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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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as a consequence the modern LGBT wars die down

The new wars will be over "a pill to turn LGBT kids cis het? this is genocide!" and those who want "a pill to change cis het to glorious queerness". As humans, we can always find something to fight over.

Maybe that's how the fight looks like in the next 5-10 years, but again, I think you're being insufficiently imaginative. Imagine instead a realignment so that the feuding sides are, "people should keep the sexual orientation and felt gender identity they're naturally predispositioned to" versus "we should precisely schedule changes in sexual and gender organization across several developmental thresholds to create well-behaved citizens." Something utterly bizzare, like making every kindergartener a girl so that they all play peacefully, then transitioning people to man or woman based off which educational track they used, combined with making people gay during their early teens so they don't have accidental pregnancies, but making them EXTREMELY straight going into adulthood to make sure their parents get grandchildren.

Something utterly bizzare, like making every kindergartener a girl so that they all play peacefully, then transitioning people to man or woman based off which educational track they used, combined with making people gay during their early teens so they don't have accidental pregnancies, but making them EXTREMELY straight going into adulthood to make sure their parents get grandchildren.

That level of messing around with basic biology means that you're going to do better creating android bodies to implant the brains in. Plus, why would you get grandkids for the parents who let their kids be switched around from male to female to female to male to gay to straight? The confusion about "am I going to have babies or make someone else have babies" will be enormous, if you're mucking about with "biological female but interested in 'male' subjects during education so transitioned to be trans man, but now we want them to be straight to have babies"? Pregnant (trans) man if you left the original plumbing intact, but after all the hormone dosing and surgeries there may not be too much functional plumbing left. Even worse if you want to have your trans man now be able to father babies with their neo-penis, where's the viable sperm coming from?

And even after all that has been sorted out, there's the stubborn problem remaining of "people like having lots of sex but don't like having lots of babies to try and raise, they will dodge having kids if at all possible". Maybe your EXTREMELY straight men and women will all be having anal sex because that's more fun than boring old penis-in-vagina sex, especially after "between the ages of ten and twenty-two I was gay as an entire Pride parade and fucked all the guys/gals", trying to rewire psychology may be a lot tougher than "chop off the breasts, now put the breasts back with fake plastic tits".

I mean I think reading this it occurs to me that the post-modern are behaving very much like modern conservatives.

You should be careful, creating extremely interesting science fiction settings is liable to inspire people to realize them.

Whether living in them is good or bad seems to have no effect on the phenomenon.

I'm writing a book where the main character wants to turn herself into a cannibalism-powered surveillance state, her best friend belongs to a tribe of matriarchal-eugenicist-fascists that can reasonably described as feminazis, the "good guys" are the IEEE if it was also simultaneously the illuminati, and the "bad guys" are a mix of UN blue helmets and the Knights Templar. I am balls deep in moral dissonance dissonance and nobody is going to stop me.

I think the next frontier is the rights of midgets. It's been simmering for a while, and I assumed it would happen as soon as the trans thing died down, but that was ten years ago and the trans thing lasted longer than I would have thought.

I think you might be right about this one, at least in a broad way. Interestingly I think “midget rights” is/was catching on more in Britain than in the U.S., although it may have died down. As a specific example I recall watching the last season of Derry Girls with my girlfriend a few years ago and there was a midget reporter (or news anchor, or something like that, I think) whose midget-ness went completely unremarked upon by the characters, to a really implausible extent that took us out of the episode in a sort of “are we really not going to address this?” kind of way. I’m certain there were at least one or two other British TV shows from that period that did a similar thing but I can’t recall them off my head. I don’t think this particular version of woke casting ever caught on at all in American media and I suspect it died down in Britain as well, although I’m not sufficiently keyed in to the British media scene to say that for sure. I hadn’t thought about this in some time so I’m curious if any Brits (or anglophiles) here can weigh in.

As an aside, did “we”, so to speak, ever settle on a politically correct word for “midget”? I’m positive midget is considered rude but it frankly feels like the least bad way to say it, and is what I would probably choose in most cases in real life. “Little person” is ridiculously patronizing… maybe “dwarf”? That still feels weird to me, but introspecting maybe it’s what I would choose in woke company.

I think you construct your sentence as, “Peter Dinkle, an actor who famously suffers from dwarfism, commented today…”

Surely aborting fetuses for having a trait has a different moral calculus than removing that trait while leaving the person otherwise intact?

Given there seems to be a decently common strain of progressivism that's pro-abortion and anti-gene-editing, for many people no, the calculus would be the same.

If they’re coming to opposite conclusions, then I don’t see what makes you say they’re using the same calculus.