This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
At the moment, I work at a supermarket. Early today, a customer got pissed off about something at checkout - I don't know what - and started manically shouting a vulgar schizo quasipolitical rant, pacing around, targeting and physically intimidating my customers and coworkers, trying to start a fight, before he wandered back into the store. I'm not sure, in the end, if he left the store of his own accord or because security forced him to; I didn't care to ask around. He was a large, fit, middle-aged white man; exactly the kind of guy you'd stereotypically expect to see in the profile picture of a really deranged MAGA boomer Twitter account. We probably get several problem customers a day, but this was definitely the worst one I've seen in quite a while. It was mortifying to watch a walking hateful strawman of the Red Tribe, especially as I hail from the Red Tribe myself and used to be extremely invested in its success in the culture war.
(As of 2020 or so, I'm trending more centrist, because of exactly this kind of thing. I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but I do not intend to vote this year; I have become disillusioned with democracy, politics, and the culture war. I feel that the mentally ill and generally unpleasant have become too dominant among the right wing. Of course, I always saw the mentally ill and generally unpleasant as dominant among the left wing; I feel that that's inherent to what the left wing is and represents, from its origins around the French Revolution to the ideology of Marx and on to the present progressive-stack day. But anyway, tangent over.)
The main content of the man's rant was that life in the modern US is shitty because [God presumably cursed the country because] President Obama was secretly "a faggot" and his wife was secretly male.
Now, I tend to have a pretty conspiratorial worldview myself. It's pretty obvious that the world does in fact run on conspiracies, and that much of the conventional wisdom suggesting otherwise is desperate copium, often pushed by the people in power. But, of course, we don't know all that much about what the conspiracies in charge are actually doing - that's the whole point of a conspiracy - and most of the "conspiracy theories" you see going around are deeply stupid, and you would need to be stupid to believe them. (The man at my workplace this morning threatened a woman in line for "calling [him] stupid"; she actually said no such thing, but I'm saying it now. I'm not a mind-reader, but I'm pretty sure that that man was stupid.)
Among these stupid conspiracy theories, the so-called "transvestigations" have always been the most striking to me personally, for many reasons. I'm sure ugly rumors about famous men secretly being women and famous women secretly being men have gone around for a long time, as ordinary bottom-feeding gossipy trash talk. But they seem to have emerged as a distinct, legible "type" of conspiracy theory relatively recently, starting in my adolescence, around the late 2000s and early 2010s. Noteworthy early individual targets included Lady Gaga (this was a "Marilyn-Manson-had-his-ribs-removed-so-he-could-do-autofellatio" tier schoolyard rumor for my generation) and, of course, Michelle Obama. However, over the course of the 2010s and on into the 2020s, as transgender people became central to the culture war, transvestigation metastasized into a more omnidirectional tendency to delusionally believe that any arbitrary public figure is secretly trans.
There are several key points here, in a natural order. The first is that the transvestigation phenomenon is nakedly psychological, in a way that feels like an exaggeration of the pattern of other stupid conspiracy theories. Transvestigators are obsessive in searching for rationalizations for their beliefs. They start with a single point that they want to believe - it would be convenient for their worldview if some specific person they hate, like Michelle Obama, were secretly transgender - and they start collecting and glomming onto "evidence" to reinforce the idea, ignoring any counterevidence. Confirmation bias. They strain to develop a suspicion, and that implausible suspicion quickly becomes ludicrous certainty. And that broken thinking winds up leaking out into and contaminating the entire rest of their worldview as they obsessively think back to it over and over again, fixating on their imagined secrets about their enemies' genitals, until eventually they wind up completely convinced that the entire ruling class is secretly transgender, and/or they wind up screaming to a crowded supermarket that the most popular First Lady of my lifetime is actually a man in a dress.
The next point is that the pathology of transvestigation very directly parallels and acts as a foil to various pathologies associated with the transgender movement itself. People can go crazy over both sides of the "we can always tell" coin. Transgender people often try to build confidence through denial of it; they convince themselves that it's much easier to pass than it actually is. From there, they can convince themselves that any given person around them could plausibly be of either sex, and that transgender people are arbitrarily common. Transvestigation has the opposite general motive, but follows a similar path to a similar endpoint. They want to convince themselves that they're always able to identify transgender people, and so any note of ambiguity in their minds, however disingenuous, starts throwing up panic signals and fostering conspiracy thought, which feeds itself in a vicious cycle until they've ironically destroyed their own ability to reasonably perceive/intuit people's sexes.
The more nuanced truth about passing, which both sides of the coin are missing, is that it's fundamentally a modern problem. Back in the olden days, it was much easier for men to pass themselves off as women and vice versa, because people weren't thinking about that possibility in the back of their minds at all times. The more relevant that transgender issues become to the zeitgeist, the harder it is for transgender people to pass, as normies start to consider the sex of those around them with more skepticism; a predator/prey-population-style cycle leading towards equilibrium. But, as transvestigators demonstrate, we might be hitting the limits of that process now; the appearances of the sexes are in many ways distributions with overlapping tails. Plenty of ugly people look remarkably like ugly people of the opposite sex, and you don't even really need that kind of natural androgynous ambiguity to get confused, if you're flooding your brain's training algorithm with images of attractive transgender models while contemptfully scoffing and trying to convince yourself that you can Still Definitely Tell.
We are a confused and spiraling people.
Finally, I think transvestigation is plausibly a baptists-and-bootleggers situation. For transvestigators themselves and their close extremist-right allies, it's a simple and effective way to stoke hatred and fanaticism; they perversely make themselves more and more paranoid while comforting themselves that they're able to see through the great veil. They develop the assuredness and the sense of grievance necessary to shout threats at strangers in a supermarket. For the left, transvestigation-adjacent rhetoric lowers the sanity waterline and encourages their enemies to beclown themselves.
And here's the thing: when I was a kid circa 2009, and transvestigation was just getting started? I got sexually harassed a lot, like, a lot a lot, by the LGBT kids (and their allies) at school. It wasn't a sexually-driven thing; it was political activist shitflinging. I'll admit I was an open bigot about those issues at that age, and that painted something of a target on my back. They saw the trope of outspoken bigots turning out to be repressed queers as a strategy and a goal, and they sought to confuse their enemies' sexualities. I keep seeing people in the modern culture war say that transgender people entered the discourse after the gays had fully won, because the activist structure needed something to move onto. There might be some truth to that, but I think it largely gets the order of cause and effect completely wrong. (Many people seem to be under the impression that transgender was invented from whole cloth in the mid 2010s. Full strain copium.)
In my experience of that era, transgender people entered the discourse as a tactic for advancing gay issues; they were ubiquitous rhetorical objects long before they were an actual notable demographic. The 2009-era LGBT activist kids talked a lot about transgender people, far out of proportion to their actual prevalence in the movement at the time; hell, "LGBT" was already a common and very recognizable term and I'm not sure that any of them were actually transgender, though they would often tell me that they were, at an ambiguous irony level. It was a foot in the door for forcefully making people question their sexuality, like a more politically pointed, though equally crude, meatspace analogue to old 4chan's trap culture (back when the term "trap" was new!). Oh, so you're not gay at all, right? You're not attracted to dudes even a little bit? Just girls? No penises, just veejays? Okay, what about this girl? She's hot, right? You wanna fuck her? Well, she's got a penis. How about that? You wanna suck her cock? Or do you think she's a man? Do you think that would make you a faggot? Maybe it would, if you think so. Or maybe you'd prefer Buck Angel? Early prototransvestigation rhetoric was spread around by a mix of bigots mocking their enemies and activist perverts fantasizing. Whenever I found out at that age that a classmate professed that Lady Gaga was born male, I could not have reasonably guessed, just from that, their view of the matter, ideologically speaking.
(Out-of-touch right-wing nightmares of teachers grooming children to become queer through sterile corporate-board-room-esque gay lesson plans are largely ignorant of how children interact with their peers already.)
Anyway, bit of a swerve, but - has anything like the scenario transvestigation points at ever happened? That is to say, has anyone ever become a major celebrity presenting themselves as one gender and later turned out to have secretly been the opposite sex the whole time? The closest examples I can think of aren't very close, and/or they're much closer to microcelebrity status than someone a normie might have heard of; very niche YouTubers. Famous transgender people I can think of are usually either famous specifically for being transgender (the proverbial dancing bears; Laverne Cox; Jazz Jennings), they decide to transition after they've already become public figures for other reasons (the celebrities' public crises; Elliot Page; Maddy Thorson), or both (the Caitlyn Jenners; Caitlyn Jenner). I guess the closest thing to an example I can think of after a few minutes of thought is Brianna Wu; I never followed Gamergate all that closely, but I get the general impression that she publicly presented herself as an at-least-implicitly cisgender woman but was eventually outed by her enemies. But there's a pretty big gulf in fame level between Brianna Wu, twice-failed primary candidate for Massachusetts' eighth congressional district, and, like. Michelle Obama.
(Naively, one would assume that some devious conspiratorial plan to normalize transgenderism through an influx of secretly-transgender celebrities would involve those celebrities publicly revealing themselves eventually. You know. To normalize it. But this part never seems to actually happen, which moves the hypothetical conspiracy more to "taunting you by sneaking triangles into the media, because the devil wants there to be secret triangles there" territory.)
There wasn't really any investigation or outing needed, Wu was on MSNBC very early on and people watching recognized Wu was transgender immediately. You can actually go back and read an archive of the GG thread at the time:
Incidentally while looking up that thread I also found the original /gg/ thread regarding Wu. It shows most of the ultra-compressed process of how Wu became a media-recognized "Gamergate harassment victim", in case you're curious about the details of how that sort of thing went down from the perspective of those involved.
September 18, Wu creates a "sock puppet" parody pro-GG twitter account named brololz. There is a small KIA thread about it but it doesn't attract much attention.
October 9th, Wu creates the "Oppressed Gamergater" image macro on MemeGenerator.net and tweets about it. GG notices the image macro and makes a lot of meme/shitpost ones, flooding the memegenerator page in the process.
October 10th, Wu cherrypicks a few of the more hostile ones (assuming Wu didn't create them) and tweets that "8chan/#gamergate generated 60 pages of this today attacking me. I'm going on a Twitter break until I feel more safe."
Someone makes the aforementioned /gg/ thread about the above tweet, the first GG thread about Wu other than the KIA thread about brololz. Some people mock the tweet, and someone finds Wu's game Revolution 60 and people mock it as well.
Someone posts Wu's phone number and address to the /gg/ thread. Every single response condemns it, with most assuming it is a false-flag, especially because of nobody in GG giving a shit about Wu. (It is deleted when a mod comes online 45 minutes later.)
14 minutes after the post, Wu tweets that "8chan/gamergate just doxxed me".
7 minutes after that, a new twitter account named chatterwhiteman tweets the same address and begins tweeting threats at Wu.
45 minutes after chatterwhiteman begins tweeting, Wu posts a screencap of it and tweets "The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe. Remember, #gamergate isn't about attacking women."
40 minutes later, an article on Gameranx by Ian Miles Cheong reports that "Game Developer Brianna Wu Driven From Home After Death Threats and Doxxing". (This is before Cheong flipped from anti-GG to pro-GG and from left-wing to right-wing.) Other coverage from game journalists follows.
October 13th, 3 days later, Wu appears on MSNBC to talk about being a gamergate harassment victim.
And for those who weren't around back then, we know that Brianna Wu manufactured at least some of the "hate", because GG caught Wu forgetting to switch to a sockpuppet on the Steam forums.
I don't think that particular case is proof of anything, I would interpret it as Wu being snarky while making a containment thread. I think the intended meaning was "I'm telling GG to restrict personal criticism to this thread without flooding the rest of the forum". And then I think the other accounts that made the same thread after that one was deleted were people trolling, rather than even the original copy being a Wu sockpuppet.
I do think Wu engaged in false-flagging, particularly in the incident I described, but fundamentally it's based on circumstantial evidence. Certainly it's incredibly unlikely that anyone sincerely pro-GG did it, both because GG condemned dox and considered it firmly counterproductive and because nobody cared about Wu. The previous discussion about Wu consisted of a small thread about a fucking Memegenerator template, an amusingly shitty-looking game, and a tweet playing the victim over GG people using the memegenerator template. What's harder to confidently rule out is that it was a third-party troll trying to stir up trouble. But stuff like the fact that Wu was actively reading the 8chan thread at the time and posted about it within minutes, how quickly Wu took advantage to get media attention, and Wu's other lies (like the webcam interview about "I've had to flee my home again due to GG threats" that, based on background details, was conducted from within the home in question) I am inclined to think Wu made the post and the Twitter account, even if I can't be sure. At the end of the day making a 8chan post and a Twitter account is easy and there's every incentive to do it if you want to play the victim.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link