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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Middle ground

471 replies

HDDD · 15/09/2019 12:45

I've been trying to follow conversations online in regard to gender critical thought, pronouns, selfID, transrights, lesbian erasure etc. And all I can find is extreme views on both sides. Is there a middle ground? Is it here? Is Twitter too toxic? I want to be informed not screamed at.

OP posts:
PotatoShape · 17/09/2019 13:53

@BickerinBrattle I thought women were at fault for having 'eggshell skulls', not the violent men who attack them??

Tyrotoxicity · 17/09/2019 15:01

Take away the words to describe who's of risk at what and why and you've made it much harder for the potential prey group to protect themselves.

This is it, my feline overlady.

This is what socialisation is for, and this is what it does, and this is why it does it.

This is what mammals do.

This is why the equality lie persists.

This is how they seized control, and this is how they maintain it. And this is why they won't let us splinter off - they're terrified that we'll figure out how to fix it (and we have; they're just not listening) and they're terrified they'll be annihilated in the process. So they annihilate us all instead.

Lurkers: if you want to know the extremist view, that was it, right there. This isn't an accident. This is a fucking war. Keep focusing on the battleground that's in front of you, and at the same time step back and flip it, so you can see through the lie and work out what victory actually looks like.

Until you see it, you'll just keep unwittingly recreating it in another direction.

Stop thinking of yourself as a fixed point. Extend yourself through time, start identifying as an essential part of the multiplicity that is the human species, face your fear of death, and open your eyes.

Or, y'know, go and read up on trauma therapies and communication skills and parenting classes, work out the underlying theories, and click it together. All you need is three things to click together. Recursion will do the rest.

You have a brain. You're a mammal. Be a mammal.

And how mammals work is: you make the picture, and you step into the picture, and then the baby makes the picture and the baby steps into the picture.

It really is as simple as that, if you open your eyes.

(Am I radical enough yet, Kittens? Grin)

TheProdigalKittensReturn · 17/09/2019 15:08

Too radical for the people you're addressing, I think! In all seriousness, it's such a big mental shift realizing the enormity of what you're up against and just how deeply ingrained into society all the harmful stuff is that I think a lot of people get a glimpse of it and basically just go, nope, too scary, if I acknowledge this then it destabilizes my current worldview too much so I'm just going to cover my eyes and stick my finders in my ears. It's not there if I refuse to look!

As a possible alternate approach I offer Gloria Steinem's "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off"

Tyrotoxicity · 17/09/2019 15:12

when it comes to dysphoria, any dysphoria, it's an mismatch between the body and how the brain perceived the body

Point of clarity - it's not a mismatch between brain and body.

It's a mismatch between mind and body.

That's why they can't find it in the brain.

They're looking for something along the boundary, and they haven't realised the boundary is an illusion. It's not the wall. It's the interface.

The mismatch is cued in through a gendered society and gets entrenched. That's all it is.

NeurotrashWarrior · 17/09/2019 15:16

Good point tyro. Mind and perception which is unique.

TheProdigalKittensReturn · 17/09/2019 15:18

Part of what bothers me about the standard trans dogma is that it's not possible to have a mismatch between your brain and your body because the brain is part of the body. It's not floating off to the side in a jar somewhere.

Tyrotoxicity · 17/09/2019 15:21

And since we're on the subject and I'm off on one now:

Has anyone else worked out free will yet? And how it links into socialised cues not allowing the probability field to collapse into an automatic behavioural-response protocol?

Or is everyone else still looking in the wrong place?

Because until we get this one collectively agreed, you lot are going to keep fucking over the csa victims and then telling us we're regressive when we tell you how you've held us back from healing gendered trauma.

Now that is too radical for this space. Yet it's the truth.

Tyrotoxicity · 17/09/2019 15:36

Part of what bothers me about the standard trans dogma is that it's not possible to have a mismatch between your brain and your body because the brain is part of the body

Rooted in the initial schism within the mind as conscious awareness emerges and refines over the lifetime.

They're still using the language of the oppressor.

The mind/body distinction? It's an illusion. The boundary isn't a Real Thing. It's not a fixed point. The problem is in the interface.

If you identify as a fixed point, you identify your problems as fixed points. And everyone who's entrenched on the science vs woo debate can't step back and flip it and see the picture.

This idea that bodies are really real and minds are something else, something different and inexplicable and not as really-real as everything else? That is the root of the problem.

The awesome thing about the schism between science and woo is, when you go far enough in one direction and then reverse the polarity and see how far you've come, you can step out of the story and see why everyone else has got their brain tied in a knot.

Melroses · 17/09/2019 15:39

Delurking to say thankyou to BickerinBrattle for the excellent post. It made trawling through the disrupters worthwhile.

OldCrone · 17/09/2019 15:52

Part of what bothers me about the standard trans dogma is that it's not possible to have a mismatch between your brain and your body because the brain is part of the body. It's not floating off to the side in a jar somewhere.

Yes, and a clear difference between male and female brains would destroy the idea of a 'female brain in a male body' (or vice versa), as would the finding that there is no clear difference between male and female brains.

If there is no clear difference between brains from female or male bodies, in the sense that certain traits only ever occur in one sex or the other, then there is no such thing as a female brain or a male brain.

If there is a clear difference between male brains and female brains (ie there are traits that are found only in brains from males or only in brains from females), then this also proves that it is not possible to have a male brain in a female body (or vice versa). As soon as you find a trait which occurs in brains from both male and female bodies, it is no longer a specific male or female trait, but one which is found in both sexes.

Tyrotoxicity · 17/09/2019 15:57

Spot on, OldCrone.

Step back, flip it, and look at it.

Bodies are born sexed. Brains are blank slates.
OR
Brains are born sexed. Bodies are blank slates.

Socialisation operates on the mind.

Put the mind back in, and think it through.

OldCrone · 17/09/2019 15:57

As soon as you find a trait which occurs in brains from both male and female bodies, it is no longer a specific male or female trait, but one which is found in both sexes.

Just clarifying what I mean here. If there is some trait, which to date has only ever been found in female brains, and suddenly we find a male who also has this trait, it means that the hypothesis that this was a female-only attribute is wrong, and it is actually something which is found in both sexes, not that this particular male has a female brain.

TheProdigalKittensReturn · 17/09/2019 15:58

Which is why they don't want any research done. On some level they know everything they're claiming is nonsense.

Also, on the brain mapping idea, if your brain is perceiving parts of your body incorrectly then the problem there would lie in the brain, not the body. It is not possible to have the "wrong" body, barring some kind of Face Off like scenario where we pop people's skulls open and switch the brains (and that doesn't kill both patients).

LangCleg · 17/09/2019 16:16

Which is why they don't want any research done. On some level they know everything they're claiming is nonsense.

Well, also, it's a heresy thing, no? Religious fanatics rely on faith and any questioning of the catechism cannot be tolerated.

Tyrotoxicity · 17/09/2019 16:32

Mm, Kittens, but your brain doesn't really perceive the body map. Your brain perceives sense data going in (from both within and without) and crunches it through the gendered&socialised protocols.

Your conscious mind is the bit that is doing the perceiving. The mind is perception (ongoing, present continuous, continually emerging).

Your mind perceives your body wrongly because the ongoing socialisation process has fucked up the cues. It sees the mismatch between Out There and In Here; it either internalises or externalises the problem.

It doesn't work for either side, because the problem isn't just out there and it isn't just in here. It's in the dynamic of the interface.

Stop thinking in fixed points. Stop thinking about preprogrammed traits. Mind is not preprogrammed. Mind is emergent.

Mind emerges into a world full of sexually dimorphic bodies locked a power imbalance. When the shit hits the fan, the mind sees, the ultimate endpoint is always the same: female body accommodates for as long as it can, and then the male body overpowers.

Patriarchy isn't just out there. It's been emerging and coiling itself around the individual human mind for millennia.

The other side sound mad because we have to hold the line on brains-aren't-sexed, and everybody is pretending the mind is irrelevant. And everybody is holding the line on free-will-is-real so we can hold them to account, which means nobody looks at what socialisation really is.

Here's a clue: it's not a fixed point.

You have to be courageous enough to get very, very radical, before you truly find the middle ground.

SmellbowSpaceBowl · 17/09/2019 16:36

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Tyrotoxicity · 17/09/2019 16:36

On some level they know everything they're claiming is nonsense.

On some level they know that what they're saying is only nonsense because they're in denial about the socialisation element.

TheProdigalKittensReturn · 17/09/2019 16:41

Mind is still incorrect though! Body is still male no matter how much mind might be going nope nope totally female no cock to see here. And nobody can see into someone else's mind, but they can see the body.

The central problem with the trans delusion is the belief that they can somehow impose their own self perception on other people. But they can't, and telling them that they'll be able to if they just finally get rid of all those nasty bigots who refuse to see what exists only in their minds is just giving them false hope. Which isn't as kind as the people doing it seem to think it is, and is extremely, aggressively unkind to the people being ordered to pretend to see something that isn't there.

If someone is mad, for the lack of a better word, then that's unfortunate, but they don't have an inherent right to try to force other people into madness too in the hopes that it might make them feel better.

Tyrotoxicity · 17/09/2019 16:45

I could, Smellbow, but it wouldn't make perfect sense to you. You have to click it together with your own internal experience. You have to figure out for yourself what everyone else is pointing at when they use the word 'mind'.

Your own internal experience and your ongoing perceptual understanding thereof? That's your mind. The whole sensory emporium. That's your version of the universe, perception perceiving itself, being projected out on top of whatever the hell the string theorists think they're talking about. Everything you see, everything you hear, everything you touch - it's just data going in.

Mind is how it feels to be a brain.

If you want an analogy, borrow one from a superficial understanding of the weird-end physics woo.

The brain's the particle, the mind's the wave. People think the body's the particle and the brain's the wave. The body and the brain are one. One thing. One point. The internal mind-experience is the second. Everyone forgets to look for the third point that clicks them together. Which in this case is the illusion of chronological time.

Tyrotoxicity · 17/09/2019 16:50

The central problem with the trans delusion is the belief that they can somehow impose their own self perception on other people

In fairness this is the basic problem every human mind faces. It's not limited to trans people. We keep trying to do it to men (yo, feminism!) and it's not working.

We still characterise it as Us and Them. They're wrong, where "they" is anyone who isn't in our current in-group, anyone whom our sense of self hasn't extended to cover.

Most people get, eventually, that "other people have minds, just like I do!" And then they expect everyone's mind to work just like theirs. And then they get cross when it doesn't. Theory of mind needs continual exercising or it atrophies.

SmellbowSpaceBowl · 17/09/2019 16:51

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

SmellbowSpaceBowl · 17/09/2019 16:54

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

TheProdigalKittensReturn · 17/09/2019 16:57

I'm not sure most trans people have any functional theory of mind. There seems to be a real inability to comprehend the fact that other people aren't seeing what you're telling them they should see, and that shouting at them will not solve that problem!

"You see a woman!"

"I don't, though"

"Die in a fire! Do you see a woman now?"

"Still no."

SmellbowSpaceBowl · 17/09/2019 16:59

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Tyrotoxicity · 17/09/2019 17:07

No I get that - I’ve got a philosophy degree. I’m struggling to reconcile the subjectivity of lived experience with the biological fact of sex.

Take out the fixed point, then.

The subjectivity is entwined around the ongoing biology - and both are entwined around the dynamic between the two. Recursive feedback loops, emerging and feeding back into one another continuously. Three things clicking together to make one. The pattern repeats within the mind, within the basic family unit, within the social group. They co-evolve.

And evolution isn't a fixed point either. It's in the dynamic.

As for the trans/ASD/sexuality link - I've cracked it. But I'm nearly out of battery, bugger.