p0lka
Illuminator
I agree
over time though, assuming the first part that I agreed with, would there even be such a thing as a female single-sex space?
Trans women are not women (Part 8)
- Thread starter Meadmaker
- Start date
- Status
They have existed for thousands of years across a vast array of cultures. You can read about them in the Iliad if you like. Basic versions of them exist in apes.
In that case you are an ideologue and a zealot with the same vision of how to improve the world as Robespierre. This is not how the world has ever worked, it is not how the world currently works, it is not how the world will ever work. The realisation of that basic reality is why Marxists had to speculate that when bourgeois society was finally taken apart and destroyed and socialism had been achieved.... a new Communist Man would appear who would be able to live in the Communist utopia that was clearly so unsuitable to any human yet born. It's the "and here a miracle occurs" method of solving problems.
A world in which there is no normal is the Tower of Babel as a model for society. It can not work and will not work. You are proposing taking a functioning system and replacing it with a non-functioning chaos that you find appealing conceptually.
How do you determine what serves a purpose and what is unnecessary? Will there be some long series of experiments on children to determine it? It sounds a lot like you are taking John Money's ideas about gender being socially defined and wanting to start discarding things based on that.
A tragic case of what happens when an ideologue gets his hands on children and used them to advance his deviant ideology.
Last edited:
No, there would not.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
You think that if we let pre adolescents sort out gender for themselves, they'll grow up too stupid to notice the sexual dimorphism and all that entails.
Typically what happens is that, just like achieving Communism, you have to have a period of coercion, indoctrination and so on in order to remove the last vestiges of the old oppressive culture that people mistake for innate sexual dimorphism. If the utopia is to be achieved, that is necessary.
We are already teaching p0lka's worldview as fact in schools in the UK, I imagine in the US as well. There is no neutral environment where children make it up for themselves. There can't be. What would actually happen is that pressure would be applied, and is being applied to young children to explore their gender and gender identity and boys will get praise for putting on dresses while girls will get praise for dressing as firemen. Children will be coerced into making the decisions that they would make in the idealised vision in p0lka's head.
Obviously because of the innate nature of boys and girls, it will require continual positive reinforcement to maintain this natural, freely chosen state that is definitely not the product of ideologically driven social conditioning. It will also definitely not cause problems between the sexes because if we know nothing else, women are deeply attracted to weak effeminate men in dresses who earn less than them and men like strong women with calloused skin who wear overalls. You can just change up all this stuff to fit your idea of gender equity and it will all work, because it's all socially defined. Just like eugenics was taking reproduction and rationalising it to produce an ideal society, p0lka just wants to do eugenics for gender expression.
Last edited:
Rolfe
Adult human female
I am clearly failing to get across the point I am trying to make.
Sex is immutable, and it matters. No matter what you wear or how you speak or walk, you will always be the sex your chromosomes dictated when you were conceived. Dress as you please, walk as you please, speak as you please. Nobody should be criticising you for any of that, assuming no taboos on nudity or whatever are being broken. However, if you are male you do whatever you have to do in the male spaces, and vice versa for female.
Wearing clothes some people think of as feminine isn't important at all. It doesn't change your sex. Sex-segregated spaces are important, and there is nothing to prevent you using the one set aside for your space, because nobody is taking a blind bit of notice of the fact that you're wearing a vinyl miniskirt and heels.
Sex is immutable, and it matters. No matter what you wear or how you speak or walk, you will always be the sex your chromosomes dictated when you were conceived. Dress as you please, walk as you please, speak as you please. Nobody should be criticising you for any of that, assuming no taboos on nudity or whatever are being broken. However, if you are male you do whatever you have to do in the male spaces, and vice versa for female.
Wearing clothes some people think of as feminine isn't important at all. It doesn't change your sex. Sex-segregated spaces are important, and there is nothing to prevent you using the one set aside for your space, because nobody is taking a blind bit of notice of the fact that you're wearing a vinyl miniskirt and heels.
I think it's pretty clear where you draw the line Rolfe, I'm just not sure that it will practically work. I think that if men dressing as women, and acting as women, is normalised you make it much, much harder to keep them out of changing rooms. It feels like you are pulling in two directions at once.
I think part of the issue is that the reasons for wanting to normalise men putting on dresses seems to me to be ideological. It's this libertarian, egalitarian idea of people being able to define themselves however they want, and typically being given equal access to things comes into that. You seem to be drawing your line based on some conservative notion of the actual consequences of implementing this libertarian, egalitarian idea of allowing men into women's spaces.
The problem is, I don't think that consequences are really seriously being considered at any point up until the line you personally want to draw. It's not as if concerns about undermining gender roles haven't been articulated on the way to this point, it's just that they were dismissed out of hand in favour of ideology. We all want equality and freedom to live our lives how we want, right?
There is a phrase in Catholic thinking that comes up in Brighton Rock. From the stirrup to the ground. The idea is something like that somebody who has lived a sinful life is thrown from their horse and on the way to the ground regrets it, and is accepted into heaven. One of the messages of Brighton Rock is that it isn't really that easy. You can't live your life under one set of rules and then do a hard 180 just because it's convenient.
It seems to me that your moral reasoning about everything else is based on the liberal equality, liberty etc... principles. I don't think as a matter of pure practicality, one can go with those principles right up until the point you want to defend, and then turn conservative.
Last edited:
Meadmaker
Unregistered
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2004
- Messages
- 29,033
Not speaking for Rolfe, to whom the question was addressed, but I believe that we would. I think this thing that we call "modesty" is an instinctive aspect of human nature. It's guided by custom and how it manifests differs across cultures, but I think evolution has created the basic framework for it to exist. I don't think it's a cultural imprint.
I base that in large part on the fact that every society everywhere has customs based on modesty, in some form.
If it sounds like I am saying that we have evolved to wear clothes, you are right. Some people think that's absurd, because....well, you fill in the blank. No one has ever gotten to a because on that one. The way I see it, though, is that humans did not stop evolving when we first put on animal skins, and 5,000 generations have passed since then.
I don't know how to go about proving it or testing the hypothesis.
Meadmaker
Unregistered
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2004
- Messages
- 29,033
In my opinion, the specifics of the boy-girl templates are, to some extent, societally created. However, the existence of boy-girl templates is something that I think is instinctive. Also, some aspects of those templates are so common that I think they are, in fact, instinctive.
In Germany and Scandinavia nude saunas are, I think, relatively common. I went to Bavaria and there was a mixed, nude, outdoor hot tub on the first floor of some kind of health club that I drove past each day. I kept getting stabbed in the eye by potbellied Bavarian men's penises and Bavarian women's breasts. Well, quite a lot of the men had breasts as well.
Yes. And I think as critically, the push for the sexes to differentiate themselves. Also, if men look, on the whole, for particular things in women, and women look for particular things in men.... you may well have lots of freedom in terms of how you express the thing the other sex is programmed to look for.... but you don't have complete freedom to just be whatever you want if you want any likelihood of finding a partner.
Meadmaker
Unregistered
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2004
- Messages
- 29,033
The existence of nudist areas is often cited as reason not to believe that modesty is instinctive, but I think it's a misinterpretation of the behavior. What I actually think is that display of genitals is programmed as a sexual signal. Possibly, simply the display of "something forbidden" is a sexual signal. Culture influences what is forbidden. Women, especially, are careful of the circumstances where they make such displays. Some people insist that nudists are unconcerned, free, not sexual, just enjoying nature, etc. I don't believe it. My experience with clothing optional areas in my youth was that they were very much a sexually charged atmosphere.
I'm not sure that those two things are mutually exclusive. I'm not going to argue that breasts aren't any kind of signal.
Presumably it gets old for most people eventually. I mean, people go around now wearing clothes that people would have felt practically naked in 150 years ago. Look at those old bathing costumes and girls today going about in bikinis. National Geographic used to thrive on tribal cultures where the women went about with their breasts out.
Maybe a lot of that depends on living in a high trust culture. I'm sure if nudity resulted in unwanted attention from perverts, it would lose it's attraction. Just because you can do this in some tribal village, or in rural Sweden doesn't mean public nudity in Detroit would work well.
905
Student
As a newbie I can't post links just yet, which is fair enough, so I'll just ask any interested parties to do a search on "Julia Hartley Brewer's transgender clash with Labour MP" and marvel at the cognitive dissonance on display.
Could you unpack that reaction a bit...?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Bsj4VmEf4
The MP talking to Julia Hartley Brewer looks to have lower testosterone than a BuzzFeed journalist. He comes close to admitting his stance is an incoherent attempt to hold two contradictory positions in order to avoid admitting there isn't an "everybody wins" solution. I don't see cognitive dissonance since I think he is smart enough to understand what he is doing, he just isn't man enough to pick a side honestly.
Last edited:
905
Student
It looks almost textbook to me, but reasonable people can differ as to whether we're seeing slyness or stupidity (not even getting into political IQ here) in service to toeing the party line.
Last edited:
What I think is interesting is how close to the surface the reasoning actually is. To my mind it's the same as we saw with the conservative Muslim parents protesting about their kids being taught LGBT+ positive lessons by their gay activist teacher.
There is an anchoring assumption that there is an inclusive and tolerant utopia out there in which everybody is free to live as they want and respects everybody's culture and religion. How long has that idea driven progressive-liberal thought? 80 years? Longer? It's too politically useful an idea to give up even if it's been obviously false since the beginning.
Ultimately they have an idea of what the people in their utopia will be like, but if they straight out told Rolfe that women in the sense that she understands them won't really exist in the utopia, then Rolfe probably wouldn't be too happy with them. The same with the Muslim parents if it was straightforwardly stated that the idea was to convert their kids to liberal ideas and liberal expectations. So instead they pretend that if only everybody was considerate enough about everybody else's feelings the problem would go away and wait for a new generation to grow up educated to believe these things.
Last edited:
Rolfe
Adult human female
I see McKinnon/Ivy has won another race designated for "elite women" while carrying the sort of lard that would see him panting in last in male company.
Doesn't it make you proud to be a woman, Rolfe?
- Status