liskantope's tumblelog

I venture that it's because the legalization of gay marriage didn't really change anything (even in the deep blue areas in which I've lived, gay marriages seem vanishingly rare). And even if someone doesn't think a gay-married couple is "really" married, it just doesn't come up unless someone really goes out of his way to be a jerk to people about it

Trans stuff at least has the appearance of requiring greater social shifts

It's interesting, right, because in many ways I feel that a broadly-christian culture is better than a broadly-secular one. Actual faith (being an internal matter) aside, the way of living and relating to others/the world seems to work best for most people. But at the same time, cultural Christianity is different from actual christianity and i think it is bad for people and bad for the faith when it is socially mandated to pay lip service to a faith you might not really believe

The kingdom of God is within you, right. Social trends are gonna trend and you will be disappointed if you expect your society to do your religion for you. But then we're back at the beginning, bc Christianity's influence on societies seems obviously better than what came before and much of what appears to come after

Long winded way to say I dont really have a consistent Hot Take

I basically want to second all the rest and mention that I appreciate seeing someone else besides me say it. (Perhaps I just don't have as good a way of saying these things, but when I try to express some of them on Tumblr, in return I get a good bit of flak.) Yeah, the gay marriage debate is basically yesteryear's major culture war battle and represented how that old culture war really revolved around Christianity vs. secularism (with each waging war in a different way against Islam). Yeah, it mainly got supplanted by trans issues -- that's what both social conservatives and social liberals decided around the same time to focus on, once gay rights by and large became a done deal on the legal front and was established in the hearts and minds of a solid enough majority of Americans. I'm not sure I'd call gay marriage "vanishingly rare" from my experience (one of my current colleagues is in a same-sex marriage, and I know other academics in such as well, for instance), but it doesn't seem to be something the whole gay community has jumped to either. Yes, trans issues are different from gay rights issues in a number of key ways (this is the part I get in trouble for, and I don't want to suggest it's exactly what you're saying because it isn't), including requiring the appearance of greater social shifts (I would go further and claim, actually requiring greater social shifts).

The trans issues culture war battleground is not a proxy for Christianity vs. secularism, even though some parts of the anti-trans side comes in a conservative Christian flavor and is held by conservative Christians, and even though the liberal side seems determined to brand the debate over trans rights as the Gay Rights Debate 2.0 (and perhaps the conservative side does this as well, although I doubt it since it would be disadvantageous branding given that they lost the gay rights debate?).

Yeah, I've always said that abortion is always going to be a contentious issue and I don't see how that will ever change, because it involves a legitimately deep philosophical/ethical conundrum that can't be boiled down to getting rid of "hostility to, discomfort with, and resistance towards accommodating people who are different along some axis" -flavor conservative ideas that inevitably will eventually decline, as applies to gay rights stuff and many aspects of trans rights stuff.

Probably if (some version of) christianity were to again become dominant in the US then different kinds of Christians would go back to being at each other's throats, as opposed to being more or less friendly in the face of broader secularism

Let's say you're a person who genuinely believes life begins at conception, and thus, abortion is murder. Right? So you want to prevent abortion. Well, the first thing you'd do is prevent pregnancy in anyone who wants to prevent pregnancy. Life is precious, so it shouldn't be started in someone who won't or can't give their all to it. You would also want to eliminate economic reasons for abortion. So, strong protection for pregnant workers, paid maternal leave, universal health care for mothers and babies, and government-run day care, because the pressure of "if I have another baby I'll have to quit my job" might lead women to want an abortion. These are pretty basic causes of abortion. Unlike the murder of born people, we can actually zero in on the reason for a lot of abortion and prevent it with simple social policies.

They're against those. Not just, not stumping for them. Against.

The truth of the matter is that what they really, really want is adoptable white babies. They want white women to have more kids, and they want middle-aged Christian couples to be able to adopt from teen girls who got pregnant, so that means, bring back the stigma of pregnancy. Make pregnancy financially difficult unless there's a well-established career man backing you, and then make abortion impossible, and this will create more adoptable white babies. It'll also be a huge setback to women's rights and prevent a lot of divorces... which in their eyes is a plus. They want a world where men control women, everyone is Christian, and white people are unquestionably on top of the social hierarchy.

But those are wildly unpopular ideas outside of evangelical circles and extreme white supremacism. So, they positioned it as "save the babies". And there are probably some pro-lifers who really do have a principled objection to "killing babies", but if no part of their motivation is wanting to make sure women get punished for having sex with the wrong men, then they'd probably be in favor of making it easier to avoid pregnancy, thus preventing a lot of abortions.

I've become very tired of the memes I've seen over years and years where Republican beliefs about restricting sex education and welfare and support for new parents and etc. are invoked to conclude that "actually, you see, it was never about protecting the lives of fetuses" or "if they actually cared about fetuses/babies, they'd favor providing X, Y, and Z". Don't get me wrong: I'm absolutely fine with complaining that the Republican platform calls for banning abortion but completely fails to provide initiatives for preventing unwanted pregnancy or support for people with children they're ill-equipped to begin raising, and even fine (to a certain extent) with using this grievance as a sort of political bargaining chip ("if you're going to push for restricting abortion, at least allow us to advocate condom use in schools and give us universal health care for mothers and new babies"). But, I generally believe that deciding, over the explicit rhetoric of another group, that you know what they're "really thinking" instead, is very dangerous to the goal of using cognitive empathy to reach those in the opposite camp from you and figuring out how to change cultural beliefs. Eventually it can and sometimes should be done, but I think we need to hold ourselves to a standard of fairly strong evidence that a group has a different "real reason" from the one they explicitly give. In particular, I don't like jumping to conclusions about the "actual motives" of a group based on other contentious policy positions they separately hold because that often runs the risk of failing at theory of mind regarding the model of the world the other side would have behind those other policy beliefs. For instance, there are a multitude of ideologically conservative reasons for opposing government-funded social support and, while I may feel most of them are unreasonable and in practicality amount to a certain degree of callous ignorance of other people's legitimate difficulties, I'm not going to assume they add up to "actually Republicans want new parents to be poor and their babies to not be able to live".

In the case of pro-life conservatives, I will go as far as stipulating that the desire to "protect the lives of fetuses" is just part of a cluster of related conservative ideological beliefs which reflect a severe discomfort with anyone (particularly women) having sex out of the sanctified structure of marriage and a neurosis about how everything at every stage of human reproductive function is to be left to God and Not To Be Messed With. I base this upon a lot of the rhetoric that does quite visibly exist among evangelical conservatives and how well it explains other hard-line socially conservative policy beliefs such as being against birth control, stem cell research, and IVF. I would add that the idea of sex/reproduction stuff being Not To Be Messed With has been an ingredient in both the opposition to gay rights (a lot of which was framed in terms of marriage being for the purpose of binding two people who at least in theory would have the equipment to procreate) and the purely conservative opposition to gender medicine. And that is the type of conservatism that overall could wane -- I suppose the "no sex outside of marriage" part has already waned massively -- which helps push things in favor of pro-choice. But I contend that when abortion rights are taken in isolation, the fundamental principles behind supporting or condemning the moral right to abortion are grounded in an even deeper and more difficult philosophical place that shows no sign of being collectively "resolved" by humans anytime in my lifetime, and so I'm not holding my breath for us to stop being divided on this issue as a society.

You go much further than that into the territory of claiming that the real intention of pro-lifers is to increase the number of white babies available for adoption and seem to treat this as not only ultimately behind the opposition to abortion but a desire to "stigmatize pregnancy" (you mean, outside of marriage? in other words, the white babies thing lies upstream of the longstanding conservative value that sex outside of marriage should be stigmatized? it seems that pregnancy within marriage has traditionally not at all been stigmatized and that Republicans quite recently have been raising hell over the fact that fewer people are getting pregnant nowadays!). I acknowledge that you included the nuance that not every pro-lifer individually cares about the availability of white babies for adoption, but drawing up a bunch of tenuous causal relationships between various conservative attitudes and the availability of white babies for adoption, and then concluding that the conservative movement collectively sees all those same relationships and therefore has "more white babies for adoption" as its true ultimate goal behind almost everything else related to abortion, is completely wild as far as I'm concerned.

I venture that it's because the legalization of gay marriage didn't really change anything (even in the deep blue areas in which I've lived, gay marriages seem vanishingly rare). And even if someone doesn't think a gay-married couple is "really" married, it just doesn't come up unless someone really goes out of his way to be a jerk to people about it

Trans stuff at least has the appearance of requiring greater social shifts

It's interesting, right, because in many ways I feel that a broadly-christian culture is better than a broadly-secular one. Actual faith (being an internal matter) aside, the way of living and relating to others/the world seems to work best for most people. But at the same time, cultural Christianity is different from actual christianity and i think it is bad for people and bad for the faith when it is socially mandated to pay lip service to a faith you might not really believe

The kingdom of God is within you, right. Social trends are gonna trend and you will be disappointed if you expect your society to do your religion for you. But then we're back at the beginning, bc Christianity's influence on societies seems obviously better than what came before and much of what appears to come after

Long winded way to say I dont really have a consistent Hot Take

I basically want to second all the rest and mention that I appreciate seeing someone else besides me say it. (Perhaps I just don't have as good a way of saying these things, but when I try to express some of them on Tumblr, in return I get a good bit of flak.) Yeah, the gay marriage debate is basically yesteryear's major culture war battle and represented how that old culture war really revolved around Christianity vs. secularism (with each waging war in a different way against Islam). Yeah, it mainly got supplanted by trans issues -- that's what both social conservatives and social liberals decided around the same time to focus on, once gay rights by and large became a done deal on the legal front and was established in the hearts and minds of a solid enough majority of Americans. I'm not sure I'd call gay marriage "vanishingly rare" from my experience (one of my current colleagues is in a same-sex marriage, and I know other academics in such as well, for instance), but it doesn't seem to be something the whole gay community has jumped to either. Yes, trans issues are different from gay rights issues in a number of key ways (this is the part I get in trouble for, and I don't want to suggest it's exactly what you're saying because it isn't), including requiring the appearance of greater social shifts (I would go further and claim, actually requiring greater social shifts).

The trans issues culture war battleground is not a proxy for Christianity vs. secularism, even though some parts of the anti-trans side comes in a conservative Christian flavor and is held by conservative Christians, and even though the liberal side seems determined to brand the debate over trans rights as the Gay Rights Debate 2.0 (and perhaps the conservative side does this as well, although I doubt it since it would be disadvantageous branding given that they lost the gay rights debate?).

Yeah, I've always said that abortion is always going to be a contentious issue and I don't see how that will ever change, because it involves a legitimately deep philosophical/ethical conundrum that can't be boiled down to getting rid of "hostility to, discomfort with, and resistance towards accommodating people who are different along some axis" -flavor conservative ideas that inevitably will eventually decline, as applies to gay rights stuff and many aspects of trans rights stuff.

Probably if (some version of) christianity were to again become dominant in the US then different kinds of Christians would go back to being at each other's throats, as opposed to being more or less friendly in the face of broader secularism

Aw man, I can imagine during the series Jake's gender being "I'm probably a girl, but I have a war to fight in the morning so I don't care about that right now." Because in this scenario I feel like she would. She's got Animorphs to lead, a planet to save, God's Own Angst to chew on at night... and, okay, everyone gets her gender wrong. But that last is just... she just can't deal with it right now. Her friends and her brother and her entire species all have to come first.

Now, an argumentative advantage is that there are many people who will be especially open to a Constitutional or Biblical argument. And these texts contain plenty of resources for advocating good and condemning evil. The texts reflect multiple viewpoints and broad principles, some of which are highly adaptable.

What I'm going to say here is primarily an anecdotal claim coming from personal experience, although it seems to me to be backed pretty well by common-sense-level layperson's science.

Sans the recent growing prevalence of modern types of medical intervention in certain regions of the world, there is a very very but just not 100% watertight reliable way for humans to ascertain whether another human is male or female by looking at them, apart from their chosen presentation.

This is what one would expect within any sexually dimorphic species, even one which is admittedly less dimorphic (as the OP says) than most animal species. Most animals within their species are innately equipped to tell their fellows apart by sex, you know? It would be rather strange if homo sapiens (a species which, if you go far enough back, lived about as basic an existence of striving to survive and reproduce as any other mammal) were any different?

And that has been my experience my entire life, save many instances starting around this decade of people presenting more gender-ambiguously because gender medical treatments have become much more popular and effective. Mind you, I was a late bloomer in learning to tell humans apart by sex, to the point that when I was four or five years old it was a serious concern of my parents and probably considered part of the Developmental Disorder I was being diagnosed with. (I really did initially only recognize woman vs. man from long hair vs. short, and even bizarrely at one modeled it as curly hair vs. straight even though I was a boy and my own hair was curly -- maybe I got the idea from the fact that many women had perms in the early '90's??) Here on the Neurodivergence Website there are probably a lot of other people with a similar history to mine in that regard. But even my "developmentally disordered" younger self by middle childhood had no problem telling apart men and women from their physical characteristics. A lot of this has to do with secondary sexual characteristics, of course. Perhaps my distinguishing boys vs. girl among kids of my own age was more about their clothing and hairstyle, but when looking at anyone past the onset of puberty, it was extremely and immediately obvious. I remember people also occasionally misgendering (mis-sexing?) me up until I began puberty and then never being misgendered again in meatspace.

There were occasional exceptions to the rule which I find memorable mainly because they were so exceptional. The only one, and perhaps the most recent one, I can think of (up until 2019 when I met a nonbinary person who'd done lots of hormone therapy and who I mistook as AMAB when they were AFAB) was most of twenty years ago, when I was in college and spent a lot of time using the bus system, and there was one middle-aged person I saw at bus stops repeatedly whose sex I couldn't distinguish. I'll use "she" here because eventually I became like 70% sure she was a woman, but I couldn't quite tell. She was physically disabled and generally not quite normal in appearance, and I remember going to a town hall meeting about a pending reduction of local bus routes and that she got up to speak and talked about her disability ("it just means I have a hard time getting from point A to point B") requiring her to use the bus frequently. My only other specific memory of her is hearing her tell her son at the bus stop, when he was complaining about something, "What have I always told you about who in the world always gets what they want? That's right: almost no one." That is my one fairly vivid recollection that amounts to the exception proving the rule, as far as I'm concerned. There have been other very occasional times I think when I glanced as someone and couldn't tell their sex, and probably occasional other instances of passing by someone and unknowingly mis-sexing them, but this is the recent (and perhaps the only) example I can think of, modulo encountering trans people who have done hormones beginning in 2019, where I had repeated encounters with someone and couldn't quite be sure of their physical sex even though I leaned towards "female".

So, in other words, ever since getting past a delay in this ability during my early childhood, I've effortlessly been able to pretty immediately distinguish other humans by sex by looking at them in what must be around 99% of cases (or maybe even higher). I'm beginning to wonder if the experiences of a large swath of other humans are completely different somehow. But if even if your experience is different, you can imagine how strange I find posts like the ones above, or at least the second one that I'm immediately reblogging. You can imagine how I blink and how my mouth drops when I see someone (in their 30's at least!) making a comment like

the idea of pronouns corresponding to sex specifically makes me really uncomfortable, and is not how I have ever used pronouns for anyone at any point in my life. [boldface mine]

Now it's fair to ask how I (along with, I suspect, most people) distinguish physical sex based on looking at someone when, as I acknowledge, humans are sexually dimorphic in much less obvious and single-axis ways as most mammals (lions with manes, deer with antlers, and so on) and also, granted, humans unlike other animals wear clothes that conceal genitalia and have a poor sense of smell compared to e.g. dogs, etc. Well, I don't entirely know, because I can't break down and analyze from a completely objective perspective the cognitive processes I'm innately wired to perform, and I'm not a doctor or a biologist. But I would suppose that there are a number of (mostly secondary) sexual characteristics that differ on separate axes (such as facial structure, testosterone-ish vocal timbre characteristics, general body shape including fat/muscle distribution, and others) but extremely non-independently, so that they very heavily cluster at two nodes, which we are very well wired to distinguish between. There's certainly some fuzziness around the nodes: some people naturally have hormonal abnormalities, and some people have an exceptional value of a sexual characteristic along one or two of the axes. We still instinctively classify such a person according to where most of the values of the physical traits cluster. For instance, it also so happens to be my college years that I occasionally encountered a man who worked in my university's math department whose voice sounded pretty much female. Since every other physical characteristic I could perceive pointed to "male", I never doubted for a moment that he was male, and I've always figured that the voice was due to some fairly rare but not unheard-of disorder (compare John Fiedler and George Washington Carver). There's a whole thing about this in Yudkowski's Sequences about setting up categories to divide up our "thingspace" by "carving reality at the joints" and so on.

Height would be one of the axes of physical characteristics that's so loosely correlated with physical sex that it just kind of hovers in the periphery of the clusters of characteristics that form the nodes; obviously height is an extremely unreliable metric for determining sex. The teacher in the anecdote from the post above mine, by jumping to height, clearly had some similar instincts to mine but not a ton of ability to articulate the likely explanation and also not a ton of patience so argued rather stupidly. (As for the comment about how "Gendering was mandatory", delivered with a tone indicating how strange and arbitrary this is, I mean... our language for millennia has indicated, both in personal pronouns and in a number of gendered nouns, the apparent physical sex of a person we're speaking to or talking about, until the past decade when a particular social movement has been trying to unilaterally sweep that aside, so I don't see what's so strange about that? For instance, it seems that my parents' alarm when I in the early '90's seemed unable to reliably distinguish the physical sex of those around me was perfectly reasonable?)

no dude, I don't think you're evil for not examining a social microtrend or seeing how it ties into broader problems culturally. we are literally all doing that sometimes. I do think that you are a little bit annoying for making this all about your feelings right now, though

For me, to put it very simplistically, topics are divided into those I know tons and tons about, and those I have an average or below-average familiarity with. For the former, I'll correct people who say something I know to be wrong with a level of confidence bordering on arrogance, while for the latter, I'll do a lot of "well that seems really counterintuitive for sure but the world is complicated and there's a lot I don't know about this subject so the other person could be right and I'd rather let ten 'guilty' people 'go free' by assuming that they're telling the truth than one 'innocent' person get called deluded or a liar".