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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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One is imposed on people to deny them opportunities, the other emerges from what people choose and is not mandatory.

What is the difference? You just answered a question with a question (or rather, with a Russell conjugation). What is the difference between "discriminating" against people based on an inherent trait they have no control over, and drawing a "social distinction" between people based on an inherent trait they have no control over? I choose to give drunken male people a wider berth than drunken female people. No one forced me to do this, so it's not mandatory. Couldn't you therefore say that I'm not discriminating against male people, I'm just drawing a social distinction between male and female people?

the Muslim extremists are demanding superiority, that you follow the rules of their religion, under threat of violence

That seems to be exactly what you're threatening, even if you're doing it on behalf of another group of which you are not a member.

...in the thought experiment you gave. "You aren't allowed to learn anything else about the applicants other than their age and sex." In actual reality-based reality, I would be allowed to learn other things about the applicants, interview them, ask for references, &c.

Oh, so you mean that in reality you would come up with some pretext to preferentially hire a female babysitter over a male, but insist that it's just because the girl is more "experienced" than the boy and their sex has nothing to do with it. Just like a suspiciously large number of white anti-racists just so happen to live in gated communities which are 90%+ white. Try not to twist your arm from patting yourself so hard on the back.

Furthermore, my child might very well have opinions of their own; these could also be a factor.

Of course your child would: nine times out of ten, your child would feel safer being left alone with a female babysitter than a male, because "discrimination on the basis of sex" is instinctive, not learned. "I think it's wrong to discriminate on the basis of sex – but the female babysitter was more qualified than the male, and my kid liked the female babysitter better, so I hired the female babysitter. Complete coincidence that I ended up making exactly the same decision as every other parent who would never leave their child alone with a male teenager, I swear to God."

defaulting to a definition based on hormone levels.

An extremely noisy and unreliable metric, given that male puberty imparts permanent changes to bone density and lung capacity.

If you must have changing rooms divided by sex, use the 'currently possessed anatomy' or 'hormone levels' definition, the former of which would shield people from having to be exposed to the other genitals

Trans activists sometimes accuse TERFs of being perverts who want to subject everyone to mandatory genital inspections before they're allowed to get changed. Interesting to see the shoe on the other foot. Note that such a rule would prevent ~95% of trans-identified males from using female changing facilities: advocating for it might get you tarred as a TERF by your erstwhile fellow-travellers.

Designate one facility specifically for trans-women

You realise what will happen, don't you? All of the male inmates who suddenly "realised" they had a female gender identity immediately after being convicted will be transferred to this shiny, comfortable facility. For a few months, all will be well in this facility. But eventually the number of "trans women" being transferred to this facility will reach the point at which the population density in this facility is the same as any other male prison, with all the opportunistic violence and rape that that implies, and "trans women" will be no safer in this facility than they would be in an ordinary men's facility. Actually, if you look at the prison population as a whole, the proportion of prisoners who've been convicted of at least one sex crime* includes a disproportionate number of trans women, and trans women are nearly three times more likely to have at least one sex crime conviction than ordinary men are: hence, it's entirely possible that trans women would be more at risk in the dedicated trans women facility than they would be in an ordinary men's facility. Meanwhile, the overrepresentation of sex offenders in the dedicated trans women facility would mean that, in the popular imagination, people would quite reasonably think of the trans women's prison as being "the prison where all the nonces are". As an advocate for trans rights, is this really the kind of connection you want to impart to the general public?

Perhaps you'll say that admission to the dedicated trans women facility would be made conditional on some kind of gatekeeping. Now would be an excellent opportunity to suggest what that might look like.

if you cannot protect a trans-man among cis-men, designate one for trans-men.

No need: convicted trans men are staying put in the women's prison because they know they're safer there. Per this article, of requests for trans people to be transferred to the opposite-sex facility, 96% came from male inmates. There are even examples in this article of trans men being incarcerated in the male facility, realising they weren't safe there (presumably shortly after learning that the sun rises in the morning and that water is wet) and requesting to be transferred to the women's prison. So much for their "male identity".

there will still be male and female doctors even in a single-sex ward

Yes, but doctors are gatekept and subject to safeguarding requirements. The only requirement for a patient to be admitted to a hospital is that they be sick. Hospitals cannot simply turn patients away because they are violent or prone to sexually assaulting other patients. There is simply no way that admitting male patients to women's wards does not greatly increase the rate of sexual assaults therein.

and the patients are unlikely to be in a condition to cause much if any harm.

Incorrect.


*Before you ask: no, that does not include prostitution.