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#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.
No, I clocked them as extremely obviously not natal women and then got confirmation in one way or another afterwards. What did you think I meant by “confirmed”?
That seems absolutely nuts. How the hell does that happen? The texture of neovaginas is, like, not going to be anything close to a real one. Even just the lack of proper lubrication for one.
I’m sorry but your insistence that trans women are actually generally passing reads as massive cope to me. That some lizardman’s constant worth of interactions suggest otherwise is not relevant in this case -- I've been clocked offhand as a woman previously during a period of my life when I had long hair by people who weren't paying too much attention, and I was not trying to present as a woman and definitely wouldn't appear female to anyone actually looking.
So are you saying that you're in the outlier of outliers for having known multiple trans people IRL? This might be true, but "liars on the internet" is multiple orders of magnitude more common so you'll have to forgive me if I have doubt you're that special unicorn.
Are you also the rare unicorn to have banged a trans person who has surgery (unlike ya know, the people on the show who literally did), or are you just saying it to say it?
I don't know the rates, and I'm not pretending to either. I'm not the one making grandiose claims that "everyone can tell" and that people can't meaningfully pass, despite tons of evidence to the contrary.
Yeah, so you're even saying that there's overlap even when you aren't trying.
Now imagine that but with feminizing hormones causing feminine fat distributions, skin thickness, breast growth, etc and a person actively trying to look more female. If there's already overlap for many, then it should be the obvious and easy assumption that active effort with feminizing hormones makes it even more effective.
You'll have to take my word for it, but for various reasons including profession, social circle and upbringing I do know more trans people -- either professionally or otherwise -- than the modal person. I'm not even saying that it's impossible for a man to pass as a woman (and I in fact concede that women may well pass as men -- I can imagine at least one trans man who I've met who I think would've passed as a short and stubby guy if given androgens), but I think the rate of truly passing trans women is really very, very low, edge cases aside (e.g. vanishingly small number of truly passing trans women, small number of people who legitimately have a poor sense of sex differences, etc). I certainly don't know of one and I know upwards of five trans women (and a few more in passing both personally and professionally -- I once recommended Wandering Son to a trans person who hadn't heard of it and never met her again).
(edit: that said, now that I think about it, potentially the reason I'm able to recognise trans women is because I have seen more of them than normal. Perhaps I am not the modal observer either.)
That isn't me "passing", though -- they recognised the error when they looked more closely. And I think for the majority of cases that is also what is happening to trans people getting clocked as women -- people don't look very closely when it's actually only in passing, +/- when they clock that something's not quite right they're too polite to say otherwise. I'm also honestly stumped by the idea that someone could have sex with a trans person and not realise, unless they've never had sex before. I doubt a trans man would be able to fool a natal woman either -- last I checked neopenises weren't very convincing at all.
I suppose this really depends on what it means to "pass". I would categorise someone as "passing" if under more-than-incidental observation someone still mistakes the trans person's natal sex. Under a looser definition of "pass" that might not apply. I imagine morbidly obese people might also have an easier time passing due to all the fat obscuring the frame. But there are still other non-visual tells...
I'm not even a conservative who's dead set on denying that trans people exist or something -- I have great sympathy for the transmedicalist sort of trans people, and if there was a button that magically transformed men into women (and women into men) I would be all for people to press that button if they really wanted to. I think that the greatest insult and harm that the tucutes and recent "trans activists" have done is to transmedicalist-trans people themselves. I can't speak for other people, but to my eyes it's not accurate that even a significant minority of natal men, even with great effort, can generally pass as natal women with current technology. It's a sad situation.
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