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 agree, violence for the most part is not actually that common in the US unless you hang out with bad crowds and a few examples otherwise are statistical anomalies.
Ok but how the heck you gonna dismiss violence against trans people as just a few small cases but then cite a single anecdote of violence here? There are not roaming death squads hunting down and killing conservatives either.
A few examples to the contrary does not change the statistical truth that basically any demographic in the US (besides black male really) is a rather safe demographic.
Now this is just blatantly not true, I've seen plenty of passing trans people. It's a toupee fallacy at best and delusional wishful thinking at worst. There's a lot of overlap in male and female appearance, there's even plenty of men (who identify as male) that can make for a convincing female appearance without even having the feminizing effects of hormones, a lot of the "femboys" can do that.
Yeah there's lots of people who don't, but there's plenty who do without any trouble.
How the heck do you know what you do there? If you were trans, how do you know you wouldn't be able understand their problems? Certainly in this hypothetical you would have those same feelings of discomfort about being identified as male.
Because it is, and it's not a genocide? I've mentioned this before, but I've gone through two of the lists from the Trans Day of Remembrance List of Murdered Genocided Trans People, and about three cases were "yep, this person was murdered solely for being trans".
When your supply of Trans Genocide is so skimpy you need to include "fatal hit-and-run traffic accident" as "Deliberately MURDERATED FOR BEING TRANS!", I think we can indeed safely say "violence as trans people is just a few small cases". In fact, the lists should be celebrated as being true achievement of the aims of being accepted as your preferred gender, given how many domestic violence and murders by ex-partners happened, just like cis women! Yay! You are being treated like a Real Woman!
(That last is not meant as anything more than black humour, just to make it clear).
(And I wish I was joking about the transphobic automobiles, but that was a seriously intended explanation for including such cases in the stats: systemic how's your father bingo card phobia and -isms mean that, uh, if a trans person is killed in a car accident then it's equivalent to being deliberately murdered for being trans, society to blame).
I would consider state enforced speech restrictions violence, institutional violence if you will. So the compelled speech pronouns stuff in Canada definitely qualifies. The roving gangs of auto-mods in Reddit while not state sponsored are still violence. If Elon hadn't bought twitter people would still get shadow banned/banned for not toeing the line. The UK is also a tiny step away from extending their anti-anti-imigration in person policing to trans stuff.
Calling it violence when the state does it, fine. You do suffer violence when you don't comply.
But reddit mods? Really?
Hey, if words are violence so is censorship.
Big if.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This feels like you read half of the sentence and immediately decided to write up several paragraphs without any interest in the rest of the comment. Go back and give it an actual read, I never argued that violence against trans people is a common or major issue.
The thing is, claims about epidemics of anti-trans violence are used to back up "and this latest legislation/storm in a teacup is yet more encouragement to commit trans genocide!" and are unquestioningly repeated by the media.
Such lists, as I have exampled, get issued by the activists and are propaganda. Instead of fact-checking (and I only needed about twenty minutes with Google and the names, I didn't even use AI!) "is this really true?", the media is happy to parrot "56 murders of trans people according to this list from Reputable Organisation" when the truth is "56 unsubstantiated claims according to this propaganda from activists".
One example from a previous list was "Trans man murdered for being trans!" Turns out the person was an environmental activist who was shot inside a tent during a police raid on a camp. You can argue over "was this murder?" but it is undeniably a lie to say it was "trans man murdered for being trans".
So the next time you, or anyone, sees a news report about "X number of trans people murdered due to transphobic hate crimes", you should assume that this is probably a lie, at least about "murdered for being trans due to transphobia as instanced by state of Y legislation about not putting rapists with functioning male genitalia into women's prisons, which is dysphoria-inducing hate legislation against innocent trans people who just want to be treated civilly and which encourages crazed murderers to go out and murder trans people".
Really validating the "not actually reading my comment" claim, I was already dismissive of the idea that violence against trans people was common.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There aren't, but I would imagine that if I was a notable conservative figure, I would be much more worried about a lone assassin tracking me down and hunting me, in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death. That seems to be kind of the point of such political violence.
How do you know they were trans if they were passing? I'm not trying to do a gotcha, I'm genuinely curious.
I see this similarly to someone who is carrying a concealed weapon. Isn't the entire point of carrying concealed that you don't know if someone is carrying concealed? If they, for example, tell others that they are carrying concealed, that defeats the utility of concealment. In the same way, a real woman isn't telling everyone that she is a woman, because other people see her and automatically recognize her as one. Ideally, a trans person wouldn't have to tell others their preferred gender, it would just be obvious to everyone. They wouldn't even have to say "my pronouns are she/her".
I still feel like most trans people don't pass because I've never thought of someone as non-trans only to find out that they were trans later.
Is discomfort about being identified as male a prerequisite for being trans? If I'm a trans person but I have no such discomfort, am I not a real trans person? These are questions even trans activists have disagreements on.
Either way, I don't think that it's sustainable to make all efforts to remove any way I could possibly be identified or categorized as male, so I think it would be reasonable to draw the line somewhere.
Well
Sometimes people just list it on an online bio or something, you can find plenty of folk who clearly look quite feminine. Sure pictures and videos are different than IRL, but it's not "obvious" there still. Someone like NikkieTutorials was a famous content creator on YouTube and they're only known to be trans because someone in their life who was told it threatened to out them. "Outing" wouldn't even be a thing anyway if it wasn't the case that some people do pass.
Plenty of trans people tell stories of doctors asking them about pregnancy risks or whatever else sort of story that only works if passing really does happen and them having to explain that they're trans. Maybe they're all lying, but that is some evidence.
Just go to like an anime convention or something else where people dress up. There's a lot of men who can make for very convincing women.
The reverse, "transvestigations" claiming people like Macron's wife or Erika Kirk or other famous women as being potentially trans show that many of the "signs" are clearly something that occur in ordinary women too. Sometimes it goes into ridiculous territory even like this lady has a picture of her after a C-section with her newborn and husband and she still gets constantly harassed with people trying to claim she is trans because of how she looks, even trying to say that she must have had a uterus transplant (which if a trans woman had a successful transplant, got pregnant and gave birth would be a huge story). A lot of people who can "always tell" refuse to admit otherwise. Even offline here's a teen who got harassed and told to leave the women's restroom, despite her not being trans.
Statistically speaking you probably don't even know a trans person passing or not who is meaningfully trans in the sense of changing their name/hormones/identification/etc to begin with! It's something like .5% of the population for it, that's relatively rare. 1/200 is pretty uncommon, dunbar's number is around 150, and that's things like associates not close friends who would tell you something like that. If you have something like five really close friends, four family members and three partners throughout life the chance of any of them being meaningfully trans is really low to begin with. However it is possible that someone in the nameless crowds at the grocery store or movie theater or sports stadiums might be and you don't even notice and count them because they're a stranger.
Yes that's the toupee fallacy. The argument that all toupees look bad and you can always tell falls apart when you consider that good looking realistic toupees aren't noticed.
Well discomfort for birth sex but I think generally so. At the very least it's pretty common among people who meaningfully transition with and not like a stupid 16 year old who just puts neopronouns in their bio and calls themselves trans.
I'm pretty sure the average Mottizen by virtue of educational status and exposure to mild autistic hobbies like Themotte.org is massively more likely than the true average of having run into trans people.
Also 'yaddayadda influencer passes' is generally in the context of an aggressively curated media suite of videos and photos from particular angles.
Yeah that's probably true but if we're talking generally especially for IRL people it's pretty uncommon. This Kansas situation actually gives us some interesting numbers to work with to see how rare trans people actually are. Apparently 1700 people are impacted by the decision, and chatgpt pulls up "Active driver’s licenses (most recent full year reported): ~2,099,927 licenses."
That makes for less than one tenth of a percent of trans people who had the gender marker changed (assuming there wasn't even any data input false positives). Of course not every trans person will have had a changed license but even if we doubled or tripled, it's an incredibly small number of people, and assuming that other states are around the same rarity, the chance that any user knows a single person who is meaningfully trans in this way is unlikely, yet alone knowing enough trans people to make a determination about passing quality.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You can not hide an adams apple, height, shoulder configuration, and most of the "passing" trans individuals are either children, extremely low T males or various Asian descent inherently neotenous with help from make up. I am frankly tired of the "there are invisible trans all over the place, you just don't know about them" song and dance.
A handful of genetic abnormalities(XXY, XYY) like that woman that looks like a dude shouldn't be used to excuse 99% of cases. The Hermeneutics of
GayTrans Suspicion surely suck for the wrongly accused, but w/e.I do kinda feel for mannish and/or tall women on dating apps these days. I remember when I was on the apps a few years ago I'd always have a vague twinge of concern when those profiles popped up.
Also the amount of clearly trans profiles that were doing their best to hide that fact felt like potentially cruising for a bruising from somebody desperate who didn't know how to read the cultural norms.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
#1: Pictures and videos can easily be manipulated to make trans people look passing. I'm not talking about AI or anything like that, just techniques (that ironically enough, real women use too) like filters to hide blemishes/shadows and using angles that are most appealing. I'm talking about most appearances of trans people in my daily life. They do stick out like a sore thumb. The trans-identifying females less so, but I can tell the difference.
"Outing" is unrelated to transgenderism. You can threaten to "out" someone's anonymous identity, for example StoneToss being outed as Hans Christian Graeber. When trans people are "outed", it's usually the reveal of their birth name, or even just making it common knowledge that they are trans and it's acceptable to speak of them as such. The central example that comes to my mind is a trans-identifying man being unwillingly outed to his parents, perhaps because they don't approve of his identity. Were he not outed, he would just be their son to them, meaning he doesn't pass. I'm not sure how passing is relevant here.
#2: Even if I believe this, I think it's negligible evidence and there are other explanations that are more probable. Many forms have standard questions about pregnancy risks even for guys. And doctors may have just adopted a universal set of questions regardless of gender identity because it reduces the risk of a malpractice lawsuit for failing to ask a critical question, but no one's gonna sue them if they ask a man if he's pregnant.
#3: Even if this is true and they pass there, it does not follow that a man on the street in everyday life could pass. People do not usually cosplay as anime girls in real life.
#4: "Transvestigators" are conspiracy theorists by another name and I don't use or endorse any of their methodology. There are obviously many similarities between male and female bodies, but that doesn't mean it's likely that a man can pass as a woman. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Your position on noticing non-passing trans people seems unfalsifiable. If I don't notice a person is trans, that's them successfully passing. If I do notice them being trans and they are poorly passing, then I'm just cherry-picking because I'm not counting all the successful people. Then is there even a set of observations that could refute the assertion that trans people typically pass, if all can be explained the same way? What if we agree to compare the rates of non-passing trans people with the percentage of the population that trans people are? I notice that in my daily life, the number of obviously trans people I can count divided by the number of people I notice or interact with, is roughly proportional to the percentage of trans people that make up the population. It's entirely possible that I missed one or two trans people who pass extremely well, but I'm fine concluding from my observations that most trans people don't pass.
I will have to admit that I don't know what exactly I would do if I had discomfort for my birth sex, but I would probably seek treatment and not transition due to the surgeries basically being medieval torture. I would continue to weigh the costs and benefits of each option and see if they are worth it, as I have done here.
Does this not literally admit that it's not always obvious to people? If you were correct about them never passing, there would be no need to "make it common knowledge that they are trans" in the same way there's no reason to make it common knowledge that someone is black. Everyone would already know.
Also on that same vein, here's another piece evidence that passing trans people do exist.
The argument about if a person should disclose if they're trans. Completely unnecessary if we assume that they never pass and everyone is aware. You could never possibly have sex with a trans woman without giving explicit consent towards that under your theory.
It's also not possible to just chuck that up to lying trans people and allies either given that the "I want them to disclose" side is going to be primarily people who don't want to be with a trans woman.
Ok explain this one then. I'm in a star trek related discord server and one of the users is an out on discord trans woman who I remember had once offhandedly mentioned they got asked for a tampon by a stranger that day and had to say sorry they were out. It was just an offhanded remark (many of us often talk about random things/post pics/etc, we got a kinda friend group going on). I do not believe it to be a lie, I've seen pictures and videos of them too and they look quite feminine.
Why would that have happened unless they looked convincingly female and the stranger in need did not view her as an ordinary woman? If your theory was true, the stranger should have not behaved in such a way and needed such a deflection.
It does mean that it must be way harder to tell than you might think. False positives are an error too.
This isn't "my position", it's a known logical fallacy. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
It doesn't work to say "ah but disproving this fallacy could be happening is too difficult for me so I wish to ignore it". I've provided multiple affirmative arguments for trans people being able to pass, and your one continued argument is challenged significantly by a known selection bias flaw.
I disagree. I can think of a scenario where a trans person doesn't pass but people don't know that it's okay to talk about their transness, so they don't. Just because people don't bring up the subject doesn't mean that they pass. It's entirely possible for the trans person to think they pass when they don't, if they interpret silence as evidence of passing. If it's not common knowledge that someone is trans, someone can still commit a social faux pas by bringing up someone's transness in conversation unwanted, even if they don't pass. Common knowledge is when everyone knows that everyone knows; everyone may know that someone doesn't pass, but it does not necessarily follow that everyone knows that everyone knows that someone doesn't pass.
I concede that if one is particularly unintelligent, or otherwise their judgment is impaired by lust, alcohol, drugs, dark lighting, etc. in a one-on-one situation with another trans person, then a trans person might be able to pass to them. That's a far cry from the definition of passing I would imagine most trans people want.
I can't imagine how you wouldn't be able to tell you're about to have sex with a penised man once he is naked (unless your judgment is impaired by the aforementioned).
Some trans-identifying men do carry tampons. I've heard it helps them feel more like a woman. It's entirely possible for the stranger to recognize him as a trans person and still ask him for tampons under that belief.
Just because some people are so stupid they ignore evidence in favor of a woman being a woman? No, it doesn't. Those people are also biased and motivated (for whatever reason) to go looking for trans people even if they aren't there. Their demand for trans people is higher than the supply. Again, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. In my daily life, I've never identified a person as a woman only to later find out he's a trans-identifying man, or a person as a (trans-identifying) man only to later find out she's a woman.
I know it's a logical fallacy. You can use logical fallacies to argue for a position, but it's still a position that you are holding and arguing for. It being a logical fallacy does not inherently lend more credence to your position.
I'm not saying to just ignore it. I'm saying that your position seems to be unfalsifiable if you are going to invoke that fallacy for every set of possible observations. I've already offered one way of falsification, do you disagree with it or have another way?
And I disagree with all of them.
Why exactly would outing by another person suddenly make it go from not OK to fine for discussion?
If it's obvious in the way you say then it's already common knowledge to everyone. They would know, and they would also know everyone is aware because it's obvious. Unless a great deal of people think a trans person is passing to others, in which case that's evidence passing is a thing.
How often is "enter into a dark room already drunk and banging a stranger" a thing that happens? And even this caveat doesn't explain situations like this where someone only finds out from social media that the girl he was crushing on is trans or this where some guy is dating and didn't know
Ok possibly, this argument actually works for once. There's still plenty of other examples from trans people and their friends/family that would suggest passing exists.
Yes, if the signs aren't reliable and wrongly identify women as trans when they aren't, they aren't flawless signs.
If you're the average person, you've never met a transitioned trans person to begin with in your daily life, yet alone one who is close enough to tell you. It's kinda like saying "I've never met a nuclear licensed submarine operator that I couldn't immediately tell was one", well yeah you've never met one anyway so it is meaningless.
If your whole argument depends on a known logical fallacy and the "I don't know a licensed submarine operator" fallacy I made there combined, it's not very strong. Meanwhile I have presented lots of positive evidence that passing can occur.
Better way to think of this, depoliticize it in your mind and instead think of it as just the toupee fallacy. Would your arguments and logic work for "toupees never look natural to anyone, every toupee I've ever seen is awful"? If not, then make a better argument.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've met MTF trans that are able to pass, generally those fortunate enough to have an already feminine, petite and neotenous racial background. Admittedly that may be my ignorance, as for instance I can probably recognize say 50% of Thai ladyboys on sight and my friend's Thai girlfriend can bat at 99%.
I've also met FTMs who pass, but generally it's more through the 'nobody really cares about this short round dude beyond the first glance' way than in the 'attempting to perform peak feminity way' that MTF aspire to.
Nonetheless the majority are easy to clock, especially outside of Asia.
Knowing a single trans person IRL is already an outlier, knowing multiple is an outlier even among outliers that would mostly occur among people who seek it out in some way like going to a LGBT group.
So are you sure you're not just having false positives where you think "that person has gotta be trans" and then take it as as true without verification?
That does happen, I gave a few examples of people being harassed by false positives after all. There was even a school board member in Utah once who falsely claimed a teenager was trans or this Walmart employee labeled trans because she was tall. And considering just how statistically rare it is that you've actually met multiple meaningfully trans people IRL, the explanation of false positives is pretty strong.
Statistically, yes if you just go by raw numbers. But since Trans people are not uniformly distributed across the country, ones exposure more likely hinges on ones exposure to high concentration of prog politics. I know multiple trans people IRL. I don't seek them out. I just exist in a more progressive area and have hobbies that MTFs and Non-Binary people are biased towards. Which increases my statistical exposure to trans people.
More options
Context Copy link
I’ve definitely met and confirmed multiple trans women in person, and they do look different. Of course I can’t say that I’ve definitely clocked all the trans women I’ve seen, but it does seem like there’s a bit of discontinuity between how trans women, at least, look and how natal women look; it doesn’t seem like there’s a spectrum from not obvious at all to very obvious, especially if you look at someone in daily life rather than someone in curated photographs.
(Of course there could actually be a spectrum and my brain just pattern matches to one or the other so readily that it only seems discontinuous, but that is my experience. I don’t see people who “barely” pass.)
Trans men I’ve definitely seen one or two “real” examples (eg excluding ones with “they/their”, neopronouns or ones that feel like a man one day and a woman the next, only counting the ones going from one binary to the other and making an effort to actually pass), but I’m less sure I’m clocking all of them due to the sheer effect of testosterone. That said in my milieu I don’t really see many of either trans men or gender lunatics to begin with.
If you knew they were trans in person you were looking for features with confirmation bias. Lots of people without that before knowledge don't and can't always tell a person is trans. Easy and quick evidence, just go look up internet posts from people finding out someone they're dating is trans like this one.
Or hell just go look at some of the older Jerry Springer episodes about guys who didn't realize they fucked a trans woman and got upset after it was disclosed.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link