A more likely explanation, it seems to me, is that a large part of early LW/sequences was militant atheism, with religion being the primary example of the low “sanity waterline”, and this hasn’t been explicitly disclaimed since, at best de-emphasized. So this space had done its best to repel conservatives much earlier than pronouns and other trans issues entered the picture.
I approve of the militant atheism, because there are just too many religious people out there, so without making a strong line we would have an Eternal September of people joining Less Wrong just to say “but have you considered that an AI can never have a soul?” or something similar.
And if being religious is strongly correlated with some political tribe, I guess it can’t be avoided.
But I think that going further than that is unnecessary and harmful.
Actually, we should probably show some resistance to the stupid ideas of other political tribes, just to make our independence clear. Otherwise, people would hesitate to call out bullshit when it comes from those who seem associated with us. (Quick test: Can you say three things the average Democrat believes that are wrong and stupid? What reaction would you expect if you posted your answer on LW?)
Specifically on trans issues:
I am generally in favor of niceness and civilization, therefore:
If someone calls themselves “he” or “she”, I will use that pronoun without thinking twice about it.
I disapprove of doxing in general, which extends to all speculations about someone’s biological sex.
But I also value rationality and free speech, therefore:
I insist on keeping an “I don’t know, really” attitude to trans issues. I don’t know, really. The fact that you are yelling at me does not make your arguments any more logically convincing.
No, I am not literally murdering you by disagreeing with you. Let’s tone down the hysteria.
There are people who feel strongly that they are Napoleon. If you want to convince me, you need to make a stronger case than that.
I specifically disagree on the point that if someone changes their gender, it retroactively changes their entire past. If someone presented as male for 50 years, then changed to female, it makes sense to use “he” to refer to their first 50 years, especially if this is the pronoun everyone used at that time. Also, I will refer to them using the name they actually used at that time. (If I talk about the Ancient Rome, I don’t call it Italian Republic either.) Anything else feels like magical thinking to me. I won’t correct you if you do that, but please do not correct me, or I will be super annoyed.
My biggest problem with the trans discourse is that it’s a giant tower of motte-and-baileys, and there’s no point where it’s socially acceptable to get off the crazy train.
Sure, at this point it seems likely that gender dysphoria isn’t an entirely empty notion. Implying that this condition might be in any way undesirable is already a red line though, with discussions of how much of it is due to social contagion being very taboo, naturally. And that only people experiencing bad enough dysphoria to require hormones and/or surgery could claim to be legitimately trans is a battle lost long ago.
Moving past that, there is non-binary, genderfluid, neo-genders, otherkin, etc, concepts that don’t seem to be plausibly based in some currently known crippling biological glitch, and yet those identities are apparently just as legitimate. Where does it stop? Should society be entirely reorganized every time a new fad gains traction? Should everybody questioning that be ostracized?
Then there’s the “passing” issue. I accept the argument that nowadays in most social situations we have no strong reasons to care about chromosomes/etc, people can successfully play many roles traditionally associated with the opposite sex. But sexual dimorphism is the entire reason for having different pronouns in the first place, and yet apparently you don’t even have to try (at all, let alone very hard) to “pass” as your chosen gender for your claim to be legitimate. What is the point? Here the unresolved tension between gender-critical and gender-affirming feminism is the most glaring.
Also, I will refer to them using the name they actually used at that time. (If I talk about the Ancient Rome, I don’t call it Italian Republic either.)
A closer comparison than Ancient Rome is that all types of people change their names on occasions, e.g. on marriage, so we have lots of precedent for referring to people whose names have changed. This includes cases where they strongly dislike their former names. Those traditions balance niceness, civilization, rationality, and free speech.
There are people who feel strongly that they are Napoleon. If you want to convince me, you need to make a stronger case than that.
It’s confusing to me that you go to “I identify as an attack helicopter” argument after treating biological sex as private information & respecting pronouns out of politeness. I thought you already realize that “choosing your gender identity” and “being deluded you’re another person” are different categories.
If someone presented as male for 50 years, then changed to female, it makes sense to use “he” to refer to their first 50 years, especially if this is the pronoun everyone used at that time. Also, I will refer to them using the name they actually used at that time. (If I talk about the Ancient Rome, I don’t call it Italian Republic either.) Anything else feels like magical thinking to me.
The alternative (using new pronouns / name) makes perfect sense too, due to trivial reasons, such as respecting a person’s wishes. You went too far calling it magical thinking. A piece of land is different from a person in two important ways: (1) it doesn’t feel anything no matter how you call it, (2) there’s less strong reasons to treat it as a single entity across time.
Ah, I disagree, and I don’t really wish to discuss the details, so just shortly:
I assume that for trans people being trans is something more than mere “choice” (even if I don’t wish to make guesses what exactly, I suspect something with hormones; this is an empirical question for smart people to figure out). If this turns out not to be true, I will probably be annoyed.
If you introduce yourself as “Jane” today, I will refer to you as “Jane”. But if 50 years ago you introduced yourself as “John”, that is a fact about the past. I am not saying that “you were John” as some kind of metaphysical statement, but that “everyone, including you, referred to you as John” 50 years ago, which is a statement of fact.
Even if we assume that there should be a crisp physical cause of “transness” (which is already a value-laden choice), we need to make a couple of value-laden choices before concluding if “being trans” is similar to “believing you’re Napoleon” or not. Without more context it’s not clear why you bring up Napoleon. I assume the idea is “if gender = hormones (gender essentialism), and trans people have the right hormones, then they’re not deluded”. But you can arrive at the same conclusion (“trans people are not deluded”) by means other than gender essentialism.
I assume that for trans people being trans is something more than mere “choice”
There doesn’t need to be a crisp physical cause of “transness” for “transness” to be more than mere choice. There’s a big spectrum between “immutable physical features” and “things which can be decided on a whim”.
If you introduce yourself as “Jane” today, I will refer to you as “Jane”. But if 50 years ago you introduced yourself as “John”, that is a fact about the past. I am not saying that “you were John” as some kind of metaphysical statement, but that “everyone, including you, referred to you as John” 50 years ago, which is a statement of fact.
This just explains your word usage, but doesn’t make a case that disliking deadnaming is magical thinking.
I’ve decided to comment because bringing up Napoleon, hysteria and magical thinking all at once is egregiously bad faith. I think it’s not a good epistemic norm to imply something like “the arguments of the outgroup are completely inconsistent trash” without elaborating.
Napoleon is merely an argument for “just because you strongly believe it, even if it is a statement about you, does not necessarily make it true”.
We will probably disagree on this, but the only reason I care about trans issues is that some people report significant suffering (gender dysphoria) from their current situation, and I am in favor of people not suffering, so I generally try not to be an asshole.
Unfortunately, for every person who suffers from something, there are probably dozen people out there who cosplay their condition… because it makes them popular on Twitter I guess, or just gives them another opportunity to annoy their neighbors. I have no empathy for those. Play your silly games, if you wish, but don’t expect me to play along, and definitely don’t threaten me to play along. Also, the cosplayers often make the situation more difficult for those who genuinely have the condition, by speaking in their name, and often saying things that the people who actually have the condition would disagree with… and in the most ironic cases, the cosplayers get them cancelled. So I don’t mind being an asshole to the cosplayers, because from my perspective, they started it first.
The word “deadnaming” is itself hysterical. (Who died? No one.)
Gender essentialism? I don’t make any metaphysical claim about essences. People simply are born with male or female bodies (yes, I know that some are intersex), and some people are strongly unhappy about their state. I find it plausible that there may be an underlying biological reason for that; and hormones seem like a likely candidate, because that’s how body communicates many things. I don’t have a strong opinion on that, because I have never felt a desire to be one sex or the other, just like I have never felt a strong desire to have a certain color of eyes, or hair, or skin, whether it would be the one I have or some that I have not.
I expect that you will disagree with a lot of this, and that’s okay; I am not trying to convince you, just explaining my position.
I don’t think “deadname” is a ridiculous term just because no one died. The idea is that the name is dead: it’s not being used any more. Latin is a “dead language” because (roughly speaking) no one speaks or writes in Latin. “James” is a “dead name” because (roughly speaking) no one calls that person “James” any more.
This all seems pretty obvious to me, and evidently it seems the opposite way to you, and both of us are very smart [citation needed], so probably at least one of us is being mindkilled a bit by feeling strongly about some aspect of the issue. I don’t claim to know which of us it is :-).
As my 2 cents, the phrase ‘deadname’ to me sounded like it caught on because it was hyperbolic and imputes aggression – similar to how phrases like trauma caught on (which used to primarily refer to physical damage like the phrase “blunt-forced trauma”) and notions spread that “words can be violence” (which seems to me to be bending the meaning of words like ‘violence’ too far and is trying to get people on board for a level of censorship that isn’t appropriate). I similarly recall seeing various notions on social media that not using the requested pronouns for transgender people constituted killing them due the implied background levels of violence towards such people in society.
Overall this leaves me personally choosing not to use the term ‘deadname’ and I reliably taboo it when I wish to refer to someone using the person’s former alternative-gendered name.
“Trauma” meaning psychological as opposed to physical damage goes back to the late 19th century.
I agree that there’s a widespread tendency to exaggerate the unpleasantness/harm done by mere words. (But I suggest there’s an opposite temptation too, to say that obviously no one can be substantially harmed by mere words, that physical harm is different in kind from mere psychological upset, etc., and that this is also wrong.)
I agree that much of the trans community seems to have embraced what looks to me like a severely hyperbolic view of how much threat trans people are under. (But, usual caveats: it’s very common for the situation of a minority group to look and feel much worse from the inside than from the outside, and generally this isn’t only a matter of people on the inside being oversensitive, it’s also a matter of people on the outside not appreciating how much unpleasantness those on the inside face. So my guess is that that view is less hyperbolic than it looks to me.)
I agree that the term “deadname” is probably popular partly because “using my deadname” has more of an obviously-hostile-move sound than “using my old name” or similar. But if we avoid every term with any spin attached, we’ll have to stop calling people liberals (as if no one else cared about freedom) or conservatives (as if their opponents were against preserving valuable things) or Catholics (the word means “universal”) or pro-life or pro-choice or, or, or, or. For my part, I avoid some spinny terms but not others, on the basis of gut feeling about how much actual wrongness is baked into them and how easy it is to find other language, which (I don’t know how coherently) cashes out as being broadly OK with “liberal” and “conservative”, preferring to avoid “pro-life” and “pro-choice” or at least making some snarky remarks about the terms before using them, avoiding the broadest uses of the term “transphobia”, etc. And for me “deadname” seems obviously basically OK even though, yes, the term was probably chosen partly for connotations one might take issue with. Your mileage may vary.
Napoleon is merely an argument for “just because you strongly believe it, even if it is a statement about you, does not necessarily make it true”.
When people make arguments, they often don’t list all of the premises. That’s not unique to trans discourse. Informal reasoning is hard to make fully explicit. “Your argument doesn’t explicitly exclude every counterexample” is a pretty cheap counter-argument. What people experience is important evidence and an important factor, it’s rational to bring up instead of stopping yourself with “wait, I’m not allowed to bring that up unless I make an analytically bulletproof argument”. For example, if you trust someone that they feel strongly about being a woman, there’s no reason to suspect them of being a cosplayer who chases Twitter popularity.
I expect that you will disagree with a lot of this, and that’s okay; I am not trying to convince you, just explaining my position.
I think I still don’t understand the main conflict which bothers you. I thought it was “I’m not sure if trans people are deluded in some way (like Napoleons, but milder) or not”. But now it seems like “I think some people really suffer and others just cosplay, the cosplayers take something away from true sufferers”. What is taken away?
I think I still don’t understand the main conflict which bothers you.
Two major points.
1) It annoys me if someone insists that I accept their theory about what being trans really is.
Zack insists that Blanchard is right, and that I fail at rationality if I disagree with him. People on Twitter and Reddit insist that Blanchard is wrong, and that I fail at being a decent human if I disagree with them. My opinion is that I have no comparative advantage at figuring out who is right and who is wrong on this topic, or maybe everyone is wrong, anyway it is an empirical question and I don’t have the data. I hope that people who have more data and better education will one day sort it out, but until that happens, my position firmly remains “I don’t know (and most likely neither do you), stop bothering me”.
Also, from larger perspective, this is moving the goalposts. Long ago, tolerance was defined as basically not hurting other people, and letting them do whatever they want as long as it does not hurt others. Recently it also includes agreeing with the beliefs of their woke representatives. (Note that this is about the representatives, not the people being represented. Two trans people can have different opinions, but you are required to believe the woke one and oppose the non-woke one.) Otherwise, you are transphobic. I completely reject that. Furthermore, I claim that even trans people themselves are not necessarily experts on themselves. Science exists for a reason, otherwise we could just make opinion polls.
Shortly: disagreement is not hate. But it often gets conflated, especially in environments that overwhelmingly contain people of one political tribe.
2) Every cause gets abused. It is bad if it becomes a taboo to point this out.
A few months (or is it already years?) ago, there was an epidemic of teenagers on TikTok who appeared to have developed Tourette syndrome overnight. A few weeks or months later, apparently the epidemic was gone. I have no way to check those teenagers, but I think it is reasonable to assume that many of them were faking it. Why would anyone do that? Most likely, attention seeking. (There is also a things called Munchausen syndrome.) This is what I referred to as “cosplayers”.
Note that this is completely different from saying that Tourette syndrome does not exist.
If you adopt a rule that e.g. everyone must use everyone else’s preferred pronouns all the time, no exception, and you get banned for hate speech otherwise, this becomes a perfect opportunity for… anyone who enjoys using it as a leverage. You get an explosion of pronouns: it starts with “he” and “she”, proceeds with “they”, then you get “xe”, “ve”, “foo”, “bar”, “baz”, and ultimately anyone is free to make up their own pronouns, and everyone else is required to play along, or else. (That’s when you get the “attack helicopters” as an attempt to point out the absurdity of the system.)
Again, moving the goalposts. We started with trans people who report feeling gender dysphoria, so we use their preferred pronouns to alleviate their suffering. So far, okay. But if there is a person who actually feels dysphoria from not being addressed as “ve” (someone who would be triggered by calling them any of: “he”, “she”, or “they”), then I believe that this is between them and their psychiatrist, and I want to be left out of this game.
Another annoying thing is how often this is used to derail the debate (on places like Twitter and Reddit). Suppose that someone is called “John” and has a male-passing photo. So you try to say something about John, and your automatically use the pronoun “he”. Big mistake! You haven’t noticed it, but recently John identifies as agender. And whatever you wanted to talk about originally is unimportant now, and the thread becomes about what a horrible person you are. Okay, you have learned your lesson; but the point is that the next time someone else is going to make the same mistake. So it basically becomes impossible to discuss John, ever. And sometimes, it is important to be able to discuss John, without getting the debate predictably derailed.
Shortly: misgendering should be considered bad manners, but not something you ban people for.
I think about transness in a similar way to how I think about homo/bisexuality.
If homo/bisexuality is outlawed, people are gonna suffer. Bad.
If I could erase homo/bisexuality from existence without creating suffering, I wouldn’t anyway. Would be a big violation of people’s freedom to choose their identity and actions (even if in practice most people don’t actually “choose” to be homo/bisexual).
Different people have homo/bisexuality of different “strength” and form. One man might fall in love with another man, but dislike sex or even kissing. Maybe he isn’t a real homosexual, if he doesn’t need to prove it physically? Another man might identify as a bisexual, but be in a relationship with a woman… he doesn’t get to prove his bisexuality (sexually or romantically). Maybe we shouldn’t trust him unless he walks the talk? As a result of all such situations, we might have certain “inconsistencies”: some people identifying as straight have done more “gay” things than people identifying as gay. My opinion on this? I think all of this is OK. Pushing for an “objective gay test” would be dystopian and suffering-inducing. I don’t think it’s an empirical matter (unless we choose it to be, which is a value-laden choice). Even if it was, we might be very far away from resolving it. So just respecting people’s self-identification in the meantime is best, I believe. Moreover, a lot of this is very private information anyway. Less reason to try measuring it “objectively”.
My thoughts about transness specifically:
We strive for gender equality (I hope). Which makes the concept of gender less important for society as a whole.
The concept of gender is additionally damaged by all the things a person can decide to do in their social/sexual life. For example, take an “assigned male at birth” (AMAB) person. AMAB can appear and behave very feminine without taking hormones. Or vice-versa (take hormones, get a pair of boobs, but present masculine). Additionally there are different degrees of medical transition and different types of sexual preferences.
A lot of things which make someone more or less similar to a man/woman (behavior with friends, behavior with romantic partners, behavior with sexual partners, thoughts) are private. Less reason to try measuring those “objectively”.
I have a choice to respect people’s self-identified genders or not. I decide to respect them. Not just because I care about people’s feelings, but also because of points 1 & 2 & 3 and because of my general values (I show similar respect to homo/bisexuals). So I respect pronouns, but on top of that I also respect if someone identifies as a man/woman/nonbinary. I believe respect is optimal in terms of reducing suffering and adhering to human values.
When I compare your opinion to mine, most of my confusion is about two things: what exactly do you see as an empirical question? how does the answer (or its absence) affect our actions?
Zack insists that Blanchard is right, and that I fail at rationality if I disagree with him. People on Twitter and Reddit insist that Blanchard is wrong, and that I fail at being a decent human if I disagree with them. My opinion is that I have no comparative advantage at figuring out who is right and who is wrong on this topic, or maybe everyone is wrong, anyway it is an empirical question and I don’t have the data. I hope that people who have more data and better education will one day sort it out, but until that happens, my position firmly remains “I don’t know (and most likely neither do you), stop bothering me”.
I think we need to be careful to not make a false equivalence here:
Trans people want us to respect their pronouns and genders.
I’m not very familiar with Blanchard, so far it seems to me like Blanchard’s work is (a) just a typology for predicting certain correlations and (b) this work is sometimes used to argue that trans people are mistaken about their identities/motivations.
2A is kinda tangential to 1. So is this really a case of competing theories? I think uncertainty should make one skeptical of Blanchard work’s implications rather than make one skeptical about respecting trans people.
(Note that this is about the representatives, not the people being represented. Two trans people can have different opinions, but you are required to believe the woke one and oppose the non-woke one.) Otherwise, you are transphobic. I completely reject that.
Two homo/bisexuals can have different opinions on what’s “true homo/bisexuality” is too. Some opinions can be pretty negative. Yes, that’s inconvenient, but that’s just an expected course of events.
Shortly: disagreement is not hate. But it often gets conflated, especially in environments that overwhelmingly contain people of one political tribe.
I feel it’s just the nature of some political questions. Not in all questions, not in all spaces you can treat disagreement as something benign.
But if there is a person who actually feels dysphoria from not being addressed as “ve” (someone who would be triggered by calling them any of: “he”, “she”, or “they”), then I believe that this is between them and their psychiatrist, and I want to be left out of this game.
Agree. Also agree that lynching for accidental misgendering is bad.
(That’s when you get the “attack helicopters” as an attempt to point out the absurdity of the system.)
I’m pretty sure the helicopter argument began as an argument against trans people, not as an argument against weird-ass novel pronouns.
I agree with most of that, but it seems to me that respecting homosexuality is mostly a passive action; if you ignore what other people do, you are already maybe 90% there. Homosexuals don’t change their names or pronouns after coming out. You don’t have to pretend that ten years ago they were something else than they appeared to you at that time.
With transsexuality, you get the taboo of deadnaming, and occasionally the weird pronouns.
Also, the reaction seems different when you try to opt out of the game. Like, if someone is uncomfortable with homosexuality, they can say “could we please just… not discuss our sexual relations here, and focus on the job (or some other reason why we are here)?” and that’s usually accepted. If someone similarly says “could we please just… call everyone ‘they’ as a compromise solution, or simply refer to people using their names”, that already got some people cancelled.
Shortly, with homosexuals I never felt like my free speech was under attack.
It is possible that most of the weirdness and pushing boundaries does not actually come from the transsexuals themselves, but rather from woke people who try to be their “allies”. Either way, in effect, whenever a discussion about trans topics starts, I feel like “oh my, the woke hordes are coming, people are going to get cancelled”. (And I am not really concerned about myself here, because I am not American, so my job is not on the line; and if some online community decides to ban me, well then fuck them. But I don’t want to be in a community where people need to watch their tongues, and get filtered by political conformity.)
I think there should be more spaces where controversial ideas can be debated. I’m not against spaces without pronoun rules, just don’t think every place should be like this. Also, if we create a space for political debate, we need to really make sure that the norms don’t punish everyone who opposes centrism & the right. (Over-sensitive norms like “if you said that some opinion is transphobic you’re uncivil/shaming/manipulative and should get banned” might do this.) Otherwise it’s not free speech either. Will just produce another Grey or Red Tribe instead of Red/Blue/Grey debate platform.
I do think progressives underestimate free speech damage. To me it’s the biggest issue with the Left. Though I don’t think they’re entirely wrong about free speech.
For example, imagine I have trans employees. Another employee (X) refuses to use pronouns, in principle (using pronouns is not the same as accepting progressive gender theories). Why? Maybe X thinks my trans employees live such a great lie that using pronouns is already an unacceptable concession. Or maybe X thinks that even trying to switch “he” & “she” is too much work, and I’m not justified in asking to do that work because of absolute free speech. Those opinions seem unnecessarily strong and they’re at odds with the well-being of my employees, my work environment. So what now? Also, if pronouns are an unacceptable concession, why isn’t calling a trans woman by her female name an unacceptable concession?
Imagine I don’t believe something about a minority, so I start avoiding words which might suggest otherwise. If I don’t believe that gay love can be as true as straight love, I avoid the word “love” (in reference to gay people or to anybody) at work. If I don’t believe that women are as smart as men, I avoid the word “master” / “genius” (in reference to women or anybody) at work. It can get pretty silly. Will predictably cost me certain jobs.
Well, the primary goal of this place is to advance rationality and AI safety. Not the victory of any specific political tribe. And neither conformity nor contrarianism for its own sake.
Employees get paid, which kinda automatically reduces their free speech, because saying the wrong words can make them stop getting paid.
What is an (un)acceptable concession? For me, it is a question of effort and what value I receive in return. I value niceness, so by default people get their wishes granted, unless I forget. Some requests I consider arbitrary and annoying, so they don’t get them. Yeah, those are subjective criteria. But I am not here to get paid; I am here to enjoy the talk.
(What annoys me: asking to use pronouns other than he/she/they. I do not talk about people’s past for no good reason, and definitely not just to annoy someone else. But if I have a good reason to point out that someone did something in the past, and the only way to do that is to reveal their previous name, then I don’t care about the taboo.)
Employment is really a different situation. You get laws, and recommendations of your legal department; there is not much anyone can do about that. And the rest is about the balance of power, where the individual employee is often in a much worse bargaining position.
Agree that neopronouns are dumb. Wikipedia says they’re used by 4% LGBTQ people and criticized both within and outside the community.
But for people struggling with normal pronouns (he/she/they), I have the following thoughts:
Contorting language to avoid words associated with beliefs… is not easier than using the words. Don’t project beliefs onto words too hard.
Contorting language to avoid words associated with beliefs… is still a violation of free speech (if we have such a strong notion of free speech). So what is the motivation to propose that? It’s a bit like a dog in the manger. “I’d rather cripple myself than help you, let’s suffer together”.
Don’t maximize free speech (in a negligible way) while ignoring every other human value.
In an imperfect society, truly passive tolerance (tolerance which doesn’t require any words/actions) is impossible. For example, in a perfect society, if my school has bigoted teachers, it immediately gets outcompeted by a non-bigoted school. In an imperfect society it might not happen. So we get enforceable norms.
Employees get paid, which kinda automatically reduces their free speech, because saying the wrong words can make them stop getting paid. (...) Employment is really a different situation. You get laws, and recommendations of your legal department; there is not much anyone can do about that.
I’m not familiar with your model of free speech (i.e. how you imagine free speech working if laws and power balances were optimal). People who value free speech usually believe that free speech should have power above money and property, to a reasonable degree. What’s “reasonable” is the crux.
I think in situations where people work together on something unrelated to their beliefs, prohibiting to enforce a code of conduct is unreasonable. Because respect is crucial for the work environment and protecting marginalized groups. I assume people who propose to “call everyone they” or “call everyone by proper name” realize some of that.
If I let people use my house as a school, but find out that a teacher openly doesn’t respect minority students (by rejecting to do the smallest thing for them), I’m justified to not let the teacher into my house.
I do not talk about people’s past for no good reason, and definitely not just to annoy someone else. But if I have a good reason to point out that someone did something in the past, and the only way to do that is to reveal their previous name, then I don’t care about the taboo.
I just think “disliking deadnaming under most circumstances = magical thinking, like calling Italy Rome” was a very strong, barely argued/explained opinion. In tandem with mentioning delusion (Napoleon) and hysteria. If you want to write something insulting, maybe bother to clarify your opinions a little bit more? Like you did in our conversation.
Maybe, but Martin Randall and Matt Gilliland have both said that the trans explanation matches their personal experience, and Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees with the explanation as well. I have no insider knowledge and am just going off what community members say.
Do you have any particular reasons for thinking atheism is a bigger filter than pronouns and other trans issues?
It’s not clear what your position is. Do you think the contribution of pronouns and other trans issues is negligible? Slightly smaller than atheism? An order of magnitude smaller?
I suspect atheism is a non-negligible filter, but both smaller than trans issues, and less likely to filter out intelligent truth-seeking conservatives. Atheism is a factual question with a great deal of evidence in favor, and is therefore less politically charged. Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have both said that the intellectual case for atheism is strong, and both remain very popular on the right.
I’d say that atheism had already set the “conservatives not welcome” baseline way back when, and this resulted in the community norms evolving accordingly. Granted, these days the trans stuff is more salient, but the reason it flourished here even more than in other tech-adjacent spaces has much to do with that early baseline.
Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have both said that the intellectual case for atheism is strong, and both remain very popular on the right.
Sure, but somebody admitting that certainly isn’t the modal conservative.
I wouldn’t call the tone back then “conservatives not welcome”. Conservatism is correlated with religiosity, but it’s not the same thing. And I wouldn’t even call the tone “religious people are unwelcome”—people were perfectly civil with religious community members.
The community back then were willing to call irrational beliefs irrational, but they didn’t go beyond that. Filtering out people who are militantly opposed to rational conclusions seems fine.
A more likely explanation, it seems to me, is that a large part of early LW/sequences was militant atheism, with religion being the primary example of the low “sanity waterline”, and this hasn’t been explicitly disclaimed since, at best de-emphasized. So this space had done its best to repel conservatives much earlier than pronouns and other trans issues entered the picture.
I approve of the militant atheism, because there are just too many religious people out there, so without making a strong line we would have an Eternal September of people joining Less Wrong just to say “but have you considered that an AI can never have a soul?” or something similar.
And if being religious is strongly correlated with some political tribe, I guess it can’t be avoided.
But I think that going further than that is unnecessary and harmful.
Actually, we should probably show some resistance to the stupid ideas of other political tribes, just to make our independence clear. Otherwise, people would hesitate to call out bullshit when it comes from those who seem associated with us. (Quick test: Can you say three things the average Democrat believes that are wrong and stupid? What reaction would you expect if you posted your answer on LW?)
Specifically on trans issues:
I am generally in favor of niceness and civilization, therefore:
If someone calls themselves “he” or “she”, I will use that pronoun without thinking twice about it.
I disapprove of doxing in general, which extends to all speculations about someone’s biological sex.
But I also value rationality and free speech, therefore:
I insist on keeping an “I don’t know, really” attitude to trans issues. I don’t know, really. The fact that you are yelling at me does not make your arguments any more logically convincing.
No, I am not literally murdering you by disagreeing with you. Let’s tone down the hysteria.
There are people who feel strongly that they are Napoleon. If you want to convince me, you need to make a stronger case than that.
I specifically disagree on the point that if someone changes their gender, it retroactively changes their entire past. If someone presented as male for 50 years, then changed to female, it makes sense to use “he” to refer to their first 50 years, especially if this is the pronoun everyone used at that time. Also, I will refer to them using the name they actually used at that time. (If I talk about the Ancient Rome, I don’t call it Italian Republic either.) Anything else feels like magical thinking to me. I won’t correct you if you do that, but please do not correct me, or I will be super annoyed.
My biggest problem with the trans discourse is that it’s a giant tower of motte-and-baileys, and there’s no point where it’s socially acceptable to get off the crazy train.
Sure, at this point it seems likely that gender dysphoria isn’t an entirely empty notion. Implying that this condition might be in any way undesirable is already a red line though, with discussions of how much of it is due to social contagion being very taboo, naturally. And that only people experiencing bad enough dysphoria to require hormones and/or surgery could claim to be legitimately trans is a battle lost long ago.
Moving past that, there is non-binary, genderfluid, neo-genders, otherkin, etc, concepts that don’t seem to be plausibly based in some currently known crippling biological glitch, and yet those identities are apparently just as legitimate. Where does it stop? Should society be entirely reorganized every time a new fad gains traction? Should everybody questioning that be ostracized?
Then there’s the “passing” issue. I accept the argument that nowadays in most social situations we have no strong reasons to care about chromosomes/etc, people can successfully play many roles traditionally associated with the opposite sex. But sexual dimorphism is the entire reason for having different pronouns in the first place, and yet apparently you don’t even have to try (at all, let alone very hard) to “pass” as your chosen gender for your claim to be legitimate. What is the point? Here the unresolved tension between gender-critical and gender-affirming feminism is the most glaring.
A closer comparison than Ancient Rome is that all types of people change their names on occasions, e.g. on marriage, so we have lots of precedent for referring to people whose names have changed. This includes cases where they strongly dislike their former names. Those traditions balance niceness, civilization, rationality, and free speech.
Disclaimer: not a correction, just a perspective.
It’s confusing to me that you go to “I identify as an attack helicopter” argument after treating biological sex as private information & respecting pronouns out of politeness. I thought you already realize that “choosing your gender identity” and “being deluded you’re another person” are different categories.
The alternative (using new pronouns / name) makes perfect sense too, due to trivial reasons, such as respecting a person’s wishes. You went too far calling it magical thinking. A piece of land is different from a person in two important ways: (1) it doesn’t feel anything no matter how you call it, (2) there’s less strong reasons to treat it as a single entity across time.
Ah, I disagree, and I don’t really wish to discuss the details, so just shortly:
I assume that for trans people being trans is something more than mere “choice” (even if I don’t wish to make guesses what exactly, I suspect something with hormones; this is an empirical question for smart people to figure out). If this turns out not to be true, I will probably be annoyed.
If you introduce yourself as “Jane” today, I will refer to you as “Jane”. But if 50 years ago you introduced yourself as “John”, that is a fact about the past. I am not saying that “you were John” as some kind of metaphysical statement, but that “everyone, including you, referred to you as John” 50 years ago, which is a statement of fact.
Even if we assume that there should be a crisp physical cause of “transness” (which is already a value-laden choice), we need to make a couple of value-laden choices before concluding if “being trans” is similar to “believing you’re Napoleon” or not. Without more context it’s not clear why you bring up Napoleon. I assume the idea is “if gender = hormones (gender essentialism), and trans people have the right hormones, then they’re not deluded”. But you can arrive at the same conclusion (“trans people are not deluded”) by means other than gender essentialism.
There doesn’t need to be a crisp physical cause of “transness” for “transness” to be more than mere choice. There’s a big spectrum between “immutable physical features” and “things which can be decided on a whim”.
This just explains your word usage, but doesn’t make a case that disliking deadnaming is magical thinking.
I’ve decided to comment because bringing up Napoleon, hysteria and magical thinking all at once is egregiously bad faith. I think it’s not a good epistemic norm to imply something like “the arguments of the outgroup are completely inconsistent trash” without elaborating.
Napoleon is merely an argument for “just because you strongly believe it, even if it is a statement about you, does not necessarily make it true”.
We will probably disagree on this, but the only reason I care about trans issues is that some people report significant suffering (gender dysphoria) from their current situation, and I am in favor of people not suffering, so I generally try not to be an asshole.
Unfortunately, for every person who suffers from something, there are probably dozen people out there who cosplay their condition… because it makes them popular on Twitter I guess, or just gives them another opportunity to annoy their neighbors. I have no empathy for those. Play your silly games, if you wish, but don’t expect me to play along, and definitely don’t threaten me to play along. Also, the cosplayers often make the situation more difficult for those who genuinely have the condition, by speaking in their name, and often saying things that the people who actually have the condition would disagree with… and in the most ironic cases, the cosplayers get them cancelled. So I don’t mind being an asshole to the cosplayers, because from my perspective, they started it first.
The word “deadnaming” is itself hysterical. (Who died? No one.)
Gender essentialism? I don’t make any metaphysical claim about essences. People simply are born with male or female bodies (yes, I know that some are intersex), and some people are strongly unhappy about their state. I find it plausible that there may be an underlying biological reason for that; and hormones seem like a likely candidate, because that’s how body communicates many things. I don’t have a strong opinion on that, because I have never felt a desire to be one sex or the other, just like I have never felt a strong desire to have a certain color of eyes, or hair, or skin, whether it would be the one I have or some that I have not.
I expect that you will disagree with a lot of this, and that’s okay; I am not trying to convince you, just explaining my position.
I don’t think “deadname” is a ridiculous term just because no one died. The idea is that the name is dead: it’s not being used any more. Latin is a “dead language” because (roughly speaking) no one speaks or writes in Latin. “James” is a “dead name” because (roughly speaking) no one calls that person “James” any more.
This all seems pretty obvious to me, and evidently it seems the opposite way to you, and both of us are very smart [citation needed], so probably at least one of us is being mindkilled a bit by feeling strongly about some aspect of the issue. I don’t claim to know which of us it is :-).
As my 2 cents, the phrase ‘deadname’ to me sounded like it caught on because it was hyperbolic and imputes aggression – similar to how phrases like trauma caught on (which used to primarily refer to physical damage like the phrase “blunt-forced trauma”) and notions spread that “words can be violence” (which seems to me to be bending the meaning of words like ‘violence’ too far and is trying to get people on board for a level of censorship that isn’t appropriate). I similarly recall seeing various notions on social media that not using the requested pronouns for transgender people constituted killing them due the implied background levels of violence towards such people in society.
Overall this leaves me personally choosing not to use the term ‘deadname’ and I reliably taboo it when I wish to refer to someone using the person’s former alternative-gendered name.
“Trauma” meaning psychological as opposed to physical damage goes back to the late 19th century.
I agree that there’s a widespread tendency to exaggerate the unpleasantness/harm done by mere words. (But I suggest there’s an opposite temptation too, to say that obviously no one can be substantially harmed by mere words, that physical harm is different in kind from mere psychological upset, etc., and that this is also wrong.)
I agree that much of the trans community seems to have embraced what looks to me like a severely hyperbolic view of how much threat trans people are under. (But, usual caveats: it’s very common for the situation of a minority group to look and feel much worse from the inside than from the outside, and generally this isn’t only a matter of people on the inside being oversensitive, it’s also a matter of people on the outside not appreciating how much unpleasantness those on the inside face. So my guess is that that view is less hyperbolic than it looks to me.)
I agree that the term “deadname” is probably popular partly because “using my deadname” has more of an obviously-hostile-move sound than “using my old name” or similar. But if we avoid every term with any spin attached, we’ll have to stop calling people liberals (as if no one else cared about freedom) or conservatives (as if their opponents were against preserving valuable things) or Catholics (the word means “universal”) or pro-life or pro-choice or, or, or, or. For my part, I avoid some spinny terms but not others, on the basis of gut feeling about how much actual wrongness is baked into them and how easy it is to find other language, which (I don’t know how coherently) cashes out as being broadly OK with “liberal” and “conservative”, preferring to avoid “pro-life” and “pro-choice” or at least making some snarky remarks about the terms before using them, avoiding the broadest uses of the term “transphobia”, etc. And for me “deadname” seems obviously basically OK even though, yes, the term was probably chosen partly for connotations one might take issue with. Your mileage may vary.
I agree that which terms people use vs taboo is a judgment call, I don’t mean to imply that others should clearly see these things the same as me.
When people make arguments, they often don’t list all of the premises. That’s not unique to trans discourse. Informal reasoning is hard to make fully explicit. “Your argument doesn’t explicitly exclude every counterexample” is a pretty cheap counter-argument. What people experience is important evidence and an important factor, it’s rational to bring up instead of stopping yourself with “wait, I’m not allowed to bring that up unless I make an analytically bulletproof argument”. For example, if you trust someone that they feel strongly about being a woman, there’s no reason to suspect them of being a cosplayer who chases Twitter popularity.
I think I still don’t understand the main conflict which bothers you. I thought it was “I’m not sure if trans people are deluded in some way (like Napoleons, but milder) or not”. But now it seems like “I think some people really suffer and others just cosplay, the cosplayers take something away from true sufferers”. What is taken away?
Two major points.
1) It annoys me if someone insists that I accept their theory about what being trans really is.
Zack insists that Blanchard is right, and that I fail at rationality if I disagree with him. People on Twitter and Reddit insist that Blanchard is wrong, and that I fail at being a decent human if I disagree with them. My opinion is that I have no comparative advantage at figuring out who is right and who is wrong on this topic, or maybe everyone is wrong, anyway it is an empirical question and I don’t have the data. I hope that people who have more data and better education will one day sort it out, but until that happens, my position firmly remains “I don’t know (and most likely neither do you), stop bothering me”.
Also, from larger perspective, this is moving the goalposts. Long ago, tolerance was defined as basically not hurting other people, and letting them do whatever they want as long as it does not hurt others. Recently it also includes agreeing with the beliefs of their woke representatives. (Note that this is about the representatives, not the people being represented. Two trans people can have different opinions, but you are required to believe the woke one and oppose the non-woke one.) Otherwise, you are transphobic. I completely reject that. Furthermore, I claim that even trans people themselves are not necessarily experts on themselves. Science exists for a reason, otherwise we could just make opinion polls.
Shortly: disagreement is not hate. But it often gets conflated, especially in environments that overwhelmingly contain people of one political tribe.
2) Every cause gets abused. It is bad if it becomes a taboo to point this out.
A few months (or is it already years?) ago, there was an epidemic of teenagers on TikTok who appeared to have developed Tourette syndrome overnight. A few weeks or months later, apparently the epidemic was gone. I have no way to check those teenagers, but I think it is reasonable to assume that many of them were faking it. Why would anyone do that? Most likely, attention seeking. (There is also a things called Munchausen syndrome.) This is what I referred to as “cosplayers”.
Note that this is completely different from saying that Tourette syndrome does not exist.
If you adopt a rule that e.g. everyone must use everyone else’s preferred pronouns all the time, no exception, and you get banned for hate speech otherwise, this becomes a perfect opportunity for… anyone who enjoys using it as a leverage. You get an explosion of pronouns: it starts with “he” and “she”, proceeds with “they”, then you get “xe”, “ve”, “foo”, “bar”, “baz”, and ultimately anyone is free to make up their own pronouns, and everyone else is required to play along, or else. (That’s when you get the “attack helicopters” as an attempt to point out the absurdity of the system.)
Again, moving the goalposts. We started with trans people who report feeling gender dysphoria, so we use their preferred pronouns to alleviate their suffering. So far, okay. But if there is a person who actually feels dysphoria from not being addressed as “ve” (someone who would be triggered by calling them any of: “he”, “she”, or “they”), then I believe that this is between them and their psychiatrist, and I want to be left out of this game.
Another annoying thing is how often this is used to derail the debate (on places like Twitter and Reddit). Suppose that someone is called “John” and has a male-passing photo. So you try to say something about John, and your automatically use the pronoun “he”. Big mistake! You haven’t noticed it, but recently John identifies as agender. And whatever you wanted to talk about originally is unimportant now, and the thread becomes about what a horrible person you are. Okay, you have learned your lesson; but the point is that the next time someone else is going to make the same mistake. So it basically becomes impossible to discuss John, ever. And sometimes, it is important to be able to discuss John, without getting the debate predictably derailed.
Shortly: misgendering should be considered bad manners, but not something you ban people for.
...and that’s basically all.
I’ll describe my general thoughts, like you did.
I think about transness in a similar way to how I think about homo/bisexuality.
If homo/bisexuality is outlawed, people are gonna suffer. Bad.
If I could erase homo/bisexuality from existence without creating suffering, I wouldn’t anyway. Would be a big violation of people’s freedom to choose their identity and actions (even if in practice most people don’t actually “choose” to be homo/bisexual).
Different people have homo/bisexuality of different “strength” and form. One man might fall in love with another man, but dislike sex or even kissing. Maybe he isn’t a real homosexual, if he doesn’t need to prove it physically? Another man might identify as a bisexual, but be in a relationship with a woman… he doesn’t get to prove his bisexuality (sexually or romantically). Maybe we shouldn’t trust him unless he walks the talk? As a result of all such situations, we might have certain “inconsistencies”: some people identifying as straight have done more “gay” things than people identifying as gay. My opinion on this? I think all of this is OK. Pushing for an “objective gay test” would be dystopian and suffering-inducing. I don’t think it’s an empirical matter (unless we choose it to be, which is a value-laden choice). Even if it was, we might be very far away from resolving it. So just respecting people’s self-identification in the meantime is best, I believe. Moreover, a lot of this is very private information anyway. Less reason to try measuring it “objectively”.
My thoughts about transness specifically:
We strive for gender equality (I hope). Which makes the concept of gender less important for society as a whole.
The concept of gender is additionally damaged by all the things a person can decide to do in their social/sexual life. For example, take an “assigned male at birth” (AMAB) person. AMAB can appear and behave very feminine without taking hormones. Or vice-versa (take hormones, get a pair of boobs, but present masculine). Additionally there are different degrees of medical transition and different types of sexual preferences.
A lot of things which make someone more or less similar to a man/woman (behavior with friends, behavior with romantic partners, behavior with sexual partners, thoughts) are private. Less reason to try measuring those “objectively”.
I have a choice to respect people’s self-identified genders or not. I decide to respect them. Not just because I care about people’s feelings, but also because of points 1 & 2 & 3 and because of my general values (I show similar respect to homo/bisexuals). So I respect pronouns, but on top of that I also respect if someone identifies as a man/woman/nonbinary. I believe respect is optimal in terms of reducing suffering and adhering to human values.
When I compare your opinion to mine, most of my confusion is about two things: what exactly do you see as an empirical question? how does the answer (or its absence) affect our actions?
I think we need to be careful to not make a false equivalence here:
Trans people want us to respect their pronouns and genders.
I’m not very familiar with Blanchard, so far it seems to me like Blanchard’s work is (a) just a typology for predicting certain correlations and (b) this work is sometimes used to argue that trans people are mistaken about their identities/motivations.
2A is kinda tangential to 1. So is this really a case of competing theories? I think uncertainty should make one skeptical of Blanchard work’s implications rather than make one skeptical about respecting trans people.
Two homo/bisexuals can have different opinions on what’s “true homo/bisexuality” is too. Some opinions can be pretty negative. Yes, that’s inconvenient, but that’s just an expected course of events.
I feel it’s just the nature of some political questions. Not in all questions, not in all spaces you can treat disagreement as something benign.
Agree. Also agree that lynching for accidental misgendering is bad.
I’m pretty sure the helicopter argument began as an argument against trans people, not as an argument against weird-ass novel pronouns.
I agree with most of that, but it seems to me that respecting homosexuality is mostly a passive action; if you ignore what other people do, you are already maybe 90% there. Homosexuals don’t change their names or pronouns after coming out. You don’t have to pretend that ten years ago they were something else than they appeared to you at that time.
With transsexuality, you get the taboo of deadnaming, and occasionally the weird pronouns.
Also, the reaction seems different when you try to opt out of the game. Like, if someone is uncomfortable with homosexuality, they can say “could we please just… not discuss our sexual relations here, and focus on the job (or some other reason why we are here)?” and that’s usually accepted. If someone similarly says “could we please just… call everyone ‘they’ as a compromise solution, or simply refer to people using their names”, that already got some people cancelled.
Shortly, with homosexuals I never felt like my free speech was under attack.
It is possible that most of the weirdness and pushing boundaries does not actually come from the transsexuals themselves, but rather from woke people who try to be their “allies”. Either way, in effect, whenever a discussion about trans topics starts, I feel like “oh my, the woke hordes are coming, people are going to get cancelled”. (And I am not really concerned about myself here, because I am not American, so my job is not on the line; and if some online community decides to ban me, well then fuck them. But I don’t want to be in a community where people need to watch their tongues, and get filtered by political conformity.)
I think there should be more spaces where controversial ideas can be debated. I’m not against spaces without pronoun rules, just don’t think every place should be like this. Also, if we create a space for political debate, we need to really make sure that the norms don’t punish everyone who opposes centrism & the right. (Over-sensitive norms like “if you said that some opinion is transphobic you’re uncivil/shaming/manipulative and should get banned” might do this.) Otherwise it’s not free speech either. Will just produce another Grey or Red Tribe instead of Red/Blue/Grey debate platform.
I do think progressives underestimate free speech damage. To me it’s the biggest issue with the Left. Though I don’t think they’re entirely wrong about free speech.
For example, imagine I have trans employees. Another employee (X) refuses to use pronouns, in principle (using pronouns is not the same as accepting progressive gender theories). Why? Maybe X thinks my trans employees live such a great lie that using pronouns is already an unacceptable concession. Or maybe X thinks that even trying to switch “he” & “she” is too much work, and I’m not justified in asking to do that work because of absolute free speech. Those opinions seem unnecessarily strong and they’re at odds with the well-being of my employees, my work environment. So what now? Also, if pronouns are an unacceptable concession, why isn’t calling a trans woman by her female name an unacceptable concession?
Imagine I don’t believe something about a minority, so I start avoiding words which might suggest otherwise. If I don’t believe that gay love can be as true as straight love, I avoid the word “love” (in reference to gay people or to anybody) at work. If I don’t believe that women are as smart as men, I avoid the word “master” / “genius” (in reference to women or anybody) at work. It can get pretty silly. Will predictably cost me certain jobs.
Well, the primary goal of this place is to advance rationality and AI safety. Not the victory of any specific political tribe. And neither conformity nor contrarianism for its own sake.
Employees get paid, which kinda automatically reduces their free speech, because saying the wrong words can make them stop getting paid.
What is an (un)acceptable concession? For me, it is a question of effort and what value I receive in return. I value niceness, so by default people get their wishes granted, unless I forget. Some requests I consider arbitrary and annoying, so they don’t get them. Yeah, those are subjective criteria. But I am not here to get paid; I am here to enjoy the talk.
(What annoys me: asking to use pronouns other than he/she/they. I do not talk about people’s past for no good reason, and definitely not just to annoy someone else. But if I have a good reason to point out that someone did something in the past, and the only way to do that is to reveal their previous name, then I don’t care about the taboo.)
Employment is really a different situation. You get laws, and recommendations of your legal department; there is not much anyone can do about that. And the rest is about the balance of power, where the individual employee is often in a much worse bargaining position.
Agree that neopronouns are dumb. Wikipedia says they’re used by 4% LGBTQ people and criticized both within and outside the community.
But for people struggling with normal pronouns (he/she/they), I have the following thoughts:
Contorting language to avoid words associated with beliefs… is not easier than using the words. Don’t project beliefs onto words too hard.
Contorting language to avoid words associated with beliefs… is still a violation of free speech (if we have such a strong notion of free speech). So what is the motivation to propose that? It’s a bit like a dog in the manger. “I’d rather cripple myself than help you, let’s suffer together”.
Don’t maximize free speech (in a negligible way) while ignoring every other human value.
In an imperfect society, truly passive tolerance (tolerance which doesn’t require any words/actions) is impossible. For example, in a perfect society, if my school has bigoted teachers, it immediately gets outcompeted by a non-bigoted school. In an imperfect society it might not happen. So we get enforceable norms.
I’m not familiar with your model of free speech (i.e. how you imagine free speech working if laws and power balances were optimal). People who value free speech usually believe that free speech should have power above money and property, to a reasonable degree. What’s “reasonable” is the crux.
I think in situations where people work together on something unrelated to their beliefs, prohibiting to enforce a code of conduct is unreasonable. Because respect is crucial for the work environment and protecting marginalized groups. I assume people who propose to “call everyone they” or “call everyone by proper name” realize some of that.
If I let people use my house as a school, but find out that a teacher openly doesn’t respect minority students (by rejecting to do the smallest thing for them), I’m justified to not let the teacher into my house.
I just think “disliking deadnaming under most circumstances = magical thinking, like calling Italy Rome” was a very strong, barely argued/explained opinion. In tandem with mentioning delusion (Napoleon) and hysteria. If you want to write something insulting, maybe bother to clarify your opinions a little bit more? Like you did in our conversation.
Maybe, but Martin Randall and Matt Gilliland have both said that the trans explanation matches their personal experience, and Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees with the explanation as well. I have no insider knowledge and am just going off what community members say.
Do you have any particular reasons for thinking atheism is a bigger filter than pronouns and other trans issues?
It’s not clear what your position is. Do you think the contribution of pronouns and other trans issues is negligible? Slightly smaller than atheism? An order of magnitude smaller?
I suspect atheism is a non-negligible filter, but both smaller than trans issues, and less likely to filter out intelligent truth-seeking conservatives. Atheism is a factual question with a great deal of evidence in favor, and is therefore less politically charged. Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have both said that the intellectual case for atheism is strong, and both remain very popular on the right.
In the before-time of the internet, New Atheism was a much bigger deal than transgender issues.
I’d say that atheism had already set the “conservatives not welcome” baseline way back when, and this resulted in the community norms evolving accordingly. Granted, these days the trans stuff is more salient, but the reason it flourished here even more than in other tech-adjacent spaces has much to do with that early baseline.
Sure, but somebody admitting that certainly isn’t the modal conservative.
I wouldn’t call the tone back then “conservatives not welcome”. Conservatism is correlated with religiosity, but it’s not the same thing. And I wouldn’t even call the tone “religious people are unwelcome”—people were perfectly civil with religious community members.
The community back then were willing to call irrational beliefs irrational, but they didn’t go beyond that. Filtering out people who are militantly opposed to rational conclusions seems fine.