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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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Sorry to single you out, but this is exactly the sort of response mindset I was addressing with they "well, I suppose ... Hey guys!" rhetorical flourish that bothered @SSCReader so much.

My claim was simple: castration fetishists managed to get positions of influence in a fairy impactful organization, and are using them to push their fetish into the standards of care for transgender people. To prove my claim I:

  • Pointed to a forum where castration fetishists gather.

  • Showed that some of it's most veteran members of the WPATH, who were invited to several conferences where the standards of care are debated.

  • Quoted an excerpt from that standards of care that is directly to the fetish.

  • Pointed out that the chapter cites the very forum these members regularly post at, and have been active for over 20 years.

If my post was limited to the first 3 points, I could understand dismissing it as a run of the mill conspiracy theory. I'd disagree, but I could understand it, as this is how the conspiracy discourse has gone on for the past several decades. I'm not going to call the fourth point the final nail in the coffin, but we are getting to the point where it's going to be quite a bit of work to reopen it again.... I was expecting pretty much everyone to agree, that at the very least this raises several red flags.

What I got in response was:

This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration.

"Move along, nothing to see here...". Then I was asked:

  • whether the academics attending the WPATH conferences actually wrote any stories (addressed in the OP)

  • whether they were fetishists, or just academics studying them (addressed in the article I linked, and was quoted to argue against me)

  • to provide examples of more "blatant" and/or "pedophilic" content, because evidence that at least one of them wrote stories there suddenly wasn't enough (and if I managed to do that it would "slightly" updated towards my original claim, and all it would conclusively prove is that 3 out of over 4000 WPATH members are eunuch fetishists, which is not relevant to my claim at all).

  • to provide survey data about the fetishes of all WPATH members?! Which... how am I suppose to that to begin with, and what does it have to do with my original claim?

This is just reflexive denialism, and exactly what my rhetorical flourishes were poking fun at. I'll plead guilty to not staying with the spirit of the forum, but I hope it's clear now that it wasn't a broad attack on the blue tribe, but at a certain epistemology.

I tried to engage you politely and in good faith, but since you disagree, I apologize for the offense and I'll leave you to your more productive conversations with other folks.