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This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
How do you define woman/man?
Like most people I keep multiple different definitions in my head. Eg a grandma is someone with grey hair who is retired, loves cooking and spoiling her grandkids and all the other stereotypes, and a grandmother is someone whose children have children of their own. So Tina Turner is a grandma even if she doesn’t act grandma-ly.
In the case of woman/man, I generally go with what people tell me about what they are. However, I am well aware that historically, being a woman or a man was about external body parts, and if you got classified as a woman you were subject to various social definitions, if you got classified as a man you were subject to the draft or press-ganging, personal identity had nothing to do with it, barring some exceptional cases. So I switch between meanings depending on context.
I also am well aware that a binary definition does not cover everyone, some people identity as genders other than the binary, some people physically are inter-sex. I don’t think we will ever have words, or even short noun phrases, that cover every single possible case.
What’s your opinion of the cotton ceiling?
I think the cotton ceiling was the unfortunate intersection of two principles, both good in themselves. One, that people should avoid prejudice and discriminating on irrelevant grounds, and the other, that anything remotely like shame in relation to sexual preferences should be avoided. Sex should be about fun and pleasure, and violent language like “breaking down barriers” only used where both parties want it.
If you look at what advertisers do, they present their products as fulfilling existing needs or wants of the people they’re selling to, not as the needs or wants of the seller. A much better approach to trans women’s concerns would have been to focus on telling stories, and encouraging key idea makers, to produce stories, about trans women in happy romantic relationships and as attractive partners, and criticising only people who dispute others’ claim to be lesbian or whatever because they’re in a trans-relationship. There’s nothing sexy about obligations.
On the other hand, there was definitely ridiculous overreaction by radical feminists to the cotton ceilings, which should not happen, and is terribly abrasive to the public discourse.
Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
A combination of factors I think. Programming is something you can do without navigating social situations. (I got into it when I was forced to spend weeks as a kid off school lying down with my foot elevated.) So it’s a natural place for kids who get bullied, and kids who get bullied tend to have something odd about them (as a kid, a lot of other kids tried to bully me).
It’s also a good career for people who can be happy inside their heads, which goes with a strong inward focus, and perhaps also the willingness to take on prejudice that transwomen face, or have faced. It’s easier to defy social norms if you don’t face them all the time.
And, it’s intellectually demanding of precision. “feelings” that some code is wrong or something have their place, but feelings don’t debug code. Working through implications rigourously is important.
So several reasons.
Explain trans people assigned female at birth.
A full explanation of the whys of trans men of course depends on proper research being carried out. But in the meantime I will speculate. There’s nothing I can think of in the laws of the universe that says that women (in sense 3) can’t be auto-androphilic, nor that they can’t find transitioning to men (in sense 1) attractive for social reasons.
There are more social advantages to people who are perceived as female to transition to male as well in our often sexist society. Which is another incentive for trans men to transition.
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The first item on the poll refers to what side you think the author of this post really believes, while the second item refers to what side you believe. When taking the poll, if you can POSSIBLY round yourself off to Blanchard-Bailey or gender identity, please do so. Please do this even if you have major disagreements with the side you are leaning towards. Only use “neither” if you really really really cannot in good conscience round yourself to either.
Thing of Things 
Fake. My gut feeling is that it’s too nice, but if I try to break that feeling down into actual reasons: there’s almost no mention of any uniquely BB ideas, even in the programming section. There’s no stereotyping of trans women as mouth-breathing anime-loving neckbeard autistics. In fact, there’s too much calm agnosticism about other people’s transitions.
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“There’s no stereotyping of trans women as mouth-breathing anime-loving neckbeard autistics.”
I am disturbed that you would consider this necessary for a Blanchardian perspective. I semi-accidentally introduced the typology to 4chan and I still think it’s somewhere on the wrong-evil spectrum to see AGP women as some horrific stereotype of nerdy men, mostly because I think the stereotype is also on that spectrum.
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It’s not always exactly that, but I’d be surprised to find a Blanchardian who didn’t give some sign of viewing AGPs as having their fundamental humanity impaired in some way by being AGP or as being less deserving of respect than other people. It’s “did you know AGPs are narcissists?” on the parts of the internet that care less about cartoons and facial hair. Fair enough, it’s not always about anti-autistic stereotyping.
Then again, I wouldn’t know charity if it bit me on the ass, so maybe I just never noticed all the nice Blanchardians because evil cannot comprehend good.
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I actually kept track of my guesses this time, as I should have done with the last ITT. I’ll be surprised if my results are much better than chance, but since I’m also just interested in what these views are, it will be interesting to find out which people were sincere. GI on this one. It doesn’t actually talk much about BB, but if I’m being honest, the bigger reason I’m voting GI is that I’ve voted too many of these BB ones as BB, and I don’t think the BBs are likely to have been a majority of the participants. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this one is BB and half of those I’d marked previously as BB are in fact GI.
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I’ve been mostly keeping track of my guesses as well (there’s just one BB case where I don’t remember how I voted), and in each section I only marked two as false, which obviously doesn’t work out mathematically. (There was also one BB case where I was just too unsure to vote, but that doesn’t really help.) But I think this is working as intended, since hopefully some people will successfully pass the test.
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I would drop dead of shock if this is BB. The author—ever-cognizant of the need to validate people’s identities—carefully disclaims that "a binary definition does not cover everyone, some people identity as genders other than the binary."
But on the Blanchardian perspective, "genders other than the binary" isn’t an interesting object of psychological study (though it may be sociologically interesting)! The question to which the two-type taxonomy is an answer is, "Given that humans are sexually-dimorphic animals, what kinds of psychological condition might motivate someone to think that that are, or should be, the opposite sex?" You can’t even ask that question if you’re the sort of person who "go[es] with what people tell me about what they are" (putting more weight on verbal self-reports than robust biological realities like sex).
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The author said that they use different definitions in different contexts.
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You totally can ask that question from within a GI framework. But also I don’t understand why you wouldn’t find non-binary identities interesting in the same way that binary trans identities are interesting.
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Hm, so my guesses this time have been less inconsistent than last time, at least. Whether that means they’re more accurate… who knows.
Since this is presumably the last one before wrap-up, here’s a record of my guesses: (T for real, F for fake)
GI: T T F F F T T T F
BB: T F T F T T F T F
So on each side I labeled 5 real and 4 fake, which isn’t consistent. So out of 18, I’ve gotten at most 17 right (but am also guaranteed at least 1 right 😛 ).
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I feel like this one doesn’t quite say enough to be easily classifiable.
It’s almost too *nice*. I feel like Blanchardians tend to have a bit of contrarianism that you can feel whenever you read what they write, but this post is missing it.
There’s not really anything that stands out. I’m going with gender identity, but not very confident.
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GI vote. I didn’t see any discontent with the existing gender identity ideology besides loose use of men and women as words.
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Voice of dissent here, I think this was a genuine Blanchard, maybe because it fits my own moderate-Blanchardian perspective. Gender Identity writers will insist that personal identities define gender, but this writer refused to say that gender is whatever you want it to be. They also “generally go with what people tell me about what they are”, which sounds more like being polite and accepting what people say for the sake of social propriety than actually believing there is no ‘objective fact’ about that person’s gender.
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I don’t fully identify with either Blanchard-Baily or Gender Identity views, so it’s possible I’m missing some subtleties. But when I read this, at first I thought we’d swapped back and it was a straight-up entry for the Gender Identity section. For people who voted Blanchardian, what about this makes you think BB?
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I generally expect that any person rounding off as GI would, giving their own perspective, eagerly affirm that a person’s gender is exactly what that person says or feels that it is. And so if they’re going to try to fake a BB, they’d go further than simply not affirming their own view, to full out describe some perspective that actually contradicts their own, i.e., gender is defined by some kind of physical characteristic.
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I am kind of disturbed that people’s main reason for voting identitarian on this is ‘not evil enough’. This is definitely a weird example of Blanchardian beliefs and could well be from the ‘well, I have to model someone who I hate and I need to make up some bizarre version of it I don’t hate’ school of thought, but I think the chance it’s real is slightly more likely. The most off section from a Blanchardian perspective is the whole ‘affirming of nonbinary identities’ thing, but most criticisms of that section read more like ‘Blanchardians could never possibly be decent human beings who accept the discourse norms of wherever they are even when these discourse norms include calling people who are clearly X or Y Z (and keep up those discourse norms where those people can’t hear them because saying rude things about people behind their back is also horrible)!’.
On the other hand, at least part of the reason I voted Blanchardian on this is ‘I have 4/9 GI entries marked BB and only 2/8 BB entries and I need to even this out a little’. The attitude I have applied to the ITT appears to be ‘better to jail a thousand innocent men than let one guilty run free’.
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The people saying this person is too nice to be a Blanchardian themselves include Blanchardians, so it’s not just insufficient charitableness. That said yeah I’m also a little uncomfortable with that particular criticism (but I can’t tell whether that’s just because it’s not nice or because it’s actually false (but possibly this part is just me being insufficiently charitable because my own interactions with Blanchardianism have been fairly unpleasant)).
I voted fake not because it’s too nice but because it’s too vague, I guess? In the beginning I thought this was a real one because the answers were too atypical (or at least, different from the stereotypical BB views) and I wouldn’t expect a BB impersonator to use atypical answers. But I would expect someone who has atypical views for their side to explain why at some point, whereas this one just continued being generically vague all the way through.
Possibly also I feel like this person puts too much emphasis on social explanations for things whereas the BB framework doesn’t really do that? I would have expected the programming answer to talk more about trans women’s innate characteristics rather than social stuff (though of course my expectations could be way off). And it also doesn’t actually talk about the two types at all – the last answer in particular is compatible with the person not actually knowing about the “HSTS” category in this framework.
😛 How come, though? I have totally the opposite view – I think we want people to pass if they do a pretty good job.
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@tcheasdfjkl – I love the meta-ITT stuff, especially since I’m not qualified to vote on this one.
My natural reaction to voting in the last one is to maximize my voting accuracy – I wanted to have the highest possible percentage of correct identifications.
Given the definition of an ITT, it’s probably more fair to approach it from “if this were posted on a ToT comment thread, would I suspect it might be false,” but since there’s not a specific judging standard, I think we’re all free to pick our own.
A variety of standards is actually pretty good if what you want to do is rank the essays from least plausible to most plausible. That’s probably how we should interpret the results – it might not be super meaningful that 40% of the voters thought an essay was fake if we don’t know their judging standard, but it should be interesting that Essay A convinced significantly more voters than Essay B.
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I’m on the same page. My model for Blanchardians is that they are composed primarily of two distinct groups. (Which sounds a little familiar, now that I think about it).
1) People who are attracted to Blanchard’s ideas because they confirm some pre-existing and negative ideas about trans women.
2) People who believe that the evidence supports Blanchard and Bailey’s factual claims.*
Both of those groups could be nice – in the case of group 1, it’s possible to hold some negative ideas about a group and still be insightful and nice, because people are complex, and in the case of group 2, it only slices off the group who believe that being nice requires them to believe nice facts about other people, regardless of evidence.
These are interesting questions, but it would be hard to test a sincere group 2 Blanchardian using them. You could very easily believe that the evidence supports Blanchard and Bailey’s factual claims and still be very sympathetic on 1 & 2. 3 & 4 are more interesting, but I haven’t seen anyone provide an answer that cites to Blanchard or Bailey, so I’m guessing there’s still some room to hold a variety of opinions.
I think if you did an analogous for “Human Biodiversity”, you’d get similar results – some of the HBD people would believe that the evidence supports the claims, but otherwise sound fairly social justicey on the theory that no matter what the evidence says about groups, we should still be nice to individuals, and the SJ folks would find those essays fake as “too nice.”
* I don’t know if there is any credible.evidence in support of B/B, but I think you can be factually mistaken about evidence and still nice. I’m sure there are some nice people who believe that white people were created by Yakub the mad scientist, or that the Trilateral Commission faked the moon landing.
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I think possibly one thing that happens is that some (many? not sure, I feel like I keep seeing this) BB people think the evidence is *so obviously* in their favor that anyone who disagrees is poorly informed or lying, and possibly also they’ve had enough people shut them down for having these beliefs that any other opposition gets pattern-matched to that. And it’s true that most non-BB folks are not very familiar with the BB evidence, and it’s also true that a lot of people object to anyone believing BB at all. But like, overwillingness to believe someone is lying is one of my problems with BB in the first place, and also I don’t object to people believing BB as long as they aren’t needlessly mean, and also I, like, *actually disagree* with BB (though annoyingly it’s hard to articulate both “please stop being needlessly mean (this particular meanness isn’t even required by your theory)” and “I disagree with you” without these things being rounded off to “your disagreement with me is needlessly mean”).
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@tcheasdfjkl – that’s insightful. I think HBD and “Red Pill” are similar. Some people believe those ideas because they are jerks and the nasty implications of the theories appeal to them.
A second group believe the ideas because they believe the evidence supports the ideas. Many people in this second group are ALSO jerky about it, because they have kind of a gnostic secret keeper/persecution complex where the fact that other people disagree with them (and often treat them like jerks) offends them.
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@jossedley
I think it’s a self-reinforcing cycle, too. The more the contrarians are viewed with suspicion and hostility, the more hostile they act themselves, and the more grounds others have to be suspicious of them.
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A problem is that the intellectual turing test is not very interesting with just group 1. If you want to test the merits of Blanchardianism, you really should do it based on what group 2 believe. As you point out, the questions are not very informative on group 2, which significantly reduces the value of the ITT.
I think for future ITTs, it would be good to have people on each side suggest some questions that should be answered, which they feel requires good knowledge about their viewpoint.
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My main observation: I am still an idealist who believes other people are good. I’m not sure why I do this, because it has been proven to me time and time again that people are bad and will hurt you. Going by how far a lot of my guesses for the BB entries deviate from the modal respondent’s guesses, and that most of mine are “but this BB entry is needlessly evil and I don’t believe people are needlessly evil”, I should probably just accept already that every other person who agrees with me on this is needlessly evil.
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I don’t think the people on your side are any worse than GI people! 🙂
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Ah, damning with faint praise 😛
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In an ideological environment where being a good person requires pretending to be stupid, it can be more convenient to just bite the bullet and say, “Yup, I’m needlessly evil!” rather than painstakingly trying to explain empiricism and the is/ought distinction to people who just aren’t interested in reality.
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*tries to avoid engaging with a comment that makes me angry, fails partially*
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Oh, I’m not saying you’re wrong, though I am certain that there is a better way to go about it. I just have, uh, not found that way.
I think part of the reason I fail to understand other Blanchardians/they don’t pass my internal ITT is because most people (and you’ve discussed this on your blog in the context of your own views) who agree with me come from a very different perspective. Like a really disproportionate amount of TERFs and TERF-sympathetic people compared to the general population, whereas I think both TE and RF are fundamentally wrong viewpoints. I have essentially switched from ‘trans wo/men are literally wo/men and always have been’ to ‘trans wo/men are kinda-sorta-literally wo/men and have been ever since they developed the relevant paraphilia, and also ‘cis’ ‘gay’ people are literally trans and always have been’.
Part of this is because of my weird relationship with GI ideology, which I picked up in my early teens because I was autistic and hadn’t even developed theory of mind yet (but was aware of the concept of p-zombies, which I responded to with “but isn’t it well established that every single non-me person in the world is one of these?”), and spent a lot of time watching the trans community with the assumption that everyone would act exactly like my HSTS self and being extremely confused when their psychological profiles hemmed closer to their natal than transitioned sex, but at the same time because of having skin in the pro-trans game since the very beginning of my political awareness it is not possible in any way for me to develop the ‘but we all know here that trans people are really their natal sex, right?’ view held by a lot of Blanchardians. Mostly because, in turn, that view seems easy to develop only if you’ve mostly met A*Ps. (It is not by coincidence that HSTS Blanchardians really do skew ‘HSTS is trutrans’ and that, despite a 4chan-based experiment at doing otherwise, the results of that experiment made it really clear I should just go back to the Problematic™ version.)
But all this boils down ultimately to the fact I really don’t understand why TERFs like an ideology that proves they should have been transitioned as children! And thus I am a major outlier amongst Blanchardians for, you know, taking it to the logical conclusion that all ‘GNC’ ‘gay’ children should be transitioned.
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@trent:
I think you should think of TERFy Blanchardians not as true Blanchardians, but instead as rounds-to-Blanchardians. They will likely take issue with many parts of Blanchardianism, including ideas like neurological intersex syndromes being the reason for HSTS.
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So this one doesn’t actually make any Blanchardian arguments. It could have been in the GI section if not for one mention of “auto-androphilic” at the end.
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This one feels to me like a gender-identity-model adherent who set themselves the challenge of writing a Blanchard-Bailey entry without saying anything they could not frame as technically true according to their own viewpoint. Either this is a fake (as I voted), or there is WAY more common ground between (versions of) the two viewpoints than I would have anticipated. I look forward to finding out which.
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Recording my aggregate answers before Ozy posts the true results. I believe there were 5 rounds-to-GI and 4 rounds-to-BB:
GI
1. Real
2. Fake
3. Fake
4. Fake
5. Real
6. Real
7. Real
8. Real
9. Fake
BB
1. Fake
2. Fake
3. Real
4. Real
5. Real
6. Real
7. Fake
8. Fake
9. Fake
(I am cis not-by-default and rounding to GI myself.)
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