Like a butcherbird I am hanging this long-winded sneer in the Sneer Tree to age. I will read it when it is good and ready, but I am sure there is a tasty sneer inside.
(/r/TheMotte/comments/klvdji/trans_people_dont_exist/)
posted on December 29, 2020 07:43 AM by
u/an_thr
47
u/DELETED48 pointsat 1609232254.000000
What always gets me about these posts is the contrast between the
vague, almost unthinking endorsement of biological explanations as
applied to male-female interest differences (“dudes muscles lmao”)
compared with the impossible epistemological standard placed on even
really basic claims that would take a second of research to explain.
Talk about isolated demands for rigor!
It’s not like gender identity is some mysterious characteristic only
trans people possess; one of the primary cases used to demonstrate
innate gender identity is the tragic case of David Reimer, the
product of a rather horrific medical experiment.
**[David Reimer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David Reimer)**
David Reimer (born Bruce Peter Reimer; 22 August 1965 – 4 May 2004) was a Canadian man born male but reassigned female and raised as a girl following medical advice and intervention after his penis was severely injured during a botched circumcision in infancy.The psychologist John Money oversaw the case and reported the reassignment as successful and as evidence that gender identity is primarily learned. The academic sexologist Milton Diamond later reported that Reimer's realization that he was not a girl crystallized between the ages of 9 and 11 years and he transitioned to living as a male at age 15. Well known in medical circles for years anonymously as the "John/Joan" case, Reimer later went public with his story to help discourage similar medical practices. He killed himself after suffering severe depression.
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It's entirely *possible*, but to be honest I don't think it matters.
Humans are sufficiently 'leaky' that we can't even test horses to see if they know arithmetic without accidentally feeding them the answers - there is no possible (let alone ethical) way to achieve the sexologist's holy grail of accurately testing this sort of thing, let alone to actually act on it as a premise without poisoning the waters. People, whether they're cis or trans, will never react well to being manipulated into another gender identity, because they know they're being abused by someone with an agenda who is trying to live their life for them.
You see this with David Reimer under Money, you see this with every trans person under Zucker.
Not content to let their unbiased, heat-not-light, charitable
discussion of Why Trans People Don’t Exist be confined to the spheres of
bad biology, bad sociology, and bad philosophy, this intrepid Motte-user
makes a noble effort towards adding bad history to the mix:
It depends, but from a historical perspective the popularization of
feminization/masculination of males/females has always indicated a
decedent society on the verge of collapse. Ancient Greeks are often
cited as the first to openly practice/record homosexuality and were
conquered by the Romans.
Ahh yes, that time when the decadent, gender-bending Ancient Greeks
were conquered by the extremely not-doing-homosexuality-at-all Romans.
Good thing that’s not his only example since, I guess, this “always”
indicates society is about to collapse.
The Romans started falling out of power when the elite were too busy
subjecting themselves to selfish hedonism to maintain the supply chains
necessary to maintain the country to where a more vicious Visigoths were
able to eventually sack Rome despite the technological and resource
advantages
Roman Senior Vice-President of Supply Chain Management: “Sire, our
empire is too big, there are potholes in all the roads, and shipping
takes too long because all the teamsters care about anymore is gay sex.
I’m worried Rome is going to get sacked in a couple hundred years.”
Roman Emperor: “I’d fix this problem myself, but I’m doing incest
right now.”
>from a historical perspective the popularization of feminization/masculination of males/females has always indicated a decedent society on the verge of collapse
Up there with "history is cyclical" like that wasn't a parochial pre-capitalist observation that maybe applied in the fucking Neolithic.
Who said it? A. a 27 year old Motter; B. Joseph Goebbels; or C. my 80 year old uncle who still won't buy a Japanese car? Often it's hard to tell.
imo the MVP statement in there is "barely reads, just thinks". i have seen so many examples of efforts by iamverysmart type trying to reinvent the wheel within a bubble of ignorance of their own making, and conversations around it where their friend and allies try to make them understand how they should do the basic reading before making grand statements... to no avail. maybe it's like asking an autist to stop being autistic. anyone 'member Yud's take on what is known about Socrates?
I honestly don’t think people should necessarily be mocked for trying to articulate thoughts about abstract topics like philosophy in which they may lack formal education. A layman operating off of intuition can sometimes have insightful things to say, even if they lack the “proper” vocabulary, and discouraging people from voicing opinions on a topic if they aren’t sufficiently researched just locks away knowledge of and interest in that topic to an academic elite. Many intuitive thinkers learn better from dialogue than simply reading texts, and expressing their views on an issue can and should be the first step toward establishing a dialogue.
The problem isn’t people trying to philosophize without an academic background, it’s a lack of epistemic humility that prevents them from accepting input or interacting with people who *do* have that background. The problem with the LessWrongosphere isn’t computer science nerds trying to approach philosophy without a formal education, it’s that they’ve created an entire closed system of pseudophilosophy that refuses to engage with the formal discipline of academic philosophy at all (except when convenient) because of their fetish for autodidacticism and warped individualist ideology.
People shouldn’t be discouraged from offering intuitive thoughts about an area in which they lack formal education (unless it’s, like, hard science), but they *should* have enough self-awareness to know they lack that education and not overstate their authority on the issue.
> Rediscovering ideas that are almost standard in the academic discourse and already seep into the mainstream is just intellectually lazy.
I mean there is something almost admirable in it. Eliezer Yudkowsky's independent rediscovery of 20th century analytic philosophy is kind of impressive from a certain angle - it's just sort of redundant and wasted effort, since if he had read the big names in analytic philosophy he could have had a foundation to build new things from, instead of just rediscovering an existing academic tradition.
It would be more impressive if his takes were more similar to actual early 20c analytic philosophy. In fact though his "system" vaguely resembles the views of Carnap, Schlitz, et al, but deviates wildly in many places, and almost always for the worse.
J-L Marion once said, "When you are done reading a lesser philosopher like Carnap, you will turn to Wittgenstein with relief". Reading the Sequences (as a serious work of philosophy) makes me turn to Carnap with relief.
I mean, being second- or third- rate behind Carnap for an amateur who doesn't interface with existing academic literature is still a pretty decent achievement.
If someone never heard of classical mechanics or calculus and was able to broadly reinvent Newton's achievements in calculus and physics it would be quite impressive, even if their actual work was shoddier and more slapdash than Newton's was. (Though it is sad to imagine someone with such potential wasting it away arriving at a result everybody already knows about.)
I remember being similarly confused by trans people at one point, but rather than assume I knew everything and reason from there and end up like the OP, I actually did read what the feminists had to say on it. Can't say I've got gender identity all worked out, but I think that's the point - it's complicated.
On the other hand, it's genuinely affirming to find out you've independently intuited yourself into the same insights that established and respected academicians spent years building up.
Broke: actually putting time and effort into learning about what people have thought and published before you, before writing a rambling screed on the Motte.
Woke: writing a screed on the Motte, and letting /r/sneerclub put together the background for you so you can pretend that you're as smart as the people who came up with the ideas the first time.
My mom always warned me that the envious masses will try to tarnish your achievements. I didn't expect it to be so blatant.
Edit: I'm going to listen to some music to wash off some of these bad vibes. I leave with with these insightful lyrics for you to consider from Drake - Energy.
> I got enemies, got a lot of enemies
> Got a lot of people tryna drain me of my energy
Too true Mister Drake. Too true.
Yeah? My mum sent me to a shrink as a kid but never told me my Skull Quotient until I was an adult and demonstrably less of an insufferable wanker. Now I'm reasonably well adjusted -- all things considered -- and you're a Motter.
>They wanna see me sprayed 'cause of my hops.
\-- Viper
>My mom always warned me that the envious masses will try to tarnish your achievements.
I'm going to take a gander and guess that the only reason you don't believe in Santa Claus anymore is because you didn't get a PS5 this year.
[eigensneer #2](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/j1zpdk/nsfw_towards_an_eigenbasis_of_the_sneer_space/): "Often the ideas circulate in the water supply, making it easy for people who don't read to believe they came up with them independently."
It takes a special kind of person to write something this long,
citing figures as niche as Aella, Katie Herzog, and Andrea Long Chu,
while steadfastly ignoring the dozens of more famous writers who made
the same points ages ago, with more color and fewer words.
The Trans Rights Activists (TRA), as best as I can tell, generally
talk about trans identity as a mismatch between your sexed body (I don’t
have a better word for this) and your “innate” gender identity. In a
widely-cited study, researchers found that individuals experiencing
gender dysphoria tend to have brain structure similar to what you’d see
in individuals of the opposite sex. So is trans identity a neurological
disorder? That position would get you in trouble among TRAs. The idea
that trans identity is necessarily tied to diagnosed dysphoria is
dismissed as “transmedicalism” or “truscum”. But then, if trans identity
doesn’t show up in brain scans, where and what is it exactly? Further,
if “gender identity” is unmoored both from sex and gender expression,
where does it “exist”? I had this question a few months back, trying to
determine exactly what the difference between a transman and a masculine
female is. If there is in fact no difference, then what purpose does the
concept serve?
breaking news: local rationalist discovers that sociological truth
claims are often politically motivated and contingent upon situational
intangibles, recoils in horror, blames trans people for the existence of
the increasingly contrived ontological schema they require to convince
cis people to leave them the fuck alone
**Gatekeepers:** lol u cant transition just because you want to! that way lies anarchy and chaos!
**Trans people:** \*with their fingers crossed behind their backs\* actually you have to let us transition because of this totally legit innate gender identity thing we heard about. nine out of ten respectable white male sexologists endorse it so it must be true.
**Bigbrain rationalists:** wow why would trans people say such regressive and unfalsifiable things??? they must be idiots who haven't thought as hard about gender in their entire lives as i, a cis man, have in the last five minutes
I mean, seriously, even in the most relentlessly reductive worldview possible, leaving no room for the validity of any abstract identity claims because you have no patience for anything you can't measure with a tool - how much of an uncharitable elitist windbag do you have to be to assume that *all* trans people are *blinkered and stupid*, and not just saying what's useful?
I know you chucklefucks understand the concept of saying one thing because you believe another, you make that very clear every time you hide your alt-right power level, so ask yourself what states of mind and contingent circumstances would make it likely for even a completely "rational" trans person to make claims you find absurd. At least give me the credit of calling me an autogynephile pulling a clever long con instead of telling me that I'm a gender-essentialist idiot, you tool.
If you genuinely think this is an issue, wouldn't it make more sense to examine why it's happening, and try to actually address whatever is making people feel like they need to do that (whether it be an actual obstacle, the perception of one, or some combination of both) rather than just making pointless sniping jabs?
> I had this question a few months back, trying to determine exactly what the difference between a transman and a masculine female is.
One's happier being a man, one's happier being a woman. How is this not so utterly fucking obvious that the question even needs to be asked, let alone deeply and profoundly cogitatated upon.
They're also completely incomprehending the 'transmed' debate. No one, in my experience, (or certainly very few people) actually has a problem with the idea that being trans may have biological underpinnings. As a trans woman, I certainly don't find the idea in the least offensive; indeed I find it on a purely personal basis to both make sense of what I feel and experience and also to be a source of comfort. I am extremely skeptical that this biological underpinning is something that would be able to be differentiated in a brainscan between myself and a cis man next to all the other differences between our individual brains; but that's a side issue. What people have a problem with is the idea that access to transcare should be contingent upon convincing medical professionals of your transness; the reason people detest 'truscum' is because they want trans status to be restricted, generally along almost purely political lines, something which is generally harmful to all trans people.
>the reason people detest 'truscum' is because they want trans status to be restricted, generally along almost purely political lines, something which is generally harmful to all trans people.
Yeah, I'm trans and I feel pretty sure that transness probably ultimately *does* result from neurological differences -- but I'm not 'truscum,' because I support informed consent/access to transition related stuff for everyone on the basis of (a) bodily autonomy, and (b) the fact that gatekeeping on the off chance a cis person transitions by mistake is prioritizing cis people's well-being over trans people's well-being, and categorically fuck that.
Also, if you ask trans people, a lot of them will say they don't feel like their experiences are particularly well described by the concept of "gender identity" anyway. 99% chance the author of the linked post has never talked to a single trans person about this (or if they did they didn't listen), and 100% chance they have no idea about the existence of trans people throughout history. Ugh.
>feel pretty sure that transness probably ultimately does result from neurological differences -- but I'm not 'truscum,' because I support informed consent/access to transition related stuff for everyone
That's exactly my stance as well; I would say that, from my experience, it's a pretty normal view among trans people.
And yeah, they very clearly have never talked to any trans people. This bit really underlines that for me:
>One of the best ways to find out what a stereotypical woman is is to ask a transwoman why she "feels" like a woman. There is a high likelihood that long hair, high-pitched voice, make-up, dresses, breasts, etc. will be features that make the list.
This is the classic catch 22 of transmisogyny. Trans women are put under tremendous social pressure to adopt a stereotypically feminine presentation, then punished for it, as it it's something *we're* imposing on society rather than something that's being imposed on us. It's maddening stuff, and I can't imagine many trans women who would actually answer that question in that way.
>There is a high likelihood that long hair, high-pitched voice, make-up, dresses, breasts, etc. will be features that make the list.
Also, notice how this conflates social gender roles with secondary sex characteristics in a really weird way? Like, oh no, how dare we enforce the social norm that women wear makeup and... have breasts??
> Trans women are put under tremendous social pressure to adopt a stereotypically feminine presentation, then punished for it, as it it's something we're imposing on society rather than something that's being imposed on us
Yeah, despite claiming trans women are enforcing the "gender role" of "having a high voice", I'd bet in a different context they'd be complaining about how "trans women with deep voices still expect us to call them women when they're not even trying?? how dare they??" You literally cannot win with these people, it's absurd.
>
>
>
>
> Also, notice how this conflates social gender roles with secondary sex characteristics in a really weird way? Like, oh no, how dare we enforce the social norm that women wear makeup and... have breasts??
Yeah, that jumped out at me too. I wonder if they realise that trans women's breasts are often as not like...an organic part of our bodies?
> You literally cannot win with these people, it's absurd
As a cis person I see a lot of the anti trans discourse to be setup like this. (See the trans people in sports thing, if you include trans men, the only conclusion there is is 'trans people are not allowed to compete'which is why none of the transphobes talks about trans men) Like if you take a step back and look at the context and other discourse it is clear that trans people are held to an impossible high standard with added no win scenarios. Which imho stems from the fact that a lot of people rather have trans people (or the idea of trans people/non strict gender stuff) not exist at all.
See also rowling admitting that she feels bad about trans people because she is afraid to be introspective about her own gender. (This in addition to her being abused in the past is imho why she is so transphobic, which creates a nasty feedback loop of: i [rowling] cant do the work on myself so i take it out on a minority, minority fights back, see my actions were justified the minority group is abusive!).
Also, I volunteer that we put this person on the wrong sex hormones for a decade or two and then see if they feel like all their issues would be solved by "less restrictive gender roles" lmao
To be fair, most trans people don't want you walking up to them and demanding they validate their existence to you, so not talking to trans people about this is probably a good thing.
That's a good point, haha. But there's also tons of writing from trans people on the internet about their subjective experience, etc, so it's not like it's hard to find info if you're looking to actually understand in good faith.
they could have talked to a transman and a tomboy lady and wrote down what they said, but after three seconds in a conversation with this dunce, every other living human being I can think of would be so repulsed they would literally do or say anything to get away
>uhhh I have a male brain k bye I have a monster truck rally to be getting to
*Heh. First of all, as an impartial observer that's quite a misandrist stereotype you have employed there and I am offended, and for another thing...*
This is a pretty obvious consequence of the "politics is the mind-killer/above it all" attitude that the rationalist community espouses. If you try to view the supposed contradictions in people's attitudes/statements without actually looking at the political/structural context behind them (ex. transgender people having to make statements appealing to traditional ideals about gender in order to get accepted by large portions of society) than you're bound to make some pretty stupid misinterpretations.
> blames trans people for the existence of the increasingly contrived ontological schema they require to convince cis people to leave them the fuck alone
one of the saddest, most infurating things I've read is the waves of "sooooo truuuuuuu!!!!" and "whycome nobody speaks these Deep Truths aloud to me, a fool who shuns and avoids any discussion with Actual Human Trans People" as people rediscover 'Jen Coates' medium article.
An insightful person replied that 'being in the closet does your head in,' which, yeah.
HoW cOuLd TrAnS PeOpLe ReIfY tHe GeNdEr BiNaRy??
That’s a lot of words to say “I’m cis, I’ve never listened to trans
people talk about their own experiences being trans and I don’t intend
to start now”
Every explanation I’ve come across tends to morph into a rewording of
“gender expression”, often with very regressive stereotyping. For
instance, to highlight just one example, Andrea Long Chu (a transwoman)
wrote a book called ‘Females’ in which she defines female identity as
“any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for
the desires of another.” This strikes me as an inherently misogynistic
position and I wasn’t the only one to point this out.
That’s literally the joke. It’s a screamingly obvious pastiche of
psychoanalytic sexology - which was always already terrible - that swaps
out the phallus as the basic structural element of desire in favor of
the vulva as the basic structural element of desire.
Now stop listening to queer inside baseball just because some trans
woman was dumb enough to post her shitpost thesis as a book for public
consumption instead of circulating it as a zine or medium blogpost.
One might naively imagine that having a greater capacity to read and comprehend things than many other primates would naturally lead motteniks to a greater interest in educating themselves... yet here we are.
The syllables don't match but do you think it's possible to create [something as catchy as this](https://twitter.com/neekolul/status/1234601269127458817?lang=en)? I'll take my croptop collection out of storage for this.
I don't understand all of this needless hostility. He doesn't claim to know anything he doesn't, and he specifically asks that if anyone can describe to him what "gender identity" is without relying on societal gender stereotypes, he would like to be pointed in that direction.
So, can you? Or do you know anyone who can?
> he specifically asks that if anyone can describe to him what "gender identity" is without relying on societal gender stereotypes, he would like to be pointed in that direction.
> So, can you? Or do you know anyone who can?
I don't know, do you think it's possible to describe "north" without relying on the reference frame of the Earth?
He's getting a hostile response because there are some entirely reasonable questions which you would never ask if you could just *read the fucking room*, and because at *best* he's taking lay trans theory out of its sociopolitical context in order to criticize it, explicitly as if to make trans identity go up in a puff of logic, while showing an appalling level of uncritical blindness to the forces that make trans identity politics necessary.
I honestly do not understand why you wrote this and posted it in the Motte. Your question had the makings of a perfectly normal "CMV" or "ELI5" post: your job was to *ask trans people*, preferably philosophically or theoretically inclined trans people, for help understanding queer theory and how it relates to the experience of being trans. If you had phrased your question respectfully in the appropriate forum, you could have actually learned something. (Let me point out that Scott has generally been good about attempting to engage with the literature of ideologies he views skeptically: he even [retracted one post in its entirety](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/01/postmodernism-for-rationalists-my-attempt/) because his informants told him he was misunderstanding key points.)
Instead, you formulated a poorly informed thesis of your own about trans experience, gave it a clickbait title, and posted it so you could get back pats from reactionaries.
> Let me point out that Scott has generally been good about attempting to engage with the literature of ideologies he views skeptically
Spoken like someone who's never read his take on marxism
[This essay](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/13/book-review-singer-on-marx/) is the one i had in mind.
If you want more of Alexander failing to engage with stuff he disagrees with, see literally anything he has ever written about feminism.
Assuming you're talking about Scott's overall conclusion that communism is utopian and bad rather than his specific, garbage objections.\* I'm only a baby leftist, but I think you should read a primer on Marxism and then "shop around". Maybe _Capitalist Realism_ (which I haven't read yet) as a partial answer to why nobody has made a precise blueprint for how society should work, and _Manufacturing Consent_ or _The Jakarta Method_ as an antidote to the preconceptions of communism that Scott is clearly bringing into his book review. The history of real-world socialist states makes it clear that there's more to Marxism than just hoping that people start acting nicely, but this topic is pretty contentious and the books are tough reading if you're not into economics.
DSA bread and roses has a nice-looking [reading list](https://breadandrosesdsa.org/reading-list/) that I will eventually work through.
\* this is because, in an effort to save time, the only leftist thing Scott has read seems to be this one critical summary of Marxism and it didn't have enough game theory for him. I think the bulk of his questions are answered by later Marxist works (or even by David Moss and a couple other dissenters in the comments).
What exactly do you agree with there? Scott only quotes Marx twice and he completely bungles both excerpts - so much so it appears Scott didn't actually read what he's quoting.
What always gets me about these posts is the contrast between the vague, almost unthinking endorsement of biological explanations as applied to male-female interest differences (“dudes muscles lmao”) compared with the impossible epistemological standard placed on even really basic claims that would take a second of research to explain. Talk about isolated demands for rigor!
It’s not like gender identity is some mysterious characteristic only trans people possess; one of the primary cases used to demonstrate innate gender identity is the tragic case of David Reimer, the product of a rather horrific medical experiment.
Not content to let their unbiased, heat-not-light, charitable discussion of Why Trans People Don’t Exist be confined to the spheres of bad biology, bad sociology, and bad philosophy, this intrepid Motte-user makes a noble effort towards adding bad history to the mix:
Ahh yes, that time when the decadent, gender-bending Ancient Greeks were conquered by the extremely not-doing-homosexuality-at-all Romans. Good thing that’s not his only example since, I guess, this “always” indicates society is about to collapse.
Roman Senior Vice-President of Supply Chain Management: “Sire, our empire is too big, there are potholes in all the roads, and shipping takes too long because all the teamsters care about anymore is gay sex. I’m worried Rome is going to get sacked in a couple hundred years.”
Roman Emperor: “I’d fix this problem myself, but I’m doing incest right now.”
“I’m starting to think that..” hold it right there bud https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/927/272/6ec.jpg
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I almost guarantee that the writer of this essay has never had a conversation of any depth with any trans woman about anything.
It takes a special kind of person to write something this long, citing figures as niche as Aella, Katie Herzog, and Andrea Long Chu, while steadfastly ignoring the dozens of more famous writers who made the same points ages ago, with more color and fewer words.
breaking news: local rationalist discovers that sociological truth claims are often politically motivated and contingent upon situational intangibles, recoils in horror, blames trans people for the existence of the increasingly contrived ontological schema they require to convince cis people to leave them the fuck alone
That’s a lot of words to say “I’m cis, I’ve never listened to trans people talk about their own experiences being trans and I don’t intend to start now”
OP has discovered gender abolitionism
That’s literally the joke. It’s a screamingly obvious pastiche of psychoanalytic sexology - which was always already terrible - that swaps out the phallus as the basic structural element of desire in favor of the vulva as the basic structural element of desire.
Now stop listening to queer inside baseball just because some trans woman was dumb enough to post her shitpost thesis as a book for public consumption instead of circulating it as a zine or medium blogpost.
[deleted]
Is this the point where I post one of my traumatizing childhood cartoon incidents? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pypyDDPmIQ
Ah, Animals of Farthing Woods: Cartoon violence is okay as long as it’s talking animals and not people!
The post title gave me a mental image of the Shrike from Hyperion Cantos staking Motters on the Tree of Pain and I can’t stop thinking about it now.
I finally made it. I had a feeling this was going to be the One.