Split Thread Philosophical musings about trans rights

[shuttlt]

Indeed, and I agree that it would be incredible if this was not the case. It would also be incredible if these differences were uniquely tied to sex differences.

Uniquely, perhaps not, I'm not sure I said that. However, we have had sexual reproduction for 2 billion years. There can't be many features that differentiate us one from another that are as old, and as thoroughly baked in to us. What are the core things that a human needs to do to survive? Eat, find shelter, and have sex. Recognising, and finding important, the difference between men and women has been critically important, and has been critically important for millions and millions of years. It is very clearly baked into brains across the animal world from penguins to elephants. Very frequently you see differences in behaviour, and differences in role in the animal world, just as you see it with us. This again is not surprising because for one thing there is a function that only females can perform. For another, in times of threat, the value of the sexes is not remotely the same as one another.

What other cultural architypes are you thinking of that are remotely as significant? Are there any that you can detect the differences between in the behaviour of new born babies, that we have different hormones and so forth to steer? Thinking that society can make these differences inconsequential is like thinking society could regard food as optional. Sure there are cultural rituals around food, but they are build upon a basic physical reality and necessity, just as gender is.

Believing all this stuff is optional, and arbitrary is like believing in breatharianism.

There is a saying you see going around on the dissident right that comes from Spengler:
“When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having children' as a question of pro's and con's, the great turning point has come.”
He is saying that when having children isn't just something you assume you are going to do, the civilisation is doomed to collapse. I think that pretty easily extends to people acting as if they don't know what men and women are. There are core tasks that civilisations need to do to survive, and we seem to have decided that one of them is optional.

It's just that this seems to be an unpopular view among those here who are skeptical of trans rights. I have certainly received quite a lot of pushback from this contingent when I suggest that the brain might be gendered in this sense.

Sure, we live in a decadent age where people have ridiculous beliefs that in harsher times would have got them slapped round the head and made to do something useful. Trans stuff is just an even more silly, decadent belief on top of previous only marginally more sensible ones. They are peacocks tails. These things aren't so bad when it's just a fringe aristocratic fad. If it spills out though, it's like if the Chinese had decided they were going to normalise foot binding, and you'd had peasants tottering about the fields.

 

[Leumas]

Without rehashing the other thread....you need to describe what is going on as if you were a gender critical feminist, not as if you were what ever you are.

I have no idea what that is… I am a geriatric guy … who has not bothered to keep up with this meaningless humanity’s new reasons to hate and discriminate and oppress and wrangle… in my days we had plenty other reasons.

Much of those reasons, those days and nowadays, stem from religious zealotry and bigotry and the religious syphilitic parasite's droppings rattling around the skulls of the religious zombies in lieu of grey cells.

 

[shuttlt]

I have no idea what that is… I am a geriatric guy … who has not bothered to keep up with this meaningless humanity’s new reasons to discriminate and oppress and wrangle… in my days we had plenty other reasons.

Well, ok. I will give you the best and shortest version of this I can. It's not the version you would get from the people who believe this stuff, but as a fellow outsider it's the best version I have been able to figure out.

Many of the people who believe this stuff don't know it, but they are a kind of neo-Marxist. Back when the left made it's cultural turn, the Marxist analysis of history where you have a struggle between the owners of the means of production and the workers got generalised. Feminists did a search and replace on class struggle and replaced the bourgeoise with men, the proletariat with women and capitalism with the patriarchy. You then add to that the postmodern idea of deconstructing things, and turning everything into some kind of literary theory language game and you have gender critical feminism. Gender roles, for them, are the means by which men oppress women through their control of the cultural means of production.

The trans-activists are a later branch of that that comes from queer theory. For them it is not a class struggle, or a struggle between men and women, instead their search and replace on Marx has made the oppressors CIS people, and the oppressed trans people. Rather than deconstructing gender roles, they deconstruct gender categories.

It's one generation of cultural Marxists fighting another generation of cultural Marxists with the joke being that most of the people identifying with the two camps don't realise they are cultural Marxists. Complicating that are concerns coming from more the place you seem to be coming from, which I assume is more old school liberal.

The gender critical feminists / TERFs are never going to accept that males are women, because that is equivalent to letting anybody from the bourgeoisie who wants to identify as a member of the proletariat. Similarly, the trans-rights activists can't accept anything less than unilateral acceptance that trans-women are women because to do otherwise would be the equivalent of Marxists leaving the bourgeoisie in charge of the means of production. Maybe a better example would be Rolfe's feelings about male spaces, her revolution couldn't happen if men had been allowed to keep their male only spaces. It's the same thing. Feminists wanted to take down what they saw as male power structures that reinforced their dominance. Trans-activists want to take down female dominance of the concept "woman" and to do that they can't accept to only be women when it is acceptable to females. That would be like women only being allowed into traditionally male roles when it was acceptable to men.

The conflict is very obviously non-resolvable between the two groups. If one excludes what their actual philosophies are, you end up with an unresolvable, pointless conversation that pretends there is a practical disagreement about how to implement a compromise around a shared set of values.

 

[Robin]

Do you have an example, even a hypothetical, of what you're talking about? that is, a sex difference which is not uniquely tied to the brain but is also associated with - what, either some non-brain biological difference? Is that what you mean?

For example, if it is the case that men are generally more aggressive than women and if this difference is the result of genetics rather than environment, it is not the case that all men are aggressive.

 

[shuttlt]

For example, if it is the case that men are generally more aggressive than women and if this difference is the result of genetics rather than environment, it is not the case that all men are aggressive.

All this stuff is about averages and distributions. Something like 2.5% of women are stronger than 50% of men. We would still be insane to operate society as if it wasn't a good rule of thumb that men are stronger than women. Society wasn't constructed by logicians to conform to some kind of Platonic ideal.

 

[theprestige]

All this stuff is about averages and distributions. Something like 2.5% of women are stronger than 50% of men. We would still be insane to operate society as if it wasn't a good rule of thumb that men are stronger than women.

Cool. Now do the philosophy of natural rights.

 

[Robin]

,Trans stuff is just an even more silly, decadent belief on top of previous only marginally more sensible ones. .

The "trans stuff" seems to me to boil down to the claim that the brain is gendered but not rigidly so.

You seemed to agree with this position earlier.

 

[Robin]

Society wasn't constructed by logicians to conform to some kind of Platonic ideal.

Who suggested it was???

 

[shuttlt]

Cool. Now do the philosophy of natural rights.

We talked about that already. You didn't want to talk to me about it. As I recall you were not particularly polite about how not interested you were in what I had to say. I have nothing further to say about it right now. This thread is about trans-rights, not natural rights. As you know, I am heavily modded, so discussing natural rights in the abstract is just asking for a rule 11. To restate what I have said earlier, since not everybody involved believes in natural rights, and amongst those that do there isn't agreement on what those rights are, appeals to rights don't resolve anything. Whoever has cultural and political power gets to decide what natural rights people have.

 

[shuttlt]

Who suggested it was???

You were saying that not all men conformed to the properties of the majority of men. I don't see how that is relevant to anything.

 

[shuttlt]

The "trans stuff" seems to me to boil down to the claim that the brain is gendered but not rigidly so.

You seemed to agree with this position earlier.

I don't know what you mean about "not rigidly so". Part of the reason that these are decadent philosophies is that they are focused on the individual. Because there are a small number of masculine women, we need to deconstruct gender roles? Because there are a small number of males who want to be women, we need to deconstruct gender categories? This is building igloos in the Sahara stuff that you only do in times of incredible abundance and security.

Again, you seem to be looking at this like a logician, trying to construct a rational society based on some abstract idea of individual fairness and liberty.

 

[Robin]

Recognising, and finding important, the difference between men and women has been critically important, and has been critically important for millions and millions of years.

Can you name any time and place where society was clear about the difference between men and women?

A time and place, for example, where there were no gradations of manliness, where a Quentin Crisp would have been considered just as manly as a John Wayne?

 

[Robin]

Again, you seem to be looking at this like a logician, trying to construct a rational society based on some abstract idea of individual fairness and liberty.

I have no idea where you got that from. I haven't even mentioned or alluded to fairness and liberty.

 

[Robin]

Incidentally y don't see the problem with looking at an issue logically. Are we supposed to consider issues illogically?

 

[Leumas]

<interesting stuff>

I liked feminists in my days... all they did was take off their bras in the open... not much to complain about in that... and two of my favorite feminists were together in a movie I enjoyed a lot (Julia).

But seriously though... I am old enough to remember when women were not allowed to open bank accounts or apply for credit and the university I went to had a couple of colleges for women and the rest did not admit women... this latter point irked me to no end. My college many years later allowed girls and from what I understood the last time I looked they lived on the same floors in the digs as the boys and they all shared the same bathrooms and showers on each floor.




.

 

[Robin]

Was there ever a dafter straw man than the guff that gets talked about "neo Marxism" and "Cultural Marxism"?

 

[Leumas]

... Complicating that are concerns coming from more the place you seem to be coming from, which I assume is more old school liberal....

I come from the place of realism about reality... I think gender is NATURE not nurture... and whatever nature makes a person feel one way or the other is part of the nature of the person not the consequence of the nurture or hormones or surgery or any other thing the person is subjected to.


See this podcast proving irrefutably that it is definitely nature despite all the efforts and drugs and surgeries to forcibly prove otherwise in a tragic accidental experiment.

Think about the implication of this for the "Free Will" myth and the other social issues of today.


Here is a youtube video about it too:



Here is a longer TV episode about the case:

 

[lionking]

I come from the place of realism about reality... I think gender is NATURE not nurture... and whatever nature makes a person feel one way or the other is part of the nature of the person not the consequence of the nurture or hormones or surgery or any other thing the person is subjected to.


See this podcast proving irrefutably that it is definitely nature despite all the efforts and drugs and surgeries to forcibly prove otherwise in a tragic accidental experiment.

Think about the implication of this for the "Free Will" myth and the other social issues of today.


Here is a youtube video about it too:



Here is a longer TV episode about the case:

I have no idea what you are talking about. Do you believe that transwomen are women or not?

 

[Leumas]

I have no idea what you are talking about. Do you believe that transwomen are women or not?

What I believe should matter less than a rat's dropping... what matters is what she thinks she is... as proven by the FACTS in the videos and podcast in this post.

Why are people making so much fuss about this... why is it so hard to live and let live... and the more religious they are the less likely they are to do this... just like a virus' sole reason for existence is to infect and spread its virulence... so is the syphilitic religion parasite's Zombification effect is to compel and propel the victims to spread the infection.

 

[shuttlt]

Can you name any time and place where society was clear about the difference between men and women?

A time and place, for example, where there were no gradations of manliness, where a Quentin Crisp would have been considered just as manly as a John Wayne?

I don't understand the relevance of the question. There are bowls that achieve the platonic ideal of bowlness better than others. That doesn't mean that we don't know what a bowl is, or that there is a problem with our definition.