What is a woman? What does a woman look like? What is a girl? Is a woman a girl or a boy? What are the differences between a woman and a man? Is there a difference between a male and a female? Simone and Malcolm try to answer these questions and more in this episode.
00:00:35.960That you can determine this, right? And in different cultures, elevate different interpretations of gender above other interpretations of gender.
00:01:06.980I was in this trans-maxing. I was talking in the trans-maxing discord with the trans-maxing community.
00:01:12.620For people who aren't familiar with the trans-maxing community, they are individuals who transition not because, or at least they don't think that transitioning needs to be tied to gender dysphoria, but they think that it makes sense for some men to transition for social advantage.
00:01:28.560Yeah. So basically transition for gain or gender euphoria, not just gender dysphoria.
00:01:33.240Yeah. And I like it because what I like about the community is they're expanding the concept and they're pissing off traditional trans communities.
00:01:41.980I don't know. Am I terrible for having so much fun when like extremist progressive communities get pissed off at somebody just for asking questions they're not allowed to ask?
00:01:49.700They're like, hey, I'm a guy and I feel pretty oppressed in society today. Am I allowed to transition?
00:01:56.920Yeah, that's the most trans-phobic question anyone can ask. How dare you think about doing that? You're so privileged.
00:02:03.420So I do love that they're breaking down these things and they asked at the end of this thing, what is a woman?
00:02:08.720Because, you know, there's this video, what is a woman, which good video has been recommended to us by smart people.
00:02:14.300And I think it shows a real toxic parts of the trans movement, which, let's be honest, has some real toxic parts.
00:02:22.700But I had never actually considered the question myself until it was proposed to me in the context of this group meeting.
00:02:29.680And so I had to come up with an answer on the spot and I was really satisfied with my answer, but it's not one that I had come up with before.
00:02:36.880So, Simone, first, I want to hear if you, what your answer is, unbiased by me to this question.
00:02:44.300Right. So, to me, I mean, obviously there's not a good answer for this, but for me, a woman is someone that I see on the street and I'm like, oh, look at that woman.
00:02:56.660So if you pass, whether it's intentional or not, you're a woman or a man.
00:03:02.460So if you count men who just look extra girly, you just look extra girly, are not trying to look extra girly as women.
00:03:09.420Yeah. Yeah. Like there, there can be a, a natal man who just looks extremely femme, not intentionally.
00:03:15.340And I'm like, oh, what a pretty girl. But same, same with, you know, natal women who just happen to look really boyish.
00:03:21.280Like, you, you are, you are what people interpret you to be.
00:03:26.860So you judge womanhood as in the eye of you as the perceiver, because your brain is categorizing everyone you see into either male or female.
00:03:35.420And the way it handles that categorization, you say, because everyone's brain does this.
00:03:40.500I should be clear. Even people who are like, I am the most gender understanding person in the world.
00:03:46.260They definitely have an assumption when they first see somebody of what gender that person identifies.
00:03:51.440And they'd be like, okay, I'm not sure.
00:03:53.700But what you're saying is from your perspective, gender is whatever your brain innately categorizes people as from your perspective.
00:04:05.260Well, and this is, I think this is, it works for me too, because male and female traits, you know, hormonal levels, et cetera, are averages.
00:04:13.920Right. And so there are, there are women who have way more testosterone, way more other like male traits than men.
00:04:20.000And there are men who have like way more female traits than women.
00:04:23.260Even Spencer Greenberg, like created this like quiz you can take.
00:04:26.460It sort of shows you cognitively where you trend gender wise toward like male or female averages.
00:04:37.900But you would come off as probably a hyper, hyper masculine because of sort of the, like dominant approach that you take to things.
00:04:43.660But yeah, like my point though, is like, you know, even, even a, a, a natal male or female may be outside the averages for the, the gender they were born into or the sex they were born into.
00:06:00.120This is a common thing you see within polygynous societies.
00:06:02.600And it helps to deal with the fact that because many women often sort to one men in these societies, you get a lot of unpaired men.
00:06:10.260Typically, the more unpaired men you have in a society, the more terrorism you have, the more social unrest you have.
00:06:13.980And so it makes sense for these societies to find ways to match these unpaired men and matching them with each other is a very convenient and intergenerationally durable solution to the problem.
00:06:24.540So it's trans maxing before trans maxing.
00:06:27.760I'm not saying it's an ethical solution, but this is where things get interesting, is cultural groups are going to have different answers to this question.
00:06:39.680And most of those answers are going to be determined by what led to intergenerational success of that cultural group.
00:06:48.760We just gave one evolutionary pressure for why conservative Islamic cultures would have seen a woman as what you're attracted to.
00:06:56.120Whereas, you know, if you're talking about monogamous cultural groups, well, typically fertility rate is higher by getting almost everyone to breed.
00:07:03.040Right. So it really depends on your equipment.
00:07:05.000You're going to find woman by who can have kids and who can get who pregnant.
00:07:09.540How you determine what a woman is within those cultural groups.
00:07:12.160And I think it's very clear that, you know, these monogamous cultural groups have one answer.
00:07:16.480These philoginous cultural groups have one answer.
00:07:18.200And progressive cultural groups have a different answer.
00:07:20.540And all of these answers are valid within these cultural groups and should not be treated as invalid.
00:07:27.720And this is why I have such enormous disdain for individuals like Dylan Mulvaney, who has – this is the person who caused this Bud Light controversy.
00:07:38.900I think it was an absolutely warranted controversy because this individual has advocated to make it illegal and for legal punishments to be vented on individuals who misgender somebody.
00:08:04.360They want to culturally dominate and culturally erase the groups that are different for them.
00:08:08.400They do not care that different people are different from them.
00:08:11.040They do not respect the rights of any cultural group but the progressive urban monoculture.
00:08:15.460And they – I mean, this is a strategy that they can use to begin to disenfranchise anybody who holds really strongly to their cultural practices.
00:08:25.440I was really shocked that the mainstream media, when they were covering the Bud Light controversy, they made it sound like Dylan Mulvaney was just like a normal trans person.
00:08:35.960And that's the reason why people were freaking out.
00:08:39.440The extent they went to to hide what was really going on was shocking to me.
00:08:43.840You know, if Bud Light had done a deal with Buck Angel, nobody would have freaked out, you know?
00:08:49.100The reason why people were freaking out is because Dylan Mulvaney is an extremist activist whose goal is the cultural erasure of groups which she frames as being subhuman in their rights when contrasted with her.
00:09:07.280And that individuals who hold to their traditions and faced should be sent to jail for even slightly upsetting her or inconveniencing her.
00:09:18.440This was not a case of a reasonable, normal trans person who was put into an ad campaign.
00:09:26.360I mean, it reminds me of the Romans when the Romans were like – you know, and they would do this with Jewish populations.
00:09:32.060Like, okay, well, most other people are okay with sacrificing to the Roman emperor as a god.
00:09:37.420Why aren't you okay with sacrificing to the Roman emperor as a god?
00:09:40.620You know, they did this with Jews and Christians very frequently.
00:09:42.840And, of course, Jews and Christians are like, yeah, but from our cultural perspective, that's blasphemy.
00:09:47.520Why can't you just let us do things our way?
00:09:49.260And the Romans are like, well, the emperor finds that very distasteful.
00:09:53.460It's very offensive to the emperor when you don't sacrifice to him.
00:09:57.540I don't understand why you can't just bend your way of seeing the world in this one area right here.
00:10:03.260And it's like, well, if you saw it from their perspective, you would understand why they can't bend on that one perspective.
00:10:07.980And this is where we have really strong beliefs.
00:10:10.740Like, I believe very strongly against Islamic cultural groups when they're like, it should be illegal or an individual should be able to be punished for another cultural group for showing depictions of my, you know, Muhammad.
00:12:02.420You don't have to call other groups by other titles that they care about within their culture.
00:12:06.340But you do it because you're a nice person who, you know, I call someone a doctor because I don't want to be a dick.
00:12:12.440Like, but I understand if some group was like, yeah, but we believe that all humans are born equal and you shouldn't elevate any person above any other person.
00:12:20.520And that's why we never use the title doctor.
00:14:10.380Well, but you could say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:14:12.220But, well, what if I say that what I'm optimizing for is what makes people happiest, right?
00:14:17.740Well, progressives would say in the moment, and I agree, in the moment it is almost certainly true, that a moment is identifying people who want to be identified as a woman as a woman.
00:14:27.180However, I don't know if that is longitudinally happiness.
00:14:30.000Well, but isn't that kind of a zero-sum happiness, though?
00:14:32.320Because often making, you know, if someone is forced to acknowledge a gender that's really hard for them to acknowledge or that makes them feel like they're-
00:14:51.260Now, I'd say that longitudinally is actually less clear to me.
00:14:55.040A lot of the research done right now indicates that, yes, trans people are much happier after they transition.
00:15:02.980However, if they didn't know that transition was a possibility, would that still be true?
00:15:08.200Like, if they live in a society that was, like, no transition at all, would that still be true?
00:15:13.000Also, we have to keep in mind that these results are coming through a filter.
00:15:15.920Like, if you look at older results, this is less true in some of the older studies on this.
00:15:20.640And I do know that if a researcher published something saying that people were less happy after they transitioned today, they would lose their tenure.
00:15:27.340Anyone who doesn't think that is living in an ideologically insane bubble.
00:15:33.080I don't see if I can find the study, but recently, yeah, some studies that just were reporting data were, like, the people who published them were either punished or they were heavily censored and they had to be redacted.
00:15:42.320Like, it's sad that this is a state because it means for people like us who are trying to get at the truth, what actually makes people happier, we don't know.
00:15:48.960We do know that conservatives are happier on average.
00:15:51.200We do know that if you're depressed, you're likely going to be better served by becoming a conservative, like a conservative Christian tradition.
00:15:56.940And this is one of these things where it's like, okay, well, so then people say, well, we get to do whatever makes every kid happiest, right?
00:16:03.900And it's like, well, if that's true, then if we're giving, you know, the same-sex attracted kids to the LGBT community and the gender dysphoric kids to the LGBT community, are we giving the depressed kids to the Christian community?
00:16:16.240Because they seem to do better in that community?
00:16:18.320Like, just statistically speaking, right?
00:16:20.060Well, I think many people would be quite unhappy with that trade.
00:16:23.320And so it's better that, you know, we leave this up to individual free will where that can be exercised.
00:16:32.540It depends on what utility you are multiplying this by.
00:16:36.680I think that the current evidence is if you're optimizing for in-the-moment happiness, probably the progressives are right.
00:16:43.340If you're optimizing for intergenerational cultural durability, I think that monogamy-like systems are the closest to right systems.
00:16:52.100So in this system, likely the evangelical Christians are right.
00:16:54.580If you're optimizing for a truest understanding of reality, what you would say is, well, none of them matter.
00:17:01.260It matters what my cultural group is optimizing for.
00:17:03.500So our cultural group is optimizing for fertility rates, right?
00:17:05.920So what we would say is transition would only make sense for an individual if it was so distressing to them that they needed to transition to maximize their fertility rates, which would be true in almost no individual.
00:17:19.000Well, but I think what you're describing, though, is a world in which, for example, as long as one doesn't compromise one's fertility, so this might preclude one from hormonal transition, but not preclude one from plastic surgery, someone could still transition and then be what looks like a gay or lesbian relationship with someone.
00:17:41.060This is for what we're optimizing for within our culture.
00:17:44.160And also keep in mind that our culture, because of the way we define this, changes in its quote-unquote acceptance of these different groups as general fertility technologies are invented.
00:17:55.800So perfection of IVG, perfection of artificial wombs would make it that our culture might even encourage gay relationships or transition everyone to, like, one gender, if it turns out one gender is more efficient than another gender in, like, economic situations.
00:18:13.260So that's a very interesting way of relating, but that's how our gender, I'm saying this is not the truth, this is just how we have chosen to relate to it because our goal is to give our kids the truest understanding of reality we can while still maintaining intergenerational cultural fidelity and high fertility rates.
00:18:26.680But the actual true answer is the question is rigged to the beginning, from the beginning.
00:18:32.180It only matters, you can only come up with quote-unquote correct answers when you know what you're optimizing for.
00:18:37.120And then, yes, there are specific answers that come up with specific solutions, depending on what you're optimizing for.
00:18:44.700Well, this has actually been pretty enlightening.
00:19:16.660Yeah, I just wanted to double-check that Dylan Milvaney did say that we should be illegal for conservatives to use incorrect gender pronouns.
00:19:24.440And I think that this is also a really important part, that, you know, we as a society need to know where to draw the lines and where we get into government-mandated cultural genocide, where we get into my culture is ethically superior to other cultures' dominant.
00:19:43.600Large cultural groups in this country, both Muslims and Christians and Jews, and they are all wrong, and my culture is correct because – and why do they think their culture is correct?
00:19:52.980Because they control power in the moment.
00:19:54.280And so they, like most cultural groups throughout history who have controlled power in the moment, think that they have the right to culturally enforce their norms on other groups.
00:20:03.360And to me, that is one of the highest forms of evil that any individual can engage with.
00:20:07.980And absolutely, yes, you should boycott a brand that is platforming any individual who is promoting that.
00:20:16.840It is one of the – genocide is one of the purest forms of evil, cultural genocide, attempting to erase other cultural groups or lauding your cultural power under other cultural groups.
00:20:27.040And I'm not going to lie, Christian groups have done this when they've had power in the past.
00:20:32.200And when they take power again, if they do take power again in the future, our cultural group will fight them just as ardently as we are fighting the dominant cultural group in our society today.
00:20:49.720You need to act on your own moral core.
00:20:52.080And this is something that I can say with a lot of confidence that it never turns out well when one cultural group thinks that they are axiomatically better than their neighbors and that they have a right to enforce those value systems on their neighbors using a government's legal system.