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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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I think the sin of the trans movement is having no coherent ideology, other than to be against anything "traditional", against any prescriptive categories, and against anyone telling anyone "no". Yes, there are some aspects of the modern trans movement that can seem somewhat like a transhumanist end-goal. But they're bedfellows with other people who seem to just want to cause chaos. People who want to take away some of the logic we have in our society, and divorce ideas from where they were traditionally associated.

For example, it's a common trans-adjacent complaint nowadays that when you're referring to reproductive health, you shouldn't say "women", you should say "people with uteruses", because there are trans-men who have uteruses who are affected, too. I see this sort of warring all the time all over my facebook, for example, after the SCOTUS issue this year, people saying "don't erase trans-men from the reproductive rights issue! trans men will suffer as well" as if that even matters, relatively speaking, or is at the forefront of anyone's mind.

Let's say we did have completely perfect transhumanist technology that would allow women to perfectly and in all regards become men. Do you think that these activists I mentioned above would be okay with us going back to the more traditional usage of language? No, I don't expect they would. They want anyone to be able to be called anything, even if they don't choose to fit the biological bill. They want to change the categories to be entirely "you're just whatever you want to be", not just "you're just whatever your current biology supports". They're making up new categories that never existed before, all sorts of in-between, or not related, genders, and then they're also taking all preexisting categories and saying none of the previous definitions matter at all for it. In-effect, they don't want transhumanism, they just want to disrupt the system and anyone who wants to have coherent categorization.

I think the sin of the trans movement is having no coherent ideology, other than to be against anything "traditional", against any prescriptive categories, and against anyone telling anyone "no".

I think this is dangerous underestimation modern "transgender" movement. To large extent it is an on the ground application of ideas from Queer Theory, most importantly a revolt against "normativity" such as fight against cisheteronormative society. All you have to do is just to write down the vocabulary used and check where it originated. It is exactly how it sounds, it is not even fight for making queer people accepted as "normal" in society - similar to how early gay right movements wanted to get some rights and then be done with that. It is revolt against the very concept of normalcy, even to say that something potentially can be considered as normal or abnormal is oppressive and needs to be opposed.

And I agree that this is very much in line with transhumanism. Want to live as a cat person littering in sandbox toilet with somebody who transplanted his lower body into titanium appendage with extra ultraviolet sensor hanging from his left ear in polyamorous polycule with a literal lizzard? Nothing to see here, there are literally no valid philosophical or moral grounds to challenge this lifestyle in any way. In fact any criticism or pushback is (paraodoxically) something that is abnormal and needs to be squashed and this lifestyle needs to be accepted and supported exactly in order to fight against normativity.