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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Many Democratic lawmakers and liberal activists have criticized Youngkin’s recently announced education policy changes. Most prominently, the new policies prohibit teachers from using personal pronouns “not on a student’s official records.” They also reverse a previous state policy “allowing students to use bathrooms that align with their preferred gender.”

Even if this is pure conflict theory, doesn't this quote show Han the Red Tribe shot first? Or do we take another step back and original creation of the policy that was reversed was the first shot?


I was actually considering making a top-level post (wasn't sure if it belonged here or in the Sunday small questions thread) on the "who shot first?" question in the trans rights culture war of the past several years. The story from trans rights side I see in person and on progressive social media is basically that trans people want to be left alone and anti-trans people (usually "TERFs") want trans people to stop existing in public, which necessarily results in extending to causing trouble for gender-non-conforming cis people including tall women and other possibly-mistaken-for-trans categories. They cite things like bathroom bills suddenly being an issue when trans people have existed forever, using whichever bathroom seemed appropriate.

Obviously there's a disconnect here as a law that the first group would likely interpret as "encourage CPS to step in when parents are abusing their trans children for being trans", the parent reads as "hurt the outgroup as badly as possible".