In this episode, Simone and I discuss the loss of shame in society and the role it plays in the trans community, as well as the role that shame plays in society as a whole, and why this is a good thing.
00:00:34.600Okay, so, I mean, if we're talking about losing shame, one of the things you'll repeatedly see,
00:00:39.880and you'll see this especially among the trans community,
00:00:42.700that they will act and dress in ways that historically you would have been embarrassed to act and dress.
00:00:50.340You would have had some shame around this.
00:00:51.780You would have known, I am acting like a buffoon right now.
00:00:55.100I, I, like, you, you should, historically, if you had walked into like a children's book reading, looking and dressing like this, you would have said.
00:01:35.560To coerce society to act in a way that doesn't feel natural.
00:01:39.340It's about the directionality of coercion.
00:01:41.300In this case, people are coercing other people to do something without their consent.
00:01:45.900That is to say, you know, pretend that someone looks like a woman or a man when they don't, which can be very difficult for some people.
00:01:53.200And that's why there's all this misgendering versus just being allowed to do something with your private life that you'd like to do.
00:01:59.300And I think worse than just being hard for some people, it goes against some people's cultural values.
00:02:03.880There's a huge difference between a government allowing gay people to get married and a government forcing Catholic churches to marry gay people.
00:02:12.420The trans movement is fundamentally fighting to force you to validate them.
00:02:31.900But, and I point out here, like, if it's clear from the way these people dress and look that the old line of, I just want to be seen as a woman isn't true.
00:02:41.800They're not people who are desperate to look and act and be seen in public as women or they would dress in a way that looked remotely like a woman.
00:02:51.460They are people who are getting off on forcing people to see them in a way that's obviously not true and forcing their self-perception onto another person in a way that is, if not sexual, clearly something adjacent to sexuality.
00:03:09.540Because that's not any other recognizable emotional set that I can think of where you force another person to say something about you that is obviously not true.
00:03:23.500Like, if that sort of thing gets you off, what would get you off more than forcing someone to get their kid to say something that they know isn't true and exercising that power over them?
00:03:34.420And I think you can see the joy in this, in these individuals' faces when they talk about how they can force parents to get their kids to do stuff like this.
00:03:45.740And parents are waking up and saying no.
00:03:48.180When asked about parents' rights, OJ says...
00:03:51.160Well, actually, in Canada, parents' rights are limited.
00:03:54.640So the child has the right to be protected from the parents when the parents behave badly.
00:03:59.420Like village resident Dave Davey DiCarlo, support SOGI and limiting parental rights.
00:04:06.080The change that we have to see is sometimes the parents.
00:04:10.700My culture believes that if a little girl likes boys' toys, that she's just a tomboy.
00:04:17.500That's a girl who likes boyish things.
00:04:22.560If a little boy likes to do things that sometimes little girls like to do, we say whatever.
00:04:28.200We accept them for the way that they want to act without demanding that they change their gender in relation to that or their gender presentation in relation to that.
00:04:38.700Yet the dominant societal view of gender right now, the one that many school systems and educational programs are attempting to push on my kids, aspires to erase this cultural perception of gender.
00:04:50.700And I think that that is highly colonialist, imperialist, and you could almost say genocidal of my culture.
00:04:59.260And the little girl came home in tears because the teacher had told her since she was playing with some toys in the class that were deemed to be masculine in nature that she was likely a boy in a girl's body.
00:05:14.300The mother went to the school the very next day, and instead of having any sort of tolerance or support or understanding, she was actually called names.
00:05:23.060She was told that she was a homophobe, that she was a bigot.
00:05:26.720Like, and there were trans people in the past, and I remember growing up, like, when trans people would interact with other people, the iteration of trans back then cared about passing.
00:05:34.600Like, they would have felt embarrassed about not passing.
00:05:39.100Yeah, you might, like, disappear for a year, maybe go to another country, work on it, and then come back.
00:05:45.900Yes, this new group actively thrills themselves on not passing.
00:05:52.200Well, I think it's a different group of people.
00:05:55.420It's a different group of people with a different drive.
00:06:26.740And we used to know that both of these things existed at the same time.
00:06:29.680We used to know that there were some people who wanted to be a different gender, and there were some people who liked doing perverted things in public and making people uncomfortable, especially children.
00:06:42.560And somehow we made it, like, a huge problem to point out that the second group was using rights that we were trying to carve out for the first group.
00:06:53.780A person who was just born in the wrong body would not care how they were gendered by other people.
00:07:00.200The only people who would care how they're gendered by other people are people trying to force their self-perception onto other people without those people's consent.
00:07:11.360Attempting to force their gender, their sexuality, onto others without their consent.
00:07:17.700And if you only desperately wanted to be seen as a woman, you wouldn't be showing male genitalia to other women in the women's locker room as Lea Thomas did.
00:07:27.280And I think it can be undersold how heartbreaking things like the Lea Thomas thing were for people who had supported the trans community,
00:07:50.600believing this with a community that was just people born in the wrong bodies who wanted to be able to live as close to a normal life as was reasonable,
00:08:00.680and not people who wanted to wantonly violate the consent of others, and not a community of, you know, sex pest flashers, for example.
00:08:08.880I understand that there's going to be weirdos out there who will randomly try to take advantage of this stuff.
00:08:15.220And so when one of them did, and you then turn to the mainstream trans advocate orgs, and you're like,
00:08:22.080okay, like surely this isn't what you were fighting for.
00:08:25.400You were not fighting for the right to violate other people's consent.
00:36:05.680So why are you burdening me with your negative emotions?
00:36:08.980But if you create a very simple argument, which is to say you are hurting people because your job here on Earth is, well, martyrdom is to live a life for other people, to live a life for other people in the future, then that's a good reason.
00:36:26.140Well, or just to reward that, I think the bigger thing I'm hearing you say is that we need to reframe what is good and not focus on punishing that which we think is bad.
00:36:35.880And people, to a great extent, I mean, if we're going to talk about the, from a mainstream standpoint, but I don't think controversial to us, controversial concept of rapid onset youth gender dysphoria as being like a contagious factor in high school, people are doing it because, I don't know, they think it's going to lead to good things because they think it elevates them because they think that that's kind of the cool thing to do.
00:36:59.400And if we can frame more pro-social for society, more beneficial for humankind in general behaviors, like martyrdom in favor of the future, like investing in future generations rather than your own life and hedonistic pleasures, then yeah, people will do it more because it's what they get rewarded for socially.
00:38:14.080Like that is how they brought people into their community.
00:38:16.700That is how they kept their kids within the community.
00:38:18.920Because there was a level of pride in being righteous over cool, okay?
00:38:24.960But being, like doing the right thing, like being a genuinely good person requires not succumbing to indolent signaling, which so many people do, right?
00:38:35.740The communities that fall into these deontological factions where they're like, I'm following all of the rules exactly, they don't look righteous to outsiders.
00:38:45.960They look like rule-obsessed, like, well, rule Nazis, right?
00:38:49.840Applying their rules both to themselves and aspirationally to others instead of saying, oh, well, you know, if somebody looks to you as an outsider, right, who's fallen to the urban monoculture or something like that, and they genuinely engage with their content, they're like, oh, they're making sacrifices to make the world a better place for all of us, right?
00:39:08.780Whereas if you look at many of these other groups, they think that they are being righteous by constantly signaling, like a book of rules.
00:39:17.300And that doesn't make you look righteous.
00:39:18.900It makes you look like you are, like, being extra goth and therefore think you're better than other people.
00:39:24.620And this is as important for the Christians to get as it is for the Wokies to get.
00:39:29.460The Wokies who think that by signaling commitment to their group and their group's obscure rules, they are signaling their righteousness to outsiders.
00:39:39.200Oh, this is how strictly I follow my group's rules.
00:39:41.560You don't think, oh, that person's extra righteous, but they think that that's what you're thinking.
00:39:45.180Now, try to use that to get some insight into how other people might see you if you are constantly signaling how extra masculine or Christian or et cetera you are.
00:40:26.480And the early Christians, as we point out in the other video, they were actually doing things like putting their lives at risk to help plague victims at a much higher rate than the pagans.
00:40:33.800Right, and people did see that and they were clearly impressed by it.
00:40:37.640And they were like, wait, they're actually, there were complaints from emperors, as we note in that one, where he's like, look, you need to start giving more to poor people because the Christians are giving more to our poor than our community is giving to our poor, right?
00:40:50.620Like, it was clear to everyone that one group was actually the more moral group.
00:40:58.520You need to be the more moral group where morality isn't just your values, but it's a clear thing that anyone can understand.
00:41:59.740Well, I mean, it's, it's shocking for a lot of groups because they were able to use these tools for centuries, right?
00:42:05.960Because they were the dominant cultural force in their region for centuries.
00:42:09.380And when you tell them, they're like, why can't I just do what people were able to do 60, 70 years ago to keep their kids within the faith?
00:42:17.100And you, you explain, well, well, here's why.
00:42:20.640And they're like, yeah, but why can't it?
00:42:21.760And I'm like, well, you, you, you do see her in a completely different social context.
00:42:27.760Thinking back to that Scott Alexander review of the rise of Christianity and what caused people to turn to Christianity when they had more difficulty adopting Judaism, for example.
00:42:38.740And Judaism had a lot of the same benefits, but you just circumcise yourself.
00:42:42.080People were like, I don't know about that.
00:42:44.060People were like, oh, I can have rights as a woman.
00:43:20.840Right now, now there's different iterations of this rule.
00:43:22.980Some people are like, well, if you love God, that means that you have to do the type of things that God would want you to be doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:43:28.820You know, but the point being is that in Christianity, they basically boiled the water of Judaism, which is to say they, they, they, what's the, what's the word I use here?
00:43:38.840They, they roasted the vegetables of Judaism.
00:43:52.780They compressed the software package of the Jewish rules, which is to say, what if we boil all of the rules down into just one rule, right?
00:44:03.640And it allows it to be carried with a much, as we've mentioned in other videos, Christianity as a, as a religious system achieves much of what modern Judaism does, but it does it with a way lower source code.
00:44:17.040Like the source code is just like way simpler, easier to read, easier to work with, which boils down to love God.
00:44:25.900So both easier to adopt, but also like quite attractive from the perspective of many people who also happen to be fairly influential in a very back channel-y kind of way, AKA women at the time.
00:44:40.180And then, and then if you look at our tweak on that, I mean, we don't disagree with the traditional Christian perspective, which is love God.
00:44:46.740We just say love God, which is all future humans, which helps better morally align.
00:44:51.340Because if you just say love God, the problem is, is then you can assign ideas or restrictions to God that may be cultural to your group and not in the Bible or not in other things, which I, we regularly see.
00:45:06.340And I was actually talking to Simone about recently where I'm like, the Bible doesn't really make it clear that, for example, a heaven exists.
00:45:12.580And yet a lot of Christians will use heaven and hell as like these obvious concepts from the Bible.
00:45:17.520And, and, and I was telling her today, one thing I found really fun is I was trying to find any evidence that, that when you die, your soul immediately goes to this paradise, right.
00:45:29.440Or that even that you have a soul at all.
00:45:31.340And the, the, the closest line I could find was Jesus on the cross telling the, the thief, he's saying, well, you know, today we will basically, people argue that maybe he made it wrong.
00:45:42.160Like I'm telling you today, we will be in paradise, which could mean that, you know, you'll, we'll be in paradise in the distant future, which is the way a lot of Jews thought that things worked is, and, and many early Christians that appeared also thought this is that everyone would be risen from the dead.
00:45:56.340And from now until you're risen from the dead, you have no conscious experience, but this line is argued that, no, he meant today because of where the comma is in this.
00:46:04.480Well, well, it depends on where you put the comma.
00:46:07.140Even if you read it that way, I was like, okay, what does this word paradise mean?
00:46:11.200And the word paradise, unfortunately, both in ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew means a walled garden.
00:46:17.880And I was like, okay, so Simone, does a walled garden to you mean a place of endless pleasure more or a cycle of birth and death more?
00:46:26.680And it's like, well, even Jesus used the metaphor of gardens to mean a cycle of birth and death pretty regularly.
00:46:32.440So, oh no, he was probably talking about today, you and I will be in a cycle of birth and death, not a place where you never feel hunger or pain or anything like that, which I find really interesting.
00:46:45.380Like, as Octavian said on that boat once, you're going to die, Torsten.
00:46:49.000You're going to die, yeah, you're going to die.
00:46:54.420Which I think is really interesting that, like, when I go back to the Bible, it, like, doesn't say all of this weird stuff that many Christians assume it says.
00:47:02.560And then they'll assign those things to God and they'll assign this world perspective where there's a heaven and there's a hell and there are souls that, you know, judgment is applied to instead of humans that judgment is applied to.
00:47:15.620And this leads to them being able to act in ways that might be biblically very unaligned, but that are very aligned with their personal.
00:47:26.020Now, here's probably my biggest change recently, and I want your thoughts on this, Simone.
00:47:31.360Because we mentioned this in the previous episode, but recently I've become more, like, personally, I used to take this position of, like, trans is, like, there's some real group of trans people and I'm okay with that.
00:47:42.280But what actually broke this for me was looking at historic examples of people who people said were trans.
00:47:48.640And these were just gender fluid people.
00:47:51.000Like, they were not, they were not trans.
00:47:52.600They did not have an obsession with gender.
00:47:54.020They did not have an obsession with the way people were seeing them.
00:47:56.800They either would have been called cross-dressers or gender fluid if you look at, like, modern parlance, right?
00:48:03.260They would not be seen as this trans community that, like, needs everyone to see them as this certain gender.
00:48:07.940And then it made me think, well, okay, there might be this real group of people that's born with a different brain, but they just want to express themselves differently.
00:48:17.400They don't, they're not obsessed with pronouns and people seeing them as a different gender and all that, which is, which now that I look at the negatives that come with this trans obsession, i.e. the really high suicide rate, the really high self-hatred rate.
00:48:32.020They're really high, you know, I've moved quite, like, maybe, like, we shouldn't, and, and, and the moral license to have this obsession, which is created by the normalization of this.
00:48:43.200Do you think it's wrong that I've moved into this position of, actually, I don't know if, at least it was in our own culture, saying that being trans is okay, is bad entirely?
00:48:54.180I, I think what we're, we're larger as, as a couple, like, people talking about this a lot are coming to is, the conclusion that you need to do something about it is wrong.
00:49:06.800And this concept that your gender is a part of your identity is stupid.
00:49:13.760It's not, it's not, it's, it's, the problem in, with trans stuff now is it is, oh, you identify with these traits, which we largely group as male or female.
00:49:58.520And then at this one event where this, this friend was present and another one of our friends was present and one of our friends came and was like, oh, what, what are their pronouns?
00:50:18.100And, and so I think that the thing is, there are a lot of people who already realize this and it's just like, nobody cares and they live their lives.
00:50:26.120And even in this world in which a mainstream society is like, oh, we need to do something about this.
00:50:32.000Like, we need to now classify you as you, you as this.
00:50:34.740And we need to put something in your, in your email signature.
00:50:37.800And you need to begin your soup calls by naming your pronouns, even when you don't care.
00:50:43.300But there are still people who manage to maintain that level of, it doesn't matter, deep respect.
00:50:51.180And I think it would be so healthy for society to get back to that.
00:50:54.080I also think to, to a great extent, a lot of mental conditions are like that.
00:50:58.420People didn't used to have bipolar or, you know, people that didn't used to have borderline personality disorder.
00:51:15.440So the danger is, and the sacrilege here is, is, is, is, is, is, is not actually like identifying with a different gender than your birth gender.
00:52:08.480And also back to my, like, larger theory about anxiety and depression, which is that anxiety and depression fill a void when you don't have bigger things to care about.
00:52:16.900And when those bigger things fill your life, suddenly the anxiety just kind of melts away because there's no space for it.
00:53:16.520Pride in not, not, you should never be comfortable with who you are.
00:53:21.700You should always be trying to improve yourself.
00:53:23.280And I think that's another thing to work on here is, is, is understanding.
00:53:28.100And, and, and, and I think rightfully so that you should not be, and, and to not elevate, not through shame, but just be like, you shouldn't have pride in whoever you happen to be.
00:53:38.640You should be trying to improve yourself.
00:53:40.180Whoever you happen to be is who you are without effort.
00:53:45.480And people are like, oh, you don't know what I've been through, like trying to categorize everything in terms of past trauma.
00:53:50.300And this is what I hate so much about trauma narratives is they try to recontextualize who you have allowed yourself to become indolently as a journey of hardship.