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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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I notice that I'm confused as to what "transgender rights" are.

From what I notice, it tends to be things like:

  1. Being denied housing/jobs. - You know what, I could side with the Ts on this.

  2. Surgery for adults. - I'm not going to celebrate you realizing your authentic self by cutting off your dick, but it's America and you should have the right.

  3. Being able to use the bathroom of their choice. - Note that they always focus on bathrooms because they have stalls. Never mind locker rooms where you can glance over and see someone naked.

  4. Legal documentation - I'd say it annoys me that they need everything to validate them, but speaking practically I don't care that much. I could actually slightly lead towards anon_'s take that the fact that they're actively revoking licenses shows direct animus.

  5. Hormones for children. - They always play this game where they pretend getting them is difficult and you need to jump through all these hoops so no one could get them by accident. Never mind the gatekeepers (gender clinics) are also the advocates.

  6. Sports. - They always attempt to pretend sports are unfair anyway due to biological differences, as if being male is equivalent to being a tall woman.

  7. Prisons - A transwoman in a male prison is more likely to be raped. A transwoman in a women's prison is more likely to rape. Personally I'd rather make a small number of trans prisons around the country.

  8. Insurance - Edited to add because I forgot about it. Because this is life-saving surgery of course they think it should be covered by insurance.

I deliberately search for takes from the left and right. The argument I constantly see is that the lefties on reddit seem to think that conceding any argument to the right is a slippery slope to Kristallnacht. Honestly, I would be perfectly accepting if a trans person would be willing to say, "Yes I know it's silly but my brain kicks me whenever I'm misgendered so please just go with it." My problem with the movement is the constant maximalist demands. I remember when the argument was that pronouns are meaningless titles, so it's no difference than using "Dr." instead of "Mr." Now it's "The science is settled and only a bigot could object."

Hormones for children . - They always play this game where they pretend getting them is difficult and you need to jump through all these hoops so no one could get them by accident. Never mind the gatekeepers (gender clinics) are also the advocates.

To be fair on hormones, there was a nearly two-decade period where the Official WPATH-approved Protocol for adults was to require 'three months lived experience' -- aka looking like a bad crossdresser, full-time, at your work -- before prescribing hormones or surgical interventions, including levels of 'surgery' that was just laser hair removal. In a lot of places, even fairly friendly psychotherapists would draw that out to six months.

I think the WPATH-approved approaches are pushed way too hard the other direction, but the trans activists were reacting to policies that did genuinely exist as recently as the Obama administration. Wish there were options other than complete bans that leave a lot of people stuck with surgical interventions they might have been able to otherwise avoid, or extremely sketchy application on 12-year-olds without any admission when they don't work... but the Litany of Tarski still rules.

The argument I constantly see is that the lefties on reddit seem to think that conceding any argument to the right is a slippery slope to Kristallnacht.

The problem's that it's worked, precisely because the activist branch pushed that hard and in that direction, and now it is going to be a serious problem for a lot of people when the pendulum swings. The framework where access to hormone therapy was access to early and fast gender transition was the only thing that could prevent thousands of people from A Heroing themselves was misguided at best, but it was a massive thumb on the scales for any and every risk-benefit analysis, and empowered a lot of motion claiming that opposition could only be downstream of rabid hate.

Now, there's a lot of not-psychological needs, and a lot of reasons for the social conservatives to hate. At best, the pendulum's going to have someone somewhere stuck paying out of pocket for stuff that they're now much more dependent on getting, whether that's 'just' dependent to 'avoid body hair' or dependent in the 'don't make sex hormones on their own' sense, and I'm not optimistic it's going to end there.

Honestly, I would be perfectly accepting if a trans person would be willing to say, "Yes I know it's silly but my brain kicks me whenever I'm misgendered so please just go with it."

Yeah, but we'd need both that -- already pie-in-the-sky thinking -- and, simultaneously, a social conservative branch willing to just go with it.

Some of the latter does exist: I work in a moderately Red Tribe sphere in a fairly Red Tribe state, and we've had a trans employee that was willing to put up with a gender-neutral restroom while the mechanics weren't going to make a big deal out of there being a gender-neutral restroom, and outside of an older guy trying to take me aside and gently inform me that They Hadn't Always Been A Woman, it was just something no one mentioned. But that did also happen post-Bostock, and I'm not sure it'd have gone the same way even five years earlier or later. Worse, a lot of 'oh, they're not all obnoxious gits' only happened downstream of that coordination being possible in turn.