The Rise of Gender Critical Homophobia

endless_assfluff · 2022-04-17T22:17:18+00:00

Thank you! I hate trying to talk to people about controversial topics online, and logged in after years just to upvote this.

Agreed---it's possible to be GC and a homophobe, but there's nothing tying the ideology of GC feminism to homophobia the same way there is with TRAs. That's why this author had to call out specific people rather than focusing on the core ideas. Leaning on logical fallacies is a personal no-no and while I would like to know ASAP if I have harmful beliefs, 'this lady said something bad on Twitter' isn't giving me anything to work with because the GC beliefs I do hold have nothing to do with what mean ladies are saying elsewhere.

(God, I'm not logging back into this account because I do not want to deal with the emotional reactions certain people will have to this, but I get the sense this author wasn't 100% motivated by wanting to make the world a better place for gay men. I think part of him wanted an excuse to not reflect on radfem ideas that don't benefit him.)

Though I haven't seen this behavior personally, I'll keep an eye out and challenge homophobic ideas when they pop up. But I'm also wary of people who expect women to listen and be empathetic to men and then throw tantrums when asked to reciprocate.

endless_assfluff · 2021-08-02T18:44:28+00:00

Ok, sure, I do call both men and women dude, but thanks for clarifying! It makes sense that after an experience like that, you'd be turned off from radical feminism as a whole. Totally. I think what happened here is that you want to distance LGB from radfems as a whole movement after your crappy experience, and what I want to happen is for people in this sub to think about radfems as individuals, some of whom are driven by hate and some who spend a lot of time keeping their beliefs in check and thinking about how to express them effectively to others, rather than a hive mind who are just not worth engaging no matter what. That's why I said I wasn't interested in hearing about your reasons: I assumed you'd interacted with radfems and it ended badly, it just wears me out to be lectured because of something other people did that I don't support & I'm working to change.

Yeah, I'm taking that possibility into consideration too. I do spend a lot of time reflecting on my own beliefs and motivations. And I know you have no reason to trust my take on my own motivations at this point. That said, I'll tell you what my interpretation is, and you're free to look at the data we both have available to us, which is my comment history, to draw your own conclusions. So. A major part of my personality is that I get massively stressed out by conflict or having any aggression directed at me; I also get stressed out when talking to people who have a motive to interpret everything I say in the worst possible light. My comment history should reflect this. Every time I say something that might incite conflict, I disappear for months.

Starting conflict for the sake of feeling morally superior would be rough for that type of person. That is, in an environment like the internet where the norm is to be combative and try to 'win,' the person being challenged will feel like the challenger is trying to insult them in some way, and is likely to double down and lash out at the challenger. That's a huge disincentive for people who are scared of aggression, don't really care about 'winning,' and already accept that some of their core beliefs must be faulty.

The only time I chime in is when there's something in the discussion that feels off and I think I have some shot at redirecting it. Here, I decided to engage because it seemed like you were frustrated with the state of things and had good intentions, and---most importantly---were talking politely with other people, some of who disagreed with you. Sure, I'll admit to rolling my eyes at the sentence writing off radfems as a group, but it's how I've learned to expect to be treated, and I don't hold it against anyone personally b/c it's safe to shit on radfems in like 99% of spaces. But that's just one statement, and you said a bunch of other things that were interesting. So I thought we might be able to have a nice discussion on strategizing about how we could approach conflict with people we don't agree with, but not about changing your mind on radfems. That's why I specifically asked not to talk about it. Unfortunately, it backfired. Next time I won't even bring it up in the first place.

Interesting take about the discussion. Thank you for still being open to those ideas! Because the ideas are really the important part, not the person who proposed them. Any mistakes advocating for them effectively are my fault. (This exchange has taught me a lot, so I'm grateful for that. I'm probably also going to let this sit for a year and then re-read it to see what else I can learn.)

endless_assfluff · 2021-08-02T17:57:46+00:00

Yeah... I regret it and think it was a mistake to bring it up in this case. My intention here was to try and separate the idea of radical feminism as an evil, man-hating hive mind from individual people who might be able to talk productively with OP who just happen to be radfems. It was meant as an invitation. But it's fair that OP should need some time after a bad experience with radfems, so I'm dropping it.

(The relevant training would be logic, by the way, and having credentials in one field doesn't mean I have no training in social sciences or medicine. Unfortunately, sometimes people get really offended by this because they think me saying that logic is a field of study that you need formal training in means I'm calling them illogical or irrational, when my real intention is to motivate them to develop those skills. So that's another reason not to bring it up.)

endless_assfluff · 2021-08-01T23:59:39+00:00

LMAO, you're making my day! I'll say this: at least someone else is getting something out of the random-ass comments.

endless_assfluff · 2021-08-01T23:37:59+00:00

About making generalizations against one category: right?! I've been pretty lucky in avoiding the bad eggs of radfem circles. It does seem to me sometimes that people can get defensive about the ideas radfems propose, and rather than recognizing that reaction as getting defensive, they point to the meanest and angriest of us so that they can use it as an excuse to dismiss the whole group offhand. Or interpret what we say in the least charitable way because the movement is already stigmatized. But whatever. Eh.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify.

endless_assfluff · 2021-08-01T23:27:32+00:00

Fair enough point about the doctors, dude. That's another reason I don't bring it up: fallacy of authority. If you don't want to engage with radfem circles, it's no skin off my back and totally your choice; just know that you're right that this discourse should be happening, and I promise you it's happening elsewhere. But I'll drop it because it seems like you have some history. It's true that many people find radical feminism because of a traumatic event, which causes anger---I won't dispute that---and I'm trying to use the same strategies for calm discourse in radfem groups so we can lessen that association. Hope it helps.

I do hope you see the distinction between "you're too stupid for discussion" and "it seems like you're interested in rhetoric, I am too, here are some resources that might help you develop a stronger strategy." I wouldn't have tried to start a conversation if I thought you were stupid. Rather, you seem frustrated with me because, like you said, you feel as if I'm pushing something on you that you're not interested in. That's understandable. I'd be very grateful if you revisited this thread when that frustration dies down and maybe later decided to read about emotional intelligence. But again, you're under no obligation, it's all cool.

endless_assfluff · 2021-08-01T18:09:15+00:00

Why, you're too kind! I spend a lot of time working on those things, and hope to encourage others to do the same :) And thank you for this comment. It's draining to have discussions online where aggression/combativeness is the norm, and positive interactions and positive feedback mean the world to me.

endless_assfluff · 2021-08-01T17:59:53+00:00

I'm also not interested in the reasons why you want to distance from GC/radical feminism. Please don't waste time explaining it to me.

^{^{^{^}}}

That being said, I don't think you're not worth my time! On the contrary, I posted what I did because I can see you're trying to improve and might appreciate a push toward studying emotional intelligence, which is exactly what one would do to develop the skills you say you value in the original post. If you reread my statement, it clearly says "I am not interested in discussing this one particular thing," not "I don't think you're worth my time."

I don't know whether there are other non-radfem LGB academics. All I know is what's going on in my one cohort, and that if I have a super-dry essay from a philosophy professor or something from PubMed to post, it goes on the GC sub and not here. I don't like pushing my credentials online because it's usually not relevant, but to put things in perspective, I'm a mathematician, and am far from the only radical feminist I know who holds a PhD in a relevant area and likes doing the type of measured analysis you're talking about. And it's tiring for me to try and engage with people who don't understand what I'm saying---but think they do, and surprise, surprise, it's always something devoid of nuance & easier to argue with than what I actually said---or who have the impression that radical feminists are angry extremists, so much so that I often have to go months without commenting.

Anyway. What I'm saying is, there's a huge correlation between people who work to develop the skills you value and people who realize that radical means 'root' and not 'fueled by blind hate.' That's why so many high-level discussions are happening elsewhere and in conjunction with radfems. I hope you can join us someday.

endless_assfluff · 2021-08-01T00:25:51+00:00

While I've talked about emotionally intelligent discussion strategies in the past and agree that we could spend more time strategizing, changing our behavior in a casual setting like this to center the needs of people outside the group comes with its own problems. There's something to be said for a space where people are allowed to vent.

Put more clearly, if you say "UUUGH, men are trash," and a friend responds "aCKShelLy you shouldn't say that because not all men," that doesn't mean the friend is more logical, knowledgeable, or level-headed, just that they lack empathy/emotional awareness to some degree. That is, in context, the purpose of the statement was to communicate that something distressing happened to you and you wanted to talk about it, not to literally write off half the population as buffoons. Regardless of whether the friend in this case is 'correct,' it's clear that anyone starting a conversation like that wants the other party to listen and validate their emotions. And instead they get lectured. The natural response to that is to feel hurt or defensive, since the aggrieved party is being told they don't deserve emotional support unless they communicate their problem in the 'right' way, something that takes loads of maturity and practice to do. That's why people will respond poorly to someone coming into a space where they're venting and telling them they can't do that anymore.

The best solution would be having a separate, less trauma-driven space reserved for talking strategy and rhetoric. Unfortunately, all the specialized academics I know working on this problem are radical feminists, so they wouldn't be welcome. (I'm also not interested in the reasons why you want to distance from GC/radical feminism. Please don't waste time explaining it to me.)

endless_assfluff · 2021-07-30T18:40:16+00:00

Lol, yep. Dubious correlations pop up all the time with a cohort of 6, especially if the goal is to hunt for similarities rather than to prove those similarities actually mean something. Funny thing, it also goes in the opposite direction if we're talking experiments and not people: one time a bio lab ran 24 trials of an experiment that normally gets repeated only 5 or 6 times, and another lab accused them (BRUTAL nerd drama) of running more and more trials because the initial 6 didn't give them the P-values they wanted.

endless_assfluff · 2021-07-30T00:52:19+00:00

Scientist here; will do a more complete breakdown when I don't have other papers to read but wanted to share some preliminary thoughts. (Also, Kai, I pinged you on Twitter! I wanna be friends!)

You and sneeuweekhoorn nailed that the MTF brain scan is inconclusive and that if there were truth in the matter, brain scans would be used as a diagnostic criterion. And you're right, the conclusions the authors are drawing are far too strong for the data they're presenting. I'll try to keep it short.

The question the authors are considering in this review paper is not "do male and female brains exist?", it's "well DUHHHHH male and female brains exist; can we identify what makes brains male or female?" Right off the bat, if a study assumes a certain hypothesis is true, it cannot prove or disprove that hypothesis. That's like if a paper came out that said "okay, we think children's diets influence what kind of TV they like. We found that kids who ate more bacon preferred cartoons, and kids who ate more bread preferred live-action shows," and then the media picked it up and said "look!! They found a correlation, so that must mean their initial assumption was correct!" Makes no damn sense. In order to convincingly argue that prenatal factors determine---or even influence!---an individual's gender identity, one would have to at least cite a study that actually does rule out the null hypothesis (that is, that they do not). To say nothing of correlation and causation.
The study is disingenuous in the way it pits pre- and postnatal factors against each other. In this and at least another paper, they repeat this sentence: "there is no evidence that one’s postnatal social environment plays a crucial role in gender identity or sexual orientation." A careless reader might interpret that as "alas, many bigoted scientists have tried for years to claim some environmental connection to gender dysphoria, but they have all failed," when what the author really means to say is "due to lack of evidence, we cannot rule out environmental causes as a factor that influences gender identity." Again, gender is a social construct and social constructs aren't introduced in utero, so the first case makes no damn sense whatsoever.
And like---can't something be influenced by both nature and nurture? It's not like they're mutually exclusive. But these authors claim that because they found prenatal factors "that influence gender identity that may result in transsexuality," surely gender identity cannot possibly be affected by any postnatal factors.
Omg, that reference they cited for Table 2 links back to a ANOTHER review paper with almost the same name written two years before by the second author. Dying. Gimme a sec.
The Programmed gender identity is irreversible section; just the whole thing. Putting aside---with some difficulty---that this section consists of a single case study and ends with citations to two papers from this lab, one of which is the aforementioned earlier review paper and the other of which has jack all to do with gender identity, they sure are throwing around words like "irreversible" and "permanent" despite having no evidence that this is the case for gender identity.
This:

In addition, a female INAH3 and BSTc have been found in MtF transsexual persons. The only female-to-male (FtM) transsexual person available to us for study so far had a BSTc and INAH3 with clear male characteristics (Figs 3 and 4).

LMAOOOO. Can't have error bars on a cohort of 1.

7. This is not the original authors' fault, but because I'm guessing this male/female brain theory is being used to justify all sorts of weird stuff, it's worth mentioning that this paper doesn't say anything about how GID should be treated or how the number of CRH-immunoreactive neurons in the PVN makes someone prefer blue over pink, for example. I'm just gonna go out on a limb and guess that people are using this paper to argue in favor of/against things that are not in the paper.

To wrap it up, yes, there are probably some sex differences in the brain and yes, brains are complicated, but there's a HUGE gap between what this paper says and what people want it to say. 'Sex hormones influence brain development prenatally' is such a far cry from socially relevant conclusions this paper didn't draw, such as 'trans people are the gender they say they are' or 'women are idiot dum dums who are bad at math.' But part of this is on the authors for basing part of the review on incredibly strong claims they couldn't substantiate.

Like I said, this is preliminary, but I'm happy to go into more detail if prompted. (Edit: formatting)

endless_assfluff · 2021-07-16T19:19:41+00:00

Two words: GENDER EIGENVALUES.

endless_assfluff · 2021-07-16T19:19:06+00:00

AT NO POINT do I say that lesbians who don’t sleep with people if they do not want to are bigots.

...

I am inviting lesbians to consider that, if a woman rejects another woman because this woman has a surgical vagina, then that’s (to a smaller or bigger degree) driven by prejudice.

...

By this I am not accusing lesbians who don’t sleep with trans women of being bigots, every last one of them. I am inviting each person to explore themselves, in their heart, and see if they find pockets of prejudice.

Dude. Gaslight harder.

Come to think of it, this person's argument seems to be "I didn't specifically use the word 'bigot.'" Another case where the label is valued over the word's actual meaning.

endless_assfluff · 2021-07-04T23:20:20+00:00

Oh, goodness, I'll try to keep it short, but the strategy I prefer right now is to treat this situation like an abusive relationship between gender ideology and the people who promote it. We may have already realized the parallels between the way abusers defend their beliefs and the way gender ideologists defend their beliefs, but they haven't yet. So the idea is to (a) learn what manipulative reasoning looks like to ensure we're not using any of these tactics ourselves, (b) share these resources with the person you want to talk to so that they develop the tools to recognize when they're being manipulated, (c) listen to what they have to say/validate their emotions, which encourages them to do the same with you, and (d) once you're on the same page, gently point out using "I feel" statements when gender ideologists use harmful rhetoric.

As in, maybe one day you find an article about how manipulators get their way by convincing everyone that their emotions are the only ones that matter, when the honest approach would be to take the experiences and feelings of both parties into account. That is, because emotions are information, and ignoring them is lying by omission. You think, "oh, man, that's going to put some pieces together for a lot of people," and share it. Now some people you interact with might get interested in figuring out ways to tell if an argument is manipulative. You, also, can use what you've learned to demonstrate a more productive discussion style. Then, by promoting truth and education, you're not critiquing the ideas themselves, just the way they're presented, which can motivate people to fix that reasoning in order to make their arguments more convincing.

Once someone understands what tactics are manipulative and why, you can start gingerly objecting to certain common practices the gender ideology movement relies on. There's a lot of detail here that I have to think through.

"I don't know, that tweet that said 'TERFs can choke on my girldick' rubbed me the wrong way. I don't think it's ever okay to threaten an opponent with violence."

"Doesn't it feel kind of dangerous to keep silencing TERFs? You have to know what your opponent is saying in order to properly respond to them. I'm concerned that if I went head-to-head with a TERF, they could blindside me with arguments I've never heard." [it's very likely here that the other person will 'splain a strawman] "Oh man, that's rough. Where'd you find that?"

"I'm upset by people calling that woman 'evil' for not wanting to see a penis. I think it makes us look insensitive when we shame someone for their feelings, and that weakens the point. Isn't there a way to object to this without emotionally invalidating her?"

"It sounds like you need to vent. Did something happen?" [e.g., in response to "[group of people] is evil," showing that acknowledging and talking through the anger is a better way of addressing it than screaming at people online. to be fair, following this one up is super hard unless you've got EQ for days]

Of course, you still have to continue the conversation in a respectful manner, and of course, some people are too far gone and will demonize you at the slightest hint of questioning. At least when you encounter those, you can point to their sketchy rhetoric ("I don't think name-calling/belittling/emotional manipulation/ignoring evidence has a place in a productive discussion, but I'm worried that challenging this will upset you. So I'm not really sure what to say here"). They're still going to be pissed and take it personally, but any third parties are going to see one person throwing a tantrum because the other wanted to adhere to a code of conduct. And that's not a good look for anyone.

Once people start adopting this sensitive style of conflict resolution, it's easier for them to listen to those who have been harmed by gender ideology, and it's more likely they'll be able to see their ideological opponents as humans rather than 1D villains whose only goal is to hate. That's the real answer to "why should I question gender ideology?": it's hurting marginalized groups in ways many of its supporters probably didn't intend. It's a true test of character for someone to admit they supported something that goes against their core beliefs---in this case, to be conscientious and kind. But I've met liberal feminists who are capable of that. I'm guilty of falling for it myself. I had all the pieces but wasn't motivated to put them together until an AGP transbian harassed me. So that's why I say this strategy is designed for people who prioritize empathy, because it requires someone to put goodwill for others over their selfish desire to be right.

Some helpful resources are Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft, The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, issendai.com, and all of EQI.org, especially the page on emotional invalidation. EQI.org is a damn game changer.

I'm considering writing an essay and posting it on the GC saidit, but something still feels incomplete. Gonna mull it over for a couple more days. Thanks for asking, though!

endless_assfluff · 2021-07-03T23:47:29+00:00

Holy shit, this is terrifying. Thank you for the updates.

endless_assfluff · 2021-07-03T20:48:27+00:00

Yeah, same here! I fully believe in the kind of approach you're describing, where the goal is to listen to people and understand why they believe what they do, then use that to fine-tune your own position. What brought me here in the first place was empathizing with people on both sides. I've had so many trans friends that I also have detrans friends, and don't want what happened to them to happen to anyone else.

It upsets me that most gender-ideology supporters seem to be well-meaning, but perceive any criticism of the movement as a bad-faith attack on someone's feelings ("I was hurt, so you must have meant to hurt me") rather than concern about nasty consequences the individual supporters may not have intended. Lately I've been reading about emotional validation/how to set someone at ease during a conflict, and have been fine-tuning an emotionally intelligent strategy for talking about these things with empathetic libfems.

My point is, I understand why you would feel bad about joining the TERF brigade, and want to reassure you that there are others out there who don't like the combative approach. You just might not see us as much. For me personally, addressing any kind of conflict---especially standing up for myself---takes so much energy that it drains me for months, and so you'll rarely see me comment here even though I read every day. But there's at least one person here who thinks you're totally on the right track! Did anything happen lately that rubbed you the wrong way, or do you just feel exhausted from having to process other people's anger and frustration?

endless_assfluff · 2021-06-09T00:04:53+00:00

I talk about how the language the gender ideology movement chose to use made it possible to gaslight marginalized groups about their own sexual boundaries.

(Because this is a language issue, I may use words I don't personally agree with using, but that help disambiguate for people familiar with woke terminology.)

People have shared characteristics and it's okay for them to have groups where they talk about their shared experiences. Home country, pet ownership, Yu-Gi-Oh fandom, whatever. There are people who identify with the concept of masculinity, the concept of femininity, neither, or both. That's fine. They can all get together and talk about identity. There are people who are born with the organs required to produce sperm but not the organs required to produce eggs, and there are people born with the organs required to produce eggs but not the organs required to produce sperm. That's also fine. They should be able to get together and talk about sexual-organ-related issues, or shared experiences, or how the perceived ability/lack of ability to gestate young has affected them, or whatever.

Sex and gender are different, sure. So we should have clear, unambiguous terminology that does not conflate the two. Instead, what happened is that the gender ideology movement took words that referred to sex and decided they now meant something else. When people say "trans women are women" or "trans women are men," what makes these statements true or false is the definition of 'man' or 'woman' the speaker is using. The first is saying "people who identify with femininity identify with femininity," the second says "people with the organs required to produce sperm but not the organs required to produce eggs are people with the organs required to produce sperm but not the organs required to produce eggs." The core disagreement is over what the words 'man' and 'woman' should mean.

What they did is like redefining 'prime number' from 'any number greater than 1 with exactly 2 positive divisors' to 'any number anyone says is prime,' insisting that all theorems involving 'prime numbers' still apply for the new definition, and vilifying anyone who not only uses the original definition of 'prime number,' but who dares to mention divisors at all. Whole fields of mathematics would vanish overnight. But what makes formerly-known-as-prime numbers significant isn't that they have a special name, but that they all share a core property of having exactly 2 positive divisors. Furthermore, this group of numbers still exists even if we aren't allowed to talk about it.

(Side note: mentioning intersex conditions in this context is like saying "but what about 1?" Okay. Even if the multiplicative identity exists, composite numbers are still not prime. I say this not to exclude intersex people from any group---not an expert in that---but rather to highlight which specific fallacy this argument uses.)

Why not let the word that meant "people born with the organs required to produce eggs but not the organs required to produce sperm" keep its original meaning and create a new word that means "people who identify with the concept of femininity"? As you all know, it's so they can retcon any previous usage of the words "woman" and "man," etc., to have been specifying groups by gender all along, when they originally specified groups by sex. And also to paint people as bigots for using the "wrong" definition of words they made ambiguous. Bottom line---that bathroom doesn't say "woman" on it because it's for people with this or that identity, it's because bathrooms are a setting where sex organs become relevant and some people don't feel comfortable exposing their sex organs, even semi-privately, in a space the opposite sex is allowed to enter. That is, the word "women" referred exclusively to AFAB people when the decision to label these spaces was made, and so should continue to specify that same group of people. And changing what words mean isn't going to change anyone's sexual orientation.

What this use of language demonstrates is that the gender ideology movement is causing harm its supporters may not have intended. Rather than creating their own words, they took them away from someone else. And this has the side effect of preventing people from setting boundaries related to biological sex. If it is not, then why is it "hateful" for AFAB people to have communities that center themselves, but "not hateful" for people who identify with femininity to do the same thing? Why not label bathrooms "AMAB" and "AFAB"? Why do they allow "feminine-identified people exclusively attracted to feminine-identified people" to have a word but not "AFAB people exclusively attracted to AFAB people"?

I then say, I don't support gender ideology because I want people to be able to express themselves independently of gender roles and I also want people to respect the personal sexual boundaries of others. I think people from outside a group shouldn't be allowed to control the language people inside that group use to talk about themselves. And we can't do that with an ideology that says it's unethical to acknowledge that humans have gonads.

(I've been successful with this, but honestly, that's mostly because I refuse to have discussions with bad-faith actors. My biggest roadblocks have been people with no understanding of formal logic and people who think it's okay to use logical fallacies to justify their beliefs. It's rough to address, and dealing with that kind of thing tires me out so hard I rarely interact with people online.)

endless_assfluff · 2021-04-15T22:58:57+00:00

Yes, and I would also consider myself to be a radical feminist. And I also don't buy into the argument that trans women are evil rapist men who want to degrade and destroy women. That is because this is not what gender-critical or radical feminists believe. These straw men get repeated because gender-critical or radical feminists are easy groups to shit on: many people think the word "radical" indicates a failure to consider nuance and middle ground, and many people, although they might not like to admit it to themselves, also dislike the word "feminism."

I'm going to use an imperfect metaphor to illustrate what I'm thinking. Liken saying "all men are rapists" (or that any subgroup of men are rapists) to saying "all odd numbers are prime." Switching it around, "all rapists are men" is like "all prime numbers are odd." None of these statements are true. What radical feminists are actually saying is "most rapists are men," which is like "most prime numbers are odd." (Of course the ratios are off here because it's not like there's one female rapist and an infinite number of male ones. You get the point.) We're also saying "this is an important thing to take into consideration if we want to prevent people, both men and women, from being sexually assaulted." Now if you don't trust any data that suggest rape and sexual assault crimes are more likely to be committed by men, or if you don't think we should take biological sex into account when discussing sexual assault, at least those are both a step above misrepresenting the argument.

I don't have the data on sexual assault committed by TRAs or trans women, so I won't comment on the relative prevalence of that. But we don't need every single TRA/trans woman to be a perv for it to be a concern. Just some. Just a subset. Just enough to say "hey, what should we do to prevent this problem" rather than "this NEVER happens."

I could go into more detail about what line of thinking and introspection led me to radical feminism, but no one asked that so I'm going to cut it short.

What I'm saying is, people siding with any ideology have beliefs that may conflict with each other and that they may have arrived at through any number of ways. Some gender-critical or radical feminists arrived at our beliefs through an interesting reasoning process, but it's not productive to talk about them in a space like this where many people hear the words "radfem" or "GC" and assume they must be wrong in some stupidly obvious way like the odd-number example I described above. So because your original post has a sentence crapping on GC/radfem beliefs, the replies you're going to get are mostly going to be from people who also feel comfortable crapping on GC/radfem beliefs to some degree.

For my part, I have no clue whether writing this out was worth the time, but I hope it was.

endless_assfluff · 2021-04-09T20:08:10+00:00

That's my title, and that whole situation is goddamn hilarious. Declaring yourself a doctor is one of the fastest ways to announce you have no idea what's going on. Maybe I'm just jaded, but so many people have heard I have a PhD in math and responded with "oh, I was also good at calculus in high school" that I interpret it as coming right out and saying "I'm an idiot and if you mess with me it'll fly right over my head." It is offensive, but it's hard to be offended by someone that stupid.

endless_assfluff · 2021-03-20T19:09:53+00:00

My immediate reaction on reading the title was "this sounds like something I read in Why Does He Do That?", so it was nice to see it featured so prominently.

For anyone interested, you can access Why Does He Do That? here and the Mr. Sensitive part begins on page 170.

endless_assfluff · 2021-03-09T04:19:24+00:00

And now r/SuperStraight's been set to private.

I don't see any action on s/SuperStraight yet, any idea where they're going to organize? Those guys are hilarious.

Edit: They're back! But I hope there's a contingency plan in the works.

endless_assfluff · 2021-01-26T18:23:45+00:00

I play Pot of Greed, which allows me to draw two genders at once!

endless_assfluff · 2021-01-17T22:03:26+00:00

Hey, I don't know if you need to hear this, but this random internet person is backing you 100%. You're right: you're not hateful, ignorant, an asshole, ridiculous, or crazy, and you're not alone in feeling frustrated and scared for standing up against these things. Your voice is absolutely valuable. I could see you making a huge difference for young, vulnerable GNC men.

I have no doubt that your reasoning is airtight and your heart is in the right place. But if talking rhetoric and strategy with someone else would help your confidence, do feel free to message me. (We both know people like your brother are going to bring up BS arguments that have no place in a good-faith discussion anyway, so, uggggh. Can't do much about that.)

(Also, You're Kiddin', Right? is hilarious.)

endless_assfluff · 2021-01-14T02:41:03+00:00

Okay, I'm used to word confusion with this crowd, but what does she think 'heteronomy' means? Is she saying she's not autonomous? What?

Carton of what?

endless_assfluff · 2021-01-14T01:01:32+00:00

Mr. Cute Anime Girls had a crush on me and I thought it would be a good idea to let it slip in conversation that while I was bisexual, I was only looking to date women at the time. Ohhh man. That backfired. His face lit right up. So yeah, the harassment was unwanted sexual comments and it was motivated by the standard boundary-stomping we all know and love.

Yeah, I'm in a less shaky position than most because mathematicians at least understand that "any integer greater than 1 has a unique prime factorization, BELIEVE ME OR I'LL KILL MYSELF!!! TRANS PRIMES ARE PRIMES!!" isn't a valid proof technique. All the gender-pronoun people in my department are good natured. They just aren't motivated to question trans ideology. They believe the intention of this movement is to combat bigotry, and have no reason to suspect that it harms marginalized groups. I can have a productive discussion with highly trained woke people if I focus it from that angle: it's not ok for Mr. Anime to sexually harass me regardless of gender identity, it's understandable that I would be creeped out by his preoccupation with anime lesbians even after he transitioned, and it is not exclusionary if someone sets and enforces sexual boundaries. If I focused instead on how it makes no sense to re-define a word and then pretend all properties of the previous word also apply to the new definition, they'd probably shut me down.

The sad thing is, I'd love to participate in public science discourse, but I don't even feel comfortable saying anything anymore because of the dynamic you identified. For sure, the "science and reason" crowd tends to focus on the parts of science and reason that are rewarding to them, like finding studies that support their pre-existing views, and less on the painful, challenging parts. Studying logic in a formal setting can cause someone to realize how much of their belief system is not actually based on sound reasoning. Because how could they flawlessly implement something they've never studied? But that makes people feel stupid, or insulted, or makes them get defensive, so there's less of an emotional payoff to that than there is for chastising your opponents for being ignorant.

So what happens is I see a discussion around a paper or a meme that uses some kind of reasoning; I think, hell yes, I love papers and reasoning; I mull it over and, if applicable, expand on the idea---or try to gently point out some faulty reasoning if I see it, hoping like a lunatic that OP will be like "yeah, thanks, I consider myself a rational person and therefore am glad to correct faulty reasoning when it appears"---and then some layperson who couldn't prove the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic even if someone showed them how to do it 15 minutes earlier word-slaps me with the fury of a thousand suns for daring to question SCIENCE. So I don't say much online. Yeah, it's just not a good time for anyone.

(Of course I don't mention in these discussions that I'm Dr. Assfluff. That's tacky and counts as an appeal to authority. It also makes it way funnier when someone tries to explain the paper to me.)

Oh, and I don't have to interact with Mr. "It's okay to peek through bathroom stall cracks if you can't tell whether someone's in there" anymore.

endless_assfluff · 2021-01-13T19:21:40+00:00

I'm a mathematician and sadly, many of my colleagues do have pronouns in their email signatures. Everyone played along when the creepy, anime-obsessed AGP grad student transitioned and harassed me.

Learning how to think is step 1. Step 2 is realizing that no matter how well-trained you are, no one fully understands objective reality, so you still hold beliefs and assumptions you didn't arrive at through airtight reasoning. And sadly, "I'm a scientist so everything I believe must be well reasoned" works against that.

And I'm not saying I'm immune to this: I'm bad at standing up for myself and would have been shunned by my colleagues if I dared to publicly challenge the dogma. It took being harassed by the lovely individual above for me to realize this practice was worth questioning.

(Edit: grammar)

endless_assfluff · 2020-12-27T20:55:38+00:00

I'm making a distinction between "being a bigot" and "performing bigoted actions." Bigotry, a state of mind, is not, and it's hard for even an individual to detect bigotry in themselves, let alone for an observer to detect it (edit: parallelism error, whoops). Bigoted actions are an observable thing that can be measured. That's true. The issue arises when you choose a set list of bigoted actions to measure, you're going to miss several---and introduce bias, since you're only measuring things that are on the list.

Oh, sorry, no. I don’t believe in stereotypes on the basis of innate or superficial characteristics.

Time for the basement metaphor again!

Say there are three people who own houses with basements. A friend visits the first person's house, goes down to the basement, and says "hey, your basement's dirty," to which person 1 immediately responds "Oh no, I'm sorry about that! I'll take care of it right away." Another friend visits the second person's house, goes down to the basement, and says "hey, your basement's dirty." Person 2 gets defensive. "What?! My basement can't be dirty! I'm a clean person! My house is clean! Where do you get off, accusing people of having dirty basements like some kind of neat-freak victim," and then never goes down to check. Because of course it's clean! And the third person goes down to the basement on their own before the friend visits, to try and get out any cobwebs beforehand, and invites their friend to hunt down any specks of dust if they so desire. So at the end of the day, who's most likely to have a clean basement?

You see what I'm saying? Making the claim "I don't believe in stereotypes" is an example of "sorry, my basement's clean, I don't have to look into that because I clearly don't do it." Similarly, simply being aware of confirmation bias and other concepts doesn't guarantee that you're not falling victim to them. By asserting these claims and getting defensive when they're challenged, you're creating a blind spot in your reasoning. If you are concerned with the truth of whether or not your claims are rational, rather than that what you are asserting appears rational and sounds reasonable, you don't say "I am rational," but rather ask "Am I rational?"

The use of a logical fallacy promotes critical thinking only if the person using it is capable of saying "you're right, this was a logical fallacy, and me having used it was wrong. I'll go back and see if I can defend or formulate this argument without using logical fallacies, and if not, I have a reason to abandon it." Which doesn't happen often on the internet. Yes, it is possible for one to defend a true statement using fallacies, but if the person can only defend a statement using logical fallacies, and refuses to reflect on the origin of the argument, it's not productive.

Don't see how it's an appeal to authority? Here:

Orwell said a lot of things that I think are right.
Here's another thing he said.
Since he said a lot of things that I think are right, maybe this other thing he said was right.

Arguments that assume statements have more value depending on whose mouth they come out of are either appeals to authority or ad hominem, or maybe a form of genetic fallacy if that's how you prefer to classify things. Like, if a hobo screamed at you on the street that women were more bigoted, you probably wouldn't mention where you heard it. Oh, and I didn't mean to use 'argument' in the colloquial sense; I didn't realize you would interpret it that way and didn't mean to accuse you of being combative. My bad. Replace it with 'assertion' if that's better. And it is an assertion, because the phrasing "I can’t help but wonder if there is a problem with women?" is loaded.

Because your response was to double down, restate your assertion while refusing to admit to using faulty reasoning, and condescend to me, I don't think it's a good use of my time to continue having this discussion. If you've started from the assumption that this statement has merit and refuse to consider otherwise, it's not really asking a question in good faith, is it? Even if you say it is.

endless_assfluff · 2020-12-27T08:51:53+00:00

This statement is (a) impossible to prove and (b) counterproductive to focus on.

It's impossible to prove because it's ill-posed, first of all: is he saying that every single woman in existence is "more" bigoted than every single man, or the level of bigotry shown by women on average is higher than the level of bigotry shown by men on average, or that there is some fundamental connection between bigotry and producing eggs? And how do you measure something like bigotry? Especially if, as the character seems to be claiming in this case, it's not absolute and there's a sliding scale of bigotry that someone can score higher or lower on. Psychological tests can hint at a correlation but not outright prove it, the same way that IQ is a crappy measure of intelligence and good performance on standardized tests doesn't guarantee future success.

Second, suppose you adopt this belief or its opposite and meet a new woman who you know nothing about. Is it productive for you to decide "she's a woman -> she must be a bigoted drama queen" or "she's a woman -> she must not be a bigoted drama queen" before even knowing a single thing about her? No. Statistics don't apply to single cases. That is, posing the question in its current form already makes an unfounded assumption about causality. "Is there a problem with women?" isn't the right question. "How do people develop bigoted views and sustain bigotry, and if men and women are treated differently, how does this influence the way they show bigotry?" is a better one to ask; an even better, imo, would be "Is there a problem with biases in my perception---for example, do I believe there's something wrong with women because I've been socialized to be more critical of women's behavior than men's?"; and the best one is "Why am I going to stress out about not knowing something I can't really answer in the first place?"

Since these ill-posed, general statements are based on anecdotal evidence or improvable assumptions, the people who hold and defend them usually do so not because they actually care about the truth, but because they have something to gain if they can convince themselves they're true, like a sense of intellectual superiority. By pulling something out of his ass about how young women are the worst, the character Orwell wrote gets to justify his misogyny, avoid any painful introspection about his own behavior because he's not the real problem, and autofellate himself for being better and smarter than appx. half the population.

By the way,

However, because so much of 1984 has continued to hold true...

isn't good reasoning. It's an appeal to authority. Here. You might find it helpful to reread what you've written here and figure out whether you've used any other fallacies in your reasoning, and I'd particularly like to point you toward this one. This might also help. Have fun.

endless_assfluff · 2020-11-24T03:29:41+00:00

Thanks for asking this! I feel like this is something we don't talk about enough, because I see some commenters on this sub repeatedly bashing radfems as angry---we're on your side, my dudes---and wanted to look into that more.

So I think telling radical feminists not to be misandrist is the wrong battle to fight. In this case, if the posters above truly meant to say "Good, let [all men, every man in existence, every single one] rape each other" rather than "Good, let [the subset of men who happen to be rapists] rape each other," for example, that's a weak statement and they shouldn't have said that.

That being said, I'm white, and when my friends say "white people suck," my instinct isn't to lecture them about reverse racism. It's to say "yeah, they do," and let them vent. Other people have identified these kinds of statements as emotional responses to stuff the utterer shouldn't have had to deal with in the first place. I agree. It's not my place to tell my friends how they're allowed to respond to systemic racism. The real issue we're both up against isn't a person but a false belief system: end racial stereotyping and all the other baggage that comes with it, and "reverse racism" ends as well. Likewise, here, if we work together to end misogyny, misandry should die with it.

But instead, I often see radical feminists being blamed for things they have no control over. If I said that 90% of sexual-assault perpetrators are men, would you be angrier at me for being misandrist, or at the asshole rapists for making everyone else look bad? (Not you in particular. Anyone reading this.) Would you feel compelled to say men get sexually assaulted too/women can be the perps too, or would you say, yeah, we shouldn't let those jerks get away with that? Would you assume I'm erroneously using statistics to argue in favor of biological determinism, or assume that I understand statistics perfectly well and just want to strategize about preventing sexual assault because I'm on Team People-Should-Not-Be-Assaulted-Regardless-Of-Gender? If a woman is saying questionable things because she's a victim of assault, would you be angrier at the woman, or the man who terrorized her so thoroughly that she's now scared of all men? You know? I mean, I don't know what your answers would be, but these are all questions I asked myself at some point. I changed my behavior when I didn't like my answers.

My point is, it's true that saying things that could be construed as generalizations isn't productive, and neither is telling radfems to police their language in order to cater to men. You're right that men might stay away from these spaces because they're offended. What I'm disagreeing on is the culpability: I think radfems could do everything and say everything perfectly and people would still hate on them because the label "radical feminist" carries negative connotations. The bad apples are an excuse to justify that belief. As long as people keep trying to paint radfems as the problem, rather than misogyny, homophobia, or lies, there's going to be unnecessary infighting.

(For the sake of disclosure, I'm not particularly offended by this post, since I've done a crapton of epistemological soul-searching to ensure my beliefs in this area are well-founded and don't stem from hatred. You also seem reasonable and I thought this was a discussion worth having. I hope I haven't come off as combative here and I apologize if I have.)

endless_assfluff · 2020-11-10T18:53:52+00:00

treating folks with uteruses like walking fetus incubators

Argh. They're so close.

I'm totally adding "fetus incubators" to my list of things to call Folx with Uteruses (or Folx Who Once Had Uteruses But Don't Anymore For Assorted Reasons) in discussions with my wokie friends. Bleeders, birthing bodies, fetus incubators... perfect.

endless_assfluff · 2020-11-10T01:54:58+00:00

Cavemen knew about biological sex? Did they? I thought biological sex was a conspiracy invented by white colonialists to antagonize indigenous communities who lived in a magical gender utopia, and who apparently shrugged their shoulders and drooled on the floor every time someone asked where babies came from.

endless_assfluff · 2020-11-10T01:43:22+00:00

If you don't mind me asking, what have other people done that you've found helpful during your recovery? I have a female friend on the spectrum who trusts me, who has confided that she is questioning her gender, and am walking the razor-thin line of nudging her away from the trans while not outing myself as an evil angry radfem.

(And please don't feel pressured to respond! If it's too much to ask, or if you don't think your experience was comparable enough to give advice on this, I understand.)

endless_assfluff · 2020-11-10T01:32:42+00:00

That's horrifying. I regret not speaking up, but recently saw a discussion on a forum I frequent where some people were slamming the Nordic model because it made life harder for the---I wanna say, like, eight max?---sex workers who chose sex work as a career because it's super-empowering and totally not rape. Others did acknowledge that decriminalizing prostitution increases sex trafficking, but in the context of presenting decriminalization and the Nordic model as a difference in priorities. As if the bureaucratic troubles of a very, very small minority were comparable, in any way, to what the hundreds of thousands of trafficked women and girls experience.

I hope personal and professional accounts like this one get them to stop thinking about consequences in the abstract.

endless_assfluff · 2020-11-07T21:34:20+00:00

"What's the end goal of all this" is an interesting question to ask. I wonder whether there's an ideological component to it where the end goal is avoiding culpability.

By that I mean, there's this recurring theme in abuse/oppression where the oppressed party says "please, stop, you're hurting me!" and the oppressor's response is "well, you're hurting me too! It hurt when you accused me of mistreatment!" At that point---and I assume you're perfectly familiar with this, don't want to over-explain---the oppressor is the one responsible for stopping the mistreatment, but they don't have any intrinsic motivation to do so. Not only would they have to willingly give up power, they'd have to acknowledge that they've been engaging in immoral behavior. And that's emotionally rough. It's even rougher to admit that you were at fault and that someone you consider inferior was right all along.

Of course, this often arises from a form of black-and-white thinking where the oppressor sees any criticism as a personal attack. They think sexism is bad---of course sexism is bad! And because they think sexism is bad, they can't possibly be sexist! Wait, now people are saying this action is sexist? Why, that can't be true! People they know who aren't sexist do that all the time! Those people saying it's sexist are a bunch of vindictive nutters.

But that approach is epistemologically weak. That is, say there are three people who own houses with basements. A friend visits the first person's house, goes down to the basement, and says "hey, your basement's dirty," to which person 1 immediately responds "Oh no, I'm sorry about that! I'll take care of it right away." Another friend visits the second person's house, goes down to the basement, and says "hey, your basement's dirty." Person 2 gets defensive. "What?! My basement can't be dirty! I'm a clean person! My house is clean! Where do you get off, accusing people of having dirty basements like some kind of neat-freak victim," and then never goes down to check. Because of course it's clean! And the third person goes down to the basement on their own before the friend visits, to try and get out any cobwebs beforehand, and invites their friend to hunt down any specks of dust if they so desire. So at the end of the day, who's most likely to have a clean basement? (My apologies if I come off as over-explaining; I'm assuming you know this perfectly well. I just enjoy the metaphor.)

So who's more likely to be sexist/racist/homophobic? The person who says "of course I'm not sexist/racist/homophobic! I know that sexism, racism, and homophobia are bad!" or the person who says "yeah, I've done sexist/racist/homophobic things. Now I know exactly what the problems with my actions are, and I owe it to the people I hurt to be better." But then again, who's going to be perceived as less sexist/racist/homophobic by the uninitiated? The second person directly admitted to problematic behavior, after all. I've seen people who call themselves feminists fall into this trap, too.

Anyway, my point is that many of the things TIMs focus on echo the oppressor's perception of how the oppressed class is behaving. The Oppression Olympics, for example. To the oppressor, their victims aren't victims at all, but rather using their oppressed-class status to label whole groups of people as Bad. Now, if he chooses to, a man can transition from "evil man" to "literally the most oppressed"---and suddenly, not only is he no longer in the Bad group, he gets to do the fun bit of telling everyone how hard he has it and how everyone who's not trans should feel guilty about themselves.

Also, many of the things TIMs label as oppression have to do with being accused of misbehavior. It's "men fear that women will laugh at them, women fear that men will kill them," in a different package. Look at the dangerous and violent behavior they accuse radfems of perpetuating: saying transwomen are men. Saying the laws they promote are giving sexual predators easier access to women. Saying that other people are allowed to have sexual boundaries and you can't get around them by lying. Not validating them hard enough. Stealing women's spaces, movements, and identities. So, several ways of saying "stop, stop, your basement is dirty." Odd that physical violence isn't an issue... and that they're more concerned with chastising radfems than the conservative men who are actually killing them.

Their treatment of radical feminists is in line with the idea that if someone does something bigoted once, they are automatically a bigot now and forever and must be chastised. Make a mistake once, say something problematic once and it leaves a black mark on your soul forever, and admitting any fault means you know you're a bad person and deserve it. And lastly, the belief that membership in an oppressed group implies that someone is 100% the victim, always, and so therefore doesn't need to reflect on how their own actions could be problematic.

So I think part of the allure for some is a twofer: behaving the way they think oppressed people act, where the end goal is to scream down, browbeat, and accuse the oppressors rather than to get the boot off their neck; and removing themselves from the privileged groups that have a responsibility to reflect on their own behavior. Because the truth is, yes, they are bigots, and the basement's collecting dust while they claim "I can't be bigoted! I'm trans! I'm vulnerable!" It's all a big misdirection.

That's my take, anyway.

endless_assfluff · 2020-11-07T05:21:15+00:00

So it seems that I've gotten permanently banned from r/lgbt for "transphobia" I literally posted this same post verbatim there.

AAHAHAHAHA MY SIDES

endless_assfluff · 2020-11-07T05:15:09+00:00

Yes, that's exactly the point I was making!

endless_assfluff · 2020-11-07T01:13:56+00:00

It hasn't been debunked because it's unfalsifiable. To debunk it, the claim we would need to prove is "nobody who has existed, ever, has not been romantically attracted to one group of people and sexually attracted to another." And we can't test that.

I'd say the bigger issue is lumping romantic attraction into the definition of 'orientation,' because it undermines the research done to show that sexual orientation is inborn and immutable.

First off (and this is the slightly weaker argument), by the definition the author gives in the first article you linked, the 'desire to have a committed, romantic relationship with someone' can be influenced by social factors, while sexual orientation cannot. Both sources try to distinguish between romantic and nonsexual attraction, but they don't specify the difference between close, affectionate friendships and nonsexual romantic relationships. I'd argue this is because the idea of a nonsexual romantic relationship is a social construct. If not with sex, where do they draw the line? Because if they don't, two couples showing the exact same nonsexual behavior could be considered friends or partners depending on how they choose to label themselves. And then it's a societal label, not a descriptor of any meaningful difference in behavior. If the definition they have for a 'romantic relationship' is divorced from sexual attraction, the factors that lead them to label a relationship as 'romantic' are societal, and so the decision is a social one. Not one with any relation to biology.

And the second bit (stronger argument) is that 'romantic orientation' can change, as the author of the first article admits. She says, "my orientation is really fluid and changes often." That's quite a vague statement: is she saying her romantic orientation changes often, but her sexual orientation does not? Or that her romantic and sexual orientation both change? Or that only her sexual orientation changes? Because the statement she made could mean any of those things.

That sort of semantic confusion, placing 'the desire for a romantic relationship' or 'tender feelings' at the same level as sexual orientation, does one of two things. It either lends a false gravitas to the idea of romantic-but-nonsexual attraction---suggesting that romantic and sexual orientation are both well-studied and empirically established concepts, when really it's just sexual orientation---or it suggests that sexual orientation is a mutable social choice just like 'romantic orientation' is. Bleh in either direction.

I feel compelled to clarify that the difference between romantic attraction, sexual attraction, and no attraction is indeed ill-defined in these sources, but if you go that route, the opposing party can just continue to assert their definition as if you "didn't get it." Now, "how the heck do you differentiate between 'tender' and 'passionate' feelings when both of these are subjective, where, in contrast, sexual arousal is an observable physiological response?" is a tempting question to ask because it indeed makes no sense. But if you ask that, you're opening yourself for a condescending explanation of the words 'tender' and 'passionate,' and then you're gonna have a nice forehead-sized hole in your wall.

And then there are logistical issues caused by elevating romantic attraction over the other 562438645234 forms of attraction suggested by the author of the first article. "Attraction can be infinitely more complicated than that" calls the author's understanding of infinity into question, and it also suggests that if romantic attraction can be used to describe one's orientation, why not include sensual, aesthetic, platonic, etc., affection as well?

So that's the strongest counterargument to the idea of romantic orientation I can come up with right now. While these labels might help an individual classify themselves the same way a Which Spice Girl Are You? quiz would ("learning about this 'label' gave me the vocabulary to understand and describe my complicated, difficult feelings"), grouping them with sexual orientation is legit harmful.

endless_assfluff · 2020-11-06T00:57:04+00:00

TERFs look at this and say "trans women actually have male privilege" and trans people's only response seems to be "no, it's not happening". There's no actual counter argument to it, and huge numbers of cis women get won over by TERFs because their argument is more convincing than no argument.

Funny, when I don't have a counterargument to something, even after making a Reddit post about it, I generally assume it's because I'm wrong.

So, yes, there ARE benefit to spending some number of years passing as a cis man, but the disadvantages of being trans clearly outweigh it. This should be the easiest argument in the world to make.

Then make it. Asserting "well OBVIOUSLY the disadvantages of being trans outweigh the benefits of male privilege" or "we all know trans women have it harder than cis women" isn't an argument. Who's measuring? How are they measuring? Is there a standard Human Suffering Metric that's used to judge the Oppression Olympics? I'll give some of the commenters credit for pointing out it's not a competition.

Isn't the statement "trans women have it harder than cis women," all on its own, demonstrating that this poster wants to draw attention away from female struggles and have everyone focus on their experiences instead? And doesn't it imply 'trans women' and 'cis women' should receive different treatment because they are not the same?

That does illustrate the problem quite neatly. Reddit OP, if you are reading this: there are two overlapping groups of people, those who identify with 'femininity' as a concept and those who were born female. The word 'women' used to refer to the second group. The word 'feminism' used to address the issues people face for being born female. I don't know about everyone else, but I have no problem with people in each group gathering to talk about the crap they have to deal with. But under TRA ideology, the second group is not allowed to have their own spaces. They're not allowed to have a movement that just focuses on their issues. They're not even allowed to have a word for themselves anymore. That's what the problem is. Using "but trans women have it worse!!!" as an argument to justify hijacking someone else's movement and even the language they're allowed to use to describe themselves is straight-up emotional manipulation.

The reality is that there are still proportionally less MTF politicians than cis male politicians and cis female ones. Trans women have on average lower incomes than cis men and cis women.

It's possible for this to be true and for TIMs to experience male privilege. These two points do not contradict each other. And the statements 'trans women are appropriating the female struggle' and 'trans women have not had to struggle at all' are not the same, even though Reddit OP seems to think they are.

But I do agree that the mainstream trans narrative has holes. Very, very many holes.

endless_assfluff · 2020-10-27T00:06:23+00:00

I read it as Cis Rights Activists; is that what they were going for?

endless_assfluff · 2020-10-22T16:59:06+00:00

No words? I can come up with at least 200, and they're all pronouns.

endless_assfluff · 2020-10-21T20:56:35+00:00

Late to the party (sorry!) but wanted to throw my two cents in. I talk about it like a boundary issue. The mean ol' nasty TERFs think that if someone doesn't want to see genitals of the opposite sex in an environment where genitals may be exposed, this is a totally reasonable sexual boundary to have. TRAs say that having this boundary is unacceptable. If someone doesn't want to see the opposite genitals, too bad so sad, because the existence of a single-sex space would be exclusionary.

You could also lead with this: don't they call the women who don't want to pee in a mixed-sex bathroom TERFs? Don't they call TERFs dangerous? So then wouldn't having single-sex and gender-neutral bathrooms work better, since those nasty TERFs would use the single-sex bathroom and leave them alone?

This makes it clear that TRAs are more concerned with stomping over women's sexual boundaries than making sure TiMs and TiFs have a comfortable peeing experience. There are some people who are okay in mixed-sex bathrooms and some who aren't. There is an obvious solution that will make both groups comfortable---offer both single-sex and gender-neutral bathrooms---but that's not the one they're promoting. Instead, they're promoting a system where if a woman is uncomfortable because someone's exposing his penis in the bathroom/locker room, etc., she has no recourse and nowhere to go.

I don't think they've realized either that brushing off assaults in restrooms is basically accusing women of making up stories about sexual assault to get men in trouble.

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-13T00:20:32+00:00

Does Hazbin Hotel count? There's only one episode so far.

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-10T21:26:27+00:00

Yes! Annoying as Tumblr culture is, young LGB people suckered into trans ideology need help.

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-08T21:01:42+00:00

For real. It's just not 'woke' to believe women about sexual harassment/abuse if the harasser/abuser is higher up on the Oppressed Totem Pole.

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-08T20:47:03+00:00

Great responses all around, and I'd like to add that I've seen it used as a form of straw man.

It often happens in online conversations that Person B sometimes doesn't entirely understand what Person A says, and rather than admitting that, Person B responds to what they think Person A said instead of what Person A actually said. And if Person B is looking for a fight, they're going to interpret Person A's statement in the least charitable way possible.

Suppose Person A says "men are more violent than women," and provides sources to back it up. There are ways to interpret this statement that make it stronger or weaker. It could have been that OP has a strong understanding of statistics (but not rhetoric apparently) and meant "of course there are violent men and peaceful men, and violent women and peaceful women, but the vast, vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men. That's an interesting effect. If we want to prevent violence, we should try to figure out why this is happening." It could have been that OP meant "every man who has ever existed is more violent than every woman who has ever existed. Neener neener man bad woman good." If you're Person B and what Person A said rubbed you the wrong way---'cause it is slightly ambiguous what they meant---which meaning do you want their statement to have had?

There are ways you could argue with the first statement, but they're more subtle. But all you need to counter the second statement is one example, either of a violent woman or a nonviolent man, to argue that Person A was wrong to generalize. When really, Person A might know you can't use statistics to make conclusions about individual cases in the first place.

In that case, it makes sense to ask Person A for clarification. That's only if you care about what Person A is saying. If you don't care and just want to make it look like Person A is wrong and you are right, isn't it much easier to immediately dismiss Person A for generalizing? Plus it puts A on the defensive and detracts from their original point as they're forced to explain, no duh, there's personal variation, but this trend may be worth examining. Usually the conversation just ends there.

You can tell someone's doing this if the only statements they respond to are the weakest ones Person A made---or the easiest to interpret in a poor light---and they gloss over everything else. Like if Person A writes a five-paragraph essay and someone's entire response is ranting about something Person A said in the intro. In that case, it's a waste of time to engage this person further because they aren't actually listening.

It's somewhat ironic that I feel I have to say this, but of course some people really are generalizing, and I'm talking about a phenomenon that only happens with people who aren't.

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-07T20:44:25+00:00

That unmarked graves comment reminded me of the Magdalene Laundries. Uggghhh. I can't wrap my head around the scale of reproductive abuse---still ongoing!---and how much we owe to these women whose achievements will never be acknowledged. But it's not "woke" to talk about the Magdalene Laundries because it reflects poorly on a specific religion. Oh no. The real woke problem is an author tactfully and respectfully standing up for women.

And yeah, the sexism is so obvious. They spend more energy shouting down women for saying words they don't like than on condemning men for, y'know, assaulting or killing people.

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-06T23:40:13+00:00

I was recently in a similar situation. The frustrating thing is, it's not possible to prove that your coworkers are treating you differently because of your sex, because that relies on knowing someone else's intentions. And, of course, if you dare to say the word "sexist" in front of them, they'll deny it until the cows come home and start inventing justifications for why their behavior is okay. Sexism is bad and they're not bad people, so they can't possibly be sexist!

I spent a lot of time ruminating over whether my coworkers were treating me differently because of their own internal biases or because I did something wrong. I wanted to sort it out because I thought exposing my workplace's sexism would solve the problem, or that I could get them to stop by changing my behavior. What helped me get through that was realizing that sexism is a motivation, not an action---and their motivation didn't matter, because their actions were still wrong anyway. Regardless of whether they're shooting everything you say down because you're a woman, or a minority, or they don't like your shoes, it is dumb and illogical as HELL to evaluate an idea based on who said it instead of the idea itself. And you've already proved they're doing that. So if you and your friend are planning on calling 'em out, I would advise staying away from sexism---they'll just shut down and deny, deny, deny---and instead point out that the value of an idea doesn't change based on who says it. Or, just find comfort in knowing their Logical and Rational Man Brains aren't as infallible as they want us to think.

I've found in situations like these that it's easier to stand up for someone else than for yourself. If someone comes at me directly with that behavior, I'm put on the spot and have to sort out my emotions while also summoning the words and courage to call them out. But if I'm at a conference and see someone talking down to a junior woman the same way I've been talked down to, yeah, that guy's getting told. So, here, your friend is an absolute badass for helping you out. It shouldn't be your responsibility to deal with this anyway. You're not causing the problem, so you shouldn't be the one expected to solve it.

In case you also need to hear this, even though I haven't heard your ideas, I can tell you right now that you could be presenting the best ideas possible and they'd still treat you like this. This happens in creative fields sometimes, where people are conditioned to judge mens' work on its merit and women's work on its shortfalls. And like, every idea and creative work has positives and negatives, and creative people by their nature make a lot of missteps, so they're usually going to be able to find something to criticize. And if they don't find any mistakes, they start inventing them. This is going to happen independently of the quality of your work. I've been laughed out of discussion groups with over a dozen people when I was the only person in the room who was right.

I thought that if I could just exert myself more and work harder they'd eventually respect me. I don't believe that anymore. Instead, I've learned not to trust their judgement because it's biased against me in ways that don't have anything to do with the quality of my work or suitability for the career. That doesn't mean ignoring criticism, but rather sifting out the made-up garbage from actual criticism, and not wasting energy trying to earn this person's praise and respect because they're never going to give it to me.

Unfortunately, I had to leave that environment in order to get better. But I hope this helps anyway.

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-06T04:27:16+00:00

Looked it up---solid! (Haha!) If you see discussions as a way to collect information and refine your worldview rather than to defend your position at all costs, steelmanning seems natural. Too bad it's easier to see flaws in everyone's argument but our own. 'Course, it's easier when you have an entourage of 15 STEMbros picking apart everything you say.

I'm planning an essay/series of essays on GC debate strategy that you can add to your own arsenal---you into this stuff?

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-06T04:15:02+00:00

And there's nothing wrong with that. I do privately refer to people with the correct-sex pronouns. It's the truth. For sure. The only time I play along is in public around people who drank the Kool-Aid, so they don't get the vapors.

Is that quote from someone else?

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-06T00:29:29+00:00

It's been a few years: "But my friend, you left so early/Surely something slipped your mind/You forgot I gave these also/Would you leave the best behind?"---yeap yeap. Gotcha. Yeah, people abuse kindness, I feel that. But I can only do this because I cut the toxic trans people out of my life. I DEFINITELY don't talk to the yuri addict who peaked me. I do have a trans colleague whose work I respect and whose company I enjoy, and some of my GC friends are lesbians who once identified as genderqueer/nonbinary when they were figuring things out. The latter are the people I'll have frank conversations about gender with, so that they're not just hearing about gender dysphoria fixes from the TRAs.

I don't provide support in ways that conform to the TRA narrative, if that's what you're wondering. No "you're valid!!!" or anything of the sort. More like, there's nothing wrong with you, it's not possible for someone to be born in the wrong body, this is the body you have and you don't have to change it. (I'm not... I'm not sure why people claim to support body acceptance and SRS... like what??? What????)

Appreciate the warning, and I could go more into the nuance, but rest assured that I've been an empath for decades and the world has absolutely beaten the naiveté out of me.

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-05T21:42:24+00:00

That's one approach. Would you approve of my strategy if I told you I adopted it specifically to promote good-faith discussions and drag the narrative higher up the hierarchy of disagreement/pyramid of debate? If I'm in the company of liberal feminists and misgender or otherwise disrespect a transperson, their obvious response would be to label me as a bigot and TERF, which gives them an out to not listen to anything I say. So I avoid doing those things. This shifts the discussion away from whether or not transpeople deserve help and kindness, which is not the main point, and towards the most airtight argument we can make against TRA ideology, which is that the current system disallows "people with vaginas" from forming groups, having sexual boundaries, or even having words to talk about themselves unless they make concessions for "people with penises."

You can be respectful of your opponent's humanity without aiding them: here, I know they can't directly respond to my central point, so it's in my best interest to stay on the high road and expose their BS tactics for what they are. It's like saying, "Look, I don't need to dehumanize anyone or ignore information in order to win and I'm asking you to do the same." But they can't. Gaslighting and emotional manipulation are their only tools because facts are not on their side. 'Empathetic' doesn't mean 'doormat.' You dig?

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-05T19:57:57+00:00

Oh, totally. Everyone does. Trans people should not be bullied for gender non-conformity. They should not be beaten. They have the right to express themselves. In real life, I give trans people the benefit of the doubt, call them by their preferred pronouns, listen to their experiences, emotionally support them through those struggles, etc.

What they do not have the right to do is exert control over other groups of people. And as you know, that's what's happening here. The claim that TERFs are evil and literally want every single trans person to die is a misdirection tactic because even acknowledging what our primary qualm is, head-on, shows how sexist and homophobic their movement is.

Unfortunately, people are born with genitals. There is a group of people born with vaginas (once called "women") and a group of people born with vaginas who are exclusively attracted to other people born with vaginas (once called "lesbians"). Current TRA ideology is trying to make it unacceptable for these groups to talk amongst themselves about shared issues related to biological sex. They're not even allowed words to describe themselves. You want a word for feminine-presenting people who are exclusively attracted to feminine-presenting people? Cool, that's a group of people. They can have a word. Why aren't biologically female people who are exclusively attracted to biologically female people allowed to have a word and their own communities, too? Why is it considered discriminatory and exclusionary if someone wants a space where they don't have to look at or think about penis? Isn't that a sexual boundary?

Giving a direct response to that makes them look bad. So they don't. They can't. They swing the narrative back to how poor and oppressed trans people are and how painful gender dysphoria is, and if some trans teen somewhere kills themselves because a group of women wanted to have a chat about periods without centering the teen's feelings, those women are evil. But the truth is, we are perfectly capable of empathizing with and listening to trans people, while TRAs dehumanize us and call for our deaths.

TRAs fighting alongside women to make the world safer for feminine-presenting and gender-nonconforming people? Cool.

TRAs telling people formerly known as women and people formerly known as lesbians that they aren't allowed to gather because it's exclusionary? Not cool.

And while I'm ranting, it's so blatantly obvious how much the movement has swung from self-acceptance to exerting control. Look, if it's painful for a trans person to hear someone else refer to them by the wrong gender pronouns, I acknowledge that pain, and agree that it should be lessened. But what's the easier path here: convincing every single person in the world to always use the correct pronouns, or helping the trans person love and accept themselves so that they don't rely on external validation? Why is the message "TWAW, so everyone had better play along OR ELSE" and not "TWAW, so you are valid no matter what anyone else says, your body and gender presentation are perfect the way they are because they belong to you"?

Because it's not about empowerment, it's about dominance. Full stop.

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-05T07:35:11+00:00

"The current debates over trans women bring us back to the question of what set of core experiences supposedly make someone who was assigned female at birth a “real” woman. Is it menstruation or childbirth? Nope — lots of women don’t experience those, either by fate or by choice. What about being subject to sexual violence and harassment? Trans women face as much if not more sexual violence than cis women. How about simply a lifetime of unwanted objectifying male sexual attention? There are plenty of women who don’t meet the standards of superficial sexual attractiveness who do not get such attention, and some of them even long for it. And surely we don’t want to go back to the days of defining women by their hormones or even their chromosomes — if for no other reason than we’d leave out the estimated 1.7 percent of women who are intersex."

Hmmmmmm.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

Real head-scratcher. If only there were some... observable feature... doctors were taking into account when "assigning" femaleness at birth. Couldn't tell you. Still waiting for the politically correct explanation of where babies come from.

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-05T05:44:03+00:00

Okay, wow, your analysis is far more interesting than the paper itself, but I'm going to add my $0.02 in case anyone wants it.

Right off the bat, WES studies and GWAS are currently next-to-useless, in terms of predictive power and mechanistic insight, for complex conditions. But the last time I looked at WES and GWAS in the context of complex diseases was years ago and that's just my opinion.

A primary limitation of this study was that it included only 30 subjects...

You think?

And a control cohort of 88, with the same number of TIMs and Ms who aren't TI.

... though this does constitute a larger sample size than the majority of prior studies utilizing WES to study gender dysphoria.

I can't figure out which prior WES studies they're referring to, since this paragraph doesn't cite anything. [24] does seem to be a WES project with... 9 TIFs and 4 TIMs. LMAO. Let's see---the next one I can't access from home, the next is a review, and [27] has a pretty sweet cohort of 380 TIMs, and they chose their 12 genes based on a lit review rather than WES.

The authors don't mention whether their findings are consistent with previous genetic studies. They're posing new candidate genes rather than looking to confirm existing results, so it's not a huge issue. They do filter out results that appear in dbSNP. I'm just curious.

I can't get that one review paper they keep citing that suggests gender dysphoria has a genetic component ([22]), but will download it the next time I'm on campus.

K, so how widespread are these mutations?

With the exception of a variant of DIAPH2, which is localized to the X chromosome, each variant was observed in only a single subject, and all were heterozygous.

In general, all frameshift variants were heterozygous, including a variant of PPP2R3B, c.356dupC (p.P119fs), located on chromosome X, in one transgender male. One exception to this was noted in a single transgender male, who was homozygous for a variant of PRAMEF13, c.1291_1292insA (p.A431fs).

All splice-region variants were heterozygous and noted in only a single subject.

Variants in this group were heterozygous and only observed in a single individual, unless otherwise noted below.

Okay, so with nine exceptions, most of the variants in Tables 1--4 were observed in only one person out of 30 (and not observed in any of the 88 controls). And because the method the authors chose is just to find new genes that might be related to gender dysphoria, they can't confirm whether these variants do anything, and instead speculate on why these genes might be related to gender dysphoria in the mini review paper that dominates the discussion section. So these long tables are mostly variants that they found in a single person, out of 30, and they don't know which ones are important, or even if any of these are important at all.

We have a lot of genes. I'd guess every single one of us has variants that don't appear in dbSNP and might also not appear in 88 randomly selected people. It's not surprising that they were able to find such variants in their cohort of 30, even restricted to genes that might affect sexual development.

I'm also not seeing anyone's race mentioned anywhere. Sad to say, but WES studies and GWAS have to be super racist by design. People whose ancestry is constrained to a certain region are genetically similar to each other and genetically different from people whose ancestors lived in a different region, in ways that are unrelated to the goal of the study. This does often confound results.

Ooh, and now I'm thinking of how hormone therapy would affect epigenetics. Unfortunately,

In addition, we are unable to characterize the extent of the majority of subjects’ transition processes, as this information was not collected as part of the enrollment process.

And:

However, we did make certain that each subject met the clinical criteria for gender dysphoria before enrollment.

Are they saying only people with gender dysphoria can be trans? TERF TERF TERF TERF TERF

I'm scrolling through Tables 1--4 and recognize a few of these genes. I don't know if this is useful for anyone to hear, but the genes they identify as contributing to sexual dimorphism aren't exclusively developmental. Many of these genes have specific roles that don't neatly relate to sex or gender, and sexual dimorphism is kind of a side gig for them. And:

In contrast to the limited knowledge regarding the development of human gender identity, there has been significant progress, over the last twenty years, using animal models to demonstrate the neurodevelopmental pathways leading to sexually dimorphic brain regions and resultant sex-specific behavior patterns. In rodents, four key areas of the brain have been identified with developmental pathways leading to sexual dimorphism...

The key phrase here is 'in rodents.' Do the authors know of any studies on sexual dimorphism in humans?

Lastly, in addition to the two paragraphs in the intro about how bad trans kids have it (not related to the content of the study), the subsection in Discussion titled 'Special considerations...' suggests that the authors want their work to lend legitimacy to gender dysphoria claims, meaning that they are not addressing the question "is there a genetic component to gender dysphoria?" but rather "there's probably a genetic component to gender dysphoria, what is it?" These claims don't have anything to do with the study and suggest the authors are biased towards one hypothesis over another (that gender dysphoria has a genetic component), but this study says so little that this bias wouldn't affect their results. It's only dangerous here because laypeople like the one in OP's title don't realize that this paper does nothing to confirm or support this hypothesis.

Is it the case that every single gene in Tables 1--4 is associated with ASD? That's what I interpreted your title to mean. I don't see any mention of CNTNAP2/CASPR2, in particular, and I see DIAPH2 but not DIAPH3.

So, what this paper is saying is "we think gender dysphoria has a genetic link. If it does have one, it's complicated. We tried to find some genes that are different in trans and non-trans people. We have an idea of how these genes are linked to gender and are telling other scientists about these genes because we think they might be interesting." In particular, these authors start out by assuming gender dysphoria has a genetic component, so they can't prove that gender dysphoria has a genetic component. Link to ASD or not, this paper does not prove that gender identity is innate, as whoever posted this study claims.

(Edit: typo)

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-04T19:30:33+00:00

I am so with you too. So much of my young life was struggling to prove I, as a woman, could do the class, the job, the whatever, as well as a man.

But not better than a man! You have to be competent, but not too competent lest someone's masculinity is threatened.

endless_assfluff · 2020-09-02T05:22:30+00:00

Gonna go out on a limb and guess that estradiol is one of those things.

endless_assfluff · 2020-08-31T21:32:02+00:00

Eh, I'm going to expand on what the rest of the thread says. If you present it as an argument or satire, it works as a reductio ad absurdum. It won't support gender ideology if you keep it hypothetical.

I'm going to expand on that because I think some people may find it helpful. "Suppose kink is non-negotiable, homosexuality ('genital fetishism,' ugh) is a kink, and genital fetishism needs to be unlearned because it's bigoted" is the first line of a proof by contradiction---an argument that ultimately refutes the statement made in the opening sentence---not an assertion that these statements are true. (As you're saying, the next two lines would be "By the first two statements, homosexuality is non-negotiable, which contradicts the third statement. Hence these three statements cannot simultaneously be true.") For those who like simpler language, it's like saying "You can't claim these things are simultaneously true. When we apply formal logic, they conflict with each other."

The weakness of this strategy is that it doesn't work when everyone else involved (a) doesn't understand formal logic, (b) does understand formal logic, but chooses to ignore it because they believe holding the opposing belief is harmful; or (c) simply isn't listening because you are a TERF TERF TERF TERF TERF.

The strength is, they strawman every statement we make anyway, so it's easiest to see what's wrong with their ideology by letting them talk themselves into a fallacious corner. They can't use sound argumentative strategies because what they're claiming is fundamentally untrue. Never interrupt your opponent when xe is making a mistake, after all.

Other good reductio ad absurdum strategies include starting a gender arms race where one pursued sexually by a transperson can 'come out' as a gender outside of the list of genders said transperson says they're attracted to, Cantor-style ("sorry, I identify as contragender, it's a gender that no one finds attractive. Respect my gender identity!"); and claiming that because TERFs are so dangerous, TIMs should be able to use the women's room freely but women should have to pass a test to see if they're not a TERF---and if they fail, tough luck, they can't use the bathroom. (For anyone who needs to hear: yes, this is satire, I'm not saying you should seriously do these things.)

endless_assfluff · 2020-08-30T23:18:32+00:00

So... despite the strawberry pop tart being in a box of cinnamon pop tarts, it's still a strawberry pop tart based on observable physical characteristics? And that we shouldn't listen to people trying to gaslight us into thinking it's cinnamon? Ok.

endless_assfluff · 2020-08-29T23:13:50+00:00

Fantastic. I dropped by to say most of those things.

The "if you don't accept trans people as their chosen gender, they'll kill themselves" argument is so manipulative and insidious, and it's really all they have. Every libfem I've met recognizes that "if you don't date me, I'll kill myself" is an intimidation. It's clear that (a) the person saying it is using suicide as a bargaining chip to get the recipient to do what they want and (b) that a person threatening suicide is not likely to kill themselves, because people who actually do want to commit suicide don't give others a chance to stop them and see no other options. It's just straight-up emotional manipulation. So they've come up with empowering tactics to counter this abusive trash, not a single one of which involves giving in and dating the guy to keep him happy. But all that great intuition goes out the window when TRAs start threatening suicide if they don't get what they want.

Not only that, but you could rephrase

We are aware through our work with families that there have been cases of self-harm and even attempted suicide following J.K.Rowling’s statements and the public response on social media and in the press.

as

Nobody has killed themselves in response to JKR's statements.

And I also take issue with

J.K. Rowling rightly speaks of brave ‘detransitioned’ young women. Yet, does she consider trans people, living openly in spite of public hostility, less brave?

Their arguments don't so much rely on misinformation (sans the gaslighting about biological sex) as they rely on controlling which narrative the public sees, and here's an example of them using faulty logic to do just that. First, the faulty logic. They seem to have interpreted JKR's statement as "If a young woman has detransitioned, she is brave," and the following paragraph responds to this as if JKR had said "If a transperson did not detransition, they are not brave." That's the inverse. That a statement does not imply its inverse is fifth-grade-level logic. Nothing JKR said actually reflected poorly on transpeople, but they're deliberately misrepresenting her statements to make it seem that way.

And misinterpretation is all they have here because they can't reveal what the actual purpose of this tactic is: silencing dissenters. Oppressors tend to create a one-way system where the oppressed are expected to have empathy for the other party, but they do not have to have empathy for the oppressed; and that the oppressed should be held responsible for their actions, while the oppressors should not. Both parties have emotions and both parties sometimes do problematic things. Someone who cares about truth and can empathize with both sides would readily admit that. A person who does not care and just wants to push their side will be incapable of acknowledging the other party's feelings and incapable of taking responsibility for their wrongdoings. An attractive strategy for these people is to keep drawing attention away from the information that doesn't serve them---the other party's emotions and their problematic actions---and towards the information that does---their emotions and the other party's problematic actions---in a way that looks fair, balanced, and true, but is actually betraying that their position is not based on fact, and that they fundamentally have to ignore information in order to hold it.

Since I used a break-up as an example above, I'll use one here, too. Consider the following exchange:

A: I'm sorry, I don't think we can be together anymore. What you said at the restaurant hurt me too deeply.

B: But my feelings were hurt too. When you broke up with me, it hurt me.

A: I understand that the break-up is emotionally stressful, and it is for me too, but I just couldn't go on.

B: But I'm hurt too. I'm hurt by you painting me as some kind of monster.

A is acknowledging B's feelings; B can't acknowledge A's. A is acknowledging the consequences of their own actions; B cannot. A is able to empathize with B. B is not able to empathize with A. So because both A and B see B's side but only A sees A's side, the narrative will keep getting pulled in B's favor. Unless A exposes what B is doing. (If it's a private discussion, A needs to cut it off because just continuing the discussion itself is allowing B to pretend A can still win, when really nothing A can say will convince B because B's not listening.)

So if we go back to their statement:

J.K. Rowling rightly speaks of brave ‘detransitioned’ young women. Yet, does she consider trans people, living openly in spite of public hostility, less brave?

What is actually happening here is that JKR is saying "We should listen to detransitioned young women" and they are responding with "But what about the people who don't detransition?!" Classic misdirection. JKR has clearly and repeatedly expressed empathy for trans people, so her statement from the beginning has been "We should respect and listened to both transitioned and detransitioned people." And what Mermaids is really saying here is "don't listen to detransitioned people," but because saying it outright makes them look bad, they try to redirect any discussion about detransitioners by interrupting with "but what about US?!"

Because they don't have another choice. Detransitioned teenagers are living, walking proof of their wrongdoing. Even acknowledging their existence challenges their incredibly weak claim that anyone with gender dysphoria is trans. Even if they were to pretend to empathize with detransitioners and say "We know detransitioners have it hard," I can all but guarantee you that the next word will be 'but' and the subject of the next clause will be transpeople.

This paragraph reads alright to most people but clearly exposes that their argument is selfish.

Ugh. I'm trying to write an essay about how crappy these arguments are and how to counter them, and it's so hard to not call them out when they pop up.

endless_assfluff · 2020-08-29T20:11:26+00:00

Women are Human has a great list. There's a reason the only way they can win is to silence us; their ideology is so riddled with obvious logical errors that emotional manipulation is the only tool they have.

endless_assfluff · 2020-08-06T00:51:36+00:00

Shoutout to @evopsychgoogle for their hilarious take on this garbage fire of a paper.

endless_assfluff · 2020-08-03T22:00:55+00:00

There's a class of non-binary-identified women who use it as a coping mechanism for rape or sexual assault, like they don't want other people to perceive them as a woman anymore because they want to escape from the problems being female has caused, and I can't convince myself whether that's subtly sexist or just counterproductive.

The ones I've met are often either lesbian or bisexual and terrified of men. They've internalized that being born female means there's something horribly, horribly wrong with them, that they're going to keep being punished for it their whole lives, and that they're powerless to fix. So, like, super-relatable. It's like they're self-centered but not narcissistic, because they've been taught to ruminate on how wrong and awful and broken they are. They respect other people's femininity but hate their own. They almost get it---I've seen many de-transition and peak---but need time and therapy to accept their femininity.

I guess that's internalized sexism against the self.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-25T21:30:51+00:00

Being oppressed is a new feeling for me, but I am SO ready for it!

BRUTAL. Love it.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-23T01:11:50+00:00

CW: Assumes Gender

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-22T07:43:01+00:00

In PNAS?! Wow, I hate that this paper is needed, but the methods section is hilarious.

"Each study assessed changes in the penile circumference of participants when viewing erotic stimuli, with increases in circumference denoting increased genital arousal (31)."

And those best-fit lines in Fig. 3? Lol.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-22T04:34:37+00:00

Yes, that was a typo. It should say "no longer feel dysphoric after puberty," and it's just reiterating the statistic quoted in the article. I just reworded it a couple times and forgot to fix it. Sorry.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-21T22:33:46+00:00

This take makes sense. Your computations assume the gender dysphoria diagnosis frequency stayed relatively constant between 1900 (idk how old the oldest living person diagnosed w/gender dysphoria as a child is) and 2002. It's a reasonable assumption to make, since, as the other poster said, gender dysphoria awareness has remained low until relatively recently.

The fact that you knew one kid with a gender dysphoria diagnosis doesn't imply that every parent in that time frame with a gender-dysphoric kid, whatever the diagnostic criteria were, knew what it was and how to get a diagnosis. That's the first thing opponents are going to argue with: people have only recently become aware of gender dysphoria, so that many children who fit the diagnostic criteria may have never gotten a formal diagnosis. They may also point out that statistics can't be used to predict outcomes in singular cases and bring up anecdotes about people they know who were helped by transitioning.

You can make a stronger argument against childhood transitioning based on the statement that 73--98% of gender-dysphoric children still feel dysphoric after puberty (I can't access the link to that study but found it here; the figure they provide is based on 10 studies dating back to 1968). Your opponents can argue that gender dysphoria was under-diagnosed, but they can't dismiss the existence of de-transitioners. (Rather, they shouldn't if they were arguing in good faith, but still do.)

I'd personally say it doesn't matter how many trans adults had gender dysphoria as children. Nearly every single one of them is going to claim they did, retroactively, and it's impossible to disprove someone's statements about feelings they had in childhood. But if they're arguing "I had gender dysphoria as a child and still have gender dysphoria as an adult, therefore we should let children transition," that's not logically sound because their relationship with gender is personal, that is, not universal. What's good for them may well not be good for someone else. If you point out that many gender-dysphoric children without hormone treatment or puberty blockers detransition later, the focus becomes figuring out what's right for each child, and so claiming every GNC kid should be put on hormones/puberty blockers is going to unnecessarily hurt the ones who would have grown out of it otherwise.

Is that helpful? Do let me know if I'm just rambling and not being helpful.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-12T21:34:28+00:00

I mean, defining what a transwoman or transman is requires you to acknowledge the genitals they were born with, which is transphobic.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-11T19:34:02+00:00

Ohoho, and I see your username. A fan of Poincaré maps? I'm barely restraining myself from posting some uniquely identifying information here because if so, we'll probably run into each other at some point.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-10T18:56:39+00:00

Welp, see you all in wrongthink hell.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-10T18:50:38+00:00

Ok, I read the original "article." Here's what I'm getting, and I know it's similar to what people have already said.

This is an opinion piece by a grad student.
The argument addresses a straw man: no one is arguing that an individual's biological sex should be determined by brain structure or hormones, and the existence of intersex people does not conflict with the existence of biological men or women. They are arguing with a definition, that the definition of "man" is someone who was born with XY chromosomes and a penis and the definition of "woman" is someone who was born with XX chromosomes and a vagina. Yes, we have a word for people with different genital/chromosome combinations, a word that the author herself used: intersex. At no point do they use the word "genital" in the article, nor do they address that definition. "Actually, intersex people exist" as an argument is like someone saying "A number is prime if it has exactly two positive divisors, itself and 1, and a number is composite if it has more than two positive divisors" and someone else saying "Actually, 1 is neither prime nor composite." It makes no sense because a definition isn't an argument for or against something, it's a definition.
The argument is self-contradictory. The author does not substitute her own definition of "male" or "female," or even "transgender." So since a small minority of people are intersex, neurochemistry can vary between the sexes, hormone levels also vary, and apparently scientists are left shaking their heads and throwing up their hands on how to define biological sex---if only people had observable sex characteristics that were present at birth!---what does the author think the words male, female, and transgender mean? Put another way, if biological sex doesn't exist, how can someone be transgender?
The articles linked by the author agree with gender-critical ideology. Neurochemistry varies between individuals? Cool, that's what we've been saying all along, and it doesn't conflict with the fact that genitals exist.
"Secondary sex characteristics—penis, vagina, appearance, behavior—arise later, from hormones, environment, experience, and genes interacting." What the actual fuck? Penises and vaginas aren't secondary sex characteristics. They don't somehow "arise later" out of nowhere. Neither is appearance and behavior; the author just spent a few paragraphs arguing that behavior isn't tied to sex.
The author seems to think science is the process of hunting down evidence that fits your pre-existing worldview, not a process by which to develop that worldview. She willfully misrepresents dissenting ideas and ignores obvious evidence that conflicts with her beliefs. By doing so, she reveals that her beliefs on this topic are not based on reasoning or empirical evidence. And scientists do that sometimes because scientists are people. Heck, "my beliefs are logical because I'm a scientist" is an appeal to authority, which is a fallacy, which is illogical.

So to break it down:

"The irony in all this is that these “protectors of enlightenment” are guilty of the very behavior this phrase derides. Though often dismissed as just a fringe internet movement, they espouse unscientific claims that have infected our politics and culture. Especially alarming is that these “intellectual” assertions are used by nonscientists to claim a scientific basis for the dehumanization of trans people.": Ad hominem.
"The real world consequences are stacking up: the trans military ban, bathroom bills, and removal of workplace and medical discrimination protections": Appeal to emotion, also somewhat fuzzy & circular since you need to already believe self-identification can override biological sex in order to believe those things are bad.
"...a 41-51 percent suicide attempt rate...": The 41% statistic has been debunked, which the author would know if she'd bothered to read the primary source. Author cites a news article instead of a peer-reviewed study. The 51% statistic seems to be pulled out of someone's ass, since it doesn't appear in the original study or the news article the author cites. In addition, the statistic by itself does not imply that TERF meanies are the reason the transgender suicide rate is so high.
"Biological sex: How you get it": Straw man, see above. Misunderstanding of formal logic: you can't argue with the "logic" of a definition, because a definition is just that.
"Secondary sex characteristics—penis, vagina, appearance, behavior—arise later, from hormones, environment, experience, and genes interacting.": An outright lie, repeating here because it's so egregious that the author claims that genitals are secondary sex characteristics. Also self-contradictory that behavior is a secondary sex characteristic.
"The brain: where stuff gets 'made up'": Straw man; agrees with GC ideology.
"The body and the brain and the hormones betwixt": Straw man; agrees with GC ideology. Eye twitching at the word 'betwixt,' but that's not relevant.
"While this is a small overview, the science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real.": Lying by omission; the author never actually addresses the most obvious characteristic of biological sex.
"Defining a person’s sex identity using decontextualized “facts” is unscientific and dehumanizing.": Continuing to lie by omission. Are we supposed to pretend genitals aren't observable?
"The trans experience provides essential insights into the science of sex and scientifically demonstrates that uncommon and atypical phenomena are vital for a successful living system.": Unsubstantiated; what does the second clause have to do with anything else? Also, straw man.
"Even the scientific endeavor itself is quantifiably better when it is more inclusive and diverse.": Straw man. Genitals exist != leave people who identify as transgender out of any discussion forever.
"So, no matter what a pundit, politician or internet troll may say, trans people are an indispensable part of our living reality.": So are genitals?

It's that old quote about reasoning someone out of something they weren't reasoned into. Scientists aren't immune to that.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-10T00:26:04+00:00

I'm going to interpret 'literature' as scientist slang for peer-reviewed articles. Sue Donym on Medium has done some great compilations of PubMed articles, with commentary, including:

The New Homophobic Bridge To Nowhere: Child Transition

*A Republican Billionaire Is Funding the Trans Movement and Conversion Therapy Junk Science. Here’s the Who, and the How (baaah can't get the bullet points right)

*Inauthentic Selves: The modern LGBTQ+ Movement Is Run By Philanthropic Astroturf And Based On Junk Science

It would take a while for me to hunt down and list every paper she mentions. But yeesh, I've read through a few of those PubMed articles and share the author's concerns (no control cohort in a longitudinal study---wtf!). Every intro and conclusion seems to have some variation of the phrase "more data is needed to base these decisions on empirical evidence," implying that there's not enough empirical evidence to suggest the assumed benefits of hormones or puberty blockers outweigh the severe side effects.

So, from what I'm read, no, we don't know what the effects are. There isn't even any evidence to suggest puberty blockers and hormone therapy work better to address gender dysphoria than non-drug therapies (no! control! cohort! I've seen homeopathy papers more thorough than this). But that's not a problem! It's not a problem because we assumed that treatment works, therefore it must work! If you disagree it's because you literally want GNC kids to die.

If anyone wants to chat about specific articles, hit me up. I'm happy to promote scientific literacy if you don't want to take my word for it.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-08T18:39:34+00:00

So I've always been a little gender non-conforming, respect the struggles people go through, and used to think referring to someone by their preferred pronouns was a no-brainer if it made them happy. I work in STEM and have seen at least a dozen people transition; never thought worse of them for it. I can still empathize with their pain.

The first exposure I had to transgenderism was when I was in college. I'm a bisexual woman and was only looking to date women at the time. When I learned about trans people, I changed my dating pool to be more inclusive, and said I was looking to date women and trans men. It didn't even take a week before someone shamed me for being discriminatory. I very reluctantly told people I would be open to dating trans women. On top of that, I also shied away from dating trans men because I admitted to myself that I saw them as the sex they were born as, which I felt was unfair to them.

That's when I should have peaked. Instead, I continued to buy into the TRA claims for ten years, and, because I have so much experience dealing with hardship, emotionally supported multiple people who struggled with gender dysphoria. I should say at this point that most of the trans or nonbinary people I knew were women. And I did go through a phase like that in college in response to sexual abuse: I bound my breasts, cut my hair short and dressed in more masculine clothes because I didn't want men to find me attractive, so I got where they were coming from. That being said, I don't approve of threatening violence against people who don't share your beliefs and I recognize that labeling ideas as TERF-y is ad hominem, so I was never in the crowd of people telling lesbians to choke on girl dick, thank heavens.

Halfway into those ten years, I met a very awkward man from my graduate program. It seemed like this person needed a friend; I have a high tolerance for awkward because I used to have trouble socializing myself (see 'abuse,' above) and do have many of those stereotypically nerdy hobbies (not everyone had patience for that. Mathematicians are generally less dorky than people think). At some point I suspected this person was developing feelings for me. I'm not attracted to this person at all, so at some point I let it slip that while I was in an open relationship, I was only interested in dating women.

His eyes lit up.

From then on, he made a beeline for me at every department event. Outside of work and research, his conversations with me were restricted to anime, video games, and lesbian relationships. I never liked anime because the infantilizing portrayal of women rubbed me the wrong way, so I asked him at one point to not say the words "cute anime girls" in my presence. And to stop making every conversation about lesbians, because what the hell, dude. (It's worth noting that if I mentioned a straight or gay male couple, this person would flat-out not respond and steer the conversation to be about lesbians again.)

About two years ago, he took me aside and asked me, "Do you think I would look cute as a girl?"

So you can guess what happened next: I supported him unconditionally, listened to everything he had to say about his transition, even when it rubbed me the wrong way and I didn't want to admit it. Skipping ahead, they started pushing more and more boundaries, including grabbing their breasts and genitals in front of me and asking repeatedly about my porn habits. I took this person aside and asked them to please not talk about anything sexual in front of me, that it was making me uncomfortable. He was very upset about this, and not for my sake. Not because one of his closest work friends felt alienated and tense around him.

Then my spouse made a comment that would set me down the GC path: "I'm skeptical when one of these introverted tech guys decides they're a woman. I always wonder what their understanding of femininity is based on."

I'm quite into epistemology, so this spoke to me. How can someone who wasn't born as a woman know what being a woman feels like? It's impossible. It struck me that when people choose to transition, their impression of femininity cannot possibly come from experience (even if you buy into TWAW, they spent their whole life before that living as a man). It has to come from some external source. And for this person, that source was very obviously anime, video games, and lesbian porn. That's when I learned about autogynephilia. And then the floodgates opened.

This all happened months before JKR spoke up. By that time, I was a hardened radfem, lurking on GC and LGBdroptheT every day. Lurkers, it's not that I have no compassion for GNC people. I was GNC myself. My best friend had top surgery. Heck, I have TIM colleagues who I still think are perfectly lovely people and never gave me crap about anime lesbians. It's not that I haven't heard the TRA arguments. I spent ten years buying into the TRA arguments. It's that a negative experience pushed me to examine my own beliefs, and once the they-aren't-hurting-anyone veil was lifted, it became strikingly obvious how contradictory the transgender movement is. It's not that I'm a stupid idiot woman who doesn't understand Logic™ and Reason™; I'm a professional logic-and-reason user to the point where I have a fancy gender-neutral title for it and gladly put the search for truth above my own ego, which is why I'm here. I'm not filled with hate, I'm filled with pain. The only time I've felt discriminated against or targeted as a same-sex-attracted woman was in the context of transgender people ordering me to prioritize their self-identification over my own sexual preferences. (But I also get that I'm bisexual, not a lesbian, and will not invade lesbian spaces. Not going to whine about it either.)

I didn't act until the gun was pointed at me, and I'm sorry.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-07T07:33:09+00:00

That's one phallic dog. It's perfect.

endless_assfluff