liskantope - Tumblr blog

[liskantope]

I've mentioned a bunch of times in this space that I used to be really into lucid dreaming as an early teenager (peaking when I was 13-to-14) and was pretty good at it too; then I gradually lost something (interest? or opportune circumstances/lifestyle?) and had mostly stopped doing it by the time I became an adult, and I often wish I could get back what I lost.

I was rereading a bit of one of my old lucid dreaming books (the copy of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, by Stephen LaBerge, which I got when I was 14) and it was describing the DreamLight mask (cutting-edge technology of ~1990 to detect REM sleep and flash lights that will stimulate the user to realize they're dreaming) and began to remember how I'd always been curious about these devices, and also about lucid dreaming retreats in (I think) Hawaii that I knew of at the time, and other things which I couldn't imagine having the money to buy. And now that I do have enough money that I could at least consider buying a new toy like one of these DreamLight-like devices and surely technology will have improved since 25-30 years ago, I wondered if I could find a place that was still selling stuff like that. And of course, I found out that the DreamLight and the NovaDreamer and most other such products have been off the market for many years. Somehow I'm not shocked by this at all.

I can't say that there has ever been any kind of widespread interest in lucid dreaming as a cultural phenomenon at any point in history, but I can't help feeling that there somehow was stronger collective interest in it between 20 and 30 years ago than there ever has been since. A good bit of my vivid recollections of the first-half-of-the-00's internet comes from memories of lurking on a lucid dreaming forum that was connected to the Lucidity Institute -- some years later, the Lucidity Institute lost funding and was shut down. I don't think they're doing those retreats anymore either. Stephen LaBerge (the foremost founding scientific expert on lucid dreaming) is still alive AFAIK but well past retirement age now and maybe no longer active. I don't know of a place where many people talk about it (okay, I checked and there is an active Reddit page which doesn't look to be great quality so far, but as far as I know there is no Lucid Dreaming Tumblr). The topic of lucid dreaming has just fallen long past its peak in our collective pool of cultural interests. There is no "market" for it any more, either in the literal sense of production of lucid dream -stimulating technology or funding for scientific research or in a more metaphorical sense.

The funny thing about it is that this parallels pretty well my own intense interest and engagement with lucid dreaming: peaking around 2000-2002 and then diminishing gradually until it had reached near-oblivion by the end of the '00's and then I haven't quite been able to revive it since. (Of course it's not a precise parallel: I imagine there was a lot of collective activity around the 80's and 90's, which is for instance when LaBerge's seminal books on it came out and the Lucidity Institute was at the height of its powers. But that was pretty much before my time.)

It makes me think of my own personal interest in atheism and related topics, which peaked only slightly after my interest in lucid dreaming (2003-2006-ish) before lagging slightly and then dropping sharply in the early 2010's. (One of my other main sources of memories of the first-half-of-the-'00's internet, even more vivid, is of hanging around atheism-related forums!) And this almost precisely lines up with the New Atheism movement and prevalence of atheism as part of the culture wars (I consider this era to have begun around 2003 and ended definitively in 2011). Now obviously this isn't a coincidence: the fact that everyone was arguing about atheism a lot circa 2005 clearly contributed to my continuing to think about it a lot. But it still feels like kind of an individualistic personal journey for me: my mid-teenage self was ripe for sinking my teeth into this particular kind of social and philosophical question, getting really indignant about it, eventually finding hours to discuss it with semi-strangers as a college campus (an environment very conducive for that!), then eventually feel like I was "growing out of it", had burned myself out mulling and discoursing over something that was never quite going to be resolved across large groups of people (I do feel like my side -- the pro-secular side -- by and large won those culture wars though), and... meh. That arguably sort of is what happened on the broad society-wide scale, in fact: a bunch of people got obsessed by atheism and then kind of collectively "grew out of it", but it feels like something that could only happen to me at those particular ages which makes it feel like a significant coincidence that the particular ages coincided with society's arc here.

[liskantope]

I'm beginning to think just a chip of melatonin not only is likely to improve my sleep but may increase my chances of having lucid dreams. Last night I took one and, although I wound up sleeping a lot (being already sleep deprived and getting into bed early helped), my sleep in the morning was choppy and I noticed after I got up that I remembered more dreams than usual. Three separate brief dream scenes stuck with me all day, with no memory of which order they occurred in, each a bit unsettling in its content but not disturbing enough to make me wake up sweating.

In one, I was in a plane and noticed that the engine seemed to have completely stopped, or at least that's what I assumed because I heard dead silence. I wasn't alarmed exactly, because I figured it may be time for the plane to make a quick descent anyway, but I braced myself for a stomach-jolting abrupt acceleration toward the ground which never quite came. In another dream scene, I discovered that if I pulled my hair apart, behind a somewhat healthy tuft of hair in the front was a half-ring of complete baldness -- not a single hair in that section (although plenty of thick hair behind it) but it seemed that usually I was able to keep this completely bald part covered. And in another, I got on my phone and called the particular friend whom I hung out with the evening before last (in real life) but when he answered I discovered I couldn't remember the thing I wanted to ask/tell him; I was mortified to have bothered him for no reason. I'm dreamed variants of the first two of these dream scenes before, but the third was more current-topical in nature and actually felt like more of a nightmare than the others; in fact, with relief I realized it was just that and managed to wake myself up from it.

At some point in the midst of all this I had a Waking Induced Lucid Dream, where the usual roaring in my ears was quite brief this time, and I reminded myself not to will a scene into being but just gently focus on some random thing in front of me, which turned out to be speech bubbles of comic strips. Pretty soon I was looking at a newspaper comics page and testing how quickly the writing changed in the speech bubbles of a Baby Blues strip between each time I glanced away from it. Then I tore the page in several places and consciously appreciated how realistic the sound and sensation of tearing was, said out loud "I'm dreaming" and woke up (possibly a very brief awakening) before much else could happen.

Again, it's weird that I have no sense of what order any of this dreams happened in -- I even think I might have remembered more dream scenes than these when I first woke up this morning -- and only know that my early morning was a mess of brief awakenings interspersing rich REM sleep and that overall it was pretty enjoyable and even restful despite some of the unsettling dream content.

[liskantope]

I of course agree about disliking this thing where people go "X political opponent of mine is weird and awkward, haha", including when it comes from Democrats. In addition to it simply being ableist and hurtful to people who have struggled with social skills - I'm certainly no fan of J. D. Vance, and I imagine you aren't either. But I think there are lots of very intelligent, thoughtful people who would make great policy decisions but aren't especially socially charismatic. (1/2)

(2/2) I really don't think it's a good idea for liberals to reinforce a norm that such people should be disqualified from office.

(This is regarding this post from 10 days ago -- I've been really busy with the new academic semester and so am struggling to find time and the right mindspace to respond to stuff on Tumblr.)

You're right that I'm no fan of Vance: his book that made him famous might have some merits for all I know (I haven't read it), but at least since then he seems to be a completely phony chameleon, and, worst of all, he's chosen to run on a ticket with Trump, which is pretty automatically disqualifying for my respect. That, and all his vitriol towards childless people and cat ladies and so on is much worse than any of the specific examples of ableist undertones I see from the other side.

I'll also say that all the ridicule of Walz's son for standing up and tearfully shouting "That's my dad!" a bit non-neurotypically after Walz's words of love for his children (ugh! God forbid! actual exemplary family values are just dumb and cringey, at least if they come from Democrats!) made me far angrier than any kind of ableism that would come from David Pakman. The only reason I didn't go on a rant about it here is that I already got it out of my system on Facebook. And there's plenty of other garbage coming from the Trump/Vance side about Harris laughing a little strangely (supposedly? her laugh seems pretty normal to me) which makes her intolerable and so forth.

Still, two wrongs don't make a right.

And anyway, I agree that social skills shouldn't be considered such a huge factor in what makes for a qualified politician -- it does need to be somewhat of a factor, but I wish we didn't live in a world where most public support for politicians is based on vibes and most vibes come from superficial mannerisms. It wasn't true 150 years ago and is an unfortunate product of our modern technological world.

Also, if Pakman and his ilk want to point out that Vance was very awkward in the donut shop by typical politician standards and this doesn't bode too well for him because that's how politics works, I wouldn't really have a problem with that. (That's essentially the treatment they gave deSantis.) It's the "ha ha ha, nyah nyah nyah" -flavored mockery, which comes across as being independent of the context of politicians being held to extremely high standards of charisma, that gets to me.

I also might as well mention (though this is less in response to your ask) that this came somewhat in the wake of an earlier Pakman clip that I mentioned in the other post that I was even more annoyed by, didn't bother to post about it at the time, but I just recovered it. Seriously, Pakman, in an uncharacteristically halting way, says the following in anticipation of showing Vance issuing a few kind of evasive and sub-par answers at an event and being a little awkward by politician standards but still less awkward than most ordinary people in their everyday lives:

The only -- uh -- how can I even say this?... The only people I know personally who are this uncharismatic-seeming... Man, it's just so hard to say this without sounding so offensive. There's, like, some explanation, um, that sometimes is... medical in nature... uh, it just sounds so horrible to say... I-I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's... it's a personality that he seems to have that is really an edge case. It's a fringe personality of some way to be this unappealing as a person, some traits of which sometimes connect to medical explanations -- I don't believe they do with JD Vance -- I think he's just really a horrible person, is what I'm trying to say. I hope I'm being kinda like sensitive and not offending anybody.

He can worry as much as he wants about coming across ableist, but, well, what he says is still what he says.

[liskantope]

Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"

[liskantope]

I will take an undercurrent of ableism over literally anything and everything Vance and Trump are peddling, any day.

Yes, heartily agreed! (And anyway, it's not like there isn't a decent supply of ableism on the Trump/Vance side as well. "Weird laugh" = intolerable trait, anybody?)

[liskantope]

The undercurrent of ableism in the attacks on J.D. Vance (and in this year's election discourse in general) is continuing to grind on me. (The worst of it isn't the anti-Vance stuff, and also I see no evidence that Vance actually has any kind of disorder or disability, but this constant "eww yuck" emphasis on any kind of awkwardness he ever displays is harmful in my eyes.) Tim Walz seems sort of complicit in it, although I'm still not sure he's actually quite crossed a line yet apart from his not-so-subtle-or-clever quip about the (again I emphasize totally made up) couch thing.

Or maybe I'm just watching too much David Pakman lately. Vance's cringey donut shop visit was genuinely very awkward and demonstrated that Vance doesn't have the consistently high level of social skills that we generally expect of politicians, fine. (I remember a very similar sort of clip going around with Ron deSantis in a restaurant or something, back during the Republican primaries, earning his social skills criticism without quite the same mockery and "he's so weeeeird" commentary.) But I still haven't really forgiven Pakman for, a few weeks ago, playing a clip of Vance being nothing at all like in the donut shop but just giving some sort of weak answers in an interview (like, you know, most politicians do in their worse interviews), and Pakman started going on, in a halfway-restraining-himself way, about, "I really really don't want to be offensive here, but the only people in my whole life I've ever encountered who are this awkward have... some kind of diagnosis that explains that they're this awkward..."

Yeah, it's always nice to see my regular everyday levels of awkwardness now semi-regularly mocked as ugggh the most painful thing we've ever seen. (No, I know I don't have the social skills or stamina it takes to be a politician, don't find the idea attractive anyway, and am no more sensitive about that than I am about not having the physique it takes to be a professional athlete. But I'm talking about something that says more than "frequent awkwardness is a sign you shouldn't be a politician" here.)

[liskantope]

Just read within a forum comment:

the idea of pronouns corresponding to sex specifically makes me really uncomfortable, and is not how I have ever used pronouns for anyone at any point in my life. [boldface mine]

This comment is by an assistant professor somewhere (presumably an adult probably in their 30's at least).

I generally believe people when they describe their own lifelong behaviors, but I'm having a really, really hard time with this one. (Maybe an elaboration by the commenter would clear something up here?)

Starting around the 2040's or 2050's, a claim like this may start to become a lot more plausible.

[liskantope]

By one of those funny coincidences, the very day after I argued about the meaning of "bigot" and expressed surprise that the first definition quoted at me from a dictionary actually wasn't in reference to one's attitude towards a group of people (didn't want to reblog again because the chain is long and this is mostly orthogonal to the discussion), I happened to be skimming over a section near the end of Harper Lee's questionably-published Go Set a Watchman (originally written circa 1957), in which the main character (Jean Louise Finch) looks up "bigot" in a dictionary.

"...you[Jean Louise]'re very much like him[Atticus Finch], except you're a bigot and he's not." "I beg your pardon?" Dr. Finch bit his under lip and let it go. "Um hum. A bigot. Not a big one, just an ordinary turnip-size bigot." Jean Louise rose and went to the bookshelves. She pulled down a dictionary and leafed through it. "'Bigot'," she read. "'Noun. One obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion.' Explain yourself, sir." "I was just tryin' to answer your running question. Let me elaborate a little on that definition. What does a bigot do when he meets someone that challenges his opinion? He doesn't give. He stays rigid. Doesn't even try to listen, just lashes out..."

This excerpt suggests that the primary use of "bigot" back in the late '50's is this "pig-headedness" or "intolerant of other's opinions" one and not directly based on being prejudiced or antagonistic towards a group of people, at least not a group of people defined by a characteristic any more intrinsic than their ideological beliefs. (It's just occurring to me know that f this were more widely known, I imagine a fair few people would try to bring this sense of the word back -- for instance, the anti-DEI types in academia who accuse DEI of "caring about racial and gender diversity but not ideological diversity" may accuse the more strident DEI advocates of being "the real bigots".)

It's ironic in the context of Go Set a Watchman, because here Jean Louise is arguing with her uncle after having just had a huge show-down with her father Atticus in which he has exposed himself as if anything the bigoted one in the debate (in the modern sense, in this case racist).

(I do think I remember, in an early episode of Mad Men, taking place around 1960, a white character says to a black stranger, "Do you think I'm a bigot?", using "bigot" as a sort of 1960-era synonym for "racist", but then again, this was written some fifty years more recently.)

I suspect the drift in usage followed the usual trend of negative-valence words narrowing in meaning to focus on the particular context of -isms as -ism-type beliefs have become increasingly stigmatized in our society (e.g. "gross" and "creepy" being used by millennials-and-under in a much more narrow way than by our parents), where this particular semantic drift took place a good few decades ago, at least I suspect by the time of my childhood.

[liskantope]

Your response has two parts to it. I'm ready to essentially concede your point about how non-politician anti-trans people talk amongst themselves, modulo my not knowing much about how those types of commentators talk amongst themselves. (JKR certainly sounded like she had compassion for trans people in 2020, even if her screed then was dismissive and harmful in other ways, but nowadays, let's just say, not so much, at least judging by the snippets of her activity I've run across. I already brought up Matt Walsh as an obviously uncaring douchey douchebag with douchiness coming out of his pores. Posie Parker I don't know anything about.)

The way politicians and political factions among the people talk, and the way this is discussed in mainstream discourse which reflects how the great masses of people think about these things is very important, but the way activists on that side talk amongst themselves would seem also quite important, and I should probably pay better attention to it. I remember being criticized for this back in spring 2023, and I guess I didn't take it enough to heart.

You're probably right that verasimile did mean people like Walsh and JKR and other such commentators, and correct on that point in general. That said, I fully disagree with your take on the meaning of bigotry. I, in turn, don't think your definition of bigotry makes sense.

(First a side point, since this isn't germane to your argument: the first part of the dictionary definition given is more general than any use of "bigotry" that I think I've ever seen. It sounds like it's describing pig-headedness or something like that. I've only ever seen "bigotry" in the context of being bigoted against a certain type of person. So I'm a little taken aback.)

I'm perfectly aware of a "prejudiced" meaning along with an "antagonistic" meaning. A dictionary definition isn't going to delve into all the nuances of what forms prejudice can take; it's going to refer to the most commonly understood concept and use of the term, which all my life (since I first encountered the term at a very young age) has meant something like "making assumptions (usually negative) about someone's abilities, capacity, or morality based on what group they belong to". So for instance, if a black person is denied a job on the assumption that they might be a criminal, or are likely lazier or stupider or something, that's prejudice (and racism). If a trans person gets their rental application rejected because of some assumption being made just from the fact that they're trans, that's also prejudice. Same with choosing your straight over your gay acquaintance as a babysitter solely because their orientations affect how much you trust them with your child. Etc.

It comes across to me as a pretty... athletic stretch of this idea to extend it to being skeptical of a certain kind of claimed experience and thus holding that skeptical view of the set of people who claim that experience. That's having a certain attitude towards a group of people for the tautological reason that that group, by definition, claims something you're generally skeptical of. It's the obvious consequence of believing that certain experiences are significantly more rare than reflected by the number of people who claim them: believing that the perception of Experience X is often incorrect obviously leads to a general belief about people who profess Experience X, and this, according to your logic, now makes someone a bigot.

This leads to all kinds of absurdities. I suppose that my belief that (to use an example I brought up above) there is a society-level phenomenon of young women thinking a bit of cellulite or unevenness of skin tone makes them hideous, and that this is an unhealthy delusion, makes me bigoted against young women with certain fixations on their appearance. (Of course, there are male versions of this phenomenon too; incel culture is said to be rife with them.) A similar point can be made about how I view anorexic people who don't fully realize they have anorexia (this may be most of them? I'm not sure), or people with various other disorders who don't realize it. If I believe that there is no supernatural (at least not accessible to us) and therefore born-again Christians are mistaken in interpreting certain experiences as God/Jesus speaking to them, then I'm bigoted against born-again Christians. If I believe that all scientific evidence shows that extraterrestrial visitors are currently extremely unlikely, therefore the thousands of people who claim they saw UFOs or made contact are mistaken about their experiences, then I'm bigoted against people with UFO stories. (There is a radio show that plays on my local station which regularly interviews such people.)

And so on and so on. It turns out that since we each think particular frequently claimed experiences are somewhat unlikely, we're all massive bigots, and with that, yet another negative-valence word has been watered down to lessened meaning and utility.

I can't think of a more eloquent reflection of what I've sometimes called the "internal experience supremacy" mentality than branding skepticism about the interpretation of a frequently claimed internal experience with the concept of bigotry with all of its severely negative associations. I'm not assuming that you necessarily believe all of this that I've just ranted about; I'm only saying that it's the only logical conclusion I get from your interpretation of "prejudice".

If some common interpretation of a certain experience is being dismissed wrongly (because in reality it's correct most of the time), harm is usually being done to that person and so we can and should call it harmful because in this case the skepticism happens to be incorrect. I really can't get behind stretching the concepts of bigotry and prejudice to that kind of skepticism itself.

They know exactly what they're doing.

[liskantope]

Very lightly skimming (and mostly skipping over the lengthy quoted excerpts of) Strom Thurmond's over-24-hour filibuster opposing the (already incredibly weakened) 1957 Civil Rights Law is quite entertaining, albeit in a rather grim way. One interesting and bemusing aspect of glancing through official records of Senate proceedings like this is observing the carefully formatted language used in the Senate chamber, for instance the avoidance of directly addressing each other but instead addressing whomever was presiding over the Senate (in this case, during large parts of the 24-hour period, probably Vice President Richard Nixon, who is nevertheless addressed as "Mr. President" meaning "President of the Senate"). It wasn't a 24-hour monologue because a number of times other senators, after requesting permission in the required stilted language, engaged in back-and-forths with Thurmond which most often took the form of questions sympathetically worded so as to hand Thurmond further ammunition.

Here is an excerpt from some nine hours in illustrating the third-person-centered style of dialogue:

Mr. Knowland: I did listen to the earlier part of the Senator's address. I was in the Chamber at the time. I must confess that for several hours I did get some sleep and was able to freshen up and change my clothes, and I am now back in the Chamber. Mr. Thurmond: I notice the Senator looks very fresh at about 6:15 in the morning. Mr. Knowland: Yes. I am glad to be here with the Senator.

Many hours later, by which time Thurmond's voice must have become much hoarser, another exchange between the same two men that takes passive-aggressiveness to a whole new level:

Mr. Knowland: Mr. President, I do not want the Senator to strain his voice but I do have some responsibilities as minority leader. I do not think the Senator is making any motion, but I should at least like to know what is going on in the Senate Chamber. Mr. Thurmond: Mr. President, I yield for a question if the Senator has a question. Mr. Knowland: My question is, would the Senator speak up? I do not want him to strain his voice, but I should like him to speak a little louder so I should be sure no motions are being made or anything of that sort. I do have some responsibility here. Mr. Thurmond: I suggest the Senator move closer to me. Mr. Knowland: Under the rules of the Senate, which are now being strictly enforced, both Senators being in their respective seats, and this happening to be my seat as the minority leader, I urge my request of the Senator. Mr. Thurmond: We might get unanimous consent to allow the Senator to come closer to me if he wishes. I do not think my colleagues will raise any point. There is an excellent seat here, I may say to the Senator. Mr. Knowland: I am very well satisfied with the seat to which I am assigned. Mr. Thurmond: Mr. President, I continue to read...

Just a bit earlier than this last excerpt, some of the dynamic between Thurmond and Long, a Louisiana senator who was clearly making it his job to throw softball "questions" at Thurmond while Thurmond took extra care to enforce that they were actually "questions".

Mr. Long: Is it not, therefore, true that insofar as the right of a citizen to be tried by jury for a crime is concerned, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson would have agreed 100 percent that the freedoms guaranteed Americans under their form of government included the right to be tried by a jury of their own neighbors, in the area where the crime was committed, in the event they were accused of committing a crime? Mr. Thurmond: I can yield only for a question. I shall be glad to express myself after the Senator has concluded. Let the Senator ask any question he wishes. I yield for a question. Mr. Long: Is it not correct to state that...

And shortly later in the same exchange, where Long's "questions" become more bemusingly a vehicle for him to make his own points:

Mr. Long: Mr. President, will the Senator from South Carolina yield for a further question? Mr. Thurmond: I yield for a further question. Mr. Long: Is the Senator aware of the fact that Senator Borah's statue is just outside the main entrance of the Senate chamber, immediately outside the door? Mr. Thurmond: That is correct. I see it every time I go through the door.

[liskantope]

Your intuition is within the realm of plausibility for me and might well be more or less right. My intuition about the "people who advocate for them" -- which I'm mostly going to round off to "politicians" since those are mainly the ones visible to me -- is somewhat different from yours: I think most politicians are just rather soulless, skilled at playing on the fears of the public, and lacking in truly grounded beliefs of their own, particularly on issues that sprang up recently enough that they aren't what got them into politics. (Qualification: there are some politicians and pundits by this point that did get into politics because of trans issues, I suppose. Matt Walsh strikes me as someone who probably truly hates -- or at the very least doesn't care the least bit about -- trans people, even if what he explicitly says is a lot of stuff about wanting to save teenagers from their own misguided beliefs and older influencers.) I find it kind of pointless to speculate what most politicians' Actual Beliefs on the most current divisive culture war issues are. Certainly someone like Ron deSantis is evil, but in some sense that's more because he's a sociopath typical of people in his position who also happens to be advocating for harmful things.

Of course, we can certainly judge politicians by their actual rhetoric, but I think I have yet to run across a quote from any right-wing politician expressing hostility or distaste towards trans teenagers. Rather, their tactic is almost always to frame trans youth as victims of mental illness, misguided beliefs, and a certain culture that perpetuates them, and they do blame older LGBT people for this if they feel the older people are badly influencing the youth (while, it seems, not actually attacking older trans people directly for being trans, just attacking them for advocating "gender ideology" to the more impressionable) and blame doctors who are willing to perform transition procedures. This reminds me of how I once, back around the spring before this last when I let myself get into extended discussion/debate in demonstrate my awkward views on all this stuff, had someone offer to show me proof through quotes that the very most extreme conservative politicians without too national of a platform were willing to applaud the deaths of trans people. My recollection is that the set of quotes this Tumblr user provided me, while bone-chilling, turned out to be one hundred percent about putting gender medicine doctors to death and one hundred percent positioned trans people themselves as victims! (Right now I can't remember that Tumblr's handle and a quick search is not finding me that reblog, may edit it in later.)

(Qualification: political commentator Richard Hanania does express visceral distaste for trans people and suggests that conservative politicians share this distaste and would be more honest to admit it openly.)

I'm going to get myself into a deeper hole with this, but I can't really get behind your use of "bigot" here either. Is it a form of bigotry to believe "such-and-such group of people is confused and misguided by our surrounding culture about what is best for them and they have an illness we should focus on curing?" Because I'm pretty sure most of us believe that about some group of people, and it's a question of how accurate our beliefs are. The fact that I (and probably most anyone reading this) happen to believe that, for instance, teenage girls and young women who view themselves as hideous because they have a tiny bit of cellulite or meat under their jawbone or something thanks to a culture that enforces female "perfection" are deluded and, in the cases of ones who are especially distressed over this, have a mental illness that typically would be best treated in other ways than surgery to get rid of the "extra" fat, doesn't make us "bigots" against young women with that belief. (Acting on our attitude by blanket banning all such medical treatment is a response I think would be wrong. But in the way I typically use language, "bigotry" refers to an attitude.)

To compare/contrast to gay rights for a moment (which I've learned gets me in a lot of hot water around here, but I'm clearly feeling reckless today), as someone who has stood by gay rights and the bulk of the surrounding rhetoric since I was becoming a teenager around the start of this century, I was quite comfortable characterizing the anti- gay rights side as bigoted, because a good bit of their rhetoric was along the lines of "homosexual behavior is evil and wrong and perverted, an abuse of God's creation, deserving of hellfire". But other parts of their rhetoric were "teenagers who say they're gay are confused and need our support and counseling" and, as far as I can accurately remember my own attitudes, I don't think I was ever comfortable with calling that bigotry. And the interesting thing is that, unlike in the gay rights culture war situation, almost all of the rhetoric I hear from conservative politicians on trans issues is arguing about what should be done for trans youth specifically and takes the latter tone rather than the former.

I'll end by conceding, however, the highly uncomfortable (for me) fact that there is a very, very thin line between looking at someone and going "what an unfortunate illness they have" and going "ugh gross, how distasteful it is to be in their presence", so the boundary between genuine concern for others and stigma or bigotry can be unfortunately quite blurred.

They know exactly what they're doing.

[liskantope]

Hell, I used to have that ability when I was around college age and in my early 20's, especially back when I hung around bus stops all the time. It has severely deteriorated and now feels quaint within myself.

The boomer-and-older ability to just strike up a convo with any old stranger is going to seem like some ancient forgotten superpower in ~50 years, like us gawking at the Victorians who ate cocaine for breakfast.

[liskantope]

Well, you're (rightly) pointing to one of the main shortcomings of the pro-banning position: some young people (surely!) really do need gender medicine, where "need" is in the sense that it's the only effective way to make them non-suicidal. And, however small that portion of the youth in gender clinics might be (according to the beliefs behind the ban), it's massively unfair on them to make the treatment they need impossible.

That's a problem any way you look at it, but what I was criticizing was the portrayal of the UK government's inclusion of mental health and suicide prevention links as being evidence that they're just fine with suicide. Because in fact, if one believes that youth trans-identification is a delusional mental illness most of the time and if one's way of handling this issue is to choose a government ban as a lesser evil (again, I don't believe this is the right way to handle it), then what "alternative" to specialized therapy and hotlines can they provide? They already banned the medical intervention alternative! So they're in a bit of a tight place. (Which again, is just one good reason to be extremely uncomfortable with banning medical intervention. But that's not my point here.)

Of course, I'm sure that quite a healthy proportion of supporters of the ban take the much more simplistic and convenient route of assuming that transness doesn't really exist, that there aren't actually any young people who need gender medical therapy, and so on. (Because when we assume reality to be that absolute in a difficult situation, we can indulge our laziness by not actually having to calculate the lesser of two evils and go with a policy that we know will deeply harm some people.) For those people, as incorrect about the world as they might be, it's if anything more clear that they're not out to see gender dysphoric teenagers die or anything like that.

I was going somewhere else with that last paragraph, but it's past my bedtime and my thoughts are starting to get confused. My main idea is, if you're critical of bans on youth gender clinic procedures, go ahead and criticize those bans (I may even join you), but suggesting that the lawmakers on the other side are really just fine with seeing young people die seems to me dubious, unnecessary, and super unconstructive to the whole conversation.

(I think actually the most charitable reading of the OP and even more of Fierce's reblog is: isn't it awful that some people are aware that their decision is very risky to some other people's lives but have chosen it anyway as the lesser of two evils, when perhaps(?!) deciding the other way wouldn't actually involve risking lives? My instinct is to respond with something about consequentialist utilitarianism, but I'm too tired to expand on that and I'm not sure that sort of argument would convince the right people anyway.)

They know exactly what they're doing.

[liskantope]

I'm probably going to regret sticking my nose into this, but.

This is yet another example that I see so often (particularly on this topic) of a failure of Theory of Mind and failure to approach a problem by adopting a conditional from the opposite end of it.

I mean, sure, it comes across as kind of lame and awkward and cheap just to leave a bunch of links to mental health organizations (by the way I haven't looked up the linked organizations but some of them seem to be for treating mental health issues in general as opposed to suicide hotlines) as a sort of compensation for saying "sorry, we're going to deny you the thing a lot of you are desperately asking for". But.

Suppose -- just suppose -- that the UK people in support of restricting gender medicine sincerely believe something like "Claimed gender dysphoria is usually a form of mental illness where the child/teenager is confused about what's the matter and wrong in thinking that the only way to feel better is this form of medical treatment, when actually most of the time there's a better way to treat their mental health which doesn't have serious physical consequences."

(This first step already seems to be one that almost nobody ever seems willing or able to arrive at unless they're already on the other side of this issue. That is, acknowledging that a whole lot of people believe the thing I described in the paragraph above rather than "Ugh, trans teenagers are gross, so let's get rid of them by restricting their access to gender medicine so that they'll do the work for us", as kind-of-implied in the OP and so many other places.)

Now given the above hypothetical, and given that those people's favored solution is banning certain treatments (as harmful or hurtful as that may be), what should they add in support of trans youth? Like, what would you have preferred?

If their model of the situation is that a bunch of young people have a certain mental illness and are mistaken in thinking it should be dealt with by physical treatment, well, wouldn't it make sense that the way to support them is by directly treating their mental illness? Which is what mental illness hotlines are for (particularly one that seems specialized for dealing with "gender confusion" -- yes, it's probably an organization based on the "so-called transness is mostly just a mental illness" ideological belief)?

And with regard to half of them being suicide hotlines, well, that would seem to be a reasonable choice given that one of the main refrains of the groups of people clamoring for easier access to gender medicine for teenagers is that without it they might kill themselves, which no decent person would want. I mean, I suppose they could choose not to link to suicide hotlines and risk that children/teenagers denied puberty blockers might hurt themselves on the belief (correct or not) that it's the only way out of their pain. Would that be better?

I'm generally quite opposed to laws coming from governments that ban medical procedures that a ton of people would choose to get and desperately want, particularly in the case of puberty blockers (as they seem at least in theory to delay having to make a decision without permanent consequences of their own), but we're never going to figure this out as a society if one side insists on being convinced that the other is simply out to kill (or fine with killing) the affected set of people.

They know exactly what they're doing.

[liskantope]

Gendered pronouns in Japanese vs English

In Revolutionary Girl Utena, the main character Utena is a girl (it says so in the title), but very conspicuously uses the masculine first person pronoun 僕 (boku) and dresses in (a variation of) the boys school uniform. Utena's gender, and gender in general, is a core theme of the work. And yet, I haven’t seen a single translation or analysis post where anyone considers using anything other than she/her for Utena when speaking of her in English. This made me wonder: how does one’s choice of pronouns in Japanese correspond to what one’s preferred pronouns would be in English?

There are 3 main differences between gendered pronouns in Japanese vs English

Japanese pronouns are used to refer to yourself (first-person), while English pronouns are used to refer to others (third-person)

The Japanese pronoun you use will differ based on context

Japanese pronouns signify more than just gender

Let’s look at each of these differences in turn and how these differences might lead to a seeming incongruity between one’s Japanese pronoun choice and one’s English pronoun choice (such as the 僕 (boku) vs she/her discrepancy with Utena).

Part 1: First-person vs third-person

While Japanese does technically have gendered third person pronouns （彼、彼女） they are used infrequently¹ and have much less cultural importance placed on them than English third person pronouns. Therefore, I would argue that the cultural equivalent of the gender-signifying third-person pronoun in English is the Japanese first-person pronoun. Much like English “pronouns in bio”, Japanese first-person pronoun choice is considered an expression of identity.

Japanese pronouns are used exclusively to refer to yourself, and therefore a speaker can change the pronoun they’re using for themself on a whim, sometimes mid-conversation, without it being much of an incident. Meanwhile in English, Marquis Bey argues that “Pronouns are like tiny vessels of verification that others are picking up what you are putting down” (2021). By having others use them and externally verify the internal truth of one’s gender, English pronouns, I believe, are seen as more truthful, less frivolous, than Japanese pronouns. They are seen as signifying an objective truth of the referent’s gender; if not objective then at least socially agreed-upon, while Japanese pronouns only signify how the subject feels at this particular moment — purely subjective.

Part 2: Context dependent pronoun use

Japanese speakers often don’t use just one pronoun. As you can see in the below chart, a young man using 俺 (ore) among friends might use 私 (watashi) or 自分 (jibun) when speaking to a teacher. This complicates the idea that these pronouns are gendered, because their gendering depends heavily on context. A man using 私 (watashi) to a teacher is gender-conforming, a man using 私 (watashi) while drinking with friends is gender-non-conforming. Again, this reinforces the relative instability of Japanese pronoun choice, and distances it from gender.

Part 3: Signifying more than gender

English pronouns signify little besides the gender of the antecedent. Because of this, pronouns in English have come to be a shorthand for expressing one’s own gender experience - they reflect an internal gendered truth. However, Japanese pronoun choice doesn’t reflect an “internal truth” of gender. It can signify multiple aspects of your self - gender, sexuality, personality.

For example, 僕 (boku) is used by gay men to communicate that they are bottoms, contrasted with the use of 俺 (ore) by tops. 僕 (boku) may also be used by softer, academic men and boys (in casual contexts - note that many men use 僕 (boku) in more formal contexts) as a personality signifier - maybe to communicate something as simplistic as “I’m not the kind of guy who’s into sports.” 俺 (ore) could be used by a butch lesbian who still strongly identifies as a woman, in order to signify sexuality and an assertive personality. 私 (watashi) may be used by people of all genders to convey professionalism. The list goes on.

I believe this is what’s happening with Utena - she is signifying her rebellion against traditional feminine gender roles with her use of 僕 (boku), but as part of this rebellion, she necessarily must still be a girl. Rather than saying “girls don’t use boku, so I’m not a girl”, her pronoun choice is saying “your conception of femininity is bullshit, girls can use boku too”.

Through translation, gendered assumptions need to be made, sometimes about real people. Remember that he/they, she/her, they/them are purely English linguistic constructs, and don’t correspond directly to one’s gender, just as they don’t correspond directly to the Japanese pronouns one might use. Imagine a scenario where you are translating a news story about a Japanese genderqueer person. The most ethical way to determine what pronouns they would prefer would be to get in contact with them and ask them, right? But what if they don’t speak English? Are you going to have to teach them English, and the nuances of English pronoun choice, before you can translate the piece? That would be ridiculous! It’s simply not a viable option². So you must make a gendered assumption based on all the factors - their Japanese pronoun use (context dependent!), their clothing, the way they present their body, their speech patterns, etc.

If translation is about rewriting the text as if it were originally in the target language, you must also rewrite the gender of those people and characters in the translation. The question you must ask yourself is: How does their gender presentation, which has been tailored to a Japanese-language understanding of gender, correspond to an equivalent English-language understanding of gender? This is an incredibly fraught decision, but nonetheless a necessary one. It’s an unsatisfying dilemma, and one that poignantly exposes the fickle, unstable, culture-dependent nature of gender.

Notes and References

¹ Usually in Japanese, speakers use the person’s name directly to address someone in second or third person

² And has colonialist undertones as a solution if you ask me - “You need to pick English pronouns! You ought to understand your gender through our language!”

Bey, Marquis— 2021 Re: [No Subject]—On Nonbinary Gender

Rose divider taken from this post

[liskantope]

The other day I saw a much-heavier-than-conventional man in a commercial. I already don't remember where (I don't have cable and this was probably YouTube or something on Hulu), only that I made a mental note of it. It caught my attention because it seemed so anomalous in the context of my usual commercial-watching experience. It was an otherwise unremarkable advertisement as far as I could tell. I can't guarantee that it was the first time I'd seen someone both male and significantly obese appear in a commercial with nothing said about it (I do distinctly remember a commercial from 2010-ish that had an overweight man but part of the script was about his being overweight), but I couldn't remember ever having seen/noticed this happen before.

What's kind of astonishing to think about is how the frequency of much-heavier-than-conventional women in advertisements has spiked dramatically in the last five or so years. It brings to home how the fat acceptance part* of the body positivity movement has been almost exclusively female-oriented to the point of basically ignoring men who feel shame and stigma over their weight (and while men have never had it as bad as women in this regard, I've definitely known men who do struggle with it).

*which I have some serious issues with, most of which I try to keep to myself, but I do strongly endorse the part about making efforts at increasing representation

[liskantope]

This is uncannily similar to my internal experience; it's interesting to hear it articulated by someone else. I tried to describe something very similar exactly six years ago (with a slight follow-up here). My external experiences differ at most in subtle ways. I did once get propositioned around the end of a first (and only) date by a woman who I was sort of physically attracted to but with a personality I found completely unattractive, and I rejected her proposition mainly because I didn't much like or trust or feel a connection with her and don't think I could ever be a sex-on-the-first-date type of person even with someone I found hotter and did like and trust, not to mention that it was during the most dangerous part of the pandemic. (She was then quite bratty about my rejecting her.)

It's hard to say how much or little a decree of "no sex for the rest of my life" would bother me. I don't feel like I particularly need to give myself a pep talk to "go out and try to have sex in the next year" or anything like that. I do need to motivate myself to go out and try to find a relationship partner sooner rather than later (an anticipated geographic and professional move within the next year is interfering with my motivation), and sex would hopefully eventually come with that.

I'm clearly not asexual but descriptively I think it must be true that other people want sex more than me, for some practical definition of "want". Like I definitely feel like I want sex, I often think to myself "you know what would be nice? To have sex right now" and I also experience attraction to people. At the same time, I have basically never in my entire life directly sought out sex, I have never hooked up with someone or gotten into a short term casual relationship or anything of that sort. I have even had people that I am attracted to directly proposition me for sex and turned them down, for reasons that are sort of hard to articulate. I just didn't actually want to, even though theoretically I wanted to. That's not quite it but it's close.

My only sexual experiences have happened in relationships already of significant length. I don't know. I'm just not. I'm not very sexually motivated? I am attracted to people all the time but I so rarely feel any real desire to do something about it.

Not that I'm complaining. It seems like a ton of most people's problems come from this need they feel to have a sexual partner, and literally not needing that kind of frees me to do whatever. There's a lot of stuff I don't have to worry about by virtue of the fact that if I literally never had sex between now and the day I die that would not inherently bother me very much. Just not that worried about sex, man.

That said I do want to have sex, and I am currently trying to motivate myself to try and have sex. I think it would be nice to have sex this year, or next year. I might give it a go, but I really need to find someone I feel comfortable with and that's hard.