Declaring a religion might rile someone, before you have even engaged. I suggest that you simply proffer a hand. Empathise as best you can. Be careful.
At best, with mentioning religion, you have declared your rightful intentions and at worst you have added yet another layer of tribalism to a ... debate.
I'm pretty sure that at least the synoptic gospels and probably John too (for the full set) tell you to keep it quiet. There is no need to put your religious heart on your sleeve - that's between you and God.
I don't think you understood what they were saying. They were saying that as a Christian, they've experienced being blamed for the misdeeds of other Christians which they personally had nothing to do with.
The most important part of that statement isn't the word "Christian": you could replace "Christian" with Muslim or atheist or whatever and there'd be someone else who could truthfully say it.
I grew up in Manchester, NH which was almost 100% white until 1990 or so. [1] My family was out for a bike ride and got a flat. A black couple (the man had just been transferred to the Raytheon factory where they make the radar for Patriot missile) came by and helped us fix the flat and shared lemonade with us in the kitchen. If you have an experience like this you think "I want more black people to move into my town."
One branch of my wife's family comes from southern Italy and is pretty conservative, one of her cousins is dating a black guy who is an EE and works on robots at Amazon. The family is pretty old school but he's won everyone over by making a point to be really awesome. He talks about every prominent thinker about what blacks in America should do from Marcus Garvey to Malcom X. He thinks it's a terrible act of racism that 'Black Wall Street' was bombed but also thinks people who are still stuck in the pathologies of the projects he escaped from need to take responsibility: he thinks it's unfair but he knows black people have to work twice as hard to get ahead and accepts the burden. He's really won the family over.
To link it to transgender issues, this poll [2] from 2022 says that 57% of Americans don't know personally know anybody transgender, and this 2024 poll of Asian-Pacific Islanders in the US [3] gives the same number.
People are getting their ideas about transgender people from the media where stories like this [4] are pretty widespread; whatever you do you don't want to live up to those stereotypes.
[1] I think because the bottom fell out of the economy at the end of the 1920s and never came back until the 1990s; you had no reason to go there unless you had family, black people leaving the south were going to Detroit because (a) there were already blacks there, and (b) the car industry was expanding despite the Great Depression.
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/09/21/does-publ...
[3] https://apnorc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/AAPI-Data-AP-N...
[4] https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-witch-trials-of-j-...
I get that it's been a rough couple of weeks for trans people, and immigrants, and people who due import and export, and grant-writers--but perhaps you should take a moment to reflect on how comments like this reflect on you and trans people to the general populace (which is adjacent to the point made by the comment you were replying to).
All you had to write was "Do you think this state of affairs works for or against trans people?", or even "I'm not sure I understand which direction you're going with this, could you elaborate?"
Instead, you picked an us-vs-them phrasing and were shitty.
Let me give some blunt feedback:
Trans people (the ones that are clockable) are a relative novelty outside of urban areas, and most of the voting public (much as the gays faced before) don't have any familiarity with them outside of either: scaremongering from the conservatives and tabloids, excessively fawning presentation in movies and shows and liberal/progressive media, or spicy tweets and posts on Twitter and Facebook.
Normies don't really know about the boring, relatable parts of being trans--finding clothes that fit correctly, struggling to feel that your body is right, dealing with stupid bureaucracy that doesn't match your needs, being unable to get competent or affordable healthcare, looking for a partner that loves you for being you and not because of how you look or what they think you are. (You'll note: these are, modulo some biological issues, exactly the same things that they face too.)
The trans people aren't doing themselves any favors (especially the ones in tech, who are incredibly privileged and until recently inhabited a rarified atmosphere of good pay and performative catering) when interacting with normies, though. When people like you act like assholes it confirms every negative stereotype.
Honestly? It's exhausting. It's tiring. It's enough to drive away the allies and friendlies that aren't already getting driven away by those of you with personality disorders.
The trans friends and partners I've had that are decent and capable of relating on a normal level are vastly outnumbered by the catty, annoying, neurotic transgendered men and women I've encountered in my career and schooling.
Go on Mastodon, go onto the Fediverse, and tell me with a straight face that your average trans poster isn't at least as likely to be as toxic as somebody on Twitter. Go look at the self-congratulatory bullshit to own the MAGA folks...all the way up until the election that has so many of you freaking out. Go look at the immediate closing of ranks and decrying "transphobe! transphobe!" when one of your group does something shitty and gets called out for it--even when they deserve it.
If you want to know why the popular support for trans people isn't great, look in the mirror and consider if you want to double down on a losing strategy for behavior.
The current swing of the pendulum is not good, it is not kind, it is not entirely fair--but it sure as hell isn't inexplicable. Good luck to you in the coming years.
Trans people are the most hated subgroup and were for years. Literal physical attack against them were going up for years now. It was not rough couple of weeks, it is systematic campaign of hate again and again and again.
> Trans people (the ones that are clockable) are a relative novelty outside of urban areas, and most of the voting public
The reason for that is violence they are and were targets of in those areas. It is also that if a kid outs itself as trans, they will likely be kicked off out of house. If not kicked, they will be mocked in those areas all the time.
> The trans friends and partners I've had that are decent and capable of relating on a normal level are vastly outnumbered by the catty, annoying, neurotic transgendered men and women I've encountered in my career and schooling.
And it did not helped those people at all. The hate is preexisting and has nothing to do with how trans actually act.
> If you want to know why the popular support for trans people isn't great, look in the mirror and consider if you want to double down on a losing strategy for behavior.
Hate for trans has nothing to do with what trans to. Conservative people feel massive disgust over crossing gender lines. It is that bad feeling they have when they hear the idea itself. And literal campaign of hate they themselves feed.
I used to go out in drag in Halloween before things got so polarized. Many people thought I had a great costume but I'd always seem some microexpressions of disgust enough to know I was doing something that wasn't completely safe.
I was very inclined to think positively of transgender people ten years ago but my own experience with them on Mastodon and in other places has led me to agree with the person you're replying to. It was when I started reading their words as opposed to reading about them in the media that I became more negative. People were sharing so many hateful memes on Mastodon that I had to put in a large number of filtering rules so that I can't see anything they post except for the hateful image memes that can't be filtered because the only text is in the filter.
It's almost as if some of these people have a fascination with assholes like Kiwi Farms and see it as a template for activism, like they build their whole lives and find all their meaning out of hating and being hated. See that "Witch Hunt of J.K. Rowling" podcast -- yes, there are jerks online who say horrible stuff like that to them, but that doesn't make it a righteous cause to that to other people; by fighting for territory that they couldn't defend they may have turned people against them and lost rights that they could have kept. They mirror the hatred and intolerance of the people they hate.
So I don't agree that "Hate for trans has nothing to do with what trans to (sic)" -- they do have to overcome some hate which is intrinsic but there is a lot which is a mirror of the hateful view that many of them have about the world.
I do not think it goes both ways symmetrically, really. What I think is that any misconduct by any trans person is used as excuse to mistreat all of them. And when they do not do misconduct, well, it wont help them either.
The attacks toward trans last years were not about ugly memes on mastodon. It was literally about beer can having minor ad with trans person. It is about making gender affirming care illegal, full stop. It is about transsexuality itself being disgusting. It is about pushing polite respectful trans people out of any visible situation.
Like, OP complains about people not knowing relatable things about trans. But, if they are visible, say on beer can, the hate campaign is very very real. You cant harass someone for being visibly trans and then complain you do not know about day to day trans people.
I can say personally my feeling thermometer went from maybe 75 to 15 as a result of being on Mastodon and other online forums in the last tow years. I like trans people as individuals but I hate the movement. It's not the only place where that kind of negativity leaks out.
For instance the men's rooms in my building are stuffed with menstrual products for "men who menstruate" with a preachy card that talks about it in a reductive, narrow minded frame the same as the worst conservative Christians. This is for the benefit of 0.6% of the population at best, maybe 3 or 4 people benefit from it, out of 8 men's rooms in that building it is probably less than one person per bathroom.
It seems to me that this sucks all the air out of the room to discuss anything else. Young men are struggling. Maybe you only see the survivors in higher ed, but the K12 system is not built with boys in mind, particularly if you are in a racial minority, see
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/04/boys-school-challenges-r...
Instead of messaging aimed at, say, 20% of people who are struggling we get this stridently minoritiarian discourse that leaves many people feeling unheard, erased, and resentful.
You understand that this state of affairs has been created by the bigoted side? I just want to live in peace and build stuff that makes the world better, not worry about the federal government coming after me and pretending I don't exist. Please try not to get so fooled next time.
Start taking responsibility. Bigotry is a real thing but you can have a large impact on how other people treat you based on how you behave.
Organized transgenderists in my view have a reducivist, moralist, my-way-or-the-highway approach that initially exploited 'progressive' people who were inclined to think they were acting in good faith but are in the process of driving those people away. (I was really inclined to think of transsexual people positively because my best friend in college was a really awesome person who happened to be transsexual)
J.K. Rowling picked an issue where public opinion was far away from what transgenderists wish it was. (Where do violent sex offenders in prison get housed?) She thought the vast majority of transgender prisoners were safest in prisons that corresponded to their identity but that authorities had to have some latitude for people acting in bad faith.
She got jumped on because she agreed with them in most cases but not all.
Normal people will call you an ally if you agree on 7 out of 10 issues but organized transgenderists come across as people who will treat you as an enemy if you disagree about anything.
On some issues (workplace discrimination) public opinion is on the side of trans people. On other issues (sports participation) public opinion is the other ways. A year ago questions involving access to health care tended to split down the middle, the one recent poll I looked at seems to have moved far to the right in the last year on the issue of transgender care for minors.
A healthy political movement accepts that it's won on certain issues, that it can't win on other issues, and that there are some issues in the middle where you can persuade people and win.
On top of that there is the whole "egg hatcher" thing where you find there are people who are looking for people who "march to the beat of a different drummer" and sell transgenderism as an answer to their problems, almost certainly a false answer. If somebody knew their gender identity of a child I'm inclined to believe them (e.g. they certainly aren't going to change their mind based on whether people 'affirm' them or not) but if somebody discovered a variant identity as a teen I'm skeptical. As a schizotype
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy
I am already frustrated with the bandwagoning of 'neurodivergence' by an autism industrial complex and an ADHD industry that pushes addictive medicine. Neurodivergent people are already 'bully magnets' and the last thing they need is to take on an identity which will get them further targeted and be surrounded by people who will reinforce their feelings of victimhood. (see 'impulsive nonconformity' in the article I link above)
I see the current movement as something that centers the activism of its enemies as a template for its own activism [1] [2] and that thrives on bigotry. It looks like a pernicious cult that is all about 'othering' other people and sees any and all pushback they get from people whether it is primary preexisting feelings of disgust, fear and hatred or the learned feelings of exasperation you might see on the face of a otherwise bleeding heart socially progressive HR manager who has just dealt with too many people who see a fascist under every bush and wants the whole cake yesterday.
[1] see anti-fascism
[2] transgenderists say it was OK to treat J. K. Rowling the same way Kiwi Farms treats them
It is an objectively true moral statement that minority rights ought not depend on majority opinion (that is the whole point of constitutionalism). To the extent that minority rights depend on majority opinion in reality, that is a deficiency of political systems. All of us exist in deficient political systems.
> if somebody discovered a variant identity as a teen I'm skeptical
What is your expertise in this matter? Why do you think your opinion is worth anything? People figure things out on their own pace.
If you think your opinion carries any weight here, you've been fooled.
> She got jumped on because she agreed with them in most cases but not all.
JK Rowling signed the so-called "Women's Declaration International" which has the exact same policy proposals as what Trump is doing. Again, you've been fooled.
> A year ago questions involving access to health care tended to split down the middle, the one recent poll I looked at seems to have moved far to the right in the last year on the issue of transgender care for minors.
Yes, because people's brains have been cooked through immersion in social media.
If you surround yourself with virtue, you will become virtuous. If you surround yourself with vice, you will become vicious. Social media rewards vice, so people have become more vicious.
> I am already frustrated with the bandwagoning of 'neurodivergence' by an autism industrial complex and an ADHD industry that pushes addictive medicine. Neurodivergent people are already 'bully magnets' and the last thing they need is to take on an identity
I have ADHD (according to my psychiatrist one of the most obvious cases they've ever seen), and autism, and I'm trans (both -sexual and gender). So I guess in your eyes I'm a bully magnet (??) who has taken on an identity (???????). In reality, despite the horrible discrimination, my neurodivergence gives me a pretty nonstandard insight into things, and an ability to explain concepts, that I've been able to turn into something valuable to others. (The last 4 technical blog posts I wrote were all front page on HN, with 100-300+ upvotes.)
This has nothing to do with paranoia or delusions. My work is valued for its correctness and attention to detail.
Sports is a clear example. Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.
On the other hand, there are many benefits to participation in sports. I don't want the state to decide who can play in what league. I want leagues to decide that. My school is part of club leagues where teams have a mix of men and women in them and I think there's a lot of room for innovation. Different leagues want different things: I want trans people to be able to participate in some sports, it's important.
J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.
As for social media, I deleted my Twitter account in 2016, I don't hang out in places with right wing nuts, rather I am on Mastodon and Bluesky with the left wing nuts. I need lots of filters to keep out hateful content posted by trans people on both of those platforms.
'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other. See [1]
It took me 40 years to get my diagnosis; I've had numerous psych evals and today I can get enough signs and symptoms to get a diagnosis looking at the first paragraph of any of them, even if that paragraph stated it was inconclusive.
I have a small amount of the thought disorder of schizophrenia, enough that I can't win at chess because I'll screw up. I max any test of verbal intelligence I take, I write long posts like this that have bizarre typos, the harder I try to fix them the more my keyboard turns into a Ouija board. On a bad morning I have a paranoia towards objects that seem to jump out and grab me. At one point of my life I was wrapped up in a system of delusions.
I also can do detail oriented work and systems thinking. (I've compensated for my condition very well) Sometimes my work is highly valued. Yet I graduated from elementary school the same way Ender Wiggin did. The child post of this one (where I tell the story of my son's incel and trans friends) [4] got upwards of 37 votes so "my opinion does hold some weight here" (But so does yours, and one difference between me and you is that I'm not going to tell you that your opinion has no weight)
Sometimes I feel angry that I wasn't served by the mental health community and that about 5-10% of the population is similarly underserved. On the other hand I was lucky that I was only under the spell of a charlatan for about 9 months of my life and I'm glad I didn't get drugged the way they wanted to drug me in school because a friend of mine who's the same age as me and did get drugged got all his teeth pulled at the age of 40 and might suffer from osteoporosis soon [2] [3] if he lives that long.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Talk-Impoverishment-Political-...
[2] https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2016/b...
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19894-x
[4] My son's friend went through a period of near complete social isolation during the pandemic where just about the only person he talked to was an 'egg hatcher' for months. It is not a clinical study or even a case report but my son and I both have notes on our experiences of knowing this person from elementary school to the present day that we're going to consolidate and turn into a real write-up some day. I'm going to support this person as an individual to the maximum that I can because those are my 'family values', I can still think they're making a mistake.
I agree that Americans don't think enough about their responsibilities. I fully support a bill of responsibilities paired with rights. Several countries have that kind of list already. They're not mutually exclusive.
> Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.
Yet women's sports are still second-class, outside of exceptions like tennis. Is it trans people who have caused women's sports to be second-class, or the patriarchy enforced by cisgender men?
FWIW, I think it's reasonable to require that trans women be on HRT for a while before playing professional women's sports. But categorical bans are horribly unjust—making a class of women inherently lesser. So yes, as a kind of woman, trans women ought to have the right to be on women's sports teams.
> J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.
True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.
I am a very firm believer that there is no free will. We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments. Social media creates extraordinarily bad environments.
> 'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other.
Well, no, it just makes it clear that (a) morality is objective and (b) societies are better when people are more virtuous. The solution is to not make people talk to or past each other, the solution is to effect environmental changes such that people are less exposed to vice and more exposed to virtue.
Is there any possible other reason than these two things, do you think, for this state of affairs?
> making a class of women inherently lesser.
A sort of Morton's fork here would be that transwomen are lesser women because they have to assume that identity instead of starting there (to say nothing of the intuitive biological differences), or that women (and thus trans women) are lesser because they are a subset of the functionality offered by men (because they can be emulated by men choosing to do so). I don't particularly agree with either point, mind you, but both could be made. The trivial solution to avoid this is to simply acknowledge that trans women are neither men nor women (nor trans men) and are a category unto themselves worth valuing on their own merits and characteristics.
> True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.
If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place? Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?
> We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments.
That being the case, there is no virtue in being trans--you're a medical and social anomaly, and if we can remove the factors that cause trans folks to occur all that suffering goes away in a generation or two and the system does better (on the metric of suffering).
And before you go off on how this is unethical or not virtuous or whatever, by your own assertion...
> I am a very firm believer that there is no free will.
...such a solution is admissible and without blame, because no moral agents would be involved in its occurrence.
(You don't get to claim there is no free will and then hold anybody accountable in any moral way. Morality does not exist unless free will does; otherwise, it's just the dull observation of iterated cost-benefit analysis and reactions to an environment.)
The forcible third-gendering of trans women is one of the greatest crimes of the culture I grew up in, so I'd rather we move past all traditionalism entirely.
> If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place?
Constant exposure to virtue makes you more likely to be virtuous.
> Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?
See the obvious what? The normies are simply wrong about a lot of this.
> Morality does not exist unless free will does
This is simply false. Free will is linked to moral responsibility, not the existence of morals. How moral we are is out of our control (Thomas Nagle called this moral luck).
I think one issue is – do "man" and "woman" have some objective essence? I think most progressives would say "no" – that kind of essentialism is more associated with conservatives and traditionalists. But if "man" and "woman" don't have an objective essence, their definition is ultimately conventional – which means if different people want to define those terms differently, how can we say one definition is ultimately more right than the other?
That has a benefit for transgender people – if transgender people and their allies want to adopt trans-inclusive definitions of "man" and "woman", nobody can say they are objectively wrong to do so, if we accept these concepts are ultimately cultural constructs.
But then comes the downside – if conservatives and traditionalists (and various others, such as a significant number of radical feminists) want to adopt trans-exclusive definitions of those terms, how can we say they are wrong to do so? If these are cultural constructs and conventional definitions, as opposed to naming objective realities which exist independently of culture and language, how can one say their definition is objectively incorrect? It's just different.
Maybe the answer is a form of "live and let live": let progressive people have their spaces governed by their definitions, let conservative/traditionalist people have their spaces governed by theirs, and where the two have to overlap or intersect or coexist, try to find a way to be neutral between the competing definitions.
Of course, if you are growing up in one of those conservative/traditionalist spaces, and end up identifying as LGBT, that solution isn't exactly pleasant, at least until you become old enough to cross over to a space more welcoming to your identity. But I don't know what the alternative is. Progressives like to imagine that conservative/traditionalist viewpoints will eventually wither away and disappear, but looking at trends in the real world, it seems unlikely that dream will be fulfilled, certainly not in the lifetime of anyone currently alive. Finding a way to peacefully coexist seems preferable to interminable cultural and political conflict over the issue.
So "essence" isn't the right word, but there absolutely are affinities and anti-affinities towards gender in brain wiring, as reflected in people's internal psychology. There is no better explanation for the vast majority of people being cisgender, and having gender dysphoria when misgendered. The traditionalists are somewhat correct about this!
A lot of traditionalist freaking out about gender is extrapolating their own internal experiences onto everyone. Many cis people feel quite bad when they are misgendered! This is a commonality with trans people, not a difference.
> That has a benefit for transgender people – if transgender people and their allies want to adopt trans-inclusive definitions of "man" and "woman", nobody can say they are objectively wrong to do so, if we accept these concepts are ultimately cultural constructs.
But I am saying that the traditional model of gender is objectively wrong! Gender is not just a cultural construct, there is clearly an inherent aspect to it.
"Gender is binary and immutably assigned at birth" and "gender is entirely social" are two positions that are both incorrect in their own ways. The truth, as expressed in the modern scientific model of gender, is more complex. Gender is not binary, but there is quite clearly an inherent (likely biological) component to it -- otherwise HRT wouldn't have the psychological effects it does on trans people. There is also a social component: we are a social species, and our biologies and sociologies are intertwined.
> But then comes the downside – if conservatives and traditionalists (and various others, such as a significant number of radical feminists) want to adopt trans-exclusive definitions of those terms, how can we say they are wrong to do so? If these are cultural constructs and conventional definitions, as opposed to naming objective realities which exist independently of culture and language, how can one say their definition is objectively incorrect? It's just different.
Right. This is the downside of the kind of "model relativism" that you're describing. This is very explicitly not my position, and I think the progressives who have promoted this position have done a bad job. I'm saying that the traditional definition is objectively incorrect, in the sense that the traditional model doesn't describe reality nearly as well as the modern scientific model of gender. It's as incorrect as a belief that the sun revolves around the earth.
> Maybe the answer is a form of "live and let live": let progressive people have their spaces governed by their definitions, let conservative/traditionalist people have their spaces governed by theirs, and where the two have to overlap or intersect or coexist, try to find a way to be neutral between the competing definitions.
That is fine when the two definitions are equally correct. They're not! One is more correct than the other.
> Of course, if you are growing up in one of those conservative/traditionalist spaces, and end up identifying as LGBT, that solution isn't exactly pleasant, at least until you become old enough to cross over to a space more welcoming to your identity. But I don't know what the alternative is.
The alternative is to use objective reality, as determined by evidence and study using modern methods, to determine public policy. Traditional and religious beliefs should have no role here.
edit: I want to add that at a meta level, I believe relativism destroys credibility. One of my big issues with the left has been that people intuitively feel certain things are true, and if progressives show up saying "oh neither of us really are correct, live and let live," it's easy to stay attracted to traditionalism -- or even worse, descend into far-right paranoia. I think a much more robust response is "your intuitions aren't completely incorrect, but reality is more complicated -- our views are more correct than yours, because we have modern methods of learning on our side which are better than traditional ones." But this response really implies a scientific, evidence-based mindset. Inculcating that is a generational challenge, though one that must be done for society to survive.
I’m sceptical about this. There is evidence for some group differences in neurobiology between men and women, but they are group differences, they don’t operate at the individual level-meaning, for some brain features, there is a statistically significant difference in the male average and the female average, but the distributions are overlapping, so there are some males with brains at or near the female average, and vice versa.
There’s also some evidence that LGBT people are more likely to belong to those “overlapping” groups (males with brains closer to the female average in certain respects, and vice versa). But, again, it is a group rather than individual difference: not every person who has such an “overlapping” brain is LGBT, and not every LGBT person has such an “overlapping” brain-and we still can’t explain why. Plus, I don’t believe we have found any reliable biological difference between different LGBT subgroups (e.g. some gay cismen have rather ‘female’ neuroanatomy, as do some transwomen, but I’m not aware of any high quality evidence for distinguishing those two groups at a neurobiological level)
For most transgender people, we can’t point to any specific neurobiological factor as an explanation for why they are transgender. And even for the minority for whom there is something specific to point to, there will be other people who share that factor yet aren’t transgender, so that factor can’t be a complete explanation-and the rest of the explanation we just don’t know. All I think we can confidently say is that biological factors are in the mix, but we can’t rule out the possibility that psychosocial/sociocultural/etc factors also have some role to play-plus, the respective contributions of the biological vs the non-biological may differ from person to person.
Also, I don’t know if everyone actually has a “gender identity”. I mean, I don’t think I do. Yes, I have XY chromosomes with a typical male phenotype, a male-coded given name, my legal documents all say M, I’m married to a woman and father of two children with her, and I suppose “male” describes a social role I play. But, I don’t have some internal “identity” as “male”. Maybe this is an autistic trait, but deep down inside I don’t identify as anything at all. Well, maybe as pure consciousness, and everything else about me (including my sex/gender) is just a contingent chance accident of what that consciousness happens to experience.
> There is no better explanation for the vast majority of people being cisgender, and having gender dysphoria when misgendered.
Do non-trans people have gender dysphoria when they are misgendered? Some of them don’t really care. And even if a person reacts negatively, is that due to gender dysphoria? Or could it be they feel upset because you’ve got a fact about them wrong, and they might be just as upset if you’d got any other fact wrong instead? And even if they experience some special upset at being misgendered, how do we know that isn’t just due to cultural conditioning, as opposed to an innate psychological factor?
I’ve personally experienced being misgendered more than once, and my reactions have varied from amusement to irritation to equanimity, depending on how I was feeling at the time. But I don’t think those varied reactions convey any deep fact about “who I am”, and I’m not convinced any of those reactions had anything to do with gender dysphoria
> I think a much more robust response is "your intuitions aren't completely incorrect, but reality is more complicated -- our views are more correct than yours, because we have modern methods of learning on our side which are better than traditional ones." But this response really implies a scientific, evidence-based mindset.
The problem I see: I think there’s often a substantial gap between what the science actually says, and what people claim the science says (including even many scientists themselves, especially when addressing a lay audience.) I think when you look at the actual research, it is obvious that there are still massive gaps in our knowledge, along with widespread problems with replication, methodology, sample sizes, etc. It is obvious that biology has a significant role to play in issues of gender and sexuality-but saying much more than that involves rather high epistemic uncertainty. Yet a lot of the public discourse on this topic makes the scientific picture sound a lot firmer than it actually is. And I think many scientists think it is more important to publicly present the science as clearly supporting a progressive social agenda, than be completely open and honest about just how much we still don’t know, and how patchy the evidence actually is for some of the conclusions they endorse
I was careful to word that as "as reflected in internal psychology". I don't think we're going to pinpoint any specific pieces of brain wiring any time soon, but there are quite clearly profound internal psychological differences -- since supernatural phenomena don't exist, they must be either due to internal brain wiring or another property of the internal body, or due to social factors, or a mix of both.
A survey I've done of trans people near me is whether they'd still want to transition on a desert island. Some say no, but the vast majority say yes. To me, this demonstrates that there's at least some inherent characteristic at play.
> Also, I don’t know if everyone actually has a “gender identity”. I mean, I don’t think I do. Yes, I have XY chromosomes with a typical male phenotype, a male-coded given name, my legal documents all say M, I’m married to a woman and father of two children with her, and I suppose “male” describes a social role I play. But, I don’t have some internal “identity” as “male”. Maybe this is an autistic trait, but deep down inside I don’t identify as anything at all. Well, maybe as pure consciousness, and everything else about me (including my sex/gender) is just a contingent chance accident of what that consciousness happens to experience.
Strength of internal gender identity does vary -- agender people demonstrate that. But would you be able to transition (especially medically) and live day in and day out as a woman?
Dr Will Powers, a cis male, has a description of how taking an excessive dose of estrogen gave him gender dysphoria for days [1].
David Reimer, another cis male, was forcibly transitioned by his doctor after a botched surgery as an infant [2]. He suffered lifelong dysphoria as a result, and tragically took his own life at a young age.
What trans people go through is quite similar to what these people went through, just in reverse. Reimer was lied to about his gender for years, which led to tremendous distress. Trans people are falsely informed (though not as a lie since this isn't intentional at first) about their gender for years, which also leads to tremendous distress. A lot of people want to openly and proudly lie about it, in a way that is documented to cause distress.
> Do non-trans people have gender dysphoria when they are misgendered? Some of them don’t really care. And even if a person reacts negatively, is that due to gender dysphoria? Or could it be they feel upset because you’ve got a fact about them wrong, and they might be just as upset if you’d got any other fact wrong instead? And even if they experience some special upset at being misgendered, how do we know that isn’t just due to cultural conditioning, as opposed to an innate psychological factor?
Gender culture is created primarily by cis/het people, so it's hard to separate the two out. Being upset at misgendering is a cross-cultural phenomenon -- I've asked cis people across American, European and a couple different Asian cultures about this.
> The problem I see: I think there’s often a substantial gap between what the science actually says, and what people claim the science says (including even many scientists themselves, especially when addressing a lay audience.) I think when you look at the actual research, it is obvious that there are still massive gaps in our knowledge, along with widespread problems with replication, methodology, sample sizes, etc. It is obvious that biology has a significant role to play in issues of gender and sexuality-but saying much more than that involves rather high epistemic uncertainty.
To be clear, we don't actually need to know the causes of some people being trans. There is a vast amount of scientific evidence regarding the efficacy of gender-affirming care (astonishingly low regret rates!) [3], and anthropological evidence that every society with a recorded history has had some notion of gender variance [4]. It also tracks with my own experience transitioning after spending years detached from my body [5].
> Yet a lot of the public discourse on this topic makes the scientific picture sound a lot firmer than it actually is. And I think many scientists think it is more important to publicly present the science as clearly supporting a progressive social agenda, than be completely open and honest about just how much we still don’t know, and how patchy the evidence actually is for some of the conclusions they endorse
What specific conclusions is the evidence patchy for, in a way that distinguishes GAC specifically? The evidence is often observational rather than RCT, but that's because RCTs are impossible when changes are visible within days. There is less evidence for pediatric care than for adult care, but extrapolating from adult to pediatric care is very common across all of medicine. (Some reports like the one by Cass claim otherwise, but they have a number of shockingly incorrect statements which indicate a lack of basic familiarity with the field [6].) The evidence is often based on self-reporting, but that's true for many other interventions as well, like when I fill out a DASS-21.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/fcxboa/the_st.... (This is not an endorsement of the doctor, who has a number of problematic practices. But it's an amusing and enlightening story.)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/154t1qq/my_...
[4] Again, not an endorsement of the particular gender structures of each society -- many of them forcibly third-gendered all trans people, which is a kind of misgendering like any other.
[5] My experiences before transitioning were remarkably similar to https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depersonaliza... -- I used to joke all the time about it. This is not something I feel any longer.
[6] https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/0... -- for example, p. 14 has the statement "medication is binary", which is plainly false. There are several ways to medically transition in a non-binary manner, and every doctor in the field knows about them. The fact that a statement like this made it all the way to publication calls into question the basic competence of the people involved. The statement is quite material as well, since it essentially makes the argument that nonbinary people may not want to medically transition. Maybe, but certainly not based on the false idea that medical transition is binary.
When it comes to soccer at Ithaca College the men play a very physical but kinda stupid game which has a lot of hard running and kicking and headers but very little sense of space. The women play much smarter soccer that looks more like good pro soccer, where, ideally everybody knows where their team mates are supposed to be and what to do to confound the opposition. More people turn up for a women's game in the rain than turn up for a men's game in the shine. They're both entertaining in their own way.
At Cornell I think the men play better than the women categorically but that's not about men or women, it's about the coaching staff, the recruiting, the priorities of the schools, etc.
Last Friday I went to a double header of women's and men's basketball at IC. The women's game was unequal but I was focused on getting good shots of the players and not thinking about the quality of the play. One of the men from the away team promised me that if I stuck around I'd see a much more entertaining game, I said I wouldn't miss it. It was 12-0 for Ithaca at the beginning so I was getting worried they wouldn't come but Hobart did and it was like 63-60 at the end. Side by side the men were so much bigger, so much faster, so much more intense. Still I like the competition and teamwork of women's ball and would rather show up in person at any college game of either gender and watch the NBA on TV.
I think time will tell what's right about fair competition, in the meantime women's soccer and basketball at the pro level is becoming a big business in the US.
In my mind 'patriarchy' is a thought stopping word. We picture the Hebrew god as an old man on a throne with a beard. One take on it is that it's got nothing to do with woman at all except as tokens, it's really a game of status where young men and poor men are dominated by rich men and old men. It's particularly harmful when it comes to discussing the 'incel' phenomenon which mainly affects straight men (slightly more likely to be black or asian!) but also affects women and gay men.
People like J K Rowling don't have a choice but to get cooked by right wing social media because there isn't a sensible discourse from the left.
I do believe in free will. If you think moral agency matters, you have to believe we have a choice. I think genes and epigenetics matter more than people want to admit and hell yeah there are bad environments. But in the end you've got a choice. The 'bad' thing I see is not so much virtue or vice but more like inflammation, as in the medical condition.
No constitution is an absolute guarantee of the rights of any minority. Constitutions contain roadblocks to slow down the majority when its desires conflict with the rights and interests of minorities, but a sufficiently determined supermajority retains the ability to overcome all those roadblocks. At the end of the day, almost all constitutions can be amended, even if with some difficulty – no matter how many constitutional provisions you have to protect minority rights, if the constitution can be amended, then those provisions can be altered or repealed.
The alternative is a constitution which is impossible to amend, no matter how large a supermajority of the population wants it amended. That's fundamentally antidemocratic, and could be described as a form of constitutional tyranny.
In short, nerds and nutjobs are overrepresented online so any conclusion you reach about groups of people using experiences you've had online need to be taken with a massive grain of salt.
They're saying that a minority of evangelists and rapey priests have been making Christianity look bad for decades.
But in any case, yeah: you don't have enough information from this type of stuff to make good judgments about individuals in any scenario.
Two things that are obvious when explicitly stated but unintuitive otherwise:
* Abusers deliberately target people with a poor reputation; particularly, a known history of lying about other matters.
* If the group does their own investigation, the media will condemn them for it. If the group leaves the investigation up to the government, the media will condemn them for it.
Since the 90s we have seen 2 things, which change the picture entirely:
* organizations are acutely aware of the issue, and thus make structural actions to both make offenses less likely and improve documentation regardless; and
* technology has improved so there is much more evidence, both to convict and to acquit.
... I can't actually locate a single allegation where the occurrence was after 2000, now that I look for them.
Seems a bit prejudiced.
I encourage you to read the four gospels at the beginning of the New Testament. Jesus didn't teach "shut up and let your good works speak for you". No, he was very much more in your face than that. He spent all of his ministry preaching (IE, talking about God and religion) and teaching and healing.
> ... tell you to keep it quiet
Uh, no? See Matthew 28:18-20
And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.
Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:
Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
> There is no need to put your religious heart on your sleeve
I spoke as one aggrieved class to another. Modern Christians get a lot of hate for things that have happened in the past, because we wear the name of our God.
As for wearing a 'religious heart on my sleeve', I have nothing if not the hope of forgiveness and grace from the Almighty. Of course I'm going to wear it on my sleeve.
Jesus says not to pray loudly like the Pharisees which could be interpreted as not bragging about ones faith, but he also says “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven” so it seems like an instruction to share faith with others.
In present day USA if you loudly announce your faith its hard to escape tribalism associations so I agree with your advice, but I also think its important not to water down religion by ignoring the parts that do not fit with modern sensibilities because then we are having a totally different conversation.
The unfortunate part is, in my 38 years of existence, she is possibly the first "real" Christian I've known: Christian through her acts, not just her words. In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus bases judgment not on religious rituals or verbal professions of faith, but on acts of compassion towards others: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the unclothed, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned. This seems to emphasize practical love and concern for the vulnerable as true evidence of discipleship, rather than one's ability to proselytize.
Isn't the most important part of the New Testament the Gospels and almost everything that comes after is more about institutional Christianity? Acts, describing the spread of Christianity after Jesus' ascension, with little new information about his teachings. Epistles focus primarily on doctrine, ethics, and church organization rather than Jesus' words and actions. Revelations...well I'll leave that to others to interpret.
If Christianity is built around Jesus, shouldn't his teachings and words be the focus rather than the institution of Christianity itself? I don't think there is anything wrong with proselytizing per se, it's obviously critical to ensuring the survival and expansion of any belief system and from an evolutionary standpoint, ideas that encourage their own reproduction tend to thrive. But it seems misguided to focus on spreading the faith rather than doing all the things Jesus says you should do.
For me, religion starts and stops from within. I am not an evangelist - my God is mine and your's is yours. I'll tell you what I'm about and no more.
"Still small Voice of quiet" not "Hell fire and damnation".
I will dive in with a gentle nudge but never an exhortation.
No-one choses to be trans.
This is not a useful analogy.
I think it is more complex than that. Some people, they've been raised in a religion, it's been part of their life since they've been a small child. They never sought it out and actively chose it for themselves, they inherited it from their parents and their ancestors. It can be a very deep part of their identity.
Also, try replacing the word "Christian" there with "Muslim" or "Jew", and see how it sounds.
> No-one choses to be trans.
I think transgender feelings exist on a spectrum. Some people don't have any. Some people have a tiny inkling of it that they know is never going to go anywhere. Other people, they are very strong, and they are convinced they'll never be happy unless they live life true to them. But, there are people in the middle, for whom it is more of a choice whether to cultivate these feelings or suppress them – and they might be able to find happiness going down either path. For them, being "trans" is a choice – it wasn't a choice to have those feelings to begin with, but they have a real choice about what to do with them – and if they choose to suppress them, and manage to find happiness in doing so – aren't they in a sense choosing not to be trans? But conversely, if they make the opposite choice – are they not choosing to be trans? From which I think it follows, some people really do choose to be or not to be trans – which isn't to say there aren't other people for whom there isn't anywhere near as much choice involved in it.
I have no idea how big a group of people this "people in the middle" is, but I suspect it may be bigger than you think. It isn't the kind of thing one goes around telling everyone about.
My son has two friends. One fell under the spell of blackpill incels, thinks he is not tall enough even though he's an inch above the mean, wants to break his legs to extend them and get taller, hasn't talked to my son for two years because my son said what his real height was in an online chat. Rumor has it he's taken anabolic steroids (but hasn't done any weighlifting or athletic training.)
The other fell under the spell of a self-described "egg-hatcher" who "aggressively" (his friend's word) worked on him for a year and a half to convince him that his being out of sync with other people was a sign he was trans. I knew him pretty well as an elementary school student and he didn't give any sign of variant gender identity then, although like my son and myself he was always a little 'weird'. (He uses a different pronoun and name at his job but tells us it is OK for us call him 'he' and use his own name so we do.) He's taking a cocktail of drugs that gets prescribed via telemedicine and was telling us about the serious side effects he was suffering: one of these drugs, spironolactone, is primarily a drug that alters your mineral metabolism but has the effect of suppressing testosterone if you take 20x the normal dose. (My doc gives it to me for my blood pressure.) He has insatiable cravings for salt as a result.
I completely believe my transsexual friend from college is for real. I believe my son's transgender friend is making a mistake; I support him as an individual and feel I owe him a lot as a person I knew from a young age but I believe he's a victim of a cult-like movement, as is my son's first friend.
(Note a lot of Christian people are brought into it by their family before they're able to make a choice by their own judgement)
It's worth noting that while Spironolactone can be used to suppress testosterone, that's not really what it's used for. Rather it weakly blocks androgen receptors so it makes the body act like the testosterone isn't there or is lower than it actually is. And this is effective at a far lower dose than the testosterone "suppression".
This is why it's sometimes prescribed to women for hair loss, improper hair growth, and/or acne.
It's for that purpose that it's normally prescribed in trans healthcare and it's generally only temporarily (~3-9 months) prescribed while an estradiol regimen suppresses testosterone production. After that it can be dropped with the estradiol doing the rest of the work.
And outside the US it's far less commonly prescribed for this purpose with other androgen antagonists generally being preferred but US doctors tend to be more weary of those other medications and therefore prefer spironolactone.
So while said kid may be a bit "weird" in your eyes, nothing about this really seems unusual. At worst they probably just need to ask their doctor to prescribe a different androgen antagonist instead of spironolactone.
It reminds me of a friend I have who is quite severely depressed and has gone through a wide range of sexual identities. Straight, to asexual, then gay, then polyamorously bisexual, and now back to monogamously straight. Each change she excitedly explained to me that she had unlocked some deep secret to her identity and now her whole life made sense. This happened well into her adult years, not adolescence.
Some people seem to have a strong sense of a "missing piece" in their lives, and might be susceptible to latching on to almost any identity or community if it can explain that feeling.
EDIT: Because of the current barrage that trans people are under, I should clarify that I know trans people who have a deep and abiding certainty that their gender is different from what it says on their birth certificate; my above comment is not meant to include those people.
My trans friend in college suffered terribly because her mother disowned her. I can say as a parent though, if I saw my child was involved with people who were as hateful and negative as the trans people I see on Mastodon, I'd think "I'd do anything at all to spare my child from that suffering."
---
I think "asexual", as a fashionable label, is particularly harmful. I've met a lot of people who are definitely sexual who went on a phase of glomming on to it and it certainly contributed to their misunderstanding of themselves.
The proliferation of labels about sexuality seems harmful to me (polyamorous is another, BDSM people introduce 10s of them, like you couldn't possible be articulate about your desires but you imagine there is some place where you can pick them off a menu)
My recent experience is that when something squicky goes down or a paraphilia rears its ugly head the people you can trust the least are the ones who talk about sex as if they were liberated or who claim to have some subaltern identity. I think people like this are dangerous not just as direct social connections but even if they are 2, 3 or 4 steps removed.
This classic of French theory
https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....
has a great part near the beginning about how glib talk about sexuality is a trap, not a way to liberation.
But lots of non-gender-related online communities also look like that to me: some political groups, antiwork, etc.
People have done this all the way back time eternal, the only thing that's different today is that people are allowed to be more open about it and that there are many discrete labels that allow people to easily describe what they are specifically feeling.
I don't think a gender transition will make this person whole, this person will just be a weird person who is also trans. The old problem will persist but now he (maybe she or something else later) will have additional side effects and other baggage not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.
> not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.
This isn't true. Even if you stay trans the entire rest of your life you can still often have kids. This goes for trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people. Generally at worst you'd just need to supplement with some hormones to support fertility but often even that isn't necessary.
But supposing someone de-transitioned, fertility generally returns completely or near completely within 6 months to a year.
The only case where you can't "undo" any degree of loss of fertility is with an orchiectomy (testicle removal) but even then the standard procedure is to preserve sufficient semen in cold storage for future use.
So, I think the analogy, at least for those people, holds.
I think this is a very confused remark. You are mixing up the existence of choices with the philosophical question of the nature and existence of "free will".
I had a real choice as to what to eat for breakfast this morning. There were several live options and I chose one of them and discarded the others. Was that choice of mine "free"? Was it "predetermined"? That's a vexed philosophical question. But however we answer it – it was still a "choice". An unfree choice, a predetermined choice, is still a choice. Choice is a process in the mind/brain, the subjective experiences associated with those processes, an externally observable behaviour – and whether or not it is free, whether or not it is determined, it obviously exists.
By contrast, I did not have any choice at all as to the circumstances of my birth–the day and month and year in which I was born, the place and country, who my parents are, what chromosomes I have, etc. And that, likewise, is true completely independently of how we answer philosophical debates over free will
I absolutely do not believe anyone chooses to be of any religion. It's just luck.
Whereas you said "No one chooses to be anything", which is a denial of the existence of choice altogether
Whether or not you are confused inside your own head, you are expressing yourself in an imprecise and confusing way
Compatibilists: free will is a term for something real that we do.
Incompatibilists: no, that thing is trivial and should have a different name. Free will is a term for something impossible. But despite being impossible it's a meaningful concept. And it's somehow hugely important and deserves a name.
I'm unclear about the motivation for this, especially the last part.
(1) Do we have choices?
(2) Are our choices "free"?
(3) Should we be held morally responsible for our choices?
How we answer (1) and (2) doesn't necessarily determine how we answer (3). And if (3) is your real point, maybe you should focus on that, rather than confusing things by conflating it with (1) and (2).
I'm saying as an irreligious trans person who sees the wreckage that fundamentalist religion is causing on my community at the moment.
But I still think several things you said on the way here were put in a rather imprecise and conflationary way.
So one can say "I should do XYZ", but this soon descends into blame: "hey you, why didn't you do XYZ?", and that can be mean-spirited recrimination to do with bullying and social pressure, coercion and guilt and labelling people as no good, and main function of the question might not be to seek an answer.
Or, more rarely, it might be an honest enquiry into philosophical differences, or practical problems. Developers shouldn't write bad code. But they do, so we can "blame" them for it. That doesn't mean we should hurl rotten vegetables at most of them. On Wikipedia, I routinely blame people for fucking up an article, but the objective isn't to make them feel bad, it's to fix the article (and to check their reasons, to make sure that I'm not the one with the bad idea). Blame is one thing, but what to do with blame is a separate question.
It's definitely about the way people function, though, about enquiring into their mistakes and motivations. They have "responsibility" in the sense of being expected to respond to "why did you do XYZ?", and even if the answer is "it was inevitable because of the way I am", there's still more practical aspects of the answer ("because I was sleepy, because I was trying to avoid PQR, because I like XYZ") in which to seek knowledge. If we're all autonoma, so what: these autonoma want to solve moral problems.
If you did something wrong, and you are morally responsible for it, then we are morally permitted (or even obliged) to make you suffer for it (where "suffer" can mean potentially anything from mild social opprobrium up to torture and execution). If you did something wrong, but (for whatever reason) lack moral responsibility for it, then it is morally wrong for us to make you suffer for it. If your moral responsibility is impaired but not completely absent, then it is wrong for us to make you suffer to the normal degree, but it might be justifiable for us to do so to a more limited degree.
But, many people today reject the idea of retributive punishment. And if you do so, it isn't clear how important the concept of "moral responsibility" still is. It is a logically coherent position to accept the evaluative/axiological aspects of morality (the labelling of states of affairs as "good" or "evil" or "neutral", their ranking as greater or lesser goods/evils), and its prescriptive aspects (you ought to do this, you ought not do that, you may do this but you aren't obliged to), while rejecting the concept of "moral responsibility" as misconceived, useless, harmful and/or erroneous.
Some incompatiblist determinists might view metaphysical libertarianism as a logically coherent possibility, albeit a false one. They might then view "free will" as useful in naming a way the universe coherently could have been, but turned out to actually not be – much like they might view Ptolemaic epicycles, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, and steady state theory. And, much as a person might object to the position "the luminiferous aether is actually true, if we redefine all the terms involved to refer to concepts from special and general relativity" as a form of unhelpful obscurantism, they might view compatibilist determinism as doing the same kind of thing to metaphysically libertarian free will.
There's also the other kind of incompatibilism: metaphysical libertarianism is itself a form of incompatibilism. Both incompatibilist determinists and metaphysical libertarians agree that determinism and free will are incompatible. They just disagree on whether that means we should junk free will or junk determinism.
Although I think here "determinism" is a bit of a misnomer. Most physical determinists don't actually have a problem with the idea that there might be irreducible quantum indeterminism (whether or not they believe there actually is). An incompatibilist determinist would say "a clock doesn't have free will, and a roulette wheel doesn't either, so neither can some hybrid between the two". A compatibilist determinist will say that whether it is a clock or a roulette wheel or a hybrid of them, if it gets sufficiently complicated in the right ways, then it will have free will. For both, the real objection is to metaphysically libertarian ideas that human choice involves some irreducible "third thing" which is neither deterministic causation nor impersonal chance, nor any mere combination of the two. There are also claims (e.g. by Roger Penrose) that quantum indeterminism operates in some special way within the human brain, different from how it operates normally, and that human free will is somehow rooted in that. Many "determinists" (whether compatibilist or incompatibilist) would view that as uncomfortably close to metaphysical libertarianism, even if it does attempt to partly replace the transcendental metaphysics with something closer to the realm of the empirically testable (even if not quite there). But, while "quantum indeterminism operates in a very special way in the human brain" makes them uncomfortable, I don't think most of them view in the same way "quantum indeterminism is real and irreducible, but it doesn't operate in the human brain in any way differently from how it operates anywhere else"–again, whether or not they actually believe it. Some will prefer purely deterministic interpretations of quantum theory instead, such as many worlds or de Broglie–Bohm theory–but that debate has no inherent connection to the topic of human free will.
And you aren't using the standard common sense definition either – for, surely per the common sense definition, this is true: "I can choose what I eat for breakfast, but I can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast" (because the first is clearly within the scope of my own personal causal power and influence, the second is well outside it) – yet by your own definitions you'd have to reject that statement, and say "no, you're wrong, you can't choose what you eat for breakfast" – whereas most incompatiblists would instead say "yes, you can choose what you can eat for breakfast, and you can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast – but your choice of what to eat for breakfast isn't free"
So I'm using the word "choice" in the standard way, and you're using it in your own personal idiosyncratic way
I don't want to believe what that book says but it is quite a strong argument. It is really too sweeping and complicated to discuss in this format though. It really would need an entire counter book to it that dissects each point.
The point of my comment was not whether free will exists or not – it was whether choices exist or not.
I haven't read Salopsky's book myself, but I don't believe it argues that choices don't exist, only that they aren't free. And the comment to which you are replying wasn't expressing any stance on the question of whether our choices are "free" or not, only distinguishing it from the separate question of whether they exist at all.
That said, the impression I've gathered of his book – e.g. the review in The Atlantic by Kieran Setiya (a professor of philosophy at MIT) – doesn't impress me – Sapolsky largely ignores the philosophical literature on the topic, despite its essentially philosophical nature. "Free will" is more fundamentally a question of philosophy than neuroscience, because a big part of the debate is how the phrase "free will" should even be defined – and that kind of definitional question is one in which neuroscientists have no special competence, but for philosophers it is their bread and butter.
This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief, and also intricately tied to moral responsibility. So compatibilists might be better served by tabooing the phrase—which some do, replacing it with "free choice" or similar.
There's also this bit:
> Still, when you act with indifference to the rights and needs of others, we can blame you for what you do—unless you have a good excuse. What counts as an excuse is a question of morality, not metaphysics.
When developers write code with security bugs, there are sometimes "good" excuses for it and sometimes not. We tried apportioning blame for many years, and it never worked. What worked is large-scale tooling and environment changes. I believe this generalizes quote broadly.
[0] https://archive.is/20231223221002/https://www.theatlantic.co...
> This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief,
I disagree. I don’t think the average person’s belief in “free will” is “fundamentally supernatural”. Most people say they believe in “free will”, but (unless they’ve had some exposure to philosophy) they are pretty vague about what it actually is.
If by “supernatural” you mean “religious”, I think you might be overestimating how much influence religion has on the average person’s views on the topic. While it is true the majority of Christian denominations will endorse some version of metaphysical libertarianism in theory, it is a rather secondary doctrine - the Bible never explicitly discusses the topic, and opinions differ on whether or not it presumes it implicitly. [0] The Nicene Creed, which most Christians accept as a statement of the most important points of Christian teaching, never explicitly mentions it either. In many denominations, services will rarely or never address it. Hence, for many Christians, Christianity doesn’t contribute a lot to their understanding of “free will”, because it just isn’t the focus of a great deal of Christian teaching
Now, of course, there are exceptions: for example, there are the Free Will Baptists, for whom the concept of “free will” is so important, they even put it in their name-but they are minuscule in comparison to Christianity as a whole
In fact, some Christians are compatibilist determinists. There are actually two main forms of determinism - physical determinism (all our choices are predetermined by physical processes) and theological determinism (all our choices are predetermined by God’s will)-and the compatibilist versus incompatibilist distinction exists for both. Most Calvinists reject metaphysical libertarianism in favour of compatibilist theological determinism, although a minority (primarily the so-called “hyper-Calvinists”) are incompatibilist theological determinists instead.
[0] I’ll limit the discussion to Christianity, in part for reasons of space, but I think if you look at Judaism or Islam you will find it is a similar situation - most Jews and Muslims will affirm belief in “free will”, but both religions tend to spend relatively little time on this topic in comparison to others, especially if one is talking about the experiences of the average follower, as opposed to the arcane theological debates covered in advanced study
Or to be more direct, how do you work?
You choose to be a Christian and the idea that a God exists makes sense to you? It's not that the arguments for it are strong, you just choose to believe them.
Then atheism becomes fashionable and your old thoughts stop making sense to you? Not because of any new evidence, refutation or anything of the sort, but simply because you make a choice.
Are your politics the same?
Do you believe in the existence of truth? If you do, are your professed beliefs just a facade?
As a Christian, I can empathize. The wrongs and hypocrisies of so many are heaped on those who have no relation to the actions.