By David Futrelle
Tuesday was the annual Trans Day of Visibility and, as expected, the transphobes were out in force online, spewing venom and pestering any trans people they could find. Do they ever take a day off?
Some of them invaded the #TransDayOfVisibility hashtag on Twitter with their, er, thoughts on the matter. Their tweets ranged from slur-filled vitriol …
… to failed attempts at compassion.
The transphobes were quick to pile on any company or organization that put out a statement of support on Twitter. When Amnesty International UK tweeted “Trans rights = human rights” (repeating the phrase six times for emphasis), it was bombarded with hundreds of tweets from a veritable army of bigots, among them former-comedy-writer-turned-full-time-transphobe Graham Linehan, who thought he could outwit the human rights experts at Amnesty with this question:
Other commenters offered their own version of Linehan’s question or came up with equally uninspired (and sometimes incoherent) put-downs of their own:
Even the Merseyside Police — yes, a local police department in Northwest England — found themselves swarmed by transphobes after tweeting that they were “proudly flying our trans flag at Merseyside Police HQ.”
One inventive transphobic Twitterer attempted to inspire other transphobes to pester trans people and allies with a strategy that seemed likely to puzzle a lot of its intended trans targets; it only makes sense if you’re a transphobe to begin with and think that only cis women are “real” women.
While the tweet got quite a few likes and retweets, I can happily report it doesn’t seem to have inspired much of a pestering campaign; I only found a small handful of tweets asking either of these questions to trans people and their allies.
I hope your Trans Day of Visibility went better for you than it seems to have gone for these sad people.
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I have no idea, been a good couple of decades since I was last in a nightclub. Considering butch/femme was a thing even back then, I have no idea why it was a thing back then either. And I am no femme. Just confusing I guess.
No diagnosis, just that I was looking into related topics, came across that, and parts of it seemed very … resonant.
On the other hand I do feel a desire for more connection with people … though I don’t seem capable to do much, on multiple levels. (Meeting new people seems impossible without spending a fair bit of money, which I can’t afford; when I do, I don’t seem to relate well to them; I don’t seem to be able to get the hang of “small talk”; if there’s more than one other person I often seem to get pushed to the periphery; etc.)
I also don’t seem to grieve normally, nor be able to maintain relationships very well.
It’s certainly a suspicion when parts of that seem to fit and it says elsewhere that over a quarter of aspies come down with it …
The really disturbing part, of course, is where it says the prognosis is poor. I have often felt “on the outside, looking in”, and some of the times would have preferred not to be. I’ve also often felt as if my life is some stunted and gnarled imitation of a normal one, like some tree at the edge of a wood that didn’t get enough of some nutrient or something. If there is little hope of those things changing …
@Allandrel:
I know PZ Myers over at Pharyngula has complained about physicists trying to do biology multiple times. There’s a lot of ‘why yes, that is an obvious an interesting idea; that’s why we tried it over a hundred years ago before finding out it didn’t actually work’. A lot of ‘very smart’ people seem to have a blind spot about realizing that there are people in other fields who are also very smart, and that anything ‘obvious’ to a non-expert was probably obvious to the experts already.
In the category of ‘there’s an xkcd for everything’:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/engineer_syllogism.png
@Jenora Feuer
Another relevant xkcd for that sentence would be this one:
This even happens outside of science. I can’t count how many times I’ve been trying to fix something or solve a real-world issue I’ve been having, then I tell someone else and they suggest an obvious idea that doesn’t work.
@Naglfar:
Ahh, yes, I remember that one now; I just wasn’t sure of the search terms to look for it.
Sometimes the crackpot ideas come in that are self-defeating. Back when I used to work for a company that did work in space science of various sorts (my group was involved with radio astronomy) one of our members kept getting crackpot theories faxed to him. I picked one up at one point, and noticed that it made some comment about the speed of light not actually being constant, but being the geometric mean of the speeds of all the tachyons in the area.
My reaction was pretty much “… WTF? … By definition tachyons (if they even exist) can only go faster than the speed of light, so it is mathematically impossible for the mean of their speed to be the speed of light.”
In my current job, I do enough tech support to be very familiar with the person who insists he knows what is going on purely from an outside view, and ignores my internal knowledge of how the system actually works. It’s just another case of that human capability to see patterns, even when the pattern in question doesn’t actually exist.
@Jenora Feuer
I’m not a physicist, but my response would equally be WTF. I would think most people even without physics education would know that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant and not variable (despite what creationists think).
There are a lot of men who think that way. Like that fellow last year who tried to explain gynecological anatomy to Dr. Jen Gunter and insisted he was right even after multiple doctors and the dictionary chimed in to tell him he wasn’t.
@Naglfar:
Yes, so far our only ability to mess with the speed of light is to mess with exactly what constitutes a vacuum. (It’s actually possible using the proper equipment to produce a space with an energy state lower than a vacuum, which then has a higher speed of light… but only within the equipment, and the greater an effect you want to have, the smaller the space has to be. It’s part of the Casimir Effect.)
And I remember that particular incident, yes. There were a lot of people around the net who kind of went WTF over that.
Later last year, Dr. Gunter ended up doing a short online documentary series for the CBC called ‘Jensplaining’ which was her own gynecological version of Mythbusters.
I simply did not know TERFs were a thing until I was in my late 30s. I mean, I knew jack about trans women, but I was aware there were people who had sex change operations and ‘became women’, and I assumed this was OK with feminists because, why wouldn’t it be?
Discovering the TERFs was a nasty shock.
@Podkayne Lives: I hadn’t heard of them until I was 40, and not on this site (back then, it wasn’t covering TERFs yet, I don’t think) and my posted response on that site was “What’s a TERF? (Does some quick research) [Ragequits humanity]”. I wasn’t ever directly involved in feminist circles, just non-heteronormative sex-positive ones. I was aware that there existed schools of thought on gender which weren’t very trans-friendly, but I thought that they had become defunct by the late 80s or earlier… not gone underground¹, combined and metastasized into something outright toxic, and later resurfaced.
Though the “Radical Feminist” part of the TERF movement does seem to be dying out, as they’re much better at recruiting antifeminists who nevertheless don’t want a total patriarchy than they are at recruiting the next generation of would-be feminists.
¹By “gone underground” I mean out of view of the feminist-adjacent. I don’t know if they were out of view of feminist insiders at the time.
Re: learning TERFs exist
I learned some ten years ago that there are people who are vehemently opposed to the existence of trans* people. I was sad to hear about it, but it wasn’t really a surprise, considering that there are all kinds of bigots out there. What was more shocking was to learn that a subset of them call themselves feminists.
What puzzled me most about transphobia all those years ago was the utter ignorance of facts or the lengths they’d go to prove to everyone that they didn’t hate trans* people. Like that apparently well-meaning guy who’d written a lengthy comment somewhere on how he wished trans* women could “become women” if they really wanted to, he wished it so darn much, but that couldn’t change the fact that you can’t “become a woman” because “naturally-born” women just have that essence of femininity that trans* women will always lack.
Makes me think about all of the AFAB people I’ve met whose sex and/or gender gets questioned because they appear androgynous or whatever. Where’s their “essence of femininity”?
Could it be that that’s just a circumspect way of saying that your idea of being a woman (or feminine) is so narrow that almost no one qualifies, be they cis or trans?
@Masse_mysteria
Many bigots now do some length of coverup but it does seem TERFs go much further in that regard. Of course, I doubt many people in the know are fooled.
(That doesn’t stop many people unfamiliar with TERFism from falling for it, I have had to on multiple occasions request that cis people stop being apologists for TERF rhetoric because they didn’t realize it was transphobic).
As far as I can tell, most TERFs are misogynists who think they can more easily get away with hating trans* women specifically and even pretend to be feminists. For example, in the infamously transphobic episode of “The IT Crowd,” the trans* character is played by a cis woman who then gets beaten up by a man. As far as I can see, that scene exists solely so Graham Linehan could show a woman getting beaten up.
This is also why most TERFs sound more like patriarchal conservatives than feminists.
Slightly OT:
British TERF group LGB Alliance has been revealed to have Nazi supporters and refuses to denounce them.
@Jenora Feuer
Put a bunch of them together and you get Less Wrong, who seem to divide their time between reinventing the wheel while insisting that it be square, and shaking in terror at the thought of Roko’s Basilisk despite how mind-breakingly stupid the entire idea is.
@Naglfar
Hardly a shock. Scratch a TERF, find a fash
@Allandrel
Roko’s Basilisk is quite easily the most idiotic thought experiment (if I can even dignify it to call it that) that I’ve ever seen. It’s so fractally wrong it’s hard to know where to start in breaking it down.
Every single aspect of Roko’s Basilisk is stupid, but my favorite (which does NOT make any more sense in context) is this:
Less Wrong Guy: So the AI, long after you are dead, creates a digital duplicate of your mind, which is completely indistinguishable from you. It’s impossible to tell which is the original and which is the duplicate.
(Time travel is apparently involved, I guess? How else are they testing the long-dead original?)
Me: It’s VERY easy to tell. The original me is a long-dead human. The duplicate is a digital entity.
Less Wrong Guy: No, it’s impossible to tell when you use text-based tests only, like the Turing Test.
Me: Ah, I see. It’s impossible to tell the difference so long as you avoid any and all tests that can actually tell the difference.
Here are two squeaky toys! They are completely identical, and it is impossible to tell which is which. Well, so long as the person examining them is blind, and so cannot see that one is red and the other blue. And deaf, so that they cannot hear that one goes SQUEAK and the other goes SQUAWK. And has no sense of smell, so that they cannot smell that one smells like new rubber and one smells like dog saliva.
But so long as your test meets those criteria, they’re completely identical and impossible to tell apart.
Brilliant! No wonder the Less Wrong guys take The Basilisk so seriously that many have suffered existential dread over it, to the point that talk of it is forbidden there.
@Allandrel
The other thing is, if I’m long dead, even if the duplicate for practical purposes is indistinguishable from me, why do I care? It’s still a duplicate and I’m still dead, so this doesn’t affect me. It’s like how if someone makes a cardboard cutout of a deceased person and burns it, it doesn’t really do anything to the original person.
It seems to have become a deity of sorts: they created an idea which they fear to the point that they work to keep it out of their minds, yet they have a sort of reverence towards it. Even though the Basilisk is pure brainless drivel, the whole thing does provide somewhat of a case study into sociology of cults.
Re: Roko’s Basilisk – There are two major philosophical schools of thought it regarding to identity (both personal identity and object identity) – Continuity Theory and Pattern Theory. Both schools have severe flaws when examined in the context of physics and neurology, so probably either the truth is something presently unimaginable or the concept of identity is an illusion. Most people, if they aren’t aware of discourse on the subject and try to think about it at all, subscribe to some fuzzy and not really well thought out version of continuity theory, because it’s more intuitive. Under any form of continuity theory, even poorly formed ones, Roko’s Basilisk is clearly ludicrous.
Under some versions of Pattern Theory, Roko’s Basilisk makes sense. The person who made that argument with Allandrel was either trying to use really bad metaphors to explain high-level concepts in Pattern Theory without making it clear that they were attempting to do so, or else doesn’t actually understand it, because that’s not how it works.
To give a general idea of the difference between the two, I use this variant of the Ship of Theseus/Grandfather’s Axe paradox. Let’s say you have a computer. Over time, you replace the parts of the computer with newer, updated parts. Once the entire thing has had every part replaced, you use all of the old parts to build another computer which uses the exact same parts and configuration as the original did, even if said parts might have changed a little (minor repairs, different rates of wear, maybe the hard drive contents are a little different, etc.). Which computer is the original one? According to Continuity Theory, it’s the one made of newer parts. According to Pattern Theory, it’s the one made of all the old parts. (Though there are some variants of both theories where that’s not quite so clear cut.)
@Snowberry
I’d guess it’s the second. Assuming the first gives the Basilisk enthusiasts far too much credit into their understanding of philosophy.
@Snowberry
It’s kinda both. Identity, consciousness, etc. are illusory as far as can be determined, but since that illusion is the part of us that has a sense of identity we can’t really interact with that fact in a useful or even meaningful way.
RE:Roko’s Basilisk
Interesting,Did any over you watch ‘Star Trek: Picard’? If so how would you apply Roko’s Basilisk to the end of season 1?
@Fabe: I’ve seen every Star Trek up to ST:Enterprise, though not anything after that (including the reboot movies), but I figure I should put some mentions here:
1. Nobody who knows how they supposedly work would be willing to step into a Star Trek transporter unless they believed in Pattern Identity (even if they only had a fuzzy concept of it and didn’t know it was called anything), as those transporters annihilate you and then reconstruct you elsewhere.
2. We don’t see anyone engaging in the logical outcome of a culture with their technologies and widespread Pattern Identity beliefs – making personal backups to restore themselves in the event of otherwise permanent death.
3. Most of the ST:TNG and Voyager transporter malfunction episodes are based on thought experiments which stomp all over either or both schools of identity; though in-show, they would only matter for Continuity Identity if transporters worked differently.
@Surplus
Then if this is the way you feel, I would suggest seeing a professional to see if they believe you should be diagnosed with it, to begin treatment. The person I know who had it was my great-uncle, and he was much happier when he was diagnosed and on medication. We could always tell when he was or wasn’t, despite what he said about his total normalcy during cycles where he would improve with medication and then believe that the strength of his own will was enough, go off the medication, and relapse before eventually resuming medication. I highly recommend, if you believe yourself to be ill with this particular illness, that you become diagnosed by a professional and commence medication as soon as possible. It would be a game-changer if this was a problem for you.
Remember to stay safe regarding covid-19 though. I for one would much rather you not die trying to get a doctor’s visit for this. Maybe wait until the trouble is over in Canada.
Somewhat OT: TERFs have joined various right wing groups in making conspiracy theories about 5G cellular. Both groups appear to believe that 5G masts are causing people to become trans* and now there are arson attacks going on again the cellular companies.
@various:
“Identity” seems to be a conflation of two things. One you might call referential identity. This is the identity of grandfather’s axe. It’s just a matter of human convention what we consider to be “the same axe”, or computer or etc., and what we don’t. As far as the universe is concerned a form of pattern identity would apply here, in that an axe is an axe is an axe and it doesn’t matter to it which one. If the blade is sharp it will chop wood.
The other would be the personal sense of being, well, a particular person stably over time. That’s a function of memory accumulation and ties in with the thermodynamic arrow of time. You have the sense of being a particular thread of life through time, or the growing-tip of that thread. A form of continuity identity applies “inside”, based on the reef-like accretion of memories and experiences, but “outside” one should expect something like pattern identity to apply: a copy with the same memories would feel that they were you, and consider themselves to have had the same life and experiences up until whenever the copy was made, diverging thereafter. So, internal self-identity is a kind of thread through time, but it can branch.
Ultimately, this self-identity is just a label like “grandfather’s axe” is, but it’s “observer relative”. When you boil it down to whatever information processing underlies conscious experience of qualia, there should be a fundamental symmetry of all observer-moments. We just, in any paricular moment, can’t remember any past observer-moments other than ones that contributed to the particular reef of memories at one growing-tip of which is that current observer-moment. The others are there but we can’t see them, like not being able to see past the edge of the observable universe. And none are less important, so the Kantian categorical imperative more or less falls right out as a consequence. Either no one is an end in themselves or everyone is, and in either case one would have to accept an egalitarian ethos that can not elevate anyone’s potential joys or sufferings in significance above anyone else’s.
What this means for the even bigger questions, such as death, is hard to say with certainty. Likely if the accreting memory-reef can conceivably accrete more on top of any particular spot, then in some sense you can’t die at that spot, as an observer-moment should exist in the physical configuration space that experiences that memory as in its past. You, or someone who considers themselves to be you, would wake up and experience that moment as a continuation of their life through that event. The same thing that happens every time you exit the dreamless phase of sleep, or recover from anaesthesia or a knock-out of any kind. So, most likely some species of quantum immortality is true. If, that is, nothing more is needed to extend an experienced life than to layer on new memories on top of the old. If more is needed then all bets are off.
I no longer fear death due to this, not as such. I do fear pain and suffering that might accompany one, and if I thought anyone would truly miss me I’d fear that being inflicted on them. I fear leaving things unfinished. But pain, suffering, and leaving things unfinished can easily occur for other reasons as well. I fear the possibility of civilizational collapse for, among others, those reasons.
I expect that some combination of quantum information theory and thermodynamics will be needed to formally solve these questions and consider them definitively answered. I don’t expect that when this occurs the conclusions will differ too much from what I’ve presented.
@BTD:
Unfortunately, I have no GP now (thanks, Doug Ford OHIP cuts!) to get any sort of a referral from, nor a clue how to circumvent that, nor do I think any sort of therapist would be insured for me, nor do I have the finances to pay out-of-pocket. Not to mention that I’d likely be stuck anyway due to COVID. The health care system has bigger fish to fry now, believe you me.