This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I was referring more to the choices made by the people between whom the distinction is drawn, and whether they have the ability to opt out of it if they personally choose to. It is the distinction between an Englishman choosing to attend a Protestant church and an Irishman choosing to attend a Catholic church, either being able to diverge from this if he so chooses, versus a charity giving food unquestioningly to a hungry Englishman while giving a hungry Irishman the third degree over whether he might fall short of perfect virtue in some way which would allow the charity matron to leave him to starve while thinking her own hands clean.
No, I am merely observing that, when one racial/ethnic group keeps its collective boot on the neck of another, karma has a tendency to bite the first group in the derrière.
This is no more the same thing as one group demanding that another group bare their neck to its boot, than 'Kyiv threatens to bomb Russia unless Russia stops invading them' is the same thing as 'Moscow threatens to bomb Ukraine unless Ukraine resigns itself to being Belarus writ large', or than the Easter Rising is the same thing as Bloody Sunday.
No, I mean that I would judge on the same characteristics as were I choosing between two applicants of the same sex.
I just happen to disagree with what seems to be your assertion that "allow rapists and sex pests free reign to rape and sexually assault to their heart's content" and "keep half the planet on a de facto sex offender registry from womb to tomb" are mutually exhaustive. (If this is not your assertion, what precisely do you acknowledge as being between those?)
I doubt that it would be that often, but I acknowledge the possibility that my child might agree more with you than with me, thus "I think it's wrong to discriminate on the basis of sex – but my child disagrees with me, and I believe that attempting to force the issue risks undermining both my efforts to teach them the things previous generations had to learn the hard way and my strategy for protecting them from abusers, sexual or otherwise, and regardless of any definition of the would-be perpetrators' sex or gender.".
Also, "my child might very well have opinions of their own" was referring to a broader category, which could include other, less one-sided, subcategories, e. g. the often-depicted-in-media 'opposite sex has cooties' phase. (I'm not sure whether this actually happens, and doubt that it is anywhere near as common, but if it happens, it could tilt the decision either way depending on whether I have a son or a daughter.)
(In my response to the artificially constrained Gedankenexperiment posited earlier, note that, following the coin toss, I specified that I would take measures to prevent abuse by a male babysitter; they just happen to be the same measures I would take to prevent abuse by a female or intersex babysitter, both due to the fact that, even conceding your statistics arguendo I do not want to be the one individual in thirty-seven who loses everything betting at the roulette wheel on 'Albania' only to see it come up 'Ghadaffist Libya', and due to the fact that what I believe to be the most effective way of protecting a child from nonces can't be applied selectively. To the best of my knowledge, a sexual predator does not go from zero to Epstein in a single day. Like a tiger¹ unto Cervidae, they seek the most vulnerable; instead of a sambar with a broken leg, they seek a child who has been taught that (1.) they have no rights that their parents, or anyone given in loco parentis authority by their parents, are bound to respect, and that any word of complaint will be met with a total dismissal of the substance thereof in favour of a laser-focus on the sheer temerity of a child having any response to anything decreed by their
ownersparents other than a joyous acceptance² that makes an LLM chatbot seem like the enfant d'amour of R. Lee Ermey and Oscar the Grouch³, and (2.) anything involving certain parts of their body is (a.) deeply inherently shameful, and (b.) somehow their fault (even if they were praying the whole time that they would wake up and realise that it had been a nightmare).)I'm not advocating for it, per se; the operative word there is 'if'.
If you must have changing rooms divided by biological sex,
Dividing by natal anatomy is more intrusive than by current anatomy, as the former involves digging into other people's medical charts as well as their genitals. If a woman walks into the women's changing room, takes off her clothes, and lo and behold! that individual has a vagina, than no woman had to see a penis in the designated penis-free zone; mutatis mutandis for the men's room.
They should not be the only facilities available, compelling pre-operative trans people to use the facilities of their assigned-sex-at-birth, or the majority of them, making the use of the neutral facilities marked⁵ as indicative of transnessosity. Either would, in addition to exacerbating dysphoria and outing trans individuals, also demand that they endorse the anti-trans position; compare a Protestant schoolteacher demanding that the 80% Catholic student body recite the version of the 'Our Father' with 'trespasses' instead of 'debts'.
Of the 87-95% (your link gave a range, 95% being only one end of which), how many have no intention or desire to undergo that part of transition, and how many have been denied the opportunity?
Perhaps I should have said 'one or more'; my point was that, if you cannot protect trans-women in the same facility as cis-men, and you cannot protect cis-women in the same facility as trans-women, then I don't know what else you can do but to treat trans-women as their own category in this instance.
What is not morally acceptable is to, whether it be motivated by personal animus or purely by bureaucratic indifference, decide that it is too inconvenient to fulfill the duty, inseparable from the practise of incarceration, of protecting all of the people one has deprived, even for the most solidly founded of causes, of the capacity to defend themselves⁴; this is the kind of thing that calls for people to end up in the dock at the Hague.
¹My comparison is solely in terms of tactics; I do not intend to insult the character of these magnificent animals, whom I do not begrudge for their need to eat, any more than a military historian comparing the battle doctrine of an Allied general to his Axis counterpart is (at least prior to c. 2015) claiming any moral equivalency between them. Wildlife people, please do not send me angry letters again.
²If the sole determinant of entry into heaven is one's indirect effect on the prevalence of the sexual abuse of children, Aella will have had time to have an affair with every mutually consenting adult in the afterlife long before her mother's sperm donor (for he does not deserve any title a myriadth as respectable as 'father')⁶ has a snowball's chance in hell of coming within sight of the Pearly Gates. (And that's before considering the violent abuse.)
³Yes, I know they are both male; that is not in any way more than the most trivial obstacle, compared to the fact that one of them is a puppet.
⁴The same principle applies to the Ludovico Technique; if we posit an alternate universe, call it A Wind-Up Tangerine, in which Mr DeLarge either is never afflicted with or is cured of the part of the conditioning gives him an aversion to classical music, but is still incapable of violence, even if you think this is a improvement over the status quo, they shouldn't just abandon him to be victimised by everyone else.
⁵"Marked Absent", Outlandish Claims, July 2024
⁶"The Joy Is Not Optional", Knowingless, May 2025
I'm not being the least bit facetious when I say I've read this passage four or five times, and I still have absolutely no idea what point this "analogy" is meant to illustrate in the context of the trans debate. In this analogy, is the Englishman a trans-identified male and the Irishman is a female person? Is the Englishman a male person and the Irishman is a female person? Is a charity matron leaving a hungry Irishman to starve meant to be analogous to a trans-identified male being denied access to a female-only bathroom or sporting event?
It's not an analogy for anything so much as an answer to your question "What is the difference between "discriminating" against people[...] and drawing a "social distinction" between people[...]?"
Okay, so what is the difference between:
?
(substitute "female", "men" in the examples above as necessary)
Whether, as a result of the difference in identified gender, you do anything to them that they don't want. (E. g. the matter of Carlita Rodríguez.)
That doesn't answer my question. I assume you mean that "discriminating against" someone on the basis of their claimed gender identity means doing something to them that they don't want. (I note that this isn't what the word "discriminate" literally means, but let's park that for now.) What does it mean to "draw a social distinction" between two people on the basis of their gender identities?
(Incidentally I have never seen that film so I have no idea what happened to Rodriguez on the basis of their claimed gender identity.)
The adminisphere at the coal mine where she was employed accepted that Sra Rodríguez was a woman, but insisted that, as a woman, she be excluded from 'men's work'.
(Note that because I do not personally experience gender identity, corresponding or opposed to my anatomy at birth, I can only rely on the lived experience of people who do have strongly felt gender identities, many of which point in the same direction as their intercruoral organs, as communicated through the not-entirely-lossless channel of human language.)
In society as it stands now, some 'social distinctions' which would rarely, if ever, constitute 'discrimination', would include
¹cf. the dwarven society in Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. (GNU Terry Pratchett)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link