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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.
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.
#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'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.
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.
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