Trans isn't even recognized as a protected class under the Equal Protection Clause (United States v. Skrmetti) so why would the Supreme Court rule that you MUST allow someone to play in a gender segregated sport based on what they identify as?

People out here like WOW SUPREME COURT BAD, HOW COULD THEY

@feld I'm seeing a lot of outrage based on Thomas's opinion that being trans isnt an immutable characteristic

@georgia it's hard to swallow but he's not wrong. A not insignificant number of people de-transition which means it's obviously not an immutable characteristic.

It sucks but it's true.

@feld I don't think it's clear cut, especially under biden they treated it like it was.

@feld you can say the same thing about "ex gays" though, sexual orientation is still protected even though Thomas would like it not to be

@feld @georgia I'm not trying to attac trans people but its just obviously also true that you literally can't know without talking to a person, and then you can't derive intent why someone says they are, why they transitioned, or why they detransitioned. if you can frame this as an immutable characteristic that would be insanely weird

@sun integrity. what is that like, jack?

@sun @feld again that also applies to gay people

@georgia @feld fear of that is probably why the trans extreme is pushed so hard, it make the break clear. sometimes I think things are good to have legal protections for, but they are not, in any way, a constitutional issue.

@feld good for him pushing the power of the executive office as far as it could to get his desired policy goals, but then you're kinda back to the historic liberal "what if a bad guy got these powers" argument, then trump got elected and lol

@sun @feld thats fair, a constitutional amendment would be required to either include gender identity protection or to make transness its own sex that is protected as a sex

@georgia @feld @sun It is so strange to me that this is the practical option, considering the point of transitioning is to, ya know, transition. I guess trans people who identify as trans primarily and not as the gender they are supposed to be transitioning to are actually at the end of the day non-binary.

@7666 @feld @sun non-binary people have no real protection right now either for that matter. :/

@georgia@netzsphaere.xyz @sun@shitposter.world @feld@friedcheese.us that wont happen tho

@feld lol after all the absolute devastation suffering and death wrought on our society and the globe by the supreme court's decisions the geezers uphold Trans In Sports. corporations are people AND trans women are women. there is nothing more amerika than that

granted the supremes are just a quarter-millenium ARG but they're really laying it on today

@7666 @feld @georgia I am sympathetic to the argument that queer category people should be resistant to legal categories completely because they reify and limit and ultimately punish people outside those categories, which is kind of what queer movement is meant to get away from. but governments are fundamentally rule-making machines and all the rights any gay person has, isn't exclusively because of government, but wouldn't exist without top-down government. there's a real contradiction there and I don't know how to resolve it.

@sun @feld @georgia Unfortunately it absolutely is an immutable characteristic

@scathach @feld @georgia it is but it's also not one that can really be externally tested which is a really important legal prerequisite in a lot of cases.

@7666 @feld @georgia I guess the obvious way is, but people just don't like it because it's not fast enough: you get your rights when society accepts you, not when a couple judges force everyone

@sun @feld @georgia There is a little bit of research indicating it could be externally tested whether or not someone is trans with fMRI brain scans but last I checked nobody it hasn't been seriously pursued

@scathach @feld @sun there is also even more compelling overlapping evidence of "gay brain"

the heck is gay brain

@newmodel @feld @sun @scathach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_sexual_orientation

@georgia @feld @scathach this gets back to the reification thing and policies like "genetic test to prove you can move to israel" and all the way down to "now we can genetic test who to exterminate"

@sun @feld @scathach saying something is associated with biological differences is different from exterminating people for merely corresponding with this observed correlation

@georgia @feld @scathach of course. standard debate: does inventing the tool help society more than it hurts

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @scathach the idea that gender is just a feeling plays directly into transphobic hands tbh

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @georgia @feld I kinda suspect the reason there hasn't been any followup research into this is that the nonsense woke narrative about trans people and "being valid" made it politically impossible

@feld @georgia it's really not unless you're pedantic and insisting on "2 standard deviations," and even then it's just barely "significant." usually the number i hear is something like 5% detransition.
A better satisfaction rate than basically any surgery (to be clear you don't have to have surgery to be trans)
I think this 'regret' thing people harp on almost exclusively comes from cis people who don't understand why someone else would want to transition or can't get past their own view because they think _they_ would personally regret it if they did it. It could also be bad faith concern trolling, not sure.
A few years ago before i started i was worried i might regret it but honestly i don't think i regret anything except not doing it sooner. It's been awesome.

Clarence Thomas is a cunt. He makes that clear when he says "Because “gender dysphoria” is a mutable mental state that is the object of psychiatric treatment, it does not resemble the immutable characteristics on the basis of which our precedents have applied heightened scrutiny."
Not everyone who transitions even had dysphoria, by the way. Some simply would prefer to be someone else, even if they are basically 'fine' with how things were before, so they try to become someone else. Equating dysphoria with being trans is stupid and wrong. And the letter and the spirit of the law differ, clarence thomas knows it, but he would prefer to make things worse for people that are currently a punching bag of the right after they lost on gay marriage and had to pivot.

@wyatt @feld also the only reliable way gender dysphoria is treated is to transition, not by encouraging desistance. gender dysphoria being treated doesnt make transness go away as an ephemeral thing, it creates "transexuals".

@sun @feld @georgia I am sort of done with the concept of democracy and "the people", but don't want this to be read as "this guy's gonna make tranny centric fascism!".

Like, no, I am done with it in its entirety because any system that can be so completely and utterly subjugated by idiots, malicious pillagers, or foreign stooges at any point in time doesn't deserve power, because one grant of power at one point of time becomes a weapon to be used against us at another point in time, so either it needs to be bulletproof against subjugating factors via the reduction of powers so that a misled populace cannot destroy itself (yeah right), or just dismantled and rebuilt entirely, and that rebuild will likely require some tough decisions about mitigating how we got here in the first place.

@7666 @feld @georgia I don't disagree but I'm not directly talking about democracy.

gay marriage was because a couple guys in robes overrode "democracy."

gay marriage is now broadly supported across society by the population (which is good), but which isn't a legal construct, it's a social one. (arguably because of manufacturing of consent, which again is an argument against democracy lol)

@georgia @feld i chose not to address that but yes, it sounds like thomas is hinting at conversion therapy which is flat out wrong. He didn't explicitly say that though so i just have to treat it like a possible dogwhistle

@7666 @feld @georgia so to be fair I think what you're asking for is closer to what we originally had, before heavy concentration of power into a few points, mainly the executive branch.

my position on trump is considering him an aberration is a huge mistake. trump is the logical extreme of decades of power centralization.

@georgia @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @scathach what about bisexual people who sometimes feels attracted to females, and other times to males? aren't those feelings?

@anokasion @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @scathach all brain-derived states manifest as "feelings". sexual orientation is immutable, and even if it werent then religion is protected.

@georgia @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @scathach yeah i agree that "gender is a feeling" is reductive and counterproductive but i also think that the neuroscience of gender is kinda dubious , lowkey eugenics-coded , and reinforces the psychiatric-state-industrial complex so i do think that we ought to use something somewhat better . same thing for the "gay brain" . using these things is not conducive to a liberatory biopolitics . my foundational text for this is "American Eugenics" by Nancy Ordover , i highly highly recommend it

@ikeWren @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @scathach oh yeah, the brain is not an organ of sex, I would not claim otherwise

@sun @feld @georgia
"religion" is deemed a protected characteristic

@ageha @feld @georgia no one claims it is immutable, religion is considered an extremely strong social concept that has to be accommodated, which was definitely true at least when the country was founded.

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @ikeWren @feld @scathach I really think its mostly the legacy of eugenics that is the concern

@ikeWren @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia @scathach "liberatory biopolitics" feels like an oxymoron

@sun @feld @georgia
point was that "immutable" ought to be irrelevant to the discussion. of the things considered protected characteristics in the states, the majority change over time (religion, age, pregnancy, familial status, disability, veteran status). even "race" (socially derived categorisation dependent on zeitgeist) and "genetic information" (subject to chromosomal loss, other mutations, donor or other foreign cells proliferating, etc) are things that change with time. the only one on the list that doesn't is "national origin"

@sun @feld @georgia
※ strike that first "national origin", sorry

@sun

Trump is functionally identical to every president in the last 175 or so years. He’s just way more open about it

@7666 @feld @georgia

@feld @georgia @sun
what the actual ruling turns on is the fantasy of a "biological sex", which it asserts is not a cultural invention of the past 5 years or so (in it's current terminological form, bit over a hundred in spirit) but a fact of the universe across cultures throughout history, and one so powerful that "the benefit 'that natural testosterone provides to male athletes is not diminished
through the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones' "

@feld @georgia @sun
basically, whereas the historical understanding of "sex" in the united states was a (sometimes fuzzy) categorisation based on physical layout and cultural perception, they're asserting that neither of those things matter and instead everything hinges on a magic immutable essence that manifests itself in the physical realm in the form of immutable physical archetypes

@ageha @feld @georgia I tried to, in a different place, make an appeal to that that I knew you would appreciate, but I think your position on it is way further toward unclassification than any reasonable society or government at this scale could adopt

@sun @feld @georgia
don't even mean actual reality here but the historically perceived reality, which, even in the legal context, disagrees with them

@ageha @feld @georgia I don't think even the 1919 USA can come back, though. please believe, I would like a world where a woman acts and dresses like a man, there's no law that says she can't and her sheer force of will makes people accept her as one.

@georgia @feld @sun or more realistically just liberal god kings instead of christofascist ones. they only read the constitution enough to make up excuses about how their desired conclusion is actually the same thing as what it says if you completely disregard the english language.

@ageha @feld @georgia lets be real though, the libertarian impulse has no actual support in the government even among radicals who almost 100% are really "libertarian but only for gender, but also I need laws enforcing my trans-affirming gender views"

@sun @feld @georgia @ageha
> libertarian
that's because AIPAC politically assassinates them all

@sun @feld @georgia
what i mean is that, going back hundreds of years ago, there were legal debates over what a person's sex is (because that mattered in the context of marriage and inheritence and such). and those decisions were made looking at physical layouts and social contexts, not mystical essences, and sometimes by necessity came to fuzzy conclusions. that was both common and legal understanding historically, and this ruling is a retcon

@icedquinn @feld @georgia @ageha the problem with libertarians and anarchists is they are outcompeted by better organizers, who tend to be evil, even if the elaborate crystaline structure they create eventually shatters 100-300 years later

@sun @feld @georgia @ageha it is indeed hard to coordinate against foreign adversaries who have deeply infected your state already, yes.

they literally set spending records to dump a milquetoast republican for saying war bad actually.

@ageha @feld @georgia for the record I am not defending or accusing the ruling, this is an incredibly muddy topic though and you can expect the supreme court to flip a lot on it and I don't think you can even take all that precedent and make a coherent legal theory anyway

@sun @feld @georgia @ageha > the courts mirror the politics of the party that installed them

absolutely gobsmacked

@icedquinn @feld @georgia @ageha generally but not absolutely. but they at least do make arguments you can test

@sun @feld @georgia @ageha whom can test them?

thomas et all can literally write "pee pee poo poo goo goo gaga" as the ruling and literally nothing changes compared to writing 500 pages of pseudo english drivel.

@icedquinn @feld @georgia @ageha I mean you can evaluate if they're a good argument, you can't do anything bout it lol

@sun @feld @georgia @ageha i took a few pokes at that the first time i saw people setting their hair on fire about it. even some of the basic words ("immutability") don't even mean anything; it traces to court precedent that was supposed to mean "something true about a person that they had no control over" redefined over the years as "whatever the judge caste decrees" which is basically the meaning of all words they use.

the documents are basically worthless at the SCOTUS level.

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia @scathach part of the issue is that i just categorically disagree with the idea that there is objectively a gay brain and a straight brain lol , i have not seen any science that is sufficiently convincing to prove this and to my knowledge we have such a poor understanding of what's even going on in there to say that gay and straight cognition and behavior emerge from some preexisting condition of the brain or whether some other shit is going on . maybe im wrong about this and there's some new science about it since then that somehow proves this but it's all very dubious to me

@ikeWren @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @georgia @scathach

> part of the issue is that i just categorically disagree with the idea that there is objectively a gay brain and a straight brain

But why? We accept that brain chemistry/hormone balance does all sorts of things to humans, so why wouldn't this most likely be a significant factor?

@feld @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @georgia @scathach i take issue with the idea that there can be some static neural predisposition to complex behaviors like sexuality . shit like emotional dysregulation or sex drive are pretty simple in comparison, but sexual and gender orientation involve a lot of extremely complex social and cultural context and it's not like xyz neurotransmitter can change all that

@feld @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @georgia @scathach justifying things by their naturalness is stupid and regressive and im tired of pretending that neurological determinism is progressive . it isnt and it never has been just like any kind of determinism . i dont really care if being gay or trans is a choice or not because everyone should be able to choose to Do gay or trans regardless . the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia @scathach i lost my original point along the way somewhere here but this is ultimately what it's all about anyway

@sun @icedquinn @feld @georgia @ageha

In a democracy, wise men are condemned to be ruled by their lessers.

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia @scathach interesting but I believe this is just trivial data. There must be something more to it.

@georgia @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @scathach I believe you are right, but I know people who learned they are bi at 35 years old. That doesn't contradict what you're saying at all, but it makes you wonder, how such things- such feelings can discovered so late.

@ikeWren @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia You seem to be talking entirely about your personal ideology rather than reality, not sure what point you're trying to make here

@scathach @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia my point was that there is an underlying ideology behind why the sciences are seeking and finding a gay brain and that this ideology is not good for us , but admittedly that got lost when i was writing that up

@scathach @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia and re:moss's point about the gay brain existing anyway, the entire concept of the gay brain is predicated on a system of knowledge that is grounded in an ideology that denies its own existence and asserts that there are Single Defined Traits that *cause* somebody to fall into a socially constructed category and *that category* prescribes behavior . you can see this also wrt autism and how it's a basically arbitrary set of behavioral classifications that no common neurological cause* has been found for . to me it should be obvious why this is a Bad Idea and complete bullshit also

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @ikeWren @feld @georgia @scathach because its a bad idea

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @anokasion @feld @georgia @scathach girl u gotta stop w the phrenology its not a great look

@feld @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @ikeWren @georgia @scathach type of shit that gets u to believe a certain bone structure makes u more prone to “crime” lmao .

@fiore @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia @scathach yeah exactly . scientific racism makes perfect sense under its own paradigm it's only once people started interrogating that paradigm on an ideological basis (antiracism) that it stopped making any sense

@ikeWren @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia @scathach also people arguing for this shit have NO IDEA how science actually works but WHATEVER lets all hear the chud programmer’s take on uhh what is it now ? biology ? medicine ? sure !!!!!!!!!!

@fiore @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia @scathach my point is that you should interrogate the paradigm of psychology and neuroscience and understand why it's useful for there to be some deterministic trait behind gay and trans beyond it proving that we deserve to exist under that paradigm

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @anokasion @georgia @scathach nobody said that and youre ignoring the actuaol points people are making but whatever man you do you i suppose . go agree with the chud for all i care see where taht gets you

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @anokasion @georgia @scathach i have argued this before with you youre clearly not interested in having a good faith conversation about it so im not even gonna waste words youre right

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia @scathach I completely agree with the exposure of estrogen pre and post being born, I just don't believe so much about the fingers thing -but I'm not saying it's true or not, I'm ignorant on these.

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @anokasion @georgia @scathach sorry im just genetically predisposed to this kind of asinine arguing style and childish points because of my 0.56% shorter-than-average left ear lobe :/

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @anokasion @georgia @scathach if thats what you took from it im afraid theres no real point in arguing here . also youre being rlly mean to me and i rlly dont respond well to me given my 1.345% excess in forearm hair growth rate , indicative of general incapacity to argue with someone . if you read the study by dr. Racist McNazis on the matter where he conveniently omits the statistical analysis only pointing numbers and saying “oogabooga number big = correlation” youd know how serious this is .

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @anokasion @georgia @scathach oh i was probably just being an insufferable leftist asshole that calls anything she doesnt like “racist” or smth dont worry about it .

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @anokasion @georgia @scathach 0 predictive power means it is not science and it is in fact useless . furthermore , 0 theoretical links between the obsesrved trait and the implied characteristic means not only it is useles , but also very easily disproven . the fact that nobody bothered to do so is just because the first part of this post already rendered it a joke so why even bother .

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @anokasion @georgia @scathach and that matters because ? sorry my fingernail is 0.014% thicker than it should so i have trouble following stuff like this .

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @fiore @feld @anokasion @scathach wonder what you guys think of the fraternal birth order effect which is established in twins separated at birth and in various cultures around the world

@georgia @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @anokasion @scathach whats that

@fiore @feld @anokasion @georgia @scathach the way i feel seeing "identified by Ray Blanchard" <3

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @anokasion @georgia @scathach >blanchard

what are we even saying here , man

@fiore @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @anokasion @scathach its actually well studied and well attested despite that

@georgia @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @anokasion @scathach not gonna say anything about it but i also cant rlly say i expect it to be interesting or useful or scientific in the slightest . but i dont care enough to actually read the study so im just gonna say i dont have an opinion on it and move on

@georgia @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @anokasion @feld @scathach oh of course this is TYPICAL of a fingernail-thick person like me . comes with the gene yknow . research laziness . awful stuff

@MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @ikeWren @feld @georgia @scathach Do we have to chase whatever tiny little speck of statistical evidence there is for innate differences to gotcha transphobes that do not care about the backing or means and only that the maximal number of trans women are murdered?

@fiore @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @feld @georgia @scathach please lord kill this thread with fire

@ikeWren @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @georgia @scathach I don't think it's a complex behavior at all. I think some people want to believe it's a complex behavior because it gives them comfort and they're afraid that some day in the future there will be an attempt to medically correct or cure this "unwanted" behavior.

@feld @MossGrowsOnNormanRuins @georgia @scathach sexual attraction is known to be extremely complicated (which is why it's STILL being studied after all these years) and monosexuality in general relies on layers upon layers of socially constructed systems for its existence to make any sense at all . and yes i am in fact afraid of that happening because it Has Been Happening for the past 150 fucking years and is Continuing To Happen