One thing to consider might be that you are not obligated to accept any particular worldview wholesale. Changing your mind about trans people on Trans Topic A does not have to result in a change in your feelings about Trans Topic B.
It is possible e.g. to be less transphobic, to not reduce people to gametes, to be willing to respect peoples’ preferences for identification… but still have reservations about trans women competing in professional women’s sports, or about trans women being housed with cis women in prison.
That is an option! Some people might still get mad and say you are transphobic. They might be right. Or wrong. But you do not have to define yourself by either the anti-trans/gender-critical movement or the pro-trans movements. Rejecting anti-trans bigotry (which is rampant in most gender critical spaces) does not mean you have to embrace “trans ideology”.
In general, particularly for the most contentious issues such as gendered sports, you can also just reserve judgment. One reason the most contentious issues come up a lot is that they are weaponized to push people in particular directions. In general, the modern conservative movement has been heavily motivated to push the most extreme trans perspectives into the public consciousness because these issues trigger revulsion responses in a lot of "people. Trans people have been an effective boogeyman to motivate conservatives and lots of conservative leaning centrists.
If you care to investigate it yourself (I am not recommending this, only do it if you genuinely want to) and talk to lots of different trans people from varied backgrounds, you may find there are different perspectives on these issues even in trans communities. Many trans people do not have strong feelings about the more contentious issues, or may even have less PC views of those issues. Not every trans person is a radical agent for a postmodern trans ideology.
I had another thought about how you do not need to adjust all of your views wholesale.
This seems like a reasonable concern that you should think about. No need to rush into a conclusion.
By contrast, this seems not very well-thought out, and tribal.
Trump disallowing all trans women in all women’s sports seems very anti-liberal to me. Many forms of sports in the US are private organizations. Even those that are not private are often run at local or state levels, such as high schools. Also, sex differences change across ages.
Even if you feel that e.g. trans women should not compete at top level professional/Olympic women’s sports, does that mean that trans teenagers should also be disallowed from competing in middle school or high school sports? What about private recreational leagues? Why do all of these sports need to have their rules dictated by the federal executive branch?
The reason is because of bigotry. Because Trump supporters see trans people as disgusting freaks who need to be punished for their abnormal behavior until they conform with mainstream gender roles. So even if “no trans people in pro sports” might not be a bigoted anti-trans position, Trump’s ban on trans people in women’s sports actually is anti-trans IMO.
Also, Trump has done much worse than that to trans people via executive orders. He has kicked people out of the military without proper cause, attacked gender affirming care, and more.
I think it is interesting that you seem to feel strongly about this and have a good idea of what the most extreme (and rare) online trans activists are saying about their rights, but you are ignorant of what the actual US government is saying and doing about those rights.
That seems like a big weird disconnect, to me. Well, weird in that I think it is foolish and illogical. It’s not unusual, though, I think the overwhelming majority of right and center right people with anti-trans views are in a similar situation as you.
If someone with a trans flag in their profile posts an aggressively worded tweet and calls you a transphobe, that is alarming and upsetting. If the president strips rights from thousands of trans Americans, that’s not really something worth paying attention to.
It might be a boy who cried wolf situation. Even if they were wrong to say their rights were under attack before, that may not be wrong now.
Also, I am curious: how do you feel about the violence from the right? Do you have a sense that one “side” is more violent right now? Is this something you have looked into much?
I’m a bit confused by what you mean here. Do you mean because ICE is detaining more people, that would be a point of government contact that people could use to figure out their birth certificates? ICE isn’t really in the business of helping people get their documents in order. They are an entirely different branch of government, and also they don’t seem to be particularly concerned with helping people prove their status. ICE has also detained people who have legal status (either legal immigration status or citizenship), and actually have documents, without giving them a chance to prove their status.
Given that ICE has been detaining people when they show up to their immigration court dates (i.e. when they are “doing it the right way”), I’m not sure that people would actually trust the government if they told people to show up and self declare that they didn’t have proof of their own citizenship.
Another problem is that it can be really hard to prove citizenship if you weren’t registered at birth. It’s a legitimately hard problem – it’s hard to tell the difference between someone who was born at home and never registered vs someone who was brought into the country as an infant or young child. And one of the groups of people that the government is deporting right now are people who were not born in this country, but were brought here as infants or children. So identifying yourself to the government as potentially part of a group of people that they are currently deporting seems dangerous.
One perspective that the government might have is that the problem actually does not need to be solved. If you are specifically thinking of black people born during the Jim Crow era, that problem will eventually go away – those people aren’t going to live forever. And if you are thinking of people born more recently, who just didn’t get registered for some other reason, then it’s easy to just blame that on the parents irresponsibility, so not see it as a problem the government needs to put any effort into. If their parents are US citizens, they can derive their citizenship through their parents, even if they weren’t born in the US. So it doesn’t really matter if they don’t have proof of birth in the US. And if their parents aren’t US citizens, then I think that the attitude of the current administration (which is laid out in an executive order) is that they aren’t legitimately US citizens either. So there’s not really a problem for the US government to “solve” there, from that perspective.
I don’t spend much time in the US and can’t vote there. Maybe that context helps. Mostly I get US news via YouTube and skip plenty, so while I have an idea what’s going on, it’s not as relevant to me as general trends.
I agree it’s antiliberal, though the idea of a top down decree seems somewhat reasonable to me when other governmental or pseudo governmental bodies (states, universities) are pushing an agenda also.
While I think private sporting orgs makes a lot of sense, especially when it’s somewhat separated (different bodies for men’s and women’s leagues), this does clash somewhat with the usual laws in western countries as I understand them which often have particular laws about when discrimination is okay (women’s leagues being a prime example).
Besides under 12s mixed gender leagues, I can’t think of many examples where mixed leagues make sense. Even something like chess would crowd a lot of women out if it were combined. (Also it’s usually allowed for women to compete in men’s leagues, just they don’t perform well most of the time).
Maybe, but I know several ordinary trans people (not influencers, have a pretty normal life outside of being trans) and many of them say pretty extreme things. Like implying someone is a nazi for using Twitter.
The least agressive one I know is a not-immediate family member and I’ve never really heard him talk much about trans issues outside of more general conversation with his boyfriend (also f2m) and that was mostly them talking about experiences.
It occurs to me now that I suspect f2m have a much easier time than m2f. Probably because it’s much much easier to pass. (He and his BF do quite well unless you know what to look for. I think they both have had masecomies too)
I don’t have a great sense for the situation except what I see online which seems like violence from the left is on the rise (particularly with recent high profile attacks). Also actual violence doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue outside the US.
I ended up chatting with a trans woman at dinner 2 nights ago. It didn’t take long for some more contentious (IMO) views to come out. The conversation started around adblockers and monetization on twitch/yt and moved to web browsers. Being in some tech communities I guess this makes sense (that there are strong opinions about eg Brave and Ladybird). She did not seem to like my position of not trying to police other peoples opinions, but did acknowledge that it’s important that people are able to make mistakes without having their lives destroyed. At one stage more problematic people in gaming communities came up (the kind that say “kys” and the like) and I asked her (respectfully) if there was one thing she could say to the ones that would listen, what would it be, and she replied along the lines of “I’m a human too”. She also mentioned getting a lot of hate on the street. She had some feminine traits but also had a short beard (maybe she was nonbinary, I didn’t ask particularly but everything she could make look feminine did look feminine, skirt, shear top, necklace, highlights in hair, etc).
Anyway I do have some access to do that kind of research but have been hesitant particularly because it seems like curiosity is rewarded with hostility. (Passively observing this is also one of the things that pushed me toward an anti-trans position)
In person one on one is probably easier than over discord for that sort of thing (esp in a public channel)
Yeah, I think I have a strong desire for as consistent a view as possible, and some of my reservations are more consistent with an anti-trans position than neutral or pro. In scientific matters those kind things are more important maybe because a good explanation should handle all criticisms and be consistent and general.
Maybe that kind of approach is bad for stuff related to people though. If we wanted all social stuff to be highly principled and consistent we probably wouldn’t get anywhere fast.
Yeah but not necessarily via ICE. More that programs with relevant authorities or temporary units could be set up to reassure people concerned about US citizens being caught up. It would get the people off ICEs books as such.
Hmm yeah I see the concern. Personally some leeway is warranted because being in the US for 30 years since you were 1yo is as good as naturalization any other way. (But I’m not the president)
That helps a lot. My guess would be that your news intake is severely biased. But if you are not in the US and not participating in the US political situation, I find it less concerning.
I think there is a qualitative difference between pushing an agenda of tolerance, liberalism, and mutual benefit vs. pushing an agenda of bigotry and discrimination. I don’t think all agendas are equally good and bad. Many issues are mixed, confusing, tricky… and many agendas are flawed. But also some agendas are actually evil, with bad intentions, that would be evil even if implemented effectively. I think those are worse than flawed, confused agendas that might have unintended negative consequences when implemented.
Do you see how bringing up gendered chess leagues actually works against your position (and the anti-trans position in general) in this topic? I can explain but it might be good to think it through yourself.
A few things to consider:
What is the best argument for excluding trans women from professional women’s sports? What specific, objectively verifiable biological advantages do trans women have over cis women in sports? Do these advantages exist in all sports equally?
One thing that might also help is to not think about trans women as “identical to a typical man, but in a dress” for the purpose of this thought experiment.
Edit: Also, what might be some reasons women would choose to participate in women’s sports instead of mixed gender sports? Do those reasons vary from sport to sport? Where does chess fit in?
Implications have a problem compared to explicit statements, in that they can be easily interpreted multiple ways. So if they implied that, but did not say it outright, then maybe they meant something slightly different than you think. Maybe they were venting about what they perceive as a new or worsened problem, rather than literally saying everyone on Twitter is a nazi.
Did you know that once Elon Musk bought Twitter, many nazis who had previously been banned were unbanned? This makes some sense, considering Elon Musk felt comfortable performing multiple nazi salutes in a public setting. It is in fact extremely easy to find nazi content on Twitter now.
I don’t think that means everyone on Twitter is a nazi, though. But I think it would be reasonable to say that under Elon Musk’s control Twitter has become a nazi-friendly platform in a way that it did not used to be.
Yeah, testosterone is a much more powerful (or maybe a better word would be “overt” or “obvious”) hormone than estrogen in some ways, which is fortunate for trans men and unfortunate for trans women.
Did you know there have also been recent high profile attacks from the right? Well, I say high profile, in the sense that they were public assassinations of public figures, e.g. congresspeople. They were not as high profile in the sense that the federal government did not care about their deaths in the same way, and most online media did not dwell on their assassinations in the same way.
In general, it is plausible that left wing violence has risen lately. Here is some analysis of that:
As you can see, the dark blue line for left wing violence has gone up. It’s worth noting that even with that rise, the analysis points out left wing violence is much less lethal on average than right wing violence. I think there are some other takeaways one could immediately gather just from that one graph, much less the study itself.
One thing I find odd is you cared enough about this to mention it as a thing on your mind in your brain dump, but you did not care enough about it to actually look into the details, or fact-check the YouTube videos you have seen that maybe talked about this issue.
If you are not in the US and it doesn’t concern you, that’s totally fair IMO. You can choose to focus on other stuff. But if you choose to be concerned by it, and care about it, and be upset about it, then I think it would be wise to also choose to be well-informed on it.
I am adding bold in the below quote, it was not present in the original post.
I do find it interesting that you do not like to police peoples’ opinions, but you are seemingly okay or unbothered by e.g. the US Federal Government trying to police peoples’ bodies by trying to ban gender affirming care.
I don’t think “policing opinions” has a clear definition. I agree with your trans friend that people should have space to make mistakes and change without their life being ruined. For example: I disagree with the current federal government exerting massive influence on society to get people fired or deported or imprisoned for saying bad things about Charlie Kirk. That seems very destructive to me.
But in general if people share their opinions in public, I think it is okay to criticize them in public.
I empathize with your friend. How did you feel about those comments? You did not mention.
Curiosity can take many forms. You can ask questions in a judgmental or accusatory way, and you can ask questions in an open and accepting way. Neutral ways probably exist too, though I think they inevitably will lean one way or the other.
And also, if someone is used to getting asked questions in a negative way, they may be primed to expect that, so they may assume negative intentions unless the question is asked in a very accepting and friendly way. Also, some people don’t want to answer personal questions like that, and are tired of having to defend their existence, and might be fed up/annoyed at the whole thing.
In general I would agree that private discussions will probably yield better results. But I don’t think that’s always true.
Social/political ideological camps are not generally comparable to coherent scientific theories. Maybe some that are purely concerned with academic theory (like some forms of economics, maybe) could get a little close. But real world ideological camps, advocacy groups, political parties, etc… definitely not.
There is zero reason to assume they will be consistently right or consistently wrong. I think the current Republican party is overall deeply evil and actively working to bring about the destruction of liberalism, but they might still be right on some specific topics. And the Republican party of 10 or 20 years ago was far from perfect, but I think they were way less bad than now. That’s pretty normal and expected.
You could be principled and consistent, but that does not imply any specific conclusions on any specific topic.
It seems like you don’t really know all the bad things happening in the US lately. That’d be fine except you seem to have a lot of opinions about US politics which seem overconfident and biased. And my impression is you view some of the US right as more well-meaning than they are.
Connecting this to feminism, I guess you may not be familiar with what has been happening related to abortion, birth control, miscarriage related healthcare, etc. or may have biased information about it. See e.g. The Week in Abortion - by Jessica Valenti and also try reading through the titles of recent articles on that site.
I think that it is possible to be logically consistent with stuff related to people. You can have a highly principled and consistent view about social issues.
One thing you might be trying to do is to have a position that is consistent with one “side” of the issue. But neither of the major parties have logically consistent or principled views. So siding your view entirely with one party or “side” isn’t going to get you a logically consistent or principled view.
Another possibility is you could be thinking that views like “trans women can never participate in any female sports” or “trans women must always be allowed to participate in all female sports” are consistent, principled views. But I think those views are only naively consistent. They aren’t actually consistent in a principled way: they just seem consistent from a naive perspective that isn’t considering underlying principles.
An example of a view that is naively consistent, but not really principled, would be the view that no sports players should be allowed to take any drugs, medications, or pharmaceuticals. Or alternatively, the view that if some sports players are allowed to take some medications or drugs, that means that all sports players should be allowed to take any medications or drugs.
People are banned from taking certain drugs when participating in certain sports. To be consistent, should we ban all drugs from all sports? That wouldn’t really be consistent. You have to take into account whether the drug is performance enhancing for that particular sport. You also take into account context like how serious the sport is or what the stakes are. Is it just a group of people playing together for fun, or is it the Olympics?
Interestingly, I think that one of your replies to me is an example of you not being “consistent” in a way that agrees with the current administration in the US:
The view of the current administration is that all illegal immigrants should be deported. That would include people who came to the US at 1 year old and haven’t left since.
I thought it was notable that you seem OK being “inconsistent” in this particular way, but you are concerned about being “inconsistent” with the trans sports issue. (I would argue that in both cases the “inconsistency” is just a surface inconsistency, and not actually inconsistent principles.) This could be due to the feelings you have about the trans issue (which you noted above – I am not trying to make assumptions about your psychology or put words into your mouth here).
If you want women under 120 lbs, you may be confused by memes.
If you want thin women who are “not overweight”, you may be being misled by things like the BMI scale. A lot of people’s concept of a healthy weight range is too low, and the actual healthy range is higher. There’s controversy here and it’s hard to figure out the ideal and it varies for different individuals, but I feel comfortable in saying that overall our society is misjudging which weights are healthy or unhealthy with a bias favoring lower weights.
A woman being thin can be a sign of conformity, so looking for that can conflict with looking for intelligence (intelligent people can choose to conform for various reasons but are less likely to).
Being overweight has multiple causes so it’s important to consider what is causing it for a particular person, unless your aesthetic preferences are really, really important to you so it doesn’t matter what the cause is. But if your aesthetic preferences are that high of a priority, you also have to really prioritize finding someone who will stay thin enough for you in the future, and I think that’s problematic and trying to be really picky about that and about intelligence simultaneously is going to exclude most women. Many women gain weight after pregnancies so wanting kids and thinness can conflict. If this kind of stuff is a really high priority for you, you should discuss it with potential partners. If you wouldn’t leave your wife for gaining weight after having children, then you should reconsider being picky about weight now. If you would leave, you ought to know that, and so should she, and I think you should reconsider either the leaving or the having children (without adoption or surrogacy or something, which are also problematic btw).
If you’re assuming that most overweight people have poor willpower, and it reflects negatively on their character, I think you’re wrong. Some people called overweight aren’t actually overweight. Others are sick. Others are being harmed by a conventional diet, or by interactions between diet and genes. It can be a lot of things. If you want to filter out anyone who accepted mainstream ideas about what food to eat, or who who has various illnesses, I think you should be consciously aware of what you’re doing and reflect on whether that’s really what you should do.
How do you evaluate who’s stupid? How confident are you in the accuracy of these evaluations? How do differentiate stupid disagreements from intelligent disagreements? Are there things you view as stupidity which you don’t view as a type of disagreement?
Nothing concrete, and I don’t have breakpoints around mass (i.e., less than X lbs). As a numerical breakpoint, it’s probably closest to % body fat (tho how that looks changes person to person); it’s just an eyeball metric.
It’s somewhat dependent on other factors and isn’t the highest priority if I ranked preferences. It’s kind of like maximizing a geometric mean with a bias towards higher priority preferences (some of which are binary, like wanting children). A geometric mean isn’t a perfect method though because i’d need to convert thinness-overweightness to something via some function.
re “going to exclude most women”: I am already excluding most women.
As a rough estimate: >= 115 IQ is about 16% of the population, desire for 3+ children is like 20-30% (hard to find data and I’d prefer 4) — these probably aren’t completely independent, but just multiplying those out gives ~5% of the population. With anything like this, they’d also have to find me attractive so idk maybe 10-20% on top as a guess, so ~0.5-1.0% of the population.
I am already aware that this is highly selective and have done more detailed estimates in the past.
Curiously it’s easier to get worse proportions than this but somewhat hard to get into single digits without entering into designer-girlfriend/stalkerish territory.
Yeah I wouldn’t, or at least I don’t intend to and have a strong aversion to that kind of thing since it’s uncooperative and worse for the kids. I also have a strong aversion to some related things like infidelity. I have some related goals about being in the same relationship when I’m elderly.
On a note related to feminism: I feel let down by my parents because they didn’t challenge me much on the topic of kids or discuss it much with me when I was younger (15-25). If I end up having kids, it’s one of the things I’ll encourage them to think about and plan in their adolescent/early-adult period, since leaving it too late eliminates a lot of options and the safest option is to assume your desire for children will increase with age. I think one of the reasons that my parents and their generation failed to pass on a lot of these kinds of values is related to 2nd wave feminism (and the sharp decline in fertility around the 70s). It’s curious because my mother was just past mid 20s when she had her first child, despite having tertiary education at that point. It’s hard to imagine many women today doing that, but maybe I’m biased. I think the apparent deprioritization of children in life planning among millennials and gen z is concerning.
There are some related elements from later in BFGTF, too (like ch 7/8 from memory)
I am not familiar – that much is immediately obvious to me looking at the first article.
On Friday, the Trump administration toldThe New York Timesthat contraception like IUDs and the Pill aren’t birth control at all—but abortion. The stunning admission came in a statement about a $10 million stockpile of IUDs, oral contraceptives, and hormonal implants the administration plans to incinerate rather than distribute to women abroad:
“President Trump is committed to protecting the lives of unborn children all around the world. The administration will no longer supply abortifacient birth control under the guise of foreign aid.”
I thought IUDs prevented fertilization and the pill prevents ovulation. It seems insane to class either as abortion. It also seems insane to burn those kind of resources instead of either letting them be distributed as planned or finding some other use for them.
I thought Trump was much closer to the ‘safe, rare, and legal’ position (putting aside state based stuff in the US); I know many republicans are anti-abortion tho. Safe, rare, legal is close to my position for what it’s worth. I think abortion should be available but not abused or used as a contraceptive (condoms are cheap, just use those as a starting point). If abortion were a service provided by socialized healthcare, I’d support most something like one free one per year (and it costs something after that), but using that every year is problematic. Note: any situation involving rape is a completely separate topic and deserves different policies.
In the past it has been triggered in a moment. Like she said something that seemed so thoughtless or idiotic that any kind of preliminary attraction vanished. It’s happened more than once but I can’t remember specifics.
These days it’s more like I am less attracted to women by default (even if they’re physically attractive) and demonstrations of intelligence cause attraction. Other associated things help attraction too like vocab and being confident with words and speaking, but they’re not as powerful as her saying something I think is really insightful or demonstrating more complex thinking methods or thoughts.
This isn’t a direct proxy for intelligence. So while intelligence in an abstract sense helps, it isn’t as good as knowing how to cultivate intelligent thoughts.
I don’t know for sure but I’d guess I also would have a bias towards more conservative non-religious women. (I haven’t met any IRL recently enough)
That’s the main factor I can think of that would reduce my confidence in my eval insofar as it matters for attraction. ‘More conservative’ means like more than average and outside the dominant cluster of the left. That could still be left of center but not by that much. In essence I think this is just similarity bias (cause that’s about where I am).
