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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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The culture war is a memocidal total war between modernism (the gaining and use of objective knowledge, the rights of individuals, the identification and shunning of bias, and the creation of a unified narrative) and postmodernism (the rejection of objectivity, universalism, and individualism).

I can see this argument for say...all of the various group rights being snuck into liberalism (e.g. affirmative action)

I don't see how the trans issue specifically is about the rejection of individualism

If anything, it is individualism run amok, totally unbounded by anything.

The progression seems to be:

  1. You should be free from government tyranny and able to decide your own life.

  2. You should be free from social restrictions when making choices about your life

  3. You should be free even from biology and basic evolutionary inheritances. It is not enough to take what you want, you must be able to choose what you are, and damn society if it stands in your way. And, in fact, society has a responsibility to play into your delusional belief in your infinite malleability.

This seems to me like "toxic individualism" - individualism taken to an insane degree.

Forcing individuals to accept outside group cultural norms out of some moral imperative seems very communal, not individualistic. We should note that almost all of the debate about trans issues are their ideological normalization in society. If this were an individualist issue, you would expect one side to be against their very existence. I've never seen a serious proposal to ban them from wearing their preferred clothes, or from taking hormones (with the exception of children) Almost all the debate is over forcing people to take part in their image of themselves.

99% of transgender"ism" is all the things trans people actually do - gender dysphoria, hormones and surgery, dressing and acting and speaking and looking like a girl. 1% of it is "forcing conservatives to use the right pronouns". that may be the part you're objecting to, but that doesn't make transgenderism communal.

gender dysphoria, hormones and surgery, dressing and acting and speaking and looking like a girl

Well, hormones and surgery are required to be subsidized by insurance plans. Where I live it's illegal to perform conversion therapy, which has been interpreted to mean trying to dissuade trans people from being trans. And public schools are conspiring to make teenagers trans against the wishes of their parents, and often without their knowledge.

That's communal, and it's way more than 1%. I don't think you're very honest here.

I'm not sure if I wasn't clear, but that 1% (which definitely extends far beyond just forcing the use of pronouns and includes conforming to all sorts of norma) is basically the whole political disagreement. As I said,

I've never seen a serious proposal to ban them from wearing their preferred clothes, or from taking hormones (with the exception of children)

If this were an individualist issue, you would expect one side to be against their very existence.

Why would I expect that? Or do you mean the anti-individualist side?

Yes, the anti-individualist argument would be against allowing them to take hormones, dress up, etc. I'm not aware of any significant cohort who wants to do that in North America.

I think there's some of both "toxic individualism" and rejection of individualism going on, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. As you write, it's easy to see it as individualism run amok, heightening one's own arbitrary choice of identity, unbounded from physical or social reality, as the one standard to force everyone to submit to. At the same time, so much of the political agitating seems to be based around erasing individualism, by grouping all trans people together as one community with shared interests. For instance, trans murder rates are often invoked, which rely heavily on the murder rate of transwoman prostitutes, using it to justify policies for the ostensible benefit of wealthy transmen and transwomen. Or the aggressive grouping of LGBTQ+etc. as one bloc, where everyone in that group, down to the individual person, shares something in common with everyone else in that group for being oppressed sexual minorities in the hegemonic heteropatriarchy.