The Democrats Need an Honest Conversation on Gender Identity

[Ingenieur]

An interesting article in The Atlantic today, and a sign the tide might be turning in the USA.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/democrats-dishonest-gender-conversation-2024-election/680604/

Most voters think that biological sex is real, and that it matters in law and policy. Instructing them to believe otherwise, and not to ask any questions, is a doomed strategy. By shedding their most extreme positions, the Democrats will be better placed to defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.

Baby steps

And exposure alone doesn’t achieve conversion, in this case - awareness. That does require exposure and interaction. And it is those interactions that are powerful. And leave traces that don’t disappear.

Yes, a lot of the numbers you see in reports from "bots" experts have been calculated as something like "time this post was up" multiplied by "how many people accessed Twitter in that period."

Then they say "this post reached X million people" - in the sense that could have been accessed by that many - when it was actually viewed by 4.

When I search for one of my pet topics on YouTube, I do see a lot of AI bullshit videos these days. They only come up whenI'm doing a specific search and filtering "this week" - which means I am getting the dross that wouldn't show up on a wider search. But they've all got single-digit views. Everyone just ignores them, and they don't get promoted.

I do wonder how effective EyeOfOnion thinks e-mail spam is. Do you know how many people that reaches? As they say:

"A message isn’t sent out once, but thousands of times. To return to the image I attached earlier, the stages just one inauthentic post goes through after being posted means it can be seen by millions, dependent of platform. Even if it deleted at the platform end a few hours after posting, it could still exist on users’ computers. It still does achieve considerable reach."

All that's true of e-mail spam. Not immediately sure what distinguishes the "bots".

Well, that's not going to work. Plenty of soft, shy and gentle men would be extremely uncomfortable in shared spaces with women, not to mention the women being uncomfortable too (and for more reasons).

We can avoid most rough, confident and aggressive men without pretending to be women. In the cases where we can't, well that's part of the human condition. Life sometimes sucks. We muddle through.

Yeah, if the stats from the ads I run on social media were measured specifically on exposures (or views), I could celebrate. But alas, the conversion rate of clicks / shares and actions is the most important metric. Otherwise it is not necessarily even a relevant measure considering the degree of filtering that is done.

What is happening for the leading politicians who have promoted gender ideology is that reality is coming to bite them on the arse. Reality has a way of doing that as it’s what people live every day. Pretty much everyone knows that male is not female even if they deny that. And increasingly more and more people can see how denying that reality is harming females, as well as children who are being lied to that you can change sex and being sent down a path of irreversible harm. And it’s also becoming very clear that this reality-denying ideology attracts chancers and predators who exploit it, and vulnerable people who are harmed by it.

The more time goes on, the more these truths become apparent and the more people experience them first hand, the more those who champion it look insane and ridiculous, and the closer we get to the whole ludicrous dangerous historical mis-step being overturned. That’s how reality works and mistakes corrects themselves, through societal experience of delusion not working out because it’s not real.

it’s like if we replaced doing safety checks and refuelling on planes with prayers. Nothing wrong with praying if that’s important to you and you shouldn’t be discriminated against for it, but it shouldn’t be allowed to replace material reality and safety procedures. If we did do that, even if lots of people went along with it and those who objected were ostracised and called anti-prayer bigots, eventually the mounting numbers of plane crashes would lead to a rethink.

The course correction arises out real-life results. Im not an expert in bots unlike some here and I don’t doubt they can have influence and be used in dangerous ways, but a bot doesn’t make you go through your family member undergoing an unnecessary mastectomy while in the throes of mental illness and at raised risk from the effects of testosterone and suffer horrible complications and then regret. Or women going home without their medal after years of striving because of a male in their category. Or women being raped in prison by other inmates. Or autistic and gay children being sterilised. These are all true and being actively, openly promoted by left-wing parties. Unless bots are AI faking the entire leadership of the Democratic Party, German government, Canadian government etc.

To be fair, I used to readily accept this without questioning it at all.

I believed that I had a gender identity and that everyone else did too. Even when I was very concerned about my daughter being pulled towards irreversible medical interventions that didn't have an adequate evidence base (my original concern was about the unknown impact of puberty blockers on the brain) and even when I was joining in lots of MN threads about gender identity.

I eventually realised that I didn't believe that everyone had a gender identity. It felt similar to my journey from Christianity, through agnosticism to atheism. The pertinent points then being that a) nobody should teach children that it's a fact that everyone has a gender identity and b) nobody should position this belief as fact in any other aspects of education. Or healthcare, sports, changing rooms, prisons etc etc.

This video was my turning point on me realising that I no longer believed in it:

But I still care about believers getting access to evidence-based care. Which is why the Cass Report is so important. Calling for trials of puberty blockers, to build the evidence base (for example) is the right thing to do. However, I sincerely hope that these trails fail ethics approval because the impact on the developing teenage brain is unknown... and we already know that PBs plus cross-sex hormones will render children infertile if PBs are given at tanner stage 2. Trialling this makes as much sense as a trial that involves throwing people off a 100m cliff to test whether this will harm them, simply because we don't have an evidence base that says what that harm might be.

Good post.

I would just add one thing.

I don't believe I have a gender identity, but some people are quite happy to tell me that I do have one, and the fact that I don't realise I have one is because it aligns with my sex and so doesn't cause me any discomfort.

Let's say for the sake of argument that they are correct, that a gender identity is a real thing that everyone has, and that it either aligns or conflicts with our biological sex.

How would "being a biologically male person whose gender identity conflicts with their biological sex" be the same identity as "being a biologically female person whose gender identity aligns with their biological sex"?

There are two things distinguishing these two groups from each other. (1) The first group are biologically male and the second group are biologically female. (2) The first group have gender identities which conflict with their biological sex whereas the second group have gender identities which align with their biological sex.

So that's two things they don't have in common.

What do they have in common, other than being human, which they also have in common with everyone else, of either sex and any gender identity?

I don't believe I have a gender identity, but some people are quite happy to tell me that I do have one, and the fact that I don't realise I have one is because it aligns with my sex and so doesn't cause me any discomfort.

This made perfect sense to me during my agnostic phase. I'm now agender.... well, I would be.... except that's apparently a gender identity 🤦‍♀️😂

Sadly, there is no word to describe my lack of belief that everyone has a gender identity. All words are captured and repurposed to mean different things according to gender identity tenets.

Oh well.

Thankfully, my lack of belief is protected in law. Meaning that I don't need to think of myself as holding a "gender critical belief" and I can point out to schools and other public bodies that the Nolan principles mean that teachers, nurses etc (plus the institutions in which they work) are legally obligated not to promote their belief that everyone has a gender identity.

Here's the legal protection for my lack of belief:

https://x.com/anyabike/status/1749777661855940901?t=UtIPM8E4Ub0iUgedf2iBjg&s=19

And here are the Nolan principles:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-7-principles-of-public-life

Remember, we are talking about troll farms here - bots that proliferate information like popcorn. A message isn’t sent out once, but thousands of times. To return to the image I attached earlier, the stages just one inauthentic post goes through after being posted means it can be seen by millions, dependent of platform

I know I’m belabouring this point, but how are these bots simultaneously so proliferate and influential yet so fleeting that - blink or you’ll miss it - they’re gone?

They’re supposedly everywhere, even interacting with platform users but it’s not possible to get a single screenshot of them.

If the Democrat strategists prefer to believe that “it was the bots that done it” and not their deeply misogynistic policies, then they’re fucked.

That post is out of order. Eye is right about this stuff.

Eye isn't saying "Genderism isn't really happening, it's all made up by bots"
Eye isn't saying "Gender critcisim isn't really happening, it's all made up by bots" either.

Eye is saying there are regimes that sponsor bots and troll farms to spread division and to push societies in ways that either support their state interests or undermine states they consider hostile or a threat to their economic or political amibitions, and that these bots will both amplify real news and create fake content like doctored photos, faked screenshots etc to do so.

As I said earlier, the more you are tempted to react to something or pass it on, the more suspicious you shoud be that someone is pushing your buttons.

Do not underestimate the sophistication of these players or the resources they have. I have some adjacent experience in money laundering and cybercrime, and there is a whole shadow ecomony and infrastructure out there that is just as sophisicated as the online services we interact with - you don't need to set up your own bot network or troll farm, you can literally buy this stuff as services.

The report Eye posted is worth reading. It won't be news to most here as we are well aware of the gendered abuse that women face online, but it is helpful to have so many examples collated. (The report's analysis is I think somewhat crippled by the ideological inability to consider being female and being gender non-conforming as different groups who share some challenges, and I disagree that censorship is the solution rather than transparency and reporting but I have only skimmed it so far. Getting deeper into it would be better done as a new thread).

OK, here's a question.

Do you think there are also bots promoting trans activism online? Or do you think everyone online promoting the pro trans side of the argument is a real person?

Incredible.

I agree.

Perhaps we have had a demonstration of just how easily convinced those executive decision makers in the DP are though on this thread.

And?

There are organisations pushing gender ideology who use techniques to keep their status quo, powerfully so.

They are more likely to keep women and girls from progressing

The whole internet is awash with this, why is it of particular relevance to FWR?

And to take it back to the question in the thread title the Democrats can't use bots as a reason for their loss. They too employ all kinds of SM devices.

Yes of course I believe they are playing both sides - that's the point! Their aim is not one side or the other, their aim is division because in fighting and inability to find a consensus weakens states economically and politically.

Agreed.

I'm also happy to "step out of the shadows" and say that I've been liking (thanking) some of Eye's posts.

AFAIK, I've not done so where there were things said that I didn't agree with but I apply this approach to any poster. I also know what it feels like to be piled on, or to perceive something as a pile-on, when there is robust discussion on this board. I had to take a month off at one point because it upset me so much.

And yes, I joined in on the bot comedy myself because some of the implications didn't make sense. However, I also know what it's like to be trying to explain myself and be misinterpreted (hence a previous post where I said I would take something at face value before I then added my own comment).

The impact of bots on amplification and IT on manipulation is huge. Obviously lots of posters know this. But it's a fascinating subject in its own right, at a cybersecurity level and at a media level. This is a great documentary about the manipulation of public opinion in this respect:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

I think we can go round in circles on this point.

Personally, I'd be open to the point of view that there is some common identity shared by all female people (except the ones who identify as something other than female) plus all trans women.

I'd be open to that possibility if someone could describe this identity to me without using the words "woman" or "female". What exactly are we all feeling/identifying with, that trans women are also feeling/identifying with?

If someone could actually explain that to me, there's every chance I'd have a lightbulb moment and go, "Oh! Yes! We do all have that in common!"

But nobody ever has. Most people, when you ask them, will not even attempt it, and just block you/call you a transphobe/accuse you of sealioning. The few who do attempt it will come out with the most ridiculous stereotypes about feminine fashion choices and behavioural traits, and then when you point out how sexist they're being, they'll say, "Well no, obviously not ALL women are like that!" and then when you ask them to name one thing all women have in common they end up saying there is absolutely nothing all women have in common and usually end up going off in a huff. Often this is just the scenic route to being blocked/called a transphobe/accused of sealioning.

All of this makes me inclined to stick to my "it doesn't exist" theory until someone can produce even the smallest shred of evidence to the contrary.

The discussions on here are not due to bots. There's a clash already between both sides just due to the ludicrous nature of the legislation put in place without foresight.

So why are they relevant to this thread?

OK. And do you think the same people are behind both sides of the bot wars?

For me, the link between the bots and this thread is covered in the documentary that I posted about above.

It's more subtle than that. For many on the Left, Trans Rights became an unbreakable must have policy, one that is simply not up for discussion. The Democrats believed that is what their electorate wanted. And that pushed enough former Democrat voters into not voting for them to make a difference.

Somehow, both the Left and Right have come to feel that Trans Rights are symbolic of the Progressive project. The bots amplifying divisions helped create that situation.

Yep.

If anyone has 3 spare hours (I watched it in two chunks), Hypernormalisation does a fantastic job of exploring this. At the nation state level too - and yes, some of the bad actor nation states are the ones you might expect, but it makes the point very well that the rules on who gets to declare themselves the "goodies" are very arbitrary.

Manipulation of public opinion is big business, no matter who the "baddies" are.

Can you say what that is?

I'm pretty sure I'm talking to real women here having been on mn for a while. And I understand why other women care as they do, and what the clash is. The legislation set this up, it's not a fabricated clash. We can see the impact of gender on language and dc

None of that is manufactured, could you say which part you think is?

And this is the relevance we have been talking about on this thread.

I don’t believe that people have dismissed there are bots and troll farms. We know there are.

I don't think there is one set of people. Some are state sponsored (China, Russia, maybe others). Some are faith-based.

But certainly yes, some groups' objective is the division itself rather than a specific outcome.