Science My transgender hobbyhorse

[DrZoidberg]

Here's a great documentary on transgenderism by Matt Walsh. It's called, "What is a Woman"

Matt Walsh is a conservative. When we reach a point in a cultural movement where conservatives start making more sense in a particular issue than progressives, that's a sign we're losing our way.

Putlocker - Watch What Is a Woman? Online free

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Enjoy

 

[bigfield]

OK, I skimmed through it trying to get to the meat of his argument.

The main message in the documentary seems to be that transgender activists have an absurd set of belief regarding gender, are doing harm to people. With a side helping of conservative men bravely standing up to them.

Walsh never manages to answer the titular question, "What is a Woman"? He alludes to some notion that people are men or women as determined by their biological makeup, but he doesn't actually declare which biological traits he believes are essential to being a woman (and which are essential to being a man).

While these conservatives are trying to invent some definition of woman that includes all cis women but excludes all trans women, I'd rather just deal with reality: there are people who believe themselves to be a different sex than the one assigned to them at birth, and we might as well accommodate them.

where conservatives start making more sense in a particular issue than progressives

Yeah, nah, that hasn't happened.

 

[DrZoidberg]

OK, I skimmed through it trying to get to the meat of his argument.

The main message in the documentary seems to be that transgender activists have an absurd set of belief regarding gender, are doing harm to people. With a side helping of conservative men bravely standing up to them.

Walsh never manages to answer the titular question, "What is a Woman"? He alludes to some notion that people are men or women as determined by their biological makeup, but he doesn't actually declare which biological traits he believes are essential to being a woman (and which are essential to being a man).

While these conservatives are trying to invent some definition of woman that includes all cis women but excludes all trans women, I'd rather just deal with reality: there are people who believe themselves to be a different sex than the one assigned to them at birth, and we might as well accommodate them.

where conservatives start making more sense in a particular issue than progressives

Yeah, nah, that hasn't happened.

It's even more basic. If trans people want to not be something and then be something else, what is it they are uncomfortable with being, and what are they more happy with being? What is your definition of a man and a woman? If someone is gender dysphoric, what needs to happen for them to be happy about themselves?

What are the discreet steps that need to happen and how do we measure success?

The queer theory position is that gender is fluid and subjective while simultaneously fixed and objective. That's an absurd position.

It's important to emphasise that he's not transphobic. What he's questioning is the theoretical foundation of queer theory and gender theory. They are incoherent.

He postulates that people's fear of seeming transphobic have made them go along with swallowing nonsense.

It's important not to be black and white about it. He has no problem understanding transgenderism and gender dysphoria because he has clear definitions of what a man and a woman is. Why queer theorists are for gender reassignment is, in the current progressive narrative, impossible to understand.

 

[bigfield]

It's even more basic. If trans people want to not be something and then be something else, what is it they are uncomfortable with being, and what are they more happy with being? What is your definition of a man and a woman? If someone is gender dysphoric, what needs to happen for them to be happy about themselves?

I see that people want to be perceived as one gender or the other, or maybe a something else entirely. People seems to be uncomfortable with the way they perceive themselves and how other people perceive them. For instance, a trans woman may not be happy with perceiving her body as a male body, or may want others to perceive them as a woman. There are all kinds of transgender people out there, so what needs to happen varies from one person to the next.

What are the discreet steps that need to happen and how do we measure success?

You mean for each person? It's going to be different for each person.

The queer theory position is that gender is fluid and subjective while simultaneously fixed and objective. That's an absurd position.

From my point of view, we have relatively stable social constructs for what is male and what is female, and we have a pretty systematic approach to assigning people a sex at birth, but at the same time we have plenty of people who don't conform to either of those genders, and there are people who don't conform to the gender they are assigned at birth.

It's important to emphasise that he's not transphobic. What he's questioning is the theoretical foundation of queer theory and gender theory. They are incoherent.

Who cares? He doesn't offer a better alternative.

He postulates that people's fear of seeming transphobic have made them go along with swallowing nonsense.

Stop the press, a conservative felt persecuted.

It's important not to be black and white about it. He has no problem understanding transgenderism and gender dysphoria because he has clear definitions of what a man and a woman is. Why queer theorists are for gender reassignment is, in the current progressive narrative, impossible to understand.

What are his clear definitions? I must have skipped that part of the documentary.

All I can find is that Walsh believes that a person must ovulate to be a woman, which seems to me to be nothing more than a failed attempt to find a way to define women that only excludes trans women. I have no idea what his definition of men is.

 

[DrZoidberg]

It's even more basic. If trans people want to not be something and then be something else, what is it they are uncomfortable with being, and what are they more happy with being? What is your definition of a man and a woman? If someone is gender dysphoric, what needs to happen for them to be happy about themselves?

I see that people want to be perceived as one gender or the other, or maybe a something else entirely. People seems to be uncomfortable with the way they perceive themselves and how other people perceive them. For instance, a trans woman may not be happy with perceiving her body as a male body, or may want others to perceive them as a woman. There are all kinds of transgender people out there, so what needs to happen varies from one person to the next.

Then how could health proffessionals possibly know what hormones and treatments to give those that are trans? How could we possibly measure the success of a transition? How does the rest of society know how to behave if they want to support trans people?

Norms can be good. Norms should ideally help guide us toward being supportive to one another. What norms do we want to have? No norms is not an option. Humans are creatures of ritual and habit.

Without any guidance and norms we became insecure. Nobody likes being insecure.

What are the discreet steps that need to happen and how do we measure success?

You mean for each person? It's going to be different for each person.

Ok, then what are they? Be specific. Unless you are specific you are hand waving.

The queer theory position is that gender is fluid and subjective while simultaneously fixed and objective. That's an absurd position.

From my point of view, we have relatively stable social constructs for what is male and what is female, and we have a pretty systematic approach to assigning people a sex at birth, but at the same time we have plenty of people who don't conform to either of those genders, and there are people who don't conform to the gender they are assigned at birth.

I wasn't talking about your common sense, which sounds solid. I was talking about the other sides arguments, the queer theorists

It's important to emphasise that he's not transphobic. What he's questioning is the theoretical foundation of queer theory and gender theory. They are incoherent.

Who cares? He doesn't offer a better alternative.

I think it matters.

He postulates that people's fear of seeming transphobic have made them go along with swallowing nonsense.

Stop the press, a conservative felt persecuted.

It's important not to be black and white about it. He has no problem understanding transgenderism and gender dysphoria because he has clear definitions of what a man and a woman is. Why queer theorists are for gender reassignment is, in the current progressive narrative, impossible to understand.

What are his clear definitions? I must have skipped that part of the documentary.

All I can find is that Walsh believes that a person must ovulate to be a woman, which seems to me to be nothing more than a failed attempt to find a way to define women that only excludes trans women. I have no idea what his definition of men is.

The documentary isn't about his definition of gender. It's about figuring out what gender theorists think. Which is just waffling

 

[bigfield]

Then how could health proffessionals possibly know what hormones and treatments to give those that are trans? How could we possibly measure the success of a transition? How does the rest of society know how to behave if they want to support trans people?

Norms can be good. Norms should ideally help guide us toward being supportive to one another. What norms do we want to have? No norms is not an option. Humans are creatures of ritual and habit.

Without any guidance and norms we became insecure. Nobody likes being insecure.

The average person barely has to think about it. You're not going to meet that many trans people, and of the ones you do meet, chances are you may not even know many of them are trans.

At my old job, one of my coworkers quietly remarked to about a customer he had just served: "think that might have been a man!" The customer in question was dressed as a woman but had some very manly features. Was she a trans woman? Was she a cis woman who looked manly? In the end it didn't matter because my coworker, despite feeling awkward, treated the person respectfully despite not understanding what he was seeing.

To me that illustrated the solution to this problem: we don't need new norms, we already have the right ones: Be polite to strangers. Be respectful to people you don't know or understand. Live and let live.

The documentary isn't about his definition of gender. It's about figuring out what gender theorists think. Which is just waffling

No, it's a documentary intended to promote Walsh's own position. He rubbishes his opponents' position, then declares himself to be righteous without making his case. It's just a bluff.

 

[Hermit]

 

[Bomb#20]

It's even more basic. If trans people want to not be something and then be something else, what is it they are uncomfortable with being, and what are they more happy with being? What is your definition of a man and a woman? If someone is gender dysphoric, what needs to happen for them to be happy about themselves?

What are the discreet steps that need to happen and how do we measure success?

The queer theory position is that gender is fluid and subjective while simultaneously fixed and objective. That's an absurd position.

It's important to emphasise that he's not transphobic. What he's questioning is the theoretical foundation of queer theory and gender theory. They are incoherent.

Religions don't need to be coherent. They need to give believers an excuse to feel superior to unbelievers.

He postulates that people's fear of seeming transphobic have made them go along with swallowing nonsense.

For seventeen hundred years Christians have been made to go along with swallowing a "monotheistic" religion with three gods by fear of being penalized for disputing it.

 

[Jarhyn]

It seems that the only folks who are trying to feel superior, or enable folks to feel superior, are those who try to exclude folks.

Superiority is fundamentally taking power over someone. Saying "by power of my strength, or the strength of the traditions of the past, or by the strength of my friends, you may not for your own sake do some thing to yourself."

That's what this is about.

This is about laws which prohibit people from being and acting as themselves, and making decisions as to who that will be.

People want to write and support and pass laws that criminalize gender transitions, and which will absolutely force young children to grow organs they do not want nor need for their own happiness (or to not grow them).

They wish to prohibit in any way access to even temporarily delay the onset of puberty.

That is what this is about. People who want women to be something they won't even design to describe.

The fact is all the folks competent enough to actually consider gender to that extent end up coming to the conclusion that the real dimensions that are available and important to the question do not restrict not invalidate transition.

I could talk about pregnancy theoretics till I'm blue in the face. We could go on and on about how to select a population of "pregnancy theoretics females" and "pregnancy theoretics males", and the venn diagrams where they intersect, and how these aren't the same populations as "men" and "women" and how there are still people that are outside all of these classifications for all sorts of reasons.

I could even go on for days or weeks or months about steroidal theoretics, and how this mixed in with the above, and how this has more applications in sports.

But rather I expect some people want to find some way to attack the thing they have clearly failed to even try understanding.

 

[Bomb#20]

Walsh never manages to answer the titular question, "What is a Woman"? He alludes to some notion that people are men or women as determined by their biological makeup, but he doesn't actually declare which biological traits he believes are essential to being a woman (and which are essential to being a man).

Trying to arrive at a definition by identifying essential traits is linguistically misguided. "Woman", like many words (including "chair" and "horse"), has an ostensive definition -- it means "one of those". A language learner learns what that sort of word means not by being taught criteria but by observing which things other people use it to refer to. Which things are in the "those" set is determined by the collective perceptions of the language community.

While these conservatives are trying to invent some definition of woman that includes all cis women but excludes all trans women, I'd rather just deal with reality: there are people who believe themselves to be a different sex than the one assigned to them at birth, and we might as well accommodate them.

There are people who believe themselves to be on a different level of personal connection to God than the one assigned to them at birth; we might as well accommodate those people too. But what does "accommodate them" mean? Refrain from persecuting them? That's no problem at all, for transwomen and prophets alike.

But for many such people it's also often psychologically important to them for those around them to perceive them to have the characteristics they believe themselves to have. That too is something we can accommodate them in; but this sharpens the question of what "accommodate them" means. Refrain from rubbing their noses in the reality that most of us don't share their perception of themselves? Go to an effort to conceal from them the reality that most of us don't share their perception of themselves? Go to an effort to conceal from their partisans the reality that most of us don't share their perception of themselves? Go to an effort to conceal from one another the reality that most of us don't share their perception of themselves? Go to an effort to conceal from ourselves the reality that most of us don't share their perception of themselves? Actually perceive them to be what they believe themselves to be? How far along that spectrum of accommodation are you arguing that we might as well accommodate them? And if you draw the line for transwomen and the line for prophets at different points, what are the grounds for that?

 

[Jarhyn]

Trying to arrive at a definition by identifying essential traits is linguistically misguided. "Woman", like many words (including "chair" and "horse"), has an ostensive definition -- it means "one of those". A language learner learns what that sort of word means not by being taught criteria but by observing which things other people use it to refer to. Which things are in the "those" set is determined by the collective perceptions of the language community.

This is in some schools called a "cluster concept": a concept from a cluster of ideas or examples as center point for an idea

In those same schools, one of which I happened to go to some years ago, we learned right along with the idea of "cluster concepts" what such a cluster concept definition could be used to leverage.

Inappropriate uses of cluster concepts yield themselves to the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

It is something that genital format exclusionists, (transphobes) fall into. It's one you are falling into, because one cannot say there is any "true" satisfaction of a cluster concept.

Cluster concepts, at times CAN imply the existence of an adjacent real idea or a set of ideas which interact together, a much more complicated relationship existing beneath the surface, but the cluster concept must be abandoned for that to happen. It can only be "generally" true, but that isn't actually being correct. It's quite literally being wrong.

Now, the cluster concept of traditional "man" and "woman" is giving way to more complex understandings, understandings which recognize it's just not important to have a genital configuration, when discussing whether someone is "one of those".

What matters for this sake is that you don't get to decide for someone else which of these they are. We as a society are coming to recognize that's something they decide.

You shouldn't make snap judgements about who someone is or what someone wants or whether they want it from you by the shape of their body or the clothes they put on it.

How's this for a cluster concept: it's in the neighborhood of "you still have to ask".

You can choose not to respect that, to some extent, but the respect you receive will come in kind.

You have a mouth, it makes words come out of it, just... Ask. Ask what people want. Then, if it's something that you do for other people who you don't even trust, you do it for them, too.

 

[Bomb#20]

Who's excluding whom?

Girls hold in pee, skip school so they won't have to share gender-neutral bathrooms with boys

According to recent reports, girls risk infections due to the anxiety of sharing bathrooms with boys.

scoop.upworthy.com

 

[Jarhyn]

Your article is clearly arguing to exclude "boys".

The people who are abusing them are the people telling them things about "boys".

Of course, never mind that you are the one insisting that these "boys" be forced to have their bodies filled with testosterone and manufacture sperm.

It's a problem of your own manufacturing.

Give the "boys" power to not have their bodies produce sperms and testosterone, and the problem goes away... All but the trauma and the abuse ALL girls get by being told that such "boys" aren't girls.

The only thing they aren't (and which many girls and women are not) are "pregnancy theoretic females".

 

[DrZoidberg]

Then how could health proffessionals possibly know what hormones and treatments to give those that are trans? How could we possibly measure the success of a transition? How does the rest of society know how to behave if they want to support trans people?

Norms can be good. Norms should ideally help guide us toward being supportive to one another. What norms do we want to have? No norms is not an option. Humans are creatures of ritual and habit.

Without any guidance and norms we became insecure. Nobody likes being insecure.

The average person barely has to think about it. You're not going to meet that many trans people, and of the ones you do meet, chances are you may not even know many of them are trans.

At my old job, one of my coworkers quietly remarked to about a customer he had just served: "think that might have been a man!" The customer in question was dressed as a woman but had some very manly features. Was she a trans woman? Was she a cis woman who looked manly? In the end it didn't matter because my coworker, despite feeling awkward, treated the person respectfully despite not understanding what he was seeing.

To me that illustrated the solution to this problem: we don't need new norms, we already have the right ones: Be polite to strangers. Be respectful to people you don't know or understand. Live and let live.

But that's not at all what this is about. Young people are inherently confused. They need guidance to grow up into healthy adults. How do we guide them. If we tell young kids, "just do whatever you feel like doing", that's not how to adult. We all need learn discipline at some point. That requires adults able to set boundaries to themselves and others. If we can do this for teaching maths and science, we can do it for sex.

Just saying to kids.. "do whatever you want" might be fine if you grew up in a standard well functioning home that fits social norms. But if you don't (like most people, because the Hollywood norms we have been fed are complete bullshit) we all need help. And I'm not talking about just trans people here. I'm talking about all people. We all need healthy norms and guidance. All of us. In order to support trans rights we've given up on offering support to anyone.

The new (let's call it) "pro trans" social paradigm is normless. I don't give much for the old Christian paradigm we're coming from. But can't we do better than no norms? And not to push this too far, but people who live outside of social norms (like trans people) need more help and guidance from society. Not less. Suicide rates among trans people are very high. We're clearly failing them. And have for a long time. And we're still doing that. Whatever we are doing, isn't working. So it's just stupid to dissolve all moral fabrics to benefit a group, that don't seem to be benefitting. What are we even doing?

I recall a conversation I had regarding ISIS and why people were travelling from the to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. And a very wise and clever friend said, "at least ISIS is for something. They have balls." If we are insecure and lost we need something to grab onto. Something that can give us direction and guidance. Western liberals seem to be afraid to be for anything. It's like our culture has been reduced to being against stuff. I personally don't see the point of that. And neither can conservatives. Which, I assume, explains why they're conservative.

I recall John Waters whining about the state of gay culture. He said gay culture has been embraced and loved to death. It used to be formulated in opposition to the mainstream. Bringing gays together. But now... he says... there's nothing bringing gays together. There's just Grindr.

And not to ramble on too much but in his Atheism 2.0 TED talk Allain de Botton says that the problem with liberal education (and liberalism) is that we don't offer guidance to anyone today. If people today feel lost and in need of guidance we just give them more information, and tell people to figure it out on their own. Well... that's not how humans work. We're creatures of habit and ritual. If we have patterns in our lives that aren't working, we need help and guidance from others. I think the liberal world has completely abdicated from this responsibility. It's like we're afraid of telling other people that we think they're screwing up or making mistakes. In a normless society how could you possibly understand when your drug addict friend needs an intervention?

The documentary isn't about his definition of gender. It's about figuring out what gender theorists think. Which is just waffling

No, it's a documentary intended to promote Walsh's own position. He rubbishes his opponents' position, then declares himself to be righteous without making his case. It's just a bluff.

I've read plenty of gender- and queer theory. I don't think Walsh is wrong. I'm in the queer club. It's my people.

But yes, Walsh is conservative. So he's speaking as a conservative. I'm not a conservative. I can separate that which he is saying which is conservative values from the rest. It's a ten second snippet where he addresses a council meeting. The rest I think is solid.

 

[DrZoidberg]

It seems that the only folks who are trying to feel superior, or enable folks to feel superior, are those who try to exclude folks.

I agree. But I think we have a different view on who is being excluded.

Superiority is fundamentally taking power over someone. Saying "by power of my strength, or the strength of the traditions of the past, or by the strength of my friends, you may not for your own sake do some thing to yourself."

That's what this is about.

I also agree about this.

But again... I think we disagree on who is being excluded.

This is about laws which prohibit people from being and acting as themselves, and making decisions as to who that will be.

People want to write and support and pass laws that criminalize gender transitions, and which will absolutely force young children to grow organs they do not want nor need for their own happiness (or to not grow them).

They wish to prohibit in any way access to even temporarily delay the onset of puberty.

I also agree about this. But this fundamentally comes down to basic beliefs and views on parenting. Some parents are shit parents. There's no two ways about that. But all kids are lost and clueless. So they need guidance from adults. Preferably their own parents. It sucks if one's own parents are ill equipped to emotionally support their children. A problem, regrettably, gay and queer children often have had to struggle with. But what's the alternative?

I come from Sweden, a country where parents have almost no say on how their kids are raised. The government has full responsibility for raising your kids. If you have your own ideas about how your kids should be raised, they will be taken away from you. As a Swedish parent your duty is to feed and house your kid up until they're 18. And that's where their responsibilities end. And Swedes, in general (including me) are happy about this. This is a collectivist culture where individuals are expected to conform to cultural norms.

This, pretty extreme, set of cultural values, has one good thing. We've had to seriously think about how the state should intervene. We've left it completely up to science and the scientific community to decide on what all children need, including trans kids.

In Sweden if kids want to transition there's a bunch of hoops they need to jump through to transition. But once they're through the government will pay for all of it, and handle it. There's plenty of American trans people who move to a Scandinavian country to transition, and once they're done they move back to USA. I know and have met several.

It seems to be working. In Scandinavia we have very little debate and drama from the trans community. They, overall, seems to be happy about the current state of things.

The problem isn't the trans people. It's the rest of society. In a misguided attempt to be supportive of the trans community we're attempting to dissolve all norms and moral guidance. For the benefit of who exactly? For trans people?

That is what this is about. People who want women to be something they won't even design to describe.

What? It's not a question of making people into something they're not. If that's your take away you haven't paid attention.

The fact is all the folks competent enough to actually consider gender to that extent end up coming to the conclusion that the real dimensions that are available and important to the question do not restrict not invalidate transition.

What? I can't understand what you are trying to say.

I could talk about pregnancy theoretics till I'm blue in the face. We could go on and on about how to select a population of "pregnancy theoretics females" and "pregnancy theoretics males", and the venn diagrams where they intersect, and how these aren't the same populations as "men" and "women" and how there are still people that are outside all of these classifications for all sorts of reasons.

Again... I don't understand what you are trying to say.

I could even go on for days or weeks or months about steroidal theoretics, and how this mixed in with the above, and how this has more applications in sports.

What?

But rather I expect some people want to find some way to attack the thing they have clearly failed to even try understanding.

I'm trying to understand what you are saying. It's not going so well for me.

 

[bigfield]

But that's not at all what this is about. Young people are inherently confused. They need guidance to grow up into healthy adults. How do we guide them. If we tell young kids, "just do whatever you feel like doing", that's not how to adult. We all need learn discipline at some point. That requires adults able to set boundaries to themselves and others. If we can do this for teaching maths and science, we can do it for sex.

Just saying to kids.. "do whatever you want" might be fine if you grew up in a standard well functioning home that fits social norms. But if you don't (like most people, because the Hollywood norms we have been fed are complete bullshit) we all need help. And I'm not talking about just trans people here. I'm talking about all people. We all need healthy norms and guidance. All of us. In order to support trans rights we've given up on offering support to anyone.

The new (let's call it) "pro trans" social paradigm is normless. I don't give much for the old Christian paradigm we're coming from. But can't we do better than no norms? And not to push this too far, but people who live outside of social norms (like trans people) need more help and guidance from society. Not less. Suicide rates among trans people are very high. We're clearly failing them. And have for a long time. And we're still doing that. Whatever we are doing, isn't working. So it's just stupid to dissolve all moral fabrics to benefit a group, that don't seem to be benefitting. What are we even doing?

I don't think that's a side effect of supporting trans people. In particular it's long been my impression that society hasn't had much interest in setting down positive norms for men, which means boys form some stupid ideas about what it means to be a man (especially from Hollywood). That's been a problem since last century, at least.

I have my own ideas about how boys should be taught to behave, and what values they should hold, and I think these things could be taught to boys even in an environment with queer people, including boys who might be questioning their identity as boys.

I don't believe in teaching people "do whatever you want" a la Brad Goodman. I think there are important moral lessons that children need to learn, standards of personal conduct that we should teach them to uphold, that have virtually nothing to do with their personal gender identity or sexual preferences.

I recall a conversation I had regarding ISIS and why people were travelling from the to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. And a very wise and clever friend said, "at least ISIS is for something. They have balls." If we are insecure and lost we need something to grab onto. Something that can give us direction and guidance. Western liberals seem to be afraid to be for anything. It's like our culture has been reduced to being against stuff. I personally don't see the point of that. And neither can conservatives. Which, I assume, explains why they're conservative.

I don't see progressives that way: on many of the topics I care about, progressives have very strong ideas about what needs to be changed. In fact, I think progressives tend to convey a much stronger sense of purpose and direction than conservatives.

And not to ramble on too much but in his Atheism 2.0 TED talk Allain de Botton says that the problem with liberal education (and liberalism) is that we don't offer guidance to anyone today. If people today feel lost and in need of guidance we just give them more information, and tell people to figure it out on their own. Well... that's not how humans work. We're creatures of habit and ritual. If we have patterns in our lives that aren't working, we need help and guidance from others. I think the liberal world has completely abdicated from this responsibility. It's like we're afraid of telling other people that we think they're screwing up or making mistakes. In a normless society how could you possibly understand when your drug addict friend needs an intervention?

I will have to watch that TED talk soon, as I find Alain de Botton to have a lot of good ideas. However, my overall impression is that de Botton believes in teaching people strategies to achieve emotional maturity and personal happiness, for instance with ideas from Stoicism. He's not really about instructing people on social norms, beyond perhaps basic good manners.

I agree with you regarding liberalism. We're all basically expected to not only look after ourselves, but teach ourselves.

Some people might see it as wishy washy but I would be happy to see schools to reserve a large percentage of class time to teach the sort of things that de Botton espouses. School should not be focused solely on skilling up the next generation of workers, but training young people to cope with the world in healthy ways and form harmonious relationships.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Here's a theory. Being a woman or a man, has for most of history, been fairly straight forward.

In the olden days, for farmers, there was one very narrow path to follow or you and your community would risk starving to death. So for these people quibbling about gay rights and trans identity is idiotic. If the choices is follow cultural norms or die, forcing you to get married, have kids and do your duty is hardly a sign of an abusive society. And this wasn't that long ago. So it's easy to see where the traditional social norms come from. All cultures have also traditionally had (if you are rich) career paths for gay people. So our reluctance to support queers has obviously always been about money. Nothing else. Certainly not evil.

Cultural norms allowing normal people to primarily focus on self development and self actualization, rather than mere survival, only started becoming economically possible (for society in general) in the 1950'ies. Which explains why this is when the women's and gay rights conversation seriously take off.

So back in the olden days being a woman meant one, very specific, thing. Now (thanks to the ever faster whirling wheels of capitalism) that role has been allowed to change. But to what? That's not nailed down yet... clearly. This documentary does a good job of showing that. If gender studies professors struggle with doing it, what chance do normal people have?

Religion doesn't help. The west has a Christian heritage. Christianity and Christian culture is fundamentally sex phobic. Making it difficult for people in the west to talk about sex and sex theory without loading it with irrelevant nonsense. Something this documentary did an excellent job of showing.

 

[DrZoidberg]

But that's not at all what this is about. Young people are inherently confused. They need guidance to grow up into healthy adults. How do we guide them. If we tell young kids, "just do whatever you feel like doing", that's not how to adult. We all need learn discipline at some point. That requires adults able to set boundaries to themselves and others. If we can do this for teaching maths and science, we can do it for sex.

Just saying to kids.. "do whatever you want" might be fine if you grew up in a standard well functioning home that fits social norms. But if you don't (like most people, because the Hollywood norms we have been fed are complete bullshit) we all need help. And I'm not talking about just trans people here. I'm talking about all people. We all need healthy norms and guidance. All of us. In order to support trans rights we've given up on offering support to anyone.

The new (let's call it) "pro trans" social paradigm is normless. I don't give much for the old Christian paradigm we're coming from. But can't we do better than no norms? And not to push this too far, but people who live outside of social norms (like trans people) need more help and guidance from society. Not less. Suicide rates among trans people are very high. We're clearly failing them. And have for a long time. And we're still doing that. Whatever we are doing, isn't working. So it's just stupid to dissolve all moral fabrics to benefit a group, that don't seem to be benefitting. What are we even doing?

I don't think that's a side effect of supporting trans people. In particular it's long been my impression that society hasn't had much interest in setting down positive norms for men, which means boys form some stupid ideas about what it means to be a man (especially from Hollywood). That's been a problem since last century, at least.

We totally agree. 100%. I think we need those norms. We need new healthy norms both for me and women.

I have my own ideas about how boys should be taught to behave, and what values they should hold, and I think these things could be taught to boys even in an environment with queer people, including boys who might be questioning their identity as boys.

Now it's getting interesting. How do you think boys should be taught to behave? I do agree with you. 100%

I don't believe in teaching people "do whatever you want" a la Brad Goodman. I think there are important moral lessons that children need to learn, standards of personal conduct that we should teach them to uphold, that have virtually nothing to do with their personal gender identity or sexual preferences.

Again... we are in full agreement. 100%

I recall a conversation I had regarding ISIS and why people were travelling from the to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. And a very wise and clever friend said, "at least ISIS is for something. They have balls." If we are insecure and lost we need something to grab onto. Something that can give us direction and guidance. Western liberals seem to be afraid to be for anything. It's like our culture has been reduced to being against stuff. I personally don't see the point of that. And neither can conservatives. Which, I assume, explains why they're conservative.

I don't see progressives that way: on many of the topics I care about, progressives have very strong ideas about what needs to be changed. In fact, I think progressives tend to convey a much stronger sense of purpose and direction than conservatives.

I think you misunderstand me. Yes, progressives have very strong opinions on what needs to be changed. They're very clear on what we need to change from. But it's left completely open what we're supposed to change to. The progressive world is IMHO almost completely lost now. It's a ship without a rudder.

I think the general message of progressives today for men is "be like a woman". That's not going to work. Men don't think like women. We're similar. But not the same. We're going to fail. If we want to change society the todo list needs to be realistic.

And not to ramble on too much but in his Atheism 2.0 TED talk Allain de Botton says that the problem with liberal education (and liberalism) is that we don't offer guidance to anyone today. If people today feel lost and in need of guidance we just give them more information, and tell people to figure it out on their own. Well... that's not how humans work. We're creatures of habit and ritual. If we have patterns in our lives that aren't working, we need help and guidance from others. I think the liberal world has completely abdicated from this responsibility. It's like we're afraid of telling other people that we think they're screwing up or making mistakes. In a normless society how could you possibly understand when your drug addict friend needs an intervention?

I will have to watch that TED talk soon, as I find Alain de Botton to have a lot of good ideas. However, my overall impression is that de Botton believes in teaching people strategies to achieve emotional maturity and personal happiness, for instance with ideas from Stoicism.

He's not really about instructing people on social norms, beyond perhaps basic good manners.

His school of life project is precisely this project. I'm not an Alain de Botton fanboy. But I do approve of his methods. This, I think, is exactly how progressives need to behave if they seriously want to change anything.

The School of Life | Therapy Services

The School of Life is a global organisation helping people to lead more fulfilled lives through useful resources and tools.

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The best example of the vacuousness of contemporary liberalism is the "Occupy Movement". I never managed to figure out what they wanted, other than in the most general/abstract of terms. Yet, they were embraced by the entire progressive establishment. I think that's a telling sign of where liberalism is right now.

I agree with you regarding liberalism. We're all basically expected to not only look after ourselves, but teach ourselves.

We seem to agree on a lot of things

Some people might see it as wishy washy but I would be happy to see schools to reserve a large percentage of class time to teach the sort of things that de Botton espouses. School should not be focused solely on skilling up the next generation of workers, but training young people to cope with the world in healthy ways and form harmonious relationships.

I agree 100%

Not to derail this too much but another bad habit we (people in general) have is thinking that we know how to teach kids better than teachers. It's almost like any random guy thinks they master the science of pedagogy. Or as a psychiatrist friend put it, "we're not going to be able to teach children to think for themselves. That's not how children's brains work. That has to wait until puberty. If we introduce it too early we just make them stressed and insecure".

 

[Bomb#20]

Your article is clearly arguing to exclude "boys".

The people who are abusing them are the people telling them things about "boys".

Of course, never mind that you are the one insisting that these "boys" be forced to have their bodies filled with testosterone and manufacture sperm.

It's a problem of your own manufacturing.

Give the "boys" power to not have their bodies produce sperms and testosterone, and the problem goes away... All but the trauma and the abuse ALL girls get by being told that such "boys" aren't girls.

The only thing they aren't (and which many girls and women are not) are "pregnancy theoretic females".

You have obviously formed a completely wrong impression of what's going on in those schools. The article was not unclear; you evidently have a reading comprehension problem. Exactly which part of "gender-neutral bathrooms" don't you understand?!? Read the article again. And try taking off your ideological blinders first. They are not talking about trans children being allowed to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with. They are talking about abolishing gendered bathrooms and making all children use the same bathrooms regardless of their sex or their gender identity. The problem is not girls being forced to choose between holding in their pee and sharing a bathroom with trans people. The problem is girls being forced to choose between holding in their pee and sharing a bathroom with cis boys.

That's what's wrong with your post overall. As to specifics...

The people who are abusing them are the people telling them things about "boys".

Oh for the love of god. Women and girls do not feel uncomfortable undressing and peeing in front of men and boys because somebody told them there's something wrong with boys. Do you even know any women?

Of course, never mind that you are the one insisting that these "boys" be forced to have their bodies filled with testosterone and manufacture sperm.

Quote me, you serial purveyor of strawman arguments. I have insisted on nothing of the sort; and these boys you call "boys" would fight like mad if you tried to stop them from manufacturing sperm.

It's a problem of your own manufacturing.

Look, I get it. You are tribal to the core. To you, your outgroup are interchangeable parts. Stop thinking like that. It's a stupid way to think and it's an evil way to think. Do not tell me I manufactured something that I didn't manufacture just because you happen not to give a rat's ass about the fact that I and whoever did something you think caused the problem are two different people.

Give the "boys" power to not have their bodies produce sperms and testosterone, and the problem goes away...

The problem doesn't go away, because the boys have no wish to be girls. Literacy: look into it.

All but the trauma and the abuse ALL girls get by being told that such "boys" aren't girls.

The trauma and abuse happen because in their ham-handed effort to accommodate the negligible number of boys who want to be girls, the schools have made all the bathrooms safe-havens for the much larger number of cis-male sexual harassers and have sent in a still larger number of cis-males who are only peeing with the girls because idiot administrators told them to, but who consequently just by being there make the bathrooms horrible for girls.

Making all the bathrooms gender-neutral is misogyny in action. You appear to have very little empathy for women -- you focus like a laser on the interests of the population you care about and have no problem with anyone else being thrown under the bus for the sake of those higher on your ideological stack.

The Taliban told women it was unacceptable for them to be treated by male doctors, and also that it was unacceptable for them to go to school long enough to become female doctors. The fact that this left women totally screwed hardly mattered to them; what mattered to them was following their diseased ideology to its logical conclusion. Don't be a Taliban.

The only thing they aren't (and which many girls and women are not) are "pregnancy theoretic females".

Show your work. There appear to be quite a lot of things such "boys" aren't.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Your article is clearly arguing to exclude "boys".

The people who are abusing them are the people telling them things about "boys".

Of course, never mind that you are the one insisting that these "boys" be forced to have their bodies filled with testosterone and manufacture sperm.

It's a problem of your own manufacturing.

Give the "boys" power to not have their bodies produce sperms and testosterone, and the problem goes away... All but the trauma and the abuse ALL girls get by being told that such "boys" aren't girls.

The only thing they aren't (and which many girls and women are not) are "pregnancy theoretic females".

You have obviously formed a completely wrong impression of what's going on in those schools. The article was not unclear; you evidently have a reading comprehension problem. Exactly which part of "gender-neutral bathrooms" don't you understand?!? Read the article again. And try taking off your ideological blinders first. They are not talking about trans children being allowed to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with. They are talking about abolishing gendered bathrooms and making all children use the same bathrooms regardless of their sex or their gender identity. The problem is not girls being forced to choose between holding in their pee and sharing a bathroom with trans people. The problem is girls being forced to choose between holding in their pee and sharing a bathroom with cis boys.

That's what's wrong with your post overall. As to specifics...

I have a problem with people saying "bathrooms". As if that's what it is about. Making bathrooms gender neutral is a non-issue. Everybody will poop in private stalls. At no point will women, even attempt, to use the urinals. And if they do, who cares? It's smoke and mirrors.

What we're talking about is changing rooms. Now, that's an actual issue. And that's culturally coded.

I remember being on holiday in Hungary with my Hungarian ex-wife. We went to a spa. When I met her outside by the pool I remarked "the showers was full of weirdos showering with their underwear on". It turned out that this is a cultural norm in Hungary. Nobody goes around fully naked, even in all-male changing rooms. I was just walking around the men's changing rooms with my dick proudly swinging as if I wasn't a psycho predatory pervert, traumatizing everybody. I was cluelessly violating a taboo.

Stuff like this matters.