6 ms·

Just as a curiosity what is the counter to this troll argument? Philosophically speaking why is one obvious and the other unthinkable?

ketzo 4y ago
If you want a simple appeal to medical science, gender dysphoria is recognized in the DSM-5 [1], and gender-affirming care and identification have been shown to result in measurable improvements in transgender people’s health outcomes [2]. Neither of those things are true for “trans-racialism.” Beyond that: I struggle to find almost any good-faith examples of people claiming that they genuinely believe themselves to be “trans-racial.” [1] https://psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria https://psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/wh... [2] https://www.pcori.org/research-results/2013/examining-health-outcomes-people-who-are-transgender https://www.pcori.org/research-results/2013/examining-health...
- willcipriano 4y ago
  The issue there philosophically is that prior to it's recognition in the DSM-5 transgender people would then not have existed. That is more of an appeal to authority than an explanation why one accident of birth is a social construct and one is not.
  - ketzo 4y ago
    Yeah, that’s fair as an argument from first principles. But speaking from a more practical standpoint: we know, empirically, that there are a lot of transgender people out in the world. We know that many of them feel much healthier when they are able to transition, in various different ways. It’s not just an appeal to authority, it’s an appeal to a fairly significant consensus in medical science. Which feels better to me. We just don’t have any meaningful evidence for “I identify as black so I can say the N-word” being anything other than an annoying troll argument. Or at least, I certainly haven’t seen any. But if you want to talk about race/gender as social constructs, that’s a whole ‘nother conversation — one very worth having!
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      I don't disagree that people are suffering from a condition and feel the way they do. I'm sure if I had it, I would feel the same way. I don't care one bit what clothes you wear or what name you want me to call you. My problem is mainly when I think about other, similar conditions, like elderly people who think they are 8 years old or patients who think they are celebrities. I'm not asked to think of them in the manner that they think of themselves. Another example: a teenage girl with body dysmorphia identifies as obese, but you'd have to be evil to go along with that dysmorphia. It just seems to me that this one case is different but I can't point to a good reason why.
      - sumeno 4y ago
        This kind of argument has been used to deny people their rights forever. In the 90s and 00s one of the arguments was that if you legalized same-sex marriage then bestiality would be next. These arguments are just a new flavor of that so that people can still be jerks to transgender people.
        grajam_hons 4y ago
        I think the crucial difference is that nobody was disadvantaged by legalizing same-sex marriage. At least in how it was implemented in the UK, religious venues are not compelled to officiate such marriages. So the LGB folks still get to enjoy marriage equality, but the reverends and imams and suchlike don't feel disrespected.
        sumeno 4y ago
        Who is disadvantaged by using someone's preferred pronouns? or not using racist slurs?
        grajam_hons 4y ago
        I was thinking more along the lines of how women's rights are affected, for instance. What's recently been happening to women in prisons quite exemplifies the issue.
- Tao3300 4y ago
  Dolezal wasn't acting in good faith? Wasn't she heading a NAACP chapter? What does good faith look like?
  - titanomachy 4y ago
    That's an interesting question. She is on record lying about her parentage and about being discriminated against by police. Trans people (as far as I know) don't claim that their genetics are different from reality, but that their experienced gender is different from their genetically determined one. I don't know if that's enough to consider her "bad faith", though. If you genuinely did "feel black" despite having white parents, it would certainly be tempting to at least withhold information about your parents.
- BazzeractQ 4y ago
  [flagged]
RC_ITR 4y ago
We as a society have one class where we accept “separate but equal” which is gender. White identifying as black should have no impact on day to day life, as we strive as a society to not discriminate on race. Male identifying as female does have an impact on day to day life, since we do allow for some amount of gender based discrimination. So the solution is “either make all bathrooms, etc unisex or take trans peoples issues seriously.” But most conservatives obviously want neither.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  For me it makes me question a number of assertions we have. Why not just have stalls in bathrooms so everyone can have privacy? Why is gender on your drivers license at all? Etc.
  - banannaise 4y ago
    Fun fact: gender was not indicated on United States passports until the 1970s, when it was added to combat a perceived rise in androgyny. In other words, it exists to enforce gender roles, not as an actual identifier. edit: here's a source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-rise-of-androgyny-changed-our-passports https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-rise-of-androgyny-chan...
- grajam_hons 4y ago
  I find it intriguing how this has become part of the conservative political zeitgeist, when it's an issue that previously was the sole preserve of left-wing radical feminists. And one they have been battling for many decades now. Of course, the conservatives approach it from an entirely different point of view to the feminists, for whom this a fundamental women's rights issue. But it's interesting how they can all reach roughly the same conclusion from entirely different sets of principles.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    Yeah, politics are a weird mix of 'we disagree that this is even a problem' (i.e. abortion rights) and 'we disagree about the solution to this problem' (i.e. trans/women's rights) ^That framework and the hypocrisy it breeds is honestly 99% of the humor on The Daily Show and the Fox News knock-offs of The Daily Show (Greg Guttfield etc.)
kibwen 4y ago
It helps to have a more concrete example rather than one designed to be a straw man. I know someone who passes as white, but you'd never guess that she has a black father, making her ethnically as black as Barack Obama, and well above the infamous one-drop rules ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule ) that would have allowed her to be denied civil rights under segregation. By that criteria she's black, but she doesn't use the word in question. We can ask whether she should use it, or should want to use it, or should be able to use it, and that might be an interesting conversation, but not one with any hope of having a useful generalizable outcome; the context differs too much from person to person. And since racial slurs carry much different, and much more charged connotations than gendered pronouns do, trying to draw analogies here seems almost deliberately designed to generate argument rather than discussion.
- btilly 4y ago
btilly 4y ago
The obvious answer is that what you identify as does not give you the right to do things that others reasonably consider offensive. So if a transwoman goes on a rant about how women are all crazy bitches, she doesn't get to justify it by saying she's a woman. She can reasonably ask others to treat her as a woman. But it isn't a get out of jail free card. Now for a harder one. Why philosophically is being trans OK, but it is not OK for a white to identify as a minority and then receive preferential treatment as one? What if the white is detectably a minority, but so little that nobody would notice if they didn't make an issue of it?
- chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  You're going to need to provide a concrete example of the "preferential treatment" in your hypothetical. The concrete example of the treatment trans employees are asking to receive is, in almost all cases, being referred to with the correct pronouns. Pronouns come up in casual conversation routinely -- that's precisely why folks make an issue of it. What's the comparable situation you envision for a coworker who doesn't "look Black" or "look Hispanic"?
  - btilly 4y ago
    Concrete example, a certain number of government contracts are reserved for minority owned businesses.
banannaise 4y ago
The counter is that the troll argument compares a substantial community of good-faith actors (transgender people) to a largely imaginary community of bad-faith actors (people pretending to be trans-racial) and from that point on it assumes that those groups are entirely alike in every way, even though one of those groups doesn't exist to any meaningful extent.
basch 4y ago
I've been wrong before in this thread, but I have to guess that the troll argument is actually a https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum where he doesnt believe his argument as much as is using it to illustrate how absurd he finds the pronoun debate. The idea that a libertarian modeled company is ruling by fiat, and issues a decree telling people they cant ask to be referred to by nicknames/pronouns, is somewhat absurd, and he doesnt appear to see the irony.

ketzo 4y ago

If you want a simple appeal to medical science, gender dysphoria is recognized in the DSM-5 [1], and gender-affirming care and identification have been shown to result in measurable improvements in transgender people’s health outcomes [2]. Neither of those things are true for “trans-racialism.” Beyond that: I struggle to find almost any good-faith examples of people claiming that they genuinely believe themselves to be “trans-racial.” [1] https://psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria https://psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/wh... [2] https://www.pcori.org/research-results/2013/examining-health-outcomes-people-who-are-transgender https://www.pcori.org/research-results/2013/examining-health...

willcipriano 4y ago
The issue there philosophically is that prior to it's recognition in the DSM-5 transgender people would then not have existed. That is more of an appeal to authority than an explanation why one accident of birth is a social construct and one is not.
- ketzo 4y ago
  Yeah, that’s fair as an argument from first principles. But speaking from a more practical standpoint: we know, empirically, that there are a lot of transgender people out in the world. We know that many of them feel much healthier when they are able to transition, in various different ways. It’s not just an appeal to authority, it’s an appeal to a fairly significant consensus in medical science. Which feels better to me. We just don’t have any meaningful evidence for “I identify as black so I can say the N-word” being anything other than an annoying troll argument. Or at least, I certainly haven’t seen any. But if you want to talk about race/gender as social constructs, that’s a whole ‘nother conversation — one very worth having!
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    I don't disagree that people are suffering from a condition and feel the way they do. I'm sure if I had it, I would feel the same way. I don't care one bit what clothes you wear or what name you want me to call you. My problem is mainly when I think about other, similar conditions, like elderly people who think they are 8 years old or patients who think they are celebrities. I'm not asked to think of them in the manner that they think of themselves. Another example: a teenage girl with body dysmorphia identifies as obese, but you'd have to be evil to go along with that dysmorphia. It just seems to me that this one case is different but I can't point to a good reason why.
    - sumeno 4y ago
      This kind of argument has been used to deny people their rights forever. In the 90s and 00s one of the arguments was that if you legalized same-sex marriage then bestiality would be next. These arguments are just a new flavor of that so that people can still be jerks to transgender people.
      - grajam_hons 4y ago
        I think the crucial difference is that nobody was disadvantaged by legalizing same-sex marriage. At least in how it was implemented in the UK, religious venues are not compelled to officiate such marriages. So the LGB folks still get to enjoy marriage equality, but the reverends and imams and suchlike don't feel disrespected.
        sumeno 4y ago
        Who is disadvantaged by using someone's preferred pronouns? or not using racist slurs?
        grajam_hons 4y ago
        I was thinking more along the lines of how women's rights are affected, for instance. What's recently been happening to women in prisons quite exemplifies the issue.
Tao3300 4y ago
Dolezal wasn't acting in good faith? Wasn't she heading a NAACP chapter? What does good faith look like?
- titanomachy 4y ago
  That's an interesting question. She is on record lying about her parentage and about being discriminated against by police. Trans people (as far as I know) don't claim that their genetics are different from reality, but that their experienced gender is different from their genetically determined one. I don't know if that's enough to consider her "bad faith", though. If you genuinely did "feel black" despite having white parents, it would certainly be tempting to at least withhold information about your parents.
BazzeractQ 4y ago
[flagged]

RC_ITR 4y ago

We as a society have one class where we accept “separate but equal” which is gender. White identifying as black should have no impact on day to day life, as we strive as a society to not discriminate on race. Male identifying as female does have an impact on day to day life, since we do allow for some amount of gender based discrimination. So the solution is “either make all bathrooms, etc unisex or take trans peoples issues seriously.” But most conservatives obviously want neither.

willcipriano 4y ago
For me it makes me question a number of assertions we have. Why not just have stalls in bathrooms so everyone can have privacy? Why is gender on your drivers license at all? Etc.
- banannaise 4y ago
  Fun fact: gender was not indicated on United States passports until the 1970s, when it was added to combat a perceived rise in androgyny. In other words, it exists to enforce gender roles, not as an actual identifier. edit: here's a source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-rise-of-androgyny-changed-our-passports https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-rise-of-androgyny-chan...
grajam_hons 4y ago
I find it intriguing how this has become part of the conservative political zeitgeist, when it's an issue that previously was the sole preserve of left-wing radical feminists. And one they have been battling for many decades now. Of course, the conservatives approach it from an entirely different point of view to the feminists, for whom this a fundamental women's rights issue. But it's interesting how they can all reach roughly the same conclusion from entirely different sets of principles.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  Yeah, politics are a weird mix of 'we disagree that this is even a problem' (i.e. abortion rights) and 'we disagree about the solution to this problem' (i.e. trans/women's rights) ^That framework and the hypocrisy it breeds is honestly 99% of the humor on The Daily Show and the Fox News knock-offs of The Daily Show (Greg Guttfield etc.)

kibwen 4y ago

It helps to have a more concrete example rather than one designed to be a straw man. I know someone who passes as white, but you'd never guess that she has a black father, making her ethnically as black as Barack Obama, and well above the infamous one-drop rules ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule ) that would have allowed her to be denied civil rights under segregation. By that criteria she's black, but she doesn't use the word in question. We can ask whether she should use it, or should want to use it, or should be able to use it, and that might be an interesting conversation, but not one with any hope of having a useful generalizable outcome; the context differs too much from person to person. And since racial slurs carry much different, and much more charged connotations than gendered pronouns do, trying to draw analogies here seems almost deliberately designed to generate argument rather than discussion.

btilly 4y ago

btilly 4y ago

The obvious answer is that what you identify as does not give you the right to do things that others reasonably consider offensive. So if a transwoman goes on a rant about how women are all crazy bitches, she doesn't get to justify it by saying she's a woman. She can reasonably ask others to treat her as a woman. But it isn't a get out of jail free card. Now for a harder one. Why philosophically is being trans OK, but it is not OK for a white to identify as a minority and then receive preferential treatment as one? What if the white is detectably a minority, but so little that nobody would notice if they didn't make an issue of it?

chipotle_coyote 4y ago
You're going to need to provide a concrete example of the "preferential treatment" in your hypothetical. The concrete example of the treatment trans employees are asking to receive is, in almost all cases, being referred to with the correct pronouns. Pronouns come up in casual conversation routinely -- that's precisely why folks make an issue of it. What's the comparable situation you envision for a coworker who doesn't "look Black" or "look Hispanic"?
- btilly 4y ago
  Concrete example, a certain number of government contracts are reserved for minority owned businesses.

banannaise 4y ago

The counter is that the troll argument compares a substantial community of good-faith actors (transgender people) to a largely imaginary community of bad-faith actors (people pretending to be trans-racial) and from that point on it assumes that those groups are entirely alike in every way, even though one of those groups doesn't exist to any meaningful extent.

basch 4y ago

I've been wrong before in this thread, but I have to guess that the troll argument is actually a https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum where he doesnt believe his argument as much as is using it to illustrate how absurd he finds the pronoun debate. The idea that a libertarian modeled company is ruling by fiat, and issues a decree telling people they cant ask to be referred to by nicknames/pronouns, is somewhat absurd, and he doesnt appear to see the irony.