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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm thinking about the trans rights debate.

How is asking women to give up their spaces for trans women different to how we asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to people of color back in the day?

  • -17

I mean, I'll answer your question in a strictly political sense. Women are a protected class in a way that white people are not.

I think that's the long and the short of it. That's the core of the conflict, I think, and why this sort of thing is so nasty. We've set an expectation that asking women to give up their spaces is an anti-social thing to do. And people are fighting for that expectation to be met. But at the same time, we've also set an expectation that marginalized groups should be able to gain access to those sorts of things.

Essentially, what you're seeing is the Progressive Stack being actualized, and how it creates conflicts.

Now, I think it's more complicated than that, and there's a lot of moving parts (I strongly believe "The Movement" as they're calling it, or at least is my understanding I.E. the Gender Criticals, played a huge role over the last few decades in normalizing the Progressive Stack to the benefit of women. This alone makes things REALLY complicated I think)

I could go on a long discussion about what I personally believe...but I think it's irrelevant (something something eliminating protected classes and replacing them with a liberal focus on maximizing individual liberty and happiness). But understanding the underlying politics...that this is essentially people who model the world, on both sides, in strict oppressor/oppressed frames, and believe that the latter should gain absolute privilege over the former.

Note: This isn't all feminists or all trans people. I think this is the view of a relatively narrow slice of activists and influencers, for whom complexity over power dynamics in our society reveals some undesirable light onto the way we/they live.

Interesting.

So you're sort of saying (that people who believe this are saying), women are oppressed so to make up for that or fight it, they have been afforded certain things, like women only spaces or quotas, which sort of gives them help at a cost to their oppressors (men).

But this thinking also means that trans women are more oppressed than woman, so they deserve to get help, even at the expense of women, because while women are oppressed, they're not as oppressed as trans women?

So there's a hierarchy of oppression and it's OK to encroach on the rights of those above you in the hericachy, even if that group is being oppressed by the groups above them?

I'm not saying this is what you believe but what you said in your reply, dumbed down so I can understand it!

To make it more confusing, trans women also have all the rights of men, so not only are they higher up the heirachy than women, but they also want some of the spaces / benefit woman have?

Has anyone plotted out this heirachy?