places. People try to fit in. So you can’t trust your own personal poll of the people you know, either. So how do you know what the ‘majority’ opinion is? What’s your evidence?
(Also, in this age when people are universally hiding their transphobic views even from an anonymous survey, I’m astonished that there are people brave enough to express those views here on the internet! You can’t seriously think the police couldn’t track you down…)
“Nullius, debating him, does not clarify the different roles of the PC and of their proteges.”
As I said above:
Should women be allowed to vote? Should women be allowed to go out and get jobs? And not just the menial secretary/typist/cleaner/nurse/shop assistant-type jobs, but managers and company directors and engineers and doctors? Should women drive cars? Should women be able to sign contracts, take out loans, own their own houses? Should women be allowed out of the house alone without their menfolk to guard them?
Should women be allowed to wear trousers and cut their hair short?! And then go out in public, driving their car to their company where they can boss men around as their manager?!!
Attitudes change. Many of the innovations above have come along in living memory, and while there are still vestiges of the old sexism, I don’t think most people are lying to pollsters when they say ‘Yes of course women should be allowed to vote.’
And I don’t think they’re lying when they nevertheless say they’re not impressed by modern feminists, and people getting fired by authoritarian HR departments for telling sexist jokes. I don’t think most women think men should be fired for telling sexist jokes. That’s not what women’s rights are about.
And it’s the same with the transgender. Most people are sympathetic to the reasonable requests of the transgender to be able to live their daily lives without constant harassment and conflict and deliberate bullying from the remaining small minority of out-of-date bigots. They should be able to get a job, and get official documents, and get appropriate medical treatment. Without having to have a long bureaucratic or legal fight about it every time. Most people are not so sympathetic to people being fired or exiled from polite society for merely expressing anti-trans opinions. (It depends how deliberately nasty you’re being about expressing those opinions, though. There’s no public sympathy for nastiness and cruelty.) The majority may be pro-trans, but the majority are not authoritarian trans-activists.
“Nullius tells us most trans are not engaged in anti-free speech conspiracies. – but the PC MSM do not feature off-narrative trans, any more than off-narrative members of other groups they patronise. They hate “traitors to their identity group”.”
Most TGs are still too scared to ‘come out’. Most TGs are older people, who have hidden it all their lives.
And most TGs who have ‘come out’ are very much inclined to keep their heads down. They want nothing more in life than not to be noticed. They don’t want to do TV interviews. They don’t want to stand up in public meetings. They don’t even want to be followed round everywhere by crowds of small and very bad-mannered kids, pointing and sniggering. They don’t want to make a fuss, or start a conflict. When someone gets nasty about it, they hunch their shoulders, try to ignore it, and move on.
We have several commenting here – you’ll note they don’t get into arguments about it. Did you notice?
Do you remember the days when activist gays would “out” their fellow gays who were still in the closet? The activists argued that so long as most gays were invisible and anonymous, nothing would ever change. They had a duty to the rest of their identity group! Standing out in the open, under the spotlight, trying to make the case for decent treatment, they were annoyed at all the others huddled in the shadows, hoping to take advantage of the gains and freedoms won but having no intention whatsoever of paying the price for them. Conversely, those still in the shadows just wanted a quiet life, just wanted to fit in, and were willing to put up with their private fear and misery, and shame at their hypocrisy, knowing the even worse penalty society would impose on them if they were exposed.
It’s been likened to living as a spy behind enemy lines, or living as a dissident in Soviet Russia. (Given that the blog is named after samizdat, we ought to understand and sympathise somewhat with that.) There are no words for the constant anxiety, the constant terror of discovery, the mental strain of the constant state of alertness needed to never make a mistake, and give away what you are. A lot don’t have that strength to take it, living totally alone with it, which is a large part of why the suicide rate is so high.
That said, I did find it interesting to observe the reaction to a rare exception, when Caitlyn Jenner came out. Caitlyn was openly a right-wing Trump supporter. She did speak up for transgender rights, but avoided taking any part in the PC reflexive-activist right-bashing part of that. And of course, she was rather more protected from the personal consequences by wealth, fame, and a (nominally) supportive social set. The interesting thing was – the left attacked her for being a Trump-supporter and not being radical enough, the right still attacked her for being (loudly) transgender.
And many other non-leftist, non-activist TGs will look at that example, and conclude that the world doesn’t want any right-wing freedom-supporting TGs. If you want to have a support group willing to protect you when you come out, you’d better be on the orthodox authoritarian left.
So I’d say to you if you want to see a vocal and visible bunch of reasonable, pro-freedom, right-wing TGs to counter-balance the leftist MSM presentation, and to cut the ground from under the activists’ justifications, then you need lots of non-TGs on the pro-freedom right to be visibly supporting them. We have to make the clear distinction between the authoritarians and all the various sympathy groups they use to justify their grab for power.
Same with women, same with blacks, same with the poor. If you want their support for the pro-freedom right, then the pro-freedom right has to support them. If the right are constantly attacking them and criticising them, without making any distinction between ‘good’ minority and ‘bad’ minority, even when they’re right-wingers, they’ll obviously turn instead to the left, or keep quiet about it.
“As regards another point of this debate, long ago, a discussion Natalie and I had while walking a dog was written up by me and posted by her. FWIW, I don’t see either Nullius’ or Kirk’s characterisations of anti-LGBTQUERTY sentiment as having central rather than peripheral application.”
I don’t think I understand what point you’re trying to make here.
But I did strongly agree with the bit in that post where you said:
Unrepresentative examples abound in this debate!
“A more conservative colleague, admitting he had gutted his own history lectures’ discussion of things like the three-fifths compromise precisely from fear of such ‘misunderstandings’, said that his liberal colleague, because he felt how anti-racist he was, had “failed to recognise the dangers” of the brave new world.”
You might notice the similarities of this story to what I said above about those people wanting to stay ‘in the closet’.
As I said in a previous conversation, we all have a common cause, buried beneath the conflict.
*Shakes pack of ciggies*
Help yourselves, smokers.
*Shakes bottle*
Drinkers, take a glass. I’m buying.
Thing is, you don’t come out once, ok?
It’s not like you come out, and you’re done. In each individual social group, you have to make that decision. Out or not?
I’ve come out several times. I don’t know how many. Dozens, hundreds maybe. This year, alone, a couple, at least. It’s not a “one and done” thing. You come out, or not, all the time.
I could do the quiet life thing. I’m bi, after all. I could pretend I’m gold star (Google it) or straight, depending on context.
Here, I came out early. I have my reasons and it was basically me testing whether you lot are LINO or not. Thankfully, for me, the first few people that responded we’re bobby b and Julie and NIV.
Else, I’d have run a mile and decided that his site wasn’t for my kind.
The fear, the misery, the shame, all of that. That’s my life. Every day.
The hypocrisy. Every day.
Every day, until I make that decision with whatever social circle we’re talking about.
*Shrugs*
Now think of that in terms of the T.
People like this Kirk, before I learned how to fight, with their talk of depraved sexual behaviours and mental illness, with their “I don’t have skin on the game” bullshit, they’re the guys who put me into hospital, but I’m expected to go “Hm. Their free speech is really important. This overides my right to fight back.” I’m not allowed to fight back, any criticism is anti-free speech.
They don’t want free speech. They want free reign. They’re two very different things.
Neon,
Yowzah! SQOTD.
This “out” business is interesting. I don’t know how out I am. I transitioned at work, no problems. “I’m having my mid-life adventure.” I chose my new name to sound rather like my old, so if somebody used the wrong name we could both pretend it never happened. I knew about self-fulfilling predictions, so I made it very clear to myself that I expected no trouble at all. It worked.
I went to my 40th high school class reunion as my new self. Again, no trouble. “I’ve had a makeover.” Ditto the fiftieth and sixtieth. I live in a senior cooperative. Some people know, some may not. Nobody’s told me, nobody’s made a fuss.
Then again, there was going through puberty a second time. That was — interesting.
The important thing is being comfortable within yourself. Activists aren’t, and they get jealous.
But you’re fighting back right now. You’re countering speech with speech, just as you should. People within hearing distance are going to have the opportunity to hear “them”, and then an opportunity to hear you. I think you end up with more truly convinced people this way than if we just shut “them” down.
Plus, this way we find out who “they” are.
And, if the freedom to talk gives them the idea that they can move on to physical violence, well, then we’ll just shoot ’em.
Aww! Thank you, Julie!
That’s great, I’m glad for you, Ellen 🙂
I had some problems in the mid-nineties, but very little since. The only time I’ve had problems since was in a martial arts club, which were related to changing rooms, and, I privately think, to the amount of close physical contact involved in ju-jitsu. I switched clubs, but I’m not out in my current club, just in case.
I have dual purpose in “fighting”. Firstly, I’m just a bit fighty 😉 and my tolerance for intolerance is kinda low, especially when it comes to behaviours vs characteristics.
Secondly, I’d like to think that if someone else “like me” were to come across this site, they could see demonstrable evidence that it’s fine for them. Or, someone who isn’t like me, but believes in tolerance, since I think these are the folks whose hearts and minds I think we should be capturing.
I’d like to think that those with hearing distance might hear, and think “you know, there’s something to this liberty thing I keep hearing about…”
I can’t think of a more natural and needful constituency for liberty than those who aren’t always buddies with the majority.
But it’s messy. The strength of liberty is that everyone gets let in the door. The problem with liberty . . . is that everyone gets let in the door.
Julie? JULIE?!!?
*Points at bobby b’s comment*
Now that, that’s an SQOTD, right there!
Bobby b, I’m watching our election at the moment, unsurprisingly. Both (main) parties are attempting to outdo each other with promises of public spending.
In a particularly delicious piece of hypocrisy, the right-wing shit-rag Daily Express run a very negative piece on Labour’s plans to raise minimum wage to £10 a while ago (it will cost everyone their jobs, etc) and have since praised the Conservative’s plans to raise it to £10.50 as a stroke of genius. FFS.
I’m waiting on everyone’s manifestos, but currently find myself in the utterly bizarre position of going “Um. The most libertarian party, currently, are the Green Party. lol wut?”
How did that happen?
Because they’re talking about UBI, about devolving accountability to local councils, and so on.
Which is super weird.
The Tories are pushing Neo-Liberalism (or corporatism) to the hilt, funneling money out of the UK and into tax havens. Labour are pushing for re-nationalisation of public services, and appear to have majority support for that.
The Lib Dems are just an unprincipled mess.
I’d rather have a principled mess that I disagree with. I at least have a stance then, which leaves me with the mildly hilarious stance of “uh, I think I’m Green…”
ROFL
Ellen (November 10, 2019 at 11:11 pm), it sounds like you not only (wisely) chose not to assume trouble but also put thought into not causing it – the two decisions being doubtless related. I think it a sensible courtesy to choose a shortish (or naturally abbreviable) new name but I had not thought of ‘new name sounds enough like old to avoid embarrassment whichever is said’. (On a vaguely related point, since long ago, I pronounce Ms with a soft s, partly because buzzing like a bee seemed silly and unaesthetic, but also so I was never loudly wrong for the preference of whomever I addressed.)
I once worked with a girl who held strongly (based on a known psychological theory) that imagining an unpleasant experience, especially repeatedly, would tend to put it in your memory enough to do some of the mental harm that actually experiencing it would do. (She and I did some exercises to assess the idea; their outcome did not persuade me it was wrong, if I may thus cautiously express it.) Insofar as this idea has content, you probably benefitted yourself that way too.
I had not before thought of such jealousy as contributing to hatred of “traitors to their identity group”. Both logically and psychologically, activists tend to make dreadful adverts for their own proclaimed opinions – they do not look calm in whatever they profess – but it had not occurred to me they would be jealous of any who did, any whose ‘treachery’ was evidenced by not seeming as ‘worked-up’ as they.
Neonsnake, I too was interested in taking up martial arts and was fortunate to find a jujitsu club which was specificallly for LGBT members. I than had to be careful not to out myself to the other members as a tory voter who worked for The Sun and The Times. 😉
Now that I have returned to Scotland (land of my parents and where I grew up), I have to be careful that I don’t accidentally out myself (to the wrong people) as a No voter, Leave voter, Tory voter, who was born in England.
Oh, lordy, don’t ever make decisions based on a campaign! 🙂
One problem with democracy is, the average IQ is 100.
For every 140, there’s a 60.
140’s spend the time between elections watching and processing, and are hardly ever “undecided” come election time.
So, campaigns are aimed at the 60’s, who can be persuaded by nice hair and “free everything!”
bobby b,
So, campaigns are aimed at the 60’s, who can be persuaded by nice hair and “free everything!”
In the run-up to the 2014 referendum in Scotland, I remember one TV vox-pop documentary featured an individual who said he didn’t really know enough about the issues, but was probably going to vote “yes” on the basis that there’d be a hell of a party afterwards if ‘yes’ won. 🙁
Duncan S (November 11, 2019 at 9:31 pm), I chiefly recall the guy who said he voted ‘yes’ in the booth but then, as he walked out, thought again about it and realised he hoped it would fail. Talk about swing voter. 🙂
I guess we should be glad that so many potential voters for the “best party I’ve ever been to” party did not vote at all in the indyref. The more yes an area was, the lower the turnout – the correlation was striking,
Heh. I know that feeling; “But…but…you’re not a raving socialist? Even with the, y’know, the, uh, gay thing, you’re not a socialist? How ever can you not be?”
*Nods*
Definitely a thing.
The thought process is “You’re not fighting, so you must be comfortable and have forgotten what it’s like to be discriminated against. The only possible reason you aren’t being discriminated against is because you’ve compromised yourself in some way, you don’t want to rock the boat, you keep quiet when they discriminate” and so on.
Often, they’re not seeing the times you do still fight.
Often they’re not seeing that (in my case) 99% of the battle is won, by better and braver people who came before me. I’m not prepared to fight wars that have been won.
As another example, I googled Thomas Sowell some time ago when you mentioned him – it may not surprise you to learn that I discovered that he’s sometimes referred to as “Uncle Tom” Sowell. I suspect the motivation is similar.
I’m very, very unlikely to vote Green (they’re financially quite protectionist, just as one example) – it just made me laugh, ruefully, that they’re probably the only party that skew to that side of the Nolan chart, everyone else is arranged in the Authoritarian side.