Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

[DSMatticus]

I was originally just going to ignore this because Count being an asshole to one group or another is par for the course. Hell, transitioning from outright misogyny to gender essentialism is practically an improvement. But people are tip-toeing around this like they don't know how to call him out and the honest-to-god most insightful thing said so far is an Eddie Izzard bit. This shit is awful.

So hey, guess what? Gender's a set of arbitrary behaviors we teach to people based on the genitals they crawl out of the womb with. The Y chromosome does not contain genetic information which expresses itself as a distaste for wearing skirts. If you pop out of your mother's vagina with a penis, we will spend the first decade-and-some of your life teaching you not to wear skirts, and if you pop out of your mother's vagina with a vagina of your own, we will spend the first decade-and-some of your life teaching you it's okay to wear skirts. Why? Because why the fuck not. Does it have to be that way? Obviously fucking not. What do you think a kilt is? This shit is real exactly to the extent that we collectively agree it's real and to the extent we enforce it upon one another - it's a self-fulfilling game of pretend your parents opted you into when they decided to paint your room blue or pink.

So, hey, guess what else? Sometimes it doesn't fucking take, and men want to wear skirts and make-up and high-heels. And some of those men want to suck cock and others want to eat [EDITED]. And some of them want to go to work in pants and jackets and others want to go to work in skirts and blouses. We divide each of those behaviors along gendered lines (men do one, women do the other), but the only actual relationship between those things is that... we divided each of them along gendered lines. Again, it's us. It's just us. We carved a bunch of arbitrary bullshit on stone tablets and told eachother it was law and so it is.

We are gradually figuring out how bullshit all this is. None of this shit is actually related. There isn't some platonic ideal of womanliness from which we tolerate an accepted amount of deviation, there isn't some mythical ur-woman to whom you must pay worship to earn the coveted title of 'she/her'. There's a bunch of people we call women (based on the genitals they had at birth) and a bunch of behaviors we arbitrarily expect of people we call women. That is as deep as the rabbit hole goes. The whole affair is ridiculous and stupid, representing nothing, and we are gradually dropping it for the apparently ever-so-confusing alternative that people are free to express themselves however the fuck they want.

"Men can be women too" is fundamentally a gibberish approach to gender identity. "Okay, okay, gender may not be tied to one's genitals, but it's still two very important checklists we have to follow!" is just mind-bogglingly stupid. The entire premise was that because there were two kinds of genitals you could make a checklist for each and make people follow it. Once you acknowledge that maybe genitals don't actually have shit to do with the items on the checklist, the checklist itself stops meaning anything. The pronoun 'she' doesn't signify anything, the pronoun 'he' doesn't signify anything, the whole scheme collapses into nothingness. We're still stuck using them of course, just like we're still stuck teaching boys not to wear skirts. Culture has inertia. We're probably still going to be calling people 'he' and 'she' after we go full transhumanist and people are plugging their cyberbrains into fucking cars or whatever - and the car sure as shit isn't going to hit enough of the items on either of the dumb fucking checklists.

You use the pronouns people ask you to use because the set of traits that "belong" to that pronoun is the empty set. There is no gate to keep. End of story.

[SlyJohnny]

"Men can be women too" is fundamentally a gibberish approach to gender identity. "Okay, okay, gender may not be tied to one's genitals, but it's still two very important checklists we have to follow!" is just mind-bogglingly stupid.

I don't disagree with the thrust of your point, except (a) I haven't seen any of Count's other posts on the topics you mentioned, so I've only got your word for it that he's a horrible troglodyte. I'm "not calling him out" not because I'm being delicate about being rude, but because I've been honestly confused by his opinions on this topic, and what lines he's drawing between the people he hates and the people he doesn't, and where, and why, and (b) While I don't put a lot of stock by socially mandated gender differences myself, there are a lot of trans people who it DOES matter to.

For some people, it's vitally important they present as societies stereotyped image of a female. They get terribly excited about dresses and makeup and... pink things, at least when they're first coming out and ordering new clothes and stuff. They feel that not presenting as this image has been a fundamental problem that's been making them feel depressed or disconnected. A trans woman I know is extremely frustrated by the fact that she has a large, broad-shouldered build, and is extremely jealous of a mutual acquaintance who came out as trans and has had an easier time presenting as female and "passing" due to her having a much more slender frame and smaller face, etc.

I mean, I'd love it if everyone could just relax and be happy with their bodies as-is, whatever gender they want to identify as, without needing surgery or futzing around with clever costume tricks, but isn't the whole point that it isn't something they can just... elect to feel?

[Prak]

I don't wear women's clothing. I bought this dress, it is mine. And I wear it.

*e-hem*

There's a divide in the tumblr trans community between trans that have gender dysphoria and wish to transition, and trans that believe gender dysphoria is transphobic because it implies gender is not just a social construct, and "passing" is inherently wrong. As is the case with vocal tumblr groups they tend to not like each other. I believe gender dysphoria is a real thing, and when someone with a full beard dressed in men's clothes demands to be called a woman I tend to not take anything else they say seriously (at one point the person running the largest Poly group on Facebook was one such person. Not sure what happened, I know they lost a lot of members very quickly).

Well that's a gross over simplification.

Dysphora is generally understood as distress or anxiety. Some trans people feel distress or anxiety over their body, and seek to transition because of it. Some trans people, such as myself, don't feel particularly distressed or anxious about their body.

It's important to remember that transgender merely means to identify as a gender other than that which was assigned to you at birth. That's all.

So a person who feels genuine distress about their penis and wishes to fully hormonally and surgically transition to living as a woman, is transgender. A person who feels no particular distress or anxiety about their penis, but identifies as a gender that is somewhere in between male and female, and maybe merely feels a vague dissatisfaction* with their lack of breasts or a vagina, is trans.

Note- A lot of trans people also are critical of gender roles and traditional gender aesthetics. A lot are not. So a trans woman who maintains a beard is no less trans because she has fucking facial hair. She's probably just a person who decided that traditional gender assumptions are bullshit and she's going to do what she wants. Think of her as a fucking dwarf if you have to in order to be less of a douche.

There are, broadly, two major camps of trans people, and they have basically been labelled by each other. Truscum are those trans people who believe that there are only two genders, that dysphoria is a necessary part of being transgender, and that you're only valid if you're trying to pass. Tucutes are those trans people who believe that dysphoria is unnecessary to being transgender, that simply identifying as a gender other that which you were assigned at birth is the whole of being transgender. Tucutes are the trans people who have gender identities beyond "male" and "female." Truscum tend to be conservative or very centrist democrats. Tucutes tend to be more left-leaning liberals, or actual leftists.

Now, certainly, there are people who "pretend" to be trans for attention. Just like, certainly, there are people who make false accusations of rape. But, just like being skeptical of rape allegations because there is some, small, non-zero number of false accusations is being a fucking douchebag, being derisive of people who you think are "pretending" to be trans is also being a douchebag.

A few years back, there was a news story of a kid who convinced their mom and their doctor to let them begin to transition at, like, 12, and then later decided they had made a mistake and wanted to de-transition. This isn't a case of someone pretending to be trans, this is a case of gender being fucking complicated and a doctor committing malpractice**, and you'll note I used gender neutral pronouns for the kid, because I'm betting that as they mature, they come to rest on a gender identity that is other than that which they were assigned at birth.


*Looking up dysphoria on dictionary.com to make sure I was accurately defining it told me that "dissatisfaction" qualifies as dysphoria. While that may be true definitionally, the popular belief is that body dysphoria manifests as distress or anxiety. I would bet that if I told a Truscum that I was trans because I was "dissatisfied" with my body, they would say that's not dysphoria.

**The standard practice for underage trans people is for their doctors to give them puberty blockers, not the hormones to transition. This is so that a case exactly like that which I described does not happen.

So is anyone going to explain what parts of Disenchantment were transphobic? Just wondering, no one has supported that claim yet.

No, because that would require rewatching it, and it's not that good. I remember noting a transphobic joke, likely targetted at Bean from Luci, but I don't remember what it specifically was. Because honestly, transphobia is so fucking common, especially in mainstream comedy, that it would be like trying to remember the color of a particular house I delivered to last night.

[DSMatticus]

For some people, it's vitally important they present as societies stereotyped image of a female. They get terribly excited about dresses and makeup and... pink things, at least when they're first coming out and ordering new clothes and stuff. They feel that not presenting as this image has been a fundamental problem that's been making them feel depressed or disconnected. A trans woman I know is extremely frustrated by the fact that she has a large, broad-shouldered build, and is extremely jealous of a mutual acquaintance who came out as trans and has had an easier time presenting as female and "passing" due to her having a much more slender frame and smaller face, etc.

Yes, it is vitally important to people that they express themselves the way they wish to express themselves. And people often choose to express themselves in stereotypical ways, like "punk" and "goth" and "woman." That really has nothing to do with whether or not any particular traits are essential to any particular gender, but it's certainly important to people.

[Prak]

And sometimes people go fifteen years thinking "I'm a goth," and trying to present that way, and then realize at 30 "Oh, shit, I'm punk, aren't I?"

[Count Arioch the 28th]

) I haven't seen any of Count's other posts on the topics you mentioned, so I've only got your word for it that he's a horrible troglodyte.

No, they're right, piece of shit to the max over here. I had a rough time growing up, and due to the difficulty in finding decent mental health care with limited funds I developed some very counter-productive coping mechanisms. In short, for a period of time I was an incel (a fact that brings me great shame now that I have good health insurance and was able to find the right combination of pharmaceutical and talk therapy). But you know what they say, once it's on the internet it's there forever so I'm stuck with it. I can still occasionally slip into old habits under periods of extreme stress so every once in a while I let slip something fly.

As far as who I hate, I try not to hate anyone. I often fall short of that goal but I accept people think in ways that don't upset their preconceived notions very much and in ways that makes them happy so if you're not actively making my life harder in a way I can directly address myself I try to not think about it.

[DSMatticus]

I do not really give a shit that you used to be pretty bad about the misogyny. I mean, I gave a shit, because it was awful, and because you were clearly lashing out in a way that was totally preventable if you could have sorted out whatever the fuck was going on on your end and that's frustrating to see. That's basically what happened to my dad after his divorce, and frankly I was young enough that I'm lucky that shit didn't stick to me for any length of time and turn me into some kind of misogynist goblin. But you clearly actually did sort out a lot of the aforementioned whatever the fuck and chilled way the hell out, and that's a better ending than situations like that usually have, so, fuck it, put a point in the win column for decency and humanity. I am more annoyed that despite chilling way the hell out you are still finding ways to be a bit of a prejudicial dick, which is maybe unfair, Rome wasn't built in a day and whatever, but come on.

It's just - seriously, who gives a shit? What are you defending? The sanctity of pronouns isn't a thing what are you even doing? It's such a ridiculously petty thing to gatekeep. "I think gender means something, therefore I'm going to judge you by whether or not I think you're doing gender right." You can just not do that. It's super harmless. I mean, gender really doesn't actually mean anything, who does and doesn't get to wear skirts really is just shit we made up. Genitals are in fact older than the things we invented to cover them. That is a really easy version of the chicken and the egg question. But even if it did, how would any of this be harmful?

Gender dysphoria is a mismatch between the way people are expected to express themselves by society and the way people want to express themselves and that's a real conflict between what people want and a bunch of arbitary bullshit we made up. It sucks and it's real and none of that makes the arbitrary bullshit any less arbitrary. And because the world isn't literally black and white and because this isn't some post-gender utopia and because the arbitrary bullshit really is just arbitrary bullshit, different people are going to reach different conclusions about what is and isn't important to making them 'feel feminine' or 'feel masculine' or whatever and that's okay, too.

And you have got choices on how to respond to that. Choices like:

1) Declare that gender definitions are immutable and it's super important that people fit into one of them.

2) Assume that people who aren't expressing femininity/masculinity in the way you are expecting them to are acting in bad faith and deserve quiet or vocal scorn.

3) Let people identify how they want to identify, call people who ask to be called 'she' 'she,' because whatever, do you really know anything about their personal circumstances? Who exactly is that going to hurt? What is even the worst case scenario on obliging them?

Choose three, please. It is easier for absolutely everyone involved. It is the unpleasantness minimizing solution. It's one less thing for you to worry about and less people you're going to make feel shitty by suggesting they're living their life wrong and so on and so on and the potential drawbacks are... absolutely nothing.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

tl;dr

[Longes]

So hey, guess what? Gender's a set of arbitrary behaviors we teach to people based on the genitals they crawl out of the womb with.

There's some evidence that this is not entirely true.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-env ... er-choices
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

[Grek]

The test subjects were divided up into two categories according to sex, four categories by age and five categories by matrilineal rank, while there were two distinct toy types with fifteen different toy interactions studied. It then has the gall to A] not bother correcting for multiple comparisons (of which there are twelve hundred possible) and to B] go with the headline "Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences" when it says right in their result section, "When dominance rank was included as a covariate in frequency data analyses, the interaction between toy type and sex was not significant and the interaction between toy type and rank was also not significant." An equally valid reading would be that a monkey's social rank (important female -> regular female -> male) determines access to the most desirable (ie. soft and animal-shaped) toys.

Relevent xkcd:

"Monkeys of select social ranks prefer certain types of toys in a way that kinda sorta mirrors one aspect of human gender roles!"

[Maj]

What did boys and girls do before humans invented the wheel?

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Well, according to a google search for "preshistoric children's toys" they played with brightly colored plastic dinosaurs.

[Username17]

What did boys and girls do before humans invented the wheel?

The Incan Empire did not use wheeled carts and carried all goods with human strength or pack beasts like llamas. But they did make wheeled toys and incorporated circles extensively into art.

I strongly suspect that "rolling toy" significantly predates "humans."

-Username17

[Maj]

I haven't seen mention of rolling toys; just spinning disks (with animated animals!). Not sure that counts as analogous to the wheel, though.

I'm not really sure that choosing the toys of today to represent a potential biological difference that might not even be as old as lactose tolerance or alcohol is very good science. I think there are too many questions that surround that choice that need to be tested before any conclusions can be drawn (firstly, is it WEIRD?).

Lise Eliot, in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, also mentions that there is a wider range of differences within the range of "female" than there are between the two sexes (likewise for "male"). She also notes that we believe more strongly in biological differences between the sexes than we did in the 1970s, even though less evidence supports it.

[Longes]

The test subjects were divided up into two categories according to sex, four categories by age and five categories by matrilineal rank, while there were two distinct toy types with fifteen different toy interactions studied. It then has the gall to A] not bother correcting for multiple comparisons (of which there are twelve hundred possible) and to B] go with the headline "Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences" when it says right in their result section, "When dominance rank was included as a covariate in frequency data analyses, the interaction between toy type and sex was not significant and the interaction between toy type and rank was also not significant." An equally valid reading would be that a monkey's social rank (important female -> regular female -> male) determines access to the most desirable (ie. soft and animal-shaped) toys.

Your selective quoting is realy cute. Turns out that if you cut out the sentences you don't like the text will say whatever you want - who knew?

As seen in Table 1, participating males and females were comparably distributed across ranks (X2= 3.36, p =.18). In addition, a comparison of mean rank between males (9.3) and females (8.7) revealed no significant differences, t32 =&#8722;.77, p=.45. When dominance rank was included as a covariate in frequency data analyses, the interaction between toy type and sex was not significant, F(1,31)=3.90, p=.06, and the interaction between toy type and rank was also not significant F(1,31)=.78, p=.39. When the frequency data were transformed, however, then the interaction between toy type and sex remained significant even with rank as a covariate. For the untransformed duration data, the sex by toy interaction remained significant with rank as a covariate (F(1,31)=4.56, p=.04) and the toy by rank interaction was not significant (F(1,31)=.05, p=.82). We also conducted Spearman’s correlations to determine the relationship between rank and frequency or duration with each toy type. With both sexes combined, rank and total frequency were positively correlated for both the plush toy (rs= .43, p=.01, r2=.18) and the wheeled toy (rs= .38, p=.03, r2=.14), accounting for 18% and 14% of the variance, respectively. For males, plush toy (rs=&#8722;.36, p=.27, r2=.18) and wheeled toy (rs=.21, p=.53, r2=.04) total frequencies did not correlate significantly nor did total durations (plush: (rs=&#8722;.31, p=.35, r2=.10; wheeled: rs=.005, p=.99, r2<.001). For females, rank correlated positively with total frequency for both plush (rs=.71, p<.001, r2=.50) and wheeled toys (rs=.45, p=.03, r2=.20), and with total duration for plush toys (rs=.55, p=.01, r2=.30), but not for wheeled toys (rs=.34, p=.11, r2=.12). Thus, large percentages of variance, especially for total frequencies of interactions with the plush toy, are explained by rank in females, but not for males, where rank accounts for little if any of the variance in interactions with toys. Thus it is unlikely that social rank determined the sex differences in toy preference reported here.

[tussock]

What did boys and girls do before humans invented the wheel?

Hmm, kids wouldn't have time for toys after like age 7 or so, but younger, looks like there was always tiny versions of adult tools, and probably wooden or stone dolls (as, like, a thing you give a 3 year old to stop them "helping" so much with the real baby).

I guess when you mess up and break the flint you're making into a spearhead, you can still make it into a little spearhead and put it on a little stick for your kid, and they can practice hunting by chasing rats before they're anything like big enough to hold a full-size spear.

But, like, sticks and stones and imagination go a long way, if that's all there is. Even loose dirt or wet sand is a pretty cool for a kid. Just don't let 'em make a habit of playing with shit, trouble waiting to happen, that is.

[maglag]

What did boys and girls do before humans invented the wheel?

Tiddie figurines of course. Otakus are older than writing itself.

[Grek]

Your selective quoting is realy cute. Turns out that if you cut out the sentences you don't like the text will say whatever you want - who knew?

The fact that they had to do corrections in order to massage the stats into place, even after designing the entire study to be a morass of multiple comparisons does not fill me with confidence in their conclusion that it definitely wasn't social rank. Do you even have the slightest measure of skepticism for social psych studies that confirm what the author wanted to hear, Longes?

[Longes]

Your selective quoting is realy cute. Turns out that if you cut out the sentences you don't like the text will say whatever you want - who knew?

The fact that they had to do corrections in order to massage the stats into place, even after designing the entire study to be a morass of multiple comparisons does not fill me with confidence in their conclusion that it definitely wasn't social rank. Do you even have the slightest measure of skepticism for social psych studies that confirm what the author wanted to hear, Longes?

Are you so entrenched in your ideology you can only read the parts of the text that confirm what you want to hear?

An examination of the distribution of the behavioral variables using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test revealed positive skew due to a majority of animals showing relatively low frequencies and durations of behaviors with a few individuals showing very high rates of interaction. Focusing analyses on total frequencies and total durations of interaction rather than on individual behaviors reduced but did not eliminate skew. Square root transformations of total frequency data eliminated skew except for total duration data. To make analyses of both types of data as comparable as possible, we conducted ANOVAs on untransformed total frequency and total duration data to allow us to identify interactions. However, when significant interactions were revealed, follow up comparisons used nonparametric tests on the untransformed data. While we found that skew was no particular threat to the validity of our results when using only parametric tests, we felt the combination of parametric ANOVAs with nonparametric tests for other comparisons to be the most conservative approach to analyzing these data.

[Grek]

That is literally an admission that they knew what they were doing was bad practice but did it regardless so that they could get significance. Sure, they tried to paper it over with statistics, but applying a transformation can't help with multiple comparisons unless you preregister which transformation you're going to use in advance of getting the fucking data. If you pick your transformations after the fact, you're making the multiple comparisons worse because now you can shop around for which transform makes the data significant and not report the ones that don't. This sort of bullshit is endemic to psych studies and is why you should basically never trust any positive result in the field until it's been replicated by at least three additional people.

[Leress]

The good news is you won't have any reason to stick around long enough to get to the transphobic parts.

I'm only at episode 7, what are these parts?

[Iduno]

The good news is you won't have any reason to stick around long enough to get to the transphobic parts.

I'm only at episode 7, what are these parts?

I've only read about it when trying to find out if the show got better at some point, but there's something about a griffin that people got upset about. No idea how justified they are, as the show isn't worth watching enough for me to go find out.

Mostly checking reviews came out with "the show is pretty good, but I laughed hardest at the first episode." I don't think I laughed at all in the first 2, so if that's the high point, I'm out.

[Prak]

I think I kind of eye-rolled about the griffin--which is actually half-human, referred to as Griffin-man, iirc, speaks with a deep voice, and is actually a cis-woman. It was weird, but not transphobic as I remember it. Of course, there is a good possibility that Luci made a transphobic remark about her, but if so, I don't remember it just like I don't remember the color of the second house I delivered to last night.

I'm pretty sure the transphobic remark was directed at Bean.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Mostly checking reviews came out with "the show is pretty good, but I laughed hardest at the first episode." I don't think I laughed at all in the first 2, so if that's the high point, I'm out.

I have been given to understand that the last three episodes of the season (which were not pre-available to reviewers) are transformative and cast the whole show in a different light. I'm planning to skip ahead to those and see if it's true, will report back if no-one beats me to it.

[Pariah Dog]

Well unlike Simpsons/Futurama, the show has an overarching storyline. Also unlike Simpsons/Futurama the show isn't very funny. If you go in expecting fantasy Futurama, you'll be disappointed.


There is a setup for a next season, but I will be surprised if it gets renewed.