"This is proof that you don't need the lived experience to write well about these topics"
Or it's proof that mediocre or bad work is applauded as magnificent as long as the readers believe the author has certain identities and caters to the correct ideology.
Speaking of this comment section, Whenever I think I am becoming quite conservative I go to the Free Press comment section and the vile comment section reminds me why I am indeed liberal: I just can’t hang with more conservative people. I’d much rather be the more conservative person amongst people who are more liberal than I am than the more liberal person amongst conservatives. I’d like to think I have principles, but mainly I just care who I have to spend time with.
I don’t think extreme commenters are reflective of any general group, but I consider FP to be pretty centrist outlet and yet the comment section is unhinged. Ultra liberal comment sections are also unhinged and destructive in all the ways talked about in the heterodox space. I wonder why FP attracts such aggression for a centrist space.
Well, I think Free Press kind of leans toward social conservatism, which reflects Bari Weiss politics. I’ve been saying for a while now that I think that Weiss’ project is to basically take circa-1990s “conservative Democrat”/Blairite “New Labour” politics off of mothballs. I see much of the centrist/heterodox milieu tracking similarly, which has made me re-evaluate where I position myself politically, which is in a decidedly more cultural libertarian direction, albeit, more lefty on economic and environmental issues. So I remain happily politically homeless.
But on the topic of comments sections, the commentariat of FP reminds me a lot of the commenters at Quillette a few years ago. That element seems to have left when Claire Lehmann started pushing Quillette a bit away from hot-button culture war clickbait and took a more explicitly anti-MAGA stance. But it also often the case that comments sections can run distinctly to the right or left of the publication itself. Reason, for example, is a standard-bearer of old-school pre-MAGA libertarianism, but their comments section is purely hard right.
yes, I refer to them as angry blue plate grandpas. One of them once called me "woke" (completely unprompted, and for anyone who knows me completely ridiculous). I think just being a woman was enough.
I know plenty of conservatives who don’t act like TFP comment section. That’s hardly representative. It’s like saying “I can’t hang with liberals because of how progressives behave on Twitter.” DO BETTER.
Thirded and was about to suggest this. I’m pretty liberal and I adore The Dispatch and will never unsubscribe. It is such an indescribable breath of fresh air to see a community of serious, benevolent, even-minded patriotic people.
Not sarcastic, in fact! It's actually a productive comment space without the toxicity you'll find in the Free Press comments. Lots of thoughtful conservatives and liberals.
They’re going to have to do something about that as they continue to grow or else it’s going to prove to be a barrier for being seen as serious journalism that can compete with the exact institutions they say they’re challenging. No idea what, seeing as how they brand themselves as being for truth-tellers who aren’t afraid to go against the grain. Unfortunately, when you set up a big tent, you really do end up with all sorts, including complete nutjobs. Perhaps they will just turn off comments for some articles, like the Times of London, where they seem to be acknowledging that straight-up news reporting (rather than editorial) really doesn’t need a thousand randos weighing in.
I'm always confused when I see people here complain about their comment section. Do you just mean it's bad because they are politically different or is it that they are mean? Genuinely curious here. I went over and it seems most of the sections are paywalled. This random one I looked at briefly looked fine?
Admittedly I'm not a leftist, and I only looked at one article, but not seeing the issue. That said I don't want to shame anyone for not going somewhere they aren't comfortable with. It's not exactly fun to be exposed to different viewpoints constantly.
It’s the being mean. I am probably more on the conservative side for the BARpod audience. I even listen sometimes to Meghan Kelly and the Wall Street Journal Potomac Watch. The only other podcasts I pay for are Maiden, Mother, Matriarch, which has a lovely comment section, and The Rest is History, that doesn’t even have one to my knowledge.
So… it’s not the ideas that turn me off, it’s the nasty characters that are attracted to the commment sections of right wing political media.
I’m not even in very liberal online spaces, I just hear about them on this show. But I brace before peaking at the active comment sections of the political media I listen to, except for this show.
That makes sense. I do think the more political something gets the worse the comment section. Although there are exceptions like how toxic the K-pop fandom is. Here the main meat of the content is internet bullshit. For the most part it's entertainment. When politics comes in it's usually with a humorous angle. So it's natural this comment section is more chill.
Toxic culture can just wreck any kind of internet culture. Equestrian sites are unbelievably nasty--and I think there is undoubtedly an inverse relationship to how much time someone spends on the keyboard vs. in the saddle. Even the loveliest horsewoman in the world (Lady Sylvia Loch) had nasty know-it-alls on her site that made it ultimately not worth the time. I can't imagine what K-pop fandom is like :)
I would have not expected that. I always assumed people who aren't online and are in nature would just be happier. It is concerning to hear that my assumption is being challenged. Is nothing safe!?
Online spaces aren’t safe. Over 15 years ago I had a comms teacher who used their full name online and his real picture. He was a very stand up guy, and even back then he encouraged us to NEVER do anything online, in comments or content, that we wouldn’t sign our name to or show our face for. I obviously don’t do the same, but it’s my ideal of what healthy online behavior is.
There is a small group of particularly nasty commenters who invade almost every post with the wildest venom you’ve ever seen. It’s not that many people but the havoc they bring is something to see. I think they must have skipped that religious post you cited - fear of the Lord I suspect ;)
No, you haven’t checked it out enough if you don’t understand what people here are saying. It’s bad, vile, moronic, ultra angry, ultra MAGA (but in a bad way, lol), ultra anti-everything good, funny, joyful, hopeful, and sexy. And they hate puppies and rainbows (probably true.)
It's that they are really mean, and also mostly boring. The criticisms are filled with straw men and just over the top rage. So you can't really get into an interesting discussion there. They aren't even interesting or entertaining assholes.
I think what makes genuinely right-wing or reactionary politics (not necessarily conservatism which is in some ways its own thing) so repellent at times is that it's essentially betting against all the good in human nature, whereas Liberalism (including European liberal-conservatism) is broadly for that kind of stuff. The incentives are rather perverse. I suppose if you go far enough left you regress into equally parasitic and cynical behaviour though, it's just that they're more moralistic about their cruelty.
I can now claim the "if both sides of an argument are getting mad at you, you must be doing something right" honor of having been called a transphobe at Lawyers, Guns and Money (not by any of the front-pagers, admittedly, but by more than one of the commenters there) and also having been criticized (for like two minutes!) by the main podcast here, in reference to literally the same subject (trans rights).
But I will say that I generally find it much more annoying to be the "conservative" (really more old-school leftist, but certainly less "woke") among leftists than to be the leftist among conservatives.
“I pitched my boss on wearing our underwear on our heads every Thursday to improve revenue and everyone called me a retard. That must mean that I’ve stumbled on a winning idea”
You were criticized on this podcast because you're an asshole to everybody, 99% of the time and completely unprovoked. It's not because of your beliefs.
This is just objectively false, and you're not going to gaslight me into believing it by repeating it over and over again.
Like I get that this is how groups police purity among their membership-- it's a lot more satisfying to pretend that you're mad at someone for being rude than to admit to yourself that you're just mad at them for not conforming to your ideological priors-- but it's really, really funny to see it being deployed by a group that likes to flatter itself that it's for heterodox free thinkers. The sheer level of hypocrisy on display here would itself make for a fascinating and hilarious deep dive.
You're giving yourself a lot of credit there, lol. You've been labelled an asshole, but that's about the extent of it. If that gives you a sense of pride then... well, whatever floats your boat dude.
I am of the (if not minority than generally unstated) view that if both sides of an argument are getting mad at you, you are *probably* doing something wrong.
It's so much worse. The New York post comment section is like your uncle at thanksgiving. He says one or two crazy things but you love him anyway and you kind of get where he's coming from sometimes. The FP comment section is like the raving of a madman.
I remember reading somewhere that stuff for super rich people is more likely to look like something a homeless person would wear than just a nicer version of what a merely kinda rich person would wear because an ultra rich person might worry about being mistaken for merely being kind of rich, but would not worry about actually being mistaken for being homeless.
The KitchenAid was HYSTERICAL. Idk if I was exactly crying but my eyes were watering. Couldn’t Coty think of a better way to get Sarah’s legs amputated? Like just have her hit by a car or something!
My wife makes me hide our stand mixer in the pantry, so I have to pick it up and move it to the kitchen each time I want to use it, but I'm utterly incredulous that a stand mixer dropped from any normal counter height would pulverize your foot bones badly enough that doctors would conclude amputation was the best solution rather than putting pins or screws in the bones to hold them together while they healed unless you also got some sort of horrific infection during the healing process.
I know the show is technically about “internet bullshit” but my favorite episodes, like this one, are more about the deranging effects of the internet and the insane incentive structures that exist for its denizens.
The gullibility of people astounds me. Is it just being cognizant of grifters that lets me see the red flags of 50 pity-me-oppression attributes? Pick ONE, sheesh. If this is performance art at this point, five stars, no notes.
The culture of this type of community prevents a lot of people from questioning identity attributes. The culture of oppression has made itself ripe to be scammed.
If there's one thing that doesn't astound me, it's the gullibility of people. I might listen to way too many fraud podcasts, my favorite flavor of true crime.
I took a break for a year (and they also removed previous seasons from Spotify?) and came back to keep asking myself if this is the same show because it sounded so... different. Now you've confirmed it - it's the host. The episodes are only one-episose arcs and don't really grab me like the previous ones.
I listened to a podcast called Scamanda (?) Files or something, about a woman who faked cancer for YEARS and grifted untold amounts of money. true sicko stuff.
The AMA (American Medical Association) is an interesting example of where our institutions are headed.
This is a trade organization. It lobbies Congress on behalf of medical doctors and puts out policy positions. It has no role in government and no enforcement power to actually do anything, but is still quite influential.
The AMA used to have a large majority of all physicians in the US as members, but it has dwindled over the years so instead of having >80% of doctors it now has <20%. So now, although it purports to represent the whole of the medical profession, it really represents a pretty small slice, since of course only a minority of the remaining dues-paying members are even really involved. The people who are active with the AMA now slant heavily towards silver spoon types. Those are the sorts of people who have enough money in the bank to handle the demands of the medical profession and pay for medical school while still having enough free time to get involved in politics. They’re also the sort of people who have powerful friends. So the institution is a pretty extreme example of luxury beliefs. The people who are active there literally do not know anyone who isn’t rich, and most of them probably do not see Medicaid patients, if they bother to practice medicine at all. Even from the perspective of other physicians, they’re cloistered and out of touch.
I’ve been active with my state medical association and I’ve thought about trying to gain some sway in the national AMA, but from what I’ve seen I’m not convinced that anyone who isn’t an old money type or a DEI hire can really make much of a difference.
Because it is not a governmental institution, the AMA is not very transparent and is hard to change. But a lot of actual legislators and regulators will take their marching orders from the AMA even as its influence declines.
The AMA does not have to give information on this, but it is not doing well.
When I look at medicine as a whole, it is in big trouble because of the capture of regulatory bodies. But the AMA is not a regulatory body. So there is an opportunity to, in the Bari Weiss mold, simply build a new institution.
I read the ama as a trade group for doctors is mostly concerned with making sure that they back up anything their members decide they want to do, so as to reduce the chance at a lawsuit.
That is, their incentives are all in favor of saying “treatment A is great and supported by evidence” and ALSO “treatment B is”. So one of the reasons the ama etc are not against unevidenced gender treatments is that doing so doesn’t directly help their members in the short term, whereas saying the treatments are fine will help protect against lawsuits.
In other words if at least some doctor wants to try some new totally experimental thing the ama will be for it. This can be good for innovation but is pretty bad for either stabilizing raising healthcare costs or in getting rid of stuff that doesn’t work.
Interesting that the American Bar Association has seemed to lay low through all this (I say presumptuously without researching it but they haven't made the news with this nonsense). That's probably because there are always lawyers on both sides of any issue.
I kept wondering if there was an explanation for why a Turkish immigrant would be named Susan Banks, and if no one who came across her ever found that implausible.
I personally know a woman from Laos who anglicized her name to "Susan" when she came to the U.S.. Still, Craven's LARP would have made more sense if she'd chosen a Turkish last name for the character, seeing as "Susan Banks" was never stated to have been married before "meeting" Craven.
I think affinity fraud is an underexplored explanation for why there tends to be so much of this scamming in certain communities like disability related ones. Affinity fraud involves exploiting others within your own community, usually for financial gain. It's particularly common in some insular communities, like the Mormon community (see article on Mormons below as well as linked wiki article for an overview of affinity fraud more broadly). The combination people tending to be trusting of others within their own communities and the types of dysfunctional people who seem to be drawn to these disability groups seems to be create an environment that's absolutely ripe for fraud, whether it be for status seeking or for financial gain.
Exactly-- if you're running a con, you always want to do it on people who you can credibly pass yourself off as "one of."
The show White Collar is oddly good at pulling this out, weirdly enough (or maybe I just think that because I like the show)-- the main character is incredibly skilled at portraying a certain kind of upper-class twit, and almost all of his (now government-approved) cons involve some variation on that. They don't randomly ask him to portray a manual laborer for a week; it wouldn't work.
This comment makes me think of my wife's sister and her husband. They are in their mid-late 40's and live as missionaries (kind of?). They "work" for YWAM (which I understand is Youth With A Mission, but they are well past youth). They live in a nice area in San Francisco, seem to go on vacations a lot. They aren't really doing much to help people, but they are always fundraising. They launder their money through YWAM so they can get donations funneled directly to them but also allow their donors to get a tax deduction. They have large, uber-religious families, and no one seems to question why they can't get real jobs that pay them a salary or ask if there is a cheaper place to do God's work. They act like they're poor, but their lifestyle clearly contradicts this. They claim they get really good "deals" so they can spend 2 weeks at Disney world or take a 2-week cruise home from a month in Germany instead of flying. They once sent my wife and me a quarterly newsletter which highlighted their work, and the primary thing they did was take walks in the morning and say hi to people to "brighten their day." I also say hi to people when I'm out for a walk, because that's a nice thing to do. I'm not asking people to pay me for it. I often wonder what schmucks give them money, but you don't become a zealot by asking questions and demanding evidence/results.
Re the uselessness of gender ID as a concept, an argument I seldom see made but that I think is important- even if I as a man decide I have a male gender identity, distinct from and unconnected to my biology, how could I possibly know that was true? So it’s not merely that it’s a useless concept because some people don’t have a gender ID, the idea that you could feel you have one in the absence of dysphoria seems especially stupid
Not only do I not have a gender identity, I don't think anyone does. If you're saying you have a feeling that you're a man, well either you are or you aren't so that's just a thought you're having about reality. If the only feature of a GI is that you think/ say you have one, then I guess if you say you do, you do, like being religious. But then it's just whatever you say it is. Whatever, it's all gibberish.
When Jesse said something like, 'at least gender identity has a coherent definition, which is circular and we can't agree on it'... circular and indescribable is simply incoherent, right?!
To me, I think gender identity is all of the stereotypes that society puts on me because of my female body (would be the same for male-bodied people). People see me as a middle-aged woman and so expect me to behave in certain ways. My gender identity is called Beryl and she very much resembles my grandmother who had very strict VIEWS about how a lady should act.
I can defy these expectations or fall into them depending on my feelings, mood, or whatever. I don't partially like Beryl- in some ways she makes social situations easier, but in others I chafe against the gender expectations imposed on me. And I certainly don't 'identify' with Beryl. In fact, I think if she fucked off and took Nigel (the male version) with her, people would be a lot happier.
Wear what you want, do whatever hobbies make you happy, but don't cut off your penis because you like glitter and rainbows. Or poison yourself with testosterone because you prefer short hair and comfortable shoes.
There is *something* beyond sex and sexuality that seems to be a pretty fundamental aspect of our personhood. Maybe it's just left-brain vs right-brain dominance? I'm not sure that "gender identity" has always been as invalid as it is now, because I suspect that it has *become* incoherent and useless as a result of how the term has been used over the last ten to fifteen years.
No, personality is different, personality is the collected total of all the things about how you act. Gender identity as a valid concept is more like an aesthetic orientation.
The idea that people without gender dysphoria would have a “deeply felt sense of being male or female” is ridiculous. It would be like people with two legs having “a deeply felt sense of having two legs.”
Dysphoric people have a deeply felt sense of being the *wrong* sex — that’s clear enough. We already have a name for that feeling: gender dysphoria.
TRAs have tried to normalize the idea of “gender identity” being a deeply felt sense everyone has because this would normalize transness.
The meaning of “gender identity” for, like, all of social science until very recently was simply a person’s *awareness * of their own sex. We all have that.
`Dysphoric people have a deeply felt sense of being the *wrong* sex — that’s clear enough. We already have a name for that feeling: gender dysphoria.'
What you, and Jesse apparently, fail to realize is that sexologists, etc. use gender identity to explain *why* people feel gender dysphoria. That is, gender dysphoria arises because of a mismatch between one's sex and one's gender identity. It's a long-establish theory as to why some feels they're the wrong sex.
Don't like the theory then falsify it or propose another. One doesn't just get to waive away +60 years of (soft) science by making a facile, and at this point cliched (ahem, Katie) comparison with the `soul'.
As for Jesse's criticism of Serrano's example: her example just needs to be updated because a man walking around in a dress means far, far different things than it did when she made it. Here's a better example:
`"Gender identity” refers to the subjective internal feeling that one is male or female. Most of us rarely, if ever, think about our gender identities. But if we imagined that others were treating us as the opposite sex—insisted that we were the opposite sex—most could get an idea of the mental anguish a child with [gender identity disorder] may feel.'
- J. Michael Bailey, `The Man Who Would be Queen'
How about another researcher trans people really, really dislike but nonetheless finds gender identity a useful concept:
`So what is [Ken] Zucker’s position? First, he believes that the diagnosis of childhood GID [(gender identity disorder)] is useful and valid, and the diagnosis is not merely a value judgment that boys who like girls’ activities (or girls who like boys’ activities) are sick or wrong. This is due to his conviction that children with GID suffer, and that the suffering is not only attributable to bullying by closed-minded peers and adults.
...
`However, when I spoke to Zucker about the current debate about childhood GID, I came away with the impression that these days, he feels besieged primarily on the left. He has had several recent ex- changes in academic journals on the issue of GID, all with critics who believe that the GID diagnosis is essentially gender repression...'
Honestly I'm starting to get a bit uncomfortable with where Jesse and Katie are going these days with respect to gender, sex, and all things trans. When one gets to the point where they're throwing out a DSM-sanctioned diagnosis based on such clumsy and shoddy reasoning as `I don't feel like I have this thing, so this thing must not exist', I think that perhaps it's time to step back and consider whether one is treating the issue impartially and fairly.
I think Emily said it best here: "Not only do I not have a gender identity, I don't think anyone does. If you're saying you have a feeling that you're a man, well either you are or you aren't so that's just a thought you're having about reality".
I do believe that gender dysphoria exists, but it is disordered thinking. We ARE our bodies; it's impossible to be in the wrong one. Every cell in one's body is sexed, and contains your own personal DNA blueprint.
One cannot actually feel like they are a male in a female's body, because they have no conception of what it feels like to have a male's body. It's impossible, it's fantasy.
It seems clear that the best treatment is to accept the body you were born with, and make it the best and healthiest body it can be.
I'm sorry but the amount of intellectual hubris on display here is simply stunning (not just you, Molly, to be clear).
The modern idea of gender identity (GI) dates back to the work of Stoller and Kohlberg in the 1960s. Since then researchers have published thousands of papers on the topic, including studies that document the process by which children acquire their gender identity.
While much of the existing work on gender identity comes from the soft sciences, more recent work has looked at the biological components of gender identity, e.g., `The Biological Contributions to Gender Identity and Gender Diversity'* by Polderman et al., 2018. Some of the earliest work on GI also examined how hormonal interventions during development (experiments performed on animals) would lead to changes in behavior consistent with GI.
This mountain of evidence was produced by hundreds if not thousands of researchers, and I find it dumbfounding that most here are willing to simply reject it out-of-hand---if they are even aware of it!---and still claim to be grounded in science/facts/reason/etc. This is anti-intellectualism of an incredibly pernicious variety.
`It seems clear that the best treatment...'
Maybe it's clear for you but, as Alice Dreger (author of Galileo's Middle Finger) has pointed out, there are numerous studies, including ones by Ray Blanchard, that indicate `well-screened' sufferers of gender dysphoria are better off after receiving HRT and other medical interventions.
*The paper actually contains the line `Every person has a gender identity'. Such a bald assertion does not make it past peer review unless it is taken as a fact.
I understand that people who talk about gender dysphoria often use “gender identity” to explain its existence.
What I’m saying is we have no evidence that gender identity as “a deeply felt sense of being male or female” exists. (Unless we’re counting self-report as evidence, in which case there’s also evidence for ESP.)
I’m also saying that this particular definition of the term “gender identity” is recent.
If Person A creates a theory that is not falsifiable, how is it Person B’s responsibility to disprove it? This isn’t how it works in anything from drug testing to English papers. If the theory is not falsifiable, that is the end of it: it cannot be tested, people who believe in it do so as an act of faith, and everyone else who does not believe it is not doing anything wrong.
Back when I had long hair, I used to get misgendered as female from time to time. This did not cause me any trauma - I thought it was pretty funny.
Now as I understand it, I do have a "gender identity" in that I see myself as male. But as far as I can tell I don't care what pronouns people use for me, or whether they believe I am male. I'm not invested, again as far as I can tell, in whether other people consider me male.
Please consider the sad, sad case of David Reimer as an example of how distressing it can be when society and your family insist that you're something you're not.
Reimer is a tragic case that should not be used to prove anything aside from the fact that John Money was experimenting on and abusing children.
His case does not prove that he had an innate male gender identity, he simply was male. It would be an insane conclusion to claim he would have been fine if he had been born with a "female gender identity".
He was a male and the way he knew that he was a male, despite lacking the genitalia and being socialized as a female, is because he had a male gender identity.
Without an innate gender identity, he would not have known he was a male.
I never said he would have been fine had he been born with a female gender identity, nor do I think what Dr. Money did was OK.
I can’t tell if you’re answering me because of how the comments are threaded… if so thanks! My specific point was not just that it’s unverifiable but that the absence of dysphoric feelings makes it especially unverifiable and meaningless
It is definitely *possible* to have a coherent concept of "gender identity" as distinct from sex, for example, those cultures which have a "third gender" identity for feminine male. This third gender identity is coherent, and it obviously serves some kind of useful purpose, or else it wouldn't show up as having evolved essentially independently in a bunch of different cultures.
But the concept of gender identity *we in this culture specifically* have been dealing with is *not* coherent, and thus it is useless if you have good intentions.
But if you have *bad* intentions then the incoherent concept of gender identity we have been dealing with in our culture specifically *is* quite useful, because it allows you to confuse and upset people and draw attention to yourself by starting an argument that could never possibly finish.
most of the examples I've seen really are just homosexuals that are put into a third category so as to de-homo them. Look at the Hijra people who are born male and ted to be confined to sex work for males. or I forget where it was, but It was a sort of "female husband" situation, where "certain" females were allowed to live with other women in "sexless" "marriages" in the absence of men due to war.
I genuinely don't get this comment. Like, wouldn't you just... know it? That's like saying "even if I as a religious person decide I have a Christian identity, how could I possibly know that was true?" You know that it's true because it's what you think. Cogito, ergo sum and whatnot.
Like I know I have a male gender identity because I feel male. I realize YOU might not have an easy way to double check that, but from MY perspective it's completely obvious.
It’s funny for a self-proclaimed lawyer to have that much difficulty with reading comprehension. Then again, he may be a lawyer in the sense that the representatives for Mr. Mata in Mata v. Avianca are lawyers.
I don’t believe they do. They’re more developed in their brain bits.
Whilst I can’t go more than 2 seconds without thinking with/about my junk, they’re focused on more intellectual things, like kittens, Starbucks, and interior decorating.
Memories of Beavis shaping his hands in the air after the therapist asks him how he feels about his mother - while Butt-head mutters, “That’s not how I feel your mother”
I 'feel male' because I am male - how could anyone possibly disentangle their actual sex from some nebulous concept of gender identity, in the absence of dysphoria?
Even then, though, dysphoria cannot logically be the feeling that you are the OPPOSITE sex. I could accept, perhaps, that you feel you are the WRONG sex, but there is no possible way of knowing what a "woman" or a "man" feels like, especially for someone of the opposite sex. On its face it makes no sense.
I will grant it’s possible that some non-trans people have a gender identity in the sense of a deeply held feeling of being male/female. But I don’t have one, except in the extremely trivial sense that I will identify myself to others as a woman / female when prompted (because it’s materially true).
All I’m looking for really is an acknowledgement that not all people have a gender identity and thus the idea that it’s a better way of categorizing people than sex in circumstances where sex/gender matters is at least up for debate, as opposed to being accused of some type of bigotry for not holding a very particular world view
I don't really understand how you can FEEL female or male, you just are. It's like feeling 5'4 or feeling white with brown eyes.
Other people and society might treat me in a specific way because they see my physical appearance, but doesn't necessarily change how I feel. Plus, how can I know how anyone else, whether we share psychical characteristics or not.
I keep saying, everyone needs to identify as agender. Once everyone realizes they too belong in the Queer Clerb, a lot of the ridiculous parts of gender stuff will be irrelevant.
"Weird Benjy Shankovic" bringin' the 90's🎵to BARPod ftw 🙌 and no, this is not the kind of *weird* that now (as of two or three weeks ago) automatically makes you a Republican, phew
Oh there’s much more where that came from . . . If you scroll through my past comments on barpod and Fifth Column you’ll find more of my, uh, literary output.
I will do some excavating now thanks🎵! You have been on my radar since we *almost* met in Chicago (like a sliding doors thing but Nika helped bring us together anyway :-)
I don't think that's correct. My understanding is that they are basically the same condition, or at least so heavily comorbid as to effectively be the same condition. A quick google search says that something like 80 percent of people with EDS have POTS.
Maybe it's the case that people who make a point of ADVERTISING that they have all three of POTS/MCAS/EDS are likely to be Munchausens, because if you weren't trying to attract sympathy you'd just say you had one of them, and describe it as including the symptoms of all three. Not aware of any evidence of that theory, though.
Oh they are three very very different diseases. And they weren’t considered related until they started becoming way way more popular as there’s no particular reason for them to be related.
Pretty much they’re easy to fake or interpret random symptoms as having them. As was pointed out many many people can feel lightheaded after standing or have weird rashes or irritated skin. It can be pretty easy to fake what you need to fake and there’s a lot of discourse on how doctors don’t really understand the diseases and that you should do X thing to make sure you get your diagnosis (especially POTS which has a more defined test then EDS or the kind of MCAS everyone now has which is the only type without a genetic test). There’s also particular doctors that people like to go to, a lot of self-ID, tons of people having the worst case ever of it, social media influencers in the space, merch, etc.
TBF it seems likely that a lot the people are closer to actually believing in some of it and then making themselves worse then purely using to manipulate so there is an argument to be made that it’s more factious disorder with some manipulation then truly munching.
Obvious caveat that I am not a clinician; this is pure amateur hour.
That said-- I don't think there is a genetic test for MCAS. There are some known genetic markers that increase your risk, like with breast cancer, but it's not definitive. There IS a genetic test for several types of known EDS-causing genes (for types other than hEDS); perhaps you're thinking of that? If we end up locating a genetic basis for hEDS, the theory would be that that genetic disorder also causes symptoms of what we currently call MCAS and POTS. Which is reasonable enough in abstract. It's hard to definitively prove the ABSENCE of a genetic basis for something, since it could always be that we just haven't looked in the right place yet.
This paper (which is clearly, and justifiably, skeptical of the proliferation of MCAS diagnoses) says the link between MCAS and hEDS/POTS is "not definitively proven":
On the other hand, it may be necessary to screen out the factitious disorders in order to deem the proof sufficient, I don't know.
Here's my current bottom line: of the people who are claiming this constellation of symptoms, it's likely (but apparently unproven beyond correlation) that some genuinely have all of them because they're related, some (maybe the biggest group) have conversion disorders where mental-health challenges are manifesting in physical form via suggestion, and some are Munchausen's/factitious disorder. And probably some are malingerers who are trying to get on disability, although the smart ones of those will call as little attention to themselves as possible. Not a very satisfying description, but it is what it is.
This is just not true—the thing about them not being considered related until they were “way more popular,” and especially the thing about there being “no particular reason for them to be related.” I think a basic knowledge of EDS and secondary POTS would make it very obvious how they could be related.
I have POTS (not EDS or MCAS) but I think it’s a lot easier to get it as a diagnosis but like you said, it is extremely difficult to fake symptoms for a TTT. They analyze your vitals a lot, they’re checking for patterns that would be better explained by another condition. I don’t think these are easier to fake than many other conditions. But every chronic illness group I’ve been in has been full of people trying very hard to get better and better.
hEDS doesn’t have one test but other EDS forms do. But everyone I know with EDS took 10+ years to get a diagnosis and it’s extremely difficult to find a doctor who understands the condition well enough. Yes, there are “particular doctors,” but I promise you your average doc won’t know how to take on complex cases. I have had doctors tell me completely false information before that could easily be disproved if they actually read the literature. I’ve known people who nearly died while trying to see regular doctors before getting a better recommendation off of a Facebook group.
EDS tends to spark other conditions. POTS is extremely common with EDS and tends to be more commonly a secondary condition, MCAS is also very common with EDS.
"This is proof that you don't need the lived experience to write well about these topics"
Or it's proof that mediocre or bad work is applauded as magnificent as long as the readers believe the author has certain identities and caters to the correct ideology.
As a disabled, Deaf, immigrant, Muslim woman and mother of a black son, I can’t help but agree.
That makes two of us!
lolol, me too
As a schizophrenic, I make two of us!
Exactly what I was thinking.
Just wait in a few years for another "Coty Craven" to be discovered as entirely output from an AI chatbot.
The mediocre white man strikes again
Why not both?
I can’t believe anyone would question the existence of the three people I made up. This is ruining my mental health!
Speaking of this comment section, Whenever I think I am becoming quite conservative I go to the Free Press comment section and the vile comment section reminds me why I am indeed liberal: I just can’t hang with more conservative people. I’d much rather be the more conservative person amongst people who are more liberal than I am than the more liberal person amongst conservatives. I’d like to think I have principles, but mainly I just care who I have to spend time with.
FWIW, I know a lot of conservatives in person and don't think the FP comments are at all reflective of normal, offline conservatives.
If there’s ever a place online where I’ve wondered if everyone is just a bot run by some hostile foreign power, that is it.
I don’t think extreme commenters are reflective of any general group, but I consider FP to be pretty centrist outlet and yet the comment section is unhinged. Ultra liberal comment sections are also unhinged and destructive in all the ways talked about in the heterodox space. I wonder why FP attracts such aggression for a centrist space.
They are certainly an angry bunch.
Well, I think Free Press kind of leans toward social conservatism, which reflects Bari Weiss politics. I’ve been saying for a while now that I think that Weiss’ project is to basically take circa-1990s “conservative Democrat”/Blairite “New Labour” politics off of mothballs. I see much of the centrist/heterodox milieu tracking similarly, which has made me re-evaluate where I position myself politically, which is in a decidedly more cultural libertarian direction, albeit, more lefty on economic and environmental issues. So I remain happily politically homeless.
But on the topic of comments sections, the commentariat of FP reminds me a lot of the commenters at Quillette a few years ago. That element seems to have left when Claire Lehmann started pushing Quillette a bit away from hot-button culture war clickbait and took a more explicitly anti-MAGA stance. But it also often the case that comments sections can run distinctly to the right or left of the publication itself. Reason, for example, is a standard-bearer of old-school pre-MAGA libertarianism, but their comments section is purely hard right.
If anything, conservatives tend to be very nice people regardless of whatever other flaws they might have.
TFP is representative of angry, bored retirees.
yes, I refer to them as angry blue plate grandpas. One of them once called me "woke" (completely unprompted, and for anyone who knows me completely ridiculous). I think just being a woman was enough.
Hell, they call Katie woke. Endless entertainment. Infuriating at the same time, but how can you take them seriously after that?
I know plenty of conservatives who don’t act like TFP comment section. That’s hardly representative. It’s like saying “I can’t hang with liberals because of how progressives behave on Twitter.” DO BETTER.
You might prefer the comment section at The Dispatch.
Seconded, it’s lovely over there.
Thirded and was about to suggest this. I’m pretty liberal and I adore The Dispatch and will never unsubscribe. It is such an indescribable breath of fresh air to see a community of serious, benevolent, even-minded patriotic people.
I can’t tell if this sarcasm and I’m afraid to go look.
Not sarcastic, in fact! It's actually a productive comment space without the toxicity you'll find in the Free Press comments. Lots of thoughtful conservatives and liberals.
Agree regarding the FP's comment section. Definitely on the vile side.
They’re going to have to do something about that as they continue to grow or else it’s going to prove to be a barrier for being seen as serious journalism that can compete with the exact institutions they say they’re challenging. No idea what, seeing as how they brand themselves as being for truth-tellers who aren’t afraid to go against the grain. Unfortunately, when you set up a big tent, you really do end up with all sorts, including complete nutjobs. Perhaps they will just turn off comments for some articles, like the Times of London, where they seem to be acknowledging that straight-up news reporting (rather than editorial) really doesn’t need a thousand randos weighing in.
I'm always confused when I see people here complain about their comment section. Do you just mean it's bad because they are politically different or is it that they are mean? Genuinely curious here. I went over and it seems most of the sections are paywalled. This random one I looked at briefly looked fine?
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-young-catholic-women-bringing/comments
Admittedly I'm not a leftist, and I only looked at one article, but not seeing the issue. That said I don't want to shame anyone for not going somewhere they aren't comfortable with. It's not exactly fun to be exposed to different viewpoints constantly.
It’s the being mean. I am probably more on the conservative side for the BARpod audience. I even listen sometimes to Meghan Kelly and the Wall Street Journal Potomac Watch. The only other podcasts I pay for are Maiden, Mother, Matriarch, which has a lovely comment section, and The Rest is History, that doesn’t even have one to my knowledge.
So… it’s not the ideas that turn me off, it’s the nasty characters that are attracted to the commment sections of right wing political media.
I’m not even in very liberal online spaces, I just hear about them on this show. But I brace before peaking at the active comment sections of the political media I listen to, except for this show.
That makes sense. I do think the more political something gets the worse the comment section. Although there are exceptions like how toxic the K-pop fandom is. Here the main meat of the content is internet bullshit. For the most part it's entertainment. When politics comes in it's usually with a humorous angle. So it's natural this comment section is more chill.
Toxic culture can just wreck any kind of internet culture. Equestrian sites are unbelievably nasty--and I think there is undoubtedly an inverse relationship to how much time someone spends on the keyboard vs. in the saddle. Even the loveliest horsewoman in the world (Lady Sylvia Loch) had nasty know-it-alls on her site that made it ultimately not worth the time. I can't imagine what K-pop fandom is like :)
I would have not expected that. I always assumed people who aren't online and are in nature would just be happier. It is concerning to hear that my assumption is being challenged. Is nothing safe!?
Online spaces aren’t safe. Over 15 years ago I had a comms teacher who used their full name online and his real picture. He was a very stand up guy, and even back then he encouraged us to NEVER do anything online, in comments or content, that we wouldn’t sign our name to or show our face for. I obviously don’t do the same, but it’s my ideal of what healthy online behavior is.
What Ctdcb said, plus the people just seem kind of dumb and angry
MMM is so nice! Very respectful even if people disagree.
(I am also a TRIH member!)
Buddies!
Also *peek* and *Megyn*
There is a small group of particularly nasty commenters who invade almost every post with the wildest venom you’ve ever seen. It’s not that many people but the havoc they bring is something to see. I think they must have skipped that religious post you cited - fear of the Lord I suspect ;)
No, you haven’t checked it out enough if you don’t understand what people here are saying. It’s bad, vile, moronic, ultra angry, ultra MAGA (but in a bad way, lol), ultra anti-everything good, funny, joyful, hopeful, and sexy. And they hate puppies and rainbows (probably true.)
It's that they are really mean, and also mostly boring. The criticisms are filled with straw men and just over the top rage. So you can't really get into an interesting discussion there. They aren't even interesting or entertaining assholes.
It's like their whole comments section is made up of right-wing Zagarnas, and that's never fun.
Good god, what a thought.
It’s just a very angry bunch of bored little bees.
They are a pack of rabid idiots repeating talking points they heard somewhere, even if you agree with them it’s embarrassing.
I think what makes genuinely right-wing or reactionary politics (not necessarily conservatism which is in some ways its own thing) so repellent at times is that it's essentially betting against all the good in human nature, whereas Liberalism (including European liberal-conservatism) is broadly for that kind of stuff. The incentives are rather perverse. I suppose if you go far enough left you regress into equally parasitic and cynical behaviour though, it's just that they're more moralistic about their cruelty.
I can now claim the "if both sides of an argument are getting mad at you, you must be doing something right" honor of having been called a transphobe at Lawyers, Guns and Money (not by any of the front-pagers, admittedly, but by more than one of the commenters there) and also having been criticized (for like two minutes!) by the main podcast here, in reference to literally the same subject (trans rights).
But I will say that I generally find it much more annoying to be the "conservative" (really more old-school leftist, but certainly less "woke") among leftists than to be the leftist among conservatives.
If everyone thinks you’re dumb, you must be a genius.
It’s more like that rule about how if you only encounter one asshole, it's probably them, but you encounter many, it’s probably you.
“I pitched my boss on wearing our underwear on our heads every Thursday to improve revenue and everyone called me a retard. That must mean that I’ve stumbled on a winning idea”
In this case, I thinks more of the flip side. If everyone thinks you’re dumb, you’re probably a fucking retard.
This argument made me think of Wim Plo's your foot to my face style
https://youtu.be/ZqaCEPwWGtc?si=_D7FVhVRvegIhVVU
You were criticized on this podcast because you're an asshole to everybody, 99% of the time and completely unprovoked. It's not because of your beliefs.
This is just objectively false, and you're not going to gaslight me into believing it by repeating it over and over again.
Like I get that this is how groups police purity among their membership-- it's a lot more satisfying to pretend that you're mad at someone for being rude than to admit to yourself that you're just mad at them for not conforming to your ideological priors-- but it's really, really funny to see it being deployed by a group that likes to flatter itself that it's for heterodox free thinkers. The sheer level of hypocrisy on display here would itself make for a fascinating and hilarious deep dive.
"objectively false"... Lol. Unambiguous evidence that you don't have a solid grasp of the ordinary meaning of words.
You're giving yourself a lot of credit there, lol. You've been labelled an asshole, but that's about the extent of it. If that gives you a sense of pride then... well, whatever floats your boat dude.
If it helps, once I knew your focus was in particular in employment law that helped me to understand you a lot more.
I am of the (if not minority than generally unstated) view that if both sides of an argument are getting mad at you, you are *probably* doing something wrong.
I don't think I have ever seen the Free Press comment section but certainly it can't be worse than the New York Post comment section?
NYP is currently holding TFP’s beer.
It's so much worse. The New York post comment section is like your uncle at thanksgiving. He says one or two crazy things but you love him anyway and you kind of get where he's coming from sometimes. The FP comment section is like the raving of a madman.
I feel a little bad that none of the people discussed in this episode could respond to it, they can't listen to podcasts
Auto generator transcripts are really quite good these days. I guess the question is, do imaginary people have eyes?
Well, that's not technically true... :p
Those Golden Goose shoes are pure "Derelicte" from Zoolander.
I remember reading somewhere that stuff for super rich people is more likely to look like something a homeless person would wear than just a nicer version of what a merely kinda rich person would wear because an ultra rich person might worry about being mistaken for merely being kind of rich, but would not worry about actually being mistaken for being homeless.
Richception.
They're so hot right now.
They are REALLY REALLY DIRTY???
Proper "Oh no, my toddler went to the farm without his wellie boots" level of filth. You'd not let someone in the car with those on, would you? 😂
Funniest episode in a while, by the time we got to the Kitchen Aid I was crying.
The KitchenAid was HYSTERICAL. Idk if I was exactly crying but my eyes were watering. Couldn’t Coty think of a better way to get Sarah’s legs amputated? Like just have her hit by a car or something!
Then there would be an accident report ir something!
Oh, good point. She could fall down the stairs or off a ladder or something? That would still be more plausible than the KitchenAid. 😅
Unless they were moving, or rearranging the kitchen, why would they move a stand mixer? That's an item you park in a designated spot.
My wife makes me hide our stand mixer in the pantry, so I have to pick it up and move it to the kitchen each time I want to use it, but I'm utterly incredulous that a stand mixer dropped from any normal counter height would pulverize your foot bones badly enough that doctors would conclude amputation was the best solution rather than putting pins or screws in the bones to hold them together while they healed unless you also got some sort of horrific infection during the healing process.
There were chocolate chips everywhere! They got into the bloodstream...
I was driving a borrowed car while listening... and I had tears in my eyes. the whole thing was just too absurd for words!
The listing of adjectives to describe the ideal fictional girlfriend that included "dead" was what made me totally lose it while doing laundry.
I know the show is technically about “internet bullshit” but my favorite episodes, like this one, are more about the deranging effects of the internet and the insane incentive structures that exist for its denizens.
We don’t talk enough about incentives in day to day life, and I’m not sire why. It usually explains 95-99% of what people do.
"Jeff was a plagiarist, but at least he cared about people." One of many lol-worthy lines in this exceptional episode.
The gullibility of people astounds me. Is it just being cognizant of grifters that lets me see the red flags of 50 pity-me-oppression attributes? Pick ONE, sheesh. If this is performance art at this point, five stars, no notes.
The culture of this type of community prevents a lot of people from questioning identity attributes. The culture of oppression has made itself ripe to be scammed.
I was out at kitchen aid amputee and amazed at how long it went on after that
If there's one thing that doesn't astound me, it's the gullibility of people. I might listen to way too many fraud podcasts, my favorite flavor of true crime.
The Opportunist is my guilty pleasure. Definitely doesn't increase trust in society.
Me too. I miss the old host. ETA: the AARP podcast, The Perfect Scam, is also very good. I like Scam Goddess, too, in smaller doses.
Oooooh, thanks for the recs! I love learning about scams/grifts/cults.
Trust Me is another good one.
I took a break for a year (and they also removed previous seasons from Spotify?) and came back to keep asking myself if this is the same show because it sounded so... different. Now you've confirmed it - it's the host. The episodes are only one-episose arcs and don't really grab me like the previous ones.
Yeah, I much prefer a multi-episode, deep-dive into a subject, a la, The Dream, season one.
Sheri Shriner for me!
I can't overdose on so many. I'll lose all hope.
I listened to a podcast called Scamanda (?) Files or something, about a woman who faked cancer for YEARS and grifted untold amounts of money. true sicko stuff.
I am likewise astounded. Is it a Jersey thing? I grew up in New Jersey in the late 70s/early 80s where skepticism was the coin of the realm.
The AMA (American Medical Association) is an interesting example of where our institutions are headed.
This is a trade organization. It lobbies Congress on behalf of medical doctors and puts out policy positions. It has no role in government and no enforcement power to actually do anything, but is still quite influential.
The AMA used to have a large majority of all physicians in the US as members, but it has dwindled over the years so instead of having >80% of doctors it now has <20%. So now, although it purports to represent the whole of the medical profession, it really represents a pretty small slice, since of course only a minority of the remaining dues-paying members are even really involved. The people who are active with the AMA now slant heavily towards silver spoon types. Those are the sorts of people who have enough money in the bank to handle the demands of the medical profession and pay for medical school while still having enough free time to get involved in politics. They’re also the sort of people who have powerful friends. So the institution is a pretty extreme example of luxury beliefs. The people who are active there literally do not know anyone who isn’t rich, and most of them probably do not see Medicaid patients, if they bother to practice medicine at all. Even from the perspective of other physicians, they’re cloistered and out of touch.
I’ve been active with my state medical association and I’ve thought about trying to gain some sway in the national AMA, but from what I’ve seen I’m not convinced that anyone who isn’t an old money type or a DEI hire can really make much of a difference.
Because it is not a governmental institution, the AMA is not very transparent and is hard to change. But a lot of actual legislators and regulators will take their marching orders from the AMA even as its influence declines.
It’s comforting to me to hear that a minority of doctors are in the AMA. I had no idea. Thank you.
This source says it went from 75% in the 1950’s to 15% in 2010 or so (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3153537/)
This one says it’s down to 12% of actual doctors (not people who are still in training) by 2019 (https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/campbells-scoop/80583)
The AMA does not have to give information on this, but it is not doing well.
When I look at medicine as a whole, it is in big trouble because of the capture of regulatory bodies. But the AMA is not a regulatory body. So there is an opportunity to, in the Bari Weiss mold, simply build a new institution.
I read the ama as a trade group for doctors is mostly concerned with making sure that they back up anything their members decide they want to do, so as to reduce the chance at a lawsuit.
That is, their incentives are all in favor of saying “treatment A is great and supported by evidence” and ALSO “treatment B is”. So one of the reasons the ama etc are not against unevidenced gender treatments is that doing so doesn’t directly help their members in the short term, whereas saying the treatments are fine will help protect against lawsuits.
In other words if at least some doctor wants to try some new totally experimental thing the ama will be for it. This can be good for innovation but is pretty bad for either stabilizing raising healthcare costs or in getting rid of stuff that doesn’t work.
In general, I would agree. The AMA is going to be the lsat ones to speak out against anything that doctors are doing wrong.
Incidentally, the AMA has a code of ethics for physicians (https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics).
Interesting that the American Bar Association has seemed to lay low through all this (I say presumptuously without researching it but they haven't made the news with this nonsense). That's probably because there are always lawyers on both sides of any issue.
They're also a very important part of a grand conspiracy in the Illuminatus! novels.
My brother-in-law's dad was huge on the AMA conspiracy stuff. Weird stuff.
It's similar to the BMA in the UK. It's essentially a trade union and doctors don't have to be members to be able to practice.
However, the BMJ the journal produced by the BMA is well respected and peer reviewed.
JAMA and its spinoff journals are also classically in the upper echelon of peer-reviewed medical journals.
I kept wondering if there was an explanation for why a Turkish immigrant would be named Susan Banks, and if no one who came across her ever found that implausible.
The benefit of the doubt would be she anglicized her first name, and Banks was a married name.
I personally know a woman from Laos who anglicized her name to "Susan" when she came to the U.S.. Still, Craven's LARP would have made more sense if she'd chosen a Turkish last name for the character, seeing as "Susan Banks" was never stated to have been married before "meeting" Craven.
I spent the whole episode thinking I knew the name. Turns out it was a minor character in an Agatha Christie so that’s good.
Thank you! That was driving me crazy.
I think affinity fraud is an underexplored explanation for why there tends to be so much of this scamming in certain communities like disability related ones. Affinity fraud involves exploiting others within your own community, usually for financial gain. It's particularly common in some insular communities, like the Mormon community (see article on Mormons below as well as linked wiki article for an overview of affinity fraud more broadly). The combination people tending to be trusting of others within their own communities and the types of dysfunctional people who seem to be drawn to these disability groups seems to be create an environment that's absolutely ripe for fraud, whether it be for status seeking or for financial gain.
https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2023/02/20/why-so-many-latter-day-saints-fall/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud
Exactly-- if you're running a con, you always want to do it on people who you can credibly pass yourself off as "one of."
The show White Collar is oddly good at pulling this out, weirdly enough (or maybe I just think that because I like the show)-- the main character is incredibly skilled at portraying a certain kind of upper-class twit, and almost all of his (now government-approved) cons involve some variation on that. They don't randomly ask him to portray a manual laborer for a week; it wouldn't work.
This comment makes me think of my wife's sister and her husband. They are in their mid-late 40's and live as missionaries (kind of?). They "work" for YWAM (which I understand is Youth With A Mission, but they are well past youth). They live in a nice area in San Francisco, seem to go on vacations a lot. They aren't really doing much to help people, but they are always fundraising. They launder their money through YWAM so they can get donations funneled directly to them but also allow their donors to get a tax deduction. They have large, uber-religious families, and no one seems to question why they can't get real jobs that pay them a salary or ask if there is a cheaper place to do God's work. They act like they're poor, but their lifestyle clearly contradicts this. They claim they get really good "deals" so they can spend 2 weeks at Disney world or take a 2-week cruise home from a month in Germany instead of flying. They once sent my wife and me a quarterly newsletter which highlighted their work, and the primary thing they did was take walks in the morning and say hi to people to "brighten their day." I also say hi to people when I'm out for a walk, because that's a nice thing to do. I'm not asking people to pay me for it. I often wonder what schmucks give them money, but you don't become a zealot by asking questions and demanding evidence/results.
I’ll just leave this here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_With_A_Mission
Re the uselessness of gender ID as a concept, an argument I seldom see made but that I think is important- even if I as a man decide I have a male gender identity, distinct from and unconnected to my biology, how could I possibly know that was true? So it’s not merely that it’s a useless concept because some people don’t have a gender ID, the idea that you could feel you have one in the absence of dysphoria seems especially stupid
Not only do I not have a gender identity, I don't think anyone does. If you're saying you have a feeling that you're a man, well either you are or you aren't so that's just a thought you're having about reality. If the only feature of a GI is that you think/ say you have one, then I guess if you say you do, you do, like being religious. But then it's just whatever you say it is. Whatever, it's all gibberish.
When Jesse said something like, 'at least gender identity has a coherent definition, which is circular and we can't agree on it'... circular and indescribable is simply incoherent, right?!
To me, I think gender identity is all of the stereotypes that society puts on me because of my female body (would be the same for male-bodied people). People see me as a middle-aged woman and so expect me to behave in certain ways. My gender identity is called Beryl and she very much resembles my grandmother who had very strict VIEWS about how a lady should act.
I can defy these expectations or fall into them depending on my feelings, mood, or whatever. I don't partially like Beryl- in some ways she makes social situations easier, but in others I chafe against the gender expectations imposed on me. And I certainly don't 'identify' with Beryl. In fact, I think if she fucked off and took Nigel (the male version) with her, people would be a lot happier.
Wear what you want, do whatever hobbies make you happy, but don't cut off your penis because you like glitter and rainbows. Or poison yourself with testosterone because you prefer short hair and comfortable shoes.
There is *something* beyond sex and sexuality that seems to be a pretty fundamental aspect of our personhood. Maybe it's just left-brain vs right-brain dominance? I'm not sure that "gender identity" has always been as invalid as it is now, because I suspect that it has *become* incoherent and useless as a result of how the term has been used over the last ten to fifteen years.
You mean what used to be know as a personality?
No, personality is different, personality is the collected total of all the things about how you act. Gender identity as a valid concept is more like an aesthetic orientation.
The idea that people without gender dysphoria would have a “deeply felt sense of being male or female” is ridiculous. It would be like people with two legs having “a deeply felt sense of having two legs.”
Dysphoric people have a deeply felt sense of being the *wrong* sex — that’s clear enough. We already have a name for that feeling: gender dysphoria.
TRAs have tried to normalize the idea of “gender identity” being a deeply felt sense everyone has because this would normalize transness.
The meaning of “gender identity” for, like, all of social science until very recently was simply a person’s *awareness * of their own sex. We all have that.
`Dysphoric people have a deeply felt sense of being the *wrong* sex — that’s clear enough. We already have a name for that feeling: gender dysphoria.'
What you, and Jesse apparently, fail to realize is that sexologists, etc. use gender identity to explain *why* people feel gender dysphoria. That is, gender dysphoria arises because of a mismatch between one's sex and one's gender identity. It's a long-establish theory as to why some feels they're the wrong sex.
Don't like the theory then falsify it or propose another. One doesn't just get to waive away +60 years of (soft) science by making a facile, and at this point cliched (ahem, Katie) comparison with the `soul'.
As for Jesse's criticism of Serrano's example: her example just needs to be updated because a man walking around in a dress means far, far different things than it did when she made it. Here's a better example:
`"Gender identity” refers to the subjective internal feeling that one is male or female. Most of us rarely, if ever, think about our gender identities. But if we imagined that others were treating us as the opposite sex—insisted that we were the opposite sex—most could get an idea of the mental anguish a child with [gender identity disorder] may feel.'
- J. Michael Bailey, `The Man Who Would be Queen'
How about another researcher trans people really, really dislike but nonetheless finds gender identity a useful concept:
`So what is [Ken] Zucker’s position? First, he believes that the diagnosis of childhood GID [(gender identity disorder)] is useful and valid, and the diagnosis is not merely a value judgment that boys who like girls’ activities (or girls who like boys’ activities) are sick or wrong. This is due to his conviction that children with GID suffer, and that the suffering is not only attributable to bullying by closed-minded peers and adults.
...
`However, when I spoke to Zucker about the current debate about childhood GID, I came away with the impression that these days, he feels besieged primarily on the left. He has had several recent ex- changes in academic journals on the issue of GID, all with critics who believe that the GID diagnosis is essentially gender repression...'
Honestly I'm starting to get a bit uncomfortable with where Jesse and Katie are going these days with respect to gender, sex, and all things trans. When one gets to the point where they're throwing out a DSM-sanctioned diagnosis based on such clumsy and shoddy reasoning as `I don't feel like I have this thing, so this thing must not exist', I think that perhaps it's time to step back and consider whether one is treating the issue impartially and fairly.
I think Emily said it best here: "Not only do I not have a gender identity, I don't think anyone does. If you're saying you have a feeling that you're a man, well either you are or you aren't so that's just a thought you're having about reality".
I do believe that gender dysphoria exists, but it is disordered thinking. We ARE our bodies; it's impossible to be in the wrong one. Every cell in one's body is sexed, and contains your own personal DNA blueprint.
One cannot actually feel like they are a male in a female's body, because they have no conception of what it feels like to have a male's body. It's impossible, it's fantasy.
It seems clear that the best treatment is to accept the body you were born with, and make it the best and healthiest body it can be.
I'm sorry but the amount of intellectual hubris on display here is simply stunning (not just you, Molly, to be clear).
The modern idea of gender identity (GI) dates back to the work of Stoller and Kohlberg in the 1960s. Since then researchers have published thousands of papers on the topic, including studies that document the process by which children acquire their gender identity.
While much of the existing work on gender identity comes from the soft sciences, more recent work has looked at the biological components of gender identity, e.g., `The Biological Contributions to Gender Identity and Gender Diversity'* by Polderman et al., 2018. Some of the earliest work on GI also examined how hormonal interventions during development (experiments performed on animals) would lead to changes in behavior consistent with GI.
This mountain of evidence was produced by hundreds if not thousands of researchers, and I find it dumbfounding that most here are willing to simply reject it out-of-hand---if they are even aware of it!---and still claim to be grounded in science/facts/reason/etc. This is anti-intellectualism of an incredibly pernicious variety.
`It seems clear that the best treatment...'
Maybe it's clear for you but, as Alice Dreger (author of Galileo's Middle Finger) has pointed out, there are numerous studies, including ones by Ray Blanchard, that indicate `well-screened' sufferers of gender dysphoria are better off after receiving HRT and other medical interventions.
*The paper actually contains the line `Every person has a gender identity'. Such a bald assertion does not make it past peer review unless it is taken as a fact.
I understand that people who talk about gender dysphoria often use “gender identity” to explain its existence.
What I’m saying is we have no evidence that gender identity as “a deeply felt sense of being male or female” exists. (Unless we’re counting self-report as evidence, in which case there’s also evidence for ESP.)
I’m also saying that this particular definition of the term “gender identity” is recent.
If Person A creates a theory that is not falsifiable, how is it Person B’s responsibility to disprove it? This isn’t how it works in anything from drug testing to English papers. If the theory is not falsifiable, that is the end of it: it cannot be tested, people who believe in it do so as an act of faith, and everyone else who does not believe it is not doing anything wrong.
Back when I had long hair, I used to get misgendered as female from time to time. This did not cause me any trauma - I thought it was pretty funny.
Now as I understand it, I do have a "gender identity" in that I see myself as male. But as far as I can tell I don't care what pronouns people use for me, or whether they believe I am male. I'm not invested, again as far as I can tell, in whether other people consider me male.
Please consider the sad, sad case of David Reimer as an example of how distressing it can be when society and your family insist that you're something you're not.
Reimer is a tragic case that should not be used to prove anything aside from the fact that John Money was experimenting on and abusing children.
His case does not prove that he had an innate male gender identity, he simply was male. It would be an insane conclusion to claim he would have been fine if he had been born with a "female gender identity".
He was a male and the way he knew that he was a male, despite lacking the genitalia and being socialized as a female, is because he had a male gender identity.
Without an innate gender identity, he would not have known he was a male.
I never said he would have been fine had he been born with a female gender identity, nor do I think what Dr. Money did was OK.
I believe you have just defined "unverifiable".
I can’t tell if you’re answering me because of how the comments are threaded… if so thanks! My specific point was not just that it’s unverifiable but that the absence of dysphoric feelings makes it especially unverifiable and meaningless
I was responding to you, you're welcome, and the idea that it is unverifiable both outwardly and inwardly.
It is definitely *possible* to have a coherent concept of "gender identity" as distinct from sex, for example, those cultures which have a "third gender" identity for feminine male. This third gender identity is coherent, and it obviously serves some kind of useful purpose, or else it wouldn't show up as having evolved essentially independently in a bunch of different cultures.
But the concept of gender identity *we in this culture specifically* have been dealing with is *not* coherent, and thus it is useless if you have good intentions.
But if you have *bad* intentions then the incoherent concept of gender identity we have been dealing with in our culture specifically *is* quite useful, because it allows you to confuse and upset people and draw attention to yourself by starting an argument that could never possibly finish.
most of the examples I've seen really are just homosexuals that are put into a third category so as to de-homo them. Look at the Hijra people who are born male and ted to be confined to sex work for males. or I forget where it was, but It was a sort of "female husband" situation, where "certain" females were allowed to live with other women in "sexless" "marriages" in the absence of men due to war.
I genuinely don't get this comment. Like, wouldn't you just... know it? That's like saying "even if I as a religious person decide I have a Christian identity, how could I possibly know that was true?" You know that it's true because it's what you think. Cogito, ergo sum and whatnot.
Like I know I have a male gender identity because I feel male. I realize YOU might not have an easy way to double check that, but from MY perspective it's completely obvious.
You seem to "not get" a lot of comments around here, for quite a while now. Have you considered working on your reading comprehension?
Do not engage with His Lordship
Just allow his heavenly light to wash over and cleanse you of all wrong-think. He is the light and the way. There is no other.
Now I understand Him. For He is unknowable.
It all makes sense now…
Maybe one day I can truly walk the path of the Zagarna. For now I’ll just try and bask in His light as much as I can stand it.
ZigZag is an 👽 supreme being. Enjoy the glory
May it be so.
It’s funny for a self-proclaimed lawyer to have that much difficulty with reading comprehension. Then again, he may be a lawyer in the sense that the representatives for Mr. Mata in Mata v. Avianca are lawyers.
Contrary to what you might thing, Zagarna is NOT a contrarian for contrarian's sake.
Did I say I couldn't read the words the comment was using? I do not think that I said that.
I have read the words, I understand the concepts being conveyed, and those concepts are deeply alien to me.
Could be you're an 👽? I mean that pic isn't proof or anything but I'm sensing a strong alien gender energy, ZigZag.
What does it mean to “feel male”? How does that feel?
I’d say “feeling male” is when you reach down and start grabbing your dick, but apparently females can have those too now so idk.
Do women have to resist fiddling with their genitalia all day? Is this the line?
I don’t believe they do. They’re more developed in their brain bits.
Whilst I can’t go more than 2 seconds without thinking with/about my junk, they’re focused on more intellectual things, like kittens, Starbucks, and interior decorating.
Memories of Beavis shaping his hands in the air after the therapist asks him how he feels about his mother - while Butt-head mutters, “That’s not how I feel your mother”
I 'feel male' because I am male - how could anyone possibly disentangle their actual sex from some nebulous concept of gender identity, in the absence of dysphoria?
Even then, though, dysphoria cannot logically be the feeling that you are the OPPOSITE sex. I could accept, perhaps, that you feel you are the WRONG sex, but there is no possible way of knowing what a "woman" or a "man" feels like, especially for someone of the opposite sex. On its face it makes no sense.
It's the fashun du jour
I will grant it’s possible that some non-trans people have a gender identity in the sense of a deeply held feeling of being male/female. But I don’t have one, except in the extremely trivial sense that I will identify myself to others as a woman / female when prompted (because it’s materially true).
All I’m looking for really is an acknowledgement that not all people have a gender identity and thus the idea that it’s a better way of categorizing people than sex in circumstances where sex/gender matters is at least up for debate, as opposed to being accused of some type of bigotry for not holding a very particular world view
I don't really understand how you can FEEL female or male, you just are. It's like feeling 5'4 or feeling white with brown eyes.
Other people and society might treat me in a specific way because they see my physical appearance, but doesn't necessarily change how I feel. Plus, how can I know how anyone else, whether we share psychical characteristics or not.
Also, does my identity of having blue eyes change if somebody is colourblind?
I keep saying, everyone needs to identify as agender. Once everyone realizes they too belong in the Queer Clerb, a lot of the ridiculous parts of gender stuff will be irrelevant.
🎶I smell sex and gender here, mmmhmm
Who’s that writing not too clear
Who’s that being overly queer
with their medical terminology,
Oh birthing parent this surely is a dream🎶
"Weird Benjy Shankovic" bringin' the 90's🎵to BARPod ftw 🙌 and no, this is not the kind of *weird* that now (as of two or three weeks ago) automatically makes you a Republican, phew
Oh there’s much more where that came from . . . If you scroll through my past comments on barpod and Fifth Column you’ll find more of my, uh, literary output.
I will do some excavating now thanks🎵! You have been on my radar since we *almost* met in Chicago (like a sliding doors thing but Nika helped bring us together anyway :-)
Aww, I’m glad to be on someone’s radar! [sheepishly, sotto voce:] I also have a Substack, if you’re really that interested . . .
👍😅
Get Eli Lake to make an AI song of this.
Quirktastic new lyrics to pop songs is the lowest form of culture, even below puns.
So, we live in an era in which "identity" matters and certain identities matter more than others.
At the same time, we lived in an internet mediated world, in which, as the cartoon had it, "The internet doesn't know I'm a dog."
Verifying identities is harder, while claiming the right ones is more important.
Grifters' paradise.
As I learned today, the greatest thing about the internet is:
On UberEats, the Szechuan restaurant doesn’t know you’re white.
Soo disappointed that Katie and Jessie aren’t aware of the huge munchie red flags that POTS/MCAS/EDS are in combination.
Absolutely. I'm surprised EDS isn't on Katie's radar already, every single lesbian I know claims to have it.
I’ve now self diagnosed with POTS having previously assumed the symptoms were down to being over 40 and a bit out of condition.
I know a woman with EDS but she’s literally a contortionist.
I don't think that's correct. My understanding is that they are basically the same condition, or at least so heavily comorbid as to effectively be the same condition. A quick google search says that something like 80 percent of people with EDS have POTS.
Maybe it's the case that people who make a point of ADVERTISING that they have all three of POTS/MCAS/EDS are likely to be Munchausens, because if you weren't trying to attract sympathy you'd just say you had one of them, and describe it as including the symptoms of all three. Not aware of any evidence of that theory, though.
Oh they are three very very different diseases. And they weren’t considered related until they started becoming way way more popular as there’s no particular reason for them to be related.
Pretty much they’re easy to fake or interpret random symptoms as having them. As was pointed out many many people can feel lightheaded after standing or have weird rashes or irritated skin. It can be pretty easy to fake what you need to fake and there’s a lot of discourse on how doctors don’t really understand the diseases and that you should do X thing to make sure you get your diagnosis (especially POTS which has a more defined test then EDS or the kind of MCAS everyone now has which is the only type without a genetic test). There’s also particular doctors that people like to go to, a lot of self-ID, tons of people having the worst case ever of it, social media influencers in the space, merch, etc.
TBF it seems likely that a lot the people are closer to actually believing in some of it and then making themselves worse then purely using to manipulate so there is an argument to be made that it’s more factious disorder with some manipulation then truly munching.
Obvious caveat that I am not a clinician; this is pure amateur hour.
That said-- I don't think there is a genetic test for MCAS. There are some known genetic markers that increase your risk, like with breast cancer, but it's not definitive. There IS a genetic test for several types of known EDS-causing genes (for types other than hEDS); perhaps you're thinking of that? If we end up locating a genetic basis for hEDS, the theory would be that that genetic disorder also causes symptoms of what we currently call MCAS and POTS. Which is reasonable enough in abstract. It's hard to definitively prove the ABSENCE of a genetic basis for something, since it could always be that we just haven't looked in the right place yet.
This paper (which is clearly, and justifiably, skeptical of the proliferation of MCAS diagnoses) says the link between MCAS and hEDS/POTS is "not definitively proven":
https://www.jaci-inpractice.org/article/S2213-2198(21)00676-0/fulltext
On the other hand, it may be necessary to screen out the factitious disorders in order to deem the proof sufficient, I don't know.
Here's my current bottom line: of the people who are claiming this constellation of symptoms, it's likely (but apparently unproven beyond correlation) that some genuinely have all of them because they're related, some (maybe the biggest group) have conversion disorders where mental-health challenges are manifesting in physical form via suggestion, and some are Munchausen's/factitious disorder. And probably some are malingerers who are trying to get on disability, although the smart ones of those will call as little attention to themselves as possible. Not a very satisfying description, but it is what it is.
This is just not true—the thing about them not being considered related until they were “way more popular,” and especially the thing about there being “no particular reason for them to be related.” I think a basic knowledge of EDS and secondary POTS would make it very obvious how they could be related.
I have POTS (not EDS or MCAS) but I think it’s a lot easier to get it as a diagnosis but like you said, it is extremely difficult to fake symptoms for a TTT. They analyze your vitals a lot, they’re checking for patterns that would be better explained by another condition. I don’t think these are easier to fake than many other conditions. But every chronic illness group I’ve been in has been full of people trying very hard to get better and better.
hEDS doesn’t have one test but other EDS forms do. But everyone I know with EDS took 10+ years to get a diagnosis and it’s extremely difficult to find a doctor who understands the condition well enough. Yes, there are “particular doctors,” but I promise you your average doc won’t know how to take on complex cases. I have had doctors tell me completely false information before that could easily be disproved if they actually read the literature. I’ve known people who nearly died while trying to see regular doctors before getting a better recommendation off of a Facebook group.
EDS tends to spark other conditions. POTS is extremely common with EDS and tends to be more commonly a secondary condition, MCAS is also very common with EDS.