You seem to argue implicitly that transgenderism in many cases isn’t about sex or body dysphoria but rather about people dissatisfied with their appearance wanting to stand out. On this view we would expect to find a lot of male to female transgenders in populations with low social empathy, populations wanting to stand out. Recently FIDE responded to a surge in requests for gender changes by banning MtFs from competing in women’s chess tournaments. You would expect such a surge in elite chess, a population with lots of (very smart) non-conformers wanting to stand out. I cannot see the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative surviving this encounter—and there will be others—with the facts on the ground.
>>You seem to argue implicitly that transgenderism in many cases isn’t about sex or body dysphoria but rather about people dissatisfied with their appearance wanting to stand out.
No, I wouldn't argue something like that, not even implicitly, because I know rather little about transgender people. Other people have more to teach me on that phenomenon than I have to teach them.
>>Recently FIDE responded to a surge in requests for gender changes by banning MtFs from competing in women’s chess tournaments.
Like if they didn't have enough problems with all those robots presenting as human already.
Well you did avoid a more salient and harder to argue point: what about cybernetics? Better living through self modification.
Already today there are plenty of augments to improve yourself. And now in not so far future people will likely will be able to remake themselves into whatever they want.
The point you should be arguing about is letting children make irreversible decisions too early in life. However you chose to make it about a choice in general vs society values .
I avoided more or less all points except one: That having an opinion in the trans question is entirely logical even if it turns out that transitioning improves the lives of the vast majority who are doing so at different ages.
Many people have stronger and more informed opinions in this question than I have. I just meta-argue in favor of those who argue.
Love the dive, my biggest question though is what the solution is? People are going to do what they want to some extent regardless (we can still see that with body modifications moreso than trans people) but the focus of the movement is on accepting trans people as people and identifying them as their preferred gender. Sure, cosmetics and hormones are a part of becoming comfortable with being trans but I know a ton of trans people that just prefer to be called a guy or a girl.
Definitely more of a conversation in terms of hormones and changing someone's body but I think it's less of a discussion as to whether or not we should accept the people that want to become trans. I think that's a big part of the debate.
That's a very difficult question. On the one hand, the social contract stipulates that when people have pressing needs that can be met, those needs should be met. For example, if someone is in a wheelchair, the social contract stipulates that that person should be pushed and even carried in stairs.
On the other hand, what makes this social contract possible is that people make sure to have as few pressing needs as possible. Everybody, including the person in the wheelchair themselves, agrees that it is unfortunate that they can't walk and thereby need other people to make sacrifices.
When people say that it is very important to them to be called "she" although they are 180 centimeters tall with big hands and a square jaw, the social contract stipulates that the rest of us should oblige, because it is doable and people's special needs should be met when possible. But the more people develop such special needs, the more overstrained the social contract gets. Especially when those with needs don't present themselves as unfortunate, but as proud right-holders.
I don't feel like being the one that breaks the social contract. Who does? Social contracts are there to be honored. But I sense that a chicken race is going on, where one side is trying to provoke the other to be the first to explicitly break old rules of decency and kindness.
Huh, never heard it thought about that way. You're right and I'm the same way, I don't want to break the social contract lol, which is why the majority of people just acknowledge it and move on. And I think that's what the majority of trans people want, is just for people to acknowledge it and move on.
In my experience, trans people do feel like they've been put in a worse position because they've been born into the wrong bodies. They feel trapped and insecure, things that can be solved by people acknowledging their existence as a "he" or "she". Most understand that people don't need to call them by their preferred pronouns but are glad when they do because it fills the hole of validation in their own skin.
The extremes definitely blast the conversation in terms of "rights", which I don't think is valid. No one has a right to be nice to anyone else or to make anyone else feel comfortable. Something I've been thinking about is that because the actual trans population in the world is so so small, the more trans people that stick out as extremists blend the entirety of trans people together. Less people = greater percentage of people on the extreme ends.
Our culture has a really schizophrenic relationship with cosmetic body modifications. If someone has really crooked teeth, nobody is going to say that they should just learn to accept their body as it is. They are going to say they should get them fixed, and even judge them as somewhat low class if they don't. Same for having visible warts and moles removed, or getting corrective eye surgery to avoid having to wear glasses.
But for most other kinds of cosmetic surgery, it is seen as vain, and people doing them will even be seen as somehow "cheating" in the attraction game.
It gets even weirder with stuff like using creams to remove wrinkles and make the skin look younger. Women will use obscene amounts of money on stuff that is at best of dubious value and mostly total snake oil, and they will be celebrated for it, proudly displaying the right bottles and jars on their night tables. While at the same time, doing botox and the like, which actually has verifiable results, is something that is looked down on.
Yes. But I can see a kind of pattern in those norms: Everybody thinks that straight teeth are more beautiful than severely crooked teeth. Everybody thinks that warts and big, hairy moles are ugly. Everybody recognizes that life is better without glasses. Everybody thinks that youthful skin is beautiful.
Everybody doesn't think that adult noses are always a disgrace when part of female faces. Although it is scientifically proven that botox makes faces less wrinkled, everybody wouldn't say that botoxed faces are more beautiful than the same face without botox.
It seems that norms in favor of body modification halt somewhere where the majority of people start to hesitate and disagree.
I think the issue might be deeper than that. There might be varied opinions on breast size, but pretty much everybody will agree that perky breasts are more beautiful than breasts that are hanging and collapsed as often happens after breastfeeding. But even in that case, breast augmentation is looked down on. Even where a majority could agree on the aesthetic value, it is still a somewhat controversial choice.
Maybe the trigger is exactly that it is possible to overdo it. Carefully applied botox will make the skin look younger in ways no cream will ever approach, but we have all seen the stiff faces that results from overdoing it. Same with breast augmentation. Someone getting their breast slightly adjusted to look more shapely will hardly be noticed, other than people regarding them as a bit more attractive, but we have all seen the giant balloons that some women ends up with.
It's hard to overdo teeth straightening or wart removal, but most other kinds of surgery can be taken all the way to end up looking like a circus act.
It's mostly religious conservatives who make body modification controversial. Speaking as someone who grew up as a hardcore evangelical Christian, the religious right has always seen vanity and recreational sexuality as sinful.
The fact that people can overdo some procedures only makes them more obvious and horrifying; breasts that are too large (whatever "too large" is as experienced by the viewer) or faces that are too stiff (again, as experienced by the viewer) create a knee-jerk reaction in most people. But it's the intellectual resolution that says "...and also that's not what God intended" that makes the subject polarizing.
For what it's worth, I'm fine with Hunter Schafer, Martina Big, Valeria Lukyanova, and really even athletes who use steroids. Change your gender, change your race, trade health for strength, add a phone charging port so your cellphone addiction is never threatened by low battery warnings, whatever.
There might be a more secular version of "that's not what God intended".
Beauty (clear skin, symmetry, signs of fertility, etc..) is an indicator of genetic fitness. It is one of the main factors we (at least subconsciously) use to determine if a potentially partner would be a good reproductive match for us.
You could say that cosmetic surgery is a kind of false advertising. What you see is not what you get. You are put at risk of reproducing with someone of less genetic potential than you thought.
This could tie in to Tove's point that it might be great for the individual (who get an advantage), but a potential disadvantage for the society at whole.
Yes, true, and it's good to come across people who can think sensibly about these things! Nevertheless, most wealthy urban liberal blue tribe body modifiers were never going to reproduce anyway. Evolutionarily speaking, those people are all sort of partying until the lights go out.
The only kind of body modification breeding adults are into is the tattoo, and I don't know of anyone who was fooled into thinking their paramour's genetic quality was artificially inflated because they had a really awesome tat.
I think you're right that there is a clear limit between the acceptance of beauty measures that can be overdone and those that can't. A related interpretation is that the dividing line has something to do with the spending of brainpower. When questions are simple people are urged to action, when they are difficult people are urged to just accept things.
For example, there is a very simple answer to the question "When should a wart be removed?" (As soon as possible, if it can be done at a reasonable cost). Also there is a simple answer to the question "How bad does acne need for treatment to be justified?" (Not bad at all, because treatment is often easy). And the question "How crooked teeth are too crooked?" tends to be answered by dentists with teenaged patients, giving it a professional aura.
By contrast, questions like "How big should a nose be allowed to be" or "How much should breasts be allowed to sag before operating on them becomes justified?" are genuinely difficult and a matter of taste. It complicates things that far from all breasts are round from the beginning (a search for Zulu Reed Dance gives probably the world's best unselected sample of youthful breasts, for example
Establishing norms for how round breasts should be before something should be done would be very costly. A significant minority of young women would be socially required to go under the knife.
If the limit for unconditional social acceptance of plastic surgery is when the decision to operate starts to require brainpower, I think transsexual plastic surgery logically belongs to the socially unaccepted side: The question whether to look male or female currently takes up unprecedented amounts of teenage brainpower.
> a search for Zulu Reed Dance gives probably the world's best unselected sample of youthful breasts
You always like to use equatorial populations as a stand in for natural subtropical/midlatitude/subarctic populations. I don't think it works. Don't skin textures differ with ancestry, just like pigmentation, height, body fat distribution, nose shape, etc?
>>Don't skin textures differ with ancestry, just like pigmentation, height, body fat distribution, nose shape, etc?
Yes! And in that light I find it all the more interesting that the distribution of breast shapes doesn't differ much between the Zulus and the teenage girls I have spent time with naked myself. Other aspects of the female anatomy differ much more between populations.
If you know of any representative, unselected sample of nude or semi-nude European women, please tell me. I have tried, and failed, to find pictures that show how a representative sample of European women actually looks without clothes. So far without much success. We simply lack a despotic king that force us all out in front of cameras once in a lifetime.
I think this is true, but I also think it breaks the social contract in a more subtle way.
We all know that that beautiful people have it easier in life. Plenty of studies have shown that beautiful people get better jobs, higher salaries, better mates, etc, and while we may not exactly like it, it is somewhat accepted as just the way the cards are dealt.
Cosmetic surgery is kinda like cheating in the game of life, and it generates a lot of resentment. Why should you be allowed to jump the line when I still have to stand where I am?
It's a bit weird as you could in some way see it as democratising beauty, making some of the same life advantages available to those not as genetically gifted, but that is not really how it works out.
I can't say I know any hard figures, but is this the way cosmetic surgery is actually being used in most cases? As much as I see of it, it is more of a way to place oneself in a certain social category than as a way to get a competitive edge at the mainstream markets for labor and dating.
Breast augmentation, nose reduction and lip injections look like the female equivalent of visible tattoos on males: Tattoos don't make a man more handsome, really. Rather, they place him in a certain aesthetic and social category. I think that is what most nose-reduced, lip-augmented young women gain to: The clear belonging to a certain class of people.
Anything garish enough to be clearly identifiable as the result of surgery, and especially when done by young people, is clearly more for group affinity than objectively becoming more attractive.
But discrete facial lifts, botox, lifted breasts or mommy makeovers are incredible common. In some environments, like around professional business women, continuing to look young and vital is a almost a prerequisite and certainly an advantage, resulting in places like NYC having loads of clinics where you can drop-in and get it done discreetly.
Some years ago I was to dinner with a large group of business women in NYC, and the hot topic of the evening was "lunchbreak botox" with a lively discussion of which clinics were the best and most conveniently located. I was really surprised how accepted, even expected, it was among them.
Puberty blockers because they would prefer to appear as pre-teens, yet we're not yet calling them pedos - interesting! Remember when the gay marriage advocates insisted that the entire community wasn't full of degenerate wannabe child molesters? Surgical transitioning is just the 21st century version of child sacrifice that an Inca would understand.
>No society can afford to focus on the well-being of a non-reproducing minority. Not for real. It can say that it does, as a kind of religion. But if it actually does, it will get outcompeted by societies that offer the majority realistic opportunities to produce and reproduce.
How are opportunities to produce and reproduce being denied to cisgender people by transgender ideology? How does it deny opportunities to produce to anyone?
I remember someone telling me that they hated transgenderism because not being able to tell that an individual is a potential mate is a threat to the survival of the species. Is this (close to) your argument?
>>How are opportunities to produce and reproduce being denied to cisgender people by transgender ideology?
Such opportunities aren't denied. I'm reproducing well despite a few transgender people here and there - they don't disturb me in any sense, really. But I also notice that average people reproduce much less in mainstream Western society than among some religious minorities. That tells me that those religious minorities are creating better opportunities for reproduction. It is likely that not encouraging people to spend their teens thinking about what gender they are is one (and only one) thing that high-reproduction societies are doing differently. (That being said, also societies like Russia where transgenderism is not favorably have low birth rates, so I really don't say transgenderism males a decisive difference. It is just part of a package that together makes mainstream Western society demographically uncompetitive).
I don't think that transgenderism is a threat to production. Production is what mainstream Western society is good at. Few ideas have been able to change that fact.
Tove, I suppose you are among the people who would not consider suicide if they woke up one morning and found that they've somehow turned into a member of the opposite sex (this is the nightmare scenario that happens to a low number of teenagers every morning as I understand)? There's this variation of acceptance - in the one end people would be mildly surprised if such a thing happened, in the other end they would end their lives without thinking twice. Kind of difficult to understand the opposite end, I suppose.
Anyway, let's consider opioid painkillers. Should we ban them entirely, even for ill people in terrible pain? Because otherwise other people in the wider society get the idea that these are really pleasant for recreation and buy them from pharmacies in bulk. Or wheelchairs - the fact that you can use a motorized wheelchair instead of walking can drive many young people to wheelchairs out of laziness and wreck havoc to their physical health. Sorry, these are silly examples, but still. Wouldn't it be best if a committee of doctors evaluated every case carefully and allowed painkillers, wheelchairs or puberty blockers only to those who seem to direly need them? People with painful terminal diseases and many of those in wheelchairs are also unlikely to reproduce, yet we still want to help them if it's not prohibitively expensive. It's this social instinct we have, a good thing in general.
>>Tove, I suppose you are among the people who would not consider suicide if they woke up one morning and found that they've somehow turned into a member of the opposite sex (this is the nightmare scenario that happens to a low number of teenagers every morning as I understand)?
Yes, you're entirely right. I wouldn't be very upset if I woke up as a man, as long as I could be a fit and handsome man (ridiculous, I know, but that's how I imagine it).
I don't have a strong opinion on puberty blockers. I live in a jurisdiction where they are only supposed to be given "in exceptional cases" and most people seem to be fine with that (although I'm sure some transgender teenagers who are not deemed exceptional enough suffer). The only thing I'm arguing for is that altering one's body to look as the opposite sex is as superficial as altering one's body to look like an over-stereotypical member of one's own sex. I don't want to ban either of them - people do what they feel that they need to do. I just don't think it is a reason for pride.
I mean, being just an average woman and not an exceptionally pretty one might be as mild a nuisance as waking up in a man's body would be for you. Waking up as a man for me would be a hellish horror and this feeling is pretty common, the same for men who can't bare the thought of becoming female. So turning the badly dysmorphic teenagers into another sex seems unnecessary to you; for us it seems incomprehensible why we should leave a kid trapped into a nightmare if it's moderately easy to save him (if, of course, the said kid is like us and cannot bare it). It doesn't compare at all to the problem of average women who can't become rare beauties.
So: you don't have a visceral feeling of what it's like to lack badly needed sexual traits, just like many men can't really feel how bad rape is for women, and women cannot feel how awful it is for men to find they've been raising another man's kid, stuff like that. In such cases I suppose we should just believe the other side who claims that yes it is unbearable, even if we don't feel it.
Of course, if we take this too far, we get situations where students accuse professors of using wrong concepts in the lecture room, thereby making them horribly suffer inside... I don't know where to draw the line.
I admit that I don't share the feeling of belonging to a certain sex. That doesn't mean that I think that other people's feelings of doing so are unreal. Just like you, I think that believing what people say about their own feelings is a great concept.
If anything, I'm a bit desentisized to suffering in general. For several years I tried - and failed - to expose miscarriages of justice in the Swedish child protection system. I was confronted with story after story of children treated badly by the authorities because those who care the most, their family members, had been forced out of the picture. The whole exercise taught me one thing: People don't care much about individuals and their suffering, actually. They care about society as a whole. As long as cases of individual suffering doesn't fit into people's picture of how society is and is supposed to be, they will ignore that suffering and explain it away.
I don't mean that I think it is a ideal that society should ignore individual suffering. I mean that it inevitably does, as a law of nature, as long as that suffering isn't instrumental to the aims of the majority. For that reason I don't think that "individuals suffer" is a reason enough to defend a policy. That is just not what policy is about. It is entirely possible to acknowledge that people suffer and that their suffering could be preventable and still advocate a policy that upholds their suffering. For that reason I find the argument that gender transitioning must be good because it decreases suffering among some people very shallow - the amount of suffering for a minority just isn't that decisive factor that makes a policy good or bad.
I've vaguely heard that the child welfare services in Sweden are somewhat... overprotective, or something? Or strong but bureaucratized? Do you have a write-up about this? Would be good to know more; Sweden is otherwise known as a really well-functioning place that people would like to copy when designing their institutions.
My own experiences in a much lower-resources country are generally good; all the officials are constantly complaining about lack of professional social workers and other resources, yet when there's a child in need, they search around until they find a solution; it feels like talking to actual humans, not unyielding bureaucracy. (This is of course just one person's notes who hasn't had very serious problems to begin with, certainly there are others who are angry and disappointed, like everywhere).
The main problem could be summarized that the child protective services are human, all too human. Society, including the courts, simply trusts the individual social workers in almost every case. And the individual social workers trust their own feelings. That way, the system gets close to completely arbitrary: All families that give a couple of social workers a bad feeling are in danger of getting split up by the system. And I'm not exaggerating. Authorities really are making life-changing decision for tens of thousands of children every year based on feelings and the rest of society is going along with it.
I get very concerned when countries that want to build up their welfare states are looking to Scandinavia, because there is no other way to interpret this than that our societies are rotten to the core.
Interesting piece, I'm not that persuaded by the arguments though.
If your main concern is teenagers being too superficial it seems weird to target transitioning rather than say... all of social media and Hollywood. Seems like the effect laws around hormone therapy have on teenagers attitude to vanity or body modifications are going to completely indetectible compared the effects of the general media.
The stuff about promoting reproduction for the sake of competition between societies seems like an incredibly long term concern. Also wouldn't the example around boys boosting their height help on that front anyway? Maybe you should support normalising hormone therapy so there'd be fewer incels (only half joking).
Actually, I might bite the bullet and go for height boosting for free for all boys unless there are strong side effects (there probably are). Would also help the mating market situation of tall girls. I generally support interventions that make the whole population healthier, smarter or prettier without bad side effects (take better nutrition, less lead poisoning, early screening for chromosomal diseases, etc). I don't think we should fight for keeping high diversity by preventing good things when these are available.
I think only shorter boys would really benefit. Being too tall is no good - it's associated with health problems. But the right for every boy to grow to 175 centimeters for example - could be a good idea.
>>If your main concern is teenagers being too superficial it seems weird to target transitioning rather than say... all of social media and Hollywood. Seems like the effect laws around hormone therapy have on teenagers attitude to vanity or body modifications are going to completely indetectible compared the effects of the general media.
Yes. And that's why I have spent my one and a half year on Substack complaining over mainstream, cis-gender superficiality. (An exaggeration. But I have written at least two posts about it: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/primates-of-manhattan
Complaining over transgender stuff won't become a habit, because yes, it is not the most important problem.
>>The stuff about promoting reproduction for the sake of competition between societies seems like an incredibly long term concern.
Not incredibly. The Amish were a few thousand a hundred years ago. Now they are 250 000-ish. Also, Lebanon got a few problems because the French people who drew the map in the 1920s didn't predict that Muslims would be much more fertile than Christians. And how will Israel develop with the Orthodox Jews taking over? That is not a very long-term concern.
>>Maybe you should support normalising hormone therapy so there'd be fewer incels (only half joking).
I'm only half-joking too. I'm in no way sure that the current limits for growth hormone and testosterone to boys are optimal.
Refreshing angle on a usually tiresome topic. It seems likely to me that it won't be very long (5 years?) before transgenderism is old fashion and gives way to routine and genuinely transhuman body modification. Hard to see how it can be avoided. Easier to see what it will présage for the majority.
"genuinely transhuman body modification." awaits DNA modification of the germline. Until then it is just more extreme cosmetics.
Given our society's preeminent valuation of the individual, the argument around transgenderism seems to hinge on whether individuals experimenting on other individuals is ethical ie informed consent.
Things will have to go fast then. At the moment under 18s aren't even allowed to get a tattoo. A shift in attitude to young people will have to take place in order to open a smorgasbord of hormonal treatments for them.
You seem to argue implicitly that transgenderism in many cases isn’t about sex or body dysphoria but rather about people dissatisfied with their appearance wanting to stand out. On this view we would expect to find a lot of male to female transgenders in populations with low social empathy, populations wanting to stand out. Recently FIDE responded to a surge in requests for gender changes by banning MtFs from competing in women’s chess tournaments. You would expect such a surge in elite chess, a population with lots of (very smart) non-conformers wanting to stand out. I cannot see the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative surviving this encounter—and there will be others—with the facts on the ground.
>>You seem to argue implicitly that transgenderism in many cases isn’t about sex or body dysphoria but rather about people dissatisfied with their appearance wanting to stand out.
No, I wouldn't argue something like that, not even implicitly, because I know rather little about transgender people. Other people have more to teach me on that phenomenon than I have to teach them.
>>Recently FIDE responded to a surge in requests for gender changes by banning MtFs from competing in women’s chess tournaments.
Like if they didn't have enough problems with all those robots presenting as human already.
Well you did avoid a more salient and harder to argue point: what about cybernetics? Better living through self modification.
Already today there are plenty of augments to improve yourself. And now in not so far future people will likely will be able to remake themselves into whatever they want.
The point you should be arguing about is letting children make irreversible decisions too early in life. However you chose to make it about a choice in general vs society values .
I avoided more or less all points except one: That having an opinion in the trans question is entirely logical even if it turns out that transitioning improves the lives of the vast majority who are doing so at different ages.
Many people have stronger and more informed opinions in this question than I have. I just meta-argue in favor of those who argue.
Love the dive, my biggest question though is what the solution is? People are going to do what they want to some extent regardless (we can still see that with body modifications moreso than trans people) but the focus of the movement is on accepting trans people as people and identifying them as their preferred gender. Sure, cosmetics and hormones are a part of becoming comfortable with being trans but I know a ton of trans people that just prefer to be called a guy or a girl.
Definitely more of a conversation in terms of hormones and changing someone's body but I think it's less of a discussion as to whether or not we should accept the people that want to become trans. I think that's a big part of the debate.
That's a very difficult question. On the one hand, the social contract stipulates that when people have pressing needs that can be met, those needs should be met. For example, if someone is in a wheelchair, the social contract stipulates that that person should be pushed and even carried in stairs.
On the other hand, what makes this social contract possible is that people make sure to have as few pressing needs as possible. Everybody, including the person in the wheelchair themselves, agrees that it is unfortunate that they can't walk and thereby need other people to make sacrifices.
When people say that it is very important to them to be called "she" although they are 180 centimeters tall with big hands and a square jaw, the social contract stipulates that the rest of us should oblige, because it is doable and people's special needs should be met when possible. But the more people develop such special needs, the more overstrained the social contract gets. Especially when those with needs don't present themselves as unfortunate, but as proud right-holders.
I don't feel like being the one that breaks the social contract. Who does? Social contracts are there to be honored. But I sense that a chicken race is going on, where one side is trying to provoke the other to be the first to explicitly break old rules of decency and kindness.
Huh, never heard it thought about that way. You're right and I'm the same way, I don't want to break the social contract lol, which is why the majority of people just acknowledge it and move on. And I think that's what the majority of trans people want, is just for people to acknowledge it and move on.
In my experience, trans people do feel like they've been put in a worse position because they've been born into the wrong bodies. They feel trapped and insecure, things that can be solved by people acknowledging their existence as a "he" or "she". Most understand that people don't need to call them by their preferred pronouns but are glad when they do because it fills the hole of validation in their own skin.
The extremes definitely blast the conversation in terms of "rights", which I don't think is valid. No one has a right to be nice to anyone else or to make anyone else feel comfortable. Something I've been thinking about is that because the actual trans population in the world is so so small, the more trans people that stick out as extremists blend the entirety of trans people together. Less people = greater percentage of people on the extreme ends.
Our culture has a really schizophrenic relationship with cosmetic body modifications. If someone has really crooked teeth, nobody is going to say that they should just learn to accept their body as it is. They are going to say they should get them fixed, and even judge them as somewhat low class if they don't. Same for having visible warts and moles removed, or getting corrective eye surgery to avoid having to wear glasses.
But for most other kinds of cosmetic surgery, it is seen as vain, and people doing them will even be seen as somehow "cheating" in the attraction game.
It gets even weirder with stuff like using creams to remove wrinkles and make the skin look younger. Women will use obscene amounts of money on stuff that is at best of dubious value and mostly total snake oil, and they will be celebrated for it, proudly displaying the right bottles and jars on their night tables. While at the same time, doing botox and the like, which actually has verifiable results, is something that is looked down on.
It is a fascinating dichotomy .
Yes. But I can see a kind of pattern in those norms: Everybody thinks that straight teeth are more beautiful than severely crooked teeth. Everybody thinks that warts and big, hairy moles are ugly. Everybody recognizes that life is better without glasses. Everybody thinks that youthful skin is beautiful.
Everybody doesn't think that adult noses are always a disgrace when part of female faces. Although it is scientifically proven that botox makes faces less wrinkled, everybody wouldn't say that botoxed faces are more beautiful than the same face without botox.
It seems that norms in favor of body modification halt somewhere where the majority of people start to hesitate and disagree.
I think the issue might be deeper than that. There might be varied opinions on breast size, but pretty much everybody will agree that perky breasts are more beautiful than breasts that are hanging and collapsed as often happens after breastfeeding. But even in that case, breast augmentation is looked down on. Even where a majority could agree on the aesthetic value, it is still a somewhat controversial choice.
Maybe the trigger is exactly that it is possible to overdo it. Carefully applied botox will make the skin look younger in ways no cream will ever approach, but we have all seen the stiff faces that results from overdoing it. Same with breast augmentation. Someone getting their breast slightly adjusted to look more shapely will hardly be noticed, other than people regarding them as a bit more attractive, but we have all seen the giant balloons that some women ends up with.
It's hard to overdo teeth straightening or wart removal, but most other kinds of surgery can be taken all the way to end up looking like a circus act.
It's mostly religious conservatives who make body modification controversial. Speaking as someone who grew up as a hardcore evangelical Christian, the religious right has always seen vanity and recreational sexuality as sinful.
The fact that people can overdo some procedures only makes them more obvious and horrifying; breasts that are too large (whatever "too large" is as experienced by the viewer) or faces that are too stiff (again, as experienced by the viewer) create a knee-jerk reaction in most people. But it's the intellectual resolution that says "...and also that's not what God intended" that makes the subject polarizing.
For what it's worth, I'm fine with Hunter Schafer, Martina Big, Valeria Lukyanova, and really even athletes who use steroids. Change your gender, change your race, trade health for strength, add a phone charging port so your cellphone addiction is never threatened by low battery warnings, whatever.
There might be a more secular version of "that's not what God intended".
Beauty (clear skin, symmetry, signs of fertility, etc..) is an indicator of genetic fitness. It is one of the main factors we (at least subconsciously) use to determine if a potentially partner would be a good reproductive match for us.
You could say that cosmetic surgery is a kind of false advertising. What you see is not what you get. You are put at risk of reproducing with someone of less genetic potential than you thought.
This could tie in to Tove's point that it might be great for the individual (who get an advantage), but a potential disadvantage for the society at whole.
Yes, true, and it's good to come across people who can think sensibly about these things! Nevertheless, most wealthy urban liberal blue tribe body modifiers were never going to reproduce anyway. Evolutionarily speaking, those people are all sort of partying until the lights go out.
The only kind of body modification breeding adults are into is the tattoo, and I don't know of anyone who was fooled into thinking their paramour's genetic quality was artificially inflated because they had a really awesome tat.
The religious will inherit the Earth.
Not if my kids can help it.
I think you're right that there is a clear limit between the acceptance of beauty measures that can be overdone and those that can't. A related interpretation is that the dividing line has something to do with the spending of brainpower. When questions are simple people are urged to action, when they are difficult people are urged to just accept things.
For example, there is a very simple answer to the question "When should a wart be removed?" (As soon as possible, if it can be done at a reasonable cost). Also there is a simple answer to the question "How bad does acne need for treatment to be justified?" (Not bad at all, because treatment is often easy). And the question "How crooked teeth are too crooked?" tends to be answered by dentists with teenaged patients, giving it a professional aura.
By contrast, questions like "How big should a nose be allowed to be" or "How much should breasts be allowed to sag before operating on them becomes justified?" are genuinely difficult and a matter of taste. It complicates things that far from all breasts are round from the beginning (a search for Zulu Reed Dance gives probably the world's best unselected sample of youthful breasts, for example
http://www.africaimagelibrary.com/media/b2f0734a-f0fd-11e0-a42d-c9c1a2266b82-zulu-reed-dance-at-enyokeni-palace-nongoma-south-africa)
Establishing norms for how round breasts should be before something should be done would be very costly. A significant minority of young women would be socially required to go under the knife.
If the limit for unconditional social acceptance of plastic surgery is when the decision to operate starts to require brainpower, I think transsexual plastic surgery logically belongs to the socially unaccepted side: The question whether to look male or female currently takes up unprecedented amounts of teenage brainpower.
> a search for Zulu Reed Dance gives probably the world's best unselected sample of youthful breasts
You always like to use equatorial populations as a stand in for natural subtropical/midlatitude/subarctic populations. I don't think it works. Don't skin textures differ with ancestry, just like pigmentation, height, body fat distribution, nose shape, etc?
>>Don't skin textures differ with ancestry, just like pigmentation, height, body fat distribution, nose shape, etc?
Yes! And in that light I find it all the more interesting that the distribution of breast shapes doesn't differ much between the Zulus and the teenage girls I have spent time with naked myself. Other aspects of the female anatomy differ much more between populations.
If you know of any representative, unselected sample of nude or semi-nude European women, please tell me. I have tried, and failed, to find pictures that show how a representative sample of European women actually looks without clothes. So far without much success. We simply lack a despotic king that force us all out in front of cameras once in a lifetime.
Sheesh I'm just lucky I wasn't drinking anything while I read this response
Note to self: if Tove becomes queen, pornography is out, but nudism is in.
I think this is true, but I also think it breaks the social contract in a more subtle way.
We all know that that beautiful people have it easier in life. Plenty of studies have shown that beautiful people get better jobs, higher salaries, better mates, etc, and while we may not exactly like it, it is somewhat accepted as just the way the cards are dealt.
Cosmetic surgery is kinda like cheating in the game of life, and it generates a lot of resentment. Why should you be allowed to jump the line when I still have to stand where I am?
It's a bit weird as you could in some way see it as democratising beauty, making some of the same life advantages available to those not as genetically gifted, but that is not really how it works out.
I can't say I know any hard figures, but is this the way cosmetic surgery is actually being used in most cases? As much as I see of it, it is more of a way to place oneself in a certain social category than as a way to get a competitive edge at the mainstream markets for labor and dating.
Breast augmentation, nose reduction and lip injections look like the female equivalent of visible tattoos on males: Tattoos don't make a man more handsome, really. Rather, they place him in a certain aesthetic and social category. I think that is what most nose-reduced, lip-augmented young women gain to: The clear belonging to a certain class of people.
Anything garish enough to be clearly identifiable as the result of surgery, and especially when done by young people, is clearly more for group affinity than objectively becoming more attractive.
But discrete facial lifts, botox, lifted breasts or mommy makeovers are incredible common. In some environments, like around professional business women, continuing to look young and vital is a almost a prerequisite and certainly an advantage, resulting in places like NYC having loads of clinics where you can drop-in and get it done discreetly.
Some years ago I was to dinner with a large group of business women in NYC, and the hot topic of the evening was "lunchbreak botox" with a lively discussion of which clinics were the best and most conveniently located. I was really surprised how accepted, even expected, it was among them.
Puberty blockers because they would prefer to appear as pre-teens, yet we're not yet calling them pedos - interesting! Remember when the gay marriage advocates insisted that the entire community wasn't full of degenerate wannabe child molesters? Surgical transitioning is just the 21st century version of child sacrifice that an Inca would understand.
>>Puberty blockers because they would prefer to appear as pre-teens, yet we're not yet calling them pedos - interesting!
I must admit that I made that one up. I have never heard of any such cases in the real world.
>No society can afford to focus on the well-being of a non-reproducing minority. Not for real. It can say that it does, as a kind of religion. But if it actually does, it will get outcompeted by societies that offer the majority realistic opportunities to produce and reproduce.
How are opportunities to produce and reproduce being denied to cisgender people by transgender ideology? How does it deny opportunities to produce to anyone?
I remember someone telling me that they hated transgenderism because not being able to tell that an individual is a potential mate is a threat to the survival of the species. Is this (close to) your argument?
>>How are opportunities to produce and reproduce being denied to cisgender people by transgender ideology?
Such opportunities aren't denied. I'm reproducing well despite a few transgender people here and there - they don't disturb me in any sense, really. But I also notice that average people reproduce much less in mainstream Western society than among some religious minorities. That tells me that those religious minorities are creating better opportunities for reproduction. It is likely that not encouraging people to spend their teens thinking about what gender they are is one (and only one) thing that high-reproduction societies are doing differently. (That being said, also societies like Russia where transgenderism is not favorably have low birth rates, so I really don't say transgenderism males a decisive difference. It is just part of a package that together makes mainstream Western society demographically uncompetitive).
I don't think that transgenderism is a threat to production. Production is what mainstream Western society is good at. Few ideas have been able to change that fact.
Tove, I suppose you are among the people who would not consider suicide if they woke up one morning and found that they've somehow turned into a member of the opposite sex (this is the nightmare scenario that happens to a low number of teenagers every morning as I understand)? There's this variation of acceptance - in the one end people would be mildly surprised if such a thing happened, in the other end they would end their lives without thinking twice. Kind of difficult to understand the opposite end, I suppose.
Anyway, let's consider opioid painkillers. Should we ban them entirely, even for ill people in terrible pain? Because otherwise other people in the wider society get the idea that these are really pleasant for recreation and buy them from pharmacies in bulk. Or wheelchairs - the fact that you can use a motorized wheelchair instead of walking can drive many young people to wheelchairs out of laziness and wreck havoc to their physical health. Sorry, these are silly examples, but still. Wouldn't it be best if a committee of doctors evaluated every case carefully and allowed painkillers, wheelchairs or puberty blockers only to those who seem to direly need them? People with painful terminal diseases and many of those in wheelchairs are also unlikely to reproduce, yet we still want to help them if it's not prohibitively expensive. It's this social instinct we have, a good thing in general.
>>Tove, I suppose you are among the people who would not consider suicide if they woke up one morning and found that they've somehow turned into a member of the opposite sex (this is the nightmare scenario that happens to a low number of teenagers every morning as I understand)?
Yes, you're entirely right. I wouldn't be very upset if I woke up as a man, as long as I could be a fit and handsome man (ridiculous, I know, but that's how I imagine it).
I don't have a strong opinion on puberty blockers. I live in a jurisdiction where they are only supposed to be given "in exceptional cases" and most people seem to be fine with that (although I'm sure some transgender teenagers who are not deemed exceptional enough suffer). The only thing I'm arguing for is that altering one's body to look as the opposite sex is as superficial as altering one's body to look like an over-stereotypical member of one's own sex. I don't want to ban either of them - people do what they feel that they need to do. I just don't think it is a reason for pride.
I mean, being just an average woman and not an exceptionally pretty one might be as mild a nuisance as waking up in a man's body would be for you. Waking up as a man for me would be a hellish horror and this feeling is pretty common, the same for men who can't bare the thought of becoming female. So turning the badly dysmorphic teenagers into another sex seems unnecessary to you; for us it seems incomprehensible why we should leave a kid trapped into a nightmare if it's moderately easy to save him (if, of course, the said kid is like us and cannot bare it). It doesn't compare at all to the problem of average women who can't become rare beauties.
So: you don't have a visceral feeling of what it's like to lack badly needed sexual traits, just like many men can't really feel how bad rape is for women, and women cannot feel how awful it is for men to find they've been raising another man's kid, stuff like that. In such cases I suppose we should just believe the other side who claims that yes it is unbearable, even if we don't feel it.
Of course, if we take this too far, we get situations where students accuse professors of using wrong concepts in the lecture room, thereby making them horribly suffer inside... I don't know where to draw the line.
I admit that I don't share the feeling of belonging to a certain sex. That doesn't mean that I think that other people's feelings of doing so are unreal. Just like you, I think that believing what people say about their own feelings is a great concept.
If anything, I'm a bit desentisized to suffering in general. For several years I tried - and failed - to expose miscarriages of justice in the Swedish child protection system. I was confronted with story after story of children treated badly by the authorities because those who care the most, their family members, had been forced out of the picture. The whole exercise taught me one thing: People don't care much about individuals and their suffering, actually. They care about society as a whole. As long as cases of individual suffering doesn't fit into people's picture of how society is and is supposed to be, they will ignore that suffering and explain it away.
I don't mean that I think it is a ideal that society should ignore individual suffering. I mean that it inevitably does, as a law of nature, as long as that suffering isn't instrumental to the aims of the majority. For that reason I don't think that "individuals suffer" is a reason enough to defend a policy. That is just not what policy is about. It is entirely possible to acknowledge that people suffer and that their suffering could be preventable and still advocate a policy that upholds their suffering. For that reason I find the argument that gender transitioning must be good because it decreases suffering among some people very shallow - the amount of suffering for a minority just isn't that decisive factor that makes a policy good or bad.
I've vaguely heard that the child welfare services in Sweden are somewhat... overprotective, or something? Or strong but bureaucratized? Do you have a write-up about this? Would be good to know more; Sweden is otherwise known as a really well-functioning place that people would like to copy when designing their institutions.
My own experiences in a much lower-resources country are generally good; all the officials are constantly complaining about lack of professional social workers and other resources, yet when there's a child in need, they search around until they find a solution; it feels like talking to actual humans, not unyielding bureaucracy. (This is of course just one person's notes who hasn't had very serious problems to begin with, certainly there are others who are angry and disappointed, like everywhere).
The main problem could be summarized that the child protective services are human, all too human. Society, including the courts, simply trusts the individual social workers in almost every case. And the individual social workers trust their own feelings. That way, the system gets close to completely arbitrary: All families that give a couple of social workers a bad feeling are in danger of getting split up by the system. And I'm not exaggerating. Authorities really are making life-changing decision for tens of thousands of children every year based on feelings and the rest of society is going along with it.
I have written too much in Swedish about. I know of only one text in English and it is about Norway, where things are at least as bad. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/norways_hidden_scandal
I get very concerned when countries that want to build up their welfare states are looking to Scandinavia, because there is no other way to interpret this than that our societies are rotten to the core.
Interesting piece, I'm not that persuaded by the arguments though.
If your main concern is teenagers being too superficial it seems weird to target transitioning rather than say... all of social media and Hollywood. Seems like the effect laws around hormone therapy have on teenagers attitude to vanity or body modifications are going to completely indetectible compared the effects of the general media.
The stuff about promoting reproduction for the sake of competition between societies seems like an incredibly long term concern. Also wouldn't the example around boys boosting their height help on that front anyway? Maybe you should support normalising hormone therapy so there'd be fewer incels (only half joking).
Actually, I might bite the bullet and go for height boosting for free for all boys unless there are strong side effects (there probably are). Would also help the mating market situation of tall girls. I generally support interventions that make the whole population healthier, smarter or prettier without bad side effects (take better nutrition, less lead poisoning, early screening for chromosomal diseases, etc). I don't think we should fight for keeping high diversity by preventing good things when these are available.
I think only shorter boys would really benefit. Being too tall is no good - it's associated with health problems. But the right for every boy to grow to 175 centimeters for example - could be a good idea.
>>If your main concern is teenagers being too superficial it seems weird to target transitioning rather than say... all of social media and Hollywood. Seems like the effect laws around hormone therapy have on teenagers attitude to vanity or body modifications are going to completely indetectible compared the effects of the general media.
Yes. And that's why I have spent my one and a half year on Substack complaining over mainstream, cis-gender superficiality. (An exaggeration. But I have written at least two posts about it: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/primates-of-manhattan
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/a-rational-view-of-female-modesty)
Complaining over transgender stuff won't become a habit, because yes, it is not the most important problem.
>>The stuff about promoting reproduction for the sake of competition between societies seems like an incredibly long term concern.
Not incredibly. The Amish were a few thousand a hundred years ago. Now they are 250 000-ish. Also, Lebanon got a few problems because the French people who drew the map in the 1920s didn't predict that Muslims would be much more fertile than Christians. And how will Israel develop with the Orthodox Jews taking over? That is not a very long-term concern.
>>Maybe you should support normalising hormone therapy so there'd be fewer incels (only half joking).
I'm only half-joking too. I'm in no way sure that the current limits for growth hormone and testosterone to boys are optimal.
Refreshing angle on a usually tiresome topic. It seems likely to me that it won't be very long (5 years?) before transgenderism is old fashion and gives way to routine and genuinely transhuman body modification. Hard to see how it can be avoided. Easier to see what it will présage for the majority.
"genuinely transhuman body modification." awaits DNA modification of the germline. Until then it is just more extreme cosmetics.
Given our society's preeminent valuation of the individual, the argument around transgenderism seems to hinge on whether individuals experimenting on other individuals is ethical ie informed consent.
Things will have to go fast then. At the moment under 18s aren't even allowed to get a tattoo. A shift in attitude to young people will have to take place in order to open a smorgasbord of hormonal treatments for them.
I'm being over-dramatic, I guess.