I'm glad you recognize the pseudo-religious nature of trans ideology, but you dismissed other leftist as concepts as "just bad ideas" rather than sharing this pseudo-religious nature. I would argue that while the trans cult might represent wokeness taken to its most extreme, wokeness in general is still a pseudo-religion.
Number one, you point out that the claims made on issues like race can be debated empirically. While they can be, the fact is that the vast overwhelming majority of leftists who believe that all non-whites are systematically oppressed, do not believe this because they crunched the numbers. They believe it uncritically, automatically, and without thought. They believe it for the same reasons that someone who grew up in a devout household believes that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior. And if you show them the numbers and tell them that their beliefs don't hold up to reality, this will have no effect. They might counter-argue you, but they will never change their mind, and if they do, it won't be because you showed them a bunch of numbers.
My favorite anecdote that I have demonstrating this effect is a brief exchange I once had with my cousin. Somehow the topic of Trump's border wall came up, which she of course said was a terrible idea. I asked her why, and she responded that it wasted too much government money. I then asked her, what if it could be built for zero dollars? Should it be built then? Her response was that, well no, of course it shouldn't be.
Second, one of the functions of religion is to impart meaning in one's life, and the woke cult clearly serves this purpose as a replacement for (and rejection of) traditional religion and spirituality. Rather than being assured that they are good people because they believe in Jesus Christ, leftists feel assured of this because they support Black Lives Matter and the like. The parallels with the George Floyd event in particular I think are far too overt to be ignored.
I love this comment. Critical Race Theory is just as religious as trans ideology. Adherence requires faith that "systemic racism" (whatever that means) is ubiquitous in the U.S. despite myriad evidence to the contrary. Police shootings track geographic violent crime rates (the product of individual choice), anti-discrimination laws are robust and enforced, and disparities in economic and educational outcome are highly correlated with family structure (also the product of individual choice). Faith in CRT concepts requires denial of reality.
Climate alarmists are similar in that they refuse to account for numerous failed predictions, fabricate weather trends (see hurricanes in Florida), ignore nuclear energy completely, and fail to consider that, even if the West goes completely green, 85% of the planet will continue to not be green.
Also notable is that these things, whenever possible, are defined in such a way as to make them unfalsifiable. Any weather event of any kind is taken as surefire evidence of "climate change," hence the adoption of the term "extreme weather" and the like. A cold snap is considered to confirm "climate change" in exactly the same way as a heat wave. The only possible way to "falsify" this absurd theory would be if weather events somehow stopped happening entirely.
Likewise, "systemic racism" is defined as an ethereal force pervading the air itself, invisible and untouchable. By defining "racism" as "power plus privilege", leftists make it definitionally impossible for non-whites to be racist, or for whites to be not-racist. No matter how subservient a white person is, they cannot cast off their shackles of "implicit bias," and must therefore continue to prostrate themselves at all times so as to maintain their credentials as a "white ally." To do otherwise results in instant excommunication and ostracization.
These definitional games are much the same as the games played by the transgender movement, as correctly identified by Richard here. This set of ideas was not created by a simple misunderstanding or misinterpretation of any actual data. It was created by a mindset perhaps best on display with the 1619 Project, in which a leftist started out with the premise that White People Are Bad and then re-wrote American history in order to make it so. You cannot use empirical data about the world today to refute the concept of "white guilt" as emphasized by a heavily motivated historical narrative obsessed with slavery and Jim Crow (and again, even if you somehow could, the people pushing said narrative wouldn't care anyways).
That last point, to me, is why I lean toward the same conclusion that it’s a religion, and not simply febrile ideas in quasi-religious packaging. To me, the hallmark of a transcendental movement is a basis in the unfalsifiable: no matter how many times you empirically prove that prayer has no effect, that holy water has no curative powers, that a consecrated host is no different from a wafer, believers will still hold to their positions. No matter how many times climate disaster predictions fails to materialize, no matter how many times claims regarding the efficacy of masks or Covid vaccines are proved to be paper-thin, true believers won’t be swayed. In fact, those falsifications cause many to paradoxically cling harder to their ideas, which is a hallmark of cults according to a landmark book to the topic.
Yep, you can see this effect in how any failure of leftist beliefs to play out in reality is met by the proclamation that this is because leftism simply didn't go *far enough*. The masks didn't work because not enough people wore them properly, the vaccines didn't work because not 100% of the entire population took them, etc.
"disparities in economic and educational outcome are highly correlated with family structure (also the product of individual choice)"
Do we know this? What if conscientiousness is genetically based and therefore family groups have a pre-disposition to behave in a certain way. It's not that individuals have no choice but that they, over time, behave in ways that are simply more attuned to their group nature, whether good or bad.
Alcoholism was bred out of middle easterners because it would have diminished passing on ones genes over thousands of years in a pre-welfare society. On the other hand Scandinavians are more prone to alcoholism because of alcohols' more recent introduction, rather similar to American Indians.
Norwegians, for example, were able to self-correct by limiting the sale of alcohol, and during the Christian era created powerful religious proscriptions against drinking spirits. People of middle eastern background have little interest in this because their brains don't produce as much dopamine when exposed to alcohol.
I'm in agreement that there is such a thing as individual choice but I think there is a difference in degree the way groups are capable of self-correction or even have the same propensity for vice.
Genetic determinism quickly leads to unacceptable implications.
Furthermore, I am too lazy to try and find these figures for the sake of a quick Substack comment, but I believe it is the case that rates of family formation, criminality, and drug use among the black population in the US shifted massively during the 1960s, in line with the Civil Rights movement, Great Society, etc. Obviously not a change brought about by genetic determinism.
"Genetic determinism quickly leads to unacceptable implications."
Reality is the thing that won't go away if you stop believing in it. Anyway, I'm not a genetic determinist if that means humans have no free will and there is no such thing as ideal beauty or divine order. But you should just label me as unacceptable Nazi I guess and be done with it. LOL.
It's not out of the realm of possibilities that the Great Society was meant as a propaganda gambit to counter Soviet and Western intellectual's attacks on the US as a "racist," and therefore evil, society. See, the US represents unlimited freedom as opposed to dull, repressive communism. What could be more free than abstract expressionism and an unfettered, bohemian lifestyle.
Blacks were/are archetypes to the bohemian artist, now-turned mainstream middle class white, sans poverty. Read Norman Mailer's The White Negro, written well before the Great Society. There are countless other uses of the black as a symbol of unthinking sensual knowledge. The very first modernist painting was Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), African masks on the faces of white prostitutes, with a flattening anti-western style.
So, there were two powerful currents flowing through western culture before the 60s: elitist bohemianism and the use of black symbols and gestures to attack traditional western culture and religion. The pre-60s perception by sympathetic whites towards blacks may very well be reality based.
Even to suggest that whites may be more predisposed than blacks to nuclear family formation due to some kind of "racial genetic preference" will be an impossible position to defend. Feel free to try, if you like. It would be amusing to watch the fallout.
The fallout's already happening. In order to achieve diversitopia there must be quotas, hate crime laws, two-tiered grading systems, massive propaganda that nobody believes like black Vikings – all this and much more. When people start lying about one thing it spreads to other things like why haven't women founded any Fortune 500 companies? Obviously, sexism. It's so obvious women are terribly, brutally repressed.
Not impossible to defend at all. Have you heard of 'plow cultures vs. hoe cultures' theory? Roughly, it goes: in tropical lands where the soil is soft enough to be worked with a hoe, women can easily farm vegetables, even with an infant strapped to them, and can therefore make a living for themselves relatively independently, whereas in higher latitudes where the soil is harder, and needs to be worked with a plow, necessitating draft animals that are ornery enough to need to be wrangled by men, women become more dependent on men for their food. Where women are dependent on men for food, they need to offer something in return, and that something tends to be a promise of sexual exclusivity - if you will invest in me and my future children, I promise that those children will also be your children. If women who are willing to make that promise, and men who are willing to work hard to support women who make that promise, tend to leave more surviving offspring than women who sleep around or men who do not invest in their spouse and offspring, that trait will be selected for. Whereas in the hoe cultures, women are less likely to be dependent on men for food for themselves or their children, which creates a selection pressure on men to optimize for mating opportunities rather than willingness to invest in a particular partner, including getting into fights with other men to prove one's dominance in a manner similar to the males of many other animal species we are familiar with.
I'm not sure how much I am willing to endorse that hypothesis - I don't know enough about enough factors in it to be confident - but it certainly doesn't seem so implausible as to dismissout of hand.
"At the lower end of the IQ spectrum, I think people need strong, quick, simple feedback to stay on the straight and narrow. People who won't show up to work need to go hungry. Women that get knocked up by the wrong man need to see their children suffer."
Those are NOT quick and simple feedbacks! They're complicated, long range feedbacks that stupid people do not predict or necessarily connect to their choices after they happen!
I'm ... genuinely unsure of whether this is a troll comment or not, given that we're here in the comment section of the substack of Richard Hanania, one of the most HBD-pilled commentators outside of people whose whole shtick is HBD. But in case not, it has long been the consensus of professional IQ researchers that different racial groups differ, often by substantial amounts, in their average IQ, with, at least in the USA, African-Americans having an IQ somewhere in the 85 to 90 region, whites around 100, and East Asians somewhere around 105, and that these represent genuine differences in average cognitive ability (i.e. are not just artifacts of test bias).
My premise: Family structure is the product of individual choice.
Your question: "Do we know this?"
My answer: We know this as much as we can know anything in social science because there is myriad evidence that single-parent households have increased among all racial groups since 1960, indicating the trend is social, not genetic. Moreover, even if it were genetic, procreation results from deliberate acts and choices. The same can be said of addiction if you understand how addiction works (knowledge of which today is ubiquitous). You don't choose to become addicted, but you (usually knowingly) choose to engage in the addicting behavior. Similarly, you may not choose to procreate out-of-wedlock, but you choose to have risky sex with an uncommitted partner with the common sense understanding that (1) sex makes babies and (2) single parenting is inferior to dual parenting.
I'm sorry but this argument is condescending to lower IQ people. Sex-makes-babies is not rocket science. If a person is mature enough to pursue sex, he or she is mature enough to understand procreation. It comes down to discipline and personal responsibility.
The problem is not intelligence, it is culture. Our cultural sense of morality and responsibility has degraded over the last 60 years. That is the problem.
This doesn't make much sense to me. Maybe I just don't get it? Jan 6 was a buffoonish, ineffective attempt to subvert "democracy" that had no chance at succeeding. Trans ideology on the other hand is an extremely successful attack on democratically-defined language that is enforced by major institutions.
The way I read it is that like language, democracy (in theory, of course) is a well structured, predictable method to conduct ourselves (whether through communications or governance).
However, trans ideology, like J6, is a brainless, flailing amoeba (are amoebas supposed to have brains? Whatever) that has no structure beyond the the random gyrations of each of the individual cult members.
He's trying to embrace his enemies' memes in the hope of either placating them or reaching a more centrist audience. Not a great strategy in my opinion but the US right has been doing it for decades and you can see the results !
I would love for you to be right, but I’m not so sure. Elon Musk has only so much power.
I suspect the reason Silicon Valley cares more about policing wrongthink on gender than on feminism or race is because males with AGP-fueled gender dysphoria are uniquely unforgiving, intelligent....and disproportionately represented in tech (particularly, programming).
This is not true of hardline feminists and the kinds of minorities racial discourse considers marginalized. Gender is personal to SV.
"males with AGP-fueled gender dysphoria are uniquely unforgiving, intelligent....and disproportionately represented in tech (particularly, programming)"
Nail on head. What's strange is that of all the gender related deplatforming, I can't think of one specifically related to AGP.
It’s not the clothing this person is wearing that is inappropriate. If someone’s breasts were actually that large, I don’t think it would be much of an issue. The issue is the choice to wear prosthetic breasts that large. You either view that as legitimate or not.
TBH, if someone can convincingly pass as the opposite sex, like in the movie Boys Don't Cry, I wouldn't usually care (sports being the main exception). A big problem that trans people have is aesthetic.
I don't know about the "mainstream" trans movement (the people who are most vocal on twitter are never a representative sample), but I'm trans and I think those ginormous prosthetic boobs look ridiculous (whether on a man or on a woman). I see no problem with not allowing them in schools.
I also think that the vast majority of trans people wouldn't want to wear those boobs anyway, because anything that size would be *extremely* uncomfortable. Coming up with rules for what do in a situation that won't actually happen seems like a waste of time (in which I just engaged myself).
The claim was that the "trans movement has no way to reject the prosthetic boob shop teacher without rejecting the entirety of its ideology." I'm just saying that they do have a way based on unprofessional appearance. Whether they take the easy out is another question.
The Twitter purge of rebels against the Trans hegemon was the template for all category cancellations that followed. And remains to this day (as you point out) the true locus of rage at Twitter HQ. The story has barely been told. Kinda hard to when so many people were deleted and everything they tweeted got disappeared along with them. Elon needs more than to just re-animate the Twitter murdered. Their trashed Twitter feeds must be revived with them. Or were the Twitter blue-heads smart enough destroy all the evidence of their rampages against the trans-dubious? That probably goes against company policy but they've been making their own rules for 6 or 7 years now. Probably busy torching the record of their subterfuge as I write this. There will still be enough left to make for a Stasi-like archive of their secret war.
>>Most people define woman as “human with XX chromosomes
Once you get below 115 iq, most people don't even know what chromosomes are.
The real definition of woman is "human with lots of feminine features" where "feminine features" include shorter stature, fatty hips, non-resonant voices, narrower necks ect. How many features you need to cross the line into woman hood will vary depending on which neural network your brain is running.
That may be true but I think the definition of a woman is how it’s ordinarily used. Historically, it’s ordinarily been used to refer to adult human females. That doesn’t mean that it has to continue that way. Maybe that will be an incorrect definition soon. But that is what the creators of sex segregated institutions meant when they created them.
It might be better for us to change our language to be more inclusive but whatever definition you select will exclude trans people or include cis people unless it quite literally is only identification. The trans inclusion problem can’t be solved because identifying as something and being that thing can always be in conflict. For example, your definition might include cismen who are feminine.
I don’t think this proves we have to continue using language the same way. But I do think that the semantic argument is maybe not a fruitful approach. If I was an advocate for trans people, I would just argue we should fully embrace the new definition. But I don’t think people are incorrect in their usage if they say Caitlyn Jenner isn’t a woman. Maybe they immoral (I don’t think so) but they’re not wrong about language, I would argue.
Human language has existed for at least 1500 centuries, but formal dictionaries have only been around for 4. How did people learn words during the other 1496 centuries?
Probably by induction. A kid sees the tribal members calling his mom a woman, as well as his aunt, and his older sister. Then he sees a fourth person, who shares not just the genital anatomy of his mother, but also her fatty hips and softer voice. The kid then forms a model of womanhood in his brain that incorporates *all* the shared characteristics of the women he's met. Then whenever he meets a new person, his brain examines all the characteristics of the person he meets, forwards those trains to the Broca's area of the brain, which then checks those characteristics against the kids internal model of womanhood, and decides if she counts as a woman. All of that happens in microseconds.
The reason Caitlyn Jenner gets "misgendered" as a man is not because her 46th chromosome becomes a Y-shape during miosis, or because she underneath her stockings and panties is the remains of a dangling bit of flesh. It's because her voice is resonant and her shoulders are wide. Those two facts are enough to trigger most people's Broca's area to label her as a man, unless of course people have been bullied into retraining it.
(That's literally the only reason I grok Caitlyn as a female....because I've called her a female so many times.)
Our evolutionary sensibilities are nearly impossible to fool on this question, and of course have nothing to do with IQ. Even with today's advanced interventions of surgery, hormones, etc., very few trans people manage to "pass." Even those that do, in the tribal evolutionary environment of no privacy and great familiarity, would have been "found out" almost immediately. Hence why this bizarre ideology has never existed in any other culture in history before ours.
"adult human possessing reproductive anatomy (gonads) geared towards creating large gametes (ova)" would be the most specific definition.
Female is the sex that produces large gametes, male is the sex that produces small gametes. There are only two kinds of gametes of course, not a "spectrum".
They knew, but only indirectly and less accurately. Just like all our other knowledge. People knew that the earth was different from the sky 10.000 years ago. That doesn't mean they had the same understanding of that difference, or of what the earth and sky actually are, that we have now.
The author does not seem to have experience with, or understanding of, religion. I would also guess that he's autistic, which would make religious psychology and feeling even more foreign.
"Ritual" exists in religion (just as it does in Woke--chanting, swaying, repeating sayings over and over) but it is not the reason we have religion. Religion gives meaning to people's lives, gives them an impossible aim to devote their life to, gives them a community with shared discourse conventions and convictions, tells them that they are good. Specifically, in America, it's Christianity that has done this.
I was an evangelical Christian for the first 25 years of my life. Woke is essentially religious. The behaviours and motivations are all emanating from the exact same region of the brain as the behaviours I witnessed and engaged in. They are not even aware of the striking similarities they have to each other. Furthermore, Woke is a post-Christian ideology, parastic on the lingering scent of original sin, self-abrogation, and damnation.
I know exactly what a Woke person is thinking and feeling when they encounter the heathen. I know how they feel when someone says forbidden words, when they ruminate upon the Kingdom of Equality arriving on earth, and when they swat away the doubts.
There are differences of course. Woke appears to be less joyful, there's no singing, they have worse mental health, there's no afterlife, and you can't be forgiven. Sounds like a bad deal.
First, it’s funny that you refer to Dave Chappelle in the way you do. He and his (white) writing partner built their entire career off of portraying racial stereotypes in the most offensive and outrageous way possible. Just the other day, my coworker and I were watching a chappelle show skit which spoofed a 50’s sitcom revolving around a white family named the “Nigars”. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but I was nearly in tears with how hilarious and absurd the entire skit was. All of us knew for a fact that something like that could NEVER get made today, but it’s ironic chappelle’s legacy has become more about poking the LGBT bear than the comedic genius of his show/early standup.
“Kendiism” is proving to be much less resilient than you seem to think here, if only because the effects of these ideas have been universally awful for damn near everyone outside of black Ivy League grads. After the riots of 2020, people began taking anti racism seriously, and the people who espouse these ideas were given tremendous influence over city governments, schools and police departments. Even where depts weren’t officially “defunded”, officers hands were tied with stricter rules of engagement. They were told not to pursue “small” crimes like drug dealing, shoplifting, and traffic violations. Schools stopped suspending kids for “equity” concerns. Cities limited private investment in black neighborhoods to prevent “gentrification.” As anyone with a brain knew at the time, the results have been disastrous by all possible measures. It’s not subtle at all, and let me tell you that people of all races are fed up with the BS. The idea that 15 year old kids are killing in broad daylight with glock extended mags because white people sing *all* the words to the Wu Tang song isn’t nearly as believable once the killings reach the BLM/Ukraine flag neighborhoods. I’m not saying that people are ready to discuss race/iq (not totally convinced by those arguments either), but the “systemic racism” excuse has definitely worn out it’s welcome. Even on Reddit, where being conservative is an autoban, mentions of “systemic racism” on shooting threads in my city have gone from top comment to -40 downvotes. Kendi has rapidly lost ground in the marketplace of ideas.
Trans issues are easy to “debunk” because of the obvious contradiction: “genitals don’t determine gender, so therefore I must mutilate my genitals to match my gender or I will kill myself.” For the vast majority of people, however, they have never seen or interacted with a trans person, so they don’t even think about it that deeply, It’s a pure abstraction and they choose the path of least resistance. I agree that opening the conversation a little bit will reveal to the wider public how nonsensical the ideology is.
The one I believe is most sticky, however, is feminism. While things like the wage gap (mostly bs) and female CEOs can be tested empirically, I’m more concerned about things that are harder to quantify. What has the “sexual revolution” done for the mental health of men and women? What are the long term effects of unlimited porn access from a young age on the sex lives of men and women? What are we going to do with all of the displaced, mediocre men who are no longer valued by society? These are all questions that society has not even begun to discuss, and I unfortunately think the conversation will remain taboo until social stability has been undermined.
Probably, I believe it, and not because I like Trump (I don't like him that much). I believe it based solely on the evidence, starting with what happened on election night.
What happened on election night was perfectly normal and expected. Plenty of people knowledgeable about how votes are counted correctly predicted what would happen.
You fell for a psyop that was planned in advanced by the people who did the fraud. They planned it because they knew that without it they would stand a higher chance of failing their coup.
"If liberals want to use the word that way, fine." It's not fine. The word is taken. It refers to female adults who need a name to distinguish them from male adults when it comes to policy. By definition the word "woman" excludes men because the concept does. Should we can the sky the ground in pilot's manuals?
Ideologues want us to pretend that men are women if they say so by forcing us to *say* so too. If these lunatics went around pointing at random objects and using the wrong words and were laughed at like the imbeciles they are, that would be one thing. But that's not what's happening.
The Woke have the audacity to be whiney crybullies when sane people use words as they appear in the dictionary. You can't even say "transwomen" are male because they decided "male" shouldn't ever be used for sex again, just for gender feelings. Ask them what sex a gender nonbinary identity woman or man is and watch them act like sex denialists buffoons.
Language is an oligarchy or at best an aristocracy. Elites define language. Family structure is always an aspect of the culture's religion, and here the Progressive elite priests (which is just Quakerism, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public%20Universal%20Friend) is defining the family structure for this society.
So, they are right by definition.
Underlying realities, however, are not subject to democratic or elite control. They have a prior existence. Male and female are reproductive strategies that result in propagation of the species. Trans may be a valid gender state, but it isn't a successful reproductive strategy. You can of course choose to use other words than "man" and "woman" to define the two successful reproductive strategies, but their existence is prior to language.
There are two things that I actually care about in Gender Ideology:
1. I don't think kids who we legally do not allow to have sex can consent to removing their sex organs
2. A Trans-Man is a man, and a Trans-Woman is a woman. But gender and sex are different. We can acknowledge someone's gender without throwing out the fact that sex is real, binary and (under current technology) immutable.
I really don't care if an adult wants to identify as a tree. I support any adult who wants to change their gender and I sympathize with people suffering from gender dysphoria. But can we please just acknowledge reality about the sex binary, and have rational discussions about what kids can, and cannot, consent to instead of bickering in esoteric arguments on whether intersex conditions 'prove' that the sex binary is false?
"I really don't care if an adult wants to identify as a tree."
That's easy to say, until identifying as a tree suddenly grants this person social and legal rights that, for very good reasons, are reserved for actual trees, and very specifically not for things that are not trees, often with the purpose of ensuring safety and fairness for things that are actually trees, from things that are not trees.
Come on, you were equating people identifying as different "genders" to people identifying as trees as if this is all the same thing. That is what I'm responding to. The situation you describe is already happening with sex/gender but you've just suggested it doesn't bother you as long as it's adults doing it. So which is it?
It doesn't bother you or you are afraid of this problem?
I’m arguing that an adult’s choice of gender (a meaningless concept in my mind) is irrelevant to me. What I care about is discussing when sex trumps gender, what genders should the state recognize, and an adult making an absurd choice is irrelevant.
But they're not choosing their "gender", they have made society conflate sex and gender. A passport doesn't state your gender, it states your sex. Sports competitions are separated on the basis of sex, not "gender". And yet we are allowing people of the male sex participating in female sports on the basis of "gender" ideology.
I'm making a public prediction that gender ideology will keep thriving in the free marketplace of ideas. It has already won its current position in an uphill battle. It will keep doing just fine on more equal footing. Do you want to make a manifold prediction market about the issue?
The thing is, your model of gender ideology is extremely lacking. The fact that you can't see any methodology is a failure of your map, not the territory. You are right that in the basis lies the argument about definitions, but it doesn't have to be based on "we can define words whatever we like" type of sentiments. Definitions based on strict logical categories are worse at describing the way humans actually use words than definitions based on the idea of simularity clusters.
Being a woman, the way people use the word, isn't a thing based on just one factor, be it chromosomes or self-identification. Both things are just approximations. There are multitudes of factors, which we do not even notice ourself subconsciously counting. Even very anti-trans people like Ben Shapiro have to perform constant self-censorship, occasionally correcting themselves in order to keep misgendering passing transwomen. And even very pro-trans people will assume that a person claiming to be woman, while having a central example of male body and experiencing no dysphoria whatsoever is probably confused or lying.
Sometimes I wonder whether the marketplace of ideas and the questioning of everything, like the definition of marriage, the definition of man and woman, etc., is how we got here in the first place. Some things shouldn't be up for debate! I don't think you beat trans ideology by having better ideas and arguments necessarily, but perhaps by opening a space where it can be subverted and ridiculed.
Many Muslim sects police their particular definitions of Islam quite vigorously -- they can define without much difficult who "really" is a Muslim or not.
I'm glad you recognize the pseudo-religious nature of trans ideology, but you dismissed other leftist as concepts as "just bad ideas" rather than sharing this pseudo-religious nature. I would argue that while the trans cult might represent wokeness taken to its most extreme, wokeness in general is still a pseudo-religion.
Number one, you point out that the claims made on issues like race can be debated empirically. While they can be, the fact is that the vast overwhelming majority of leftists who believe that all non-whites are systematically oppressed, do not believe this because they crunched the numbers. They believe it uncritically, automatically, and without thought. They believe it for the same reasons that someone who grew up in a devout household believes that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior. And if you show them the numbers and tell them that their beliefs don't hold up to reality, this will have no effect. They might counter-argue you, but they will never change their mind, and if they do, it won't be because you showed them a bunch of numbers.
My favorite anecdote that I have demonstrating this effect is a brief exchange I once had with my cousin. Somehow the topic of Trump's border wall came up, which she of course said was a terrible idea. I asked her why, and she responded that it wasted too much government money. I then asked her, what if it could be built for zero dollars? Should it be built then? Her response was that, well no, of course it shouldn't be.
Second, one of the functions of religion is to impart meaning in one's life, and the woke cult clearly serves this purpose as a replacement for (and rejection of) traditional religion and spirituality. Rather than being assured that they are good people because they believe in Jesus Christ, leftists feel assured of this because they support Black Lives Matter and the like. The parallels with the George Floyd event in particular I think are far too overt to be ignored.
I love this comment. Critical Race Theory is just as religious as trans ideology. Adherence requires faith that "systemic racism" (whatever that means) is ubiquitous in the U.S. despite myriad evidence to the contrary. Police shootings track geographic violent crime rates (the product of individual choice), anti-discrimination laws are robust and enforced, and disparities in economic and educational outcome are highly correlated with family structure (also the product of individual choice). Faith in CRT concepts requires denial of reality.
Climate alarmists are similar in that they refuse to account for numerous failed predictions, fabricate weather trends (see hurricanes in Florida), ignore nuclear energy completely, and fail to consider that, even if the West goes completely green, 85% of the planet will continue to not be green.
Also notable is that these things, whenever possible, are defined in such a way as to make them unfalsifiable. Any weather event of any kind is taken as surefire evidence of "climate change," hence the adoption of the term "extreme weather" and the like. A cold snap is considered to confirm "climate change" in exactly the same way as a heat wave. The only possible way to "falsify" this absurd theory would be if weather events somehow stopped happening entirely.
Likewise, "systemic racism" is defined as an ethereal force pervading the air itself, invisible and untouchable. By defining "racism" as "power plus privilege", leftists make it definitionally impossible for non-whites to be racist, or for whites to be not-racist. No matter how subservient a white person is, they cannot cast off their shackles of "implicit bias," and must therefore continue to prostrate themselves at all times so as to maintain their credentials as a "white ally." To do otherwise results in instant excommunication and ostracization.
These definitional games are much the same as the games played by the transgender movement, as correctly identified by Richard here. This set of ideas was not created by a simple misunderstanding or misinterpretation of any actual data. It was created by a mindset perhaps best on display with the 1619 Project, in which a leftist started out with the premise that White People Are Bad and then re-wrote American history in order to make it so. You cannot use empirical data about the world today to refute the concept of "white guilt" as emphasized by a heavily motivated historical narrative obsessed with slavery and Jim Crow (and again, even if you somehow could, the people pushing said narrative wouldn't care anyways).
That last point, to me, is why I lean toward the same conclusion that it’s a religion, and not simply febrile ideas in quasi-religious packaging. To me, the hallmark of a transcendental movement is a basis in the unfalsifiable: no matter how many times you empirically prove that prayer has no effect, that holy water has no curative powers, that a consecrated host is no different from a wafer, believers will still hold to their positions. No matter how many times climate disaster predictions fails to materialize, no matter how many times claims regarding the efficacy of masks or Covid vaccines are proved to be paper-thin, true believers won’t be swayed. In fact, those falsifications cause many to paradoxically cling harder to their ideas, which is a hallmark of cults according to a landmark book to the topic.
Yep, you can see this effect in how any failure of leftist beliefs to play out in reality is met by the proclamation that this is because leftism simply didn't go *far enough*. The masks didn't work because not enough people wore them properly, the vaccines didn't work because not 100% of the entire population took them, etc.
"disparities in economic and educational outcome are highly correlated with family structure (also the product of individual choice)"
Do we know this? What if conscientiousness is genetically based and therefore family groups have a pre-disposition to behave in a certain way. It's not that individuals have no choice but that they, over time, behave in ways that are simply more attuned to their group nature, whether good or bad.
Alcoholism was bred out of middle easterners because it would have diminished passing on ones genes over thousands of years in a pre-welfare society. On the other hand Scandinavians are more prone to alcoholism because of alcohols' more recent introduction, rather similar to American Indians.
Norwegians, for example, were able to self-correct by limiting the sale of alcohol, and during the Christian era created powerful religious proscriptions against drinking spirits. People of middle eastern background have little interest in this because their brains don't produce as much dopamine when exposed to alcohol.
I'm in agreement that there is such a thing as individual choice but I think there is a difference in degree the way groups are capable of self-correction or even have the same propensity for vice.
Genetic determinism quickly leads to unacceptable implications.
Furthermore, I am too lazy to try and find these figures for the sake of a quick Substack comment, but I believe it is the case that rates of family formation, criminality, and drug use among the black population in the US shifted massively during the 1960s, in line with the Civil Rights movement, Great Society, etc. Obviously not a change brought about by genetic determinism.
"Genetic determinism quickly leads to unacceptable implications."
Reality is the thing that won't go away if you stop believing in it. Anyway, I'm not a genetic determinist if that means humans have no free will and there is no such thing as ideal beauty or divine order. But you should just label me as unacceptable Nazi I guess and be done with it. LOL.
It's quite possible that racial and sexual reality were ignored because of other factors, e.g., Cold War propaganda. For example, it's now known that the CIA pushed modern art by setting up various front organizations promoting artists like Jackson Pollack. See, The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Cold-War-World-Letters/dp/156584596X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=T9TNU7T5LTFD&keywords=the+cultural+cold+war+saunders&qid=1665074661&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIwLjY2IiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&s=books&sprefix=the+cultural+cold+war+saunders%2Cstripbooks%2C16836&sr=1-1
It's not out of the realm of possibilities that the Great Society was meant as a propaganda gambit to counter Soviet and Western intellectual's attacks on the US as a "racist," and therefore evil, society. See, the US represents unlimited freedom as opposed to dull, repressive communism. What could be more free than abstract expressionism and an unfettered, bohemian lifestyle.
Blacks were/are archetypes to the bohemian artist, now-turned mainstream middle class white, sans poverty. Read Norman Mailer's The White Negro, written well before the Great Society. There are countless other uses of the black as a symbol of unthinking sensual knowledge. The very first modernist painting was Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), African masks on the faces of white prostitutes, with a flattening anti-western style.
So, there were two powerful currents flowing through western culture before the 60s: elitist bohemianism and the use of black symbols and gestures to attack traditional western culture and religion. The pre-60s perception by sympathetic whites towards blacks may very well be reality based.
Even to suggest that whites may be more predisposed than blacks to nuclear family formation due to some kind of "racial genetic preference" will be an impossible position to defend. Feel free to try, if you like. It would be amusing to watch the fallout.
The fallout's already happening. In order to achieve diversitopia there must be quotas, hate crime laws, two-tiered grading systems, massive propaganda that nobody believes like black Vikings – all this and much more. When people start lying about one thing it spreads to other things like why haven't women founded any Fortune 500 companies? Obviously, sexism. It's so obvious women are terribly, brutally repressed.
Not impossible to defend at all. Have you heard of 'plow cultures vs. hoe cultures' theory? Roughly, it goes: in tropical lands where the soil is soft enough to be worked with a hoe, women can easily farm vegetables, even with an infant strapped to them, and can therefore make a living for themselves relatively independently, whereas in higher latitudes where the soil is harder, and needs to be worked with a plow, necessitating draft animals that are ornery enough to need to be wrangled by men, women become more dependent on men for their food. Where women are dependent on men for food, they need to offer something in return, and that something tends to be a promise of sexual exclusivity - if you will invest in me and my future children, I promise that those children will also be your children. If women who are willing to make that promise, and men who are willing to work hard to support women who make that promise, tend to leave more surviving offspring than women who sleep around or men who do not invest in their spouse and offspring, that trait will be selected for. Whereas in the hoe cultures, women are less likely to be dependent on men for food for themselves or their children, which creates a selection pressure on men to optimize for mating opportunities rather than willingness to invest in a particular partner, including getting into fights with other men to prove one's dominance in a manner similar to the males of many other animal species we are familiar with.
I'm not sure how much I am willing to endorse that hypothesis - I don't know enough about enough factors in it to be confident - but it certainly doesn't seem so implausible as to dismissout of hand.
"At the lower end of the IQ spectrum, I think people need strong, quick, simple feedback to stay on the straight and narrow. People who won't show up to work need to go hungry. Women that get knocked up by the wrong man need to see their children suffer."
Those are NOT quick and simple feedbacks! They're complicated, long range feedbacks that stupid people do not predict or necessarily connect to their choices after they happen!
This implies that black people have considerably less IQ than white people, on the average.
I'm ... genuinely unsure of whether this is a troll comment or not, given that we're here in the comment section of the substack of Richard Hanania, one of the most HBD-pilled commentators outside of people whose whole shtick is HBD. But in case not, it has long been the consensus of professional IQ researchers that different racial groups differ, often by substantial amounts, in their average IQ, with, at least in the USA, African-Americans having an IQ somewhere in the 85 to 90 region, whites around 100, and East Asians somewhere around 105, and that these represent genuine differences in average cognitive ability (i.e. are not just artifacts of test bias).
My premise: Family structure is the product of individual choice.
Your question: "Do we know this?"
My answer: We know this as much as we can know anything in social science because there is myriad evidence that single-parent households have increased among all racial groups since 1960, indicating the trend is social, not genetic. Moreover, even if it were genetic, procreation results from deliberate acts and choices. The same can be said of addiction if you understand how addiction works (knowledge of which today is ubiquitous). You don't choose to become addicted, but you (usually knowingly) choose to engage in the addicting behavior. Similarly, you may not choose to procreate out-of-wedlock, but you choose to have risky sex with an uncommitted partner with the common sense understanding that (1) sex makes babies and (2) single parenting is inferior to dual parenting.
See:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/07/02/the-rise-of-single-fathers/#:~:text=A%20record%208%25%20of%20households,and%20American%20Community%20Survey%20data.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/family-structure-the-growing-importance-of-class/#:~:text=In%202000%2C%20the%20percentage%20of,parent%20in%201960%3A%2022%20percent.
I'm sorry but this argument is condescending to lower IQ people. Sex-makes-babies is not rocket science. If a person is mature enough to pursue sex, he or she is mature enough to understand procreation. It comes down to discipline and personal responsibility.
The problem is not intelligence, it is culture. Our cultural sense of morality and responsibility has degraded over the last 60 years. That is the problem.
Also, land acknowledgements are a ritual of CRT-as-religion, akin to how pronouns work for Butlerian gender ideology
Don't forget Kneeling Nancy!
Anyone remember the Heaven's Gate suicide cult and their ideas about gender?
39 to beam up.
“If language is a democracy, trans ideology is January 6.” I will be plagiarizing this line.
This doesn't make much sense to me. Maybe I just don't get it? Jan 6 was a buffoonish, ineffective attempt to subvert "democracy" that had no chance at succeeding. Trans ideology on the other hand is an extremely successful attack on democratically-defined language that is enforced by major institutions.
The way I read it is that like language, democracy (in theory, of course) is a well structured, predictable method to conduct ourselves (whether through communications or governance).
However, trans ideology, like J6, is a brainless, flailing amoeba (are amoebas supposed to have brains? Whatever) that has no structure beyond the the random gyrations of each of the individual cult members.
He's trying to embrace his enemies' memes in the hope of either placating them or reaching a more centrist audience. Not a great strategy in my opinion but the US right has been doing it for decades and you can see the results !
I think it would make more sense if the sentence were "If language is a democracy, trans ideology is the Democrats'/FBI's overreaction to January 6."
I would love for you to be right, but I’m not so sure. Elon Musk has only so much power.
I suspect the reason Silicon Valley cares more about policing wrongthink on gender than on feminism or race is because males with AGP-fueled gender dysphoria are uniquely unforgiving, intelligent....and disproportionately represented in tech (particularly, programming).
This is not true of hardline feminists and the kinds of minorities racial discourse considers marginalized. Gender is personal to SV.
"males with AGP-fueled gender dysphoria are uniquely unforgiving, intelligent....and disproportionately represented in tech (particularly, programming)"
Nail on head. What's strange is that of all the gender related deplatforming, I can't think of one specifically related to AGP.
The “mainstream” trans movement has no way to reject the prosthetic boob shop teacher without rejecting the entirety of its ideology.
Yes that’s very well put.
It would be easy to reprimand this person for dressing inappropriately, without tearing down the whole ideological backstory.
It’s not the clothing this person is wearing that is inappropriate. If someone’s breasts were actually that large, I don’t think it would be much of an issue. The issue is the choice to wear prosthetic breasts that large. You either view that as legitimate or not.
TBH, if someone can convincingly pass as the opposite sex, like in the movie Boys Don't Cry, I wouldn't usually care (sports being the main exception). A big problem that trans people have is aesthetic.
All them teeny little lumberjacks...
But who's to say it's inappropriate?
"DRESS CODE (TEACHERS) RECOMMENDED
To maintain high standards of professionalism, it is the expectation that all teachers will be neat and modest in their appearance."
From the first school handbook I could find (Everett, MA). https://4.files.edl.io/e9bc/08/31/22/150114-124bc981-621e-4547-b529-cb33459b7fcb.pdf
I can't really see the mainstream trans movement rejecting this guy because he is untidy and immodest, can you?
I don't know about the "mainstream" trans movement (the people who are most vocal on twitter are never a representative sample), but I'm trans and I think those ginormous prosthetic boobs look ridiculous (whether on a man or on a woman). I see no problem with not allowing them in schools.
I also think that the vast majority of trans people wouldn't want to wear those boobs anyway, because anything that size would be *extremely* uncomfortable. Coming up with rules for what do in a situation that won't actually happen seems like a waste of time (in which I just engaged myself).
The claim was that the "trans movement has no way to reject the prosthetic boob shop teacher without rejecting the entirety of its ideology." I'm just saying that they do have a way based on unprofessional appearance. Whether they take the easy out is another question.
The Twitter purge of rebels against the Trans hegemon was the template for all category cancellations that followed. And remains to this day (as you point out) the true locus of rage at Twitter HQ. The story has barely been told. Kinda hard to when so many people were deleted and everything they tweeted got disappeared along with them. Elon needs more than to just re-animate the Twitter murdered. Their trashed Twitter feeds must be revived with them. Or were the Twitter blue-heads smart enough destroy all the evidence of their rampages against the trans-dubious? That probably goes against company policy but they've been making their own rules for 6 or 7 years now. Probably busy torching the record of their subterfuge as I write this. There will still be enough left to make for a Stasi-like archive of their secret war.
>>Most people define woman as “human with XX chromosomes
Once you get below 115 iq, most people don't even know what chromosomes are.
The real definition of woman is "human with lots of feminine features" where "feminine features" include shorter stature, fatty hips, non-resonant voices, narrower necks ect. How many features you need to cross the line into woman hood will vary depending on which neural network your brain is running.
I think that “not having a penis” has been an essential trait historically.
I don't know, i think if you introduced a cute Filipino transsexual into a hunter gathering culture, she'd probably find a husband.
Most guys who waych futa porn are straight, although not all of them.
That may be true but I think the definition of a woman is how it’s ordinarily used. Historically, it’s ordinarily been used to refer to adult human females. That doesn’t mean that it has to continue that way. Maybe that will be an incorrect definition soon. But that is what the creators of sex segregated institutions meant when they created them.
It might be better for us to change our language to be more inclusive but whatever definition you select will exclude trans people or include cis people unless it quite literally is only identification. The trans inclusion problem can’t be solved because identifying as something and being that thing can always be in conflict. For example, your definition might include cismen who are feminine.
I don’t think this proves we have to continue using language the same way. But I do think that the semantic argument is maybe not a fruitful approach. If I was an advocate for trans people, I would just argue we should fully embrace the new definition. But I don’t think people are incorrect in their usage if they say Caitlyn Jenner isn’t a woman. Maybe they immoral (I don’t think so) but they’re not wrong about language, I would argue.
Human language has existed for at least 1500 centuries, but formal dictionaries have only been around for 4. How did people learn words during the other 1496 centuries?
Probably by induction. A kid sees the tribal members calling his mom a woman, as well as his aunt, and his older sister. Then he sees a fourth person, who shares not just the genital anatomy of his mother, but also her fatty hips and softer voice. The kid then forms a model of womanhood in his brain that incorporates *all* the shared characteristics of the women he's met. Then whenever he meets a new person, his brain examines all the characteristics of the person he meets, forwards those trains to the Broca's area of the brain, which then checks those characteristics against the kids internal model of womanhood, and decides if she counts as a woman. All of that happens in microseconds.
The reason Caitlyn Jenner gets "misgendered" as a man is not because her 46th chromosome becomes a Y-shape during miosis, or because she underneath her stockings and panties is the remains of a dangling bit of flesh. It's because her voice is resonant and her shoulders are wide. Those two facts are enough to trigger most people's Broca's area to label her as a man, unless of course people have been bullied into retraining it.
(That's literally the only reason I grok Caitlyn as a female....because I've called her a female so many times.)
Our evolutionary sensibilities are nearly impossible to fool on this question, and of course have nothing to do with IQ. Even with today's advanced interventions of surgery, hormones, etc., very few trans people manage to "pass." Even those that do, in the tribal evolutionary environment of no privacy and great familiarity, would have been "found out" almost immediately. Hence why this bizarre ideology has never existed in any other culture in history before ours.
Definition of woman: an adult female human being.
You're just pushing the definition back a level. What does "female" mean?
"adult human possessing reproductive anatomy (gonads) geared towards creating large gametes (ova)" would be the most specific definition.
Female is the sex that produces large gametes, male is the sex that produces small gametes. There are only two kinds of gametes of course, not a "spectrum".
So nobody knew what a woman was before the invention of a microscope?
They knew, but only indirectly and less accurately. Just like all our other knowledge. People knew that the earth was different from the sky 10.000 years ago. That doesn't mean they had the same understanding of that difference, or of what the earth and sky actually are, that we have now.
Mostly agreed.
Professor Titan-Tits isn't a woman.
Caitlyn Jenner mostly not a woman.
The ladyboy prostitute is mostly a woman.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a woman.
The super-stimuli, big titty anime girls are more womanly still.
Censorship distorts the marketplace of ideas, Elon is restoring the market
The author does not seem to have experience with, or understanding of, religion. I would also guess that he's autistic, which would make religious psychology and feeling even more foreign.
"Ritual" exists in religion (just as it does in Woke--chanting, swaying, repeating sayings over and over) but it is not the reason we have religion. Religion gives meaning to people's lives, gives them an impossible aim to devote their life to, gives them a community with shared discourse conventions and convictions, tells them that they are good. Specifically, in America, it's Christianity that has done this.
I was an evangelical Christian for the first 25 years of my life. Woke is essentially religious. The behaviours and motivations are all emanating from the exact same region of the brain as the behaviours I witnessed and engaged in. They are not even aware of the striking similarities they have to each other. Furthermore, Woke is a post-Christian ideology, parastic on the lingering scent of original sin, self-abrogation, and damnation.
I know exactly what a Woke person is thinking and feeling when they encounter the heathen. I know how they feel when someone says forbidden words, when they ruminate upon the Kingdom of Equality arriving on earth, and when they swat away the doubts.
There are differences of course. Woke appears to be less joyful, there's no singing, they have worse mental health, there's no afterlife, and you can't be forgiven. Sounds like a bad deal.
A couple of thoughts here.
First, it’s funny that you refer to Dave Chappelle in the way you do. He and his (white) writing partner built their entire career off of portraying racial stereotypes in the most offensive and outrageous way possible. Just the other day, my coworker and I were watching a chappelle show skit which spoofed a 50’s sitcom revolving around a white family named the “Nigars”. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but I was nearly in tears with how hilarious and absurd the entire skit was. All of us knew for a fact that something like that could NEVER get made today, but it’s ironic chappelle’s legacy has become more about poking the LGBT bear than the comedic genius of his show/early standup.
“Kendiism” is proving to be much less resilient than you seem to think here, if only because the effects of these ideas have been universally awful for damn near everyone outside of black Ivy League grads. After the riots of 2020, people began taking anti racism seriously, and the people who espouse these ideas were given tremendous influence over city governments, schools and police departments. Even where depts weren’t officially “defunded”, officers hands were tied with stricter rules of engagement. They were told not to pursue “small” crimes like drug dealing, shoplifting, and traffic violations. Schools stopped suspending kids for “equity” concerns. Cities limited private investment in black neighborhoods to prevent “gentrification.” As anyone with a brain knew at the time, the results have been disastrous by all possible measures. It’s not subtle at all, and let me tell you that people of all races are fed up with the BS. The idea that 15 year old kids are killing in broad daylight with glock extended mags because white people sing *all* the words to the Wu Tang song isn’t nearly as believable once the killings reach the BLM/Ukraine flag neighborhoods. I’m not saying that people are ready to discuss race/iq (not totally convinced by those arguments either), but the “systemic racism” excuse has definitely worn out it’s welcome. Even on Reddit, where being conservative is an autoban, mentions of “systemic racism” on shooting threads in my city have gone from top comment to -40 downvotes. Kendi has rapidly lost ground in the marketplace of ideas.
Trans issues are easy to “debunk” because of the obvious contradiction: “genitals don’t determine gender, so therefore I must mutilate my genitals to match my gender or I will kill myself.” For the vast majority of people, however, they have never seen or interacted with a trans person, so they don’t even think about it that deeply, It’s a pure abstraction and they choose the path of least resistance. I agree that opening the conversation a little bit will reveal to the wider public how nonsensical the ideology is.
The one I believe is most sticky, however, is feminism. While things like the wage gap (mostly bs) and female CEOs can be tested empirically, I’m more concerned about things that are harder to quantify. What has the “sexual revolution” done for the mental health of men and women? What are the long term effects of unlimited porn access from a young age on the sex lives of men and women? What are we going to do with all of the displaced, mediocre men who are no longer valued by society? These are all questions that society has not even begun to discuss, and I unfortunately think the conversation will remain taboo until social stability has been undermined.
"it can be adaptive for an individual to have no distinction between 'what I believe' and 'what is good for me to believe.'"
I've always wondered if Trump "really does" believe the 2020 election was stolen from him in this sense.
Probably, I believe it, and not because I like Trump (I don't like him that much). I believe it based solely on the evidence, starting with what happened on election night.
What happened on election night was perfectly normal and expected. Plenty of people knowledgeable about how votes are counted correctly predicted what would happen.
Generally when a criminal tells you he's going to commit a crime in advance, that is not used as evidence in the criminal's favor.
>The concept of “election night,” is no longer accurate and indeed is dangerous
>Campaigns, parties, the press and the public must be educated to adjust expectations
starting immediately
https://paxsims.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/preventing-a-disrupted-presidential-election-and-transition-8-3-20.pdf
You fell for a psyop that was planned in advanced by the people who did the fraud. They planned it because they knew that without it they would stand a higher chance of failing their coup.
"If liberals want to use the word that way, fine." It's not fine. The word is taken. It refers to female adults who need a name to distinguish them from male adults when it comes to policy. By definition the word "woman" excludes men because the concept does. Should we can the sky the ground in pilot's manuals?
Ideologues want us to pretend that men are women if they say so by forcing us to *say* so too. If these lunatics went around pointing at random objects and using the wrong words and were laughed at like the imbeciles they are, that would be one thing. But that's not what's happening.
The Woke have the audacity to be whiney crybullies when sane people use words as they appear in the dictionary. You can't even say "transwomen" are male because they decided "male" shouldn't ever be used for sex again, just for gender feelings. Ask them what sex a gender nonbinary identity woman or man is and watch them act like sex denialists buffoons.
Don't give them an inch.
Language is an oligarchy or at best an aristocracy. Elites define language. Family structure is always an aspect of the culture's religion, and here the Progressive elite priests (which is just Quakerism, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public%20Universal%20Friend) is defining the family structure for this society.
So, they are right by definition.
Underlying realities, however, are not subject to democratic or elite control. They have a prior existence. Male and female are reproductive strategies that result in propagation of the species. Trans may be a valid gender state, but it isn't a successful reproductive strategy. You can of course choose to use other words than "man" and "woman" to define the two successful reproductive strategies, but their existence is prior to language.
There are two things that I actually care about in Gender Ideology:
1. I don't think kids who we legally do not allow to have sex can consent to removing their sex organs
2. A Trans-Man is a man, and a Trans-Woman is a woman. But gender and sex are different. We can acknowledge someone's gender without throwing out the fact that sex is real, binary and (under current technology) immutable.
I really don't care if an adult wants to identify as a tree. I support any adult who wants to change their gender and I sympathize with people suffering from gender dysphoria. But can we please just acknowledge reality about the sex binary, and have rational discussions about what kids can, and cannot, consent to instead of bickering in esoteric arguments on whether intersex conditions 'prove' that the sex binary is false?
"I really don't care if an adult wants to identify as a tree."
That's easy to say, until identifying as a tree suddenly grants this person social and legal rights that, for very good reasons, are reserved for actual trees, and very specifically not for things that are not trees, often with the purpose of ensuring safety and fairness for things that are actually trees, from things that are not trees.
The day a human adult attempts to claim the rights of trees, and wins in court, is the day I will start being afraid of this problem.
Come on, you were equating people identifying as different "genders" to people identifying as trees as if this is all the same thing. That is what I'm responding to. The situation you describe is already happening with sex/gender but you've just suggested it doesn't bother you as long as it's adults doing it. So which is it?
It doesn't bother you or you are afraid of this problem?
I’m arguing that an adult’s choice of gender (a meaningless concept in my mind) is irrelevant to me. What I care about is discussing when sex trumps gender, what genders should the state recognize, and an adult making an absurd choice is irrelevant.
But they're not choosing their "gender", they have made society conflate sex and gender. A passport doesn't state your gender, it states your sex. Sports competitions are separated on the basis of sex, not "gender". And yet we are allowing people of the male sex participating in female sports on the basis of "gender" ideology.
Sex and gender are connecting. I agree: conflating the two is a problem. I disagree with those who do
I'm making a public prediction that gender ideology will keep thriving in the free marketplace of ideas. It has already won its current position in an uphill battle. It will keep doing just fine on more equal footing. Do you want to make a manifold prediction market about the issue?
The thing is, your model of gender ideology is extremely lacking. The fact that you can't see any methodology is a failure of your map, not the territory. You are right that in the basis lies the argument about definitions, but it doesn't have to be based on "we can define words whatever we like" type of sentiments. Definitions based on strict logical categories are worse at describing the way humans actually use words than definitions based on the idea of simularity clusters.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/a-humans-guide-to-words
Being a woman, the way people use the word, isn't a thing based on just one factor, be it chromosomes or self-identification. Both things are just approximations. There are multitudes of factors, which we do not even notice ourself subconsciously counting. Even very anti-trans people like Ben Shapiro have to perform constant self-censorship, occasionally correcting themselves in order to keep misgendering passing transwomen. And even very pro-trans people will assume that a person claiming to be woman, while having a central example of male body and experiencing no dysphoria whatsoever is probably confused or lying.
Sometimes I wonder whether the marketplace of ideas and the questioning of everything, like the definition of marriage, the definition of man and woman, etc., is how we got here in the first place. Some things shouldn't be up for debate! I don't think you beat trans ideology by having better ideas and arguments necessarily, but perhaps by opening a space where it can be subverted and ridiculed.
"There is no other movement that has more to fear from a free marketplace of ideas."
Islam?
Many Muslim sects police their particular definitions of Islam quite vigorously -- they can define without much difficult who "really" is a Muslim or not.