promethea.incorporated

rendakuenthusiast:

socialjusticemunchkin:

bgaesop:

I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.

But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.

There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.

Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?

Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].

Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.

Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.

So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?

All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.

Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.

And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.

Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).

Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.

In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).

What are the murder rates for trans men? Does transitioning to male make you statistically less safe?

I counted an estimate of 4-6 trans men murdered in 2015 and 2016 (depending on whether one extrapolates for the rest of this year or not) for an annual death rate of 2-3. That’s 1/100,000 by the estimates at the top, and suggests a lot of trans men’s deaths are misreported as cis women’s deaths because I’m not believing that number for one second.

If we take ASAB as our prior it suggests that murdered trans men have 1:1 chances of being recorded as trans men. If we take gender as prior the chances are 1:6. I’m leaning more towards the latter because I find it highly unlikely that men who also have the complicating factor of transphobia would not be getting killed as often as other men, and I find it especially hard to believe that trans men would be just as low-risk as cis women.

This does creepy things to the murder rates of trans women. If we assume trans women are 5 times as visible as trans men, we would expect to be missing ~25 murders a year; if trans women are 10 times as visible as trans men, there would still be ~15 missing murders, pushing trans women’s murder rates up by 50-100%. Holy shit. Even a conservative estimate where being trans reduces a man’s murder risk by half, and trans women are 10 times more visible, the real murder rate would be 30% higher when accounting for the expected unrecorded cases.

2 weeks ago · tagged #death cw #murder cw #transmisogyny cw · 128 notes · .permalink

bgaesop:

socialjusticemunchkin:

bgaesop:

I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.

But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.

There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.

Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?

Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].

Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.

Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.

So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?

All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.

Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.

And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.

Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).

Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.

In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).

It seems a bit disingenuous to keep slicing and dicing the demographics until you come up with an obscure enough one where their rate is higher than average. Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does make me look a bit askance.

How does the murder rate of TWoC compare to, say, illegal immigrant east Asian sex workers in the US? Or just US based sex workers in general? For a variety of reasons, trans women are more likely to be sex workers than cis women are. What happens if we control for that?

The point of intersectionality is to find out the factors that make people suffer. In this case slicing and dicing the demographics has shown that black people tend to suffer extremely high rates of violence, and I don’t think “black people” is a massively obscure demographic (unlike, say, the way the most vulnerable minority is always the individual; the demographic $murdered_trans_woman_X suffered a murder rate of 100,000/100,000 and that’s terrible), nor “black trans women” either. And I don’t think including class in it is a bad thing either, because “what do we do to the murder rate” is a vague question, but “what do we do to the murder rate of poor black people” is a more specific question that is easier to answer.

And such slicing and dicing also reveals new information; in this case I updated as I was expecting the murder rate of TWoC to be higher than it was compared to the murder rate of black men, and thus it seems that being black AMAB is the actual massive risk factor for violence. Intersectional analysis improves epistemic fidelity!

Also, sex workers suffer massive amounts of violence too and that’s not okay and the things that cause it need to be destroyed.

(via bgaesop-deactivated20160701)

2 weeks ago · tagged #steel feminism #death cw #transmisogyny cw · 128 notes · .permalink

bgaesop:

I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.

But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.

There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.

Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?

Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].

Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.

Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.

So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?

All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.

Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.

And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.

Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).

Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.

In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).

(via theungrumpablegrinch)

2 weeks ago · tagged #death cw #murder cw #transmisogyny cw · 128 notes · .permalink

lovestwell:

nostalgebraist:

@lovestwell​

There are a lot of little details here that we could go back and forth on forever.  I don’t really want to continue arguing over these details.

Your account of Dreger’s perspective, although internally coherent, feels like it’s reading a lot into the book I just read that wasn’t actually there.  The line you’re drawing is (I take it) between scientists “doing their thing” with potentially harmful results down the line, and scientists using actively unethical methods.  But I don’t remember Dreger ever drawing that distinction explicitly.  This is not me being coy or “perversely charitable” or something; I just don’t remember that being the thrust of the book I read.

(It is also not something I would naturally read in, because it doesn’t fit the facts as I see them.  Michael Bailey is in fact a scientific researcher, but the campaign to ruin his reputation was in response to a popular book he wrote which meant to illustrate a theory he didn’t himself develop – and the theory itself was developed by Ray Blanchard in a clinic [the Clarke Institute, or “Jurassic Clarke”] that has a reputation for clinical horror stories.  So what Bailey actually did is sort of analogous to some colleague of Maria New writing a popular book in which they interview some cherry-picked children who received prenatal dex talking about how great the results are.  Would the author of that book be “just a scientist doing their thing”?)

But in particular I want to reply to your concluding paragraph, because it seems to get at some core friction here:

(and if you do believe that - if you do think that someone writing an article in support of autogynephilia, for instance, is “causing indirect harm”, and thereby qualifies as “those few cases where nastiness and extremism might be okay”, to quote @socialjusticemunchkin - then your repeated insistence on discussing the object level, the actual truth of autogynephilia and other such theories - remains that much mind-boggling to me).

I don’t understand this, so I apologize if I’m getting it wrong.  What I think you are saying is “you and Promethea believe that mere discussions among scientists of whether certain theories are wrong or right can be inherently harmful and deserve public shaming and nastiness, in which case you must be willing to give up the whole endeavor of scientifically adjudicating the truth or falsehood of those theories.”

I certainly don’t believe that.  I believe (like Dreger) that activism, and society in general, needs the free discussion of scientific ideas.  But I also think that not every statement by someone with a scientific professorship counts as a defense-worthy part of this free discussion.  At a certain point – as when someone writes a book for a general audience containing no new scientific content – they are acting simply as citizens, not as participants in the protected sphere of scientific discourse.  No idea should be inherently anathema in the academy, but no one spends all their time in the academy.

If a chemistry professor (after work) tells someone (not a colleague) that they should mix bleach and ammonia when they get home to make a super-great cleaning product – “trust me, I’m a chemistry professor” – they are not advancing an unorthodox scientific hypothesis in some way we ought to protect and celebrate.

You’re drawing a distinction between science and everything else that I don’t subscribe to, and which I did not intentionally ascribe to you either (whether Dreger subscribes to it or not I’m not sure). Your write “Activism, and the society in general, needs the free discussion of [scientific] ideas” and “No idea should be inherently anathema [in the academy]”, but from where I stand, both these statements improve when the bracketed parts are removed. I don’t know how to make a principled defense of the bracketed parts but not the whole; any such attempt falls victim to the volatility of the boundary.

Look; my position as far as I can see is very simple; Yudkowsky’s “Bad argument gets counterargument.  Does not get bullet.  Never.” pretty much covers it. Someone who’s making a genuine attempt to understand the world and/or explain their ideas to others is covered. It doesn’t matter if they’re writing a peer-reviewed article or a blog post on a personal blog: they do not deserve to be doxed, fired, subjected to an angry activist mob, etc. Now it so happens that scientists are much more likely to be engaged in trying to understand the world than people in general; and it so happens that “bullets” applied to explicitly scientific discourse have the greater potential to fuck with gaining more and better knowledge. And I think since Dreger is especially worried about that (as am I), she focuses on activists hindering scientists. But it doesn’t mean that “argument gets bullet” is virtuous w.r.t. a blogger or a popular book writer. I don’t know what Dreger thinks on that, but I sure don’t think so.

(of course, this also means that the onus is on me to distinguish between Bailey, whose book is protected by this principle, and New, whose actions aren’t. But to me, the difference between them is clear, as I tried to explain in my previous post)

Thus, to take an example, even though I happen to have a strong aversion to anti-Semites for many reasons, including personal ones, if you were to write a post trying to argue in good faith that Jews run the world, the thought of trying to dox you, get you fired, falsely accuse you of various kinds of misconduct etc.  would be extremely repugnant to me. I’m quite content with never having done anything like that, throughout a very long internet life of blogging that included many intense flame wars. 

I’m not sure what *your* position is, but based on the above - and I’m sorry if I’m misinterpreting you - there’s a genuine difference; following @socialjusticemunchkin, you believe that “nasty extremism” is in fact justified in cases where someone argues for a position you believe to be “indirectly harmful” in a major way. Is that a correct summary of your view? Do you, in fact, agree with and justify the actions of Andrea James et al against Bailey described in Dreger’s book (given that Bailey was merely writing a popular book with no new science, which removes him from the “protected sphere” in your words)? In case you do, how much farther would you be willing to go, and in case you don’t, what kind of nasty, directly harmful activism *do* you support against people who express “indirectly harmful” ideas?

Okay, so I’ll step in to defend my own words. “Bad argument gets counterargument” works very well when discussing things in a relatively equal position, with adequate restraint on all sides. I don’t believe there is any single idea that should be verboten to express and discuss. Yes, this includes autogynephilia; jewish world domination; HBD; whether islam is inherently connected to terrorism, violence and anti-modernity; whether women are Just Worse than men, etc.

But the difference happens somewhere along the very vague and ill-defined boundary of academia and politics. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that some ideas need to be handled with more caution than others, because the discussion doesn’t happen in a vacuum and carelessly discussing those ideas may have dangerous spill-over effects. It’s one thing to investigate even controversial ideas, and completely another to write shitty books seeking to popularize them with bad evidence. (Just like people should study syntetic biology, but it would be very irresponsible to publicize a simple how-to guide on creating an undefeatable pandemic that would kill everyone, in a cave with just a box of scraps!) (This is actually the main point I’d like to push: would you consider it not okay to ever attack scientists who disseminate their knowledge in a harmful and irresponsible way? Because if you consider it okay to even nastily disincentivize publishing “The Nihilist’s Cookbook: 50 ways of wiping out the human race from your own garage”, then we already know what you are and are just haggling over the price.)

I’d compare the situation with Bailey to someone pushing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the popular discourse about antisemitism. Even if some parts of the claims were correct, it’s nonetheless complete politics, not honest truthseeking. (In fact, Bailey himself has defended his book on the basis that it’s politics, not science, and thus not subject to the institutional restraints of science.) And if I were Jewish, I wouldn’t shed a single tear if the writers of the Protocols got the Bailey treatment.

Thus, to take an example, even though I happen to have a strong aversion to anti-Semites for many reasons, including personal ones, if you were to write a post trying to argue in good faith that Jews run the world, the thought of trying to dox you, get you fired, falsely accuse you of various kinds of misconduct etc.  would be extremely repugnant to me. I’m quite content with never having done anything like that, throughout a very long internet life of blogging that included many intense flame wars.

And I think there’s a big difference in this. Writing a blog post is one thing, writing a really popular book and being very influential is another.

Throughout the affair, Bailey had acted in a way which reflected the standard exploitative attitudes cis researchers have traditionally had towards trans people (and trans women in particular). Bailey wrote a book which got its popularity mostly from matching people’s biases rather than from being correct, and trans people are in a very bad position to defend ourselves from it. Some of its components were pure dark arts, such as “anyone who claims they aren’t an autogynephile is lying, and their claims can thus be disregarded” which very conveniently poisons the well so that people who want to ignore contrary evidence have a fully general counterargument ready.

I don’t know the exact specifics, but a lot of what the trans activists have done seems to be basically tit-for-tatting Bailey. I won’t claim there haven’t been genuine abusive overreaches but eg. the part where Andrea James juxtaposed pictures of Bailey’s children with sexually explicit captions taken from, or based on, his very own book is nothing worse than what Bailey himself had done. The only difference was that it was targeted personally instead of generally, and I find it ridiculous that it’d be somehow okay to express such attitudes towards groups but not individuals because groups are ultimately simply aggregations of individuals.

(The obvious solution is to be nice to everyone.)

And a big part of it is the relative positions of the participants. If trans women were not so thoroughly marginalized (especially back in the time the book was written), the danger of seeking to popularize such ideas would be much smaller. One of the basic ways marginalization operates is by treating people as members of groups, not as individuals, and thus when the group one is grouped into is attacked, it’s completely rational (in the “evolutionary tribal game theory” sense) to attack back to defend oneself. Even Yudkowsky has written about his frustration with journalists writing hack jobs and getting away with abusing their power like that, and when you add a bunch of biases and sociocultural status to it, shit gets really ugly really fast.

Or as I’ve said: I’d be a lot more tolerant about people expressing ideas if their ideas didn’t hurt me and my people, but since we don’t live in a libertarian utopia, when Bailey acts like a politician he shouldn’t be surprised if he gets treated like a politician. (And while it’s a totally irrelevant ad hominem, I find it ironically appropriate that Dreger is a bioethicist.)

Yes, I would love to have a society of niceness, community and civilization, but I don’t live there and I don’t blame people who reacted to Bailey with nastiness because I know where they are coming from and I know that the best cure for that nastiness is not to shun people who lash out from pain but to take away the pain. I used to be one of those nasty activists, and while I’ve updated my own methods to be more productive and effective and less likely to hurt innocents, I do consider myself a person who has some actual insight to why people act like that and what can actually be done about it. People are clockwork, if you want them to do/not do something you need to take the clockwork into account instead of whining impotently at the uncaring void.

And before you think I’m some kind of a PC spoilsport who doesn’t want to discuss uncomfortable ideas, let me express some of mine below the cut:

Keep reading

2 weeks ago · tagged #this is totally the sj equivalent of the reynolds pamphlet right? #transmisogyny cw #racism cw #meanness cw · 54 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink

brazenautomaton:

ursaeinsilviscacant:

nostalgebraist:

Another post on Galileo’s Middle Finger, having finally finished the book.  (Previous posts: Maria New and prenatal dex, also various posts in the tag #michael bailey cw?)

Galileo’s Middle Finger (hereafter GMF) is a strange book.  On one level, the book’s content is pretty easy to make sense of: Alice Dreger has been involved in a number of dramatic academic controversies over the course of her career, and she figured (sensibly enough) that people might enjoy reading a book that retells these stories.  To some extent, she just presents the book as “a memoir of the controversies I’ve been involved in.”

However, she also claims that these stories are connected by an overarching theme, which is something like this:

“Scientists and activists often find themselves at odds, on opposite sides of angry battles.  But everyone should recognize that truth and justice are intimately connected: you can’t help the victims of injustice if you don’t care about the facts of the situation, and if you’re in a unique position to explore facts (such as an academic job), you ought to steer your investigations toward the social good – not by sacrificing the truth, but by looking for the truths that can help.  Activists need to be more concerned with truth, and scientists need to be more concerned with justice.  And if both sides followed this advice, they would be at odds far less often.”

All of this sounds very agreeable to me; I think I already more-or-less agreed with it before I read Dreger’s book.  But do Dreger’s accounts of various controversies actually serve as useful examples of this stuff?  Not always.  And Dreger’s attempts to link everything back to her theme produce some awkward results.

---

Besides a few minor subplots, there are three controversies narrated in GMF.  First, she narrates the controversy over Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen.  Second, the controversy over Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado, which accused anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of genocide as well as various other wrongdoings.  Third, Dreger’s investigations into Maria New and her struggles to get her criticisms recognized by government bodies and the public.

Of these three, it’s the Tierney/Chagnon case that most directly fits Dreger’s theme.  Tierney’s book was a work of shoddy hack journalism which made spectacular allegations that have been uniformly refuted by later investigators.  (N.B. Tierney made many allegations, and some of the more minor ones have been less clearly refuted, but those weren’t the ones that made headlines.)  Nonetheless, shortly after the book came out, the American Anthropological Association quickly endorsed Tierney’s book – the academic equivalent of reflexively believing a callout post without checking the sources.

Reading this in terms of Dreger’s theme seems straightforward: in its concern for justice, the AAA neglected the value of truth, and thus failed to even serve justice.

Even here, though, the theme strains a bit.  The Tierney debacle was not exactly a conflict between “activists” and “academics”; the people under-valuing truth in the service of justice were the academics of the AAA.  (Tierney could arguably be called an “activist,” but Dreger treats him – rightly, it seems to me – as a hack journalist from whom more concern for the truth cannot be expected.)

The Maria New story also lacks a clear instance of an activist failing to sufficiently value truth.  In that story, Dreger is the activist, raising ethical concerns from the outside about an established academic, and her activism is directly grounded in science that she believes that academic is ignoring.  She may intend this as an example of “activism done right” (about which more later), and/or as a case of an academic caring too little about justice.  But it’s not as though New is ignoring justice because truth is her only value; as Dreger notes, her prenatal dex work has produced little in the way of academic knowledge.  So again, it’s hard to see this as an illustration of the theme.

So far, it looks like Dreger has failed to exhibit an example of activists behaving badly, although this is crucial to her theme.  The third story (well, first as presented in the book), about Michael Bailey, is her main (and only) example of this.  But of the three stories, it’s that one that fits the theme least well.

Dreger’s account of the Bailey controversy shares a quality with her account of the Chagnon controversy: both are told as stories of lovable and humane, if out-of-touch, researchers being persecuted by ignorant people who don’t understand them.  Dreger spends a great deal of text talking about how much she personally likes Bailey and Chagnon – Bailey is a personal friend, Chagnon she met while investigating that controversy.  As “characters” in the book, they downright glow.  They’re funny, they’re good company, they both have cute and harmonious marriages.

It makes sense to write stuff like this in order to humanize people who have been demonized by others.  But one has to note here that none of this bears on the “truth” side of the things.  It’s certainly possible for someone to have committed genocide and still be a warm and sparkling conversationalist at the dinner table; it’s possible for Michael Bailey to be a great guy if you know him personally, and nonetheless to have been wrong about trans women.

With Chagnon, this tension never becomes relevant, because as a matter of simple fact, Chagnon was exonerated by multiple serious investigators.  With Bailey, the tension is glaringly relevant, because the issue of whether Bailey is actually right never gets fully addressed in Dreger’s treatment.  Indeed, she treats it almost as an irrelevant side issue.  Where is the value of truth here?

To be fair, Dreger does put her beliefs on the table about the issue.  But these beliefs seem to reveal little serious interest in the questions involved.  She seems to have uncritically bought the Blanchard-Bailey line – possibly because she only cares about these issues insofar as they affect her good friend Michael Bailey? – and to have done little investigation into academic work on transgender beyond this.

Astonishingly, for instance, the phrase “gender dysphoria” never appears in GMF at all.  (A word-search for “dysphoria” turns up only one result, in the title of a Blanchard paper cited in the endnotes.)  When Dreger presents her account of trans women, she talks about (for instance) transitioning as a choice made by feminine gay men in order to better fit into homophobic social environments, stressing that these people might not have transitioned if feminine gay identities were more accepted in their local environments.  I’m willing to believe this happens sometimes – but Dreger seems to actually not know that gender dysphoria is a thing.  This is in a book published in 2015.  One wonders if she’s ever even looked up the condition in the DSM (which changed the name from “Gender Identity Disorder” to “Gender Dysphoria” in the 2013 DSM-V, but even before that had included dysphoria as one of the two major diagnostic criteria).

Dreger has a page on her website, written after GMF was published, in which she responds to questions about “autogynephilia” and states her current positions.  Again, she never mentions gender dysphoria.  Of Blanchard’s androphilic/autogynephilic typology, she says that “I think what I’ve seen from the scientific clinical literature and socioculturally suggests this division makes sense.”  She does not provide any citations, and does not address critiques (see here) that the data show a continuum which does not separate well into two clusters.

I belabor all of this because Dreger’s indifference to the truth here simply makes GMF fundamentally incoherent.  I agree with Dreger’s theme; I have no clue how she thinks the Bailey story illustrates it.

---

But wait – Dreger’s claim is that activists value truth too little in their quests for justice.  Does this hold true for the activists who attacked Michael Bailey?

Again, Dreger seems to not much care.  She devotes a lot of space to the claims made by these activists, but mostly to express confusion over them.  Noting that some of them display what look to her like signs of autogynephilia, she scratches her head: why are they angry at a book for talking about autogynephilia?  One would think that someone in Dreger’s position – someone interested in getting to the bottom of situations where truth and justice appear to conflict – ought to answer a question like this.  Dreger doesn’t.  Her attitude is basically: “who are these weird people attacking my friend Michael?  What do they want?  They’re so confusing!  Michael is a scientist, so maybe they don’t like science?  Jeez, who knows!!!”

What she substitutes for consideration of these issues – and let me be clear, this is not nothing – is a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the nasty, dishonest ways in which the activists tried to ruin Michael Bailey’s reputation.  They were, in fact, really nasty.  But people don’t just do things like that for no reason.  What about the larger questions of truth and justice here?  Why do these activists believe Michael Bailey is so harmful?  Could it be the case that Bailey is harmful, to the point that defaming him is a net good?

Dreger never mentions this sort of idea, but it hangs uncomfortably over her whole book.  She bemoans the fact that her work on Maria New – which is generally polite and non-nasty, if very harsh on New – has failed to make appreciable waves in the world, beyond loading the first page of Google results with dex-critical pages.  On the other hand, Bailey’s book is now solely known as the subject of a stormy controversy, which received huge amounts of media discussion.  What if nasty activism is sometimes necessary to get the job done?  What if simply having both truth and justice on your side isn’t enough?  And, putting it the other way around, how can Dreger assume that the anti-Bailey crowd didn’t have truth and justice on its side, just because they were nasty and vicious to her friend?

In Dreger’s telling, Andrea James is a scary asshole who sends her possibly-physical threats via email, and Michael Bailey and Napoleon Chagnon are precious cinnamon rolls.  But fighting for truth-and-justice is not the same as identifying the Nice People and the Mean People.  These may in fact be (I hate to say it) largely unrelated endeavors.

A serious book about activism, science, truth and justice would begin with these disquieting possibilities, and then explore from there.  (One example that book might look at: Dreger’s earlier non-nasty activism for intersex people has gotten stuff done.)  Dreger’s book instead stays in an overly cozy universe, where “fighting for good” and “defending her lovable buddies against the bad meanies” can never be conflicting goals.

“What if nasty activism is sometimes necessary to get the job done?  What if simply having both truth and justice on your side isn’t enough?”

I really want more serious treatment of this question from someone sensible. Obviously I really hope the answer is no, and I am tired of discourse from people who seem like they would actively prefer the answer to be yes (although maybe it’s only my bias making them seem that way.) But yeah, doe anyone know of any decent book-length discussions of the issue which look at real-life situations?

The answer is no because the moment you decide that nasty activism is necessary to get the job done you completely lose the capacity to distinguish “cases when nasty activism is a distasteful necessity” from “cases where nasty activism can be used to punish people for saying things that make me upset, or just for the crime of being unpopular and perceptible to me.”

This is proving too much. If one contrasts nasty activism to violence, one could say the exact same thing, and to some degree it’s quite true (PoliceMob being a very good example of insufficiently restrained violence, contrast with BadSJMob), but the actually correct answer would probably be “it’s possible to use it usefully, but most of the time it’s a bad idea and completely abstaining from it is way less likely to be harmful than using it indiscriminately”.

TL;DR and a fucking massive disclaimer to not get this misunderstood and misrepresented by everyone: I think most nastiness is excessive and unwarranted, but consider it at least possibly excusable in some situations where people are reacting to sufficiently shitty things, and Bailey is up there in the list of “those few cases where nastiness and extremism might be okay”, along with the likes of Judge Rotenberg Centre etc.; and it’s really shitty that if I say “Bailey is terrible, scorn him”, some asshole somewhere will take it as endorsement of heaping abuse on some kid whose only crime was not being up to date with their shibboleths.

(descriptions of dirty tricks, nasty sj, and other dark underbelly-of-the-world things below the cut)

Keep reading

2 weeks ago · tagged #nastiness cw #transmisogyny cw #cissexism cw #suicide cw #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 54 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink

argumate:

@socialjusticemunchkin:

[…]

I’m not against the book and I don’t really want to be mean and I was entertained by all the exerpts I’ve seen of it, but I just think that there is ~complexity~ at play which pattern-matches to the kinds of things that have empirically been very harmful to people and ideas I care about and thus there is some cause for concern in how said ~complexity~ is addressed.

That’s fair enough, but I feel there is a certain hypersensitivity issue that comes up repeatedly around these topics.

And I realise that even by framing it in those terms I’m sort of playing into the narrative, eg. it sounds like I’m accusing people of caring too much and hence implicitly endorsing deaths and genocide, which is far from the truth. But there seems to be a greased waterslide where anything that smacks of mockery gets associated with every act of mockery ever, particularly the really nasty ones.

Ultimately it always boils down to whether the mockery is detected as coming from inside the tent or outside the tent, because mockery from outsiders cannot be tolerated or it will lead to gulags and terrible suffering.

But mockery is a common part of criticism, and forbidding criticism from outside the tent unless it can be expressed in more respectful and restrained terms even than those used by insiders basically shuts down all possible criticism.

I mean you give various examples of how mockery can have bad consequences, but they are not all very compelling. Many critics of cryopreservation mock it out of sheer frustration that people keep persisting with methods that cannot work, arguably a misallocation of resources that can lead to deaths from opportunity cost alone. (And of course proponents of cryopreservation can mock those who oppose it, when they are aren’t being outraged about Deathists).

While the dudes in dresses rhetoric often accompanies violence, I think it would be simplistic to say that it causes the violence. You could say that letting it pass unchallenged excuses the violence and sends a signal about what is acceptable.

But now the discussion has suddenly shifted from a mocking tone being used in philosophical discussions to actual violence and murder! I’ve seen plenty of jokes made at the expense of P-zombies, but as far as I know none of them have resulted in acts of aggression against people who lack qualia.

This isn’t intended as a defence of mocking people or being a jerk. But I think that some humour is justifiable in response to published texts pushing a political or philosophical worldview explicitly intended to convince others, and that forbidding any attempt at humour would make for a poorer world.

(And you know, someone would have to go searching through LessWrong and edit out any sarcastic remarks about talking snakes in the garden of Eden, and that sounds like way too much work).

My argument is basically that mocking the weird-sounding arguments that are low-status is significantly more harmful than mocking the weird-sounding arguments that are commonly accepted, and that I’d really appreciate it if people did less of the first type of mocking and if they are unable to tell the difference then doing less mocking whatsoever would be nice. (Heuristic for determining mocking: is it likely to feed into a pattern where people dismiss something out of hand based on the stereotype: “dudes in dresses lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why trans people should be taken seriously, and “human popsicles lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why attempts at cryonics (or alternative technologies pursuing the same goals) should be taken seriously, and “robot gods lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why AI should be taken seriously.)

If I could achieve such an equilibrium by reducing the amount of “talking snakes lol” in the world I’d take the deal. And I want to scorn the people who only focus on mocking (not really blaming the author so much, but rather the people who take it as an excuse to engage in “robot gods lol” and “rationalists are nazis lol”) without having adequately engaged the arguments; it’s one thing to have “here’s my thorough argument for why I don’t believe in cryonics working: (…) in summary, human popsicles lol” because at least it has some actual arguments to address (and Cthulhu knows I’m sometimes snarky in my own writing), while just “human popsicles lol” makes it way too easy to dismiss attempts at addressing it with simple repetition of “human popsicles lol”.

I don’t know if this makes any sense as written, but it does in my head, and the brainpattern-to-language translation is at fault if it doesn’t.

1 month ago · tagged #cissexism cw #basilisk bullshit #transmisogyny cw #death cw #status games cw · 122 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

argumate:

@socialjusticemunchkin:

That fucking basilisk story was totally misrepresented though.

Sure, it is entertaining to say “freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him” and I always enjoy such entertainment, but I enjoy it as cheap self-decrepating humor while many others seem to actually take it as argumentation and that is a bad thing. The basilisk was a security hole in the software of some human brains that needed investigating and patching so that it would not present a potential issue later.

I’m no stranger to seemingly unintuitive ideas that are trivial to mock despite being actually way more serious and thus anything that smells like an attempt to avoid addressing such things by pointing out how superficially ridiculous they appear puts The One Which Watches The Watchers into Defcon 3. I don’t think I should need to point out that “haha basilisk lol look at these fucking bayesians” is exactly the same kind of argument as “haha look at this scrawny dude who thinks he can be a lesbian just by popping some magic pills and wearing skirts lolnope”.

The Basilisk story fits in with various themes of the book, such as “red pill” ideas that drive one to madness and or reveal the hidden horror at the heart of things, plus the end of humanity and various attempts to hasten or avoid it.

For the Basilisk to be an issue in the first place requires accepting a whole bunch of propositions about the nature of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and future recoverability of information. But although this particular formulation is highly specific to the LessWrong community, as a literary phenomenon it crops up elsewhere in a variety of other guises, which is interesting.

Finally, please remember that Eliezer proposed giving lectures in a clown suit to avoid building up a cult of unnecessary formality and respect for appearances. People are awfully sensitive about the merest hint of sneer culture, and it is actually possible to have mild teasing that doesn’t result in pogroms.

Because “haha human popsicles lol” has never [possibly] resulted in gross misallocation of humanity’s resources and massive amounts of [possibly] unnecessary deaths, enforced by both coercively banning and culturally scorning this silly thing no sane person would engage in

Because “haha insect rights lol” has never resulted in people dismissing the [possible] horrible utilitarian catastrophe that might be going on, enforced by culturally scorning this silly thing no respectable person would engage in (and it can be argued that ag-gag laws are also coercively trying to ban animal rights work)

Because “haha dudes in dresses lol” has never resulted in people trying to morally and violently mandate vulnerable populations out of existence, enforced by both coercively banning and culturally scorning this silly thing no sane person would engage in

Because “haha adults watching cartoons lol” has never resulted in genuinely non-conforming people suffering unnecessarily, enforced by culturally scorning this silly thing no respectable person would engage in (and it can be argued that some laws are also coercively banning parts of it)

Because we live in a libertarian utopia where the vox populi can’t eradicate unpopular ideas by scorning dem and voting the scorn into violent enforcement

Because insiders being self-decrepating and outsiders being mocking is the exact same thing

Because none of us have ever had experience from living at the bottom of the status ladder

Because such a ladder definitely doesn’t exist and any attempts to claim that there are positions of informal power which dramatically influence the actual material effects of teasing are cultural marxism and sjw propaganda

I’m not against the book and I don’t really want to be mean and I was entertained by all the exerpts I’ve seen of it, but I just think that there is ~complexity~ at play which pattern-matches to the kinds of things that have empirically been very harmful to people and ideas I care about and thus there is some cause for concern in how said ~complexity~ is addressed.

1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #cissexism cw #transmisogyny cw #neckbeards are my ingroup #death cw #status games cw · 122 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

argumate:

The reaction (ha!) to Neoreaction a Basilisk from the local rationalist(-adjacent) community has been narrowly focused on these core issues:

1. Is this book accusing Yudkowsky of being neoreactionary?

2. No really, is it? I mean why else would it group him with Moldbug?

3. That fuckin’ Basilisk story, that was totally misinterpreted.

Having read it, I think it’s helpful to understand that this book is not attempting to be the annotated history of Internet politics circa 2k10, and the claims that it does make in service of its overall trajectory are modest and reasonable.

It is also worth remembering that not every work of literature is a textbook intended to be interpreted as a sequence of logical propositions. A community that sees value in communicating information in the form of fanfiction, poetry, and jokes should be well aware of this.

Finally the book does not just discuss Yudkowsky, Moldbug, and Land, but also the Matrix, Hannibal, and the works of Milton and Blake, among other things. Tying these topics together in no way implies that Yudkowsky is neoreactionary, any more than it implies that Nick Land is one of the Wachowski siblings or that Moldbug is a good writer.

That fucking basilisk story was totally misrepresented though.

Sure, it is entertaining to say “freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him” and I always enjoy such entertainment, but I enjoy it as cheap self-decrepating humor while many others seem to actually take it as argumentation and that is a bad thing. The basilisk was a security hole in the software of some human brains that needed investigating and patching so that it would not present a potential issue later.

I’m no stranger to seemingly unintuitive ideas that are trivial to mock despite being actually way more serious and thus anything that smells like an attempt to avoid addressing such things by pointing out how superficially ridiculous they appear puts The One Which Watches The Watchers into Defcon 3. I don’t think I should need to point out that “haha basilisk lol look at these fucking bayesians” is exactly the same kind of argument as “haha look at this scrawny dude who thinks he can be a lesbian just by popping some magic pills and wearing skirts lolnope”.

1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #cissexism cw #transmisogyny cw · 122 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

trickytalks:

ilzolende:

socialjusticemunchkin:

ilzolende:

argumate:

I mean I’ve seen videos where they talk to little kids and it’s like hey Sally what do you think about the wage gap? and Billy you should really stop contributing to rape culture, don’t you think? and hey they’re eight years old, sure it helps to teach about communication and consent etc. but these kids are going to be convinced that gender is a warzone before they hit puberty, let alone college.

unsurprising that an increasing number say fuck this I’m out, nb4life y’all

just look at the incentives

you say that like “nonbinary” or “agender” is truly neutral

i would guess enbies are, on average, more supportive of intersectional feminism than either men or women

Speaking as a supporter of intersectional feminism, this makes perfect sense as a central point of intersectional feminism is to stop the war and establish a fair peace treaty. Of course there are those career guerrillas who are incentivized to see the war going on because they can’t imagine anything else, but the rest of us are actually trying to solve the problems.

There’s promethean-steel-feminism!intersectional feminism, and then there’s, uh, “intersectional” “feminism”. I feel that nonbinarity is correlated somewhat with the latter, unfortunately. Which is definitely a faction.

The other dimension that possibly divides different kinds of feminists is the relative focus on gender abolitionism. On the one hand, everyone is treated equally if gender does not exist. On the other, people with strong gender identities, and trans people who want to pass/express their strong gender identity with coded body language, clothing, etc – can’t. I imagine cis-by-default, nonbinary, and agender people would be more likely to support the first, while trans people would be more likely to support the second.

And all these being under the umbrella of intersectional feminism.

Me bridging gaps between different groups seems to be a thing, and as a non-binary trans person my gender abolitionism is basically gender pluralism taken to its logical conclusion.

I don’t expect gender to stop existing, but it can probably be transformed into unrecognizability by morphological freedom and abolishing cultural prescriptiveness.

For every single thing in hard gender some trans people benefit from, some other trans people suffer from it just as well, and people who want to be “the kind of people who wear skirts and like flowers and have a certain kind of body language” can still be that kind of people even if we destroy the idea that trans women aren’t women if they wear pants. There are numerous people with strong gender identities who can’t be perceived as members of their gender if said gender is assumed to consist of cultural things that are personally incompatible with them.

A huge number of trans people seem to be basically “gender is bullshit, I’m definitely a woman and people should respect that, but I don’t want to have to suffer all the social prescriptions to prove it, I want to be an individual person damnit not a role (still 100% woman though you don’t take that away from me)” and I can’t see how they would be incompatible with postgender hyperpluralist morphological freedom utopia which allows people to specify their gender as a modifier which is not intrinsically linked to their clothes/body language/etc. and most importantly not invalidated by not having the right kind of clothes/body language/etc.

I understand that in our current cistem dystopia some women would be misgendered as men if men wearing skirts was more normal, but that isn’t a flaw in “men wearing skirts was more normal” but rather in “would be misgendered if”. Assholes not respecting people’s genders is the problem, and trying to shift around the disrespect (”don’t invalidate us, invalidate those other women instead!”) doesn’t help, eradicating the disrespect does. That’s what must be done. Trying to survive in the cistem is a necessity I will not condemn, but trying to maintain the cistem of disrespecting people’s genders is a violation of others’ self-determination and gender freedom, and as a free and open source gender advocate I will not tolerate it.

This is what I want to abolish. The disrespect and the invalidation and the idea that people aren’t allowed to choose. Another’s right to choose is not a violation of my gender freedom; my attempt to impose my views on gender upon them would be.

2 months ago · tagged #steel feminism #cissexism cw #transmisogyny cw #truscum cw · 36 notes · source: argumate · .permalink