Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jul 02, 2022 3:27 pm
Astro Cat wrote: ↑Sat Jul 02, 2022 3:50 am
The reason other animals don't have cultural genders is easy: they do not have highly complex and abstracted cultures.
So you're thinking that human beings must have an essential exceptionalism? That is, all other mammals are subject to one kind of rule, and human beings are essentially not subject to that same rule? Chimps, cats, dogs, emus, and even birds and fish -- all animals, regardless of the complexity or simplicity of their social structures -- have two sexes: human beings have this thing called "gender"?
Can you explain why I should think that human beings are the lone exception to this biological universal?
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that humans have developed complex abstract concepts like identity (you also won't find any punks or priests in the rest of the animal kingdom... though watch out for octopi. I'm pretty sure they're onto something
).
Immanuel Can wrote:
Well, I would say that the folks who say that are playing a trick.
It's true that some aspects of normalization are products of social construction. That boys wear blue and girls wear pink may be purely a social convention, for example. But that's not what they're wanting you to hear when they say, "Identity is a social construct," they're wanting you to hear, "Identity is NOTHING BUT a social construct," so that they can go on to argue that everything is up for grabs.
Don't fall for it. It's a twister's game. Almost everything to do with identity is biological. You don't get to dictate your own height, weight, creative ability, intelligence, athleticism, natural hair colour, eyes, cultural birth location, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Most of what you are is simply a "given." And being a good person means coming to grips with this "given," and learning the difference between what we can change and the things we have to learn to work with. Most of what we have to work with is pretty fixed, and the culturally maleable changes afterward are pretty minimal. I can get a tattoo...but I can' t make my arm longer to hold more of it. I can dye my hair, but it's going to grow back to what I was given, if I don't fight that continually.
Transism is a particularly bad problem. It dooms an individual to spend all of her (artificially shortend, mutilated and sterile) life fighting against the "given." Her body is her permanent enemy, always betraying her by reverting to female, whereas she's desperately trying to make it male. And in the end, it will cost her everything, and she will inevitably lose that battle. And a thousand years from now, her DNA will still be female, if there's any of it left by then.
Sad. Tragic. What we need to do instead is tell young women, "It's good to be a woman; it's noble, it's desirable, and it's an achievement to come into the fulness of womanhood; and you can be helped to step up and come to appreciate being one." Certainly no course of action promises our little girls any more happiness than that. A person who is permanently at war with her own identity is inevitably going to end badly.
I think we need to draw a distinction between trans issues in children and trans issues in adults. They have enough different considerations to make that they're almost different worlds of topics. I feel like you have (understandably, since it's a domain with probably the most suffering involved) been focusing on very young trans people while I have been focusing on adult trans people in some senses.
With an adult trans person, it's their body and their choice; and I think on an individual basis they're capable of making that decision about how to deal with body dysmorphia. They may well choose to "fight their body" for the rest of their lives happily, and I feel like it's not up to anyone else to object to their choice. With a child, I already agree that it's an entirely different ethical world: by fiat children can't make fully informed, mature, long-lasting decisions.
So I think you'll find that I agree with being cautious, with refraining from pushing, with advocating for seriously educated and experienced mental health professionals being involved when it comes to children expressing trans curiosity. Protecting children is one issue, protecting a trans adult just wanting to deal with their body dysmorphia is another one. If we demarcate which one we're mainly focused on in a segment, I think that might help.
Immanuel Can wrote:
But "scientist" is not the totality of your identity. Your identity is much more complex and important than a mere career choice or label. And what I'm advocating for here is that we are happiest when we take proper stock of what we have been given to deal with, and make the most of that. "Who am I" is a fundamental question, one that is a precursor to happiness, fulfillment and meaning: and it cannot be answered by people whose idea is "You can be anything." They have no helpful information to share with you.
Yet if I had listened to some people, I
wouldn't be a scientist precisely because I am female. Some of your text near the bottom begins to flirt with that (or I have projected that leeriness onto it, having experienced similar sounding speech in negative contexts before). I understand it's not the totality of my identity, but it's one of the most serious aspects of my identity that didn't just emerge on its own (like being playful, or liking video games): it's one that I chose, which is why it's an identity at all rather than just a descriptor (I'm also a floor sweeper, when the floor is dirty: telling that this isn't an "identity").
Being a scientist is more important to me than being a woman because being a woman for me is just incidental. I'm happy to be a woman, I'm happy when I feel feminine, I feel pleasure about that like I suppose anyone does when they do something gender-affirming like being complimented on a cute outfit (a shallow example, but I am struggling to wake up today). But I don't go around thinking "yep, I'm a woman" for the most part (until I am reminded of it, usually in negative ways like catcalling!) any more than I bet you go around thinking "yep, I'm a man" all day.
For trans people, I imagine this gender affirmation (to their
chosen gender) is so strong that gender is an
identity rather than just a
descriptor.
Immanuel Can wrote:
I don't think "gender" is anything at all, actually. (Well, other than a grammar word.) And I think the use of it signals a lack of attention to how much of identity is really a "given." So I think it's a dangerous concept to believe in, primarily because it's so empty. Framing something as important as identity in vaccuous terms can be very bad, because it really leaves the individual at sea and without a compass.
Well, I think that it's a real concept that describes a lot of real people. Gender isn't that important to you or I because our gender matches our sex and we go on about our lives as we naturally would. Gender helps us to understand people though such as a woman that might not want to behave or be treated in feminine ways (such as a nonbinary person), or a man that goes between feeling masculine and feminine with those social expectations (a genderqueer person), and obviously a person for whom their gender expectations don't at all match their sex (a trans person).
There's a broad spectrum of people, and there's a broad spectrum within those spectrums (e.g. some people only feel "a little bit" nonbinary, or it might depend on the day). Like I mentioned somewhere, as a lesbian, it naturally sort of happens that I end up knowing all kinds of LGBT+ people from hanging out at gay bars, making friends at Pride, from people I still talk to from my dating pool, and so on. I'm a femme lesbian that happens to prefer other femmes, not really interested in masc women (my dating pool is probably among the smallest, womp womp). But I'll still talk to people that make a pass, and I've made a lot of friends this way. People can be so different than this stereotypical manly man and womanly woman idea that people seem to have and that you come close to advocating as some kind of ideal further below.
Immanuel Can wrote:
If you go on trans websites, you'll see lots of it. Any young woman who expresses any uncertainty about her identity is invited -- nay, encouraged and groomed -- to interpret that as proof of a need to trans.
Dr. Deborah Soh makes a strong point of this, as I said. She interprets it as a kind of "lesbian genocide." I think that may be strong; but I don't doubt that some young women misinterpret their early confusions as proof of a misfit between their biology and their identity. That uncertainty is highly exploitable...particularly in young girls.
I think we'll agree more often than not about pushiness being completely inappropriate when it comes to children. It's a duplicitous edge, though: children with questions need
support, but not pushiness.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Not necessarily. Maybe it only becomes complex when we try to interpret it through an incoherent paradigm. It seems to me that body dysmorphia is what's involved...mental illness. But mental illness has been turned into a fad, through social contagion, which is powered by a combination of both social media and the virtue signallers in the public. And the victims of it are primarily young women going through their normal uncertainty period in the early teen years.
That's what all the data shows. So I think we should stick with the data, not with a speculative narrative arranged for us by the mentally ill or mendacious. The data will be our friend here.
...
Rather, what we're discussing is whether or not mentally ill individuals can be cured by "normalizing" them and not actually treating them at all, or are better treated by being helped to accept themselves as they truly are, by understanding the givenness of their bodies and reconciling with themselves.
I'm for the latter, not the former.
When it comes to adult trans people, does it really hurt just to use their chosen name and pronouns if it alleviates their gender dysmorphia? Nobody is denying that trans issues are due to something having gone wrong: the trans person is trying to fix what's gone wrong. If they feel strongly that gendered pronouns matching their sex cause them pain every time, does it hurt them (speaking of adults here) to be able to feel happy instead with pronouns and a name that match their identity?
Skipping the Matt Walsh part, I may or may not watch some of it, I don't know: that's a big time commitment and I can already surmise the sort of content within it. I am sure he has found people that indeed say ridiculous things, that's how these sorts of things go; but that doesn't make it not propaganda. Michael Moore finds people that say ridiculous things, Sascha Baron Cohen (spelling?) found people to say ridiculous things, and so on, for entertainment guised as making a point. I've never been moved by such things, though I did laugh at Ali G and Borat, lol.
(Ooh, also, agree with you on Dawkins and Harris -- there is a reason I avoid most online bastions of atheists and it's certainly not their crushing intellect)
Immanuel Can wrote:
But biology can actually never be changed. It can be superficially altered, but not transformed. Attributions, however, can change, and do all the time. So are we best to work with the biological essentials of a person, or to work against them? And are we wise to regard attributions as primary, when we know darn well they're highly maleable and transient?
But again, trans people know something has "gone wrong." Anybody that feels suffering is going to be like "huh, something has gone wrong here." They are trying to make the best of the situation that they can. It would of course be ideal if we could be most concerned with our fundamental and unchanging aspects of our nature, but that isn't always in the cards for people; and that disconnect causes suffering.
Immanuel Can wrote:
That's interesting. I wouldn't. I would refuse because he's not my "father" and I'm not his "son." I would be ashamed to deceive him...and myself...as to our status, especially in so important a matter as our relationship to God.
Likewise, I would not use false pronouns. I would probably opt for the pronoun that seems apparently right, unless the person gave me reasons to think I was using the wrong pronoun.
And I wouldn't do it to be offensive, but because truth is more important than politeness, and because my language belongs to me, not to my interlocutor. My language is the tool I have for making sense of my world, and for asserting the beliefs I have. Nobody has a right to mandate to me what language I must use, anymore then they have a right to mandate to me what I believe. I have to address the world in the terms I believe to be true; and every time I fail to do so, I betray myself, the truth, and God.
Compared to that, political correctness has no place.
Could you at least use neutral pronouns like singular they/them? Trans people are doing everything that they're doing because they feel suffering related to gender: if you misname them or misgender them, you're actually
hurting them. It doesn't cost you any karma points to just use their pronouns to avoid causing suffering, or at worst just use neutral pronouns like they/them or structure a sentence in a way to avoid needing a pronoun.
Immanuel Can wrote:Other than, "put the girl in her place," I don't detect anything toxic in that list. Men actually don't like to cry, because they tend to cry only when they are absolutely desolate, defeated or humilated; they don't tend to cry cathartically, as women seem to do. Men avoid crying because men strive to be competent and not to collapse. For them, it's very healthy; and any group of men knows that a crying man is a man defeated.
And there are lots of "masculine things to do." I like very much being a man, and doing them. And men achieve a great sense of power and dignity from doing these things. Men like a challenge. So again, there's nothing inherently "toxic" in that. It would take something much more specific to be "toxic."
I can see that a lot of the "toxic masculinity" talk is really inauthentic. Much of it stems from a simple (maybe even honest) failure of women to understand how very different men actually are, and why they do what they do. I think women often look at men, and say to themselves, "If I were to do that, it would be because of X, and it would mean that I was toxic." And then they assume that men are acting that way out of the feminine motive. But often, men have motive Y, which is in no way like motive X, and is not at all toxic. Still, they get labeled for being "toxic."
A similar thing happens when men attribute their own motives to women. They think women are horribly gold-digging, for example, when sometimes women are simply trying to sort out a reasonable provider with whom to create a little person. Or they think women are vain for accepting approaches from more than one man while giving assurances to none, and fail to realize that her relative physical vulnerability means she actually needs to choose carefully within a pool of available mates, or she will become horribly exploitable.
I think we've lost the ability, as men and women in Western society, to understand each other because we've dropped all essentialism, and asked the opposite sex to become the same as us. That's not a reasonable expectation, I would suggest, as well as being wildly unfair. And what I would opt for is a better understanding and appreciation of difference...again, more attention to data and to the "given," and less to ideology and wishful thinking.
But there are plenty of men that are masculine that cry, why should they feel unmasculine for expressing emotion? This is the section I was talking about somewhere above where you begin to flirt with gender
stereotypes as prescriptive, not descriptive. It is toxic to chide a man or for a man to chide himself for crying or expressing emotion. It would be toxic to chide a woman for analyzing something reasonably rather than crying about it. Stereotypes describe trends that we have seen in the world (trends which don't necessarily say anything about nature vs. nurture), they shouldn't be prescriptive, especially when they're toxic.
You say that you don't need to cry until you feel utterly defeated. That's great. But what about a man who does? Expressing emotion doesn't mean being helpless, this man could still step up to the plate and do what needs to be done. Just as women can if they express emotion (or don't! Some women don't!)
We shouldn't get this idea in our heads that men
should behave this way, and women
should behave that way, especially when lists of feminine/masculine traits are often full of toxic things. The world is so much more diverse than that, and a man isn't unmasculine simply for doing something like showing emotion.
Pigeonholing people into one of only two holes is the source of a lot of pain and suffering in this world. Misandry and misogyny ensues, both explicit and implicit.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Just that to put the word "toxic" with "masculinity" and not with "feminity" means that whatever is essentialized as "feminine" is automatically "non-toxic," just as normal male values are damned as "toxic" by the same usage. I think the term fogs our thinking. We should separate between healthy male behaviour (which is still not feminine) and unhealthy male behavior (which is not authentically manly, actually), rather than associating the "masculine" in an insufficiently-clear way with "toxicity."
I know the world of men well. And I can tell you that the most vicious, underhanded and despicable males are often what are called "gammas." These are the weak males who spend all their time hating and envying the strong ones, and currying favour with women in hopes of scoring. They are truly despicable examples of men...but they lack most of the traits that get labeled "toxicly masculine." It's from that pool, not from the alphas, that you're going to get your school shooters and rapists. It's the resentful, petty, weak men that do those sorts of things, because exploding in violence is their desperate attempt to reclaim some actual masculine pride they've never merited.
Watch out for gammas. You'll see tons of them at women's marches and take-back-the-night events, and such. You've got to ask yourself, "If they're men, what are they doing here?" And you can be sure that what you think they are there for (like, allyship, maybe) is not what they're there for.
I had already said in the previous post, "replace the right words and you'll get a toxic femininity," e.g., I don't know what you mean when you suggest "toxic... with masculinity and not femininity." We hear about toxic masculinity more often, yes; but that's because men still face a lot of gendered social pressure to do toxic things, which hurts everybody (including men).
As for this "gammas" thing, I do not at all ascribe to the alpha/beta/gamma/omega/whatever scheme of classifying people (I have rolled my eyes once too many times at men claiming to be "alphas" and blah, to watch out for the "betas" and the "gammas" and whatever). There are many valued and excellent men at marches and feminist events. There
are the type to watch out for, of course, and we do, but I absolutely stand by a majority of male allies.
Immanuel Can wrote:
"Cultural guide rails"?
Well any "cultural guide rails" would be cases of essentialism, wouldn't they? And I'm fine with that, if we get the "rails" right. Children do need help in sorting our the world. But I don't think we need to be pushing people in directions they fundamentally don't want, even if it suits our ideological agenda. I don't think we have right to use people that way. So I don't want to force my son to the gun range, or my daughter to the hair salon; but neither do I want to force my son to the hair salon and my daughter to the gun range. What I would want to do is let them choose what will result in them being reasonably culturally and sexually adjusted, within the large spectrum of the options they can have. But I wouldnt fail to help them to see the guidelines inherent in their genetics and bodies, because those are some of the best, most reliable and most impartial guideliness available.
Astro Cat wrote:I'm saying don't confuse that women and men freely gravitate towards what culture says they should with there actually being some natural proclivity: you're essentially confusing nurture with nature by doing so.
I get that, and fair enough. At the same time, I would suggest the opposite is also true. We must not confuse that which is not "nurture" but is "nature" with something we can mess with without creating horrible consequences. The latter error is, if anything, far worse than the former; because with the former, the child ends up at least somewhat culturally adjusted, but with the latter, the child is maladjusted both to culture and to body. So we must be very careful in dismissing the essential as if it were merely optional, even more than we have to guard against the reification of the optional as the essential.
Astro Cat wrote:The answer is to let people do what they want, but to try to remove systemic barriers in their way so they can truly do what they want.
In general, yes. However, the problem case is always children. For as you say, children need guidelines, and don't thrive without them.
For them, "Do as you please" can be terrifyingly empty. It can mean, "I'm an adult, but I know nothing, so I can't help you at all -- you're on your own, kid." No child does well with that kind of parental neglect. So we still have to be careful to provide children with the guidance they long for, need and cannot do without, or we're betraying them. They aren't adults; they're naive and they're changing constantly, every year, so they don't always know what they want -- yet. Whatever we do, we don't want to abandon them to their confusions.
See, if you raise your little girls to be nurturers, it's no surprise that they grow up and choose to be nurturers. This is the problem that I'm talking about, though. You say we need to "set the guard rails right," but I get this feeling that you're treating gender stereotypes that exist for social and historical reasons (nurture reasons) as though they're natural and essential (nature reasons).
What I mean by setting the guard rails right is to give guidance and support for children regardless of what they want to do. If a boy expresses interest in taking care of people, we answer his questions about what that is like and give him a reasonable expectation of the kinds of skills it would take. If a girl expresses interest in a career in mathematics, we answer her questions about it and give her a reasonable expectation of the kinds of skills it would take -- and so on.
Maybe I'm reading too much into what you said, but it
sounded like you were suggesting we should discourage the boy and the girl in this scenario. Maybe that's not what you were saying, I admit that I am too leery of gendered prescriptions as a woman in STEM. But can we agree that boys and girls should be supported and given guidance for their chosen paths rather than using
historical gender as a prescription for their path?
Immanuel Can wrote:A good talk. I'm enjoying the exchange. It's a breath of fresh air to talk to somebody so reasonable, albeit on a different side. It makes for interesting exchange and progressive forming of ideas. Much appreciated.
I'm enjoying the conversation too! ^_^