The costs of trans visibility

I don't think the question makes sense. People simply are certain ways. Some people are gay. Some people are argumentative. Some people are tall. Some people are trans. This is just something we can accept without value judgement. Although I do think in general diversity within a society is a good thing.

The pro trans side won’t consider it because they begin with the assumption the trans identity is the self. This is a false assumption. Stop doing this.

it depends upon how it's weaponized

when violent rapists are allowed to pick which gendered prison they will be incarcerated within and government documents are all rewritten to say "people with the capacity to get pregnant" then it's obviously a net negative

when it's people transitioning and being their true selves without demanding the entire world change dramatically because they are insecure about it, then it's a net positive

As a society, we have put off taking the self seriously. It isn’t just the trans identity which wedges itself between the self and consciousness. The white supremacist has the self supplanted with racial identity. The radical feminist has the self supplanted with her gender identity. I have lost my self at times during my life. It’s very common.

The costs of the trans identity are particularly high, however. I hope it forces us to deal with the question of the self at scale.

imagine if there was a movement by gay men to demand every single mention of procreation in government documents was altered to "procreation, adoption, or employment of surrogates" then everyone would correctly roll their eyes at how stupid that was, how needless it would be to say that

but then you had the gay community up in arms demanding that it was stated as such, otherwise people are "denying the existence of gays" which is just poppy cock

it's amazing, josh hawley is a complete scumbag who i loathe, but this nutjob makes him look reasonable, that's how insane she is, she makes josh hawley seem reasonable

I don't think "trans identity is the self" is even a meaningful thing to say, let alone a faithful characterization of my assumptions.

Let me put it this way. I'm not trans. I've listened to a lot of trans people, but I don't really have an authentic, personal understanding of what that would feel like. However, I don't think it matters. What is clear is that a small minority of humans seems to express an identity distinct from their biological sex. I think that we can accept that this is just a part of human diversity - rather like how some people are gay and some are not - without having to make a bunch of value judgements and assumptions about it.

or more so, if we stopped referring to colors to avoid denying the existence of color blind people

there are many shades and hues which are indistinguishable to me, i'm literally unable to see them and they instead appear as a slightly different color

for me, this chart has a much choppier gradient than it does for people with normal vision because i'm unable to see a lot of the transitions here so instead of a smooth deviation from one shade or hue to the next, you have entire blocks in here that are identical

this often brings inconvenience to my life, many things are color coded, there's a lot of advanced political maps and charts i'm unable to read properly, there's a lot of games where i require the assistance of others - for example, i'm unable to play trivial pursuit without assistance of others because many of those colors are identical to me

lots of video games i can't see the difference between various sides and factions unless they have a color blind mode available in the settings

importantly, i can't tell the difference between a flashing yellow traffic light and a flashing red traffic light - something that could have mortal consequences for not just me but others on the road as well - whenever i hit a new and unfamiliar one and there's no cars in front of me that show me which it is through how they react to it, i simply am forced to guess and defer to treating it as a flashing red (but this too is dangerous if it's not and there are cars behind me)

yet despite that 1 in 12 men are colorblind in america (most don't even know, they just think they are bad with colors the same way some are bad with numbers and try to hide it out of fear of looking stupid - nearly everyone i know who is color blind (myself included) found out by accident as an adult when they came across a color blind test randomly out in the wild) - just watch how whenever there's a beautiful sunset or rainbow or the famous dress - you tell yourself "oh colors are subjective" instead of "oh i must be colorblind" because the preconceived notion people have of being colorblind is that you see things in black and white - it's actually the most common thing people ask me "so you see things in black and white" which is one of many reasons why i almost never bring up that i'm colorblind because you'll always have to answer stupid questions about it

but i'm not going to demand that the government stops referring to colors because by doing so they are denying my existence, it would be nice if we did away with flashing yellow/red but one can only dream

ye and it ends there though, like with gays or people with red hair.

they are different, no one owes them anything at all in any aspect of life because they are different, done, the end, any request to change anything in society to "accomodate" them is to be rejected, except "let us do the same you let do to every one else" which ofc has to be the law.

No, I think you're picking a fight in an empty room. People who question the participation of athletes who have gone through male puberty in women's sports pretty much all do so for the same obvious reasons.

You are in fact clearly saying that to be inflammatory and to seek out a wedge issue in a parochial culture war. The figures you mention have no significance outside of American domestic politics, whereas the issue, such as it is, is global.

This seems, to me, to be a roundabout way of saying, “I don’t think it’s important or meaningful to acknowledge or care about the self at all,” which is completely naive and wrong. First of all, the self is ultimately what unites us when social, group identities don’t.

this, there's an insane amount of bad faith on the other side where they can agree on something fundamentally but still hate those they agree with because they assume their position comes from malice rather than the same logical reasons they are against it

by rickroll k

i'm sure that chart above is supposed to be a smooth gradient all around

i still see a gradient, but there's still very distinct and obvious chunks that are basically monotone to me and it's not in a smooth recursive pattern as it should be

it's like this where stuff within each of those blocks is basically all the same to me

edit - forgot top right, that sliver of red should be a separate block

Rick you have tritanomaly which is what my son has, and it's far more rare than the much more common daltonism (red-green color blindness).

I'm not arguing that such carveouts exist, I'm arguing that people are trying to find/create them. I disagree that forcing fully medically/socially transitioned trans women to use the men's restroom, changing rooms, etc is going to be positive overall. Some people are stealth and will be out of place using the men's room. I know that people like to argue "oh if you feel unsafe in the men's room imagine how we feel having you in our room!" But I think there is a sliding scale of transition. At the very least, if you're going to ban them using the women's restroom there should be unisex restrooms for them to use so that they don't have to feel embarrassed or out themselves.

Again we already agree on sports so I don't know why you are bringing it up again. In any sport that has any kind of stakes attached (college and professional) I think it's generally fine to ban them. But I did bring this up that the data is not so clear that a fully transitioned trans woman has a competitive advantage in sports, I just think that the backlash is so high that strategically it's best to not push that.

Let me reiterate though that the reason I'm saying that people are trying to find carveouts and ways to dehumanize them is that even if we had the perfect example of a trans person who fully socially and medically transitioned after the age of 18 and is not using women only spaces, etc, there would still be people trying to find ways of insulting them, dehumanizing them, moralizing against them. It's a very naive idea that trans people would be left alone if only society would stop being so extreme about giving them rights.

I have a thought experiment we could go down on this, because I actually think there is some gradient of transitioning where for all intents and purposes the gender identity becomes more important than the underlying sex. So I'm not sure that logically this position as a hard and fast rule can ever be justified except as a way of trying to undermine their identity. Which is fine but I actually think if you test this you'll quickly bottom out at it not making much sense.

Seems reasonable.

I can have disgust with people putting pineapple on pizza , this doesn't mean i want laws to forbid them to do so, or that i am "anti pineapple".

I know you probably don't like this, but I consider some of what you said to be category errors. Disagreeing with someone for aesthetic or gastronomic objections is not the same as objecting to the morality of performing a certain action. While you might not be attacking the morality of being trans, there are plenty of people who do take that position. So I don't think in general these conversations boil down to aesthetic or gastronomic disagreements, but actually moral disagreements.

Do you see a contradiction in placing contingencies on integration on bottom surgery while simultaneously advocating against bottom surgery? Bottom surgery is used to better integrate trans people into society and alleviate gender dysphoria.

I'm not sure specifically what you're referring to not wanting taxpayers to cover, but generally Medicare (like insurance companies) will cover procedures if a doctor deems it medically necessary (upon approval of the local authorities or on the insurance company). If it's Medicare, I can see your interests in wanting to stop it since you might partially be funding it (though I disagree), but if it's an insurance company that's a completely free association so I'm guessing the objection isn't there?

Yeah, this is where I suspect the disagreement would come in. I generally agree with the civil rights act (or other things like the ADA) which enforce that people not be discriminated against due to certain protected classes. If it's your own personal opinion about trans people, sure you can have that, but once it comes to treating them as customers or employees there has to be reasonable steps taken to ensure a lack of discrimination. How and what that looks like is a matter for the courts, states, and congress to decide. In general this law has worked really well for us, even if at times some corrections are needed.

You don't get to make use of the vast resources and economy of the United States without having some kind of social responsibility towards cohesion.

Good thing I've reiterated many times I don't believe in gender self-id.

Also isn't the whole "special benefit to women" thing kind of go against the above about freedom of association? Also goes against your affirmative action thing? Or are you saying if we are going to regulate those things then we need to do as above?

I would have to know how you cache out the word "children" here. As I have stated many times in this thread, I don't think that lumping in people under 14 with high school age teens is a helpful way of looking at this issue. That's not to say I'm against all forms of social transition for children, or if puberty blockers were found to be safe and reversible, but I do think we need to make sure we're having the right conversations.

And yeah like I said, I can believe that perhaps only certain issues have come up in this thread so you just seem to always fall on the side of the issue that would make you look anti-trans.

All things being equal, I think most trans people that aren't lying to themselves would say they would rather not feel the incongruence with their physical body. If that wasn't the case, why would they transition? So for them given the issues they have, it would appear that the identity hurts them. At the same time, I think that in general it's a neutral thing and we should try to treat it as such. Don't do the cringe lefty thing of "omg stunning and brave" and don't do the cringe righty thing of "they are literally disgusting liars that should just minecraft themselves". The ideal is that we treat it like a very neutral thing, or even that they can go stealth and have their trans identity slowly disappear from how they conduct themselves in life.

I again don't really know what you mean about "the self". My point seems like a pretty benign observation about human behaviour. It feels like you are responding dismissively with some pseudo-philosophy ~The Self~ stuff. What precisely do you mean and why do you think I don't care about it?

When someone says they felt self conscious, do you immediately stop them, ask them what they mean, and accuse them of pseudo philosophy?

Have you never experienced self consciousness or self awareness before? This is a foreign experience to you? I highly doubt this.

let's put aside the definition of child

i frankly do not think anyone under the age of 21 should be allowed to undergo puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or surgery with the end goal of transitioning

i'd be willing to compromis at 18 but again that's still too young

ideally the age would be 25 as others have mentioned as that's the age by which your brain is fully formed but alas even i'll concede that's taking it a bit too far and needlessly forcing someone to live in a manner not of their choosing for an addition 4-7 years where the delay is unlikely to have any major impact on discovering their true self

ie mean up until about 19 or 20 i still entertained the possibility that i could be a latent homosexual, not because i ever found men attractive (they aren't dicks are gross) but that i simply wasn't into women very much compared to my peers and there were a lot of women who my friends all found attractive which i didn't find attractive in the slightest

at the time, my lack of interest in women made me seriously question whether or not i was gay, all this despite not being attracted to men in the slightest and the thought of putting that to the test by experimenting with a gay man was a repulsive thought to me (exponentially more than making out with one of the girls my friends all liked but i didn't)- but in my ignorance of youth, that still seemed like a general possibility that perhaps i was just repressing those feelings

i also aged at a delayed rate compared to my peers, i could basically not grow any facial hair in college, could barely muster a thin chin strap as a senior, but now i'm one of the hairest individuals out there who if i don't shave for 3 weeks will have a full on bin laden beard going on

i was also one of the smaller kids as a freshman in highschool and hit my growth spurt very late, going from 5'4" to 6' and then growing a further 2 inches while in college

i did have an undescended testicle which required surgery when i was a kid, perhaps that's the reason for the late jumpstart and total disinterest in women while i was younger - but it was absolutely a very confusing time in my life where I do not question for one second that if i had bad influences in my life imploring me to consider that i was perhaps this or that then i may have wrongly pursued those paths as I was already somewhat doing that on my own without any prompting to begin with

this personal experience biases me on my position without a doubt, but that doesn't mean that children are not susceptible to questioning who they are even when the nature of the questioning was deeply incorrect

@checkraise

/I know you probably don't like this, but I consider some of what you said to be category errors. Disagreeing with someone for aesthetic or gastronomic objections is not the same as objecting to the morality of performing a certain action/

Aesthetics are a moral topic for me, I am Italian ffs. If you want a non Italian take that is very similar, use Oscar Wilde aestheticism.

And gastronomic choices are some of the most fundamental moral topics that exist.

They determine what you are made of quite literally and they are the pillar of your historical, ethnical and cultural identity (if you are Italian).

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as for taxpayers as I claimed several times, I want no legal mandates to cover "trans care", which are equivalent to a tax.

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children the way I use it for banning body modification means "the highest consent age for the thing society considers the most complicated". Whatever that is in your society.

if we think you can't drink alcohollegally because you aren't wise enough because of your age, you certainly can't consent to self body modifications for example, it's utterly incredible to claim otherwise.

where to put age of consent is a complicated debate but what is sure is that permanent extensive functional body modifications should come last of all sets of behavior limited by age.

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you can change your body because you like to do so without being in deep emotional pain if you don't.

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locker rooms for women have nothing to do with AA. men don't lose access to a locker room of you segregate by sex. same with prison, bathrooms and so on

You don’t care about it when you allow the trans identity to replace it in your mind.

The problem is you are using "the self" in some undefined way in a critique of trans people. Like sure, I know what you mean when you say self conscious or self aware. Trans people, like everyone, experience those. Where you are falling apart is the extension in the second quote, where somehow "trans identity" is, uh, replacing, uh, something, uh, about "the self".

What - exactly - do you mean? And why is trans people existing problematic for whatever it is you mean?

to further delve into this

if at that age there was a growing trend of being asexual i would have instead of pondered "am i latently gay and just repressing it?" and instead pondered "oh i'm obviously asexual"

this is especially so if whenever people learned i was asexual they congratulated me on living my true life and being so brave

and then if there were asexual treatments - for example, the common belief was that a true mental asexual would also live as a physically asexual being - so thus i would undergo puberty blockers - not in order to become a woman, but instead just cease development as a man

at that point i would be entering a self fulfilling recursive loop where what would have been a phase that likely occured to do delayed testosterone as a result of my right teste failing to descend naturally and a doctor not catching it until about 6th grade (happens to about 3% of the male population - this is why all doctors fondle your ballsack)

so i then would have lived my life not as a my true self at all, but instead as something created by science and self sustained through that science

also out of curiousity checked out google scholar on that issue and it's not widely studied but there definitely appears to be a correlation between undescended testicles and being trans or gay - notably a bunch of the studies done on the impact on gay people noted that in identical twins, you basically never get where one is gay and is one isn't - they are either both gay or both straight which deeply implies that there is some kind of genetic marker homosexuality given that we never see a natural deviation among twins the way we do amongst other siblings

Why are you doing this with these uses of “uh”? I have stated exactly what I mean multiple times.

You simply don’t want to consider it. That’s on you. I’ve told the truth throughout this entire thread.

Rick the "identical twins share sexual preferences" doesn't prove as much as you think, as it doesn't disprove theories about womb environment (birth order related or not) or other epigenetical environmental factors.

Don't want to consider WHAT?

I am asking you - genuinely - what you mean by "the self" that somehow the "trans identity replaces it"?

I'm not sure what exactly the communication barrier is here. I'm trying to get you to explain what you mean and you are responding that I simply don't want to consider "it". What is "it"? Can you say precisely what you mean and then I can address it?

(1) The self exists.

(2) When we say “I” and “you”, we are referring to the self, not another identity

(3) The self is dual gendered - masculine and feminine

That’s all that needs to be acknowledged for now. I’m not looking to have a deep philosophical / spiritual discussion about what the self is in this thread. If you disagree with any of the 3 claims above, go ahead and state which you disagree with.