The costs of trans visibility

Earlier ITT you told us the concept of "the self" was the type of thing we are all familiar with when we say "self-conscious" or "self-awareness". But none of those familiar concepts are in any way in tension with being trans. You've just magically stolen the word "self" to mean something in opposition to being trans.

That is, you've assumed your conclusion.

Let me see if I can formalize this for the benefit of clarity.

P1 If a way of thinking denies the existence of the self, it should be rejected.
P2 Trans identity denies the existence of the self
C Trans identity should be rejected

I mean that's a really rough and awkward syllogism, but I think it should work for our purposes.

Assuming that P1 is correct under some normative ethical theory, or perhaps as a normative epistemic standard, I would just flatly reject P2 in the syllogism.

I've seen the term before, but asexual is at least in my anecdotal recall of vastly more commonly cited than either of those words. But sure, it seems quite believable that people would find much lower levels of sexual attraction or enjoyment than most people, but being not completely zero would like a more specific name to refer to their experiences. That's fine. It's a bit like someone who uses some of the more non-standard terms of sexual attraction or gender identity that aren't one of the main letters in LGBT. It's like, ok, if someone wants to refer to themselves with a term they feel describes their experience power to them. I've never been one to think the "lolol woke libs think there are 107 genders here is a list I saw on X" is a good talking point.

Trans discriminates against bio-sex-gender because it says I am one gender and not the other.

The self doesn’t discriminate against bio-sex-gender. Further, better quality of life is available only through relationship with the self.

Trans hijacks all the promises of the self but can’t deliver at all beyond the placebo affect (which is real.. for a while).

Well luckily we’re at the point where the cultural relevancy of this stuff has been vastly reduced, but you have to remember that at one point people got mad at Contrapoints for making a light joke about “asexuals that have sex” and people treated her like she was turning into Blaire White or Buck Angel.

The way this stuff is policed within the community is very toxic, but luckily it does seem to be subsiding. I’m just worried that it can come roaring back at any moment, threatening another backlash. I don’t want the LGBT community to be under attack because everyone within the community is forced to take on the most extreme positions or be faced with senseless backlash.

If you say so. Most of my experience with the LGBT community is very welcoming and accepting of diversity. I've seen a bunch of right-wing attacks on the LGBT that try and paint it this way. And ironically most of the policing seems from outside. For example, if someone says they are asexual, I think that'd be pretty accepted in the LGBT community, but outsiders might dismiss it as "that isn't a thing".

Of course the internet is big and vast with lots of stupid people on it (not to mention plenty of social media accounts dedicated to sourcing and collating the most extreme examples for us to collectively mock), but I think this characterization is overblown.

Ok so we got

P1 Trans discriminates against bio-sex-gender
-P1 support: it says I am one gender and not the other
P2 The self doesn’t discriminate against bio-sex-gender
P3 We ought not to discriminate against the self because better quality of life is available through relationship with the self
C Trans hijacks all the promises of the self but can’t deliver beyond the placebo effect

Besides lack of support for the various premises that we can get into, it plainly doesn’t follow inference rules and isn’t a logically valid argument in form (therefore not sound).

Aside from that which might be understandable, I’m not seeing why the self wouldn’t discriminate against bio-sex-gender. What if inherent to someone’s self is a mental state that there is an incongruence between bio-gender and self-identity. That doesn’t bring to mind any inherent contradiction so we have to support this.

We also have P3 which is an epistemic claim. In that case all I have to show is that better quality of life may be available through denial of certain aspects of the self. For instance, what if you are someone born with a proclivity towards addiction. You may be more self-authentic if you do drugs, because that’s what the self seems to want. But it would also be lower quality of life most likely.

In actuality I’m not sure we can assign normative principles to the self that says that we ought to do this thing because of x better outcome, and this x better outcome is always correlated to what the self does or doesn’t discriminate against. I think a stronger version of this argument might focus more on epistemic normativity wherein we ought to follow the truth fundamentally because everything falls apart if the normativity of truth isn’t followed. What I mean is maybe you can find some moral principle that says you ought not lie to yourself, and being trans is a lie to yourself. But then we’ll just be back to an epistemic inquiry of whether or not one can actually transition gender, and there are ways to make that argument go through which would be the defeater of that argument.

Yeah I figured you would say something like this, and I don’t want to get into a big argument about what can be considered overpolicing and what is legitimate defense and what is exclusionism and is cancel culture really a thing.

Maybe you have heard of Riley Grace Roshong and you can give your opinion on whether the backlash against her went too far. Because I do believe that there are certain anecdotes that can be like “wow this is just unacceptable”.

This is all just a really silly way of saying you don't believe trans people actually exist. Because their ~*Self*~ has to 100% be their "bio-sex-gender", and being trans is supposedly in contradiction with that.

I'm still reading about a the prior anecdote before I can move to a new one. Consider this article on the contrapoint's quote: https://outwritenewsmag.org/2021/10/the-....

Is that what you mean by "policing"? Or is it more like one trans person sharing their nuanced perspective? I think the article makes a bunch of decent points - I thought their comments about transmedicalism might be helpful for some ITT. Not every word resonates with me. But this type of dialogue seems pretty healthy, so I hope you aren't complaining about things like that.

I have repeatedly affirmed the existence of the trans identity. This is not some elaborate attempt to disguise my transphobia like you want it to be. Rather, I have spent a lot of time and effort exploring + mapping the mind through direct experience.

The self is really important. All of you should know that and value it accordingly.

Putting “cw queerphobia, transphobia, acephobia, biphobia” at the very top of the article is the opposite of what I would call “nuanced” or “healthy dialogue” not is calling what she said a regurgitated right wing talking point. Or the vague intimations that she had done other problematic and controversial things without actually putting out there what those things are. I absolutely despise people who go “wow this person is so problematic” without going into what those things are.

I also think it’s funny that we went from “no one ever says this” to showing that people do actually say this. And I think it’s ok to point out it’s at the minimum a little hard to understand how someone can be a slutty asexual who loves sex, all the way to saying it is in fact contradictory and nonsensical.

Dude, your logic is no good here. You don’t understand the mind / self through logic.

I mean I think it’s hilarious that you think that trans and the self are in contradiction but can’t even define what that contradiction is, or even reject that you can put it into a formal argument.

So my post where I described how the self differs from the trans identity — you couldn’t grasp that?

I just posted a whole bevvy of reasons why that argument doesn't go through, including helping you formalize your thoughts into premise-conclusion form and offering suggestions on how you can improve the argument logically. I'd say I grasped it and just thought it was nonsense.

he is beyond rationality at this point - the literal embodiment of confirmation bias

So what type of argument is it then? Abductive? Inductive? It seems to me if you are pointing at a logical contradiction, by necessity one would have to accept the conclusion if the premises go through. Sounds like a deductive argument to me.

If you are denying the argument can be formalized, that's fine, but it just means that it's going to probably bottom out as being some type of equivocation fallacy since you are probably using terms in such a way that they are not exact and therefore subject to the slipperiness of common language.

I shared an insight. I said trans is in opposition to the self. Trans discriminates against bio-sex-gender. Self accepts bio-sex-gender.

and as many have told you, there's no proof this is correct this is like

just because you wrote that doesn't mean anyone has to believe it

Empiricism doesn’t apply to identity. We are simply having a dialogue.

Ok. I was trying to figure out whether you thought the article was an example of the "policing" you were criticizing, not really whether you agree or disagree with the article itself (although I think you didn't really address its key points here). Basically if you think this IS the type of policing you are talking about, then I agree it is more common but don't think it is problematic. If you are talking about something more egregious then maybe I'd agree it was problematic but would then think it less common. Does that make sense?

This is from a student university queer newspaper - you and I aren't the normal audience here - but from what I can tell it is a genuine, in-community take giving their critique of the quote, I learned a little bit from reading it, maybe you did two I don't know.

By the way, I think worrying about content warnings is pretty benign. It might seem strange coming from these forums, where there is a sort of endless battle about trans issues and every time we come into the thread we expect there is some debate going on. But for people who actually are LGBT looking for community and support and conversation, they don't necessarily want everything to be about the acrimonous culture war debates, and I think having some tags at the top to say that the article is discussing transphobia at some level and maybe you don't want to be reading this is totally fine. I'd way rather focusing on the argument made -rightly or wrongly - than these sort of superficial tags that the newspaper adds.

lol. You can just say you don’t accept trans people, you don’t have to add the philosophy mumbo jumbo.