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A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

economist.com

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Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#801

Post by kaitai »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #658
kaitai wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is this ideology that "gender dysphoria = trans" pushed? This is really bizarre -- could you give me some references?

There are competing ideologies between the United States and the Rest of the World, essentially culminating in two approaches of diagnosing psychological and psychiatric health concerns. One comes from the American Psychological Association, called the DSM and another comes from the World Health Organization called the ICD. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/10/icd-dsm

This doesn't address the "dysphoria = trans" claim at all. As I wrote in the other comment, one can be uneasy or unhappy with one's body/gender without wanting to switch to "the other" gender. As a mathematician, it seems like people here are claiming {1,2} = R (real numbers) which is just weird, they're sets of different cardinality.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#802

Post by pseudalopex »

simonh wrote: post #776
mkr-hn wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them" This isn't actually a thing. Certain factions who would prefer trans people cease to exist push this idea that kids are on this hot new meme of getting their bits flipped before reaching the age of consent, but it is simply not a thing. No top surgery, either. It just isn't a thing. It's a wild fantasy. The only thing kids can go on are puberty bl…

> The only thing kids can go on are puberty blockers. They can also go on testosterone injections here in the UK, not sure about US.

16 according to the NHS.[1] It's the same in the US.

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/gender-dysphoria/treatment/

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#803

Post by jbay808 »

cwkoss wrote: post #740
nrjames wrote: post #518

I worked for a company that hired 4 trans women (out of 7 people total) during a "diversity hiring" push, then touted the diversity of the hires. All of the trans women had been raised and had gone through university as white men, earning comp sci degrees, before transitioning in their mid- to late-twenties. While I do not debate that those individuals represent a type of diversity in the current company makeup, it a…

I think meaning of the term diversity is often twisted into a binary outcome. If a company is 65% white and 35% Chinese is that more diverse than a company that is 70% white, 10% Chinese, 10% Indian, and 10% Vietnamese? Often, the above two examples would be flattened to just 35% or 30% Asian. But even my example is very reductive - China, for example, has many dozens of ethnic groups. I think 'diversity' is a very h…

> Can anyone point me towards better methods of measuring diversity?

It depends on what you want to achieve, but for companies, the goal is probably diversity of belief, opinion, culture, and experience. That way you can have a good spread of ideas and increase your odds of being able to understand your customers (who are probably also diverse).

So you could run anonymized surveys of your staff asking things like "have you ever changed a baby's diaper", "do you play any instruments", "do you speak the same language at home as your grandparents do", "if you could only have one carbohydrate would you choose rice, pasta, bread, or potatoes", etc, and then measure the entropy of the responses.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#804

Post by dang »

pomian wrote: post #636
dang wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is for topics that gratify intellectual curiosity, not "software development". Please see the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . You're certainly right that this is an inflammatory topic with strong political and ideological overlap, and as the guidelines explain, we don't want flamewar here, and we don't want ideological or political battle. The site exists for intellectual curios…

I wanted to express thanks to Dang for the moderation of this site, precisely because we can learn, discuss, and evaluate difficult topics like this, without flame wars, and rudeness. There are a lot of good comments here today, that satisfy and stimulate, our moral, cultural, ideological and biological curiosities. Thanks Dang!

I wish that description were more accurate, but thanks.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#805

Post by nobodyandproud »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #419
drenvuk wrote: post #268

Can someone please tell me how important this topic based on the amount of news time and eyeballs it attracts relative to the number of people that it affects? The numbers I can find for US citizens is: 0.6% or 1,988,696 out 331,449,281 of people total for the entirety of the US in 2021. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite... In the UK where the featured article took place the latest poll I…

I think there will be rather a lot of us who are quite animated by this issue—one that doesn’t directly affect us—because of our own past experiences. As a gay man growing up in the 90s, I very acutely remember some of the public discourse around gay rights while I was a teenager. In the UK, that specifically included a coordinated campaign against mentions of homosexuality in education, with some pretty stark attemp…

In the 1990s I don’t recall stifling of speech, and firing of professors on campus for having a position in the matter.

Allowing the discussion and research to take place, if anything, is what allowed LBG rights to come to fruition.

The article is pointing out that this isn’t allowed happen with trans concerns and so the inevitable backlash and a regressive outcome.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#806

Post by UncleMeat »

plank_time wrote: post #330
caeril wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a large segment of the population that feels actively threatened by trans rights. The two primary components are: 1. Parents and sexual violence victims concerned about the non-falsifiability of trans-identification and the related concerns of sexual predators claiming an identity they don't actually have to gain access to private spaces of women and girls. 2. Feminists (TERFs) who believe being a woman is a…

TERF is a pejorative term, I wouldn’t use it unless you are trying to attack feminists.

FARTs is better, since it doesn't allow transphobia to co-opt feminism.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#807

Post by packetlost »

munk-a wrote: post #659
flavius29663 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of racial ideology, I honestly don't understand how we're supposed to become less racists if we're drawing so much attention to race and putting it left, right and center of any policy discussion?

Because, honestly, shutting up about it and ignoring it is the solution we tried from the 70s through the 2000s and it didn't accomplish anything - racist folk were just empowered by not being called out on it. At least when it comes to America - there are some very deeply entrenched societal issues that we'd need to resolve to achieve anything near equality including generations of depriving wealth accumulation in c…

It's very difficult to pull individuals out of poverty, much less an entire demographic. Tribes have tried a lot, everything from covering all or part of college, regular per-capita payments, free healthcare, partially or fully subsidized housing, etc. and people waste it by trashing their free housing and blowing money on alcohol and drugs. I find it hard to believe there's a greater obstacle to growing wealth than growing up without any.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#808

Post by kaitai »

fxtentacle wrote: post #616
scubbo wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value. And that the person who is making the claim should have the right to any treatment that they wish, up to and including surgery. I can understand some caution around the latter part of this quote, given how traumatic, invasive, and costly surgery can be. It is a defensible and reasonable position that there should be _some_ barrier-…

My I can imagine thousands of reasons why teenagers would lie, and maybe they'll come up with new pronouns just to annoy you. Because that's what kids do, they constantly test the limits of acceptable behavior and the limits of your patience. That said, I agree with you that people can choose what gender they feel like and others should accept it as an opinion. But trying to force others to change their behavior to a…

This comment alone shows that HN suffers deeply from not having many women participants. If y'all had more female commenters, you'd know that you don't get to see a bunch of girls naked in a high school or college locker room. Everyone is so insecure about their bodies that they change in the toilet stalls or take their bra off under their shirt then shimmy the sports bra up under the shirt and hook it then change shirt, or put on a towel to keep it all out of view. Being a teenage girl really sucks in a lot of ways. Of course one would have gender dysphoria if it has a glimmer of a way out of the trap of having to be look perfect, act perfect, get perfect grades, be a perfect friend, be perfectly sexy but not a slut, be perfect but not stuck-up etc that teenage girls face every day. (I understand that teenage boys face another set of pressures that can also be crushing -- as a teenager though you always think that someone else has a more-perfect life or a greater set of freedoms, right?)

As for the headline "Teenager finds way to push parental buttons: this never-before-seen act is the fault of liberals" yes, can confirm that toddlers start practicing early.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#809

Post by slibhb »

danShumway wrote: post #749
slibhb wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your explanation of "TERF talking points" is fair. Contra Judith Butler it's not clear that feminism has any meaning without some essential idea of "womanhood". That is fundamentally what disturbs "TERFs". When you talk about "this Goldilocks zone of womanhood," I think you've rediscovering one of the oldest philosophical discoveries: mental concepts and ideas (in this case "woman") do not apply perfect…

> "there is no distinction between biological women and trans women," There is no category of women that is entirely identical, where you couldn't distinguish between them. Some AFAB women can't give birth. Some of them have more androgynous bodies. Some of them are black. Some of them have different levels of estrogen, or grow up in different social circles that impose different expectations about how they should ac…

Did you read my post? I addressed all of this very directly.

To quote myself:

> When you talk about "this Goldilocks zone of womanhood," I think you've rediscovering one of the oldest philosophical discoveries: mental concepts and ideas (in this case "woman") do not apply perfectly to the world of appearences. But this does not mean we can jettison concepts and ideas altogether. In fact they seem necessary. So the fact that we cannot seem to come up with a perfect criterion for defining "biological woman" does not mean that we can dispense with that category.

So, regardless of whether we can specify criteria by which we can decide whether or not someone is a biological woman, the essential concept of "biological woman" seems to me (and to gender critical feminists) to be indispensible. To me, because it allows us to provide a good (though not perfect) answer to the question "where do babies come from?" and to gender critical feminists because they view the concept as central to their political/philosophical project.

In fact, we can use your method of argument to demolish any category or concept. Take death for instance. How do we define death? By what criteria can we say anything is dead? Take life. By what criteria can we say something is alive? In fact we can't answer these questions perfectly and this is well known. But I don't see any use in getting rid of concepts like life and death which seem central to how we all understand the world. Along the same lines, I don't think we can dispense with "biological woman".

And while all of this may seem "absurd" to you, terms like "AFAB" seems "absurd" to me.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#810

Post by worik »

whoooooo123 wrote: post #743
worik wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is more heat than light in these debates. The Gender Critical Feminists do make up bogeyman stories about rapists in prisons, trans women disrupting breast feeding groups etcetera. The Trans lobby though has also been guilty of the same sort of thing. E.g. I am no fan of professional sport (I hope this kills it dead) but to claim that trans women have no advantage over natal women is opinion not fa…

> bogeyman stories about rapists in prisons As I said in another comment, this is far from a bogeyman story - there was already a case in the UK of a male-bodied convicted rapist being housed in a woman's prison because "she" decided post-conviction that "she" identified as female. She then went on to sexually assault multiple female inmates. Look up the name Karen White. I put "she" in quotes not because I have a pr…

> - there was already a case in the UK of a male-bodied convicted rapist being housed in a woman's prison because "she" decided post-conviction that "she" identified as female.

That is my point about gaolers being sadists. What do they do with aggressive women who get their thrills sexually predating on other women? They should not go into general population if the gaolers are not sadists....

In my country a young man (about twenty years) was housed in a cell with a known rapist who raped him every night for nine months.

That is my point: Prisoners need to be protected from each other, they are not, because by ad large gaolers are sadists and the general public does not know or really care much.

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