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Wesley Yang Profile picture
@wesyang
Jan 8, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
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This footnote by Amia Srinivasan, taken from her book, the Right to Sex, poses the question in a useful way. It is a hard question that is part of the psychosexual pre-history of our times. I will feel I have satisfied my purpose as I writer when I have answered it. Image
What I like about the framing is the way at looks at two pieces by the same author and uses it as a lens to look at the way the world change. Here are two of my favorites: salon.com/2005/09/20/kun…

And: thecut.com/2018/06/summer…
The story told in Srinivasan's sequence is in a way the same story told in mine. This is the story that hasn't quite been told, merely acted out by the culture industries.
The question is not hard in itself, it just becomes hard because of all the ways the culture has become involuted, but the work of writing is to master those involutions in such a manner as to make them straight them again
The rhetoric of the prior tweet is sure to be parsed as illustrative. And it is!

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More from @wesyang

Wesley Yang Profile picture
May 23
You can see in this passage from 2008, in which Christopher Hitchens heaps scorn on Michelle Obama's undergraduate thesis, ("To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be “read” at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language") the reason why the Great Awokening was soon to be launched.

After a decade of Giuliani-ism and Clintonite triangulation (welfare reform, "superpredators", the Crime Bill), cynical white guys, even those nominally "on the Left" (Hitchens had departed it by 2008, but his prior credentials as a figure on the Left were part of what gave him permission to say these things in mainstream publications) felt free to do things they would soon not feel free to do, like belittle and ridicule and denigrate the intelligence of the first black First Lady.Image
From the Before Times
slate.com/news-and-polit…
Now, here's the thing. Hitchens was doing hyperbole. This is recognizably the English language. It's not good. It's not distinguished in any way. It is utterly pedestrian work that we like to think of as something you'd see from a community college student, or from the recipient of an athletic scholarship -- but not actually that far off from the baseline norm at the best universities:Image
Read 6 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
May 22
Trans people are not a historically oppressed group because they are not a group and they have never been oppressed. There is no history of discriminatory state action against them. There are no rights they don't have. Their only grievance is the existence of sex segregated facilities designed for the safety and privacy of women. What the transgender movement calls "rights" are imperious demands to allow anyone who claims to be something they are not to violate sex-based boundaries and coerce others to affirm them as they thing they are not, inherently an assault on the civil rights and liberties of others that masquerades as a civil right belonging to themselves and as a psychic necessity they require for their survival, which in turn serves as a pretext for threatening suicide and committing violence in pursuit of that alleged imperative to survival.

They are a psychiatric diagnosis that was inflated into an astroturfed identity category in the last thirty years by a small cabal of wealthy male sex fetishists who wanted to cross-dress full time and conspired to brainwash a subpopulation of autistic and gender nonconforming children into medically harming themselves with drugs that stopped their maturation, creating an army of hostages that could be used to blackmail the state into coercing the whole world into granting their imperious demands. Along the way, this cabal corrupted medicine and science and law, turning each of these institutions into a font of misinformation in the service of trans activists goals. Literally nothing that issues from these discourses is true, from denials that men have athletic advantages over women to claims that blocking the puberty of children has ever had an evidence base.

Treating any of this like it is real, like it is a civil rights movement, inexorably will result in the infliction of a cascade of absurdities and cruelties on actual vulnerable populations -- woman and children -- above all those confused children who are being brainwashed from the earliest age the falsehood that any of them can change sex.
Behind the transgender movement is the desire for there to be a brave new frontier of human freedom. A decade into the public rollout of that movement, we can already see that the movement marks an inflection point in the history of Western societies: the end of the age of emancipation.
This is just a randomly selected recent instance of what the purported new frontier of human freedom looks like in practice. A new reductio ad absurdum emerges every day.
Read 7 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
May 21
A woman whose breasts were surgically removed after two brief telehealth appointments in order to affirm her "nonbinary" identity has reached at confidential settlement that may have been for $3.5 million.

The settlement underscores two key facts that everyone with a glancing familiarity of the routine practices within gender clinics knows: 1.) the WPATH standards of care are a joke that do not protect anyone from a lifetime of medicalized harm and 2.) nobody even follows them.

The second fact is why essentially every gender clinic in America is on the hook for millions in liability that will as a matter of certainty catch up with many of them over time. They will be punished for having ignored the existing "standards of care," such as they are.

The first fact is why gender medicine has always been a scam without an evidentiary basis that qualifies it as medicine rather than cult ritual masquerading as medicine and why the FTC should and will prosecute it as a form of fraud.Image
nypost.com/2026/05/21/med…
After many years contending with big procedural hurdles to detransitioners receiving any justice, the plaintiffs bar is receiving proof of concept that there is big money to be made in punishing a totally reckless industry grounded in systemic neglect of the most basic differential diagnosis.
Read 6 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
Apr 14
The gap itself is not in question. The debate is over whether the causes are hereditarian or environmental and if the latter, whether the environmental causes pertain to cultural deficits within the black community (this is the position taken by James Flynn, the psychometrician who observed rising IQ's across industrialized world -- a trajectory that had reversed by the time of his death in the US ) or to 'systemic racism."

In practical terms, of course, the latter question doesn't really matter to a prospective employer: for cognitively demanding tasks, the distribution of those capable of doing the work will be different across groups. This could entirely be the fault of the warping effects of repeated triggering of adrenaline on the developing child's brain caused by racial microaggressions (every time someone asks to touch your hair reduces your IQ by a point, let's say): it would not change the fact that while there are roughly 60K white students who score above 700 on the Math SAT each year, 60K Asian who scored that high -- and 2K black students. This means that for any job for which the ability to score a 700 on the math SAT is table stakes, there would be roughly nine white candidates and sixty Asian candidates.

Here is how the eminent Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks characterized the IQ gap in the NYT back in 1998. He took an environmentalist position on the question, expressed optimism that the gap could close, but said doing so "would probably take more than one generation." I read that as saying "I'll be dead by the time this prediction can be tested." He died in February 2025.Image
"The Flynn Effect" of rising IQ's across the industrialized world is typically cited by anti-hereditarians with hopes that gaps will close as disparities of health and human welfare level off between groups.

Toward the end of his James Flynn himself said black IQ's weren't rising because black parents don't create cognitively enriching environments for their children:

"In the late 1970s, an experiment took 46 black adoptees and gave half to black professional families and half to white professionals with all the mothers having 16 years of education. When their IQs were tested at eight-and-a-half, the white-raised kids were 13.5 IQ points ahead. The mothers were asked to do problem-solving with their children. Universally, the blacks were impatient, the whites encouraging. Immediate achievement is rewarded in black subculture but not long-term achievement where you have to forgo immediate gratification.”Image
Read 4 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
Mar 22
The BC Human Rights Tribunal issued a decision that established the principle that doubting a man's claim that he is a woman is "existential denialism" and levied a $750K fine against a man who harbored those doubts and stated them aloud.

Now on cue, an adult male convicted criminal and serial harasser who abused the tribunal process to target immigrant women who provide intimate services to women because they wouldn't wax his balls is shooting off accusations of "existential denialism" at everyone who accurately refers to his sex (he is a man).

The adult male convicted criminal and serial harasser is right that everyone he is targeting has indeed made repeated and public statements that men cannot become women and that despite his claims to be a woman that he is man. He is therefore arguably right that each of these people has placed themselves in violation of the tribunal's precedential finding that defines refusal of a man's claim to be a woman as "existential denialism."

Will the tribunal enforce its prohibition on "existential denialism" by levying ruinous fines on Brodie and others who deny that a man can become a woman? (Men cannot become women.)

Will the courts issue warrants for the arrest of any who refuse to pay these fines? Will they incarcerate people who 1.) deny that a man becomes a woman when he says he is a woman and 2.) assert that despite Jessica Yaniv's to be a women, he remains a man? (Jessica Yaniv is a man.)

It was always going to come to this. Now is the time for choosing.
My thoughts exactly:
Read 6 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
Mar 18
Millions of schoolchildren have literally been taught that the nuclear family is a form of white supremacy in grades K-3 across America Image
Image
In Rituals of Blood, the sociologist Orlando Patterson dismantled the myth that Black American had created functional alternatives to the nuclear family of village-like structures that compensate for the breakdown of the family.

In fact, Black Americans are the most socially isolated Americans with sparser rather than denser social networks in the Hood than those outside of it.

TLDR: Black Villages aren't real

"Which brings me to the second popular piece of folklore among modern Afro-Americans, what may be called the myth of the “hood,” the belief that viable informal friendship patterns and communities exist, compensating for the breakdown or absence of more formal institutions. Through sheer, baseless repetition, and through nonrepresentative case studies of a few Afro-American housing projects by urban anthropologists, it has become an accepted belief that large networks of support and natural neighborhood communities are out there waiting to be developed and built on.

Would that this were so. But my own analysis of representative samples of national network surveys confirms what other scholars have found: The typical Afro-American has a much smaller network of friends and kinsmen than other Americans do. And, what was most unexpected, the proportion of the members of this attenuated network who are kinsmen is smaller than in other Americans’ networks. There are no “hoods” out there, which is precisely why murderous gangs, like opportunistic social cancers, rush in to fill the vacuum."Image
Read 4 tweets

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