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+[TODO: add back just enough of the pronoun discussion to contextualize the quote]
+
During a recent discussion of pronoun conventions, I received a _fascinating_ reply that I thought was very telling about an aspect of the _Zeitgeist_ that usually remains covert. My interlocutor said (edited and paraphrased):
> I can imagine a sane society using _he_ and _she_ to refer to this-person-looks-male and this-person-looks-female. But in the society that exists today, "what pronouns does this person use for trans person" on-average **conveys very relevant information about the speaker and their attitudes to trans people.** (I mean this in a this-is-just-how-the-statistics-work rather than an accusatory way; I think in your particular case we have lots of other data.)
The legal changes required for the twentieth-century doctors' innovation was sponsored by [the political coalition of individually non-hegemonic identity groups](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/hierarchy-wings/), whose organizing principle had always been to fight on behalf of the marginalized—those who, without the coalition's sponsorship, would have been victimized by the hegemonic social order.
-But when the source of a coalition's power rests on the loyalty of the victims it protects, and of their allies, then those seeking to win more power for the coalition have an incentive to both _create more victims_, and _distinguish loyal from fair-weather allies_.
+But when the source of a coalition's power rests on the loyalty of the victims it protects, and of their allies, then those seeking to win more power for the coalition have an incentive to both create more victims, and distinguish loyal from fair-weather allies.
Aggressively marketing "being trans" as an atomic identity that everyone needs to celebrate on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide, serves both functions: a lot of autogynephilic young men and [quirky but impressionable teenage girls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_onset_gender_dysphoria_controversy) get recruited to the victimhood coalition (who might have otherwise gotten married and joined the power base of the hegemonic social order), _and_ everyone who cares about having a public concept of biological sex gets "outed" as an insufficiently-loyal ally (who can't free-ride off the coalition's successes without contributing). [It works even better if](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/real-meaning-of-diversity/) any group that doesn't have the necessary quota of trans people is marked for political attack on the grounds of being insufficiently inclusive.
As a transhumanist, I believe that fantasies deserve to be fulfilled—but _actually_ fulfilled, fulfilled _for real_, not humored by everyone forcing everyone else to pretend in order to maintain the equilibrium in some idiot political game.
-I'm glad that sex reassignment exists for those who need it, or just _want_ it. (I would want it if the technology were better.) But this new culture in which any attempt to talk about sex in the common language gets adversarially reinterpreted as a claim about this mysterious "gender" thing that has no particular truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, [_isn't helping those people_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/oppressive-rituals-of-ceremoniously-announcing-one-gender-pronouns/). Relative to more honest alternatives that could be invented or rediscovered, I very much doubt it's helping those who enthusiastically advocate for and participate in it—if they only _knew_ in detail what they were selling and being sold. Selfishly, I resent the forced updates to my native language, which I still need to make sense of the world I see.
+I'm glad that sex reassignment exists for those who need it, or just _want_ it. (I would want it if the technology were better.) But this new culture in which any attempt to talk about sex in the common language gets adversarially reinterpreted as a claim about this mysterious "gender" thing that has no particular truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, [_isn't helping those people_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/oppressive-rituals-of-ceremoniously-announcing-one-gender-pronouns/). Relative to more honest alternatives that could be invented or rediscovered, I very much doubt it's helping those who enthusiastically advocate for and participate in it—if they only _knew_ in detail what they're selling and being sold. Selfishly, I resent the forced updates to my native language, which I still need to make sense of the world I see.
And, and—that poor deer!
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff