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April 24, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
16:28
#Bristol Debates： ＂I transitioned and then detransitioned.＂
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Right, hi, what's your name?
Hi, I'm Arya.
That's me.
You too, man.
Seriously.
Huge fan.
Thank you.
So you had a question.
Yeah, so I guess I sort of wanted to clear something up.
I mean, it might help it from maybe biting you in the ass later, because you had a debate with Destiny about are trans women women?
And I'm not so concerned with that issue as such.
Basically, there wasn't much differentiation when you were talking between whether you were talking biologically, whether you were talking philosophically.
And as a result, some of the things you were saying kind of came across as if you were basically saying like, you know, once biological sex prescribes sort of morally their gender role in society.
And you said it could be argued we have a moral responsibility to breed and stuff like that.
And it almost seemed that you were defining gender in that way.
So it was okay.
Could we just get like a verifying sounded like?
I think there's no doubt that the gender roles that we inhabit collectively now are a product of our biology.
I don't think that's really arguable.
And I think that the reason for the gender roles themselves is to facilitate relationships between men and women because there are significant physical differences between men and women and they both want something from the other.
Men want to reproduce with women.
Women want men to make sure that their family unit is secure when they raise children.
Evolutionarily, this is the case.
And so they are right when they make the distinction between sex and gender.
Biological sex is one thing.
And gender is the social construct that is the social role that we use to describe ourselves to one another and know how to act.
It's kind of like a language, you know what I mean?
And so basically, that is something that is essential, I think, to the human condition.
But that's not to say that every single person falls into that category, those categories, which they obviously don't.
And I mean, one of the things about gender dysphoria that I find is I'm terribly sympathetic to how difficult it must be to be like that.
But at the end of the day, that is the nature of human beings.
And I don't think we can really define that out of existence.
Whether we like it or not, I think most people are always going to be cis because that's the biological reality of the human.
God, what was the second part?
What was the second part of the question, sorry?
So, let's see, so there were three things that...
Oh, whether it was morally prescriptive.
Ah, yeah, yeah.
Right, yeah.
Now, I don't want that to be necessarily a moral prescription.
I'm trying to be pragmatic and realistic.
Is that a thing, and is that the baseline?
Because the ideological phrase, trans women are women, is designed to make sure that you don't distinguish in any way, intellectually, between the concept of a natural born woman and a woman who's become female.
Sure.
And I think that we can't do that.
There are lots of practical reasons.
I mean, things like, you know, sports competitions, for example, are the best example.
No matter how late or early in their life a man becomes a woman, they still have a natural advantage over women, just as the way the physiology is.
Now, Joe Rogan had a great clip talking to Adam Ruins, everything about this, where he was like, no, no, no, no.
I'm a fighter.
I know exactly what I'm talking about.
It's down to the hip shape and breadth of chest, size of hands, all that sort of thing.
And it's unfair to make women compete against people who were men at some point in their lives.
So we can't just say trans women are women and there's no further discussion because that actually is, in my opinion, putting women at risk.
Okay, so basically, I'm going to see if you agree with this because it kind of makes it easier to understand where we really think about things.
I think when most trans people are saying something like, trans women are women, we're talking about three expressions of gender, so you've got your biological sex, you've got your social sex, and there's gender and there's your gender role.
How do you define social sex there?
Sorry.
So social sex, and I think this is what most trans women are talking about when they're saying trans women are women.
It's basically like, so social sex is just how we recognize and find it easy, as you said, to facilitate communication between recognizing a man from a woman.
So if a trans woman says to me, I identify as a woman, I'm like, okay, socially, I will call you a woman.
Biologically, you are a man.
So can I reframe the way you've said that?
Because the way I understand that is their performative gender, as in they try to make themselves look like a woman, right?
I think that's all.
I think I mean in terms of communication, in terms of how we choose to recognize people.
So if someone's saying trans women are women, they're not saying, change my sex on the NHS so that I don't get checked for prostate cancer.
They're saying, could you please call me a woman?
And I agree that that's definitely a fair consideration.
I don't go around misgendering trans people.
I think it's impolite and unnecessary.
If someone's making the effort to try and present as the gender with which they identify, I think it's totally fair to call them by that gender.
But the problem with the term trans women are women is that it's an axiom from which we then begin, which means that all decisions from that point onwards mean that anyone who is a trans woman or a natural-born woman have to be treated in exactly the same way.
And there are real reasons that we can't really do that, given the example of sports, particularly MMA, which, I mean, even people like Rhonda Rousey, Ava, top MMA fighter for women's leagues, she's like, no, look, I get overwhelmed fighting trans people because they are just physically stronger than me.
And she's amazing.
Yeah, yeah, I saw that article and I was very on board with that.
So I think something else that came across in the conversation a little bit now is very much a view that you've got almost like a binary sort of switch between the genders and you've got, you know, talking in terms of biology, obviously.
You know, men are like this and they want to fuck, they want to fuck a lot, they want to make lots and lots of children, promulgate the species, stronger, beardier, blah, blah, blah.
Women, more maternal, more looking for a partner that settle down these traits and that's how it is.
You know, do you sort of subscribe to that or I mean it is definitely a spectrum.
You get men who are more manly, women who are more womanly, and then the sort of more androgynous people in the middle.
I mean, obviously, you know, you've always had tomboys and feminine girly boys and things like this.
These have always existed and should exist, free to exist however they want.
But that doesn't remove the essential category of man or woman, even though it's not necessarily clearly defined.
And I think that we do need to speak to that in just regular social interactions.
I don't think there's any getting away from it.
I think people are reliant on it.
Because one of the problems that I think the way that we conceive of gender identity is that it's not just personal.
It's actually a method of communication, which is why we have this performative, which is why we dress up as male and women.
Because we're showing other people around us before we even have any kind of interaction how I want to be approached.
And the other person already has a preconceived idea of how a man wants to be approached, how a woman wants to be approached, and things like this.
And I think that these are so essential to the human species that, I mean, every society has them.
And almost, you know, 99% of people can be categorized as either man or woman comfortably.
And so I think there's one of those things that we, you know, we can't just destroy these sort of social norms and these, again, a way of communicating with each other without doing severe harm to our society at large.
Because I do think that these are the ways that men and women facilitate reproduction and family building.
And that's how the civilization has been built and carries on.
And I think attacking this is amazing because it's so wide-reaching and it's so fundamental to what any society is that the arrogance of thinking, well, we can just get rid of it and redo it all in a day or whatever.
It's staggering.
And I think the implications are genuinely dangerous.
So certainly not in a day.
And it's very true that, so, you know, you've acknowledged that, so basically, you're talking about two very functional sort of social understandings and gender roles that are very binary.
But you've also acknowledged that those are used to describe the very spectrumic sort of range from male to female of like how much testosterone or estrogen in your body and all these other things that kind of change it.
Whether you've got a switch allele in your brain, which means that even though your body is doped in testosterone, your brain isn't, and then you're attracted to men.
Just to pick on the point, there have obviously been lots of studies that do say that there is a distinctive pattern to male and female brains.
It's not a computer, it's not one or zero, but it's a collection of characteristics that are commonly found in male brains and with fast switching crossover or something like that.
I'm not an expert in you, but I've seen the bright ups.
And I think that we have to accept that there is an essential biological component to this.
And if there wasn't, why would you even take hormones to change yourself if there was no essential biological characteristics in it?
So this is something I wanted to talk about because you said earlier that most people are very comfortable with it.
And I think a lot of people are, but we need to ask.
So like I'm an ex-trans woman, actually.
I identified as a trans woman.
I was up for four years.
I went on hormones for a year.
I got my testosterone down from super high to really low and detransitioned.
And this is happening a lot, largely in terms of trans women to very effeminate gay men who think that they are women because the trans woman has achieved a lot of popularity.
And I think because there are a lot of men who don't fit the masculine role prescribed to us and who don't fit the masculine archetype, they're saying, what am I?
And some of them are saying, maybe I'm trans.
And I think the reason why we're getting a billion other genders is either as a result of those people who do transitioned or people who just jump straight to it.
They said, none of this speaks for me.
None of this describes me.
I don't sit comfortably in this.
So I've actually heard a lot of anecdotally, I can't give you any statistics, but I've heard that it is common for trans women who have decided that they don't actually feel that this is right for them to detransition and become effeminate gay men.
I'm completely in favour of anyone doing anything like this.
I don't care.
It's your God.
It's your life.
Love how you want it, right?
But I do think that there's a great deal of pressure from activists, wherever they are, making all that noise, to just not have this reality recognized.
They are, as far as I'm concerned, denying your lived experience.
And I think that's, well, it's not very inclusive, is it?
Oh, man, I got told that I was too privileged to have a discussion about beating the shit out of TERFs.
And I was like, bitch, I lived in Shrepton fucking mallet.
All right?
And I wore a fucking dress and a full face and makeup around dealers and like farmers.
That was me.
You lived it.
You lived it.
And they were telling me, I don't get to say, because I've got too much privilege to say that we shouldn't just beat the shit out of Turfs.
No, we need to be having a conversation about this.
Because, you know, the reason why there's such a multitude of non-binary genders is because they don't know what to do with the things that don't fit the masculine and feminine stereotype.
And so, you know, while I acknowledge you saying that they work and they do largely work, there's no denying that there's a huge cultural swath of people that are actually saying, no, this doesn't work for me.
Yeah, and the problem is, literally, like the people who are trying to prevent us from having this conversation.
Because I completely agree that men and women isn't just hard and fast categories.
And I completely agree that there are definitely people who legitimately fall outside of these categories.
We have to be sensitive to that.
But I don't think the debate can be framed in a way that is launched as an attack on the categories themselves.
Because I don't think that anyone's actually going to say you're not allowed to not be a man if you're male.
Then they're not going to say you're not allowed to not be a woman if you're female.
But they don't want to have their own gender roles stripped away from them.
Because again, what kind of person attacks your essential identity?
That's how you think of yourself.
And it seems to be a way of kind of stripping you away from your social safety, like your social connections to leave you isolated and vulnerable.
And that is, as far as I'm concerned, what a cult does.
So I find it very concerning.
And the fact that we can't even talk about this is deeply disturbing.
Totally.
So it's like, I do think that the terms male and female are good and they're here to stay and there's a good reason for that.
But I think it's less that the concept of how we recognize gender socially needs to change.
You know, a lot of people are like destroy it.
But I think in terms of if we're talking about destroyed gender, it should be more to do with how we treat genders differently.
You know, it actually just gets back to the backbone of gender equality activism of, you know, of men who are saying, I don't like the fact that people don't care about me.
I don't like the fact that I'm a feminine and I get beaten by my wife that no one cares about me.
I don't like because I'm a man, women want to be afraid of me.
I don't like because I'm a man, people don't think I can be raped or abused or that I'm instantly a rapist.
Isn't it a legal status in the United Kingdom that women can't actually rape men?
Yeah, that's right.
Forced development is not considered rape here in the UK.
Men's rights activists got this to be debated in Parliament and it was rejected.
So, I mean, we are in a position where, and this is something that I find deeply concerning, right?
The institutions of this country, I think, should be gender blind.
I don't think they should have special rules for men and women.
I mean, the concept of abortion, right?
I always find this bizarre.
It's like, can people get abortions?
And the answer is yes.
So it doesn't really matter whether you're a man or a woman.
If you want an abortion and you legally can get one, then you should be free to do it regardless of what your gender on paper is.
If you feel that you have been raped, then it really doesn't matter whether you're male or female.
What matters is that you were the victim of sexual violence.
And we need to start reconfiguring the mindset that these institutions are run under to be neutral towards the citizen themselves.
So you can be whatever the hell you want to be.
And the government won't care, the police won't care, the universities won't care.
They won't sit there and privilege one group over another.
And I think that's the way to do things.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
That's right where I'm at.
And it's like, I think I'm pretty darn happy with that, but just really wanted to make sure no one's going to take clips of you talking the destiny and being like, we have a biological right to reproduce.
This is just male and female and that's it.
But now you've got you saying, you know, no, let's strip this down from the top.
Let people do what they want.
Legal equality.
And it is complicated.
And I genuinely do feel bad for people who have gender dysphoria in a society where most people don't, you know, because it must be very difficult.
I do think we should be sympathetic, but you can't frame any conversation as an attack on the wider group.
I just don't think that's a way to work any of this.
And I don't think it'll work.
It's not the fault of the fact that men and women exist.
It's a fault of gynocentrism and the way that we treat men and the way that we treat women.
Because, you know, I thought I was a trans woman.
I was damn convinced of it because the way I was being told to be masculine was not working for me.
Now I do what the fuck I want, but I identify as a man because that's my biology.
But I do what I want.
And I just try to promulgate that and say, treat men as you treat women.
I completely agree.
You're a very attractive call eyeshade as well.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
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