Ⓐ ANTISTATE Ⓐ ANTICAPITAL

Capitalism is a system of exploitation, if you’re winning its because someone else is losing. 

Socialiam is a much better system. If the government is winning, it’s because you know you’ll be executed by firing squad if you refuse to work without pay

Holy shit that profile pic URL combo.

Fantastic argument and you’re one to talk

Socialists: “Workers should own and control the means of production themselves in order to keep the product of their labor and not be exploited.”

This guy: “uhhhhh have fun with government death squads I definitely understand what socialism is.”

The fact they deactivated makes this exchange so much better

I will outlive all these freaks

People who think there are two fixed distinct genders are going to have a bad time when they find out that not only is that specifically not true but literally every single category is artificially constructed and imposed on a fundamentally non dualist world.

Two distinct sexes …. not genders

You know who else is going to have a bad time? Every postmodern dumbass like OP who would rather pretend nothing is real than deal with the harsh truth of reality.

Maybe stop circle jerking to the ideology of 18th century White pedophiles and develop some fucking empathy.

you can talk about dualism in expected behavior and in what is believed to be inherent qualities of the sexes there’s an entire body of work by simone de beauvoir about it….that doesn’t mean the sexes aren’t real. but that’s not convenient philosophy for your ideology is it

I wanted to use both of these responses to point out some missed nuance here.

I don’t even mention biological sex in the original post, nor do I really make any claims about things not being “real“. Here I am not saying that biological sex is not real, but that the categorization of gender is by no means absolute and contains many things which are in fact quite arbitrary.

I think to understand the distinction its important to clarify what I mean by constructing a category. The universe does not contain inherent discrete categories, every human being is a unique combination of literally billions of traits, if you take any two people there will be some similarities and some differences. You can of course divide people broadly based on a singular specific trait, lets say for the purpose of argument that you divide people according to their sex chromosomes into two groups, XY and XX. We’ll pretend that these categories are mutually exclusive even though the strict medical reality is otherwise. 

Splitting a population along one axis does not make a functional category, saying X person is biologically male or biologically female is a true statement, but without associating other traits there is no information contained within that statement. I.E. all that would be gained from sorting people into male and female sexes would be knowledge of the individual group members’ chromosomes. When we make categories we tie traits to each other. We begin to add layers of related (or perceived to be related) properties. I will continue to use gender as the example category but this really applies to most things, even scientific concepts like what populations of animals belong to which species. In the case of biological sex, sex chromosomes are just one trait contained within the category. The second layer of traits is what are generally called secondary sex characteristics. What genitalia a person has, the shape of their breasts, body hair distribution, proportions of the body etc. The strength of the connections of each of these things to the sex chromosomes varies dramatically. Its fair to say that most people have genitalia matching their chromosomes, however even this is not true 100% of the time. Something like body proportionality is much more loosely tied to biological sex.

Take for example the ratio between the length of the index finger and the length of the ring finger. The distributions of this trait in men and women looks like this

There is a statistically significant difference in the male and female distributions of this trait, however there is also a lot of overlap. The same is true of something like height. Although there is a clear correlation between chromosomal sex and height, the casual mechanism of height is extremely complicated and and cannot be tied solely to chromosomal sex.  All of this is just to point out that the difficulty in relating traits, and to illustrate that even in the case of biological sex, categories quickly become fuzzy around the edges and often have significant overlap. The boxes aren’t so neat and we haven’t even started talking about gender yet.

I can see a possible counter argument here, and it goes like “Well ok some things are not so cleanly related to chromosomal sex, but nobody is trying to divide people into sexes based on things like height or digit ratio, using chromosomes makes the distinction much more definite“. Its important to remember that the usefulness of a category is dependent on the ability to relate traits, the distinction of chromosomes serves no function without relating it to additional traits, which often are not so distinct. This is about where gender starts to enter into it.

Obviously gender categorization predates our knowledge of chromosomes or our modern ability to scientifically investigate biological traits, and more importantly when the vast majority of people interact with gender/sex, they do not use karyotypes or examine genitalia. People perform sex categorization using secondary sex characteristics and (just as prominently) social behaviors traditionally associated with that sex. (clothing, makeup, etc.) The mechanism of this classification really start to generate something separate from biological sex. Where as before we were considering chromosomal sex to be the foundational trait of the sex categorization (or genitalia if you prefer), in the vast majority of sex characterization done in everyday social interaction these traits cannot be used for the simple reason that they are inaccessible. This is why it makes sense to consider gender as separate from sex. The two are significantly related, however the relationship is solely through those less definite secondary sex characteristics and socially dictated behaviors.

Up to this point any feminist should agree. There is clearly nothing that biologically dictates that having XX chromosomes means you should wear a dress, put on makeup, shave, or be subservient to people with XY chromosomes. These traits which, like it or not, currently exist as part of the collective categorization of womanhood are self evidently socially constructed. They have to be explicitly taught to children to perpetuate. The central principle of feminism is based on exactly this idea that the category of gender is packed full of things which are only socially related to biological sex and share no causal link to biology whatsoever. 

Many people have trouble making the next logical step however, which is that gender specific pronouns and names are also clearly only linked to biological sex through social convention. Names and pronouns, how one is referred to, are social traits. If someone born with XY chromosomes wants to be called she/her, dress a certain way or go by a traditionally feminine name there is nothing biologically preventing that. Their sex chromosomes are entirely irrelevant.

It is possible to agree with all of this and come away with the conclusion that the obvious solution is to stop relating any social traits with biological sex, to abolish gender. I wholeheartedly agree. The way social categories are dissolved is by allowing transgression of their boundaries. Trans people are doing just that by exhibiting social traits not associated with their biological sex. By attacking trans people you are guarding those boundaries, helping to reinforce them, not working towards their dissolution.

A note on self identification. People don’t only apply this gender characterization to others, they also use it internally on themselves. Identification is not a static property of the brain, it is the act of identifying the self, it is applying this categorization to the self and coming up with a result (or lack of result in some cases). Identification is a behavior, identifying as a woman is a behavior traditionally associated with people who are biologically female, but this association is again purely social. In reality many people who are not biologically female identify as women. Traditionally this is called a mistaken identification (or often more harshly mental illness) but that really only makes sense if you continue to insist that the social behaviors that traditionally make up womanhood are really tied to biological sex. How can someone be wrong in saying that they associate a set of social behaviors with themselves, solely because those behaviors do not match their biological sex, if we already agree that biological sex is not intrinsically linked to those behaviors? What trans women are identifying with are precisely those social behaviors traditionally associated with women, which we all agree are arbitrarily related to biological sex. This should be relatively clear, as no trans person says “I identify as a person who has XX chromosomes”.

This of course means that “trans” and “cis” are also purely social categories, there is no specific singular biological cause of being trans (or cis). It is possible that in certain social circumstances there would be no need to specifically identify as transgender, in a post gender society anyone could behave as they wish without need for labels and categorization. Unfortunately this is not the world we have to live in, and punishing trans people for not adhering to the traditional links between social behaviors and biological sex does not help us get there.

Getting a lot of terf replies these days and I do not engage because its 100% not worth it but goddamn do they say some stupid stuff lmao. So clearly obsessed with hating trans people they can’t even think critically enough to construct a decent argument.

In order to refine an argument one must consider basic counter arguments and make sure you can address those, but if you are emotionally motivated like these people are you are often unwilling to seriously try and counter your own position which leads to a lot of easily debunked rough draft arguments and cognitive dissonance.

“If you look at Signal’s website today, you’ll find all sorts of celebrity endorsements — Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and even Jack Dorsey. You’ll also find a ‘donate’ button — which, by the way, you shouldn’t press because Signal has plenty of tech oligarch cash on hand these days. What you won’t find is an ‘about’ section that explains Signal’s origin story — a story that involves several million dollars in seed and development capital from Radio Free Asia, a CIA spinoff whose history goes back to 1951 and involves all sorts of weird shit, including its association in the 1970s with the Moonies, the hardcore anti-communist Korean cult.”

Im all for being critical of the involvement of the us government in the declvelopment of cyber security tools, however signal is open source which allows its protocols to be peer reviewed and the actual tool itself has passed essentially all the scrutiny by impartial cyber security experts. None of the criticism presented here (or elsewhere that Ive seen) is rooted in any sort of technical argument about signal itself and comes off as fairly ignorant about how encryption actually works.

So glad we got Biden in there and can now start “pushing him left”. Great job guys.

Hold him accountable! Make your voices heard!

I love holding already elected politicians accountable! If the last four years illustrated anything, its that if a president does things enough people dislike, we can definitely do something about it and the checks on presidential power in this country are definitely functional and not entirely for show.

It really is a shame how much the anti-trans side is allowed to shape public debate about trans people. They’ve spent so much time trying to argue the philosophical question of “are trans people REALLY the gender they identify as“ they’ve honestly managed to convince a lot of us that this a meaningful question that can be answered and not just a diversionary tactic because they can’t really argue for throwing us in jail anymore.

Anti-trans debate saying over and over that we’re all trying to force everyone to admit that we’re really ontologically X gender a lot of us are now actually trying to do that but it literally doesn’t matter and if you just concede the point as meaningless and ultimately unanswerable they really don’t have much follow up. Try to shift these debates to arguments about improving the material conditions of trans people as human beings. Even if you concede that being trans is a mental illness it does not change the fact that trans people deserve housing, employment, and the same basic respect as all humans.

All this being said I do think the philosophical discussion of gender identity is very interesting, however you are not going to be able to really do that with people who are obviously debating in bad faith and who are incredibly invested in maintaining an anti trans view. Those people have already made up their minds. Their arguments are not actually critical in supporting their views, they’re ulteriorly created justifications for basic reactionary bigotry. They will construct a myriad of contradictory logic because all that matter is “winning” combative debate. The arguments do not need to be consistent because they do not construct a framework for actual understanding, they’re designed to overwhelm and obfuscate, bogging down the discussion in pointless technicality and semantics.