Reason will not be enough it seems, dear Helen. There is never a worse deaf man than the one who does not want to hear. Today the tribes only want to kill what does not belong, and it looks like being back to the 30 Years War. Worse of all is that Liberal in America means Progressive, which has spread with American cultural dominance and tainted the discourse since the start. Poor Gladstone is surely turning in his grave.
But thank you for continuing to be the voice of reason.
Isn’t there a problem with the definition of “harm”? Men who wear dresses claim that it isn’t enough to simply accept their right to dress as they please. They also claim it does them material harm if they are not treated always and everywhere as if they actually are women. This is the basis of their claim that it is their “human right” to access women’s public toilets and changing rooms, to engage in women’s sports, to be incarcerated in women’s prisons, to be allowed to body search and provide intimate health care to non-consenting women, to be given employment, awards and honours reserved for women on equity grounds... It would seem that in this and many other instances there are competing harms. How do we decide between these competing harms? Should women “win” because there are more of them than there are men who wear dresses? Or should men who wear dresses “win” because, as they argue, affronts to their paraphilia cause them more material harm than their paraphilia causes women by affronting their dignity, invading their privacy and threatening their safety, health and well-being? Who gets to be the playground monitor?
That’s the thing with liberalism. You sometimes have to reason case by case but I don’t think so here. I qualify with “material” because if only feelings are hurt, you need to deal.
I took your point about material harm, but trans activists claim that failing to accept transgender people as women causes them anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation that can lead to actual suicide. This is why people who criticise gender ideology are accused of killing transgender people. The suicide narrative is doggy, but I am sure that challenging a firmly held delusion can cause more than hurt feelings.
Yes. But the responsibility to deal with hurt feelings is the individual with them, not the rest of society. It’s very distressing to one of my relatives that I am not Christian. It keeps her up at night worrying. Still not my responsibility.
Having people take responsibility for their own feelings is the only way. Otherwise you’d have to judge what can and can’t be said in any situation by who is more likely to kill themselves if they feel distressed by the claim that a woman is an adult human female or a woman is a subjectively felt gender identity. And if you believe that intention matters, you’d also have to try to evaluate whether the speaker knew it was the trans person or the biological woman who was most psychologically vulnerable in that particular exchange & stated their own position “maliciously” or not. There would be no space for caring about truth or reason and it would incentivise people being or pretending to be psychologically traumatised whenever anybody else says something that goes against their own political views. It would be a mess.
The definition of harm is critical. If it is too loose, anything can be a damage, and the debate is not possible. If it is too strict, we would be being deliberately blind to certain harms. I understand the attempt at limitation with the concept of material harm, but what if the perceived material harm is not now to an individual, but to society in the future?. Example, the debate around marriage and its impact on birth rates and the material realities of society in the future goes beyond material harm to a particular individual.
I think you could actually decide this one, and many if not all such cases, by appeal to freedom of association. If one party does not want to associate with another, they should not be compelled to be. In this case, if women do not want to associate with men in a particular context (bathrooms), they should not have to. This and that reasoning about why it's somehow harmful to the man if he can't force himself upon the women should be, in theory, dismissed out of hand.
That said, you are touching on the basic issue that liberals are often too weak-minded to actually defend the liberal standard, and are too easily brow-beaten into giving it up by manipulative bad actors.
Does this include when a mentally ill, delusional male declares himself to be female and all sane people are supposed to pretend he is as well even though he's clearly an autogynephile with a wig on his head, lest they be called Nazis?
You seem to want to prevent these men from entertaining their own delusion. To compel them to see themselves as men when they see themselves as women.
Liberalism says: It is your right to believe that it is a delusion and to tell them so, and to refuse to treat them as women, so long as you do not follow them around and harass them. It is not your right to demand that they by law be prevented from doing with their bodies whatever they wish, or to harass them, or to call for their internment.
Liberalism says, to the men in wigs: it is your right to dress as you wish, alter your body as you wish, and believe yourselves to be what you think you are. It is not your right to demand that everybody else believe likewise, it is not your right to demand that who disagrees with you is silenced or punished, nor it is your right to harass them or demand by law access to women's spaces that are exclusive of biological males.
It is neither liberal nor illiberal to affirm mental illness. Scientific opinion changes about what constitutes mental illness and what is the best treatment for it. If you allow, homosexuality was labelled as a personality disorder until 1976 in the APA and the 90's in the WHO.
And that gender affirmation treatments are the best treatment for gender dysphoria has been the medical consensus long before trans activists came on the stage. Nobody demanded that doctors and the medical establishment affirm their "lies", the majority of doctors and the medical establishment reached the conclusion that sex-reassignment treatments are the right ones for individuals suffering from gender dysphoria. The activists have increasingly pushed for radical intervention on children that identify as transgender, and this is a problem inasmuch it has poor science to support it, but it has become unquestionable in the culture wars.
Incidentally, you may be aware that most of the people who identify as transexual are today biological females. There is certainly a problem in their growing number, but they are not likely to be "autoandrophile". Autogynephilia has been theorised as an explanation for only a specific presentation of transexuality in males, which concerns older males who envision themselves as women and are attracted to women (the ones that usually make the headlines.) Blanchard's hypotheses have value but need more studies, as he himself declares. And Blanchard never proposed any different treatment for transsexuals than the ones that are in place.
No, I want delusional mental illness to be treated.
I can't force a mentally ill 70 pound anorexic to see herself as unhealthy. What I can do is change the medical industry and culture to make it so that that type of illness is not affirmed, pushed on children, celebrated, or expected to be tolerated and accepted by normal people. Same with schizophrenia. I won't be told to call a schizophrenic Napoleon just because he "feels like" he is one.
I won't be told to call a man in a wig a woman. He isn't a woman. I won't tolerate society being upended for a small percentage of delusional males. This isn't just personal feelings. This is law, sports, medicine, passports, drivers licenses, bathrooms. We live in a society where everything is connected. It's not just a porn addict or a male autogynephile. These men always force their perversions on society through legal, medical, social, academic, etc. means. And the answer to all of it is no.
Secondly, these women are not "transexuals" because there's no such thing as "transexuals." These young girls and women are mostly autistic, victims of childhood sexual abuse, bipolar, depressed, etc.
I want the real mental health problems to be treated. There is no need for "studies." Nobody is studying whether giving a 70 pound anorexic liposuction is a good idea.
These people are delusional. They need to be told no, and idiots need to stop letting mental illness go untreated. This is largely driven by a media campaign and medical industry profits. It's not "human rights." The whole thing is bullshit.
Liberalism demands that we accommodate every conceivable identity group by changing our laws and our social norms. What was once relegated to the margins must now become mainstreamed with no moral or social disapprobation.
Previously, people who wanted to live certain ways knew there were trade-offs. If my child's 3rd grade teacher decides to transition mid-year, I must accept it and any parental demands that the teacher be replaced is hateful bigotry and discrimination. Look at the Wisconsin school dean who did porn and said it was his first amendment right and refused to resign. I can hear the liberals saying his side gig has nothing to do with his job performance and it's wrong to fire him based on our (out dated) morals and social norms.
"We have never achieved this cultural cohesion. It didn’t exist even in times when everybody was the same religion, had the same nationality, came from the same cultural/racial/ethnic background and lived under the same, sole government. Never. Humans don’t do this. As E.O. Wilson said of Marxism, “Good ideology. Wrong species.”" I fully agree with this statement, but the Wilson quote is equally applicable to those who pretend that positive beliefs should be kept in the private space and that the public space should be empty of moral judgements. Moral is basically a human invention to play socially.
What is your view on essentially eradicating certain ideas via overwhelming social sanctions, i.e. fascism/Nazism/white supremacy? The primary weakness of liberals, in my view, seems to be that they are not nearly willing enough to do this when presented with things like communism or leftist identitarianism. I would probably find liberalism appealing if it came along with a society where 99.99% of the population fully shunned anyone that even slightly hinted at supporting communism, transgenderism, etc., as is done with certain "right-wing" ideas.
That’s precisely how I think we should do it & have done it. The “Everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi” meme is a meme because Nazi is the epitome of evil. I’ll disapprove people who support totalitarian regimes of any kind, but transgenderism includes people just being trans so not that. You’ll probably need to impress this more on the right-wing liberals as they are most likely to oppose communism specifically. I think they do, though. The classical liberals and libertarians?
This conception of liberalism allows for social eradication of any sufficiently unpopular idea or behavior. This does not mean that anyone will be disallowed by force from "just being trans." But if they choose to "just be trans," they will face total social isolation and ridicule. People who advocate for pedophilia usually suffer this fate today, as an example of this shunning model being properly applied to curtail evil. In my opinion, the same treatment should extend to transgender ideology/behavior, and eventually it will again, as it did in the past.
I think I can support this notion of liberalism. We just need more people who call themselves liberals to get on board.
I think you are responding to the wrong essay. This is an essay about the simple principle of non-coercion in liberalism.
Or you have a single-minded interest in trans issues and think everyone else does too and have a responsibility to stop talking about my area of interest (liberalism) and instead talk about yours (trans issues)
I have no such responsibility.
Try someone writing an essay about your area of interest instead?
The only part of your comment that relates to my essay is already answered in my essay.
Have a look at Mill’s one simple principle against forcing people to do things and see if you can see if you apply it to your hypothetical and work out of it means it would force you to do something or protect you from any such force.
I will leave it here because I suspect you don’t want to talk about my essay at all, but your own interest. I don’t want to talk about your interest.
No. "Trans" is involved in this because you act like it exists, and a liberal society is coercive in forcing women like me to pretend it exists.
"Trans" is a lie. There is no such thing as "trans" people, "trans"men, or "trans"women.
They're mentally ill. And forcing others to pretend that they're not is an important part of the "liberalism" you write about here.
That's why you don't want to talk about it. You would like to pretend that it's true, and you would like for me to do that as well. Hence the connection.
There are no "trans" issues. Men in dresses with perversions is what they are.
Btw if you use the word as if it has meaning, you should be able to at least define it. I'm not asking for a book about it. Just definitions.
Reason will not be enough it seems, dear Helen. There is never a worse deaf man than the one who does not want to hear. Today the tribes only want to kill what does not belong, and it looks like being back to the 30 Years War. Worse of all is that Liberal in America means Progressive, which has spread with American cultural dominance and tainted the discourse since the start. Poor Gladstone is surely turning in his grave.
But thank you for continuing to be the voice of reason.
Isn’t there a problem with the definition of “harm”? Men who wear dresses claim that it isn’t enough to simply accept their right to dress as they please. They also claim it does them material harm if they are not treated always and everywhere as if they actually are women. This is the basis of their claim that it is their “human right” to access women’s public toilets and changing rooms, to engage in women’s sports, to be incarcerated in women’s prisons, to be allowed to body search and provide intimate health care to non-consenting women, to be given employment, awards and honours reserved for women on equity grounds... It would seem that in this and many other instances there are competing harms. How do we decide between these competing harms? Should women “win” because there are more of them than there are men who wear dresses? Or should men who wear dresses “win” because, as they argue, affronts to their paraphilia cause them more material harm than their paraphilia causes women by affronting their dignity, invading their privacy and threatening their safety, health and well-being? Who gets to be the playground monitor?
That’s the thing with liberalism. You sometimes have to reason case by case but I don’t think so here. I qualify with “material” because if only feelings are hurt, you need to deal.
I took your point about material harm, but trans activists claim that failing to accept transgender people as women causes them anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation that can lead to actual suicide. This is why people who criticise gender ideology are accused of killing transgender people. The suicide narrative is doggy, but I am sure that challenging a firmly held delusion can cause more than hurt feelings.
Yes. But the responsibility to deal with hurt feelings is the individual with them, not the rest of society. It’s very distressing to one of my relatives that I am not Christian. It keeps her up at night worrying. Still not my responsibility.
Not convinced, but thanks for giving me lots to think about today and as usual.
Having people take responsibility for their own feelings is the only way. Otherwise you’d have to judge what can and can’t be said in any situation by who is more likely to kill themselves if they feel distressed by the claim that a woman is an adult human female or a woman is a subjectively felt gender identity. And if you believe that intention matters, you’d also have to try to evaluate whether the speaker knew it was the trans person or the biological woman who was most psychologically vulnerable in that particular exchange & stated their own position “maliciously” or not. There would be no space for caring about truth or reason and it would incentivise people being or pretending to be psychologically traumatised whenever anybody else says something that goes against their own political views. It would be a mess.
What if a man "feels like" he's a woman?
Am I supposed to go along with that farce?
The definition of harm is critical. If it is too loose, anything can be a damage, and the debate is not possible. If it is too strict, we would be being deliberately blind to certain harms. I understand the attempt at limitation with the concept of material harm, but what if the perceived material harm is not now to an individual, but to society in the future?. Example, the debate around marriage and its impact on birth rates and the material realities of society in the future goes beyond material harm to a particular individual.
I think you could actually decide this one, and many if not all such cases, by appeal to freedom of association. If one party does not want to associate with another, they should not be compelled to be. In this case, if women do not want to associate with men in a particular context (bathrooms), they should not have to. This and that reasoning about why it's somehow harmful to the man if he can't force himself upon the women should be, in theory, dismissed out of hand.
That said, you are touching on the basic issue that liberals are often too weak-minded to actually defend the liberal standard, and are too easily brow-beaten into giving it up by manipulative bad actors.
Does this include when a mentally ill, delusional male declares himself to be female and all sane people are supposed to pretend he is as well even though he's clearly an autogynephile with a wig on his head, lest they be called Nazis?
Does what include that?
Does liberalism include this? The "trans" lie, I mean.
Is it liberal to tell lies to men who "feel like" they're women? How would they know?
What if I refuse to go along with that lie?
Is it liberal to affirm mental illness?
Read the piece and you will see if the one simple principle is “Tell lies to men who think they are women” or “affirm mental illness.”
When you see what it is, it will answer your question about whether it is liberal to coerce you to say things you don’t believe to be true
Then why should men be allowed to demand that doctors and the medical system affirm their delusion that they're actually women?
You affirm their delusion. Why?
You seem to want to prevent these men from entertaining their own delusion. To compel them to see themselves as men when they see themselves as women.
Liberalism says: It is your right to believe that it is a delusion and to tell them so, and to refuse to treat them as women, so long as you do not follow them around and harass them. It is not your right to demand that they by law be prevented from doing with their bodies whatever they wish, or to harass them, or to call for their internment.
Liberalism says, to the men in wigs: it is your right to dress as you wish, alter your body as you wish, and believe yourselves to be what you think you are. It is not your right to demand that everybody else believe likewise, it is not your right to demand that who disagrees with you is silenced or punished, nor it is your right to harass them or demand by law access to women's spaces that are exclusive of biological males.
It is neither liberal nor illiberal to affirm mental illness. Scientific opinion changes about what constitutes mental illness and what is the best treatment for it. If you allow, homosexuality was labelled as a personality disorder until 1976 in the APA and the 90's in the WHO.
And that gender affirmation treatments are the best treatment for gender dysphoria has been the medical consensus long before trans activists came on the stage. Nobody demanded that doctors and the medical establishment affirm their "lies", the majority of doctors and the medical establishment reached the conclusion that sex-reassignment treatments are the right ones for individuals suffering from gender dysphoria. The activists have increasingly pushed for radical intervention on children that identify as transgender, and this is a problem inasmuch it has poor science to support it, but it has become unquestionable in the culture wars.
Incidentally, you may be aware that most of the people who identify as transexual are today biological females. There is certainly a problem in their growing number, but they are not likely to be "autoandrophile". Autogynephilia has been theorised as an explanation for only a specific presentation of transexuality in males, which concerns older males who envision themselves as women and are attracted to women (the ones that usually make the headlines.) Blanchard's hypotheses have value but need more studies, as he himself declares. And Blanchard never proposed any different treatment for transsexuals than the ones that are in place.
No, I want delusional mental illness to be treated.
I can't force a mentally ill 70 pound anorexic to see herself as unhealthy. What I can do is change the medical industry and culture to make it so that that type of illness is not affirmed, pushed on children, celebrated, or expected to be tolerated and accepted by normal people. Same with schizophrenia. I won't be told to call a schizophrenic Napoleon just because he "feels like" he is one.
I won't be told to call a man in a wig a woman. He isn't a woman. I won't tolerate society being upended for a small percentage of delusional males. This isn't just personal feelings. This is law, sports, medicine, passports, drivers licenses, bathrooms. We live in a society where everything is connected. It's not just a porn addict or a male autogynephile. These men always force their perversions on society through legal, medical, social, academic, etc. means. And the answer to all of it is no.
Secondly, these women are not "transexuals" because there's no such thing as "transexuals." These young girls and women are mostly autistic, victims of childhood sexual abuse, bipolar, depressed, etc.
I want the real mental health problems to be treated. There is no need for "studies." Nobody is studying whether giving a 70 pound anorexic liposuction is a good idea.
These people are delusional. They need to be told no, and idiots need to stop letting mental illness go untreated. This is largely driven by a media campaign and medical industry profits. It's not "human rights." The whole thing is bullshit.
Liberalism demands that we accommodate every conceivable identity group by changing our laws and our social norms. What was once relegated to the margins must now become mainstreamed with no moral or social disapprobation.
Previously, people who wanted to live certain ways knew there were trade-offs. If my child's 3rd grade teacher decides to transition mid-year, I must accept it and any parental demands that the teacher be replaced is hateful bigotry and discrimination. Look at the Wisconsin school dean who did porn and said it was his first amendment right and refused to resign. I can hear the liberals saying his side gig has nothing to do with his job performance and it's wrong to fire him based on our (out dated) morals and social norms.
"We have never achieved this cultural cohesion. It didn’t exist even in times when everybody was the same religion, had the same nationality, came from the same cultural/racial/ethnic background and lived under the same, sole government. Never. Humans don’t do this. As E.O. Wilson said of Marxism, “Good ideology. Wrong species.”" I fully agree with this statement, but the Wilson quote is equally applicable to those who pretend that positive beliefs should be kept in the private space and that the public space should be empty of moral judgements. Moral is basically a human invention to play socially.
What is your view on essentially eradicating certain ideas via overwhelming social sanctions, i.e. fascism/Nazism/white supremacy? The primary weakness of liberals, in my view, seems to be that they are not nearly willing enough to do this when presented with things like communism or leftist identitarianism. I would probably find liberalism appealing if it came along with a society where 99.99% of the population fully shunned anyone that even slightly hinted at supporting communism, transgenderism, etc., as is done with certain "right-wing" ideas.
That’s precisely how I think we should do it & have done it. The “Everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi” meme is a meme because Nazi is the epitome of evil. I’ll disapprove people who support totalitarian regimes of any kind, but transgenderism includes people just being trans so not that. You’ll probably need to impress this more on the right-wing liberals as they are most likely to oppose communism specifically. I think they do, though. The classical liberals and libertarians?
This conception of liberalism allows for social eradication of any sufficiently unpopular idea or behavior. This does not mean that anyone will be disallowed by force from "just being trans." But if they choose to "just be trans," they will face total social isolation and ridicule. People who advocate for pedophilia usually suffer this fate today, as an example of this shunning model being properly applied to curtail evil. In my opinion, the same treatment should extend to transgender ideology/behavior, and eventually it will again, as it did in the past.
I think I can support this notion of liberalism. We just need more people who call themselves liberals to get on board.
What is "trans"?
By what criteria do you think a man should be able to refuse the reality of his sexed body and force others to pretend that he is something he is not?
How is the category of "trans" defined? Can you provide a definition of "man," "woman," and "trans"? That's asking for the minimum.
Please go ahead. You use the word so you should know.
I think you are responding to the wrong essay. This is an essay about the simple principle of non-coercion in liberalism.
Or you have a single-minded interest in trans issues and think everyone else does too and have a responsibility to stop talking about my area of interest (liberalism) and instead talk about yours (trans issues)
I have no such responsibility.
Try someone writing an essay about your area of interest instead?
The only part of your comment that relates to my essay is already answered in my essay.
Have a look at Mill’s one simple principle against forcing people to do things and see if you can see if you apply it to your hypothetical and work out of it means it would force you to do something or protect you from any such force.
I will leave it here because I suspect you don’t want to talk about my essay at all, but your own interest. I don’t want to talk about your interest.
No. "Trans" is involved in this because you act like it exists, and a liberal society is coercive in forcing women like me to pretend it exists.
"Trans" is a lie. There is no such thing as "trans" people, "trans"men, or "trans"women.
They're mentally ill. And forcing others to pretend that they're not is an important part of the "liberalism" you write about here.
That's why you don't want to talk about it. You would like to pretend that it's true, and you would like for me to do that as well. Hence the connection.
There are no "trans" issues. Men in dresses with perversions is what they are.
Btw if you use the word as if it has meaning, you should be able to at least define it. I'm not asking for a book about it. Just definitions.
Can you provide definitions?
lucid commentary