Can someone please tell me how important this topic based on the amount of news time and eyeballs it attracts relative to the number of people that it affects?
The numbers I can find for US citizens is: 0.6% or 1,988,696 out 331,449,281 of people total for the entirety of the US in 2021.
In the UK where the featured article took place the latest poll I could find comes counts the number of people who selected "other" when choosing a sex at 0.4% or 224,632 people out of 64,596,800.
Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.
I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.
In a world full of discrimination against trans folks, who knows how many people who would prefer being trans have failed to be identified?
But the topic is much bigger than that. You see, the ideology being pushed says that everyone who has gender dysphoria should be assumed to be trans. But a LOT of teenagers, particularly girls, go through a period of gender dysphoria when they hit puberty. What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire. However said research is highly controversial exactly because it undermines the politically correct ideology that we should take seriously all claims that physical appearance is less important than chosen gender.
And THAT is the real problem. I don't have statistics. But anecdotally I have a 12 year old with gender dysphoria. Many of their friends have the same. I personally know more children claiming to be trans at present than I've known people who were blind or missing a limb over my entire life.
A *LOT* of parents are in my boat. It is easy to find opposing ideologies about how we should deal with our teenage children. There is very little research. And people are so focused on yelling at each other that nobody dares DO more research. Because no matter what you find, you're going to get targeted by someone.
> What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire.
This is frequently claimed but is untrue, or at the very least highly uncertain. The studies most often referenced have serious methodological errors, including inconsistent definitions of dysphoria (owing partially to problems with the Gender Identity Disorder diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV that have since been fixed with the DSM-5) and desistance (in some cases counting anyone who didn't follow up with the clinic conducting the research as having desisted) https://www.gdaworkinggroup.com/desistance-articles-and-crit...
> But a LOT of teenagers, particularly girls, go through a period of gender dysphoria when they hit puberty. What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire.
Could you link to this research? This is a fraught topic that includes fraudulent studies and claims like this mean little without links.
I hate to wade into a controversial topic where I'm under-educated and have limited info/opinions; but for what little it is worth to add to anecdata - the current cohort of 12-15 year old girls in my friend/family circle are virtually all in some level of gender dysphoria. Most of their parents are supportive and loving but... panicked, I guess - completely uncertain what to do, how best to help them, and without robust support themselves. I think there'll be people with strong opinions giving advice here as there are in real life - but those are in some ways people whose advice I'd personally be least likely to take - on average, more interested in propagating some ideological rightness (on any and all sides), rather than looking at each and every child, circumstance, and taking a good hard look what's best of the person. Because that is a damn difficult question, whereas loud opinions are all too easy.
I can only add with my own anecdote. My son dated a girl when they were both 14. This girl had gender dysphoria. She was suffering from a lot of other externalities, but she swore she was a boy. Fast forward 3 years and she is now mature, optimistic, and very much a girl.
Culture seems to be going through a convulsion of sorts and it is taking an enormous toll on our young girls. They do seem to grow out of it, but the phenomenon is real.
>> "and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them"
This isn't actually a thing. Certain factions who would prefer trans people cease to exist push this idea that kids are on this hot new meme of getting their bits flipped before reaching the age of consent, but it is simply not a thing. No top surgery, either.
It just isn't a thing. It's a wild fantasy. The only thing kids can go on are puberty blockers. These are well-tested and their effects known and understood through their use for other medical concerns.
> What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire.
Except... people don't perform gender reassignment surgery on children just going through puberty.
I once read an anti corporate critique of this phenomenon. The argument went something like this:
Once female beauty was commoditized, and you could literally purchase an upgrade to parts you were born with. Entire cosmetic and plastic surgery industry benefited from marketing and promoting this model of beauty. The unforeseen consequence was that men started fetishizing these upgrades themselves.
As some men hyper focus on female body parts anyway.
It was a way to exploit psychological tendencies for profit.
I guess the counter remedy would be to promote female beauty as the whole, and not some collection of body parts.
| Professional organizations such as the Endocrine Society recommend against puberty blockers for children who have not reached puberty, and recommend that patients be at least 16 years old before beginning hormone treatments for feminization or masculinization of the body. The last step in transitioning to another gender, gender reassignment surgery, is only available to those 18 and older in the United States.
There's a large segment of the population that feels actively threatened by trans rights. The two primary components are:
1. Parents and sexual violence victims concerned about the non-falsifiability of trans-identification and the related concerns of sexual predators claiming an identity they don't actually have to gain access to private spaces of women and girls.
2. Feminists (TERFs) who believe being a woman is a fundamental, biological identity and cannot be coopted by males.
Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men. These groups exclusively concern themselves with trans-women.
Mormons are probably another group due to the reliance of their theology on binary gender, but I don't see them as being particularly vocal on this topic.
One note: Nobody self-identifies as a TERF. Or at least not originally (I'm sure in Internet ire people do it ironically by now.) It's mostly a label used to crush nuanced conversation.
> Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men.
One of the interesting things about spending the last few years studying Western European post-Roman history has been the discovery that, in the West, there has historically been relatively little resistance to AFAB folks "presenting" (speaking of the interpretation at the time--the dichotomy between "presenting" and "being" is one I am thoroughly not qualified to negotiate) as male unless tied into homophobia. There are historical examples of folks who outwardly identify as women taking on male roles in monastic life, and it's often portrayed as a good and pious thing.
The reverse, it seems, is generally not true, though not exclusively so. I've read of, but don't have offhand, accounts of Church investigation into "male nuns" that ruled that the erstwhile offender, a male who had suffered prepubescent genital damage, had committed no crime being raised by a particular convent as a woman. But cases going the other way round are much more common.
In terms of today's relations, however, my intuition is that the fear regarding transwomen is that it's largely a performative flavor of misogyny and the fear of those of the "superior" set somehow damaging all men, much as the performative flavor of homophobia does the same with regards to gay men but shockingly much rarely with regards to bisexual or homosexual women. But, of course, that is just an intuition.
> Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men.
While it's true there's little animosity directed at them, there is a lot of stuff Shrier's view that "gender ideology" is seducing lesbian women into thinking they're not actually women. Which, honestly, as someone who lived through lots of the dumb gay panic in the 80s and 90s sounds exactly like what people thought about homosexuals (eg: gay people can seduce/recruit straight people and turn them gay). So trans men get treated like dupes or victims of some social phenomena, rather than treated like actual human beings with agency of their own.
In fact, pretty much every anti-trans viewpoint I see, even from otherwise highbrow publicans like the Economist, are really just rehashes of what we heard about gays in the 80s and 90s, before we realized they were, in fact, not a threat to society.
> ” sexual predators claiming an identity they don't actually have”
This is such a bizarre leap of logic. Trans women are the pariahs of contemporary Western society. Yet the same people who uphold this subhuman status also assume that rapists are nefariously claiming trans female identity.
That’s not how rapists operate! They seek positions of power. Trans women are downtrodden and powerless — the least attractive position for a sexual predator.
> Mormons are probably another group due to the reliance of their theology on binary gender, but I don't see them as being particularly vocal on this topic.
I think the difference between treatment of mtf and ftm can be mostly boiled down to difference how males being female spaces VS females being in male spaces is perceived.
For trans exclusionary feminists one is the patriarchy coming to female protective places and females claiming their place and undermining the patriarchy. As for parents males being less susceptible to forceful sexual exploitation is true but there is also a huge societal double standard when it comes women forcing themselves on men or abusing their male partner which is also reflected in parents being less worried about something happening to their children. Possibly also because of pregnancies onesidedness.
I’ve always regarded transitioning gender — and how it is focused so much on men moving away from being a man — being equivalent to someone saying I am uncomfortable and I want off this ride, where the rollercoaster is testosterone. That’s what I’ve picked up anyway, from my friends who have transitioned.
I think that might be why it’s more common than transitioning in the other direction?
To say nothing of the issue itself, the methods of "trans rights activists" frequently involve intimidation or vigilantism and generally cause a lot of resentment against trans people. People are afraid.
>Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men. These ground exclusively concern themselves with trans-women.
I second this. Maybe it's some echo chamber effect or a minority stirring shit up, but I've hardly heard anything over the years about transmen-as-men vs men-as-men. It seems like most of the focus is on transwomen-as-women vs women-as-women. Maybe we're not as vocal? Maybe we care less? I don't think we have much of a dog in this race so I'm often confused as to why this topic comes up on HN considering most of us here are men. Boring day at work?
I do feel bad for the women's Olympics, but I'd like to ask the Olympics committee what the hell were they thinking long before I start any kind of anti-trans crusade. This is one discussion that doesn't seem to be happening much. The diatribe is as always directed among the proles and the decisionmakers get a free pass. Someone must have said, "Yes, lets allow a 35 year-old recently transitioned man to compete with early 20 year-old women," and some approval process must have happened. Those are the people you want to start asking the hard questions, not look at LH and blame her for participating in the Olympics that she's allowed to participate in.
Or as someone else put it: "A female POC just lost her spot to a white, middle-aged, male-born son of a billionaire. This is supposed to be progressive?"
>There's a large segment of the population that feels actively threatened by trans rights.
I'd say that's a vast overreach. It isn't like the Trans Army is going to come burn down your house.
If anything, it's a general notion that transsexuals are mentally ill and that there is something odd about normalizing it. In a sense, that it's not different than people who want their limbs amputated or wear animal costumes at all times.
The problem is the suppression of reasoned speech. People are forbidden to discuss this topic. People in power (e.g., University Deans) use this topic to abuse those under their power. Students use it to abuse professors (e.g., students claim that they don't feel safe around a particular professor). In the name of trying to stop abuse of trans people, we're abusing non trans people (e.g, people get fired over this topic).
In Australia and most other developed countries now, this ideology is heavily promoted to children, encouraging them to believe they are trans. They are connected with websites that promote the ideology, and then connected with a trans specialist who helps prescribe puberty blockers without parental knowledge.
If you are a parent who believes that children should be taught to love their own bodies as they grow rather than have surgeons pretend to fix them by removing essential organs, then this represents a massive assault on your offspring.
> The numbers I can find for US citizens is: 0.6%
And there's a huge number of "trans" who later realise they were sold a lie and have to undergo further surgery to try and restore their original sex. Selling this to ideology to children is going to dramatically increase that 0.6%. How many of the new cases are going to actually be trans, vs children that thought they were trans and started puberty blockers at school, but actually were just never taught to love their body?
This post has a very noticeable lack of citations and vague terms like "huge" which make it very likely that you are speaking from personal bias rather than any kind of expertise.
Australian parent here. While recognising I'm a sample of one, Ive never seen or heard from many other parent friends trans ideology being promoted.
If you have some examples please share. I suspect you've come across an article pushing a an edge case that tried to make it out as normal. This type of media is common at the more extreme ends of whatever views.
> And there's a huge number of "trans" who later realise they were sold a lie and have to undergo further surgery to try and restore their original sex.
There is no way this is a huge number. I'd be shocked if you could find a credible source on this. This sounds like conservative agitprop.
Based on the numbers I've seen, there are slightly more trans people in the world than blind people, but overall — you're not wrong. I don't even think most trans rights advocates would disagree with you that the amount of attention devoted to transgender people is excessive. The reason transgender people are getting more attention than blind people is because there is currently a strong movement to regress transgender rights, while there isn't an equivalent movement for blind people. Transgender people have some asks in terms of societal support (e.g. British law has some awkward legal red tape for trans people around things like marriage), but in general, most of the noise is being generated by the anti-transgender side (e.g. bans on therapy for transgender people, bathroom bans, sports bans, outrage at voluntarily chosen gender-inclusive phrasing like "people who have a uterus").
So it's a bit of a hard subject. I really don't think it's worth this much attention, but if hate groups are devoting this much attention to opposing transgender people, we're faced with the choice of either also giving it a lot of undue attention or throwing transgender people to the wolves.
>The reason transgender people are getting more attention than blind people is because there is currently a strong movement to regress transgender rights
Firstly, a resistance to expanding rights is not a movement to regress rights. For the most part (exceptions apply), the margins of the culture war here are not about trans people being on the defensive against long-standing rights being stripped.
Secondly, obviously the margins of this battle are often (again, not always, particularly when it comes to health care issues) pretty small-stakes, especially in comparison to the outsized amount of attention they're given. Certainly not important enough to justify the "you're trying to murder me / dehumanize me / erase me" rhetoric that one predictably receives when mild resistance is offered towards this agenda.
I don't know from blind people, but in America, there are anywhere from 10.2 to 17.5% of the population that are diabetic. While not pursued by hate groups, they are actively preyed by pharmaceutical companies and politicians who don't let insulins go generic - one of the few medicines that can't. Yes there is complaint about the medical system in America, I have yet to see diabetic/nondiabetic show up under facebook ID's like He/Him/His, normalization of syringe usage in restaurants, blood sugar testing not become a spectacle (of course I pick this one because I know the most about it, but there are many disorders that could be used with it). Stigma, predation and debate is associated with many things, but this one will get you fired/excommunicated from society. Speaking ignorantly about "just eat less sugar" to a type 1 diabetic does nothing.
The media does absolutely soak it for eyeballs and outrage, but at the same time it really is a bellwether for how gender works in a society at larger. Gender is simply a more social / less individual phenomenon than blindness itself is (to use your example).
I find it funny and illuminating to read about conservative cis gays complaining about those darn genderqueer "kids, these days". All media fads aside, we simply haven't reached "queer equilibrium" yet where increasing acceptance of past social categories no longer triggers the emergence of new ones.
I think the importance is based not on the numbers involved - which are small - but on the significance of the demands. People are discussing our fundamental understanding and definitions of people's sex and gender that potentially affects everyone. A major concern is that once you let everyone self identify where does it stop? A caucasian woman was vilified a few years ago for identifying as black. Had she identified as male she would have been celebrated by the same people
I think there will be rather a lot of us who are quite animated by this issue—one that doesn’t directly affect us—because of our own past experiences.
As a gay man growing up in the 90s, I very acutely remember some of the public discourse around gay rights while I was a teenager. In the UK, that specifically included a coordinated campaign against mentions of homosexuality in education, with some pretty stark attempts to smear gay men in particular as dangerous predators and paedophiles intent on sneaking their agenda into schools so that they could abuse children.
If I’m honest with you, I wouldn’t be particularly animated about trans rights myself (beyond being generally supportive) if it weren’t for the fact that I see exactly the same techniques and accusations levelled against the trans community—specifically trans women—as were used against people like myself 20 years ago.
So I’ve personally gone from generally supportive-if-disinterested, to being absolutely fucking furious that this is being allowed to happen again. I’ve observed absolute outright lies about a minority group being repeated by people in positions of influence, and while it might not affect that many people directly I am so absolutely disgusted by it that I fully intend on being extremely vocal about it.
Back in the nineties I remember scare campaigns about gay schoolmates in locker rooms taking advantage of other students - it is literally the same playbook.
> Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.
It's not impactful in terms of the number of people, but its a civil rights issue for those on the left. And for those on the right its just one more group trying to change things from the status quo.
It's also a complex issue. I sit pretty far on the left, but the various issues related to trans policy I find to often not have a clear solution -- most notably around sports and fairness. Sigh.
Honestly though the question around sports fairness is less a problem raised by trans people and more just an existing issue exposed. Female and male bodies work differently on average but there are a good number of women more fit and physically capable than 99% of men - gender is not an independent variable in physical fitness but I do wonder if there's really much of a reason to keep insisting that the genders be separated into exclusive leagues.
Sports fairness is basically a transphobe dogwhistle at this point. Major athletic organizations already have policies in place that say that trans women can’t compete unless x,y,z criteria are met which is typically a minimum number of years on HRT and T levels not more than something.
The issue is that there is a trade-off being made here. A trans woman athlete likely has a better bone structure than the average cis woman but not better than the most naturally gifted cis female athletes. Athletic orgs have largely decided that this is fine and it’s not a significant enough advantage to care about because the question for them was “how can trans women compete” not “if trans women can compete.”
But then it’s such an easy issue to drive a wedge on because you can get people riled up about whether trans women should be able to compete with a sprinkling of misinformation about what HRT does and dash of “so a man can just say he’s a woman and compete.”
This is how the ruling class controls us peons. They have us fight each other vociferously over things like this or abortion or gay marriage, while they stay above it and do nothing except minor moral victories.
It wouldn't work if we didn't subject ourselves to it. The "ruling class" may be working to control us, but they don't have to work very hard. They don't even make the lies plausible. There are an awful lot of people willing to die on the hill of the most astonishing idiocies, just because it's their idiocy.
I have no real visibility (pun not intended) into the blind community, but similar groups do exist in the Deaf community; Deafness-as-identity/culture is very much a thing and some of the general cultural views around adaptation and integration with the hearing world look not-dissimilar to what you see in some aspects of LGBTQ+ movements.
> I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.
There is something about tech, though, that seems to concentrate the male to female transitioners far above background levels.
I can count more than a half-dozen male to female transition folks in my tech circles. I can't even think of one that I bumped into doing any non-tech social activity.
"There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people."
There are more white people than black people in the US. More Christian people than Jewish people. More able-bodied people than disabled people. More descendants of immigrants than Native Americans.
What level of outrage? I notice a lot of outrage online from people whose identities I cannot verify. I have noticed zero outrage IRL from real people that I interact with.
Small sample size but I think that judging outrage from online presence is inaccurate.
Yeah, there is a huge disconnect between online and IRL discussion of trans issues. Online you see all this seething outrage but IRL there are two camps — either you run in a ‘blue’ crowd and someone being trans is a non-issue. Nobody cares, they use your name and pronouns, let you live your life, celebrate legal victories, and commiserate losses, but when push comes to shove won’t actually do anything that requires effort and can’t be posted on insta. Then if you run in a ‘red’ crowd you’re quietly not accepted, you’ll be party to dinners where phrases like “gender ideology”, “the trans agenda”, “indoctrination”, “free speech” are brought up whenever articles hit the news. And if you come out you either are kicked out of your family, ghosted by your friend group, or just ignored and expected to never speak of it again. If you do being up that people aren’t using your name, pronouns, or being otherwise not treated like your gender you’re called “political” and it’s taken as an attack. And if you say, “no it’s because what your doing hurts me” it’s doubly taken as an attack because now you’re “playing the victim.”
Only when the two groups mix do you get this fired up hate because the mechanisms within the groups that lead to people not talking about it don’t work and the social graces that tamp out arguments aren’t present on the internet so it explodes.
I hate so much that my existence is the hot button political topic right now. Like it’s good I guess — seems like we need to get this out of our systems but ugh does it bring out the worst in everyone. This should have never been a party thing and it’s so stupid that it’s now a billion times more political because of it. Both sides are trying to out woke or out red pill each other while the actual lives of trans people fall by the wayside.
Distraction is exactly what’s important about it. It triggers everyone and keeps people from paying attention to other things. Also helps get clicks, sell ads, and boost social media engagement.
Personally I don’t care at all if people want to be trans and be called by a chosen gender pronoun. I just can’t think of a reason I should have a problem with that.
There are a few edge case areas like women’s sports and prisons where it is a very complicated issue, but those are rare cases among rare cases. This is not an issue that should be monopolizing headlines.
When it comes to issues in which there is a conflict between a small group and some larger group, you can't just brush this aside as only a problem affecting the smaller group.
For instance, there are situations in which transgender rights (someone identifying as a woman using a for-women-only space) are in conflict with women's rights (women not wanting to be in a for-women-only space when whom they perceive as a male is present).
You can't just disregard the women and say, don't worry about it, it's just a 0.6% problem.
We invent wheelchairs and ramps and lots of prosthetic limbs.
We (recently) approved a drug to treat Alzheimer.
We offer nursing homes and in-house help and care to old people with mental issues.
We do little more than argue about trans individuals. And many trans individuals are killed or commit suicide. The average life expectancy for a trans person is likely a lot smaller than a blind or disabled person.
THAT is why trans people and the related community are making a lot of noise.
Couldn't agree more. The airtime on this topic is insane. People's email signatures filled with their pronouns. The anger. The division. I get it's an emotive conversation but then so are gay rights, gender rights, race rights, democratic rights, inequality, and about a gazillion other topics. That's not belittling trans as an issue, but it's so incredibly noisy.
IMO the wider question here is nothing to do with trans but about what being "liberal" means. We're in this insanely weird moment in history when the hard left is eating itself by being so Woke it's nearly impossible to even have a conversation any more.
I'm as left wing as they come, but being left wing means being able to have open, honest and sometimes uncomfortable debates. Being left wing is not, and never has been, about shutting down conversation, de-platforming, dogma, chilling effects. These are the things of the hard right, and the sooner people on the left start realising it and start being empowered to be vocal in defence of the freedom of ideas, the better.
"I'm as left wing as they come, but being left wing means being able to have open, honest and sometimes uncomfortable debates. Being left wing is not, and never has been, about shutting down conversation, de-platforming, dogma, chilling effects. These are the things of the hard right, and the sooner people on the left start realising it and start being empowered to be vocal in defence of the freedom of ideas, the better."
That has not been true anywhere in the world where a left wing (the) party dominated the discourse. No socialist or communist party has ever had tolerance to an opposing view.
> I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.
Those aren't mutually exclusive. It's not uncommon to create distractions by purposefully treating a small group badly. And the solution can neither be to allow it to dominate all the bandwidth nor to ignore it.
Meanwhile, unlike Alzheimers, amputations or blindness, there doesn't really need to be any scientific breakthroughs to handle this. We just need to somehow fix society. It's at least controllable.
> There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.
That's a little bit of a non-sequitur, no? If this should be compared to anything, it's to earlier left-right "cultural war" flash points such as same-sex marriage and abortion.
Say that people with Alzheimer's should get access to better medical treatment, and no one will disagree with you (although some might say "as long as I don't pay"). Say the same about people who have lost a limb, and you'll see the same thing.
But try making any such statement about trans people, and you'll get vehement, polarized agreement and disagreement. Now, you've entered the territory of how people should and shouldn't be able to express their physical identity in public, in both sexual and non-sexual manners. And you are about to run into many strongly held opinions and pre-existing cultural mores.
With that said, I don't disagree with your last point. Sometimes, I do feel like cultural war inflammations are purposely constructed to hack the human psyche by playing into these strongly held beliefs and pre-existing cultural mores. At least in the present day, these kinds of inflammations work very effectively for generating engagement in the attention economy. But I don't know if that's a good thing. On the contrary (and maybe you'd agree with me here), I often get the sense that it's a bad thing.
Human society has no "laws" by nature, the closest observable in nature with the great apes is a brute "winner" takes it all society, that is not capable to create and sustain complexity and coherence.
To compensate this, humanity has "contract" cults who form a basic law providing form of society, protecting the weaker party form getting exploited and abused.
These contract cults exists since the dawn of time and have been shaped into various forms, mostly with mythological wrappings, we designate as religion today.
Hounded into the service as contract cultists, have been all sexual deviants of a society. Always.
Which is why if you watch carefully, its actually selected for.
A emotional reaction to question regarding sexual deviancy from the norm, is a important signal during the mating process, regardless on what side of the political spectrum you are.
Gender ideology is a synthetic contract cult, and while it has all the other negatives, previous religion incarnations carried with them, it also brings alot of freedom to the cultists and tries to do away with alot of pain. Abolishing it, is not possible, as it will simply lead to other contract cults forming.
The best that can be accomplished is, preventing the church from intervening in fields of science society depends on and finding a new separation of church and state, with this contract cult.
PS: Bad engineered religions, lead to a faltering rule of law in societys, which then return in the long run to the "winner" takes it all societal model, destroying complexity capability.
People who don't qualify as legally blind but have extreme vision impairment would like to talk to you. My stepson is profoundly deaf but still has hearing and wears hearing aides to assist him, he'll often read lips during conversations to supplement that audio information and that can result in pretty big communication breakdowns.
Pretty much everything in life is a spectrum of possibilities - trying to boil those down to binary states can be helpful for some purposes but is never clean.
Well, it's undoubtedly a condition but there are probably some who dispute whether it's a "disease" or "disability". This resistance is more commonly associated with the deaf community, and drawing parallels between this population and the trans population will get you in hot water pretty quickly..
I would imagine that the rate of violent attacks on blind individuals specifically due to their blindness is also lower than hate crimes against Trans individuals.
I don't hear about a lot of amputees being dragged behind pickup trucks for not having as many limbs as their attackers, but maybe I'm not reading the right publications.
I have a theory that we are seeing a "Times Square Billboard Effect" where as we progress and some marginalize groups are being better heard and included other groups are both seeing an opportunity and need to get more noticed. Similar to Times Square billboards having to get brighter, flashier and larger to be noticed. With how traditional and social media are working to get noticed it has be as big and loud as possible.
I mean, 2 million people in the US being discriminated against seems like plenty enough people for this to be a worthwhile discussion. But it's not just the number of people. It's also about how severe the discrimination against them is.
>Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people.
Ok but is there a large portion of the population that believes blind people don't deserve health care for their disability? Is there a large portion of the population that believes blind people shouldn't be afforded working rights?
You can't just go "there's only 2 million trans people in the US, who cares about their healthcare, there's more important things out there", when the consequence of doing so severely impacts the quality of life of .5% of the population.
I don't think you would be sitting here going "only .5% of the US has type 1 diabetes, why are talking so much about making sure they get appropriate health care? Who cares if they're discriminated against during hiring?"
> Ok but is there a large portion of the population that believes blind people don't deserve health care for their disability?
Actually, health insurance doesn't cover the cost of a guide dog, which can cost between $40-60k [0]
From personal experience (I'm not blind, but I know one), there is also workforce discrimination in the form of "don't ask her to do that, she's blind" when in fact the blindness doesn't impact the work at all.
>I don't think you would be sitting here going "only .5% of the US has type 1 diabetes, why are talking so much about making sure they get appropriate health care?
I read that trans people suffer from high rates of violence, homelessness, etc. In contrast, amputees and blind people don't usually get kicked out by their parents or randomly stabbed.
If BLM (vs e.g. StopAsianHate) is any indication, the level of outrage in activism seems to be directly correlated to the level of violence in high profile incidents, more so than percentage of affected population
Adult percentages are too blunt an instrument. With young adults and children this is a big issue.
In the school where I teach, sex, gender, and most importantly gender identity come sharply into focus during puberty and I have several students taking a time-limited therapy course to help them with gender id questions. That puts us into the 5% to 10% range, though that is of course purely anecdotal and from a tiny sample size.
Puberty hasn’t suddenly become more complex and access to these ideas and therapies may be driving gender-identity as a fashionable topic amongst the kids. But from what I’ve seen it’s a genuine need with most of them who ask for it.
Puberty is fascinating: it is a time of identity turmoil for every human being and while in the majority of cases that means going down a difficult but pre-determined path, for many others it throws up a huge number of questions about how to match their genetic/hormonal programming and the way they think, with the society in which they live. Intersex itself is a spectrum, for example.
> Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.
Those groups aren’t subjected to violence just for existing. The comparisons aren’t at all one to one.
This is a video from a source I normally don't trust. But if we really want to learn something about bias, I think it is worth a watch. This is about racism, but I think we see similar problem with gender.
This is a real problem, especially since a too strong backlash would hurt too. But at this point I don't think it is sustainable to feed pupils wrong or ideological information.
Honestly, I would have difficulties deciding to send my kids to a school this or a pious catholic boarding school. In both cases countermeasures might be helpful.
For the topic itself I agree with you. There are countless issues that should get more exposure compared to these topics.
A minority group, by definition, has no power. It needs the majority to speak for them. So regardless of how small a number they represent, scaling the conversation up is required.
> I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.
But downplaying it is exactly what you are doing, literally.
To answer your main question, though: the very small community that we are talking about is disproportionately being subjected to murder, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and widespread discrimination.
The disproportionate harms that this small community is subject to is the key to understanding the level of outrage being evoked on their behalf.
> disproportionately being subjected to murder, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and widespread discrimination.
This is provably untrue. Not that it isn't a tragedy, but in 2020, 44 trans people were killed[1] in the US. This is a rounding error even when looking at "merely" just hate crime statistics (for example, in 2019, the FBI reported ~7000 criminal offenses[2] in the "hate crime" category). I get it, people are passionate about it, companies change their logos, everyone posts about it on social media, but let's not perpetuate these myths.
> the very small community that we are talking about is disproportionately being subjected to murder, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and widespread discrimination.
Citation needed.
From what I can tell they are being given more leeway than any other group, and anyone who dares argue against their “rights” risks losing their job.
Trans-people does absolutely not to seem to be at risk anywhere.
Given the data we have now, you’re right— if humans were rational we’d be focusing topics that affect the masses. Using minority groups (BLM, LGBT, Immigration, etc.) as shields for larger agendas is an effective defense strategy.
If you choose one variable that describes people, and assume for simplicity it's approximately bell shaped, then sure, most people are in the middle, which is "average" or "normal", and if we want to help the most people, it seems logical to focus on them.
But if you start adding independent variables, it becomes increasingly unlikely that any given person is in the middle on all of them. Even with three, let alone dozens.
So you, or any other randomly chosen person, are probably very like "the masses" in some respects, but given, say, ten dimensions, nobody is average.
Which is why disregarding minorities in general isn't a viable way to run a society.
But to answer your question “why is this important” - the extreme minority of transgender people and the army of their supporters and activists in their quest for recognizing trans rights step on and disregard women rights and aggressively “cancel” anyone who dares to disagree with gender ideology, now that affects all of us, if you care about free speech.
If I understand correctly, trans people get beaten to death far out of proportion to their numbers. No, I don't have statistics, but if true you can't just look at the number of trans people to see how serious the problem is.
In 2019, the most recent year for which the FBI has data, the total US homicide rate was 4.3 deaths per 100,000 people [0] (possible underestimate; incident reporting is voluntary, and 25% of police departments don't submit expanded homicide data). Human Rights Campaign recorded the deaths of 25 transgender and gender non-conforming people in 2019 [1]. There are an estimated 1 million people who identify as transgender in the US [2], and an estimated 1.2 million people who identify as nonbinary or gender non-conforming [3]. That produces a US trans and nonbinary homicide rate for 2019 of 1.1 per 100,000.
Of all homicides reported by HRC with transgender or gender non-confirming victims in 2019, just one was determined to involve a clear anti-LGBT motive. HRC's data may be an underestimate. However, it is consistent with their estimated homicide rates and rate of hate crimes reported in other years.
Any murder is a tragedy, hate crimes all the moreso. However, a single-digit number of annual anti-trans and nonbinary murders is thankfully not an epidemic. The overall homicide rate for trans people seems much lower than the national average.
Notably this data excludes assaults, harassment, stalking, or any other attacks which don't result in fatalities.
At my university, the fratboys were far, far, FAR more disruptive than the LGBT groups. But we go with it; fratboy are an accepted pupal stage of American men it seems
One shouldn't expect courage from The Economist, but it's always wise to bet on their prudence.
I don't read The Economist for facts or details so much as to get a sense of what topics a current establishment can no longer afford to ignore. The details are secondary to the neccessity that a writer, a sub-editor, and a senior editor with tremendous personal stake in maintaining access to the circles that define establishment media, have collectively recognized that to remain relevant as a publication, the risk/reward on any ensuing controversy still means the magazine has to acknowledge which way the wind is blowing.
When The Economist says something is just starting, it means it's been brewing for at least several years and they need to comment on it. I don't think direct discourse on the topic improves the discussion on gender because the participants use a critical theory in which the promise of discourse is just bait to corner political targets for their mobs. However, we (and even The Economist) can recognize that popular tolerance for these tactics has finally reached an inflection point, and this change in attitude is what will finally allow real analysis and insight by thoughtful people into topics about gender.
As an Economist reader who sometimes scratches his head at how late they are to the party, I love your framing here. I appreciate their sobriety though.
Thank you for your description of The Economist. I subscribed to The Economist in 1996 and at time it really was a different than the rest of the news papers. For example, Philip Tetlock identified reading The Economist as a predictor for ability to forecast future.
Then something changed. One important change was that they basically started publishing their authors names by allowing authors have blogs with their names. I also understand (would like to know more about this) that they started hiring journalists. Previously only subject experts were welcome but at some point there was a huge influx of Guardian-type journalists.
To me, first hint about the change in the articles was their coverage of feminism in work place where they really started to spout fashionable ideological points such as writing that women make better leaders, etc.
> I don't think direct discourse on the topic improves the discussion on gender because the participants use a critical theory in which the promise of discourse is just bait to corner political targets for their mobs.
Are you suggesting that we should leave gender to the scientists and when The Economist has spoken, it should be recognized as the moment that “the science is in”?
I could understand your first paragraph, the second seems like a non-sequitor.
> Are you suggesting that we should leave gender to the scientists and when The Economist has spoken, it should be recognized as the moment that “the science is in”?
I read it more as “The Economist has started speaking about the subject, so it's an established science -- now we can start to expect actual results from it”.
There’s a lot that’s already been said in this topic but I feel compelled to bring up the damage imposed by TERF talking points. The conversation goes something like this: “Transgender women possess an innate maleness that carries a non-zero threat to female spaces.” They believe that dictionary definitions of woman are prescriptive, declared at the chromosomes during birth, rather than descriptive, as in how one presents in both dress and phenotype.
In my experience this is the center of every “debate.” It’s less about the merits of the cause and more about convincing this point against the hypothetical risk of a male who’s taken advantage of self identified gender. TERFs are generally not interested in dynamics of trans men, who seem to be more like “gender traitors” than their deceptive counterparts.
Personally I find this whole movement a farce. Every talking point not only misaligns with trans women, it causes more harm to cis women at scale. “Real women” give birth — except hundreds of thousands who cannot. “Real women” look like the contemporary feminine ideal, yet 1 in 10 women suffer from PCOS enduring testosterone levels higher than any trans woman has to contend with. And the cake topper of them all, “trans women fuel negative stereotypes of femininity,” while simultaneously not appearing feminine enough, often barred from HRT until after puberty. This Goldilocks zone of womanhood is always out of reach, and therefore transness is never acceptable.
I don't see how it is unreasonable for a female inmate to be uncomfortable sharing sleeping quarters with a person who has a penis (regardless of how that person identifies).
The fear that cis-women have of rape is real. The fear that transgender women have of rape in a men's jail is real. I think the fairest thing to do is take both of these fears seriously and house intact trans-women in a space where they neither feel threatened with rape, nor impose that threat on cis-women.
I think referring to this fear as a "TERF talking point" is as disrespectful as it would be to minimize the fear that trans-women experience in men's prisons.
Fear of rape or pressurised sex amongst prisoners is perfectly real, but if a tiny minority of transpeople are a distant third in terms of sexual threat to female prisoners behind male warders and natal females and a campaign organization proposes rehousing transpeople (all 125 of them) in different prisons as their solution to prison rape over better safeguarding practises or single occupant cells which might offer many more women more protection from more pervasive threats it sounds suspiciously more like a "talking point" against the target group than a practical solution to sexual violence in prisons. Especially if the campaign groups responsible have long lists of other issues with transpeople, and somehow the sexual activity involving people with penises and keys doesn't get the same attention...
Alternatively, this could be an opportunity to address sexual assault in prisons more broadly. No inmate, no matter how heinous their crimes, should be subjected to sexual assault.
The prevalence and sexual assault in prisons is an example of a normalization of deviance that should be opposed, instead of tolerated.
Trans people are way more likely to be raped then non trans. And cis women do get attacked by trans men. Like, if your concern is prison rape, it is quite odd to start with lowest probability events and ignore high probability events.
Why would a rapist stop wanting to rape regardless of the state of their genitals? Is sexual violation with a penis so much more horrific than other violations it deserves special consideration?
Additionally if you only have to vocally identify as a woman without having to take any further steps (Hormone replacement, srs, etc) this seems exploitable.
I don't think your explanation of "TERF talking points" is fair. Contra Judith Butler it's not clear that feminism has any meaning without some essential idea of "womanhood". That is fundamentally what disturbs "TERFs".
When you talk about "this Goldilocks zone of womanhood," I think you've rediscovering one of the oldest philosophical discoveries: mental concepts and ideas (in this case "woman") do not apply perfectly to the world of appearences. But this does not mean we can jettison concepts and ideas altogether. In fact they seem necessary. So the fact that we cannot seem to come up with a perfect criterion for defining "biological woman" does not mean that we can dispense with that category.
And that's what's being asked of us. We are told "trans women are women". What does that mean? It if means "there is a category, women, and in that category there are trans women and biological women," that's fine with me. If it means "there is no distinction between biological women and trans women," that seems wrong to me and to the vast majority of people.
It's really not complex. "Trans women are women" is directly comparable to "Adoptive parents are parents". It is a statement that biology is not the important factor generally, identity is.
The supposed fear that people believe there is some magic change to your chromosomes the second you chose to identify with a gender is patently absurd. There is obviously no real support for such an idea—it is a straw-man that no one reading the phrase "trans women are women" in good faith and taking even a second to look into what trans people are saying would assume was the intent.
> "there is no distinction between biological women and trans women,"
There is no category of women that is entirely identical, where you couldn't distinguish between them.
Some AFAB women can't give birth. Some of them have more androgynous bodies. Some of them are black. Some of them have different levels of estrogen, or grow up in different social circles that impose different expectations about how they should act, or provide different opportunities.
Nobody is saying that AFAB women don't have different experiences than trans women, any more than anyone is saying that Black women don't have different experiences than white women. Womanhood has always been a broad category, and there has never been a point where you could accurately say that there are no distinctions between the subcategories within womanhood.
If TERFs believe there is a fundamental quality that makes them indistinguishable from every other woman, then they are being absurd. Even if you ignore trans women, that world doesn't exist.
I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss what seems to be a reasonable discussion as simply “TERF talking points” and then reframe what your opponents are saying in an un-sympathetic way.
Maybe it's like telling ME patients it's all in their head, and they can be cured psychologically. It may work on some, but for many they get permanently damaged from too much pressure and stress. After such abuse and being ground down, it's hard to be sympathetic to ignorance and abuse.
I don't know enough to conclude, but trying to understand and ask more questions is a first step.
Indeed, well said. Even outside of the realm of gender, the rhetoric of biological essentialism is harmful.
When I see people say things like "biology is what is real", I think about the harm done to every adopted child who is being told that their parent isn't really their parent, that their relationship should not be respected as much as someone who is biologically related to their parents.
CIS (as born) women may also have (traditional) male-like traits. If you separate people by traits in prison, then why separate based on trans-ness alone? For example, large women are more likely to rape small women in prison simply because they can. If you separate based on such risks, then separate large women from small women also; why focus on just trans?
Many prisons already separate by ethnic group simply to keep the peace. Yes, it's segregation, but the alternative is more prison riots.
Thus, if separation happens for practical reasons, then don't limit the separation practices to one group; otherwise, you will be accused of discrimination, perhaps justifiably. Use statistics, not stereotypes, to find the split points.
Or get better security so mixing doesn't result in problems. Lowest-bidder security has down-sides.
That seems to me a very uncharitable take on the TERF position. For example, approximately 1/4 of women have been raped at some time. It's not very hard to see that such women could have a problem with someone who's biologically male in the women's room - a serious, traumatic problem.
You can say that and still be sympathetic to the plight of trans people.
Sorry, I don't buy this concept that hordes of (or any, for that matter) predatory trans women are queuing up for the chance to prowl round changing rooms. Do you, really?
Say you're right. What stops them sneaking in right now? It's not like there are mandatory ID checks at the entrance.
But I also know a trans woman who is over 6 feet tall and has a beard. She is considering hormone replacement therapy but has not committed yet.
I cannot help but have some empathy for women -- who might have very good reason to be fearful of men -- who are uncomfortable having this person in female-safe spaces. That is 100% independent of the intentions or actual danger posed by this trans woman I know, which is as close to zero as I can imagine.
> to bring up the damage imposed by TERF talking points
Even to the extent that there is a debate to be had about trans identity and how gender/sex works, it's really hard to have that debate when one side is terrified that their rights are being taken away. For trans people, this debate has immediate consequences.
It's kind of frustrating to me that people don't see this. People are mad about not being able to have academic debates about trans identity as if it's unreasonable for the trans community to be prioritizing their own rights instead of the intellectual curiosity of university professors.
2020-2021 has seen one of the largest jumps in anti-trans legislation since... I don't even know when, since before I was born. So yeah, everyone who cares about this issue is on edge about TERFs, because TERFs don't want to have a friendly academic debate, they want to pass legislation blocking affirmative care, policing bathrooms and sports, and generally erasing trans people from society. I'm annoyed when I see people online acting like the trans community is the reason that these topics are politically fraught. They're politically fraught because TERFs and anti-trans politicians are using them as a front to take people's rights away.
If that problem got fixed, if trans people weren't under attack, if a lot of the questioning wasn't tied up in bigotry, then conversations online about gender wouldn't be so tense. It's wild to try and blame the trans community for prioritizing self-preservation.
Being trans is a personal philosophy. You may argue that the 'feeling' is innate, but must make major changes to your outside appearance/ biology / defy culture norms.
With that being said, defying cultural norms is a good thing but you can't force me to accept your reality. I have to option to have a difference in opinion than you. If i accidentally say sir, instead of mrs you can't cancel me because of it.
I don't claim to be a moral precept but what i do offer you A peace treaty. You can live your life in a way that is pleasing to you but you cannot force other people to accept your beliefs no matter how much scientific or cultural backing it may have. if the local womens book club doesn't want a dude who 'Claims' to be a women in their book club but can obviously still see he's a man, that's okay. It's not discrimination, it's difference in opinion and that is okay.
edit: Deleted a paragraph discussing sports. I think it mainly took away from my argument rather than helped it.
> They believe that dictionary definitions of woman are prescriptive, declared at the chromosomes during birth, rather than descriptive, as in how one presents in both dress and phenotype.
If you were responsible for compiling a dictionary, what is the accurate definition of "woman" that you would provide?
I must admit that I’m apprehensive to give an answer given this thread’s…liveliness, but I’ll do my best.
“Woman” describes a collection of chromosomal and phenological traits observed within an ongoing and temporal culture lens. A human is often perceived as a woman when she simultaneously embodies a variety of these traits, especially so when those traits contrast that which is considered male.
Much like the concept of feminism, consensus on what is and isn’t in these categories continues to evolve as it’s observed and informed by the experienced of both genders.
I can understand why a definition like this wouldn’t be as satisfying as something more concrete and well, definitive.
Sorry to break it to you, but chromosomes are prescriptive. You cannot simply ignore that there are differences between X and Y chromosomes. Society's distinctions between the sexes is not arbitrary. Why do we have separate bathrooms in public but not at home? Why do we have segregated sports? Why do we celebrate feminists but not MRAs? It's because there is a real-world difference.
Flamewar tropes like "Sorry to break it to you" are not acceptable on HN in any case and certainly not on a painfully divisive and inflammatory topic like this.
If you can't keep in mind that you're talking to other human beings who may have deep and good reasons to feel differently than you do on a topic, then please don't post here. This is a difficult enough topic without poisoning it with swipes and snark.
Chromosomes are not detectable from the outside. Phenotype is not entirely dependent on genotype. Trans women may suffer from both certain "female" diseases and certain "male" diseases.
> Sorry to break it to you, but chromosomes are prescriptive.
... Except when they aren't. Even biology doesn't paint such a simple picture. Chromosomes are important, but not as important as hormones -- and how the body responds to those hormones.
If you're not aware of CAIS, it is probably the clearest way for you to re-evaluate your view that chromosomes are prescriptive.
Edit - puzzled by the downvotes here. Do you know what chromosomes you have? Have you checked? If you do, there's a nonzero chance that they aren't the chromosomes you're expecting to find.
If you were to test your chromosomes and found they didn't match your expectations, you would either have to change your belief about the prescriptiveness of chromosomes, or your belief about your gender. Which belief would you change? Which belief do you hold more strongly?
One thing I find quite odd is how the study of gender emerged out of an approach that demanded a critical understanding of assumptions and the things society insist upon (that there are only 2 genders, that gender is essentially related to biological sex rather than something that is manifest in social behaviour, ect.) and yet that view has twisted into a sort of all or nothing view that is extremely antagonistic to critical inquiry. The tendency for a number of trans activists and talking points to revert back to a kind of gender essentialism; the logical inconsistencies in the idea that one identifies a private gender identity, rather than a personal desire to transition or live as another gender; the insistence that a trans person has special insight into the concept of gender --- raise up any of these points and you bear the risk of being labelled a "transphobe" even though you are entirely committed to the protection of a trans persons rights and dignity.
A small, extremely vocal minority insists that anyone that voices the slightest hesitation in accommodating trans people into gender/sex segregated social functions must be a transphobe or be complicit in the violence against trans people. It makes the entire conversation exhausting.
I dunno if I'd agree that it's a small vocal minority, zero-tolerance to anybody questioning the current dogma is seen everywhere where trans acceptance is a focus. Ten years ago I was told, by trans people, that there are physical differences between trans and cis brains. Say that today, and you get kicked out of LGBT spaces for being a transmedicalist or truscum.
I have no idea whether it's true or not because you can't even find research on the subject because of how absurdly politicized the topic is.
"Truscum" being the word for someone who thinks that changing one's gender and sexual characteristics might not be the greatest idea ever unless you actually have, like, gender dysphoria. Never mind the many, many people who are now pursuing "detransition" after going one step too far. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
I do not know anything about the subject of the linked article, nor her views. Did not venture past the pay/registration wall. I have no opinion about her.
zero-tolerance to anybody questioning the current dogma is seen everywhere
Generally, of course dogma should be questioned.
However, academic freedom does not mean that universities must provide a platform to literally anybody that wants one. Their resources are finite and choices need to be made.
Surely, we can agree that some discussions by their very nature are harmful or at least deeply insulting. Imagine discussions such as "should women be allowed to vote?" or "are $ETHNICITY people worthwhile of being treated like other human beings?" or "was Hitler right?" or some other such topic.
I would certainly not say such speech should be banned, but it is equally clear to me that no institution should be obligated to provide a platform for such ideas.
It's worth noting that "teach the controversy" is the disingenuous rallying cry of creationists seeking to wedge anti-evolution religious dogma into US public school systems. Those people know that merely giving creationism a figurative seat at the table serves to legitimize it to some extent. They also hope to wear down their opposition (in this case, already-overworked educators) by consuming massive amounts of their time and energy. Well, such religious teachings should be denied a seat at the table, at least in publicly-funded secular schools.
Given that reproduction in mammals is inescapably binary, and a really big fraction of social interaction in humans is shaped by courtship, both overt and covert, it's hardly surprising that our historical perspective on gender roles has been predominantly binary too.
I think another reason "things are different now" is that more of us think abstractly today than in years past. Many of the perspectives and possibilities we entertain today would have been alien to more of us 50 or 100 years ago, when the world was more conventional, more black and white.
Finally, with the multitudes of voices that no longer remain hidden behind mainstream media outlets, we're more aware of nontraditional, complex, and nuanced POVs today. That helps us realize that many psychological variations exist "between the lines", not as pathology but as a matter of natural variation.
I think the irony of the current battle around identity is that we have been making steady progress based on the idea that personal characteristics shouldn't matter. However this whole debate is reversing that by not only saying it matters a great deal but that other people should be forced to defer to others personal choices even when it directly affects them
You can notice this in a few fields of popular ideologies these days, that is overcorrecting for a problem to the point of becoming exactly the thing one was originally fighting against.
I am of the somewhat progressive-unpopular opinion that some people have an unhealthy interest in how they label themselves and how others perceive them, and in the attempts to be supportive the popular opinion is doing more harm than good. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against anyone with a certain genotype or phenotype having any particular interest in whom they love, how they dress, their hobbies, behaviors, etc. as long as they don’t put hurts on other people. I do have doubts about the amount of “identifying” people do with their preferences though. It can be a subtle point that is hard to make just right without getting pitchforks raised, I’m never sure i’ve done it right.
> You can notice this in a few fields of popular ideologies these days, that is overcorrecting for a problem to the point of becoming exactly the thing one was originally fighting against.
I've noticed this too, it's not only gender ideology but racial ideology and more. Seems to be form of ideological "pilot-induced oscillation"[0]
"[Pilot-induced oscillation] occurs when the pilot of an aircraft inadvertently commands an often increasing series of corrections in opposite directions, each an attempt to cover the aircraft's reaction to the previous input with an over correction in the opposite direction" (in this case the "pilot" is "society")
The problem is that people entangle their sense of identity with their opinions. (I think PG had an essay on HN recently that talked about this - he called out religious and political opinions in particular.)
So their opinions aren't up for discussion. If you disagree with them, they feel offended and personally attacked.
I agree and I'll add to that activists claiming to speak on behalf of a particular group are often not actually representing that group. I think there is currency in identity these days, to your earlier points, and some wish to spend others' currency for themselves.
I don't think it's an issue of people being interested in how they label themselves so much as society being interested in labels for people. If you come out as gay, suddenly there are a load of assumptions placed on you about how you speak, dress, act, what your hobbies are, etc. People adopt identities in these cases because society has preconceived notions of the identity, not because the individual themselves has decided that they want to make a big deal out of their identity.
You said it. One example I find somewhat relevant is the Boston bombers. They were young people in America, with little connection to their local Muslim community. But, like many young people, they were obsessed with identity. They joked about jihad, they bought a license plate holder that said "terrorista#1" for a friend, etc. They perceived themselves as Muslims (despite not following Muslim practices), had a thirst for identity, and sought out that identity online. When that thirst intensified, it drove them to radical communities, they started following those practices that they were told people of their identity _should_ follow, and it eventually led to tragedy.
How does this story go if they hadn't been obsessed with their identity as Muslims or if they had gone to the local mosque to ask about Islam instead of seeking out radical Muslims online?
100% Agree. At least in my home country, this is mostly fueled by the left (I consider myself center).
Lots of them just "work" of doing nothing but protesting, so once they get something they wanted, they have to move to the next thing.
For example, they start by making changes to the language so, instead of being "los" (male) or "las" (female) they started to say "les" (does not exists in spanish) as they say it is more inclusive (nor male nor female).
But it is not that they say "los", "las", and "les", they want you to say "les". So first it was an "innocent" thing, and now they are trying to pass laws and indoctrinate everyone, included kids from any age, 6 years old or less.
I absolutely agree it's wrong to publicly shame someone to use this pronoun, but I don't agree with how you're framing the rest of the situation. Why is it that they're "indoctrinating" and not "teaching"? Also, if people are using this word it naturally exists.
You seem to accuse them of having an agenda, as if this is a bad thing on its own, but it's clear you too have an agenda of your own. But while theirs, misguided or not, is based on acceptance, what's yours based on?
This was ironically one of the things that was hardest about coming out as gay, for me. Nobody ever treated me the same way again. I was either uncomfortably praised or silently judged, with practically no in-between. Suffice to say, my sexuality is on a need-to-know basis, now.
And the reverse: your sexuality - or anybody else's who is not my mate - is not on my list of 'want-to-know'. I simply do not care about the choices and/or attributes of other people though I believe they should be 100% free to make whatever choice they want and be whoever they are, and have gone out of my way to ensure that this is the case for people who find their life's choices frustrated or their reality denied by others.
This is probably a sign of my advancing age, I'm probably a prude by today's standards, but I simply don't find these subjects for semi-public or even public discussion with strangers.
It's weird to me that sexuality and identity are so intertwined. Why should someone "come out" as anything?
(I know a lot of people "come out" as various things in a mere bid for attention... I'll leave that issue aside.)
If I knew someone casually for a while who never talked about his/her sexuality, but one day they said "I never said this before, but I'm a heterosexual", I'd certainly feel awkward about it. Why did he/she say that to me?
To take it further, why phrase it "I am ..." instead of "I have ... desires"? If the latter sounds awkward, why is the former any less awkward?
Same here. I only address my sexuality when the topic comes up or with good friends. Otherwise I have noticed people do treat me differently, as was apparent at my previous workplace.
As someone who is CIS, I also don't try to imply a sexuality in myself or others unless I'm with people I know. I try not to speak about my wife, but my "spouse" and try to use gender-neutral terms where appropriate.
Do you feel the same way about nicknames? If you call someone by a nickname that they don't like and they let you know they prefer their own name then do you consider it too onerous to defer to them about it?
I don't think that is what commenter is saying. I, personally, of course defer to nicknames and pronouns.
I think it is more similar to race-blind versus race-conscious policies - along with gender-blind versus gernder-concious.
Is it better to assume that men and women are pretty much the same in academia and each are capable of the same thing? Or is it better to assume that men and women are intrinsically better at different things with certain characteristics.
I think the answer is in the middle but clearly there has been a move in the last five years to say that gender inherently effects your worldview/characteristics while simultaneously saying that men/women should have equal outcomes in all fields. Its not internally consistent.
I defer to nicknames, but if the State or my university or my company forced me to, on pain of getting fired, expelled, fined, or worse, then I wouldn't want to defer to nicknames anymore on principle.
I don't care what gender someone calls themselves, and as a nice person I'll try to remember and use it, so long as they don't attempt to get me fired if I get it wrong.
Not really an apt comparison since there's nothing about a nickname that defies observable reality, a name is a social construct to begin with. Sex however is a biological construct in which the characteristics are directly and quantitatively observable.
I have that exact situation at work, twice in fact. One woman's nickname is Pookie. Some people are uncomfortable with using that term and they use her legal name. It doesn't bother her. Another man insisted on people calling him "PawPaw". Nobody was comfortable with that, especially the women he borderline harassed every day. He was fired for stealing food out of the break room before the name situation came to a head.
You don't have the right to compel speech in other people in any way. You don't even have the right to make people call you by your birth name. Some jurisdictions like NYC have laws against malicious miss-naming by an employer or landlord, but even that only applies if they essentially make it a harassment campaign.
It's not just like a nickname, though. It's about who you're willing to date, who is put in which prison or who is allowed to compete in which sports competitions.
This is common in many of the team sports I've played in. The more someone hates their nickname the more likely it will stick. Generally it's only done with close friends.
You know.. I call people their nicknames and preferred pronouns.
But... I have a name like David Goldsmith - common first name, two common syllable last name. People call me Dave, David, Davy, Goldsmith, and this one Indian coworker of mine always seems to call me Goldsith, which I think is cool because star wars, but also like wtf dude, you're missing the same letter every time.
The point is though, I don't really care what people call me. People call me a dozen different things nowadays. The last time I got bothered about what somebody was calling me, I was 12 and it was "Davy dumbsmith".
In my experience it's pretty hard stopping people from calling you nicknames, if they feel like doing so. I've never introduced myself with a nickname to anybody, but somehow they often end up using one anyway. Then, a name is really something other people use for refering to you. Whatever is more convenient for them is probably the best name.
Wouldn't this be the opposite of that scenario? As in, someone has a given name at birth but they prefer a nickname and some people find using the nickname too onerous and use their given name instead?
Do you think legislators and employers should get involved in decisions about nicknames? If so, that would make you some sort of authoritarian.
And this is what the debate is really about: authoritarian vs libertarian political attitudes. I’m certainly ready to have that debate, but it would require the “woke left” [0] to abandon the moral high-ground.
[0] There’s surely a better term to use, but I can’t think of it right now.
I don't see any irony there, because there is a huge difference between accepting that certain personal characteristics shouldn't matter, and accepting that people nevertheless do face a wide range of problems because of their personal characteristics that shouldn't matter. The former has experienced some progress as you mention (at least for what's considered acceptable to voice publicly), but the latter appears to be highly controversial.
There's a nuance here: it's possible to both want systemic change on the macro scale, but also meanwhile seek a local maximum for oneself given the current system dynamics at play.
By proxy, I might advocate that income inequality is too high, and that some form of wealth redistribution should be considered. You might say that, therefore, I ought to donate my entire salary to charities. Someone might do that, as a radical stand against capitalism, and I would support that. However, I would also support someone that is trying to seek better wages under the current system, even if they do support wealth redistribution on the wider political scale--in context, it's understandable.
Translating that back to the original space, it seems that you advocate that someone that might today identify as a trans woman might instead identify as a man (or person) with phenotypically female presentation, due to medical treatment, and with a significant number of traditionally feminine attributes, as 'personal characteristics shouldn't matter'. This would place them in the vanguard of challenging gender dynamics. I think that's admirable of people that choose to do that. I understand that many other trans folk want to challenge the status quo less severely, and identifying as their gender allows them increased safety, sanity, and happiness within the confines of the current world.
>However this whole debate is reversing that by not only saying it matters a great deal but that other people should be forced to defer to others personal choices even when it directly affects them
Yep, and the problem is that this is obviously a principal that is not going to be impartially implied, but instead that deference towards personal identity is going to be parceled out based on tribal lines - look how common it is for many on the left to argue that black conservatives are "not really black" (or maybe they're black, but not Black?)
The battle for trans rights is intertwined much more tightly with a battle for control of language - extending to affirmative demands that others deeply change their normal language to avoid giving unintentional offense - than any other civil rights push I can think of, and I wonder if this will become more commonplace in the future.
I don't think gender ideology is an appropriate topic for HN. There is little to be gained and much to be lost from discussing it here. Little to be gained because it has nothing to do with software development, and because gender issues are thoroughly covered elsewhere. Much to be lost because gender issues are so divisive that we risk alienating members of our community.
You're certainly right that this is an inflammatory topic with strong political and ideological overlap, and as the guidelines explain, we don't want flamewar here, and we don't want ideological or political battle. The site exists for intellectual curiosity, and those things aren't compatible. There's a great deal of established moderation practice around this, if anyone wants to read past explanations:
That doesn't automatically make a story like this off topic for HN. It depends on whether there's enough new information in a story to support a substantive discussion. In this case, the topic is not just "gender ideology", it's ongoing developments at universities and in the discourse at large. All of these are significant and interesting phenomena. For that reason I turned the flags off on this submission. That's also established moderation practice (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It requires a judgment call, of course, and we don't always make the right calls—but not making any would be an even worse call.
Of course it's commenters' responsibility to stick to the side guidelines if posting in such a thread. That means curious, thoughtful conversation and respect toward other commenters (and other people generally). Flamewar, flamebait, snark, name-calling, personal attacks and so on are not ok. People sometimes think that just because a topic is inflammatory it means they get carte blanche to spew what they will (e.g. "if you don't want me to post like this then you shouldn't allow this thread in the first place"). I call that argument "the topic made me do it", and not only is it false, the opposite is true: commenters here are under a greater obligation in cases like this, as the site guidelines make clear: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
> HN is for topics that gratify intellectual curiosity
I think that's the problem with a topic like this on HN. There will be little learning going on, with many statements made with certainty by individuals that have never studied any of these concepts in any detail. The level of dismissal in the comments is itself a reason to pull the plug.
I too like nuanced discussion on HN and I generally don't shy from political questions.
That said, HN is the watering hole for people with multiple political approaches on a fairly wide spectrum.
I think debate between these people is best facilitated by prompts and articles which raise multiple nuanced questions. And I think we do have useful debates at this point.
What isn't useful is something like an overt manifesto for one or another "side" on this political spectrum. And HN generally avoids such things.
But there's a kind of article, like this one imo, that is more or less a manifesto - an article that stake out a position and only give apparent gestures at balance. These have the same low-quality potential as manifestos. In important questions, it's unfortunate have a lot of uninformed posts even when they aren't flame bait.
In the case of the present article, I don't think readers of the article will come away with any greater understanding of "Gender Theory" and what gives rise to it and so it's not really a generator of good quality discussion even when people are not shouting at each.
Edit: Another thing I should add is that in the case of article that are effectively manifestos, upvotes and downvotes are going to gravitate to being just around the popularity of various positions and that too lowers the quality of discussion.
I wanted to express thanks to Dang for the moderation of this site, precisely because we can learn, discuss, and evaluate difficult topics like this, without flame wars, and rudeness. There are a lot of good comments here today, that satisfy and stimulate, our moral, cultural, ideological and biological curiosities.
Thanks Dang!
Most of the discussion is the same old talking points. Probably because the only new information in the article is scant detail about a handful of disconnected events. The likes of which have gone on for years. The title is inflammatory too. Multiple ideologies are involved but only 1 is called that.
For what it's worth, I like that we discuss controversial topics here if only because it's the only online forum I'm aware of where this stuff can be discussed with any degree of productive dialogue or without a constant barrage of bad faith (which isn't to say there aren't bad faith commenters here, but the signal/noise ratio is much higher here).
In my experience browsing HN almost daily, over the last year it has become something of an echo chamber for "anti woke" lines of thinking. I've seen little to no healthy discussion on the topic - by which I mean productive disagreement. It's usually just a top comment decrying twitter/etc and then a pile on of agreement.
I have 3 kids in college right now, actually one just graduated with a computer science degree. All 3 of my kids have talked about how much gender ideology has creeped into the classroom at the college level, to the point where virtually every class including computer science, engineering and science courses, has to start off with addressing pronoun preferences. It is a political hot-topic for sure, and those often go horribly in online forums but to say that it's not related to software development and startup culture is a bit disingenuous. It is effecting higher education in a big way, and it is creeping into corporate culture.
> has to start off with addressing pronoun preferences
To which I can only respond: "so?".
There are a decent number of folks in my circles who are gender-nonconforming. I'll bet, sans decades-plus of social pressure, there are more in your kids' classes. What's the problem with asking? And why does asking make you characterize the effect upon higher education as "big"?
How is it "bigger" than a prof or a TA asking if I want to be called Edward, Ed, or Ted?
Certainly I am finding it very difficult to be heard. As a member of the trans community I’ve tried to be kind and helpful in my comments in this thread but I’m getting downvoted to hell.
I just really want people in this thread to learn about emotional labor and to consider what they’re asking of marginalized people when they want to “discuss” the validity of their needs.
Trans people are a hot button issue these days but it feels like we don’t really have a seat at the table in that debate. The healthiest thing you can do for yourself is just live your life, surround yourself with people who make you feel safe, valued and loved, and stop trying to convince random strangers online that you’re worth something. I take a lot of inspiration from the ball room / drag culture - how it creates families for LGBTQ folks where none exist and uses expression as a form of activism. It’s not my place to change anyone’s mind; all I can do is live my life and hopefully others will grow as a result of observing me.
I think HN is an excellent forum for this topic. It’s not just about development here, it’s also about the business of building tech companies. It’s not an accident HN was built on the side of Y-Combinator. Also if we can’t have a productive and civil discussion about it here, where can we? Sure we get trolls and wing nuts here, but fortunately there are enough adults that even divisive issues can get discussed productively. Not always, not on every topic, but it happens.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Yes, gender ideology is pretty political (should it be?). But learning about it can obviously gratify one's intellectual curiosity if they're approaching it in good faith. So I don't think you're necessarily able to just make a blanket statement like "this isn't appropriate."
As for having much to lose, if you feel alienated by a good faith intellectual discussion -- regardless of topic -- that's your problem. This sort of thing is discussed daily in liberal arts programs across the US and in most of the world. You have to be able to discuss and learn about topics, even divisive ones, without losing your shit.
So the next time one of my co-workers suggests we should do more to be inclusive when our software asks a user if they are male/female, I should tell them that gender has nothing to do with software development?
I agree that this isn't the most productive HN thread ever, with a lot of comments repeating tired talking points or going for quick jabs instead of reasonable discussion. However, I would prefer to keep this topic open because it signals to me that there is still so much work to be done to educate people.
Trans people are a tiny minority that is only now coming into the public consciousness. We're going to have to work through a lot of ignorant discussions and bad faith actors to get to a healthier place.
These discussions used to be a lot worse. I think occasionally having people butt heads a little with good moderation has helped relax people a bit on the subject. This is the most productive thread I've seen on the issue on HN.
I don't believe anyone here was holding off discussing any particular topic until we got the go-ahead from oofbaz. You don't get to decide what we discuss. If you don't want to discuss it you can close the tab and move on.
For a while I'd really enjoyed HackerNews for the lack of politics. It was great not to hear about Trump during the Trump presidency, but since then and COVID times I find more and more highly politicized editorials being propelled to the top of the front page.
Yeah, I just tend to avoid political posts and threads altogether. Speaking as a trans woman who doesn’t use Twitter or most other social media, it can feel like I don’t have a voice and I’m just seeing this debate play out. But in a way I’m fine with that. Online it’s like people either hate me because I’m trans or hate others on my behalf because they’re not trans-inclusive enough. My lived experience is nowhere near as extreme. To most of my friends, family and coworkers, I’m the only trans person they know and the topic of gender rarely comes up. Aside from a few friends and family who disowned me early in my transition, I’ve found that people are generally respectful. Strangers can sometimes be mean / scary / creepy and dating isn’t easy (most guys aren’t into trans girls or if they are it’s usually a fetish thing) - so I just try to avoid situations where I’m unsafe or feeling bad vibes.
I know that was a bit off-topic but I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s okay to create distance between you and the things that bring you down. I’ve found so much interesting content through Hacker News and it would be a shame to throw that away just because the politics here don’t always align with my own.
I'm not sure why you couldn't simply skip the topics that you don't like, and completely avoid them, regardless of whether the reason for your lack of interest is politics or just that you never owned a ZX Spectrum or whatever.
On other subjects on HN (software, mostly), I find curious, questioning people, who will, for the most part, engage very seriously with the subject matter. I think this is because users here engage with software -- the creation, maintenance, collaboration, the joy and misery of it all -- frequently and with a passion for nuance.
When high-visibility articles on trans people show up, it's almost inevitably when our transness -- our ability to move through the world, to exist in certain spaces, or even if we exist at all -- is the subject of debate. I don't know how many cisgender folks here really get how fundamentally exhausting it is to have some part of your identity always be part of a debate, to be talked about or on rare occasions talked to, but almost never engaged with in a substantive way.
It's just fear fear fear, 24/7 -- simulating hypothetical nightmare worlds where trans rapists lurk in bathrooms and prisons, where every Olympic gold medal is taken by a man masquerading as a woman, roving hordes of red-faced trans activists screaming incoherently online at nice, well-meaning, harmless people who just want to learn.
I just wanted to put out there that the flattened, simplified perspectives trans people are portrayed with may not give you the whole picture, and I'd encourage people here to give perspectives from trans people the same (well, more, preferably) curiosity and interest that you might give to scare quotes and soundbites about prisons, bathrooms, and sports.
I agree that there is more heat than light in these debates.
The Gender Critical Feminists do make up bogeyman stories about rapists in prisons, trans women disrupting breast feeding groups etcetera.
The Trans lobby though has also been guilty of the same sort of thing. E.g. I am no fan of professional sport (I hope this kills it dead) but to claim that trans women have no advantage over natal women is opinion not fact. The main fault line ion our society is gender, and to claim otherwise is simply wrong. (Not all Trans activists do that, just as not all Gender Critical Feminists are mean).
To me it is heartbreaking that this is not about fixing that fault line. No person has the right to take a interest in another person's gender unless they are their doctor or fancy them and are fussy. That is the issue we should address - how boys are raised to be violent sexual predators requiring female admiration and women are raised to be weak victims requiring male support.
That is getting lost, instead of helping fix the fault line, this debate (the excess of heat, deficiency of light) is making it worse.
As I said in another comment, this is far from a bogeyman story - there was already a case in the UK of a male-bodied convicted rapist being housed in a woman's prison because "she" decided post-conviction that "she" identified as female. She then went on to sexually assault multiple female inmates. Look up the name Karen White.
I put "she" in quotes not because I have a problem with respecting trans people's pronouns in general but because there have been suggestions that this particular criminal didn't really identify as trans and the whole thing was a cynical ploy to get access to easy victims.
Obviously the vast majority of trans people are not Karen White, but then this is the exact kind of thing that people warned would happen when self-id gets taken to its logical conclusion. Sweeping it under the rug isn't a good look.
Obviously there are transphobes out there who'll point to Karen White and disingenuously say "we're only trying to stop female inmates from getting raped!" when in fact that's just a cudgel for their real, more sinister agenda. But that makes it more important that decent people be allowed to discuss these issues in good faith.
If normal people aren't allowed to have an honest conversation about the thorny aspects of (say) gender self-id, the only people left to discuss it will be the lunatics who don't care about appearing respectable. They'll even be empowered, because it lets them say to their base "look! The authorities are trying to hide this from you!"
How is the sports concern illegitimate? It seems it's already a major issue today, as we speak. We're past the point of hypothetical worst-case scenarios in that respect.
Being trans is one of many possible attributes a person can possess (tall, short, skinny, fat, and so on)! There are lots of ways a person's body can be built that may give them an advantage or disadvantage over another person.
Strength and speed are not the sole metrics by which Olympic medals are awarded, either. Some people are taller than other people, some people are shorter, some are trans and some aren't. None of that categorically excludes trans women from womanhood, so I don't see why that would preclude them from entering into women's events. It comes back to a fundamental distrust of trans women as containing some vaguely cited percentage of lying cisgender men.
For a bad-faith actor to take advantage of the current system, they'd have to transition medically and socially, wait for years (in Laurel Hubbard, the potential first trans Olympian's case, at least five -- she quit in 2001, transitioned in 2012, then began competing in 2017), and then stay that way for as long as it would require to convince people that you've fully transitioned (could be decades or the rest of their life, depending on how they'd want their legacy to live on). The incentive structure is just completely out of whack. You'd have to fight tooth and nail for something you don't actually identify with, and live with the physical and psychological effects for years or possibly decades, plus living with the general harassment people would give you for perceiving you as trans and for trying to compete in the Olympics, and then what? You think with how stringent the IOC tries to be with doping that they wouldn't figure that one out? You think the backlash wouldn't be absolutely enormous?
What about this is "worst" case, anyway? We might get our first trans person who's even allowed to compete this year. It's a totally disproportionate response.
Readit News
The numbers I can find for US citizens is: 0.6% or 1,988,696 out 331,449,281 of people total for the entirety of the US in 2021.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...
In the UK where the featured article took place the latest poll I could find comes counts the number of people who selected "other" when choosing a sex at 0.4% or 224,632 people out of 64,596,800.
>https://practicalandrogyny.com/2014/12/16/how-many-people-in...
Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.
I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.
In a world full of discrimination against trans folks, who knows how many people who would prefer being trans have failed to be identified?
But the topic is much bigger than that. You see, the ideology being pushed says that everyone who has gender dysphoria should be assumed to be trans. But a LOT of teenagers, particularly girls, go through a period of gender dysphoria when they hit puberty. What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire. However said research is highly controversial exactly because it undermines the politically correct ideology that we should take seriously all claims that physical appearance is less important than chosen gender.
And THAT is the real problem. I don't have statistics. But anecdotally I have a 12 year old with gender dysphoria. Many of their friends have the same. I personally know more children claiming to be trans at present than I've known people who were blind or missing a limb over my entire life.
A *LOT* of parents are in my boat. It is easy to find opposing ideologies about how we should deal with our teenage children. There is very little research. And people are so focused on yelling at each other that nobody dares DO more research. Because no matter what you find, you're going to get targeted by someone.
This is frequently claimed but is untrue, or at the very least highly uncertain. The studies most often referenced have serious methodological errors, including inconsistent definitions of dysphoria (owing partially to problems with the Gender Identity Disorder diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV that have since been fixed with the DSM-5) and desistance (in some cases counting anyone who didn't follow up with the clinic conducting the research as having desisted) https://www.gdaworkinggroup.com/desistance-articles-and-crit...
Julia Serano has also written extensively on this topic with much depth and nuance, at least in my opinion: https://juliaserano.medium.com/detransition-desistance-and-d...
Could you link to this research? This is a fraught topic that includes fraudulent studies and claims like this mean little without links.
Edit: I just noticed the original poster already converted this into a longform post, so the "reader app" version isn't really necessary https://liminalwarmth.com/the-hard-thing-about-hard-things-m...
Culture seems to be going through a convulsion of sorts and it is taking an enormous toll on our young girls. They do seem to grow out of it, but the phenomenon is real.
This isn't actually a thing. Certain factions who would prefer trans people cease to exist push this idea that kids are on this hot new meme of getting their bits flipped before reaching the age of consent, but it is simply not a thing. No top surgery, either.
It just isn't a thing. It's a wild fantasy. The only thing kids can go on are puberty blockers. These are well-tested and their effects known and understood through their use for other medical concerns.
Except... people don't perform gender reassignment surgery on children just going through puberty.
Once female beauty was commoditized, and you could literally purchase an upgrade to parts you were born with. Entire cosmetic and plastic surgery industry benefited from marketing and promoting this model of beauty. The unforeseen consequence was that men started fetishizing these upgrades themselves.
As some men hyper focus on female body parts anyway. It was a way to exploit psychological tendencies for profit.
I guess the counter remedy would be to promote female beauty as the whole, and not some collection of body parts.
SRS/GRS is not recommended for pubescent children by anyone. At that age only hormone blockers are on the table, definitely not permanent surgery.
EDIT
Posting a reference backing up my claim since I'm getting downvoted:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/05/viral-imag...
| Professional organizations such as the Endocrine Society recommend against puberty blockers for children who have not reached puberty, and recommend that patients be at least 16 years old before beginning hormone treatments for feminization or masculinization of the body. The last step in transitioning to another gender, gender reassignment surgery, is only available to those 18 and older in the United States.
I think this isn't solved by education, it is caused by it and consequently the peer pressure among pupils.
The reason is probably not that trans-people are discriminated against. That is very unlikely.
Why?
There are simply more disabled people than trans people and they are getting far less attention, right?
How is that hard to say?
Dead Comment
1. Parents and sexual violence victims concerned about the non-falsifiability of trans-identification and the related concerns of sexual predators claiming an identity they don't actually have to gain access to private spaces of women and girls.
2. Feminists (TERFs) who believe being a woman is a fundamental, biological identity and cannot be coopted by males.
Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men. These groups exclusively concern themselves with trans-women.
Mormons are probably another group due to the reliance of their theology on binary gender, but I don't see them as being particularly vocal on this topic.
One note: Nobody self-identifies as a TERF. Or at least not originally (I'm sure in Internet ire people do it ironically by now.) It's mostly a label used to crush nuanced conversation.
One of the interesting things about spending the last few years studying Western European post-Roman history has been the discovery that, in the West, there has historically been relatively little resistance to AFAB folks "presenting" (speaking of the interpretation at the time--the dichotomy between "presenting" and "being" is one I am thoroughly not qualified to negotiate) as male unless tied into homophobia. There are historical examples of folks who outwardly identify as women taking on male roles in monastic life, and it's often portrayed as a good and pious thing.
The reverse, it seems, is generally not true, though not exclusively so. I've read of, but don't have offhand, accounts of Church investigation into "male nuns" that ruled that the erstwhile offender, a male who had suffered prepubescent genital damage, had committed no crime being raised by a particular convent as a woman. But cases going the other way round are much more common.
In terms of today's relations, however, my intuition is that the fear regarding transwomen is that it's largely a performative flavor of misogyny and the fear of those of the "superior" set somehow damaging all men, much as the performative flavor of homophobia does the same with regards to gay men but shockingly much rarely with regards to bisexual or homosexual women. But, of course, that is just an intuition.
I'd wager that most people believe this. Not just feminists.
While it's true there's little animosity directed at them, there is a lot of stuff Shrier's view that "gender ideology" is seducing lesbian women into thinking they're not actually women. Which, honestly, as someone who lived through lots of the dumb gay panic in the 80s and 90s sounds exactly like what people thought about homosexuals (eg: gay people can seduce/recruit straight people and turn them gay). So trans men get treated like dupes or victims of some social phenomena, rather than treated like actual human beings with agency of their own.
In fact, pretty much every anti-trans viewpoint I see, even from otherwise highbrow publicans like the Economist, are really just rehashes of what we heard about gays in the 80s and 90s, before we realized they were, in fact, not a threat to society.
This is such a bizarre leap of logic. Trans women are the pariahs of contemporary Western society. Yet the same people who uphold this subhuman status also assume that rapists are nefariously claiming trans female identity.
That’s not how rapists operate! They seek positions of power. Trans women are downtrodden and powerless — the least attractive position for a sexual predator.
"2. Feminists (TERFs) who believe being a"
... you mean the groups they represent i.e. 'a lot of women' frankly many of them who are not 'radical feminist' or even 'feminist'.
Huge numbers of women are uncomfortable with at least some parts of 'trans women' from 'changerooms' to 'sports' etc..
I don't think the very notion of 'trans' really upsets very many people at all, and that's the funny paradox.
But as soon as it crosses paths with others, then it's an entirely different issue and there's a lot of dust raised by pluralities.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints doesn't appear to feel threatened by transgender rights. At least, not according to official stances here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/topics/transgender
I worry that this can be read as "all feminists are terfs", which is not accurate.
For trans exclusionary feminists one is the patriarchy coming to female protective places and females claiming their place and undermining the patriarchy. As for parents males being less susceptible to forceful sexual exploitation is true but there is also a huge societal double standard when it comes women forcing themselves on men or abusing their male partner which is also reflected in parents being less worried about something happening to their children. Possibly also because of pregnancies onesidedness.
I think that might be why it’s more common than transitioning in the other direction?
I second this. Maybe it's some echo chamber effect or a minority stirring shit up, but I've hardly heard anything over the years about transmen-as-men vs men-as-men. It seems like most of the focus is on transwomen-as-women vs women-as-women. Maybe we're not as vocal? Maybe we care less? I don't think we have much of a dog in this race so I'm often confused as to why this topic comes up on HN considering most of us here are men. Boring day at work?
I do feel bad for the women's Olympics, but I'd like to ask the Olympics committee what the hell were they thinking long before I start any kind of anti-trans crusade. This is one discussion that doesn't seem to be happening much. The diatribe is as always directed among the proles and the decisionmakers get a free pass. Someone must have said, "Yes, lets allow a 35 year-old recently transitioned man to compete with early 20 year-old women," and some approval process must have happened. Those are the people you want to start asking the hard questions, not look at LH and blame her for participating in the Olympics that she's allowed to participate in.
Or as someone else put it: "A female POC just lost her spot to a white, middle-aged, male-born son of a billionaire. This is supposed to be progressive?"
I'd say that's a vast overreach. It isn't like the Trans Army is going to come burn down your house.
If anything, it's a general notion that transsexuals are mentally ill and that there is something odd about normalizing it. In a sense, that it's not different than people who want their limbs amputated or wear animal costumes at all times.
Deleted Comment
If you are a parent who believes that children should be taught to love their own bodies as they grow rather than have surgeons pretend to fix them by removing essential organs, then this represents a massive assault on your offspring.
> The numbers I can find for US citizens is: 0.6%
And there's a huge number of "trans" who later realise they were sold a lie and have to undergo further surgery to try and restore their original sex. Selling this to ideology to children is going to dramatically increase that 0.6%. How many of the new cases are going to actually be trans, vs children that thought they were trans and started puberty blockers at school, but actually were just never taught to love their body?
If you have some examples please share. I suspect you've come across an article pushing a an edge case that tried to make it out as normal. This type of media is common at the more extreme ends of whatever views.
There is no way this is a huge number. I'd be shocked if you could find a credible source on this. This sounds like conservative agitprop.
Proof? As an Australian with multiple family members in the education industry, I've never heard of this.
So it's a bit of a hard subject. I really don't think it's worth this much attention, but if hate groups are devoting this much attention to opposing transgender people, we're faced with the choice of either also giving it a lot of undue attention or throwing transgender people to the wolves.
Firstly, a resistance to expanding rights is not a movement to regress rights. For the most part (exceptions apply), the margins of the culture war here are not about trans people being on the defensive against long-standing rights being stripped.
Secondly, obviously the margins of this battle are often (again, not always, particularly when it comes to health care issues) pretty small-stakes, especially in comparison to the outsized amount of attention they're given. Certainly not important enough to justify the "you're trying to murder me / dehumanize me / erase me" rhetoric that one predictably receives when mild resistance is offered towards this agenda.
I don't know from blind people, but in America, there are anywhere from 10.2 to 17.5% of the population that are diabetic. While not pursued by hate groups, they are actively preyed by pharmaceutical companies and politicians who don't let insulins go generic - one of the few medicines that can't. Yes there is complaint about the medical system in America, I have yet to see diabetic/nondiabetic show up under facebook ID's like He/Him/His, normalization of syringe usage in restaurants, blood sugar testing not become a spectacle (of course I pick this one because I know the most about it, but there are many disorders that could be used with it). Stigma, predation and debate is associated with many things, but this one will get you fired/excommunicated from society. Speaking ignorantly about "just eat less sugar" to a type 1 diabetic does nothing.
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
I'm not sure how the world would be if proportional importance news were the norm, but it's certainly not the case today.
I find it funny and illuminating to read about conservative cis gays complaining about those darn genderqueer "kids, these days". All media fads aside, we simply haven't reached "queer equilibrium" yet where increasing acceptance of past social categories no longer triggers the emergence of new ones.
As a gay man growing up in the 90s, I very acutely remember some of the public discourse around gay rights while I was a teenager. In the UK, that specifically included a coordinated campaign against mentions of homosexuality in education, with some pretty stark attempts to smear gay men in particular as dangerous predators and paedophiles intent on sneaking their agenda into schools so that they could abuse children.
If I’m honest with you, I wouldn’t be particularly animated about trans rights myself (beyond being generally supportive) if it weren’t for the fact that I see exactly the same techniques and accusations levelled against the trans community—specifically trans women—as were used against people like myself 20 years ago.
So I’ve personally gone from generally supportive-if-disinterested, to being absolutely fucking furious that this is being allowed to happen again. I’ve observed absolute outright lies about a minority group being repeated by people in positions of influence, and while it might not affect that many people directly I am so absolutely disgusted by it that I fully intend on being extremely vocal about it.
Allowing the discussion and research to take place, if anything, is what allowed LBG rights to come to fruition.
The article is pointing out that this isn’t allowed happen with trans concerns and so the inevitable backlash and a regressive outcome.
It's not impactful in terms of the number of people, but its a civil rights issue for those on the left. And for those on the right its just one more group trying to change things from the status quo.
It's also a complex issue. I sit pretty far on the left, but the various issues related to trans policy I find to often not have a clear solution -- most notably around sports and fairness. Sigh.
The issue is that there is a trade-off being made here. A trans woman athlete likely has a better bone structure than the average cis woman but not better than the most naturally gifted cis female athletes. Athletic orgs have largely decided that this is fine and it’s not a significant enough advantage to care about because the question for them was “how can trans women compete” not “if trans women can compete.”
But then it’s such an easy issue to drive a wedge on because you can get people riled up about whether trans women should be able to compete with a sprinkling of misinformation about what HRT does and dash of “so a man can just say he’s a woman and compete.”
The sad thing is that this works.
There is something about tech, though, that seems to concentrate the male to female transitioners far above background levels.
I can count more than a half-dozen male to female transition folks in my tech circles. I can't even think of one that I bumped into doing any non-tech social activity.
There are more white people than black people in the US. More Christian people than Jewish people. More able-bodied people than disabled people. More descendants of immigrants than Native Americans.
That's what makes all these people minorities.
Small sample size but I think that judging outrage from online presence is inaccurate.
Only when the two groups mix do you get this fired up hate because the mechanisms within the groups that lead to people not talking about it don’t work and the social graces that tamp out arguments aren’t present on the internet so it explodes.
I hate so much that my existence is the hot button political topic right now. Like it’s good I guess — seems like we need to get this out of our systems but ugh does it bring out the worst in everyone. This should have never been a party thing and it’s so stupid that it’s now a billion times more political because of it. Both sides are trying to out woke or out red pill each other while the actual lives of trans people fall by the wayside.
Personally I don’t care at all if people want to be trans and be called by a chosen gender pronoun. I just can’t think of a reason I should have a problem with that.
There are a few edge case areas like women’s sports and prisons where it is a very complicated issue, but those are rare cases among rare cases. This is not an issue that should be monopolizing headlines.
For instance, there are situations in which transgender rights (someone identifying as a woman using a for-women-only space) are in conflict with women's rights (women not wanting to be in a for-women-only space when whom they perceive as a male is present).
You can't just disregard the women and say, don't worry about it, it's just a 0.6% problem.
We provide braille books, and TTS options.
We invent wheelchairs and ramps and lots of prosthetic limbs.
We (recently) approved a drug to treat Alzheimer.
We offer nursing homes and in-house help and care to old people with mental issues.
We do little more than argue about trans individuals. And many trans individuals are killed or commit suicide. The average life expectancy for a trans person is likely a lot smaller than a blind or disabled person.
THAT is why trans people and the related community are making a lot of noise.
IMO the wider question here is nothing to do with trans but about what being "liberal" means. We're in this insanely weird moment in history when the hard left is eating itself by being so Woke it's nearly impossible to even have a conversation any more.
I'm as left wing as they come, but being left wing means being able to have open, honest and sometimes uncomfortable debates. Being left wing is not, and never has been, about shutting down conversation, de-platforming, dogma, chilling effects. These are the things of the hard right, and the sooner people on the left start realising it and start being empowered to be vocal in defence of the freedom of ideas, the better.
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That has not been true anywhere in the world where a left wing (the) party dominated the discourse. No socialist or communist party has ever had tolerance to an opposing view.
>>These are the things of the hard right
Woah. Hey now. People can change.
Those aren't mutually exclusive. It's not uncommon to create distractions by purposefully treating a small group badly. And the solution can neither be to allow it to dominate all the bandwidth nor to ignore it.
Meanwhile, unlike Alzheimers, amputations or blindness, there doesn't really need to be any scientific breakthroughs to handle this. We just need to somehow fix society. It's at least controllable.
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That's a little bit of a non-sequitur, no? If this should be compared to anything, it's to earlier left-right "cultural war" flash points such as same-sex marriage and abortion.
Say that people with Alzheimer's should get access to better medical treatment, and no one will disagree with you (although some might say "as long as I don't pay"). Say the same about people who have lost a limb, and you'll see the same thing.
But try making any such statement about trans people, and you'll get vehement, polarized agreement and disagreement. Now, you've entered the territory of how people should and shouldn't be able to express their physical identity in public, in both sexual and non-sexual manners. And you are about to run into many strongly held opinions and pre-existing cultural mores.
With that said, I don't disagree with your last point. Sometimes, I do feel like cultural war inflammations are purposely constructed to hack the human psyche by playing into these strongly held beliefs and pre-existing cultural mores. At least in the present day, these kinds of inflammations work very effectively for generating engagement in the attention economy. But I don't know if that's a good thing. On the contrary (and maybe you'd agree with me here), I often get the sense that it's a bad thing.
To compensate this, humanity has "contract" cults who form a basic law providing form of society, protecting the weaker party form getting exploited and abused. These contract cults exists since the dawn of time and have been shaped into various forms, mostly with mythological wrappings, we designate as religion today. Hounded into the service as contract cultists, have been all sexual deviants of a society. Always. Which is why if you watch carefully, its actually selected for.
A emotional reaction to question regarding sexual deviancy from the norm, is a important signal during the mating process, regardless on what side of the political spectrum you are.
Gender ideology is a synthetic contract cult, and while it has all the other negatives, previous religion incarnations carried with them, it also brings alot of freedom to the cultists and tries to do away with alot of pain. Abolishing it, is not possible, as it will simply lead to other contract cults forming.
The best that can be accomplished is, preventing the church from intervening in fields of science society depends on and finding a new separation of church and state, with this contract cult.
PS: Bad engineered religions, lead to a faltering rule of law in societys, which then return in the long run to the "winner" takes it all societal model, destroying complexity capability.
Pretty much everything in life is a spectrum of possibilities - trying to boil those down to binary states can be helpful for some purposes but is never clean.
Being "legally blind" is a thing. The cut off for how little vision is enough to be blind is debatable.
Not that simple.
I don't hear about a lot of amputees being dragged behind pickup trucks for not having as many limbs as their attackers, but maybe I'm not reading the right publications.
Where this goes I have no idea.
>Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people.
Ok but is there a large portion of the population that believes blind people don't deserve health care for their disability? Is there a large portion of the population that believes blind people shouldn't be afforded working rights?
You can't just go "there's only 2 million trans people in the US, who cares about their healthcare, there's more important things out there", when the consequence of doing so severely impacts the quality of life of .5% of the population.
I don't think you would be sitting here going "only .5% of the US has type 1 diabetes, why are talking so much about making sure they get appropriate health care? Who cares if they're discriminated against during hiring?"
Actually, health insurance doesn't cover the cost of a guide dog, which can cost between $40-60k [0]
From personal experience (I'm not blind, but I know one), there is also workforce discrimination in the form of "don't ask her to do that, she's blind" when in fact the blindness doesn't impact the work at all.
>I don't think you would be sitting here going "only .5% of the US has type 1 diabetes, why are talking so much about making sure they get appropriate health care?
I know a diabetic who says he is COMPLETLY dependent on his work's health care to pay for his medicine. I'm not certain we are giving ENOUGH attention to this. [0] https://puppyintraining.com/how-much-does-a-guide-dog-cost/#....
If BLM (vs e.g. StopAsianHate) is any indication, the level of outrage in activism seems to be directly correlated to the level of violence in high profile incidents, more so than percentage of affected population
To counter this, I'll quote someone close to me during college "where I'm from, people like him get drowned in a bucket before they are 2"
In the school where I teach, sex, gender, and most importantly gender identity come sharply into focus during puberty and I have several students taking a time-limited therapy course to help them with gender id questions. That puts us into the 5% to 10% range, though that is of course purely anecdotal and from a tiny sample size.
Puberty hasn’t suddenly become more complex and access to these ideas and therapies may be driving gender-identity as a fashionable topic amongst the kids. But from what I’ve seen it’s a genuine need with most of them who ask for it.
Puberty is fascinating: it is a time of identity turmoil for every human being and while in the majority of cases that means going down a difficult but pre-determined path, for many others it throws up a huge number of questions about how to match their genetic/hormonal programming and the way they think, with the society in which they live. Intersex itself is a spectrum, for example.
Those groups aren’t subjected to violence just for existing. The comparisons aren’t at all one to one.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YWuD9RwJD4
This is a video from a source I normally don't trust. But if we really want to learn something about bias, I think it is worth a watch. This is about racism, but I think we see similar problem with gender.
This is a real problem, especially since a too strong backlash would hurt too. But at this point I don't think it is sustainable to feed pupils wrong or ideological information.
Honestly, I would have difficulties deciding to send my kids to a school this or a pious catholic boarding school. In both cases countermeasures might be helpful.
For the topic itself I agree with you. There are countless issues that should get more exposure compared to these topics.
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A minority group, by definition, has no power. It needs the majority to speak for them. So regardless of how small a number they represent, scaling the conversation up is required.
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But downplaying it is exactly what you are doing, literally.
To answer your main question, though: the very small community that we are talking about is disproportionately being subjected to murder, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and widespread discrimination.
The disproportionate harms that this small community is subject to is the key to understanding the level of outrage being evoked on their behalf.
This is provably untrue. Not that it isn't a tragedy, but in 2020, 44 trans people were killed[1] in the US. This is a rounding error even when looking at "merely" just hate crime statistics (for example, in 2019, the FBI reported ~7000 criminal offenses[2] in the "hate crime" category). I get it, people are passionate about it, companies change their logos, everyone posts about it on social media, but let's not perpetuate these myths.
[1] https://www.them.us/story/44-trans-people-killed-2020-worst-...
[2] https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...
Citation needed.
From what I can tell they are being given more leeway than any other group, and anyone who dares argue against their “rights” risks losing their job.
Trans-people does absolutely not to seem to be at risk anywhere.
Some politicians would call this a feature and not a bug.
Most people just aren't as utilitarian in the way that your comment implies they should be.
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If you choose one variable that describes people, and assume for simplicity it's approximately bell shaped, then sure, most people are in the middle, which is "average" or "normal", and if we want to help the most people, it seems logical to focus on them.
But if you start adding independent variables, it becomes increasingly unlikely that any given person is in the middle on all of them. Even with three, let alone dozens.
So you, or any other randomly chosen person, are probably very like "the masses" in some respects, but given, say, ten dimensions, nobody is average.
Which is why disregarding minorities in general isn't a viable way to run a society.
(I got this idea from an item on HN, which I think was more or less this: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...)
Are there any academic articles on ethics that you could cite to back up that assertion?
But to answer your question “why is this important” - the extreme minority of transgender people and the army of their supporters and activists in their quest for recognizing trans rights step on and disregard women rights and aggressively “cancel” anyone who dares to disagree with gender ideology, now that affects all of us, if you care about free speech.
I have a government pension, and when I log in to the online self service, it says my gender is "unknown".
I have been informed it can not be changed.
In 2019, the most recent year for which the FBI has data, the total US homicide rate was 4.3 deaths per 100,000 people [0] (possible underestimate; incident reporting is voluntary, and 25% of police departments don't submit expanded homicide data). Human Rights Campaign recorded the deaths of 25 transgender and gender non-conforming people in 2019 [1]. There are an estimated 1 million people who identify as transgender in the US [2], and an estimated 1.2 million people who identify as nonbinary or gender non-conforming [3]. That produces a US trans and nonbinary homicide rate for 2019 of 1.1 per 100,000.
Of all homicides reported by HRC with transgender or gender non-confirming victims in 2019, just one was determined to involve a clear anti-LGBT motive. HRC's data may be an underestimate. However, it is consistent with their estimated homicide rates and rate of hate crimes reported in other years.
Any murder is a tragedy, hate crimes all the moreso. However, a single-digit number of annual anti-trans and nonbinary murders is thankfully not an epidemic. The overall homicide rate for trans people seems much lower than the national average.
Notably this data excludes assaults, harassment, stalking, or any other attacks which don't result in fatalities.
[0] https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/cri...
[1] https://www.hrc.org/resources/a-national-epidemic-fatal-anti...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/gender/transgender/index.html
[3] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/nonbinar...
It is how they killed OWS. Now it is cool to be a member of the party of the rich, and to support megacorps and endless war.
I don't read The Economist for facts or details so much as to get a sense of what topics a current establishment can no longer afford to ignore. The details are secondary to the neccessity that a writer, a sub-editor, and a senior editor with tremendous personal stake in maintaining access to the circles that define establishment media, have collectively recognized that to remain relevant as a publication, the risk/reward on any ensuing controversy still means the magazine has to acknowledge which way the wind is blowing.
When The Economist says something is just starting, it means it's been brewing for at least several years and they need to comment on it. I don't think direct discourse on the topic improves the discussion on gender because the participants use a critical theory in which the promise of discourse is just bait to corner political targets for their mobs. However, we (and even The Economist) can recognize that popular tolerance for these tactics has finally reached an inflection point, and this change in attitude is what will finally allow real analysis and insight by thoughtful people into topics about gender.
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It is interesting to look at the Economist like their BigMac index - an encapsulation of something complex that is weirdly reliable
Then something changed. One important change was that they basically started publishing their authors names by allowing authors have blogs with their names. I also understand (would like to know more about this) that they started hiring journalists. Previously only subject experts were welcome but at some point there was a huge influx of Guardian-type journalists.
To me, first hint about the change in the articles was their coverage of feminism in work place where they really started to spout fashionable ideological points such as writing that women make better leaders, etc.
Are you suggesting that we should leave gender to the scientists and when The Economist has spoken, it should be recognized as the moment that “the science is in”?
I could understand your first paragraph, the second seems like a non-sequitor.
I read it more as “The Economist has started speaking about the subject, so it's an established science -- now we can start to expect actual results from it”.
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In my experience this is the center of every “debate.” It’s less about the merits of the cause and more about convincing this point against the hypothetical risk of a male who’s taken advantage of self identified gender. TERFs are generally not interested in dynamics of trans men, who seem to be more like “gender traitors” than their deceptive counterparts.
Personally I find this whole movement a farce. Every talking point not only misaligns with trans women, it causes more harm to cis women at scale. “Real women” give birth — except hundreds of thousands who cannot. “Real women” look like the contemporary feminine ideal, yet 1 in 10 women suffer from PCOS enduring testosterone levels higher than any trans woman has to contend with. And the cake topper of them all, “trans women fuel negative stereotypes of femininity,” while simultaneously not appearing feminine enough, often barred from HRT until after puberty. This Goldilocks zone of womanhood is always out of reach, and therefore transness is never acceptable.
- a trans woman
The fear that cis-women have of rape is real. The fear that transgender women have of rape in a men's jail is real. I think the fairest thing to do is take both of these fears seriously and house intact trans-women in a space where they neither feel threatened with rape, nor impose that threat on cis-women.
I think referring to this fear as a "TERF talking point" is as disrespectful as it would be to minimize the fear that trans-women experience in men's prisons.
The prevalence and sexual assault in prisons is an example of a normalization of deviance that should be opposed, instead of tolerated.
https://archive.is/iYD5T
Why would a rapist stop wanting to rape regardless of the state of their genitals? Is sexual violation with a penis so much more horrific than other violations it deserves special consideration?
When you talk about "this Goldilocks zone of womanhood," I think you've rediscovering one of the oldest philosophical discoveries: mental concepts and ideas (in this case "woman") do not apply perfectly to the world of appearences. But this does not mean we can jettison concepts and ideas altogether. In fact they seem necessary. So the fact that we cannot seem to come up with a perfect criterion for defining "biological woman" does not mean that we can dispense with that category.
And that's what's being asked of us. We are told "trans women are women". What does that mean? It if means "there is a category, women, and in that category there are trans women and biological women," that's fine with me. If it means "there is no distinction between biological women and trans women," that seems wrong to me and to the vast majority of people.
The supposed fear that people believe there is some magic change to your chromosomes the second you chose to identify with a gender is patently absurd. There is obviously no real support for such an idea—it is a straw-man that no one reading the phrase "trans women are women" in good faith and taking even a second to look into what trans people are saying would assume was the intent.
There is no category of women that is entirely identical, where you couldn't distinguish between them.
Some AFAB women can't give birth. Some of them have more androgynous bodies. Some of them are black. Some of them have different levels of estrogen, or grow up in different social circles that impose different expectations about how they should act, or provide different opportunities.
Nobody is saying that AFAB women don't have different experiences than trans women, any more than anyone is saying that Black women don't have different experiences than white women. Womanhood has always been a broad category, and there has never been a point where you could accurately say that there are no distinctions between the subcategories within womanhood.
If TERFs believe there is a fundamental quality that makes them indistinguishable from every other woman, then they are being absurd. Even if you ignore trans women, that world doesn't exist.
I am not sure it is true, and utterly sure it does not matter
I don't know enough to conclude, but trying to understand and ask more questions is a first step.
When I see people say things like "biology is what is real", I think about the harm done to every adopted child who is being told that their parent isn't really their parent, that their relationship should not be respected as much as someone who is biologically related to their parents.
Many prisons already separate by ethnic group simply to keep the peace. Yes, it's segregation, but the alternative is more prison riots.
Thus, if separation happens for practical reasons, then don't limit the separation practices to one group; otherwise, you will be accused of discrimination, perhaps justifiably. Use statistics, not stereotypes, to find the split points.
Or get better security so mixing doesn't result in problems. Lowest-bidder security has down-sides.
The word you're looking for is "cis".
You can say that and still be sympathetic to the plight of trans people.
Say you're right. What stops them sneaking in right now? It's not like there are mandatory ID checks at the entrance.
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I cannot help but have some empathy for women -- who might have very good reason to be fearful of men -- who are uncomfortable having this person in female-safe spaces. That is 100% independent of the intentions or actual danger posed by this trans woman I know, which is as close to zero as I can imagine.
Even to the extent that there is a debate to be had about trans identity and how gender/sex works, it's really hard to have that debate when one side is terrified that their rights are being taken away. For trans people, this debate has immediate consequences.
It's kind of frustrating to me that people don't see this. People are mad about not being able to have academic debates about trans identity as if it's unreasonable for the trans community to be prioritizing their own rights instead of the intellectual curiosity of university professors.
2020-2021 has seen one of the largest jumps in anti-trans legislation since... I don't even know when, since before I was born. So yeah, everyone who cares about this issue is on edge about TERFs, because TERFs don't want to have a friendly academic debate, they want to pass legislation blocking affirmative care, policing bathrooms and sports, and generally erasing trans people from society. I'm annoyed when I see people online acting like the trans community is the reason that these topics are politically fraught. They're politically fraught because TERFs and anti-trans politicians are using them as a front to take people's rights away.
If that problem got fixed, if trans people weren't under attack, if a lot of the questioning wasn't tied up in bigotry, then conversations online about gender wouldn't be so tense. It's wild to try and blame the trans community for prioritizing self-preservation.
With that being said, defying cultural norms is a good thing but you can't force me to accept your reality. I have to option to have a difference in opinion than you. If i accidentally say sir, instead of mrs you can't cancel me because of it.
I don't claim to be a moral precept but what i do offer you A peace treaty. You can live your life in a way that is pleasing to you but you cannot force other people to accept your beliefs no matter how much scientific or cultural backing it may have. if the local womens book club doesn't want a dude who 'Claims' to be a women in their book club but can obviously still see he's a man, that's okay. It's not discrimination, it's difference in opinion and that is okay.
edit: Deleted a paragraph discussing sports. I think it mainly took away from my argument rather than helped it.
If you were responsible for compiling a dictionary, what is the accurate definition of "woman" that you would provide?
“Woman” describes a collection of chromosomal and phenological traits observed within an ongoing and temporal culture lens. A human is often perceived as a woman when she simultaneously embodies a variety of these traits, especially so when those traits contrast that which is considered male.
Much like the concept of feminism, consensus on what is and isn’t in these categories continues to evolve as it’s observed and informed by the experienced of both genders.
I can understand why a definition like this wouldn’t be as satisfying as something more concrete and well, definitive.
If you can't keep in mind that you're talking to other human beings who may have deep and good reasons to feel differently than you do on a topic, then please don't post here. This is a difficult enough topic without poisoning it with swipes and snark.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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... Except when they aren't. Even biology doesn't paint such a simple picture. Chromosomes are important, but not as important as hormones -- and how the body responds to those hormones.
If you're not aware of CAIS, it is probably the clearest way for you to re-evaluate your view that chromosomes are prescriptive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitiv...
Edit - puzzled by the downvotes here. Do you know what chromosomes you have? Have you checked? If you do, there's a nonzero chance that they aren't the chromosomes you're expecting to find.
If you were to test your chromosomes and found they didn't match your expectations, you would either have to change your belief about the prescriptiveness of chromosomes, or your belief about your gender. Which belief would you change? Which belief do you hold more strongly?
A small, extremely vocal minority insists that anyone that voices the slightest hesitation in accommodating trans people into gender/sex segregated social functions must be a transphobe or be complicit in the violence against trans people. It makes the entire conversation exhausting.
I have no idea whether it's true or not because you can't even find research on the subject because of how absurdly politicized the topic is.
However, academic freedom does not mean that universities must provide a platform to literally anybody that wants one. Their resources are finite and choices need to be made.
Surely, we can agree that some discussions by their very nature are harmful or at least deeply insulting. Imagine discussions such as "should women be allowed to vote?" or "are $ETHNICITY people worthwhile of being treated like other human beings?" or "was Hitler right?" or some other such topic.
I would certainly not say such speech should be banned, but it is equally clear to me that no institution should be obligated to provide a platform for such ideas.
It's worth noting that "teach the controversy" is the disingenuous rallying cry of creationists seeking to wedge anti-evolution religious dogma into US public school systems. Those people know that merely giving creationism a figurative seat at the table serves to legitimize it to some extent. They also hope to wear down their opposition (in this case, already-overworked educators) by consuming massive amounts of their time and energy. Well, such religious teachings should be denied a seat at the table, at least in publicly-funded secular schools.
I think another reason "things are different now" is that more of us think abstractly today than in years past. Many of the perspectives and possibilities we entertain today would have been alien to more of us 50 or 100 years ago, when the world was more conventional, more black and white.
Finally, with the multitudes of voices that no longer remain hidden behind mainstream media outlets, we're more aware of nontraditional, complex, and nuanced POVs today. That helps us realize that many psychological variations exist "between the lines", not as pathology but as a matter of natural variation.
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I am of the somewhat progressive-unpopular opinion that some people have an unhealthy interest in how they label themselves and how others perceive them, and in the attempts to be supportive the popular opinion is doing more harm than good. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against anyone with a certain genotype or phenotype having any particular interest in whom they love, how they dress, their hobbies, behaviors, etc. as long as they don’t put hurts on other people. I do have doubts about the amount of “identifying” people do with their preferences though. It can be a subtle point that is hard to make just right without getting pitchforks raised, I’m never sure i’ve done it right.
I've noticed this too, it's not only gender ideology but racial ideology and more. Seems to be form of ideological "pilot-induced oscillation"[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot-induced_oscillation
"[Pilot-induced oscillation] occurs when the pilot of an aircraft inadvertently commands an often increasing series of corrections in opposite directions, each an attempt to cover the aircraft's reaction to the previous input with an over correction in the opposite direction" (in this case the "pilot" is "society")
So their opinions aren't up for discussion. If you disagree with them, they feel offended and personally attacked.
How does this story go if they hadn't been obsessed with their identity as Muslims or if they had gone to the local mosque to ask about Islam instead of seeking out radical Muslims online?
Lots of them just "work" of doing nothing but protesting, so once they get something they wanted, they have to move to the next thing.
For example, they start by making changes to the language so, instead of being "los" (male) or "las" (female) they started to say "les" (does not exists in spanish) as they say it is more inclusive (nor male nor female).
But it is not that they say "los", "las", and "les", they want you to say "les". So first it was an "innocent" thing, and now they are trying to pass laws and indoctrinate everyone, included kids from any age, 6 years old or less.
You seem to accuse them of having an agenda, as if this is a bad thing on its own, but it's clear you too have an agenda of your own. But while theirs, misguided or not, is based on acceptance, what's yours based on?
Trying to indoctrinate kids to use a non-gender specific term? It seems like using the term indoctrinate seems a tad strong.
This is probably a sign of my advancing age, I'm probably a prude by today's standards, but I simply don't find these subjects for semi-public or even public discussion with strangers.
(I know a lot of people "come out" as various things in a mere bid for attention... I'll leave that issue aside.)
If I knew someone casually for a while who never talked about his/her sexuality, but one day they said "I never said this before, but I'm a heterosexual", I'd certainly feel awkward about it. Why did he/she say that to me?
To take it further, why phrase it "I am ..." instead of "I have ... desires"? If the latter sounds awkward, why is the former any less awkward?
Ideal solution, because the people who don't care also don't care to know. And those who do care definitely don't need to know.
I think it is more similar to race-blind versus race-conscious policies - along with gender-blind versus gernder-concious.
Is it better to assume that men and women are pretty much the same in academia and each are capable of the same thing? Or is it better to assume that men and women are intrinsically better at different things with certain characteristics.
I think the answer is in the middle but clearly there has been a move in the last five years to say that gender inherently effects your worldview/characteristics while simultaneously saying that men/women should have equal outcomes in all fields. Its not internally consistent.
I don't care what gender someone calls themselves, and as a nice person I'll try to remember and use it, so long as they don't attempt to get me fired if I get it wrong.
You don't have the right to compel speech in other people in any way. You don't even have the right to make people call you by your birth name. Some jurisdictions like NYC have laws against malicious miss-naming by an employer or landlord, but even that only applies if they essentially make it a harassment campaign.
But... I have a name like David Goldsmith - common first name, two common syllable last name. People call me Dave, David, Davy, Goldsmith, and this one Indian coworker of mine always seems to call me Goldsith, which I think is cool because star wars, but also like wtf dude, you're missing the same letter every time.
The point is though, I don't really care what people call me. People call me a dozen different things nowadays. The last time I got bothered about what somebody was calling me, I was 12 and it was "Davy dumbsmith".
And this is what the debate is really about: authoritarian vs libertarian political attitudes. I’m certainly ready to have that debate, but it would require the “woke left” [0] to abandon the moral high-ground.
[0] There’s surely a better term to use, but I can’t think of it right now.
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By proxy, I might advocate that income inequality is too high, and that some form of wealth redistribution should be considered. You might say that, therefore, I ought to donate my entire salary to charities. Someone might do that, as a radical stand against capitalism, and I would support that. However, I would also support someone that is trying to seek better wages under the current system, even if they do support wealth redistribution on the wider political scale--in context, it's understandable.
Translating that back to the original space, it seems that you advocate that someone that might today identify as a trans woman might instead identify as a man (or person) with phenotypically female presentation, due to medical treatment, and with a significant number of traditionally feminine attributes, as 'personal characteristics shouldn't matter'. This would place them in the vanguard of challenging gender dynamics. I think that's admirable of people that choose to do that. I understand that many other trans folk want to challenge the status quo less severely, and identifying as their gender allows them increased safety, sanity, and happiness within the confines of the current world.
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Yep, and the problem is that this is obviously a principal that is not going to be impartially implied, but instead that deference towards personal identity is going to be parceled out based on tribal lines - look how common it is for many on the left to argue that black conservatives are "not really black" (or maybe they're black, but not Black?)
The battle for trans rights is intertwined much more tightly with a battle for control of language - extending to affirmative demands that others deeply change their normal language to avoid giving unintentional offense - than any other civil rights push I can think of, and I wonder if this will become more commonplace in the future.
You're certainly right that this is an inflammatory topic with strong political and ideological overlap, and as the guidelines explain, we don't want flamewar here, and we don't want ideological or political battle. The site exists for intellectual curiosity, and those things aren't compatible. There's a great deal of established moderation practice around this, if anyone wants to read past explanations:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
That doesn't automatically make a story like this off topic for HN. It depends on whether there's enough new information in a story to support a substantive discussion. In this case, the topic is not just "gender ideology", it's ongoing developments at universities and in the discourse at large. All of these are significant and interesting phenomena. For that reason I turned the flags off on this submission. That's also established moderation practice (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It requires a judgment call, of course, and we don't always make the right calls—but not making any would be an even worse call.
Of course it's commenters' responsibility to stick to the side guidelines if posting in such a thread. That means curious, thoughtful conversation and respect toward other commenters (and other people generally). Flamewar, flamebait, snark, name-calling, personal attacks and so on are not ok. People sometimes think that just because a topic is inflammatory it means they get carte blanche to spew what they will (e.g. "if you don't want me to post like this then you shouldn't allow this thread in the first place"). I call that argument "the topic made me do it", and not only is it false, the opposite is true: commenters here are under a greater obligation in cases like this, as the site guidelines make clear: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I think that's the problem with a topic like this on HN. There will be little learning going on, with many statements made with certainty by individuals that have never studied any of these concepts in any detail. The level of dismissal in the comments is itself a reason to pull the plug.
That said, HN is the watering hole for people with multiple political approaches on a fairly wide spectrum.
I think debate between these people is best facilitated by prompts and articles which raise multiple nuanced questions. And I think we do have useful debates at this point.
What isn't useful is something like an overt manifesto for one or another "side" on this political spectrum. And HN generally avoids such things.
But there's a kind of article, like this one imo, that is more or less a manifesto - an article that stake out a position and only give apparent gestures at balance. These have the same low-quality potential as manifestos. In important questions, it's unfortunate have a lot of uninformed posts even when they aren't flame bait.
In the case of the present article, I don't think readers of the article will come away with any greater understanding of "Gender Theory" and what gives rise to it and so it's not really a generator of good quality discussion even when people are not shouting at each.
Edit: Another thing I should add is that in the case of article that are effectively manifestos, upvotes and downvotes are going to gravitate to being just around the popularity of various positions and that too lowers the quality of discussion.
To which I can only respond: "so?".
There are a decent number of folks in my circles who are gender-nonconforming. I'll bet, sans decades-plus of social pressure, there are more in your kids' classes. What's the problem with asking? And why does asking make you characterize the effect upon higher education as "big"?
How is it "bigger" than a prof or a TA asking if I want to be called Edward, Ed, or Ted?
I just really want people in this thread to learn about emotional labor and to consider what they’re asking of marginalized people when they want to “discuss” the validity of their needs.
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See: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
n.b. "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Yes, gender ideology is pretty political (should it be?). But learning about it can obviously gratify one's intellectual curiosity if they're approaching it in good faith. So I don't think you're necessarily able to just make a blanket statement like "this isn't appropriate."
As for having much to lose, if you feel alienated by a good faith intellectual discussion -- regardless of topic -- that's your problem. This sort of thing is discussed daily in liberal arts programs across the US and in most of the world. You have to be able to discuss and learn about topics, even divisive ones, without losing your shit.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: And it looks like in the period of time it took me to type this half a dozen other people said the same thing.
So the next time one of my co-workers suggests we should do more to be inclusive when our software asks a user if they are male/female, I should tell them that gender has nothing to do with software development?
Trans people are a tiny minority that is only now coming into the public consciousness. We're going to have to work through a lot of ignorant discussions and bad faith actors to get to a healthier place.
Why are there so many gatekeeping people around that want to prevent discussions on topics that they aren't interested in?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm pretty close to no longer visiting here.
I know that was a bit off-topic but I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s okay to create distance between you and the things that bring you down. I’ve found so much interesting content through Hacker News and it would be a shame to throw that away just because the politics here don’t always align with my own.
There was a great deal of Trump discussion here, too. Such perceptions are prone to sample bias.
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When high-visibility articles on trans people show up, it's almost inevitably when our transness -- our ability to move through the world, to exist in certain spaces, or even if we exist at all -- is the subject of debate. I don't know how many cisgender folks here really get how fundamentally exhausting it is to have some part of your identity always be part of a debate, to be talked about or on rare occasions talked to, but almost never engaged with in a substantive way.
It's just fear fear fear, 24/7 -- simulating hypothetical nightmare worlds where trans rapists lurk in bathrooms and prisons, where every Olympic gold medal is taken by a man masquerading as a woman, roving hordes of red-faced trans activists screaming incoherently online at nice, well-meaning, harmless people who just want to learn.
I just wanted to put out there that the flattened, simplified perspectives trans people are portrayed with may not give you the whole picture, and I'd encourage people here to give perspectives from trans people the same (well, more, preferably) curiosity and interest that you might give to scare quotes and soundbites about prisons, bathrooms, and sports.
The Gender Critical Feminists do make up bogeyman stories about rapists in prisons, trans women disrupting breast feeding groups etcetera.
The Trans lobby though has also been guilty of the same sort of thing. E.g. I am no fan of professional sport (I hope this kills it dead) but to claim that trans women have no advantage over natal women is opinion not fact. The main fault line ion our society is gender, and to claim otherwise is simply wrong. (Not all Trans activists do that, just as not all Gender Critical Feminists are mean).
To me it is heartbreaking that this is not about fixing that fault line. No person has the right to take a interest in another person's gender unless they are their doctor or fancy them and are fussy. That is the issue we should address - how boys are raised to be violent sexual predators requiring female admiration and women are raised to be weak victims requiring male support.
That is getting lost, instead of helping fix the fault line, this debate (the excess of heat, deficiency of light) is making it worse.
As I said in another comment, this is far from a bogeyman story - there was already a case in the UK of a male-bodied convicted rapist being housed in a woman's prison because "she" decided post-conviction that "she" identified as female. She then went on to sexually assault multiple female inmates. Look up the name Karen White.
I put "she" in quotes not because I have a problem with respecting trans people's pronouns in general but because there have been suggestions that this particular criminal didn't really identify as trans and the whole thing was a cynical ploy to get access to easy victims.
Obviously the vast majority of trans people are not Karen White, but then this is the exact kind of thing that people warned would happen when self-id gets taken to its logical conclusion. Sweeping it under the rug isn't a good look.
Obviously there are transphobes out there who'll point to Karen White and disingenuously say "we're only trying to stop female inmates from getting raped!" when in fact that's just a cudgel for their real, more sinister agenda. But that makes it more important that decent people be allowed to discuss these issues in good faith.
If normal people aren't allowed to have an honest conversation about the thorny aspects of (say) gender self-id, the only people left to discuss it will be the lunatics who don't care about appearing respectable. They'll even be empowered, because it lets them say to their base "look! The authorities are trying to hide this from you!"
Strength and speed are not the sole metrics by which Olympic medals are awarded, either. Some people are taller than other people, some people are shorter, some are trans and some aren't. None of that categorically excludes trans women from womanhood, so I don't see why that would preclude them from entering into women's events. It comes back to a fundamental distrust of trans women as containing some vaguely cited percentage of lying cisgender men.
For a bad-faith actor to take advantage of the current system, they'd have to transition medically and socially, wait for years (in Laurel Hubbard, the potential first trans Olympian's case, at least five -- she quit in 2001, transitioned in 2012, then began competing in 2017), and then stay that way for as long as it would require to convince people that you've fully transitioned (could be decades or the rest of their life, depending on how they'd want their legacy to live on). The incentive structure is just completely out of whack. You'd have to fight tooth and nail for something you don't actually identify with, and live with the physical and psychological effects for years or possibly decades, plus living with the general harassment people would give you for perceiving you as trans and for trying to compete in the Olympics, and then what? You think with how stringent the IOC tries to be with doping that they wouldn't figure that one out? You think the backlash wouldn't be absolutely enormous?
What about this is "worst" case, anyway? We might get our first trans person who's even allowed to compete this year. It's a totally disproportionate response.