[Edited. Originally I asked “Where did I say you’re not a woman?” But I’m not looking for litigation here. I in fact don’t mean to cause pain here. So I’m wondering what you tripped over in what I wrote.]
[deleted due to going below zero, in order to disengage myself from a conversation that was pushing me into a bad mental state. Please do not reply further to my comments here; I wish lesswrong had “mute replies”. I am now rate limited to one post per day because of mass downvoting on four comments.]
Edit to restore: I had said the line was
Today’s postmodern culture, where we try to pretend as much as possible that physical sex doesn’t matter, is extremely bizarre.
Presumably I said it in a spicy way or something. I thought Valentine and I were getting along fine though, until I came back to find I’d been heavily downvoted, and became upset because of expecting to be autobanned and having to do the community service posting the current rate limit thing requires.
If it helps: I’m another trans person, approximately agree with that line, and think one expression of it is that in those indigenous cultures, trans people were held to the norms of their target gender as stringently as everyone else. I don’t know of historic cultures that do mixed-gender role mixing the way we do. AFAIK transition, in cultures that had it, was uncommon and a way for someone to move from one tightly-maintained box to another tightly-maintained box.
In other words, I don’t think “physical sex” is just one thing—for example, it seems “postmodern” and “bizarre” to me that both some pro-trans and some anti-trans people claim that taking estrogen doesn’t make a trans woman more female than she was before—but I think it’s more real and relevant than current culture admits for. (I think this came about as an enforcement mechanism for women’s rights, so on net I bet it’s a good thing.)
Hmm. I’m guessing we’re talking about slightly different parts of culture here, in a spot that’s highly sensitive to you. I don’t know if we’re going to sort through this. But I’ll try a little.
I don’t know much about indigenous cultures with gender transitions. You have way more incentive to read up on that than I have. So you probably know about way more cases than I do.
However, I’m quite sure, on evolutionary grounds, that biological sex still has to be a major factor in those cultures. Not just what sex people identified with. The actual biological question of which pairs can produce babies when they have sex, and of those pairs which one can get pregnant.
This point gets warped a lot because the obvious reality of biological sex can be used as an attack on trans folks’ needs.
That sucks. I wish that didn’t happen.
But also, there’s still a biological reality. Even if there are exceptions like XXY or whatever. Humans exist because males mated with females, getting the latter pregnant. That’s obviously the main procreative force here!
What I’m saying is “extremely bizarre” is how today there’s a push to pretend that this biological question doesn’t matter. Or that it’s incidental. That what physical sex someone is doesn’t play a role in how they fit into the social web. That we can just mix people together in an office without regard for sex, and patch with some formal rules about “sexual harassment” or whatever, and call it good.
As far as I know, that is extremely weird. It’s not something human cultures generally do or have done, to the best of my knowledge. Maybe occasionally for specific individuals, like “Joe is now Joanne.” But not as part of the social fabric.
None of this is meant to deny your claim to being a woman.
Although it would be to deny a claim that you’re a biological female. I’d say there’s a meaningful biological difference between you and a cis woman — which is why there’s a need to distinguish between “cis” and “trans”.
I’m sorry if that scans as offensive. I don’t mean it that way.
(But it is true. I’ll stand by it even if it’s offensive.)
What I’m hearing you say is, many human cultures used to view transitioning with more acceptance than we do today. That seems totally plausible to me.
I’m just guessing that even in those cultures, they didn’t try to just assert that men and women are interchangeable and should be treated identically. Transitioning between genders probably meant transitioning social roles. That the men do some things and the women do other things, and you’re switching which kinds of gendered things you’re doing and with whom.
Whereas today, you can transition while working in some corporate office, and just… change nothing. Your appearance, how you want people to refer to you, sure. But what you do? And with whom? Your role in the social web? There’s a weird game of pretend here where we’re all kind of supposed to act like it doesn’t matter.
That’s what I’m saying is historically extremely bizarre. As far as I know.
Not especially important to your main points, but for the sake of pedantry:
While it’s true that transwomen are biologically distinct from ciswomen, medically-transitioning transwomen are also biologically distinct from cismen. In particular, most of them (and all of the post-op) can’t make babies with anyone. So, from a purely reproductive perspective, those transwomen are in a group onto itself. From a sexual-attraction perspective, this group is somewhat more similar to ciswomen than to cismen, in the sense that a much bigger fraction of straight men would be attracted to a (medically-transitioning in advance stage) transwoman than the fraction of straight women attracted to that transwoman (even if it the fraction of straight men attracted to a same-percentile-of-attractiveness ciswoman would be larger still).
In particular, most of them (and all of the post-op) can’t make babies with anyone.
I think sterilizing yourself when sperm storage is as easy as it is is in general a bad idea because sometimes people want kids later. I’ve tried encouraging this among more people getting sterilized. It shocks me that this isn’t standard protocol.
[deleted due to going below zero, in order to disengage myself from a conversation that was pushing me into a bad mental state. Please do not reply further to my comments here; I wish lesswrong had “mute replies”. I am now rate limited to one post per day because of mass downvoting on four comments.]
Edit: this comment previously said “I’ll be entirely female eventually. Less wrong needs real comment deletion, though” or so.
FYI, I downvoted for the comment deletion. (I have no idea what your comments said, because I only saw them after the edit.) I object to deleting comments after you’ve posted them and had them replied to—I consider it to be disruptive and non-cooperative, basically a defection against the other forum participants. (With exceptions for, like, “whoops I accidentally said some information that I didn’t mean to make public”, or whatever. But even then a targeted info-removing edit is the ideal way.)
Ditto. Gears, I didn’t downvote your comments until you deleted them. It’s now hard to see why I wrote what I did. I think that’s bad form.
That said, I read you (Gears) as being overwhelmed here. I’m guessing you wanted to delete your comments because you’re both hurting and feeling unseen/unsupported. Pulling out, including deleting your comments, totally makes sense to me in that context I’m imagining you in.
In the future, if you have to do that, I think it would be kinder to make some kind of note about that in the deleted comment.
Even better would be to use strikethrough with a comment saying something like “This is beyond my capacity to keep engaging in, I’ll leave this here so others can understand the exchange, but I’m checking out and ask not to be pulled in or expected to reply.”
But I also recognize this is an intense and painful topic for you. I understand if all of those options are out of emotional range for you.
But in case they’re not out of range in the future, that’d at least have avoided my and Said’s downvotes!
[deleted due to going below zero, in order to disengage myself from a conversation that was pushing me into a bad mental state. Please do not reply further to my comments here; I wish lesswrong had “mute replies”. I am now rate limited to one post per day because of mass downvoting on four comments.]
Edit: in this comment I said deleting a comment isn’t defecting if it’s after a mass downvote, what I meant was that it’s legitimate response to being downvoted unjustly, when my comment was expressing a reasonable opinion.
When I downvote a comment it is basically never because I want the author to delete that comment. I rarely downvote comments already bellow 0, but even when I do it is not because I wish the comment was deleted.
Instead, it mostly means that I dislike the way in which that comment was written and thought out; that I don’t want people to have that style / approach when commenting. This correlates with me disagreeing with the position, but not strongly so; and I try to keep my opinions about the object topic to the agree/disagree voting.
I don’t know how representative I am of the Lesswrong population in that regard, but I at least think most people who downvote a comment would prefer for it to stay undeleted; if only to make past discussions legilible.
What did I say that gave you that impression?
[Edited. Originally I asked “Where did I say you’re not a woman?” But I’m not looking for litigation here. I in fact don’t mean to cause pain here. So I’m wondering what you tripped over in what I wrote.]
[deleted due to going below zero, in order to disengage myself from a conversation that was pushing me into a bad mental state. Please do not reply further to my comments here; I wish lesswrong had “mute replies”. I am now rate limited to one post per day because of mass downvoting on four comments.]
Edit to restore: I had said the line was
Presumably I said it in a spicy way or something. I thought Valentine and I were getting along fine though, until I came back to find I’d been heavily downvoted, and became upset because of expecting to be autobanned and having to do the community service posting the current rate limit thing requires.
If it helps: I’m another trans person, approximately agree with that line, and think one expression of it is that in those indigenous cultures, trans people were held to the norms of their target gender as stringently as everyone else. I don’t know of historic cultures that do mixed-gender role mixing the way we do. AFAIK transition, in cultures that had it, was uncommon and a way for someone to move from one tightly-maintained box to another tightly-maintained box.
In other words, I don’t think “physical sex” is just one thing—for example, it seems “postmodern” and “bizarre” to me that both some pro-trans and some anti-trans people claim that taking estrogen doesn’t make a trans woman more female than she was before—but I think it’s more real and relevant than current culture admits for. (I think this came about as an enforcement mechanism for women’s rights, so on net I bet it’s a good thing.)
Hmm. I’m guessing we’re talking about slightly different parts of culture here, in a spot that’s highly sensitive to you. I don’t know if we’re going to sort through this. But I’ll try a little.
I don’t know much about indigenous cultures with gender transitions. You have way more incentive to read up on that than I have. So you probably know about way more cases than I do.
However, I’m quite sure, on evolutionary grounds, that biological sex still has to be a major factor in those cultures. Not just what sex people identified with. The actual biological question of which pairs can produce babies when they have sex, and of those pairs which one can get pregnant.
This point gets warped a lot because the obvious reality of biological sex can be used as an attack on trans folks’ needs.
That sucks. I wish that didn’t happen.
But also, there’s still a biological reality. Even if there are exceptions like XXY or whatever. Humans exist because males mated with females, getting the latter pregnant. That’s obviously the main procreative force here!
What I’m saying is “extremely bizarre” is how today there’s a push to pretend that this biological question doesn’t matter. Or that it’s incidental. That what physical sex someone is doesn’t play a role in how they fit into the social web. That we can just mix people together in an office without regard for sex, and patch with some formal rules about “sexual harassment” or whatever, and call it good.
As far as I know, that is extremely weird. It’s not something human cultures generally do or have done, to the best of my knowledge. Maybe occasionally for specific individuals, like “Joe is now Joanne.” But not as part of the social fabric.
None of this is meant to deny your claim to being a woman.
Although it would be to deny a claim that you’re a biological female. I’d say there’s a meaningful biological difference between you and a cis woman — which is why there’s a need to distinguish between “cis” and “trans”.
I’m sorry if that scans as offensive. I don’t mean it that way.
(But it is true. I’ll stand by it even if it’s offensive.)
What I’m hearing you say is, many human cultures used to view transitioning with more acceptance than we do today. That seems totally plausible to me.
I’m just guessing that even in those cultures, they didn’t try to just assert that men and women are interchangeable and should be treated identically. Transitioning between genders probably meant transitioning social roles. That the men do some things and the women do other things, and you’re switching which kinds of gendered things you’re doing and with whom.
Whereas today, you can transition while working in some corporate office, and just… change nothing. Your appearance, how you want people to refer to you, sure. But what you do? And with whom? Your role in the social web? There’s a weird game of pretend here where we’re all kind of supposed to act like it doesn’t matter.
That’s what I’m saying is historically extremely bizarre. As far as I know.
Not especially important to your main points, but for the sake of pedantry:
While it’s true that transwomen are biologically distinct from ciswomen, medically-transitioning transwomen are also biologically distinct from cismen. In particular, most of them (and all of the post-op) can’t make babies with anyone. So, from a purely reproductive perspective, those transwomen are in a group onto itself. From a sexual-attraction perspective, this group is somewhat more similar to ciswomen than to cismen, in the sense that a much bigger fraction of straight men would be attracted to a (medically-transitioning in advance stage) transwoman than the fraction of straight women attracted to that transwoman (even if it the fraction of straight men attracted to a same-percentile-of-attractiveness ciswoman would be larger still).
That’s an interesting point. Thank you, I hadn’t thought about it before. I’m not sure what it implies but it’s nice to have noticed.
I think sterilizing yourself when sperm storage is as easy as it is is in general a bad idea because sometimes people want kids later. I’ve tried encouraging this among more people getting sterilized. It shocks me that this isn’t standard protocol.
[deleted due to going below zero, in order to disengage myself from a conversation that was pushing me into a bad mental state. Please do not reply further to my comments here; I wish lesswrong had “mute replies”. I am now rate limited to one post per day because of mass downvoting on four comments.]
Edit: this comment previously said “I’ll be entirely female eventually. Less wrong needs real comment deletion, though” or so.
FYI, I downvoted for the comment deletion. (I have no idea what your comments said, because I only saw them after the edit.) I object to deleting comments after you’ve posted them and had them replied to—I consider it to be disruptive and non-cooperative, basically a defection against the other forum participants. (With exceptions for, like, “whoops I accidentally said some information that I didn’t mean to make public”, or whatever. But even then a targeted info-removing edit is the ideal way.)
Ditto. Gears, I didn’t downvote your comments until you deleted them. It’s now hard to see why I wrote what I did. I think that’s bad form.
That said, I read you (Gears) as being overwhelmed here. I’m guessing you wanted to delete your comments because you’re both hurting and feeling unseen/unsupported. Pulling out, including deleting your comments, totally makes sense to me in that context I’m imagining you in.
In the future, if you have to do that, I think it would be kinder to make some kind of note about that in the deleted comment.
Even better would be to use
strikethroughwith a comment saying something like “This is beyond my capacity to keep engaging in, I’ll leave this here so others can understand the exchange, but I’m checking out and ask not to be pulled in or expected to reply.”But I also recognize this is an intense and painful topic for you. I understand if all of those options are out of emotional range for you.
But in case they’re not out of range in the future, that’d at least have avoided my and Said’s downvotes!
[deleted due to going below zero, in order to disengage myself from a conversation that was pushing me into a bad mental state. Please do not reply further to my comments here; I wish lesswrong had “mute replies”. I am now rate limited to one post per day because of mass downvoting on four comments.]
Edit: in this comment I said deleting a comment isn’t defecting if it’s after a mass downvote, what I meant was that it’s legitimate response to being downvoted unjustly, when my comment was expressing a reasonable opinion.
When I downvote a comment it is basically never because I want the author to delete that comment. I rarely downvote comments already bellow 0, but even when I do it is not because I wish the comment was deleted. Instead, it mostly means that I dislike the way in which that comment was written and thought out; that I don’t want people to have that style / approach when commenting. This correlates with me disagreeing with the position, but not strongly so; and I try to keep my opinions about the object topic to the agree/disagree voting.
I don’t know how representative I am of the Lesswrong population in that regard, but I at least think most people who downvote a comment would prefer for it to stay undeleted; if only to make past discussions legilible.
Uh… that’s not how “defection” works.