I'm not trying to interpret him, just to answer the question about whether there's evidence that his thoughts have evolved.

Here's a more recent example:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5651

The only analysis I'll give for it is that I was also disturbed by the idea of Eich being forced out, but would never donate a penny to organizations fighting marriage equality; two wrongs can't make a right.

OK I give up.

I find his thoughts on race to be alarming, too.

It's hard for me to reconcile the idea that ESR's beliefs are germane and troubling with the principle of tolerance for other people's beliefs. But: I think there's something substantively and intrinsically disturbing about the specific things ESR says. I don't think I'd have trouble being friends with someone who opposed marriage equality. But I do have trouble with what ESR says about LGBT people. It might be the whole package of positions that ESR takes, not just about LGBT issues but about race, politics, &c.

I have friends with very conservative beliefs (though none, to my knowledge, have ever argued that homosexuality is inextricably bound with pederasty). But none of them have a cohesive worldview in which their own attributes just happen to define the ideal human, compared against which all nonconformant humans are inferior. ESR, on the other hand...

ESR's general observation that the ancients often saw homosexual as being about dominance is probably correct. However, the framing makes it sound like this is specific to homosexual relationships. In fact ancient cultures often saw ALL male sexual relationships as being about dominance. Of course they didn't really need to spend a lot of time discussing who was being dominated in a heterosexual relationship: it was always the woman in pretty much all pre-modern civilizations.

This makes his second point about a supposed biological predisposition towards domination sex really apply to all men. If gay men are struggling with this "biological headwind" then so are straight men.

> The only value judgement made therein is that (assuming the information used to reach this conclusion is correct) that historically, homosexuality been associated with some pretty ugly and downright evil things.

> If they're not correct, then this amounts to a very, very disgusting and ugly smear piece worthy of groups like the infamous Westboro church.

> So now I wonder.. which is it?

Well, that's tricky. Most of the historical associations he makes are roughly correct as stated, but what is misleading is the implicit claim that underlines the whole piece -- that equivalent historical associations don't exist to each of those for heterosexuality, which they do -- romantic heterosexuality only became a cultural norm (rather than something portrayed as exceptional, often dangerous, and very frequently as a source of deviance from cultural norms relating to the family) in the Western world only fairly recently historically. The "massive reinvention" of (male) homosexuality that ESR refers to is real, but its part and parcel of a broader reinvention of sexuality in general from a very similar starting point and in a very similar direction.

What you're quoting is a trope whose malignancy might be more obvious in a racial context: "The good black people deserve praise for their attempt to get shut of them".

But by your definition you are already promoting other peoples opinions by using their stuff. It is unavoidable.

The only difference is that you don't care about those opinions because either you don't know about them or you don't think it is important. But they still exist.

Maybe we respond more to the milieu of a comment more than its actual content. Personally I like conspiracy theories about topical things. I never believe them but they make me chuckle to see the world from a weird point of view. But some people are going to find such theories to be horribly offensive (like Buzz Aldrin about moon fakery). We all have the capacity to wrongly analyse something we don't understand and have no stake in. A lot of people don't know what it is like to be attracted to their own gender and come out with things that are not just offensive but blatantly silly. The rest of us no better.

First of all it would take too much time to find out all the authors of all the software that I routinely use, and then keep up with what their current views are on various topics.

But I think the main reason is that most software has more than one author, and it would be unfair to judge the usefulness of that software based on the (non-technical) views of just one of its authors.

Your reasoning would apply only for single-author software, and TBH I would consider those pet-projects anyway, and I don't think the original author would care much whether you use it or not.

Edit: about gained knowledge: I think you could apply this if you compare multiple competing solutions, one deciding factor could be the author's thoughts on various topics. Just like how a company's attitude towards various topics might be influencing your purchasing decision: for example Nvidia doesn't support open-source drivers, hence I don't buy Nvidia when choosing a graphics card.

But again for me those are all technical reasons, I wouldn't factor an author's/company's political views into that decision, unless it was something really horrible.

Why not respond to bigotry with love, instead of hating back? This is not some zero-sum game. If anyone needs a little bit of success in life, it's a bigot.

This is a hostile environment, nobody can have a rational conversation about this without burning a lot karma (of which you have more to spare).

Nobody here except those that have those experiences has anything useful to say about non-cis gender identity. Possibly also psychiatrists/psychologists not married to a particular ideology on the topic. From my admittedly few conversations with transgendered people, it's complicated and there are no easy answers to what precisely it is.

Part of the problem is you're using "delusional" stigmatically, which damns you and poisons the conversation.

Let's assume you mean "fair" in the sense of "reasonable", not "equitable here".

Let's assume you mean "delusional" to mean "maintaining beliefs not supported by evidence and refusing to change said beliefs once presented with evidence". I'm going to leave off a stronger clause that would include non-falsifiable beliefs, because that way lies all manner of distraction.

Let's also assume that you mean "gender identity issues" to comprise a spectrum, ranging from "I am trapped in a body which feels wrong, I must take drastic action" all the way to "I tend to think more similarly to members of the opposite sex." Note that this range is supplied only by way of example: human gender and sexuality, as well as subjective experience of same, is wide and varied and I will not claim authority on what is and is not a valid experience there (as coolsunglasses has rightly pointed out).

With that understanding in place:

Is it fair to consider everyone with gender identity issues as delusional? Hell no--such issues may manifest with a completely normal and sane person, no delusions required.

Is it fair to consider everyone with gender identity issues as perhaps being delusional? Yes, but only insofar as they may exist in the subset of (delusional && GII) instead of merely (GII). It's the "perhaps" or "may" that turns it into a logically reasonable statement. Whether it's a likely membership is something else entirely, and I suspect that that likelihood is quite low--I don't think that possessing GII correlates strongly with delusional thinking.

Your statement of the question made it very easy to answer in a way that looks bad unless a lot of specific context is brought in--context which you did not supply.

~

At any rate, ESR's statement there was not posing the same question you were: he was asking first "Why do we not treat these as mental health issues?" (a stronger statement than your "might simply be delusional") and "Why do the (predicted) explanations for why we do not also hold up for, say, paranoid delusions?".

For the record, he screwed up by not enumerating the expected explanations. He also screwed up by not explaining how he might consider the application of one of the explanations to paranoid delusions.

I disagree that we ought treat the transgendered as insane, but he didn't make that claim: he simply asked a question. If you read it rhetorically, then I can see your grievance; that said, I think it was meant in earnest.