You’re a helluva contributor here, Max. You keep doing as you do.
Sorry, GreenWyvern, I’ll have to decline. I don’t want to run afoul of the new rule,
- Please do not state or imply that transgender people are mentally ill. We realize the question remains controversial; Cecil has said as much […] However, we’re not going to settle the matter here, and raising it tends to poison other discussion of transgender issues. Please keep your opinions on the subject to yourself.
~Max
I’m not sure when you were born, but there are quite a few incidents out there. In 1997, the KKK tried to blow up a natural gas processing plant. 1981, KKK hung a man named Michael Donald. There were 30 arson fires at predominantly black churches in 1995-96. The fires were linked to KKK members.
I could keep going, but my fingers would get tired before I got to the 2000s. The KKK continues to be an organization that uses violence to promote its agenda.
One use of head covering is hiding your identity. If there’s no suspect to charge, it won’t necessarily make it into “violent crime” type of statistics. Also, I don’t know of a membership list so I’d have trouble differentiating hate crime by random criminal vs hate crime by kkk member. I’d assume kkk if burning crosses were involved though.
More to the point, you are glossing over all the ways to use violence without it getting recorded somewhere google-able. Letters, brick notes, or being told by a respected member of the community “we don’t want your kind”. Putting up nooses as decorations. Mailbox smashing. All sorts of ways to threaten violence “if you don’t leave”.
Then there you go, I was factually wrong about that.
~Max
And people say the Pit is a hotbed of incivility. 
Some people aren’t happy with the way they look, and get injections of a small dose of lethal toxin. Some people need surgery to match appearance to self image. Some people are okay once they know who they are. Levels of dysphoria will vary in both cis and trans people.
“pre-op” is inaccurate, or too vague to be useful. There are multiple routes, some requiring multiple surgeries. Some operations are more risky than others. So a person could be pre-everything, post hormone pre op, post some ops and scheduling more, done all surgeries with tolerable risk levels, or did everything. All that with or without some level of dysphoria.
You could be interacting with a trans person every day, and not know because they don’t talk about it because of those water cooler language. “No currency” can also mean “will attack and cause injury if they encounter it”
This is an interesting point. Much current reasoning from progressives seems to run the other way - if an opinion is hurtful, if must therefore be wrong. Hence the unspoken (or explicit, in this case) ban on discussing certain topics, mentioning certain facts, and investigating contentious issues.
I think the solution is to separate normative beliefs - how things should be - from descriptive beliefs - how things are. Morality should be based on the former, not the latter, otherwise you put yourself in a precarious position where the basis of your morality and worldview is susceptible to empirical disproof.
I’m sure this is really a thing that happens, and not just some broad brush bullshit.
I love how confidently you state complete falsehoods.
This rule is literally banning discussing the issue because it’s hurtful, not because it has necessarily been shown to be incorrect. (For the record, I do not believe transgender people in general are mentally ill. Obviously like any other population they can suffer from mental illness.)
Do you agree with @BigT that bigotry is hurtful because it’s factually wrong? Or only because it’s morally wrong? Can it be morally wrong to tell the factual truth as you sincerely believe it?
I’m not sure what you mean by factually wrong there. Homophobia, for example, seems morally wrong to me, but what facts are in question? Saying “women are dumber than men” is bigoted, misogynist, and factually wrong, but that’s only one form of misogyny. Maybe if you fleshed this out a bit, I’d have a clue about what you’re talking about.
As to your last question, “factual truth” and “sincerely believe” don’t belong in the same sentence. Something is factual or it isn’t, whether you believe it or not. If someone thinks that some group is genetically inferior, it’s factually wrong whether they sincerely believe it or not, and it’s morally wrong because it’s bigoted.
Like I said, this is all broad brush bullshit.
I’m not trying to discuss the forbidden topic of whether transgender = mental illness or not, just explain why saying “this is not up for debate” isn’t about factual information being suppressed due to hurt feelings at all.
You’re asking about objective truth to the question, “is being transgender a mental illness?”. However, that ignores a very serious issue with the question itself. Namely, that there can’t be a factual answer to a question about categorization.
Factually, is Pluto a planet? You could put on your nerdenheimer glasses and say “Well, actually, in 2006 the International Astronomical Union defined “planet” as…” and give that sort of “factual” answer. But all you’re doing is saying what some other people said their opinion was. Other people may have other opinions, and presenting their opinions is also “factual”.
The thing is, there is no neat category in the real world. You can’t right-click different celestial bodies, go to their Properties tab, and see whether God considers them planets or not. “Planet” is just a term we made up to describe something we saw, long before we understood the actual mechanics behind what we were seeing. It is an imprecise definition. AND IT DOESN’T EVEN MATTER. Whether Pluto is a planet or not doesn’t change the scientific information we can gain from studying it. The astronomers who say that Pluto is a planet and the astronomers who say it is not do not disagree on any factual information. The only thing they disagree on is whether it is a planet or not.
Mental Illness is an even more vague and poorly defined category than “planet”. Worse, whether a condition is a mental illness or not DEFINITELY impacts the way we treat people with that condition.
So arguing over whether transgender identity is a mental illness or not is NOT a debate over factual information, even if some people want to portray it that way. It is a debate over categorization and by extension how trans people should be treated.
Note that factual claims are totally in bounds. We can talk all day about whether Pluto has collapsed into a spherical shape under its own gravity, we can talk about whether it cleared its orbit of other bodies, and we can talk about whether Pluto is a valid candidate for colonization. The only thing we aren’t talking about is whether Pluto falls in the planet bucket or not.
Well, let’s take this example. An example of a normative belief would be that society should treat men and women equally and each should have the same rights, barring medical issues that only affect one or the other. Examples of factual beliefs would be that men and women have the same average IQs, or that both sexes are equally good at mental rotation. Believing the first need not depend on the second being true.
Would disagreeing with either of the latter two claims be bigotry, or otherwise morally wrong in your opinion?
Belief does not affect the truth of something. But we are not some kind of enlightened god-like beings able to know the truth with perfect confidence. It is perfectly possible for reasonable people to disagree on what is true, and even if we agree, the arrival of new evidence may change our minds. The question is do you think a person is morally wrong if they honestly disagree with one of your factual beliefs? What happens if it later turns out that you were mistaken as to the truth and they were correct?
“Here’s a study that shows that women seem to be better at this certain kind of reasoning. Let’s discuss whether that’s due to some innate difference or some early childhood conditioning.” Not bigoted.
“I would never hire a man to do this because women are better at <something>”. Bigoted and wrong – even when there are population-level differences, there will always be so much overlap that you can’t make any judgements on the individual level.
Your last paragraph is, once again, much too general to respond to. And, even if there are some population-level difference between various groups of people, there will be much too much overlap to justify any sort of bigoted behavior.
I would interpret a ban on discussing whether Pluto is a planet as meaning is it at the very least extremely risky to bring up those facts. Almost certainly it would be seen by both mods and other posters as an attempt to get around the ban.
So, is all of this about your obvious and tiresome transphobia? Because if so, I’m out.
Sure. But is it bigoted in itself to believe (and say) that there are some statistical differences between various groups, at a population level? Earlier you said:
What if some researcher claimed to have shown there was a few points difference in average IQ? Bigoted, or no? Would it change your opinion on how people should be treated?
Researchers have been trying for years to justify their bigotry and have been wrong every time. At some point, you just say, “no, that’s bigoted”. And, as I already explained, if some researcher actually shows a few points difference in average IQ at some population level, it still wouldn’t change my opinion on how people should be treated, since there will be so much variation at the individual level.
I’m not going to stop hiring Hungarians just because some researcher showed that, at the population level, Hungarians have a few points less IQ, because this Hungarian is highly qualified and may be smarter than that other person who happens to be from a group with a few more IQ points on average.
There are likely innate differences between, for example, men and women in some types of mental gymnastics at the global level, but that doesn’t mean that some man will be better or worse at that particular task than some woman.
Do you have evidence that IQ measured anything relevant? Do you have evidence that the difference is due to biologically innate differences and not about how our culture treats women vs men?