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As a gay person who periodically wades past the dialectical peat bog that is Hacker News, I am begging you to stop digging. I cannot tell you how disheartening

by aphyr 6y ago

As a gay person who periodically wades past the dialectical peat bog that is Hacker News, I am begging you to stop digging. I cannot tell you how disheartening it is to find comments like this at the top of a thread, let alone anywhere. Perceived mutability is one aspect that affects perceptions of marginalized groups. Neither perceived nor actual mutability justifies discrimination. A world in which gender transition were a trivial weekend occurrence would not excuse the gender wage gap. If conversion therapy were effective, it would still not be moral to imprison people for being gay. Being able to lighten one's skin does not, and should not, excuse the shooting of Black people at traffic stops. For some of this, this isn't an armchair "design space". Some of us still have people shouting "faggot" at us from passing cars. Some of us have strangers threatening to kill us in the supermarket. Some of us have been fired when our old names were found out. Some of us are trying to figure out how to tell our children how not to be murdered. These kinds of discrimination are not "perfectly legitimate" social choices. They have impact on actual human beings.

ReptileMan 6y ago
Sorry but they are. It is a bit like evolution. The only measure for success for a society is survival and perpetuation. As long as the system works it is legitimate. I will give you that it may be cruel and oppressive and terrible.
rayiner 6y ago
Nobody here is saying that discrimination isn't wrong. But why that discrimination is wrong matters. In the west, you can appeal to notions of individual self-determination: "We shouldn't care about peoples' consenting sexual conduct." Those rationales have little meaning in Asian or African societies. That's why the fact that sexual orientation is not a choice people make one day, but is instead something they are born with, is critical to point out. I’m not “armchair designing” anything. I’m from a Muslim country that does not accept western notions of individualism or sexual permissiveness. So it’s important that, even then, LGBT rights have a solid justification in the fact that it’s biology, not choice. That’s something you can educate people about and improve things. Invoking fallacious hypotheticals like “what if sexual orientation was a choice”—which is the exact opposite of what LGBT advocates believe to be true—undermines that. Instead, it seems like a pretext for universalizing western sexual morality more broadly. That’s imperious—there is no reason why protecting LGBT rights should require embracing western ideas about sexual morality directed to voluntary choices. And ultimately, it’s actively harmful for the hundreds of millions of LGBT people who live outside the west.
- damnyou 6y ago
  Liberal gender and sexual norms are very clearly better for humanity and it is a moral imperative that the rest of the world adopt them. Social conservatism of the sort practiced in most of the world, including but not remotely limited to the Muslim world, is incompatible with basic human rights and freedoms. To be very clear: social conservatism is bad and social liberalism is good. As someone not from the west, I hold these beliefs very firmly. The abuse and oppression I saw growing up was the inevitable result of patriarchal culture. Traditional gender and sexual norms are not worth saving. I hope some day they're seen in the same light we see feudalism or chattel slavery today. So, yes, in that sense "born that way" is a compromise with bigots.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    There is no reason to treat "social liberalism" as practiced in western countries in 2020 as some inextricable bundle, where each change must be considered "progress" independently. For example, while the sexual revolution tries to ride the coat tails of equal legal rights for women, there is no reason a society can't have equal rights for women without embracing the premises of the sexual revolution. (Don’t forget that the sexual revolution has freed men to do a lot of socially harmful things that burden and hurt women.) Even in the west, it is far from the consensus view that the sexual revolution was a good thing: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/07/sex-revolution-my-youth-wasnt-great-maybe-celibacy-sign-progress https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/07/sex-re.... Can a society have equal rights without, for example, the epidemic of fatherlessness that plagues the United States? It’s impossible to deny that socially liberal societies today aren’t doing a great job at one of the fundamental functions of a society: raising children. North America and Western Europe suffer from birth rates so low they’d soon cease to exist if it wasn’t for immigrants from socially conservative countries (Latinos in America, Muslims in Europe).
    - rayiner 6y ago
      I'll also add a striking data point--even in the United States, conservatives are happier than liberals: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/conservatives-are-happier-and-extremists-are-happiest-of-all.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/conservati... > Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids. In Bangladesh, where I'm from, it's taken for granted that getting married, going to mosque, and having kids is the way to a good and happy life. Yes, Bangladeshis are backwards people in many ways. But maybe they’re not wrong about everything. Maybe in this area, Bangladeshis know something about being human that social liberals have talked Americans into forgetting?

by aphyr 6y ago

ReptileMan 6y ago

Sorry but they are. It is a bit like evolution. The only measure for success for a society is survival and perpetuation. As long as the system works it is legitimate. I will give you that it may be cruel and oppressive and terrible.

rayiner 6y ago

Nobody here is saying that discrimination isn't wrong. But why that discrimination is wrong matters. In the west, you can appeal to notions of individual self-determination: "We shouldn't care about peoples' consenting sexual conduct." Those rationales have little meaning in Asian or African societies. That's why the fact that sexual orientation is not a choice people make one day, but is instead something they are born with, is critical to point out. I’m not “armchair designing” anything. I’m from a Muslim country that does not accept western notions of individualism or sexual permissiveness. So it’s important that, even then, LGBT rights have a solid justification in the fact that it’s biology, not choice. That’s something you can educate people about and improve things. Invoking fallacious hypotheticals like “what if sexual orientation was a choice”—which is the exact opposite of what LGBT advocates believe to be true—undermines that. Instead, it seems like a pretext for universalizing western sexual morality more broadly. That’s imperious—there is no reason why protecting LGBT rights should require embracing western ideas about sexual morality directed to voluntary choices. And ultimately, it’s actively harmful for the hundreds of millions of LGBT people who live outside the west.

damnyou 6y ago
Liberal gender and sexual norms are very clearly better for humanity and it is a moral imperative that the rest of the world adopt them. Social conservatism of the sort practiced in most of the world, including but not remotely limited to the Muslim world, is incompatible with basic human rights and freedoms. To be very clear: social conservatism is bad and social liberalism is good. As someone not from the west, I hold these beliefs very firmly. The abuse and oppression I saw growing up was the inevitable result of patriarchal culture. Traditional gender and sexual norms are not worth saving. I hope some day they're seen in the same light we see feudalism or chattel slavery today. So, yes, in that sense "born that way" is a compromise with bigots.
- rayiner 6y ago
  There is no reason to treat "social liberalism" as practiced in western countries in 2020 as some inextricable bundle, where each change must be considered "progress" independently. For example, while the sexual revolution tries to ride the coat tails of equal legal rights for women, there is no reason a society can't have equal rights for women without embracing the premises of the sexual revolution. (Don’t forget that the sexual revolution has freed men to do a lot of socially harmful things that burden and hurt women.) Even in the west, it is far from the consensus view that the sexual revolution was a good thing: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/07/sex-revolution-my-youth-wasnt-great-maybe-celibacy-sign-progress https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/07/sex-re.... Can a society have equal rights without, for example, the epidemic of fatherlessness that plagues the United States? It’s impossible to deny that socially liberal societies today aren’t doing a great job at one of the fundamental functions of a society: raising children. North America and Western Europe suffer from birth rates so low they’d soon cease to exist if it wasn’t for immigrants from socially conservative countries (Latinos in America, Muslims in Europe).
  - rayiner 6y ago
    I'll also add a striking data point--even in the United States, conservatives are happier than liberals: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/conservatives-are-happier-and-extremists-are-happiest-of-all.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/conservati... > Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids. In Bangladesh, where I'm from, it's taken for granted that getting married, going to mosque, and having kids is the way to a good and happy life. Yes, Bangladeshis are backwards people in many ways. But maybe they’re not wrong about everything. Maybe in this area, Bangladeshis know something about being human that social liberals have talked Americans into forgetting?