I'll just point out that with respect to trans stuff it has moved WAY past me being able to simply let people do their thing and not try to change them, as you say. Me being required to address men as "her" does require something of me. In my workplace I have to participate since management itself is either complicit or feeling bullied by the larger cultural move. Having men in women's spaces (and sports) and teaching my kids things that are untrue actively involves people. From my own perspective I simply hate being preached to and gaslit by the overbearing group who run the media and institutions. I feel the need to fight back on those grounds alone.
Anyone who perceives this issue as people just trying to do their own thing without being harassed is either disingenuous or not paying attention.
The personal pronoun wars require something of others that few discuss: I now have to remember three times as much for a face as before, name + 2 pronouns. Last place I worked, a founder's son began working there as a high school graduate, and did fine work. But he had a full beard and wanted others to refer to him as they/them. Luckily for me, I suppose, third person pronouns are seldom used when the third person is present.
If I ever work with people who insist on personal pronouns, especially weird custom ones that mean nothing to me, I swear, I am going to use a random word generator make make them up, and I am going to change them weekly.
“If we define gender by genitals, hermaphrodites are both male and female, eunuchs in some sense neither. If we define it by DNA, some apparent males are female, some females male. Some are neither XX nor XY, some both.”
You say “some” for each category, but the reality is that even the word “few” doesn’t correctly measure how small the number of individuals are who belong to these groups.
Because medical researchers disagree on what exactly qualifies as "intersex," the overall percentage depends entirely on how broadly you define the term.
1.7% (Broad Definition): Calculated by biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, this includes anyone whose chromosomes, genitals, or hormones deviate from standard male or female "ideals".
0.018% (Narrow Definition): Calculated by psychologist Leonard Sax, this only includes individuals where chromosomal sex explicitly contradicts physical sex, or where genitals are entirely unclassifiable.
47,XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome): Affects roughly 0.15% to 0.20% of males (about 1 in 500 to 1 in 660 male births). These individuals have male anatomy but carry an extra X chromosome.
45,X (Turner Syndrome): Affects roughly 0.05% of females (about 1 in 2,000 female births). These individuals are born with only one X chromosome.
47,XXX (Triple X) & 47,XYY Syndromes: Each affects roughly 0.10% of their respective sexes (about 1 in 1,000 births).
Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS): Affects roughly 0.0076% of individuals (about 1 in 13,000 births). A person with XY chromosomes is born with external female anatomy because their body's cells cannot process male hormones.
Late-Onset Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (LOCAH): Affects roughly 1.5% of the population. This genetic enzyme deficiency causes an overproduction of male hormones later in life. It accounts for the vast majority (88%) of Fausto-Sterling's 1.7% figure, though critics argue it shouldn't be counted since it does not usually cause ambiguous genitalia at birth.
Ambiguous Genitalia: Affects roughly 0.05% to 0.10% of births (1 in 1,000 to 1 in 2,000). This is when a baby is born with genitals that cannot be cleanly categorized as male or female by medical staff.
True Hermaphroditism (Ovotesticular DSD): Affects roughly 0.0012% of births (about 1 in 83,000). This is an incredibly rare condition where an individual is born with both ovarian and testicular tissue.
Tetragametic Chimerism: Exceedingly rare, with fewer than 100 documented cases in medical history. This occurs when two separate fertilized eggs fuse together in the womb, resulting in a single individual who possesses two entirely distinct sets of DNA (which can include a mix of XX and XY cells).
Eunuchs:
0% at birth: This condition is entirely artificial and surgical. Because it is a physical modification rather than an innate biological condition, it does not have a natural birth incidence rate.
Why is it so hard to just say males have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes—in fact, 99.8% do!
That doesn’t sound like “some” don’t—that’s almost none.
I'm glad you enumerated all these anomalies. I'm also glad, but unsurprised, that the number isn't large. I don't think it can be.
What matters more than the precise numbers is that the people you enumerate have not founded political movements that tell us what to think, what to say, what not to say, and how to raise our children or let others do so.
Exactly. My point is why is David Friedman writing about an insignificant number of people (a rounding error) as if it’s something substantial.
What is significant is that there are parents who are bullied by schools and state governments into permitting their children to medically alter their hormones or worse—amputate parts of their body (irreversible damage!).
This is personal to me because my friend allowed his daughter to mutilate her body (and now he calls her his son). That number is significant and justifies using the measurement of “some”—as in some children are becoming victims of a social contagion and their parents should protect them from self-harm.
You're missing the wood for the trees. His point was that most people are not trans etc, so our model of the world doesn't include them. His argument is not that a substantial number are.
The problem is not much conceptual categories as the practical and realistic need for some acceptable rule to divide large groups into distinct sungrouos in legitimate ways that best serve the purposes of the division. For transsexuals two common examples are sex-exclusive segregated collective spaces like restrooms, locker rooms, prisons, dorm rooms, and so forth. And also sex-exclusive segregated activities like athletic competitions or boy scouts / girl scouts.
So for sports, if one views the rationale for segregating by sex as legitimate, there is the question of what to do with a biological male with masculine physical advantages but who claims to be a female should be allowed to compete directly against biological females. In one's mind perhaps there is plenty of space to assign such an individual to one of the many granular conceptual categories for gender and sexuality. Conceptually one is not limited to binary choices. But in reality there is a pragmatic necessity to narrow things down to a few categories that fit the vast majority of the population, and now one needs an actual bright-line policy to decide where it is allowed for this person to go. And people care a lot about how the social consensus is formed about such questions because they really care about the consequences of the answers to those questions. I'm guessing you're familiar with the many recently reported examples of women complaining about biological men with male genitalia waking nude in female locker rooms and making many of them feel very uncomfortable in a space they feel should be reserved exclusively for biological women. Or of the many cases of female athletes complaining about having to go against biologically male athletes when the whole point of female-exclusive athletics is that biological males at the top of some spott almost always possess crushing physical advantage to the extent that practically zero females would be competitive at any sport if they had to go against the men and every athlete in every competitive sport would be male with women nearly entirely shut out. It has nothing to do with their mental frustration and desire for simple categories, but yes, they are obviously going to care very deeply about the answer to such questions, and for obvious (and I would say perfectly valid) reasons.
"I can understand why some people would prefer that homosexuals not be permitted to marry, find it harder to understand why they care so much about it."
I have watched since the passage of gay marriage how it has both increased the social status of gay sexual norms (promiscuity, hedonism, lack of long term pair bonding) and spawned an Orwellian compliance regime around gay rights. As such, I switched from supporting to strongly against.
"Similarly for same sex couples adopting."
Gay men rape their adopted kids at too high a rate, and its bad for the kids even when that doesn't happen.
In the current environment parents that want to adopt vastly outnumber adoptees. We could give literally every single middle class straight couple a kid and gay adoption is unnecessary and harmful.
"Similarly for polygamy."
If you don't see this as a problem, I can get why you don't have a problem with gay marriage.
"for attitudes towards transsexuals"
I would divide this into two issues.
1) I think mutiliation of individuals is significant evil in an of itself, with the mutiliated the primary victim
2) I see transexuals are basically insane mental cases that harm those around them, and I wish to reduce that harm.
1. You got any sources for "gay men rape their adopted kids at too high a rate"?
And what is an accepted rate?
Gay parental rapes certainly make the news, but that is meaningless.
2. Gay parents are "bad for the kids" -- says who? By what standards? Compared to what? I can imagine a lot of orphans thinking they'd rather have two gay parents than live in an orphanage without any parents.
3. Ditto for polygamy. Your personal feelings do not qualify you to be dictator.
As the sports/bathroom debates show is that for at least one of the categories you listed the propensity to challenge norms is seldon limited to Convention and shows a potential hightened risk of crossing others.
The trans issue is different for adults vs. children. It's a real problem if parents and other adults are pushing life-altering medications and surgeries on children.
The opposition to same-sex couples adopting often results from a perception, whether or not accurate, that pedophilia, and hence the potential for sexual abuse of adopted children, is higher among gays and lesbians than among heterosexual couples.
The problem is seriously grappling with the issue of children would undermine the foundations of David's philosophy.
Extreme libertarianism is based on dividing all matter in the world into two categories:
1) Rational agents with the right to do whatever they want with their property.
2) Chattel potentially subject to being property of rational agents with which they can do whatever they want.
Children don't fit neatly into either category which is why David exhibits extreme amounts of cognitive dissonance around the topic and tends to vacillate between forcing them into categories 1 (child liberation) and 2 (supporting the right of parents to buy and sell children).
Marriage is intrinsically a social reality and not a private one. That's why the homosexual activists sought the marriage label in the first place. Otherwise they had already got everything through the civil partnership.
Changing the definition of marriage changes each marriage. Anthony Esolenihas written very perceptively on this.
Anti-capitalists, the left, have a comparative advantage in rewriting dictionaries.
Marriage with the family is the institution central to our civilization. I think a case can be made that the great religions of our day have survived since time immemorial because they channeled sex into productive grounds. In that sense, reliable contraception has made all this nonsense possible. That doesn't mean it's desirable. Certainly not for everybody. Perhaps for almost nobody, except as a path to gain resources.
Marxists and other leftists have been anti-family from the get go. There's already a diatribe against the family in the Manifesto [1848]. In the present, all the weird things we see having to do with sex have the joint consequence of breaking up the family.
I don't know how this will end, but there will be surely be lots of tears.
I'm not against "experiments in living" at all. But keep it small, people! It's the political activism that accompanies half baked experiments that bothers me.
The initiators of the movements are all self interested, by the way. Thus, the followers are victims, too.
Respectfully, I think you miss the biggest point of all.
In the case of transgender, beyond merely the insistence that others use different pronouns, or the minor but not completely insignificant issue of bathroom/locker room use, was the substantial public policy changes the left insisted be forced upon all that large majorities of the public, religious or not, disagreed with:
- Allowing biological males in female sports.
- Legalizing irreversible chemical and surgical procedures on minors.
I find the first position very wrong. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” And even more unprincipled and self-evidently wrong when based merely on “identifies as…”
I find the second position monstrously grotesque.
And beyond hypocritical given that the left justifies all sorts of restrictions based on minimizing harm to children, and pushes this through for clearly ideological reasons despite there not having been anything remotely close to sufficient studies of the possible harms.
I don't think anyone on this board is stupid. That's why I'm still here. They might be merely wrong from time to time, just as I am and we all are.
I participated in a certain board for about five years or so on which I disagreed with just about everybody. I stopped not because of the disagreement but because people did not think.
The article is basically "I can't understand why people do X, let me ignore all the obvious reasons and talk about a tertiary reason that makes me fell superior to them".
I favor equal political rights for both male and female homosexuals. Just get back in the closet and stay out of my face.
I do not favor letting such couples have children. I do not favor letting minors mutilate themselves. And get out of my face. Repugnance here could well be due to an evolutionary mechanism. It wouldn't be the first example of laws trying to overturn evolution.
Hayek's conceit of knowledge in operation. Here we have a social institution, universal in space and time, a fundamental building block of society no less, but for the Social Engineer it is a bigotry to say a word in its favor, indeed even to suggest that a word might be said for it.
What for you think it is important to bring in slavery? And why so little imagination? Why not steam locomotives, or New York City oysters, or tides in Tahiti? They are just as relevant.
Perhaps the mental mechanism you describe is also what is partly at play when it comes to immigration. Some people find it hard to categorise immigrants into familiar categories, hence their strong objection to immigration.
Elected authorities have a duty to set universal standards for smooth community functioning. But no one, on either side, has the moral right to coerce others into conforming to their ideal model of reality, purely for personal comfort. (This cuts both ways: neither traditionalists forcing conformity nor activists demanding affirmation of new categories.)
Of course, this doesn’t include genuine harms like disturbing the peace, noise, or physical intrusion on others.
I think you’re on to something here. I don’t feel the urge to restrict other people’s rights, but—now you mention it—I realize that these complications cause me some subconscious discomfort. It would indeed be simpler to live in a world in which (to quote Douglas Adams) “men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.” Social interactions would be easier.
One could also dream about everyone having about the same amount of money, everyone’s skin being more or less the same colour, everyone speaking the same language, and everyone having the same political opinions. But, alas, people insist on being more diverse!
I’m quite fond of the Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett and (later) Michael Kurland, stories set in the late 20th century but in a world in which monarchy and aristocracy lingered much longer than in our history. I’ve noticed in the past that Garrett envisaged a world in which everyone had his well defined place (high or low in the social order) and all seemed relatively happy with that place, whatever it happened to be. I doubt that people were ever so happy in the real world—Garrett’s world was a fantasy in various ways. But it’s a rather charming fantasy.
The intensity of the reaction to changes in gender roles is driven by two factors: one is religious precepts, and the concept of morality. The other is what underlies those precepts and concepts, which is the reproductive imperative necessary to the survival of our species. The norms of the past were in place because they maximized fertility, which was essential before the advances in public health and healthcare that reduced child mortality. Before those advances, if you wanted to replace yourselves, you probably had to have five or six or seven kids because only a couple of them would survive, given the primitive state of public health and healthcare; today that’s changed—the advances we’ve made have made it possible to have one or two children and have a reasonable expectation that they would survive to adulthood.
However, when you combine all the cultural and scientific changes that happened over the last 70 years or so, there’s been sort of a perfect storm of disincentives to reproduction— the women’s movement birth control gender dysphoria the pride movement in the LGBTQ community, which is resulted in those lifestyles being celebrated rather than persecuted… all of these, combine to suppress the birth rate So we shouldn’t be surprised, which some people seem to be, that the birth rate in OECD countries has declined and actually hS even declined in places like Japan and China. It seems that prosperity tends to have a deeply negative effect on reproduction for reasons that I am unsure of, but I think that explains the intensity of opposition to forces that threaten gender norms.
I'll just point out that with respect to trans stuff it has moved WAY past me being able to simply let people do their thing and not try to change them, as you say. Me being required to address men as "her" does require something of me. In my workplace I have to participate since management itself is either complicit or feeling bullied by the larger cultural move. Having men in women's spaces (and sports) and teaching my kids things that are untrue actively involves people. From my own perspective I simply hate being preached to and gaslit by the overbearing group who run the media and institutions. I feel the need to fight back on those grounds alone.
Anyone who perceives this issue as people just trying to do their own thing without being harassed is either disingenuous or not paying attention.
The personal pronoun wars require something of others that few discuss: I now have to remember three times as much for a face as before, name + 2 pronouns. Last place I worked, a founder's son began working there as a high school graduate, and did fine work. But he had a full beard and wanted others to refer to him as they/them. Luckily for me, I suppose, third person pronouns are seldom used when the third person is present.
If I ever work with people who insist on personal pronouns, especially weird custom ones that mean nothing to me, I swear, I am going to use a random word generator make make them up, and I am going to change them weekly.
“If we define gender by genitals, hermaphrodites are both male and female, eunuchs in some sense neither. If we define it by DNA, some apparent males are female, some females male. Some are neither XX nor XY, some both.”
You say “some” for each category, but the reality is that even the word “few” doesn’t correctly measure how small the number of individuals are who belong to these groups.
Because medical researchers disagree on what exactly qualifies as "intersex," the overall percentage depends entirely on how broadly you define the term.
1.7% (Broad Definition): Calculated by biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, this includes anyone whose chromosomes, genitals, or hormones deviate from standard male or female "ideals".
0.018% (Narrow Definition): Calculated by psychologist Leonard Sax, this only includes individuals where chromosomal sex explicitly contradicts physical sex, or where genitals are entirely unclassifiable.
47,XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome): Affects roughly 0.15% to 0.20% of males (about 1 in 500 to 1 in 660 male births). These individuals have male anatomy but carry an extra X chromosome.
45,X (Turner Syndrome): Affects roughly 0.05% of females (about 1 in 2,000 female births). These individuals are born with only one X chromosome.
47,XXX (Triple X) & 47,XYY Syndromes: Each affects roughly 0.10% of their respective sexes (about 1 in 1,000 births).
Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS): Affects roughly 0.0076% of individuals (about 1 in 13,000 births). A person with XY chromosomes is born with external female anatomy because their body's cells cannot process male hormones.
Late-Onset Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (LOCAH): Affects roughly 1.5% of the population. This genetic enzyme deficiency causes an overproduction of male hormones later in life. It accounts for the vast majority (88%) of Fausto-Sterling's 1.7% figure, though critics argue it shouldn't be counted since it does not usually cause ambiguous genitalia at birth.
Ambiguous Genitalia: Affects roughly 0.05% to 0.10% of births (1 in 1,000 to 1 in 2,000). This is when a baby is born with genitals that cannot be cleanly categorized as male or female by medical staff.
True Hermaphroditism (Ovotesticular DSD): Affects roughly 0.0012% of births (about 1 in 83,000). This is an incredibly rare condition where an individual is born with both ovarian and testicular tissue.
Tetragametic Chimerism: Exceedingly rare, with fewer than 100 documented cases in medical history. This occurs when two separate fertilized eggs fuse together in the womb, resulting in a single individual who possesses two entirely distinct sets of DNA (which can include a mix of XX and XY cells).
Eunuchs:
0% at birth: This condition is entirely artificial and surgical. Because it is a physical modification rather than an innate biological condition, it does not have a natural birth incidence rate.
Why is it so hard to just say males have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes—in fact, 99.8% do!
That doesn’t sound like “some” don’t—that’s almost none.
On your figures, Klinefelter + Turner + XXX + XXY add up to at least .3%, without counting the others, so your 99.8% is false.
"fewer than 100" is still "some."
David,
XXX present as female and XXY present as male. Why are you adding them together?
I know you taught at my law school, but that won’t pass any statistical exam for some—maybe a couple.
I'm glad you enumerated all these anomalies. I'm also glad, but unsurprised, that the number isn't large. I don't think it can be.
What matters more than the precise numbers is that the people you enumerate have not founded political movements that tell us what to think, what to say, what not to say, and how to raise our children or let others do so.
Exactly. My point is why is David Friedman writing about an insignificant number of people (a rounding error) as if it’s something substantial.
What is significant is that there are parents who are bullied by schools and state governments into permitting their children to medically alter their hormones or worse—amputate parts of their body (irreversible damage!).
This is personal to me because my friend allowed his daughter to mutilate her body (and now he calls her his son). That number is significant and justifies using the measurement of “some”—as in some children are becoming victims of a social contagion and their parents should protect them from self-harm.
You're missing the wood for the trees. His point was that most people are not trans etc, so our model of the world doesn't include them. His argument is not that a substantial number are.
You are probably right. This isn’t even a subject that moves the needle for me personally—live and let live.
Thanks for your comment.
The problem is not much conceptual categories as the practical and realistic need for some acceptable rule to divide large groups into distinct sungrouos in legitimate ways that best serve the purposes of the division. For transsexuals two common examples are sex-exclusive segregated collective spaces like restrooms, locker rooms, prisons, dorm rooms, and so forth. And also sex-exclusive segregated activities like athletic competitions or boy scouts / girl scouts.
So for sports, if one views the rationale for segregating by sex as legitimate, there is the question of what to do with a biological male with masculine physical advantages but who claims to be a female should be allowed to compete directly against biological females. In one's mind perhaps there is plenty of space to assign such an individual to one of the many granular conceptual categories for gender and sexuality. Conceptually one is not limited to binary choices. But in reality there is a pragmatic necessity to narrow things down to a few categories that fit the vast majority of the population, and now one needs an actual bright-line policy to decide where it is allowed for this person to go. And people care a lot about how the social consensus is formed about such questions because they really care about the consequences of the answers to those questions. I'm guessing you're familiar with the many recently reported examples of women complaining about biological men with male genitalia waking nude in female locker rooms and making many of them feel very uncomfortable in a space they feel should be reserved exclusively for biological women. Or of the many cases of female athletes complaining about having to go against biologically male athletes when the whole point of female-exclusive athletics is that biological males at the top of some spott almost always possess crushing physical advantage to the extent that practically zero females would be competitive at any sport if they had to go against the men and every athlete in every competitive sport would be male with women nearly entirely shut out. It has nothing to do with their mental frustration and desire for simple categories, but yes, they are obviously going to care very deeply about the answer to such questions, and for obvious (and I would say perfectly valid) reasons.
"I can understand why some people would prefer that homosexuals not be permitted to marry, find it harder to understand why they care so much about it."
I have watched since the passage of gay marriage how it has both increased the social status of gay sexual norms (promiscuity, hedonism, lack of long term pair bonding) and spawned an Orwellian compliance regime around gay rights. As such, I switched from supporting to strongly against.
"Similarly for same sex couples adopting."
Gay men rape their adopted kids at too high a rate, and its bad for the kids even when that doesn't happen.
In the current environment parents that want to adopt vastly outnumber adoptees. We could give literally every single middle class straight couple a kid and gay adoption is unnecessary and harmful.
"Similarly for polygamy."
If you don't see this as a problem, I can get why you don't have a problem with gay marriage.
"for attitudes towards transsexuals"
I would divide this into two issues.
1) I think mutiliation of individuals is significant evil in an of itself, with the mutiliated the primary victim
2) I see transexuals are basically insane mental cases that harm those around them, and I wish to reduce that harm.
1. You got any sources for "gay men rape their adopted kids at too high a rate"?
And what is an accepted rate?
Gay parental rapes certainly make the news, but that is meaningless.
2. Gay parents are "bad for the kids" -- says who? By what standards? Compared to what? I can imagine a lot of orphans thinking they'd rather have two gay parents than live in an orphanage without any parents.
3. Ditto for polygamy. Your personal feelings do not qualify you to be dictator.
The rate at which stepfathers rape girls.
As the sports/bathroom debates show is that for at least one of the categories you listed the propensity to challenge norms is seldon limited to Convention and shows a potential hightened risk of crossing others.
The trans issue is different for adults vs. children. It's a real problem if parents and other adults are pushing life-altering medications and surgeries on children.
The opposition to same-sex couples adopting often results from a perception, whether or not accurate, that pedophilia, and hence the potential for sexual abuse of adopted children, is higher among gays and lesbians than among heterosexual couples.
The problem is seriously grappling with the issue of children would undermine the foundations of David's philosophy.
Extreme libertarianism is based on dividing all matter in the world into two categories:
1) Rational agents with the right to do whatever they want with their property.
2) Chattel potentially subject to being property of rational agents with which they can do whatever they want.
Children don't fit neatly into either category which is why David exhibits extreme amounts of cognitive dissonance around the topic and tends to vacillate between forcing them into categories 1 (child liberation) and 2 (supporting the right of parents to buy and sell children).
Marriage is intrinsically a social reality and not a private one. That's why the homosexual activists sought the marriage label in the first place. Otherwise they had already got everything through the civil partnership.
Changing the definition of marriage changes each marriage. Anthony Esolenihas written very perceptively on this.
Anti-capitalists, the left, have a comparative advantage in rewriting dictionaries.
Marriage with the family is the institution central to our civilization. I think a case can be made that the great religions of our day have survived since time immemorial because they channeled sex into productive grounds. In that sense, reliable contraception has made all this nonsense possible. That doesn't mean it's desirable. Certainly not for everybody. Perhaps for almost nobody, except as a path to gain resources.
Marxists and other leftists have been anti-family from the get go. There's already a diatribe against the family in the Manifesto [1848]. In the present, all the weird things we see having to do with sex have the joint consequence of breaking up the family.
I don't know how this will end, but there will be surely be lots of tears.
JS Mill with his "experiments in living" is perhaps more influential.
I'm not against "experiments in living" at all. But keep it small, people! It's the political activism that accompanies half baked experiments that bothers me.
The initiators of the movements are all self interested, by the way. Thus, the followers are victims, too.
It is not only the leftists. On this issue the libertarians and socially liberal but economically conservative march in lockstep with the left.
Respectfully, I think you miss the biggest point of all.
In the case of transgender, beyond merely the insistence that others use different pronouns, or the minor but not completely insignificant issue of bathroom/locker room use, was the substantial public policy changes the left insisted be forced upon all that large majorities of the public, religious or not, disagreed with:
- Allowing biological males in female sports.
- Legalizing irreversible chemical and surgical procedures on minors.
I find the first position very wrong. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” And even more unprincipled and self-evidently wrong when based merely on “identifies as…”
I find the second position monstrously grotesque.
And beyond hypocritical given that the left justifies all sorts of restrictions based on minimizing harm to children, and pushes this through for clearly ideological reasons despite there not having been anything remotely close to sufficient studies of the possible harms.
Honestly, this article makes me wonder if our host is being performatively stupid.
I don't think anyone on this board is stupid. That's why I'm still here. They might be merely wrong from time to time, just as I am and we all are.
I participated in a certain board for about five years or so on which I disagreed with just about everybody. I stopped not because of the disagreement but because people did not think.
The article is basically "I can't understand why people do X, let me ignore all the obvious reasons and talk about a tertiary reason that makes me fell superior to them".
I favor equal political rights for both male and female homosexuals. Just get back in the closet and stay out of my face.
I do not favor letting such couples have children. I do not favor letting minors mutilate themselves. And get out of my face. Repugnance here could well be due to an evolutionary mechanism. It wouldn't be the first example of laws trying to overturn evolution.
Hayek's conceit of knowledge in operation. Here we have a social institution, universal in space and time, a fundamental building block of society no less, but for the Social Engineer it is a bigotry to say a word in its favor, indeed even to suggest that a word might be said for it.
I generally don't care what people do, but there is an exception, children.
I don't really like the simplified government/legal model, but there are certainly some ways I feel they should be treated differently.
> In each case, the question is why A cares so much about what B, or B and C, or even B, C, D, and E are doing.
"I don't see why A cares to much if B enslaves C."
What for you think it is important to bring in slavery? And why so little imagination? Why not steam locomotives, or New York City oysters, or tides in Tahiti? They are just as relevant.
Perhaps the mental mechanism you describe is also what is partly at play when it comes to immigration. Some people find it hard to categorise immigrants into familiar categories, hence their strong objection to immigration.
David, I agree with your conjecture.
Elected authorities have a duty to set universal standards for smooth community functioning. But no one, on either side, has the moral right to coerce others into conforming to their ideal model of reality, purely for personal comfort. (This cuts both ways: neither traditionalists forcing conformity nor activists demanding affirmation of new categories.)
Of course, this doesn’t include genuine harms like disturbing the peace, noise, or physical intrusion on others.
I think you’re on to something here. I don’t feel the urge to restrict other people’s rights, but—now you mention it—I realize that these complications cause me some subconscious discomfort. It would indeed be simpler to live in a world in which (to quote Douglas Adams) “men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.” Social interactions would be easier.
One could also dream about everyone having about the same amount of money, everyone’s skin being more or less the same colour, everyone speaking the same language, and everyone having the same political opinions. But, alas, people insist on being more diverse!
I’m quite fond of the Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett and (later) Michael Kurland, stories set in the late 20th century but in a world in which monarchy and aristocracy lingered much longer than in our history. I’ve noticed in the past that Garrett envisaged a world in which everyone had his well defined place (high or low in the social order) and all seemed relatively happy with that place, whatever it happened to be. I doubt that people were ever so happy in the real world—Garrett’s world was a fantasy in various ways. But it’s a rather charming fantasy.
I mentioned two stories set in the real world picturing the English class system. In both the people portrayed seemed happy with their role.
The intensity of the reaction to changes in gender roles is driven by two factors: one is religious precepts, and the concept of morality. The other is what underlies those precepts and concepts, which is the reproductive imperative necessary to the survival of our species. The norms of the past were in place because they maximized fertility, which was essential before the advances in public health and healthcare that reduced child mortality. Before those advances, if you wanted to replace yourselves, you probably had to have five or six or seven kids because only a couple of them would survive, given the primitive state of public health and healthcare; today that’s changed—the advances we’ve made have made it possible to have one or two children and have a reasonable expectation that they would survive to adulthood.
However, when you combine all the cultural and scientific changes that happened over the last 70 years or so, there’s been sort of a perfect storm of disincentives to reproduction— the women’s movement birth control gender dysphoria the pride movement in the LGBTQ community, which is resulted in those lifestyles being celebrated rather than persecuted… all of these, combine to suppress the birth rate So we shouldn’t be surprised, which some people seem to be, that the birth rate in OECD countries has declined and actually hS even declined in places like Japan and China. It seems that prosperity tends to have a deeply negative effect on reproduction for reasons that I am unsure of, but I think that explains the intensity of opposition to forces that threaten gender norms.