[PaulHoule]

It's reductive to say that it's one or the other.

I can say personally my feeling thermometer went from maybe 75 to 15 as a result of being on Mastodon and other online forums in the last tow years. I like trans people as individuals but I hate the movement. It's not the only place where that kind of negativity leaks out.

For instance the men's rooms in my building are stuffed with menstrual products for "men who menstruate" with a preachy card that talks about it in a reductive, narrow minded frame the same as the worst conservative Christians. This is for the benefit of 0.6% of the population at best, maybe 3 or 4 people benefit from it, out of 8 men's rooms in that building it is probably less than one person per bathroom.

It seems to me that this sucks all the air out of the room to discuss anything else. Young men are struggling. Maybe you only see the survivors in higher ed, but the K12 system is not built with boys in mind, particularly if you are in a racial minority, see

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/04/boys-school-challenges-r...

Instead of messaging aimed at, say, 20% of people who are struggling we get this stridently minoritiarian discourse that leaves many people feeling unheard, erased, and resentful.

[sunshowers]

> It seems to me that this sucks all the air out of the room to discuss anything else.

You understand that this state of affairs has been created by the bigoted side? I just want to live in peace and build stuff that makes the world better, not worry about the federal government coming after me and pretending I don't exist. Please try not to get so fooled next time.

[PaulHoule]

No. This is the black and white thinking that I'm talking about. Yes, the federal government has deteriorated, but some of that is that progressives haven't had a message that reconciles the rights of 0.6% of people with many concerns that the 99.4% have

Start taking responsibility. Bigotry is a real thing but you can have a large impact on how other people treat you based on how you behave.

Organized transgenderists in my view have a reducivist, moralist, my-way-or-the-highway approach that initially exploited 'progressive' people who were inclined to think they were acting in good faith but are in the process of driving those people away. (I was really inclined to think of transsexual people positively because my best friend in college was a really awesome person who happened to be transsexual)

J.K. Rowling picked an issue where public opinion was far away from what transgenderists wish it was. (Where do violent sex offenders in prison get housed?) She thought the vast majority of transgender prisoners were safest in prisons that corresponded to their identity but that authorities had to have some latitude for people acting in bad faith.

She got jumped on because she agreed with them in most cases but not all.

Normal people will call you an ally if you agree on 7 out of 10 issues but organized transgenderists come across as people who will treat you as an enemy if you disagree about anything.

On some issues (workplace discrimination) public opinion is on the side of trans people. On other issues (sports participation) public opinion is the other ways. A year ago questions involving access to health care tended to split down the middle, the one recent poll I looked at seems to have moved far to the right in the last year on the issue of transgender care for minors.

A healthy political movement accepts that it's won on certain issues, that it can't win on other issues, and that there are some issues in the middle where you can persuade people and win.

On top of that there is the whole "egg hatcher" thing where you find there are people who are looking for people who "march to the beat of a different drummer" and sell transgenderism as an answer to their problems, almost certainly a false answer. If somebody knew their gender identity of a child I'm inclined to believe them (e.g. they certainly aren't going to change their mind based on whether people 'affirm' them or not) but if somebody discovered a variant identity as a teen I'm skeptical. As a schizotype

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy

I am already frustrated with the bandwagoning of 'neurodivergence' by an autism industrial complex and an ADHD industry that pushes addictive medicine. Neurodivergent people are already 'bully magnets' and the last thing they need is to take on an identity which will get them further targeted and be surrounded by people who will reinforce their feelings of victimhood. (see 'impulsive nonconformity' in the article I link above)

I see the current movement as something that centers the activism of its enemies as a template for its own activism [1] [2] and that thrives on bigotry. It looks like a pernicious cult that is all about 'othering' other people and sees any and all pushback they get from people whether it is primary preexisting feelings of disgust, fear and hatred or the learned feelings of exasperation you might see on the face of a otherwise bleeding heart socially progressive HR manager who has just dealt with too many people who see a fascist under every bush and wants the whole cake yesterday.

[1] see anti-fascism

[2] transgenderists say it was OK to treat J. K. Rowling the same way Kiwi Farms treats them

[sunshowers]

> progressives haven't had a message that reconciles the rights of 0.6% of people with many concerns that the 99.4% have

It is an objectively true moral statement that minority rights ought not depend on majority opinion (that is the whole point of constitutionalism). To the extent that minority rights depend on majority opinion in reality, that is a deficiency of political systems. All of us exist in deficient political systems.

> if somebody discovered a variant identity as a teen I'm skeptical

What is your expertise in this matter? Why do you think your opinion is worth anything? People figure things out on their own pace.

If you think your opinion carries any weight here, you've been fooled.

> She got jumped on because she agreed with them in most cases but not all.

JK Rowling signed the so-called "Women's Declaration International" which has the exact same policy proposals as what Trump is doing. Again, you've been fooled.

> A year ago questions involving access to health care tended to split down the middle, the one recent poll I looked at seems to have moved far to the right in the last year on the issue of transgender care for minors.

Yes, because people's brains have been cooked through immersion in social media.

If you surround yourself with virtue, you will become virtuous. If you surround yourself with vice, you will become vicious. Social media rewards vice, so people have become more vicious.

> I am already frustrated with the bandwagoning of 'neurodivergence' by an autism industrial complex and an ADHD industry that pushes addictive medicine. Neurodivergent people are already 'bully magnets' and the last thing they need is to take on an identity

I have ADHD (according to my psychiatrist one of the most obvious cases they've ever seen), and autism, and I'm trans (both -sexual and gender). So I guess in your eyes I'm a bully magnet (??) who has taken on an identity (???????). In reality, despite the horrible discrimination, my neurodivergence gives me a pretty nonstandard insight into things, and an ability to explain concepts, that I've been able to turn into something valuable to others. (The last 4 technical blog posts I wrote were all front page on HN, with 100-300+ upvotes.)

This has nothing to do with paranoia or delusions. My work is valued for its correctness and attention to detail.

[skissane]

> It is an objectively true moral statement that minority rights ought not depend on majority opinion (that is the whole point of constitutionalism). To the extent that minority rights depend on majority opinion in reality, that is a deficiency of political systems. All of us exist in deficient political systems.

No constitution is an absolute guarantee of the rights of any minority. Constitutions contain roadblocks to slow down the majority when its desires conflict with the rights and interests of minorities, but a sufficiently determined supermajority retains the ability to overcome all those roadblocks. At the end of the day, almost all constitutions can be amended, even if with some difficulty – no matter how many constitutional provisions you have to protect minority rights, if the constitution can be amended, then those provisions can be altered or repealed.

The alternative is a constitution which is impossible to amend, no matter how large a supermajority of the population wants it amended. That's fundamentally antidemocratic, and could be described as a form of constitutional tyranny.

[PaulHoule]

I should have said "interests" rather than rights, although one thing I know is that when this civilization collapses people will turn their back on everything it stood for and the idea of individualism and rights will be gone ("my carbon my choice"), the next culture will have a bill of responsibilities.

Sports is a clear example. Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.

On the other hand, there are many benefits to participation in sports. I don't want the state to decide who can play in what league. I want leagues to decide that. My school is part of club leagues where teams have a mix of men and women in them and I think there's a lot of room for innovation. Different leagues want different things: I want trans people to be able to participate in some sports, it's important.

J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.

As for social media, I deleted my Twitter account in 2016, I don't hang out in places with right wing nuts, rather I am on Mastodon and Bluesky with the left wing nuts. I need lots of filters to keep out hateful content posted by trans people on both of those platforms.

'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other. See [1]

It took me 40 years to get my diagnosis; I've had numerous psych evals and today I can get enough signs and symptoms to get a diagnosis looking at the first paragraph of any of them, even if that paragraph stated it was inconclusive.

I have a small amount of the thought disorder of schizophrenia, enough that I can't win at chess because I'll screw up. I max any test of verbal intelligence I take, I write long posts like this that have bizarre typos, the harder I try to fix them the more my keyboard turns into a Ouija board. On a bad morning I have a paranoia towards objects that seem to jump out and grab me. At one point of my life I was wrapped up in a system of delusions.

I also can do detail oriented work and systems thinking. (I've compensated for my condition very well) Sometimes my work is highly valued. Yet I graduated from elementary school the same way Ender Wiggin did. The child post of this one (where I tell the story of my son's incel and trans friends) [4] got upwards of 37 votes so "my opinion does hold some weight here" (But so does yours, and one difference between me and you is that I'm not going to tell you that your opinion has no weight)

Sometimes I feel angry that I wasn't served by the mental health community and that about 5-10% of the population is similarly underserved. On the other hand I was lucky that I was only under the spell of a charlatan for about 9 months of my life and I'm glad I didn't get drugged the way they wanted to drug me in school because a friend of mine who's the same age as me and did get drugged got all his teeth pulled at the age of 40 and might suffer from osteoporosis soon [2] [3] if he lives that long.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Talk-Impoverishment-Political-...

[2] https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2016/b...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19894-x

[4] My son's friend went through a period of near complete social isolation during the pandemic where just about the only person he talked to was an 'egg hatcher' for months. It is not a clinical study or even a case report but my son and I both have notes on our experiences of knowing this person from elementary school to the present day that we're going to consolidate and turn into a real write-up some day. I'm going to support this person as an individual to the maximum that I can because those are my 'family values', I can still think they're making a mistake.

[sunshowers]

> when this civilization collapses people will turn their back on everything it stood for and the idea of individualism and rights will be gone ("my carbon my choice"), the next culture will have a bill of responsibilities.

I agree that Americans don't think enough about their responsibilities. I fully support a bill of responsibilities paired with rights. Several countries have that kind of list already. They're not mutually exclusive.

> Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.

Yet women's sports are still second-class, outside of exceptions like tennis. Is it trans people who have caused women's sports to be second-class, or the patriarchy enforced by cisgender men?

FWIW, I think it's reasonable to require that trans women be on HRT for a while before playing professional women's sports. But categorical bans are horribly unjust—making a class of women inherently lesser. So yes, as a kind of woman, trans women ought to have the right to be on women's sports teams.

> J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.

True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.

I am a very firm believer that there is no free will. We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments. Social media creates extraordinarily bad environments.

> 'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other.

Well, no, it just makes it clear that (a) morality is objective and (b) societies are better when people are more virtuous. The solution is to not make people talk to or past each other, the solution is to effect environmental changes such that people are less exposed to vice and more exposed to virtue.

[loanedempathy]

> Is it trans people who have caused women's sports to be second-class, or the patriarchy enforced by cisgender men?

Is there any possible other reason than these two things, do you think, for this state of affairs?

> making a class of women inherently lesser.

A sort of Morton's fork here would be that transwomen are lesser women because they have to assume that identity instead of starting there (to say nothing of the intuitive biological differences), or that women (and thus trans women) are lesser because they are a subset of the functionality offered by men (because they can be emulated by men choosing to do so). I don't particularly agree with either point, mind you, but both could be made. The trivial solution to avoid this is to simply acknowledge that trans women are neither men nor women (nor trans men) and are a category unto themselves worth valuing on their own merits and characteristics.

> True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.

If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place? Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?

> We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments.

If that's the case, it suggests something odious: there is no virtue in being trans--you're a medical and social anomaly, and if we can remove the factors that cause trans folks to occur all that suffering goes away in a generation or two and the system does better (on the metric of suffering).

And before you go off on how this is unethical or not virtuous or whatever, by your own assertion...

> I am a very firm believer that there is no free will.

...such a solution is admissible and without blame, because no moral agents would be involved in its occurrence.

(You don't get to claim there is no free will and then hold anybody accountable in any moral way. Morality does not exist unless free will does; otherwise, it's just the dull observation of iterated cost-benefit analysis and reactions to an environment.)

[PaulHoule]

Women's sports just took time. I do sports photography for a lot of events which gives me some input for an opinion.

When it comes to soccer at Ithaca College the men play a very physical but kinda stupid game which has a lot of hard running and kicking and headers but very little sense of space. The women play much smarter soccer that looks more like good pro soccer, where, ideally everybody knows where their team mates are supposed to be and what to do to confound the opposition. More people turn up for a women's game in the rain than turn up for a men's game in the shine. They're both entertaining in their own way.

At Cornell I think the men play better than the women categorically but that's not about men or women, it's about the coaching staff, the recruiting, the priorities of the schools, etc.

Last Friday I went to a double header of women's and men's basketball at IC. The women's game was unequal but I was focused on getting good shots of the players and not thinking about the quality of the play. One of the men from the away team promised me that if I stuck around I'd see a much more entertaining game, I said I wouldn't miss it. It was 12-0 for Ithaca at the beginning so I was getting worried they wouldn't come but Hobart did and it was like 63-60 at the end. Side by side the men were so much bigger, so much faster, so much more intense. Still I like the competition and teamwork of women's ball and would rather show up in person at any college game of either gender and watch the NBA on TV.

I think time will tell what's right about fair competition, in the meantime women's soccer and basketball at the pro level is becoming a big business in the US.

In my mind 'patriarchy' is a thought stopping word. We picture the Hebrew god as an old man on a throne with a beard. One take on it is that it's got nothing to do with woman at all except as tokens, it's really a game of status where young men and poor men are dominated by rich men and old men. It's particularly harmful when it comes to discussing the 'incel' phenomenon which mainly affects straight men (slightly more likely to be black or asian!) but also affects women and gay men.

People like J K Rowling don't have a choice but to get cooked by right wing social media because there isn't a sensible discourse from the left.

I do believe in free will. If you think moral agency matters, you have to believe we have a choice. I think genes and epigenetics matter more than people want to admit and hell yeah there are bad environments. But in the end you've got a choice. The 'bad' thing I see is not so much virtue or vice but more like inflammation, as in the medical condition.