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

I don't think anyone has said that posters on here aren't real women.

The link between bots and this thread is the way that public opinion is manipulated by organised, orchestrated amplification of clashing opinions on social media. These opinions get subsumed in to media as "fact", or presented carefully in ways that suggest they are factual - I remember screaming at the TV when the news anchor was sitting in front of an image of the Twin Towers when talking about the UN weapons inspectors going in to Iraq. At this point, we had no proof (Collin Powell had a university thesis he'd been given) that Iraq was linked to the Twin Towers attack.... that's why the weapons inspectors were looking for evidence.... yet the imagery suggested that the connection was a done deal. Then the weapons inspectors went in.... and war was declared at the same time (before they were allowed to conclude anything).

Manipulation of public opinion happens all the time.

It makes perfect sense that it's happening here. And by "here" I don't mean MN posters, I mean in the wider world on the subject of gender identity belief. So to me, the Democrats need an honest conversation about the impact of gender identity being positioned as fact. They need to stop focusing on the "culture war", recognise it's being stoked by bots etc and recognise that this is the distraction that they've fallen for. Instead, they need to listen and accept that people really are challenging its impact. Lots of people. Real people with everyday lives.

There has been a battle of the sexes since time memorial, to suggest that today, the battle for womens rights is because of 'troll farms' and 'bots' is simply not based in reality or sanity. 'Troll farms' - no such bloody thing! Any more than there is such a thing as lizard people. Its just not sane, its nonsense.

You are not reading the posts properly.

No one is saying troll farms and bots are inventing this. We are saying they are taking advantage of it and amplifying the most divisive perspectives and messages to increase division and mistrust.

Honestly, I'm kind of amazed anyone in 2024 could not be aware of troll farms and online manipulation of messaging. Stepping away from Feminism altogther, do you not remember the role of online messaging and fake content in radicalising young Islamists in the 2000s?

@BonfireLady
‘So to me, the Democrats need an honest conversation about the impact of gender identity being positioned as fact. They need to stop focusing on the "culture war", recognise it's being stoked by bots etc and recognise that this is the distraction that they've fallen for. Instead, they need to listen and accept that people really are challenging its impact. Lots of people. Real people with everyday lives.’

I think this is the most salient point linking Bots and the OP of this thread. If political parties are being mislead on the flavour and strength of public opinion because of bot activity in social media it is because they are looking at metrics and algorithms rather than engaging with human beings - ie their electorate. This applies to UK/European politics as much as US politics because, otherwise, it’s the tail wagging the dog, isn’t it?

Yes. It is the degree to which they ‘helped’ that we have been talking about though.

Are they so powerful that they should take the brunt of the blame for the DP’s failure ?

Are they so powerful that they caused the voting population to believe that there are significant issues to be addressed and that the DP didn’t seem to be addressing them (just the opposite)?

Are they so powerful that they amplified an insignificant issue to be a major one?

Or is it more likely that there was the expected degree of media manipulation that people understand and expect. And by media, this also includes the biases in traditional media that we comment on all the time on FWR. Not just an over amplification effect created by bots and troll farms.

This then combined with the wider USA voting public also have their own direct experiences shaping their decisions about gender identity and from real life conversations or exposure to the issues and when they saw the DP’s lack of interaction they based their voting decisions on that.

With this in mind, the DP needs to reconsider these issues as being significant and to discuss finding solutions that are equitable. And for that to happen the issues need to be acknowledged as not insignificant despite some people’s assertions that they are (and there seems quite a few of those on media, not just MN).

What is more divisive than the actual reality of what we know does happen?

Look at the crimes of men and the use of she in court rooms, the mangling of language, the participation of men in some sports

All that and more is enough to get us discussing what to do

Yes, and there was also an social media campaign operated in the recent past by Russia spreading disinformation in Finland though the details of which I am now a bit fuzzy about, but essentially it was planting the seed of an idea and then fanning and amplifying it? Finland then introduced an education programme for children as young as primary school to start teaching them how to filter fake news from legitimate items.

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/fact-from-fiction-finlands-new-lessons-in-combating-fake-news

I will say, based on what I see online I think the manipulation is not so much (but also not zero) on the truly gender critical side, simply because it's a harder message and a smaller group to motivate.

Remember there are three perspectives in this not two - gender critical, gender traditional and gender identityist. I think the main fury is being stoked between the last two groups because they are directly opposite, it's easy messaging, and most importantly because the traditionalists are a significant cultural and political power in the US. We are getting caught in the crossfire a bit.

Especially in the UK, shared language means we are getting a wash over from the states, but because we do not have the traditionalists here so much, the anger stoked up in UK-based TRAs by US-targetted content is being diverted to anger at liberal GC women like Kathleen Stock.

I've seen zero proof that this fictitious 'troll farms' exist. Humans posting 'fake news' in order to agitate for action is not proof some automated robot did it. Its just humans posting. That's all. And sometimes humans post in bad faith.

It means nothing more than that. There is no other 'master plan' or conspiracy.

That I do not disagree with.

Interesting.

I saw an army of bots in real time in the run up to the Brexit referendum but I'm fairly sure they were only being used by one side (no prizes for guessing which one). At the time I didn't realise they were bots, but when I later learned about bots the whole thing made so much more sense. I would see the same seemingly fake accounts on Facebook, over and over again, saying the same things, 24 hours a day. They were there, commenting on just about every news article even tangentially linked to the referendum, spouting the same bullshit, and behaving in the same way in response to any real person attempting to engage with them. Mixed in with them were, of course, real people who were sympathetic to their narrative and started to regurgitate it themselves. It was really quite scary to watch.

A couple of years ago I read "The End of the World is Flat" by Simon Edge, which is a parody of gender ideology and Stonewall. The main premise is that a Stonewall-esque organisation which was famous for promoting a more accurate version of the world map then starts to promote the belief that the world is actually flat instead, to keep themselves in jobs now that their organisation's original purpose has been fulfilled. But the impetus for this is actually coming from someone else, a powerful person who wants to promote this belief for their own reasons, and who is willing to invest a lot of time and money into it. One of the tools they use is an army of bots, flooding social media with these ideas, which are then eventually latched onto by real people (including celebrities) who are taken in by them.

I think it's a clever parody, but the part I've always struggled with when you apply the idea to real life and gender ideology is WHO, and WHY? Even if you consider that there are various individuals and groups who benefit from gender ideology in different ways (people working for Stonewall or in the DEI sector, big pharma, doctors who perform gender affirming surgeries, far right groups, for example), an army of bots suggests either an element of coordination between those groups, which seems rather far fetched, or that one of those groups is really really invested in this. (In which case, which group is it, and why?)

The idea that the same people might be behind armies of bots on both sides (one promoting a trans activist viewpoint and the other promoting an anti trans viewpoint) with the aim of destabilising western politics and detracting attention from more serious issues is more plausible. But in that hypothesis, I think the gender wars would have to have already been under way before whoever these people are (Putin? Trump? IDK) realised that an argument about whether humans can change sex or not was the thing that would get all their opponents warring among themselves and saying completely absurd things which make them lose all credibility.

I just can't get my head round it.

And I don't know whether the idea that some of the more horrible trans activist social media accounts are actually bots is better or worse than them being real people who actually hate women that much.

“If political parties are being mislead on the flavour and strength of public opinion because of bot activity in social media it is because they are looking at metrics and algorithms rather than engaging with human beings - ie their electorate.”

Yes. This is one of the major points.

It is like the discussions around the dossier that John Pesutto’s team created regarding Kellie Jay Keen and their position on censuring Moira Deeming’s speeches regarding the situation facing women and children. During the court sessions these positions did not seem to be well informed at all, and the dossier was full of falsehoods.

If political parties are not making their decisions based on talking to their electorate and are relying on superficial interrogation of news and metrics then they have to own that.

Ah. I see, it's just a language gap.

Troll farms are not specifcally automated, they are humans doing a job which is spreading disinformation and fake news. They will of course use AI tools and bots to work faster as any other business would.

The important thing here is not whether it's a bot or a human, it's that fake news, and real divisive news, is being amplifying deliberately to provoke division.

I mentioned Adam Curtis upthread ...

This applies to UK/European politics as much as US politics because, otherwise, it’s the tail wagging the dog, isn’t it?

Yep.

This is why I'd love to know what data the Trump campaign used to validate their huge spend on what they called "the transgender issue". They clearly saw some survey data, some public opinion, that cut through all of the bot-amplified (and then MSM-amplified) noise about "both sides" and "culture wars" and found something tangible that was surfacable at the data level. That summarised the every day opinion of everyday people in a way that was hidden to the Democrats, and still is. And Labour too, with a couple of notable exceptions.

To expand your analogy, Labour and the Democrats are busy asking everyone to stroke the dog and say how lovely it looks. In the US, they've got celebratity endorsements doing this too. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of us (real people) are screaming that the tail (the TRAs) is wagging the dog (the government) and we can't be heard.... because it's all a cacophony of noise and "culture war". So lots of people think it's far safer just to agree that the dog really is lovely, as they instinctively know that it's dangerous to enter the "culture war".... because they don't want to be seen as unkind or far right Because they can see a whole load of far right, unkind things happening on social media.... they can also see a whole load of far left, unkind things happening on social media..... so it's better just to talk about how lovely the dog looks and keep stroking it.

Or...... as per the thread title: they can have an honest conversation about it all.

Edited to add the last bit.

I get the irony of publishing an internet link to prove that troll farms exist, but anyway https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/

Can you relate it to women and what it means?

Are you suggesting women here are manipulated? That we see this issue as more divisive than it should be?

These posts are clearly trying to make this relevant but I'm not sure what is being suggested in actual every day actions

Ah cool. Sorry, I didn't spot that.

I think I need to go through this thread again from top to bottom as I keep missing things.

Whenever I've come back to it it's got loads of new posts, then I'll grab one that is interesting to add a comment myself and I've then lost track of where I got to.

When it's Russian bots it's bad. American bots don't exist.

Bots only exist on one side. And when bots support the government line they don't exist.

It's the bots fault that the Democrats can't come up with a good policy to counter the bad bots. And the Democrats policy formation has not been influenced by bots at all.

I kind of despair at the logic.

Perhaps they should all just go back to listening when voters come to them with a concern rather than saying 'we don't believe that so we refuse to engage with you about it you bigot'.

Rolls eyes.

Can I just say, before I head out to get my teens early from college (it’s the weekend, yay!), that I have actually really enjoyed this thread? I know it’s edging closer to the 40th page, but I’ve picked up some great links to look at while I’m killing time in a bar the British Library tomorrow whilst eldest is on a university short course.

I have never seen the Rebecca Reilly Cooper video, for example (it came out about 3-6m before our family nightmare really began).

Are you suggesting women here are manipulated? That we see this issue as more divisive than it should be?

Mainly I'm saying I think Democrats were manipulated into seeing it as a Red Line and that cost them a lot. Or to be more accurate, a sigificant proportion of their user base was manipulated and the Dems felt that was were they needed to be. Who knows whether taking the other position would have lost them more votes.

Which is kind of the point. Stoking up division creates a no-win position and that is inherently destablising.

I'm posting for the people who say this is not happening at all, or that is is not a significant concern. Mostly I think the women here are aware and are reacting to real news from real sources, but the odd thing has crept in - the cat litter in schools for example.

These posts are clearly trying to make this relevant but I'm not sure what is being suggested in actual every day actions

I made some suggestions in a long post further upthread, but the main gist is "be aware". I think most of us already are for ourselves, but maybe have not considered the degree to which "the other side" has been manipulated into such an extreme position.

The Dems have proved they were a bunch of fuckwits who didn't talk to and crucial bother to listen to actual voters properly and instead listened more to lobbyists, internal activists and their own self importance.

You don't have to go far to find that no one really believes in gender.

To then blame bots makes me incredulous tbh.

Lack of due diligence on this and understanding things like principles underpinning democracy when your literal strategy is to say 'dont you care about democracy' is outrageous when you think about it.

I think this is more the case, than women on here needing to change much if anything at all on being aware

The Dems have proved they were a bunch of fuckwits who didn't talk to and crucial bother to listen to actual voters properly and instead listened more to lobbyists, internal activists and their own self importance.

It's really for them to resolve

Flirts, can you explain what you mean by the red line please.

Are you now saying that the Democratic Party members and those setting policy have been manipulated by bots and troll farms? And less from political activism and lobby groups over a long period of time such as we have seen Stonewall and the like doing?

Because you now talk about the degree that the Democratic Party was influenced by bots and trolls being of significance?

Is it more likely that it is the long term campaigning from that activism that set the policies initially (without input from women) and then it is in that culture that those making the policy believed fake news. And not fake news by bots necessarily, but from biased sources who are genuinely writing completely biased and factually incorrect articles and the like. Which then get treated as credible by others who enter it into Wikipedia, and spread it via social media.

Perhaps this is where there is confusion. Maybe people really are getting confused by automated or programmed human functions with how people interact with new media and self publishing. What is ‘bot’ activity and what is the typical spread of information by humans that is not done to sow division but because those humans found something ‘informative’.

What is considered bot activity and what is merely ill informed content, if you see what I mean?

Yep.

If a country’s democracy is in the hands of people who cannot listen to all the voices in their electorate to understand the issues, is it democracy? Just because people voted?