Someone asked in the comments that Zack clarify wtf the claim is, and Zack posted this abstract:
Does this help? (159 words and one hyperlink to a 16-page paper)
Empirical Claim: late-onset gender dysphoria in males is not an intersex condition.
Summary of Evidence for the Empirical Claim: see “Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies” by Anne Lawrence, published in European Psychologist. (Not by me!)
Philosophical Claim: categories are useful insofar as they compress information by “carving reality at the joints”; in particular, whether a categorization makes someone happy or sad is not relevant.
Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.
Caveat to the Sociological Claim: the Sociological Claim about a prominence-weighted sample of an amorphous collective doesn’t reflect poorly on individual readers of lesswrong.com who weren’t involved in the discussions in question and don’t even live in America, let alone Berkeley.
so this is a two-hour post about Zack’s arguments with unnamed Bay Area rationalists. Today, in posts that should have been a Discord chat.
Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.
Zack my guy you are so fucking close. Also just fucking leave.
One day, when Zack is a little older, I hope he learns it’s okay to sometimes talk -to someone- instead of airing one’s identity confusion like an arxiv prepublish paper.
Like, it’s okay to be confused in a weird world, or even have controversial opinions. Make some friends you can actually trust, aren’t demanding bayesian defenses of feelings, and chat this shit out buddy.
And the arguments seem to boil down to them saying “if you wanna transition, just do it”, and Zack is all like “nooooooo you must convince me not to via Rationality!!!”
(sorry if I’m being flippant, this person seems to be in a lot of mental distress, but they’re also kinda big deal in the community? Like fucking gwern weighed in a bit sarcastically?)
Who knows? They seem to know all these people personally, so I guess they attend rationalist cuddle puddles in SV or something.
I ran into them online a year ago when a Twitter follow shared their last essay with some acerbic comments about the lengths (both in the mental & absurd word count senses) they were going to do deny their desire to transition & they appeared in the comments after I made a snarky remark along the lines of “methinks the lady doth protest too much”. Still quite proud of that one.
The word count variable is an intmax_t, so assuming ISO C (it’s GNU so probably not but whatever) it has to be at least C99 and thus support at least 64 bit longlong.
Looking forward to the nine quintillion word LW posts. Wonder if I should submit a patch to make wc(1) use GMP for future proofing purposes…
I think this person is kind of playing semantic games and being a bit fast and loose with the definition of ‘intersex.’ The logic would be something like, if it turns out that a particular AMAB person has a female gender identity due to an issue with some physical process of sexual development (maybe their brain didn’t masculinize properly due to something like prenatal hormone exposure, or because they have a minor androgen insensitivity, or something?) then you could argue that their being trans is, in a sense, an intersex condition, just one that is mild enough not to affect their physical body.*
I think the implication being made here is “straight trans women are trans because of this kind of developmental brain thing, but non-straight trans women are trans because they’re men with a fetish. But Big Trans wants you to believe that all trans people are trans the first way (the “intersex” way), because that’s what ‘trans women are women’ means, and I’m the brave person who dares speak truth to power by saying they aren’t intersex.” So, it has… very little to do with the actual definition of “intersex” as we here in the real world use it.
I believe this idea became part of the insane Blanchard ad-hoc theory lore via J. Michael Bailey, who wrote that book where he was like “straight trans women are all naturally fem and hot, but non straight trans women are all ugly masculine weirdos who don’t pass.” I think people in the, uh, Blanchard fandom, kind of took that idea and ran with it to an insane degree and built a whole pile of assumptions on top of it which definitely do not hold up to scrutiny, even if you set aside the fact they’re based on some random dude’s anecdote about which trans women he found most fuckable.
*I don’t think I would personally defend this claim, but it is something I’ve heard argued, and I’m not sure it’s necessarily factually wrong so much as it is kind of a pointless semantic argument. But I’m pretty sure this is what the original poster means.
Yeah it’s sad gosh. Looks like a lot of relatable fears taken to the extreme instead of dealt with properly.
Aside: Zach keeps saying trans people impose on others so I want to shout this into the void at no one in particular: dear cis people all you have to do is mind your own business!
But also holy smokes that “anon” comment is wild.
HSTS with enough IQ points
Enough IQ points? HTTP Strict Transport Security? … enough IQ points?!
Our values are different. I dislike females, where I see female I see potential for competition, mutual poisoning and anxiety-driven treason, and I see zero value, sexual or otherwise.
Actually, I’m not sure how they deal with cis gays. I think it would depend on who you ask? I think this specific variant of the theory would consider cis gays a type of intersex as well, but not ‘as much as’ trans people. Not 100% sure though.
Someone asked in the comments that Zack clarify wtf the claim is, and Zack posted this abstract:
so this is a two-hour post about Zack’s arguments with unnamed Bay Area rationalists. Today, in posts that should have been a Discord chat.
(the paper he names is a Blancharding ramble)
Zack my guy you are so fucking close. Also just fucking leave.
One day, when Zack is a little older, I hope he learns it’s okay to sometimes talk -to someone- instead of airing one’s identity confusion like an arxiv prepublish paper.
Like, it’s okay to be confused in a weird world, or even have controversial opinions. Make some friends you can actually trust, aren’t demanding bayesian defenses of feelings, and chat this shit out buddy.
And the arguments seem to boil down to them saying “if you wanna transition, just do it”, and Zack is all like “nooooooo you must convince me not to via Rationality!!!”
(sorry if I’m being flippant, this person seems to be in a lot of mental distress, but they’re also kinda big deal in the community? Like fucking gwern weighed in a bit sarcastically?)
Who knows? They seem to know all these people personally, so I guess they attend rationalist cuddle puddles in SV or something.
I ran into them online a year ago when a Twitter follow shared their last essay with some acerbic comments about the lengths (both in the mental & absurd word count senses) they were going to do deny their desire to transition & they appeared in the comments after I made a snarky remark along the lines of “methinks the lady doth protest too much”. Still quite proud of that one.
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yeah i noticed yesterday there’s a link to (one of) Zack’s blog(s) in SSC’s sidebar.
so what precisely is Zack supposed to be good at in Rationality other than Blancharding?
Word count.
when you need to add an exponential notation option to wc
wc --tldrhttps://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src/wc.c#n507
The word count variable is an
intmax_t, so assuming ISO C (it’s GNU so probably not but whatever) it has to be at least C99 and thus support at least 64 bitlong long.Looking forward to the nine quintillion word LW posts. Wonder if I should submit a patch to make
wc(1)use GMP for future proofing purposes…deleted by creator
I think this person is kind of playing semantic games and being a bit fast and loose with the definition of ‘intersex.’ The logic would be something like, if it turns out that a particular AMAB person has a female gender identity due to an issue with some physical process of sexual development (maybe their brain didn’t masculinize properly due to something like prenatal hormone exposure, or because they have a minor androgen insensitivity, or something?) then you could argue that their being trans is, in a sense, an intersex condition, just one that is mild enough not to affect their physical body.*
I think the implication being made here is “straight trans women are trans because of this kind of developmental brain thing, but non-straight trans women are trans because they’re men with a fetish. But Big Trans wants you to believe that all trans people are trans the first way (the “intersex” way), because that’s what ‘trans women are women’ means, and I’m the brave person who dares speak truth to power by saying they aren’t intersex.” So, it has… very little to do with the actual definition of “intersex” as we here in the real world use it.
I believe this idea became part of the insane Blanchard ad-hoc theory lore via J. Michael Bailey, who wrote that book where he was like “straight trans women are all naturally fem and hot, but non straight trans women are all ugly masculine weirdos who don’t pass.” I think people in the, uh, Blanchard fandom, kind of took that idea and ran with it to an insane degree and built a whole pile of assumptions on top of it which definitely do not hold up to scrutiny, even if you set aside the fact they’re based on some random dude’s anecdote about which trans women he found most fuckable.
*I don’t think I would personally defend this claim, but it is something I’ve heard argued, and I’m not sure it’s necessarily factually wrong so much as it is kind of a pointless semantic argument. But I’m pretty sure this is what the original poster means.
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There’s also this handy introduction (cw: sad)
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Yeah it’s sad gosh. Looks like a lot of relatable fears taken to the extreme instead of dealt with properly.
Aside: Zach keeps saying trans people impose on others so I want to shout this into the void at no one in particular: dear cis people all you have to do is mind your own business!
But also holy smokes that “anon” comment is wild.
Enough IQ points? HTTP Strict Transport Security? … enough IQ points?!
Jesus Christ.
Yeah ironically that comment is even more poisoned by 4chan blanchardian culture than Zack is poisoned by rationalism.
my god, it’s Zack explaining precisely how fucked up one would have to be to write that blog, in under four hundred words. Amazing.
I knew all my abyss-gazing would pay off eventually…
it’s clear we’d be beating our heads with hammers anyway, the internet points are a small consolation prize
I hesitate to ask, but information hazards be damned.
In that worldview, what are cis gay persons? Also intersex or something else?
Actually, I’m not sure how they deal with cis gays. I think it would depend on who you ask? I think this specific variant of the theory would consider cis gays a type of intersex as well, but not ‘as much as’ trans people. Not 100% sure though.
I feel it’s appropriate at this point to mention that Blanchard’s theory mostly hinges on putting little rings around queer people’s penises, a method invented by his mentor Kurt Freund.
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