Trans women are not women (Part 8)

[Meadmaker]

Well yeah. The politics is all I care about. I really don't give a **** what people believe in deep in their hearts about trans people, so long as transphobia is not politically vibrant. Clearly that is not the case, hence the concern.

If you want someone to have dispassionate academic debate about the issue, it ain't me you're looking for. The current political context is something I am very much interested in when it comes to this topic.

I would note that this thread is in the "Social Issues" section, not the "Medicine" section. Perhaps you're the one in the wrong place.

The issue is not passion or lack of passion. The issue is where the passion is focused.

Yours is on bigots, transphobes, TERFs and the intersection with right wing politics.

 

[Meadmaker]

I long ago figured exactly where to grap the crossbar on my bike so as to pick it up at the angle I wanted to carry it. This is very handy if you're on an escalator.

When I got it out of the store, it was interesting realizing how differently it fit on the bike rack.

 

[Ziggurat]

Rolfe's post addressed it. Men's bikes have stronger frames than women's bikes. The women's style is a deliberate weakening of the bicycle in order to accommodate wearing a skirt while riding.

And she is also correct that the strong frame is of practically zero significance, because the women's frame style is plenty strong, and I am not the least worried that my new women's bike might fail mechanically.

It's not zero significance. If you're riding on the street, you're unlikely to stress the frame very much, but if you're doing offroad mountain biking on rough terrain, you might. Plus, there's another aspect she mentioned which does matter besides actual failure: frame rigidity. It's usually a better riding experience if the frame doesn't flex much, and a men's bike style will flex less than a women's style. Again, how you ride the bike makes a difference as well. You won't encounter much frame flexing on any kind of bike if you're riding casually on smooth streets, but there are use cases where it's going to be much more noticeable.

One way or another, I'm going to be riding a women's bike for a while.

Reminds me of an interesting video about Danish "grandma" bikes:

Note that despite the name, it's used by both men and women, and not just old people either.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

The issue is not passion or lack of passion. The issue is where the passion is focused.

Yours is on bigots, transphobes, TERFs and the intersection with right wing politics.

Well, yeah. Given the current state of things, that seems appropriate.

 

[shuttlt]

I listen to Dennis Praeger sometimes on the radio.

I don't listen to him, but I am aware of him.

One of his consistent themes is to distinguish between liberals, and the left.

I'm a liberal.

Well now. This gets us into very interesting definitional territory where all these words can have multiple meanings. I'm an autodidact on all this stuff. Probably 5-10 years ago I was a relatively mainstream forum member on here. My views have shifted a little since those time.

What you are calling "progressive liberalism", and what others might call "progressivism" is what Praeger refers to as "leftism" or, for the people who preach it, "the left".

Allow me to give an expanded version of what I mean.Everybody knows the origin of the left/right terminology in Revolutionary France. The left were the side of progress, of liberté, égalité, fraternité, of the cult of reason, of the enlightenment. The right were the side that wanted to retain the king and some semblance of continuity with the previous order.

As I think I've said already, radical egalitarian ideas don't appear with the French Revolution. You see them in communities that popped up around the English Civil War and in aspects of the puritans who went over to New England. You see aspects of it in early Christian fanatics. If you get past the terminology, leftism predates the Revolution, and I think has existed at least as long as civilization has existed.

Where this gets us to though is that leftist thought is really bound up with the birth of liberalism in the enlightenment. You do have a split of course, with the two sides embodied by the Scottish Enlightenment and the French Enlightenment. I am much more sympathetic to Hulme and the Scottish Enlightenment that to the French version. It seems to me that Hulme's philosophy, radical as it was, was acutely aware of man's limitations and was sceptical of the possibility of utopia. The French enlightenment was a revolutionary philosophy that fundamentally believed in progress that could be willed forward.

It seems to me that Hulme's philosophy isn't really an engine of social change. The ideas had implications that changed things, sure.... but I don't think there have ever been many revolutionaries marching around with a pistol in one hand and a copy of Hulme in the other. You have to be a lunatic like Kant to get really worked up by Hulme.

I believe in political science liberalism is often divided into two types vivendi (live and let live) liberalism and progressive liberalism. One of the things that seperates the French from American revolutions is the influence of the more vivendi liberals over the American one. Thomas Sowell would say they had the "constrained vision". What gradually happened is that the vivendi liberals were displaced by the progressive liberals (Sowells "unconstrained vision").

FDR was progressive liberalism, the 60s was progressive liberalism. It's so endemic that even vivendi liberals absorb all sorts of progressive liberal assumptions. At this stage, if liberalism isn't progressive.... it's only in a theoretical way that makes no practical difference to the world. In practice liberalism today is progressive liberalism and is the left. Mainstream conservatism in the US and UK is often described as liberalism driving at the speed limit.

One of the things that happened under FDR in the US and similarly in the UK was that illiberal forms of the right that actually were advocating for a fundamentally different path were pushed out of the overton window and have remained so for the past 80 years. Sure there have been populist movements where that has bubbled up, but the illiberal right really no longer exists in the political elite, in academia or in media. So, we have a direction that is set by the left, by progressives... and we are just haggling all the time over whether to take the next step in that direction.

Relating this to the transgender debate, I think the liberal position is to not judge transgender people and to allow them, where possible, to live as they wish.

That is the vivendi liberal position. That's just not how the west operates anymore. Don't want to bake a cake celebrating a gay wedding - you're a bigot. Don't want a man who says he's a woman in the women's changing room? - you're a bigot. Don't want your kids being taught about why sodomy is a good lifestyle - you're a bigot. Vivendi liberalism is dead. Things that progressive liberalism disapproves of are actively shut down and suppressed. In the UK there have been police turning up to speak to people who have been on the wrong side of the trans-debate. Being a vivendi liberal nowadays is like being an Apollo worshiper... it's an anacronym.

The conservative position is to tell them they must conform to society's standards.

This all gets very tricky as the words conservative and liberal have their political tribe meanings and their political philosophy meanings. Are the Conservatives in the UK conservative, if so what are they conserving and have they managed to conserve it?

I would say there are a few different types of conservatives (and this is off the top of my head rather than from anything I've read). You've got the Burkeans who are really vivendi liberals.... they have all the liberal instincts, but they are sceptical about implementing them. I don't think there is any telling people they must conform about Burkean conservatives.

Then you have conservatives who have some notion of what they are trying to conserve (beyond the liberal world of 20 years ago). I think that's a mixed bag. Some of them would probably say that without all the constant pushing of society by progressives, something very much more traditional would naturally re-emerge.

For myself, I think a world without society telling you some version of "living your life in this way is good, but like that is bad" is impossible. The only question is what those things should be. I think if those things are more in tune with the real nature of people, rather than some utopian liberal dream of what the nature of people should be, then a lot fewer people would be on antidepressants and anxiety meds. It's like society is run at the moment by the kind of person who claims their cat is a vegan... it's not natural.

The progressive position is that society needs to conform to their standards.

Yes, absolutely. One of the problems is that they are kind of in denial about that.

That last bit gets kind of difficult, as three years of discussion has demonstrated.

Just three years?

 

[Meadmaker]

It's not zero significance. If you're riding on the street, you're unlikely to stress the frame very much, but if you're doing offroad mountain biking on rough terrain, you might. Plus, there's another aspect she mentioned which does matter besides actual failure: frame rigidity. It's usually a better riding experience if the frame doesn't flex much, and a men's bike style will flex less than a women's style. Again, how you ride the bike makes a difference as well. You won't encounter much frame flexing on any kind of bike if you're riding casually on smooth streets, but there are use cases where it's going to be much more noticeable.



Reminds me of an interesting video about Danish "grandma" bikes:

Note that despite the name, it's used by both men and women, and not just old people either.

Those welds look pretty darned rigid to me, on both the men's and women's styles. Maybe on super duper rough terrain that included falls off of rocks it might be an issue, but on asphalt bike paths where I'm likely to ride, I can't see it being a problem, even if they have lots of bumps because they are poorly maintained.

But the Dutch bike video was quite interesting. I wasn't deliberately searching for an "upright bike", but part of my buying decision was that I have developed some old man style back pain, and riding fifty miles while bent over just didn't seem appealing to me. I found that I was more comfortable on a frame that was sized to a level that would be considered a bit too high by the usual rules of thumb, ie. that you could comfortably straddle the bike. I found that I could comfortably straddle the bike only on bikes that I rode bent over more than I wanted. The bike that felt right while sitting left the bar in my crotch while straddling it. For a cis-gender man, this did not seem like a good idea.

 

[Meadmaker]

That is the vivendi liberal position. That's just not how the west operates anymore.

Agreed, including with the examples and discussions from your post.

And is vivendi liberalism dead? Well, a lot of us do feel like the "politically homeless" that was brought up earlier. It definitely is not represented by either political party in the USA right now, but I haven't given up hope that it cannot revive.

 

[Ziggurat]

Those welds look pretty darned rigid to me, on both the men's and women's styles.

Bikes don't flex primarily at the wields, which will be similar for both styles. The increased rigidity on a men's bike is a combination of both the seat moving less for the same distortion in the top and bottom bars, and the bars requiring less force to apply the same torque to the seat (so they won't distort as much to begin with). No matter how strong you make the wields, the rigidity advantage of a men's style is going to remain.

Maybe on super duper rough terrain that included falls off of rocks it might be an issue, but on asphalt bike paths where I'm likely to ride, I can't see it being a problem, even if they have lots of bumps because they are poorly maintained.

Sure, it won't be a problem for a lot of people, probably even most people. Women's bikes probably wouldn't even be a thing if it was. My point is more just that the advantage of a men's style is real too, even if not always critical. If it wasn't, men's styles probably wouldn't even be a thing.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Well yeah. The politics is all I care about. I really don't give a **** what people believe in deep in their hearts about trans people, so long as transphobia is not politically vibrant. Clearly that is not the case, hence the concern.

What's your political view on misogyny?

 

[Emily's Cat]

The point is, it may be a platonic idea to be discussed in the abstract by a man, but to a woman it's the difference between a satisfying, wel-remunerated career and having to become a school teacher or something because nothing else is available.

To a female, it's the difference between being independent, and being an appendage.

 

[p0lka]

How long would the preference for running around in the altogether last though? I have a memory of trying to get into my bathing costume on the beach, aged five, hiding under a towel. My mother was telling me not to bother covering up so obsessively, I was only five, it doesn't really matter when you're only five. To which I piped up "It only starts to matter when you're six, then," and continued to burrow under the towel. She laughed but declined to put an actual age on when modesty should begin.

Maybe that was all conditioning, but it sure took extremely well.

I love childhood memories they feel warm.

I think it is conditioning, which you took extremely well.

Look at what I'm replying to. Nice memory.

 

[p0lka]

Sexual intercourse is something that babies and toddlers have no interest in, but by adolescence they're pretty much obsessed with it, and I'm pretty sure that most people would figure it out even if no one showed them or suggested it.

Yeah.
we are talking about modesty though.

 

[shuttlt]

Pretty much this.

I get so very tired of the male mischaracterization of feminist objectives. For all intents, I am probably most appropriately deemed a second-wave feminist. And absolute equality in everything has never been an objective - it's irrational, and we know and accept that sex is real and it matters.

It's irritating to be presented with the "feminist pipedream of utopia equality" strawman over and over, as if the interlocutor isn't even bothering to read and comprehend what I'm saying.

You don't get to choose what the implications of your beliefs are. Unless you are the king of feminism, you don't get to choose when the revolution stops.

Conservative thought is very concerned about unintended consequences, the implications of ideas when followed through, or when applied more broadly and on slippery slopes. These are not typical features of progressive thought. Progressive thought is all about the end goal.

Your end goal isn't complete equality, terrific.... you are getting to that end goal based on a set of ideas that have consequences beyond that end goal. The ideas don't know that the end goal is the point where they have to stop or the only thing they should be focused on. Ideas are like a virus, once you set them going they are going to do what they are going to do and it is very hard to control them.

Well... perhaps they are not. Perhaps they have simply decided a priori that females can't think and reason and make good arguments, and therefore, there's no call to treat our arguments with the same degree of consideration and respect they would show to a male.

If you are talking about me, that is paranoid feminist projection. Like how calling things racist is used as the universal get out of jail free card. If it's applied to somebody else, then maybe it is justified and a withdraw my hyperbola.

 

[shuttlt]

As a female actuary with a masters in applied mathematics and over 25 years of professional experience in my field, who almost never wears skirts or dresses, and stopped wearing make-up years ago, married to a male with a fine art degree who paints their fingernails and toenails and likes sparkly things... YES IT IS POSSIBLE.

That is irrelevant to what I said. I didn't make a mathematical claim, I asked a question about how societies function.

 

[shuttlt]

I rather think that shutit's perspective is not stable regardless.

There are so many different topics out there, it's entirely reasonable for people to be liberal on some, conservative on others, and pragmatically middle-of-the-road on others. I myself tend toward being fiscally conservative, and I tend more toward isolationism than globalism. But I'm socially liberal about a great many topics, and always have been. There's a sticker out there somewhere that captures it pretty well - I want gay married couples to be able to protect their marijuana fields with guns.

All people have a degree of inconsistency. I think though that if people are going to argue for something on the basis of a liberal ideological principle like equality one minute, and then when it is something they care about suddenly turn into a conservative who is concerned about consequences rather than liberal principles.... there is something wrong with their thinking. It's like being a fundamentalist Christian, except on Sundays because your want to keep your weekends free.

It sounds like you are really just looking at each of these things in isolation as if they were disconnected things with no wider ideological or societal unintended consequences. Whatever your reason for favouring marijuana legalisation doesn't restrict the consequences of legalising it, or the scope of the arguments that were deployed in getting it legalised to the narrow domain you were aiming it.

 

[p0lka]

Lol, of course you wouldn't. As a male, you aren't the one facing those strictures.

So then. In this thread, we have a male opining that females should just accept the role that males think females should have, and shouldn't seek to be independent beings with their own agency and volition. How very, very patriarchal of you.

You're quite amazonial in your focus.
I think if males and females just got along then the independent beings thing you mentioned would be a natural consequence of that.

 

[shuttlt]

Politics is one of the only areas where I think that a quota based on sex is reasonable. I could see arguments for other quota bases as well. Where there is a meaningful difference between cohorts that needs to be represented in law and governance, I think it's worth ensuring that those views are present in a reasonable enough volume to have an impact.

Females are over 50% of the population in developed nations, but we hold significantly less than 50% of the political positions. There are many laws that directly affect females, and many that disproportionately harm females.

Why the focus on females? You could make this argument about any group. Since progressives dismantled the grammar school system there have been far fewer working class MPs from humble backgrounds.... maybe there needs to be equal representation there? Things are pretty heavily skewed to university educated people, so maybe there should be equality there. Lawyers are hugely over represented, while I can't think of a single factory worker. Since the war MPs have been in favour of immigration while the country has been against it, maybe we need to make sure that parliament reflects things like this as well.

This is another example of what I was talking about. I don't understand how your ideas take you to a particular place and then they stop when I can see the idea still has loads of gas in the tank.

Look women were turned into a political class by the left as a kind of new proletariat. That's partly why women have this class consciousness, because they are an old, now largely discarded, vehicle of the revolution. Now it's trans-women and ethnic minorities and so on who are the cool kids. Is the guiding principle here just that we balance representation in parliament for past and present client groups of the left?

 

[shuttlt]

Conservative Position: Boys play with toy cars, they are not allowed to play with dolls.

Who is describing conservatism like this?

 

[Emily's Cat]

If you define women in a materialist way, you ditch all the stuff that makes them special and worth defending.

...

You have completely misunderstood me. I don't believe females, when reduced to some materialist idea of what a woman is, are worth any special consideration at all. That isn't how I view women though. I am not a materialist. From my perspective, it is insane and a sign of the collapse of some critical aspect of society that there is even a conversation about whether women should have to accept unwanted men into their changing rooms and that we should be expected to pretend that men are women.

Even if we reduce females to the most materialist perspective available... That still leaves us with half the population that is weaker and more vulnerable, and which bears the burden of reproduction.

If you reduce children to the most materialist definition of "sexually immature humans"... does that then suggest that there is nothing about children worth defending? Does not their status as the continuation of the species count for something?

And if you don't view females as fundamentally defined by their reproductive role in contrast to males... what exactly do you view females as, and what about that view leads you to think them worthy of protection?

I hope I have clarified things. I tend to argue by trying to reframe other peoples positions and following them through to their conclusions, I think sometimes it comes across as if the position was mine.

It is often unclear whether you are paraphrasing someone else's view. I recommend clearly marking it out as such.

That said, I am pretty sure I have significant fundamental disagreements with your views.

 

[Emily's Cat]

You don't get to choose what the implications of your beliefs are.

Are you somehow under the impression that YOU get to choose the implications of my beliefs? On what basis? Does that penis grant you the power to foretell the future?