"Imagine that there was a device which could, through some magical means, literally change our sex"
That paragraph immediately floods the the argument with an unmistakable bright light. I thought it would be a great paragraph to start an essay. Very strong
Slippery slopes: They are real, but they exist as potential issues, not absolutes. Does drinking alcohol lead inevitably to alcoholism? Clearly not, since many people drink but never become alcoholics; but some people do become alcoholics, though they never would have had they never started drinking, so for them, the slippery slope was quite real. When it comes to the claimed slippery slopes of social issues, I think part of the problem is that people start out with over-simplified logic, which is then taken advantage of by others with different agendas. For the gay rights movement, it made sense to say, "We aren't suffering from a disease. Homosexuality is not a mental disorder. It's our natural orientation and we shouldn't be persecuted for it." Which is all well and good, but then pedophiles tried the same logic: "We didn't ask to be this way, we just are, it's natural for us, so we shouldn't be persecuted for being who we are." The logic, as presented, is basically the same, but we want to accept it in one case and not in the other, which leads us into complications. One common response is to say, "But sex between an adult and a child is harmful to the child, so it's different from homosexuality." Then the pedophiles deny (not very convincingly) that sexual relationships between adults and children are inherently harmful, and point out that homosexuality was once considered inherently harmful too, so therefore (watch this leap of logic) objecting to pedophilia is just as irrational and bigoted as objecting to homosexuality. Meanwhile, the cultural conservatives pop up to claim that homosexuals "groom" young people, and therefore homosexuality is harmful after all. Both groups thus have an incentive to claim that homosexuality and pedophilia are similar enough that society should treat them the same; but the pedophiles want their behavior to be accepted as normal, while the conservatives want to revert to a pre-Stonewall culture in which homosexuals are considered just as bad as pedophiles. And everyone involved is basically improvising their logic rather than constructing a consistent argument from the ground up.
Underlying all of this is the unstated claim that morality should be rational and consistent, that if we can't demonstrate that something is harmful, then we shouldn't forbid it because that would be arbitrary and unsupported by logic. Arguments for drug legalization follow this same pattern by arguing that it doesn't make sense to prohibit marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs while allowing alcohol and tobacco. (Margaret Mead made waves with a speech on this subject long ago.) The problem with this is that no culture in history has ever been rational in this sense, and worse, there is no simple, objective definition of "harm" that would compel universal agreement and that would be easy to apply in an indisputably correct way to all possible cases. Nor is it necessarily true that the only justification for a society to forbid something is because it can be proven to be harmful.
Societies actually are irrational about all sorts of things; that's part of what makes one culture different from another. I've become convinced that religion, for example, is largely a matter of cultural markers; the reality of one god vs. another (or none at all), or the superiority of one set of teachings over another, is not really the point; what matters is that believing certain things identifies you as belonging to a particular community and identifies someone else (who believes differently) as not belonging to that community. It is actually an advantage, in this regard, that it is impossible to objectively prove that one religion is "true" in the sense of its god actually existing and its scriptures correctly reporting how that god wants us to live. If a religion could be proven true or false, it would lose its value as a sign of cultural belonging. The impossibility of proving anything in this area is actually what makes it useful.
So, getting back on topic, let's list a few groups that have attempted to employ logic along the lines of, "We should be accepted because the hostility to us is based in irrational prejudice":
- Blacks
- Jews
- Homosexuals
- Pedophiles
- Zoophilists
Most of us reading this, I imagine, are sympathetic to those affected by racial or religious prejudice, and probably to homosexuals as well; but most of us probably get off the bus at that point, and are far less inclined to agree that society should tolerate pedophilia or bestiality. One could try to come up with a solid logical argument for why those last two items are fundamentally different from the others, but like any logical argument, it would be vulnerable to challenges to its premises. Perhaps it's better to reject the nonsensical goal of a perfectly rational society and accept that we make our decisions based on what we collectively want. Because that's going to be the reality in any case.
With regard to trans issues, I think you're right, at least in practice, if not entirely in theory, that the main problem is that what we call a "sex change" or "gender transition" surgery is really just cosmetic. If we had the magic technology to REALLY change someone's sex, then it wouldn't be controversial. (I've actually been saying this for a while, too.) The prior art I like to cite is a series of science fiction stories written in the late '70s by John Varley, which postulated a future society in which the magic technology for perfect sex changes actually existed. It was completely normal for anyone to change sex whenever they felt like it, and in fact population stability was achieved through a "One Person, One Child" law, such that if two people wanted to have two children together, they had to take turns having pregnancies. Of course, Varley never explained how this technology worked, because he couldn't. But considering how many technologies we have today that would have seemed like wild flights of fantasy a century or two ago, I would not be so sure that we won't someday have much better sex change technology than we do now. That's my one, admittedly rather theoretical, objection to your comments about "reality" being the issue here. Today, and for the foreseeable future, yes; but who knows what might be achievable in the future?
Once again I have improvised a response that would be better expressed as a more detailed essay. But there is hope at hand, for I am starting my own Substack at eggman.substack.com. At the moment there's only a brief introductory post stating my goals, but I hope to post more soon.
"I've become convinced that religion, for example, is largely a matter of cultural markers" made me think of Joshua Greene's important systematic exploration of the issue in "Moral Tribes" . The idea that the inherent allusiveness of religious beliefs is essential for their cultural function of distinguishing groups, however, may be original
I am surprised at how readily the concept of a distinct quality of gender, presumably innate in the human mind, is accepted among people who I regard in any other domain as highly capable experts.
Such an idea would normally warrant a high degree of skepticism, no? That would be a remarkable idea - that there is a distinct internal essence beyond what is culturally deemed masculine or feminine. Is it supposed to be universal - inside of me at this very moment?
Why would you assume that the differences of male and female biology would not correspond to differences in behavior? Or am I misunderstanding your question?
I can buy that biological differences influence behavior - one example being a woman clutching her purse if I am in an elevator with her, or a woman crossing the street to the other side if it’s late and I am walking towards her on the same side. That makes sense to me - there’s such a large strength differential, and given the amount of violent acts committed by men, I can understand how biology is influencing her behavior, but I read that as a readily apparent difference followed by a rational and completely understandable response.
I think the idea of gender is a bit different. It presumes that my stereotypical masculine behavior of say, not really caring about fashion or what I wear, is a psychological trait unrelated to just laziness about how I look. That’s just one example, but there are plenty of traits that are attributed to biological gender which seems to me to simply be downstream of culture: no one ever shamed me for how I look in the first place and my looks play less of a role in the dating game than if I was a woman.
Well, I'd say you as a guy don't worry as much about your looks as most women do because of the different strategies the sexes follow in seeking mates. Beauty is an important part of how women attract mates; but men rely more on power in various forms, whether physical strength, wealth, social prestige, etc., their looks being a secondary consideration (and sometimes not even that; it's amazing how attractive rich, ugly men can be to women). This seems to be constant across human cultures throughout history, as far as I can tell, which suggests that it's actually hard-wired into us rather than being just a cultural thing.
"Not caring about fashion or what I wear" and "laziness about how I look" sound like the same thing to me.
Back in college, I had a cultural anthropology professor who taught us that the difference between humans and other animals is that humans have no instincts. One of the things I have figured out over the years since then is that this professor was full of it. Humans do have instincts. We just aren't very good at perceiving them because they seem so natural to us that we don't notice them (and also, we're egotistical creatures who like to think that our conscious minds are independent of our animal natures, which clearly is not true).
I also wanted to mention - that I think plenty of behaviours are downstream of genetic and biological differences between people. I hope I did not give an impression that I didn't think that. I think that quite a lot of the Battle of the Sexes is attributable to sexual dimorphism, specifically the strength differences between men and women. This ultimately can lead to "women caring more about self-appearances" and men "spending more time hunting antelope/killing other men/pillaging and conquering enemy tribes/programming in C."
Those to me would be sex differences (and the modern day downstream results), hardwired by the biological dimorphism present in mammals - the basic fact that excess fat in the lower half of a female body is a tradeoff they make to support children, whereas men get more musculature and denser bones in place of large fat deposits which allows them to play power games with each other and not focus on fashion so much.
This all to me seems evidently true, but distinct from the topic at hand of gender, in short "I have the *internal experience* of a man/woman/xe/xer because I like [arbitrary article of clothing/arbitrary gendered passion/stereotypical cultural meme]."
Right, I got that from your earlier response. I think where we may disagree is that you seem (based on this brief exchange of comments, which I'm sure hasn't allowed either of us to explain all our thoughts on this subject) to think of behavior differences as a consequence of anatomy (i.e. men are bigger and stronger, and therefore...) and it seems to me that this one-way view of causality (if that's what it really is) could make it harder to see influences that don't fit into that model.
I would argue that the mind is a function of the brain, and the brain is ultimately just another body part specified by DNA, so I don't see any reason to think that any given human behavior could not be hard-wired, whether it's women wanting to be beautiful, or men competing with each other for dominance, or one man being gay while another man is straight, or even, perhaps, someone finding themselves in a male body but feeling that they are "really" a woman (or the other way around). Our DNA is not guaranteed to be internally consistent; if anything, the concept of random mutation seems to imply the possibility that in some cases it might not be.
As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, I agree that it's interesting that some trans people have that sort of "I realized I was a _____ when I did _____" experience. I'm not sure what to make of that.
Yes, I agree that humans are not above regular animals in terms of not having instincts. In my experience, the claims about what gender is are related to things that are heavily cultural. I brought up fashion because that is a common one I see: "I knew I was a woman deep down when I started to wear dresses and heals" or, "I knew I was a man when I did x and y thing."
The things being posited as biologically innate attractions are just the fashion of the day and highly distinct across time and space - they also tend to be neutral or positive traits. I've never heard someone say "I knew I was a woman because I tend to be irrational and emotional about everything," which is a highly common stereotype that we are all exposed to. I just wonder why the objects of proof of gender are what they are: usually only positive things that are highly variable like clothes or style or appearance in general - things that are typically culturally transmittable.
Ah, I see what you mean now. Yes, that is interesting. I don't think, though, that it's universal among trans people to have an "I knew I was a _____ when I did _____" experience; sometimes it's something they felt from a very early age. Why some people just always felt out of place in their natal sex while others discovered that feeling much later in life is another question.
1. You say that your hypothetical sex change machine would "morph... our minds" and that a male-to-female transitioning person would come out of this machine with a "female psychology, female sex drive." I'm a cis person, so this is all secondhand knowledge, but this seems a misunderstanding of how trans people perceive themselves. A trans woman would say that her mind and psychology is already female; it does not need any rewiring. Only her body is, regrettably, biologically male. She would welcome a machine that could morph her body, but not her mind. There's the concept of "trapped in the wrong body" - the person's mind *feels* female, but the body is male, or vice versa.
As an aside, this raises the question of how to tell that an individual's mind/psychology is male or female. There are some obvious differences on the population level - on average, men are more aggressive, more risk-seeking, more interested in things/abstract concepts than in people/relationships, more interested in casual sex, etc. But on an individual level, does this hold? It doesn't really make sense to say, "You score 8.7 out of 10 on the risk-seeking scale, so your mind must be male!" There are lots of outliers in both directions. What would it mean, then, to "rewire" a mind from male to female or vice versa?
2. I understand that you chose to focus here on trans people specifically, but there is another important issue to address: genderfluid and nonbinary people. Your hypothetical sex change machine does nothing for them. They don't want to switch from one sex to another; they want to reject the concept of sex altogether. I admit I really don't understand this. Of course nonbinary/genderfluid people ought to be treated with dignity and respect like everyone else, just, biologically speaking, humans come in male and female and the very, very occasional intersex varieties, and that's it. What does it mean to reject the sex binary on a physiological level? What would that even look like? (If you identify as nonbinary and you enter a hypothetical sex change machine, what do you leave as?)
Any thoughts on how nonbinary and genderfluid people relate to this column talks about?
1. As Eggman below pointed out, I think there is a misunderstanding of the point of the exercise, which was to show how the debate might shift if we eliminate doubt altogether. As for the other point you raise--I think we should start by understanding the brain as a *functional* organ. Given that the two sexes have complimentary roles and must pursue very different strategies--why wouldn't there be a psychology that is healthy/advantageous for a male, but unhealthy/disadvantageous for a female? And if there is a functional use of a certain psychology-- might a "rewiring" (even if possible) be a harmful endeavor?
My view is that *most* (but not all) of the people calling themselves nonbinary don't want to be sexually androgynous, they want to stop people from having expectations of them or forming judgements about them based on the gender stereotypes associated with their sex. I think many of the people calling themselves nonbinary would have previously called themselves feminists.
"Nonbinary" signals:
1. Neutral gender identity, a person who feels neither male nor female.
2. Please don't apply gender stereotypes when you interact with me
I might even go further--non binary is a response to the trans movement's indirect crystallization of sex roles. It is an attempt to reclaim individuality while technically remaining within the genderist framework.
Not to speak for Sarah, but I think your #1 is a misunderstanding. Her magic sex-change machine seems to me like a thought experiment designed to eliminate all questions of whether a transitioned person is "really" their new sex. They don't even have to have been gender-dysphoric beforehand, though if they were, that's fine too. The point is that a person processed by the machine becomes, on all levels, the opposite to what their biological sex was going in, just as if they had been born that way; and that if such a machine existed, sex changes would not be controversial and nobody would argue about what pronouns were appropriate, what bathroom someone should use, etc. The controversy about these things is due to the primitive state of our gender-transition technology (basically just cosmetic surgery and a lifetime of hormone treatments).
I agree that one's life experience to date affects the result. You can change your physical body, your hormones, even the structure of your brain, but presumably your memories and the way you've been shaped by your experiences remain pretty much the same, or you aren't you anymore.
However, I think if we had the magic sex-change machine, our ideas of what a "man" or "woman" is would necessarily change too. In a world where it's normal for anyone to change their sex at any time, even on a whim ("I feel like being a woman today"), many of the social differences between the sexes would necessarily disappear, because at any given time, many of the people around you would not be their birth sex, and for the most part you wouldn't know or care whether they were or not. The idea of someone being "really" one sex or the other wouldn't survive. At most, you might be a man who had spent most or all of his childhood as a girl, but I think that would be regarded as a biographical detail rather than a statement of essence. I think it would be at most a minority opinion, probably regarded as a bit weird by most people, to say, "I only date women who were born female."
And what if even children were allowed to change sex on a whim? Your 20 years of socialization goes out the window then.
In this context, I wonder whether it might also be worthwhile to explore whether we can expect a difference in which direction the magic sex change machine would be used in the premating = dating arena vs the postmating = parental care arena. As a matter of fact, I wonder how much of the current overall discussion may be limited by the higher interest in/focus on the dating vs the parental care arena. Do we know of people that express attraction towards male or female because of the way they are motivated by the presumptive joy they anticipate raising children? This is the second major act of our sex-identity lives.
"The "obvious" way to to do the mapping is to keep the same percentile rank within each trait (given some suitably exhaustive parsing and factorization of the human design into individual "traits"), but take it with respect to the target sex's distribution."
Speaking of apologetics and chasing a vague sense of plausibility, there are a few specific brain scans/tests that can often predict/detect homosexuality. So gay men in certain instances can be shown to have "female-adjacent" brain activity relative to straight men, and same goes for lesbians showing "male-adjacent" brain activity.
Gay people and trans people both have those same cross-sex brain activity markers, which trans people have seized on as "proof" that they really do have the brain of the sex they're transitioning to. See
Looked up the 2nd study, out of curiosity. They list orientations of the subjects and breakdown in the post-pubertal adolescents surveyed seems to confirm that they were, in fact, just examining gays and lesbians.
I suspect if this kind of approach becomes more mainstream the gender activists will shut it down.
That's probably the data a Natalie Wynn type would use to "blow this piece to smithereens". I'm just guessing though since Calvin isn't big on details.
Just like your previous post and manifesto, this is really good. I do not think you should delay any longer in posting it. The world needs to hear you.
I believe this to be the most important and convincing aspect of your argument thus far and should be highlighted as a major argument in your challenge to gender identity :
"Seeing as the impossible desire cannot be achieved, those burdened by it must resort to the next best thing: a social construct in which others are obligated to act as if what cannot be true is (in some meaningful, significant sense) actually true...They are not asking us to loosen our norms of sex-typical dress or behavior. They are not asking us to be more tolerant of violators of such norms. They are asking us to act as if the norms are not even being violated. "
Very much enjoyed reading this extension of the manifesto. When it comes to the "slippery slope" paradigm, there is an importantly rich discussion about its logic and metaphorical essence which might be worthwhile to double check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
Related, I think a point can be made that many aspects of our world are slippery slope in the sense that they occur in continuous variation from black to white in all these shades of grey. For this reason, geneticists distinguish between discrete traits, i.e. traits that have only two or very few states of variation, vs continuous traits like body height. Turns out that discrete traits are actually the minority. That means that there are also biological evidence for considering/approaching largely sex-specific traits as complex in the sense of filling a continuous space of variation that is affected by genes, environment, and in our species also culture. This has important implications when it comes to developing clear definitions of behaviors or inclinations of things. Many are just a somewhat arbitrary, pragmatically chosen window of a continuous distribution. In other words, slippery slope problems are real ones bc of the sloppy-slopey nature of our world. This may be another reason, why some gender identity definitions are challenging to pinpoint. At the same time, I don't think this affects the basic distinction between innate and treatment implemented biological sex-related differences.
Re your comment that transgender folks rarely pass. I know well two pre and post transexuals. The male-to-female one looked like/seemed like a woman to me and was accepted in lesbian culture in the 70s, which is saying something. The female-to-male went from being fairly feminine to being–he could be a guy or, maybe, a lesbian. But people who meet him without knowing his past readily accepted him as a guy and didn't seem to have a clue he was born a woman. Both of these were before the rise of the current situation where I think a lot of people only partially transition (if at all) or they do the ridiculous make-up thing if they are male-to-female. Back in the day, if you knew a transexual (plus the public ones like Jan Morris, Renee Richards and Christina Jorgensen), they didn't make your head spin at all. But now, they aren't "transexuals" but "transgender" and they certainly aren't trying as hard to blend in, that is for sure.
I agreed with the piece in general but you one sentence that really bothered me: "Pedophiles, for example, can literally achieve the object of their desire too–they can groom children and rape them."
It used to be that people understood that while pedophiles all tended to groom kids - but what they did after the child became attached to them varied widely. And punishment for the pedophile was variable depending on exactly what they did. Sometimes they have the kid watch them as they masturbate, or touched the kid's penis or vagina or have the kid touch their penis - or a variety of similar behaviors. That is as far as many go. It's bad, but it sure isn't as bad as being raped.
And, of course, lots of pedophiles do nothing with actual kids. They control themselves. Some try to find porn to satisfy their urges, which was bad as real kids were used - and lots of pedophiles are arrested every year for having illegal porn, but not for ever actually touching a kid. Real kids were usually use in the past, so that prohibition and crimes made total sense. However now it very easy to create child porn without real children - but that is just as illegal as if it is a real child. And that does not seem right to me. Clearly, as a society, the object should be protect kids - not to punish pedophiles who don't ever harm an actual kid.
Now, when people talk about pedophiles, everybody seems to assume that penetration is the plan and is what they do. However, it is not the most common thing - at all - that they do. Most usually, it doesn't lead to rape. All cases should be dealt with in the criminal justice system, but we have gone nuts as a society if the word "pedophile" is mumbled. Everybody assumes rape. I had a pedophile interested in me when I was a kid. He wanted to kiss me - I said no way and he backed off. I have a kinda friend (he went to college with my wife and she is his friend) who is in prison for pedophilia. The thing he did is have a live stream in his bathroom so he could see kids who came to his house naked. He got 30 years for that. That seems way out of whack to me. We used to treat guys like Steve - after serving some time in prison (a year or two for something that - a first offense) and then require counseling to learn to deal with the problem. In fact, recidivism for pedophiles is lower than for most crimes. But people get the sense that pedophiles can't control themselves and will always re-offend, both of which are totally untrue. What is true as those who do the most serious cases (i.e. rape) were more likely to reoffend (though still well below many crimes) and those with lesser crimes had a fairly low recidivism rate - about 20%.
Another huge problem is that they can't get counseling if they have the feelings. If they go to a counselor and say that they are sexually attracted to kids and want to control it - the counselor has to report the person to the authorities. So, they do it on their own. Thus, there is nobody out there helping these guys to not break the law. I think the number of pedophiles is quite numerous and we should be doing more to help them not offend than we are.
Anyway, "groom children and rape them" just is not nuanced enough for me.
Do you have a theory about why so many people want to -- as you argue -- liberate themselves from the reality of their sex? I don't believe in the blandishments of conventional religion, but I understand why they are attractive -- people don't don't want to die, and they'd like to have a big brother in the sky to help them with their problems. But I don't understand the benefits of going through so much trouble -- to the point of taking dangerous drugs and undergoing painful surgery -- in the vain effort to escape one's biological sex. TBH, this lack of understanding on my part forces me to give more weight to the self-understanding of trans people, at least as something that they sincerely believe.
Having the motivations that you do, would you open a private conversation with a highly virtuous trans person like this? Natalie Wynn, for example? Why would you open like this? Are trans people not your audience? Have you decided they are not worth persuading? They are my friends and I will defend their innocence when they are innocent. I will craft my narratives in cooperation with the likes of Natalie Wynn, who would predictably blow this piece to smithereens.
Your post alienates me and it would alienate my virtuous trans friends. Your framing comes off as unnecessarily hostile.
Still, it is not too late to exchange considerations, such as in this comment section. By exchanging considerations, we may adopt some of those considerations as our own, or we may simply benefit from having made ourselves more familiar with the considerations of others.
Perhaps I am the one who is in error! Here are my ideals, which I am showing you in order to make the task of persuading me easier. This list is intended as an outline of Good Itself, and I intend to be Extremely Good, not moderately- nor temperately- nor agreeable-seemingly-Good. If my list is arbitrary, such as being arbitrarily specific, arbitrarily incomplete, or arbitrarily way-off, I hope you will suggest improvements:
Freedom (F)
Justice (J)
Reconciliation (R)
Variety of beauty (V)
Curiosity (C)
Paradigm shift preparation (P)
Exceptioncraft (X)
Slack, ease, convenience (S)
Robust strategy (O)
Intrinsic sacrifice minimization (I)
Efficient extrinsic manipulation (E)
Cost-benefit-honesty (H)
Everything else that should have been explicitly on this list (U)
Accountability to the letter and spirit of this list (A)
Some of these have connotations that I could list off but I have not listed for the sake of brevity. For example, I consider Gregg Caruso's Public Health Quarantine Model one of five correct connotations of Justice. I will explain the connotations of any of these if you ask. :)
Specifics of what? My main point that this would get demolished by Wynn? My point that it's alienating to good people with good values who are my friends and are worth persuading?
I think a valuable place to start would be to challenge specific parts of the arguments stated in this post, if not here, then somewhere else and linking it back to here.
I'll come right out and say it - your only objections to Sarah's piece were about how it made you *feel*. Unfortunately, Ben Shapiro had a point when he said "facts don't care about your feelings".
You're making like at least 8 serious intellectual mistakes simultaneously and I'm not convinced they're remotely being made in good faith. Also you got liked by Sarah for this so I may have to unsubscribe but I'll give it a few more days at least.
It is a fact that Ben Shapiro had actually no point at all when he said that; I hope your feelings care more about that fact, in hopes that your persona of rationality might improve, than your feelings care about preserving your false persona of rationality.
"Imagine that there was a device which could, through some magical means, literally change our sex"
That paragraph immediately floods the the argument with an unmistakable bright light. I thought it would be a great paragraph to start an essay. Very strong
A few thoughts on all this:
Slippery slopes: They are real, but they exist as potential issues, not absolutes. Does drinking alcohol lead inevitably to alcoholism? Clearly not, since many people drink but never become alcoholics; but some people do become alcoholics, though they never would have had they never started drinking, so for them, the slippery slope was quite real. When it comes to the claimed slippery slopes of social issues, I think part of the problem is that people start out with over-simplified logic, which is then taken advantage of by others with different agendas. For the gay rights movement, it made sense to say, "We aren't suffering from a disease. Homosexuality is not a mental disorder. It's our natural orientation and we shouldn't be persecuted for it." Which is all well and good, but then pedophiles tried the same logic: "We didn't ask to be this way, we just are, it's natural for us, so we shouldn't be persecuted for being who we are." The logic, as presented, is basically the same, but we want to accept it in one case and not in the other, which leads us into complications. One common response is to say, "But sex between an adult and a child is harmful to the child, so it's different from homosexuality." Then the pedophiles deny (not very convincingly) that sexual relationships between adults and children are inherently harmful, and point out that homosexuality was once considered inherently harmful too, so therefore (watch this leap of logic) objecting to pedophilia is just as irrational and bigoted as objecting to homosexuality. Meanwhile, the cultural conservatives pop up to claim that homosexuals "groom" young people, and therefore homosexuality is harmful after all. Both groups thus have an incentive to claim that homosexuality and pedophilia are similar enough that society should treat them the same; but the pedophiles want their behavior to be accepted as normal, while the conservatives want to revert to a pre-Stonewall culture in which homosexuals are considered just as bad as pedophiles. And everyone involved is basically improvising their logic rather than constructing a consistent argument from the ground up.
Underlying all of this is the unstated claim that morality should be rational and consistent, that if we can't demonstrate that something is harmful, then we shouldn't forbid it because that would be arbitrary and unsupported by logic. Arguments for drug legalization follow this same pattern by arguing that it doesn't make sense to prohibit marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs while allowing alcohol and tobacco. (Margaret Mead made waves with a speech on this subject long ago.) The problem with this is that no culture in history has ever been rational in this sense, and worse, there is no simple, objective definition of "harm" that would compel universal agreement and that would be easy to apply in an indisputably correct way to all possible cases. Nor is it necessarily true that the only justification for a society to forbid something is because it can be proven to be harmful.
Societies actually are irrational about all sorts of things; that's part of what makes one culture different from another. I've become convinced that religion, for example, is largely a matter of cultural markers; the reality of one god vs. another (or none at all), or the superiority of one set of teachings over another, is not really the point; what matters is that believing certain things identifies you as belonging to a particular community and identifies someone else (who believes differently) as not belonging to that community. It is actually an advantage, in this regard, that it is impossible to objectively prove that one religion is "true" in the sense of its god actually existing and its scriptures correctly reporting how that god wants us to live. If a religion could be proven true or false, it would lose its value as a sign of cultural belonging. The impossibility of proving anything in this area is actually what makes it useful.
So, getting back on topic, let's list a few groups that have attempted to employ logic along the lines of, "We should be accepted because the hostility to us is based in irrational prejudice":
- Blacks
- Jews
- Homosexuals
- Pedophiles
- Zoophilists
Most of us reading this, I imagine, are sympathetic to those affected by racial or religious prejudice, and probably to homosexuals as well; but most of us probably get off the bus at that point, and are far less inclined to agree that society should tolerate pedophilia or bestiality. One could try to come up with a solid logical argument for why those last two items are fundamentally different from the others, but like any logical argument, it would be vulnerable to challenges to its premises. Perhaps it's better to reject the nonsensical goal of a perfectly rational society and accept that we make our decisions based on what we collectively want. Because that's going to be the reality in any case.
With regard to trans issues, I think you're right, at least in practice, if not entirely in theory, that the main problem is that what we call a "sex change" or "gender transition" surgery is really just cosmetic. If we had the magic technology to REALLY change someone's sex, then it wouldn't be controversial. (I've actually been saying this for a while, too.) The prior art I like to cite is a series of science fiction stories written in the late '70s by John Varley, which postulated a future society in which the magic technology for perfect sex changes actually existed. It was completely normal for anyone to change sex whenever they felt like it, and in fact population stability was achieved through a "One Person, One Child" law, such that if two people wanted to have two children together, they had to take turns having pregnancies. Of course, Varley never explained how this technology worked, because he couldn't. But considering how many technologies we have today that would have seemed like wild flights of fantasy a century or two ago, I would not be so sure that we won't someday have much better sex change technology than we do now. That's my one, admittedly rather theoretical, objection to your comments about "reality" being the issue here. Today, and for the foreseeable future, yes; but who knows what might be achievable in the future?
Once again I have improvised a response that would be better expressed as a more detailed essay. But there is hope at hand, for I am starting my own Substack at eggman.substack.com. At the moment there's only a brief introductory post stating my goals, but I hope to post more soon.
"I've become convinced that religion, for example, is largely a matter of cultural markers" made me think of Joshua Greene's important systematic exploration of the issue in "Moral Tribes" . The idea that the inherent allusiveness of religious beliefs is essential for their cultural function of distinguishing groups, however, may be original
I am surprised at how readily the concept of a distinct quality of gender, presumably innate in the human mind, is accepted among people who I regard in any other domain as highly capable experts.
Such an idea would normally warrant a high degree of skepticism, no? That would be a remarkable idea - that there is a distinct internal essence beyond what is culturally deemed masculine or feminine. Is it supposed to be universal - inside of me at this very moment?
Such a remarkable idea.
Why would you assume that the differences of male and female biology would not correspond to differences in behavior? Or am I misunderstanding your question?
I can buy that biological differences influence behavior - one example being a woman clutching her purse if I am in an elevator with her, or a woman crossing the street to the other side if it’s late and I am walking towards her on the same side. That makes sense to me - there’s such a large strength differential, and given the amount of violent acts committed by men, I can understand how biology is influencing her behavior, but I read that as a readily apparent difference followed by a rational and completely understandable response.
I think the idea of gender is a bit different. It presumes that my stereotypical masculine behavior of say, not really caring about fashion or what I wear, is a psychological trait unrelated to just laziness about how I look. That’s just one example, but there are plenty of traits that are attributed to biological gender which seems to me to simply be downstream of culture: no one ever shamed me for how I look in the first place and my looks play less of a role in the dating game than if I was a woman.
Well, I'd say you as a guy don't worry as much about your looks as most women do because of the different strategies the sexes follow in seeking mates. Beauty is an important part of how women attract mates; but men rely more on power in various forms, whether physical strength, wealth, social prestige, etc., their looks being a secondary consideration (and sometimes not even that; it's amazing how attractive rich, ugly men can be to women). This seems to be constant across human cultures throughout history, as far as I can tell, which suggests that it's actually hard-wired into us rather than being just a cultural thing.
"Not caring about fashion or what I wear" and "laziness about how I look" sound like the same thing to me.
Back in college, I had a cultural anthropology professor who taught us that the difference between humans and other animals is that humans have no instincts. One of the things I have figured out over the years since then is that this professor was full of it. Humans do have instincts. We just aren't very good at perceiving them because they seem so natural to us that we don't notice them (and also, we're egotistical creatures who like to think that our conscious minds are independent of our animal natures, which clearly is not true).
I also wanted to mention - that I think plenty of behaviours are downstream of genetic and biological differences between people. I hope I did not give an impression that I didn't think that. I think that quite a lot of the Battle of the Sexes is attributable to sexual dimorphism, specifically the strength differences between men and women. This ultimately can lead to "women caring more about self-appearances" and men "spending more time hunting antelope/killing other men/pillaging and conquering enemy tribes/programming in C."
Those to me would be sex differences (and the modern day downstream results), hardwired by the biological dimorphism present in mammals - the basic fact that excess fat in the lower half of a female body is a tradeoff they make to support children, whereas men get more musculature and denser bones in place of large fat deposits which allows them to play power games with each other and not focus on fashion so much.
This all to me seems evidently true, but distinct from the topic at hand of gender, in short "I have the *internal experience* of a man/woman/xe/xer because I like [arbitrary article of clothing/arbitrary gendered passion/stereotypical cultural meme]."
Right, I got that from your earlier response. I think where we may disagree is that you seem (based on this brief exchange of comments, which I'm sure hasn't allowed either of us to explain all our thoughts on this subject) to think of behavior differences as a consequence of anatomy (i.e. men are bigger and stronger, and therefore...) and it seems to me that this one-way view of causality (if that's what it really is) could make it harder to see influences that don't fit into that model.
I would argue that the mind is a function of the brain, and the brain is ultimately just another body part specified by DNA, so I don't see any reason to think that any given human behavior could not be hard-wired, whether it's women wanting to be beautiful, or men competing with each other for dominance, or one man being gay while another man is straight, or even, perhaps, someone finding themselves in a male body but feeling that they are "really" a woman (or the other way around). Our DNA is not guaranteed to be internally consistent; if anything, the concept of random mutation seems to imply the possibility that in some cases it might not be.
As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, I agree that it's interesting that some trans people have that sort of "I realized I was a _____ when I did _____" experience. I'm not sure what to make of that.
Yes, I agree that humans are not above regular animals in terms of not having instincts. In my experience, the claims about what gender is are related to things that are heavily cultural. I brought up fashion because that is a common one I see: "I knew I was a woman deep down when I started to wear dresses and heals" or, "I knew I was a man when I did x and y thing."
The things being posited as biologically innate attractions are just the fashion of the day and highly distinct across time and space - they also tend to be neutral or positive traits. I've never heard someone say "I knew I was a woman because I tend to be irrational and emotional about everything," which is a highly common stereotype that we are all exposed to. I just wonder why the objects of proof of gender are what they are: usually only positive things that are highly variable like clothes or style or appearance in general - things that are typically culturally transmittable.
Ah, I see what you mean now. Yes, that is interesting. I don't think, though, that it's universal among trans people to have an "I knew I was a _____ when I did _____" experience; sometimes it's something they felt from a very early age. Why some people just always felt out of place in their natal sex while others discovered that feeling much later in life is another question.
Yes, the internal experience is fascinating to me. I'm both happy and sad that I don't experience it.
I have two points to make.
1. You say that your hypothetical sex change machine would "morph... our minds" and that a male-to-female transitioning person would come out of this machine with a "female psychology, female sex drive." I'm a cis person, so this is all secondhand knowledge, but this seems a misunderstanding of how trans people perceive themselves. A trans woman would say that her mind and psychology is already female; it does not need any rewiring. Only her body is, regrettably, biologically male. She would welcome a machine that could morph her body, but not her mind. There's the concept of "trapped in the wrong body" - the person's mind *feels* female, but the body is male, or vice versa.
As an aside, this raises the question of how to tell that an individual's mind/psychology is male or female. There are some obvious differences on the population level - on average, men are more aggressive, more risk-seeking, more interested in things/abstract concepts than in people/relationships, more interested in casual sex, etc. But on an individual level, does this hold? It doesn't really make sense to say, "You score 8.7 out of 10 on the risk-seeking scale, so your mind must be male!" There are lots of outliers in both directions. What would it mean, then, to "rewire" a mind from male to female or vice versa?
2. I understand that you chose to focus here on trans people specifically, but there is another important issue to address: genderfluid and nonbinary people. Your hypothetical sex change machine does nothing for them. They don't want to switch from one sex to another; they want to reject the concept of sex altogether. I admit I really don't understand this. Of course nonbinary/genderfluid people ought to be treated with dignity and respect like everyone else, just, biologically speaking, humans come in male and female and the very, very occasional intersex varieties, and that's it. What does it mean to reject the sex binary on a physiological level? What would that even look like? (If you identify as nonbinary and you enter a hypothetical sex change machine, what do you leave as?)
Any thoughts on how nonbinary and genderfluid people relate to this column talks about?
Thanks for your questions!
Helpfully others have answered:
1. As Eggman below pointed out, I think there is a misunderstanding of the point of the exercise, which was to show how the debate might shift if we eliminate doubt altogether. As for the other point you raise--I think we should start by understanding the brain as a *functional* organ. Given that the two sexes have complimentary roles and must pursue very different strategies--why wouldn't there be a psychology that is healthy/advantageous for a male, but unhealthy/disadvantageous for a female? And if there is a functional use of a certain psychology-- might a "rewiring" (even if possible) be a harmful endeavor?
2. See my comment here. I think this group exists because transgenderism exists, and would not if it did not. https://sarahhaider.substack.com/p/were-gay-rights-a-slippery-slope/comment/15517174
My view is that *most* (but not all) of the people calling themselves nonbinary don't want to be sexually androgynous, they want to stop people from having expectations of them or forming judgements about them based on the gender stereotypes associated with their sex. I think many of the people calling themselves nonbinary would have previously called themselves feminists.
"Nonbinary" signals:
1. Neutral gender identity, a person who feels neither male nor female.
2. Please don't apply gender stereotypes when you interact with me
3. Allyship with the LGBTQ+ community
4. Maybe - gender dysmorphia or gender fluidity
I might even go further--non binary is a response to the trans movement's indirect crystallization of sex roles. It is an attempt to reclaim individuality while technically remaining within the genderist framework.
Not to speak for Sarah, but I think your #1 is a misunderstanding. Her magic sex-change machine seems to me like a thought experiment designed to eliminate all questions of whether a transitioned person is "really" their new sex. They don't even have to have been gender-dysphoric beforehand, though if they were, that's fine too. The point is that a person processed by the machine becomes, on all levels, the opposite to what their biological sex was going in, just as if they had been born that way; and that if such a machine existed, sex changes would not be controversial and nobody would argue about what pronouns were appropriate, what bathroom someone should use, etc. The controversy about these things is due to the primitive state of our gender-transition technology (basically just cosmetic surgery and a lifetime of hormone treatments).
Yes, but...
I can imagine a world where that sex change machine exists.
I think there would still be differences between women who were born female and a person who was born male and then hopped in the machine at age 20.
That's 20 years of female socialization that the new woman never got, so I imagine there would be some difference there.
I think some people would also be dismayed that you can't go in an unattractive man and come out a beautiful woman.
I agree that one's life experience to date affects the result. You can change your physical body, your hormones, even the structure of your brain, but presumably your memories and the way you've been shaped by your experiences remain pretty much the same, or you aren't you anymore.
However, I think if we had the magic sex-change machine, our ideas of what a "man" or "woman" is would necessarily change too. In a world where it's normal for anyone to change their sex at any time, even on a whim ("I feel like being a woman today"), many of the social differences between the sexes would necessarily disappear, because at any given time, many of the people around you would not be their birth sex, and for the most part you wouldn't know or care whether they were or not. The idea of someone being "really" one sex or the other wouldn't survive. At most, you might be a man who had spent most or all of his childhood as a girl, but I think that would be regarded as a biographical detail rather than a statement of essence. I think it would be at most a minority opinion, probably regarded as a bit weird by most people, to say, "I only date women who were born female."
And what if even children were allowed to change sex on a whim? Your 20 years of socialization goes out the window then.
In this context, I wonder whether it might also be worthwhile to explore whether we can expect a difference in which direction the magic sex change machine would be used in the premating = dating arena vs the postmating = parental care arena. As a matter of fact, I wonder how much of the current overall discussion may be limited by the higher interest in/focus on the dating vs the parental care arena. Do we know of people that express attraction towards male or female because of the way they are motivated by the presumptive joy they anticipate raising children? This is the second major act of our sex-identity lives.
"What would it mean, then, to "rewire" a mind from male to female or vice versa?"
There is some discussion of this interesting question in this blog post:
http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/
A quote from that post:
"The "obvious" way to to do the mapping is to keep the same percentile rank within each trait (given some suitably exhaustive parsing and factorization of the human design into individual "traits"), but take it with respect to the target sex's distribution."
Love the thought experiment! Wish every liberal would read this.
Speaking of apologetics and chasing a vague sense of plausibility, there are a few specific brain scans/tests that can often predict/detect homosexuality. So gay men in certain instances can be shown to have "female-adjacent" brain activity relative to straight men, and same goes for lesbians showing "male-adjacent" brain activity.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14146-gay-brains-structured-like-those-of-the-opposite-sex/
Gay people and trans people both have those same cross-sex brain activity markers, which trans people have seized on as "proof" that they really do have the brain of the sex they're transitioning to. See
https://globalnews.ca/news/4223342/transgender-brain-scan-research/
They generally leave out the part that all those same markers show in gays.
Looked up the 2nd study, out of curiosity. They list orientations of the subjects and breakdown in the post-pubertal adolescents surveyed seems to confirm that they were, in fact, just examining gays and lesbians.
I suspect if this kind of approach becomes more mainstream the gender activists will shut it down.
That's probably the data a Natalie Wynn type would use to "blow this piece to smithereens". I'm just guessing though since Calvin isn't big on details.
Ugh, what a mess that subthread is...
Just like your previous post and manifesto, this is really good. I do not think you should delay any longer in posting it. The world needs to hear you.
I believe this to be the most important and convincing aspect of your argument thus far and should be highlighted as a major argument in your challenge to gender identity :
"Seeing as the impossible desire cannot be achieved, those burdened by it must resort to the next best thing: a social construct in which others are obligated to act as if what cannot be true is (in some meaningful, significant sense) actually true...They are not asking us to loosen our norms of sex-typical dress or behavior. They are not asking us to be more tolerant of violators of such norms. They are asking us to act as if the norms are not even being violated. "
I feel like the argument here has a lot in common with a certain scene from Monty Python's 'The Life of Brian'
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=chnlQQCsTVw&pp=ygUVbGlmZSBvZiBicmlhbiBsb3JldHRh
Sharing the latest from the Essex WestfordSchool District in Vermont:
"Persons who produce sperm" (instead of males)
"Persons who produce eggs" (instead of females)
https://twitter.com/esanzi/status/1650872259072999435
Next: "Chickens that produce sperm" and "Roosters that produce eggs"??????????????
I prefer bleeders and skeetshooters, personally
Very much enjoyed reading this extension of the manifesto. When it comes to the "slippery slope" paradigm, there is an importantly rich discussion about its logic and metaphorical essence which might be worthwhile to double check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
Related, I think a point can be made that many aspects of our world are slippery slope in the sense that they occur in continuous variation from black to white in all these shades of grey. For this reason, geneticists distinguish between discrete traits, i.e. traits that have only two or very few states of variation, vs continuous traits like body height. Turns out that discrete traits are actually the minority. That means that there are also biological evidence for considering/approaching largely sex-specific traits as complex in the sense of filling a continuous space of variation that is affected by genes, environment, and in our species also culture. This has important implications when it comes to developing clear definitions of behaviors or inclinations of things. Many are just a somewhat arbitrary, pragmatically chosen window of a continuous distribution. In other words, slippery slope problems are real ones bc of the sloppy-slopey nature of our world. This may be another reason, why some gender identity definitions are challenging to pinpoint. At the same time, I don't think this affects the basic distinction between innate and treatment implemented biological sex-related differences.
Re your comment that transgender folks rarely pass. I know well two pre and post transexuals. The male-to-female one looked like/seemed like a woman to me and was accepted in lesbian culture in the 70s, which is saying something. The female-to-male went from being fairly feminine to being–he could be a guy or, maybe, a lesbian. But people who meet him without knowing his past readily accepted him as a guy and didn't seem to have a clue he was born a woman. Both of these were before the rise of the current situation where I think a lot of people only partially transition (if at all) or they do the ridiculous make-up thing if they are male-to-female. Back in the day, if you knew a transexual (plus the public ones like Jan Morris, Renee Richards and Christina Jorgensen), they didn't make your head spin at all. But now, they aren't "transexuals" but "transgender" and they certainly aren't trying as hard to blend in, that is for sure.
I agreed with the piece in general but you one sentence that really bothered me: "Pedophiles, for example, can literally achieve the object of their desire too–they can groom children and rape them."
It used to be that people understood that while pedophiles all tended to groom kids - but what they did after the child became attached to them varied widely. And punishment for the pedophile was variable depending on exactly what they did. Sometimes they have the kid watch them as they masturbate, or touched the kid's penis or vagina or have the kid touch their penis - or a variety of similar behaviors. That is as far as many go. It's bad, but it sure isn't as bad as being raped.
And, of course, lots of pedophiles do nothing with actual kids. They control themselves. Some try to find porn to satisfy their urges, which was bad as real kids were used - and lots of pedophiles are arrested every year for having illegal porn, but not for ever actually touching a kid. Real kids were usually use in the past, so that prohibition and crimes made total sense. However now it very easy to create child porn without real children - but that is just as illegal as if it is a real child. And that does not seem right to me. Clearly, as a society, the object should be protect kids - not to punish pedophiles who don't ever harm an actual kid.
Now, when people talk about pedophiles, everybody seems to assume that penetration is the plan and is what they do. However, it is not the most common thing - at all - that they do. Most usually, it doesn't lead to rape. All cases should be dealt with in the criminal justice system, but we have gone nuts as a society if the word "pedophile" is mumbled. Everybody assumes rape. I had a pedophile interested in me when I was a kid. He wanted to kiss me - I said no way and he backed off. I have a kinda friend (he went to college with my wife and she is his friend) who is in prison for pedophilia. The thing he did is have a live stream in his bathroom so he could see kids who came to his house naked. He got 30 years for that. That seems way out of whack to me. We used to treat guys like Steve - after serving some time in prison (a year or two for something that - a first offense) and then require counseling to learn to deal with the problem. In fact, recidivism for pedophiles is lower than for most crimes. But people get the sense that pedophiles can't control themselves and will always re-offend, both of which are totally untrue. What is true as those who do the most serious cases (i.e. rape) were more likely to reoffend (though still well below many crimes) and those with lesser crimes had a fairly low recidivism rate - about 20%.
Another huge problem is that they can't get counseling if they have the feelings. If they go to a counselor and say that they are sexually attracted to kids and want to control it - the counselor has to report the person to the authorities. So, they do it on their own. Thus, there is nobody out there helping these guys to not break the law. I think the number of pedophiles is quite numerous and we should be doing more to help them not offend than we are.
Anyway, "groom children and rape them" just is not nuanced enough for me.
Do you have a theory about why so many people want to -- as you argue -- liberate themselves from the reality of their sex? I don't believe in the blandishments of conventional religion, but I understand why they are attractive -- people don't don't want to die, and they'd like to have a big brother in the sky to help them with their problems. But I don't understand the benefits of going through so much trouble -- to the point of taking dangerous drugs and undergoing painful surgery -- in the vain effort to escape one's biological sex. TBH, this lack of understanding on my part forces me to give more weight to the self-understanding of trans people, at least as something that they sincerely believe.
Having the motivations that you do, would you open a private conversation with a highly virtuous trans person like this? Natalie Wynn, for example? Why would you open like this? Are trans people not your audience? Have you decided they are not worth persuading? They are my friends and I will defend their innocence when they are innocent. I will craft my narratives in cooperation with the likes of Natalie Wynn, who would predictably blow this piece to smithereens.
Your post alienates me and it would alienate my virtuous trans friends. Your framing comes off as unnecessarily hostile.
Still, it is not too late to exchange considerations, such as in this comment section. By exchanging considerations, we may adopt some of those considerations as our own, or we may simply benefit from having made ourselves more familiar with the considerations of others.
Perhaps I am the one who is in error! Here are my ideals, which I am showing you in order to make the task of persuading me easier. This list is intended as an outline of Good Itself, and I intend to be Extremely Good, not moderately- nor temperately- nor agreeable-seemingly-Good. If my list is arbitrary, such as being arbitrarily specific, arbitrarily incomplete, or arbitrarily way-off, I hope you will suggest improvements:
Freedom (F)
Justice (J)
Reconciliation (R)
Variety of beauty (V)
Curiosity (C)
Paradigm shift preparation (P)
Exceptioncraft (X)
Slack, ease, convenience (S)
Robust strategy (O)
Intrinsic sacrifice minimization (I)
Efficient extrinsic manipulation (E)
Cost-benefit-honesty (H)
Everything else that should have been explicitly on this list (U)
Accountability to the letter and spirit of this list (A)
Some of these have connotations that I could list off but I have not listed for the sake of brevity. For example, I consider Gregg Caruso's Public Health Quarantine Model one of five correct connotations of Justice. I will explain the connotations of any of these if you ask. :)
I agree with the comments below, some specifics would be helpful.
Specifics of what? My main point that this would get demolished by Wynn? My point that it's alienating to good people with good values who are my friends and are worth persuading?
Specifics of why you are feeling the way you are feeling. Which part of what I said is so obviously bad that Wynn would “demolish” it?
I think a valuable place to start would be to challenge specific parts of the arguments stated in this post, if not here, then somewhere else and linking it back to here.
Valuable for what?
For discourse generally, or the comment section's edification.
I suppose so, and I am willing, but did you mean to imply that my comment was not already a sufficiently 'valuable place to start'?
I'll come right out and say it - your only objections to Sarah's piece were about how it made you *feel*. Unfortunately, Ben Shapiro had a point when he said "facts don't care about your feelings".
You're making like at least 8 serious intellectual mistakes simultaneously and I'm not convinced they're remotely being made in good faith. Also you got liked by Sarah for this so I may have to unsubscribe but I'll give it a few more days at least.
It is a fact that Ben Shapiro had actually no point at all when he said that; I hope your feelings care more about that fact, in hopes that your persona of rationality might improve, than your feelings care about preserving your false persona of rationality.
Can you lay out what specifically you find hostile?
What does Variety of beauty mean?