content warning: Zack Davis. so of course this is merely the intro to Zack’s unquenchable outrage at Yudkowsky using the pronouns that someone wants to be called by
content warning: Zack Davis. so of course this is merely the intro to Zack’s unquenchable outrage at Yudkowsky using the pronouns that someone wants to be called by
Epistemic status: I have made it through this swamp. I did not read the footnotes. I glossed over the comments. Also as far as I can tell I am a cishet male, which is probably relevant to mention in reviewing this.
So here is where I am at. This post fractal sucks. Davis clearly doesn’t identify with the gender essentialist notion of male, but they also want to hold onto the idea of a biological sex binary. It sucks. I don’t think this is a unique situation- there are plenty of stories about trans kids in conservative/religious households. This particular conservative religion is the robot cult. The oppressive parents are the ghost of 2007!Yud and Scoot.
This part gets me the most. The current day Yud isn’t transphobic (enough? idk) so Zack has to piece together his older writings on semantics and epistemology to get a more transphobic gender essentialist version of past Yud.
and remember that the robot cult is considerably less transphobic than Zack, and that’s half the problem Zack has.
A standout, self-contained example of the general badness of this post is this anecdote (CW: transphobia/misgendering):
It is baffling that they choose to speculate about/rationalise the offending comment to cast aspersions on the protagonist and “trans culture” as a whole.
“eyy the lady shoulda taken it as a compliment!” is so classically misogynist that this is wrapping back around to gender affirmation
it’s stupid and i wouldn’t have brought it up if zack wasn’t such a fucking dick, but that’s fucking rich coming from someone who’s so high on their own completely misguided biological essentialism, at the exclusion of any social reality, that they think an apt and plausible way to pass as a woman in public is to use a full head silicone mask
alas, too much of a transphobe to know better
jesus fucking christ