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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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No, we condemn or tolerate things on the basis of whether or not they harm other people.

Ok, we seem to have gotten off-track on this one. So to clarify what I'm saying, I'm saying that by your standards, I can't say pedophilia is sexually deviant because the community says it is, because the community can be wrong, and because the community can be wrong (after all, the ancient Greeks thought pedophilia was fine), we have to play cultural relativism and pretend that any standard is as good as any other absent some other justification that can't be based on the community. Do you agree with that?

It is not 'naïve' to disagree with you.

I didn't say your view was naive just because you disagreed with me. I said that your view is naive because you seem to not be considering the many important differences between men and women, which have been enumerated to you before.

The same applies to a 99th-%ile-size cis-man harassing a 1st-%ile-size cis-man. Should we have facilities divided by size as well as gender?

No, the same does not apply. There are many more important differences between men and women than "one tends to be small and the other tends to be large". The smaller man doesn't have to worry about being forcibly impregnated by the larger man, for instance. We divide by gender because of the many important differences, not just because men and women differ by height.

I used online pictures because Markdown does not have a 'link to Real Life' formatting option. The one trans-woman I have knowingly met in person did not appear to be obviously male.

The many trans-identifying males I have met in real-life look like men. If I wasn't paying attention, was inebriated or was looking at them from a sufficient distance, I might mistake them for women. But either way, in normal conditions I would see them as men, especially when they speak. The only way that trans people can pass is through online media.

Your response was, anti-quote, "...making a wig look natural is much easier than making a man look like a woman."

Making a dugout canoe is much easier than making a Falcon-9 rocket; does that mean that anyone who thinks that they are connecting to this forum via Starlink is delusional?

No, that was not my response. That was a tangent and not something critical to the main point of my post. I explained how in a world where wig-wearers (claim to) feel oppressed for wearing a wig (much the same as trans people (claim to) feel oppressed for being trans), social norms would be established to not tell obvious wig-wearers that they were obviously wearing a wig, and this would result in many obvious wigs.

Your response is also confusing, even if "making a wig look natural is much easier than making a man look like a woman" was somehow my only point. I pointed that out because the "toupee fallacy" argument seems to rely on the assumption that the only differences between men and women (for the purposes of recognizing gender) are hair style, makeup, dress, maybe even body hair. In reality, there are perhaps hundreds of subtle differences that people may not be able to explicitly make legible but still factor in to their assessment, and most of them are not within reasonable control of the trans-identifying person wishing to present as the opposite gender. Whereas the only difference between successfully passing wigs and obvious wigs are, well, just the wigs.

My argument was not "X is easier than Y, therefore not-Y" as you seem to be implying.

'Exponential' does not mean 'big change'; it means that, given equidistant a, b, and c, c / b = b / a, as opposed to a linear relation in which c - b = b - a; if you only have a and b, the difference between 'linear' and 'exponential' becomes meaningless. (Also, it's 'fewer', not 'less'.)

This seems extremely confusing. I don't understand whatever you're saying about my use of the word "exponential" or how it's relevant to my argument, so I'm just going to say that if you don't like me saying "exponentially less", I can say something like "a significant reduction in" instead, as long as it properly conveys the point that gender segregation would is clearly a superior policy when comparing how many incidents of sexual harassment there are with it vs. without it.

The 'proposal of abolishing gender segregation' was if I were designing society from the ground up.

So you concede that it's not going to happen, then? Most societal changes don't require a full rebuild of society to happen.

Going forward from the society we have now, acceptable options from my view would include any compromise in which passing trans individuals are not compelled to out themselves, less-than-passing trans individuals are not compelled to confirm any suspicions held by bystanders, and neither are required to affirm the anti-trans worldview, in order to participate in public life to the same degree as cis individuals.

What's the practical difference between this and abolishing gender segregation entirely? A "passing trans individual" doesn't exist. A less-than-passing trans-identifying man (i.e. all trans-identifying men) is likely to be confronted by a woman or a security guard as a result of his entering the women's room, and if he can't be compelled to confirm people's suspicions that he is a man, then... he just gets to go in the women's room anyway? Meaning that any man who calls himself a woman can legally waltz in to the women's room, since no one can do anything about it. Is this not just doing away with gender segregation?

If what you are trying to accomplish is a reduction in harassment, a policy of 'Do not harass others' is closer to your goal than a policy of 'Do not use the cross-gender facility', in much the same way as a policy of 'Do not commit murder' is closer to the goal of reducing murders than a policy of 'Do not possess any scary-looking device'.

Policies are not mutually exclusive. We can and should have both policies of "don't harass others" and "men are prohibited from using the women's room." At no point did I say we should have only the latter policy.

There is also an important disanalogy with weapon bans, in that disarming average, everyday citizens places them at a severe disadvantage from criminals, who will ignore the law and arm themselves anyway, preying on the unarmed. "Gun-free zones" are just zones full of future shooting victims. Meanwhile, if I as a man am prohibited from going into the women's room, that doesn't disadvantage me in the slightest.

No, I am not claiming that one is just like the other; I am claiming that the difference is a matter of degree.

In both cases, one has a justifiable purpose, and is tempted to take a shortcut that will make accomplishing that purpose easier at the cost of adverse effects on a small number of innocent people.

Exactly which adverse effects are there? If I as a man am not allowed in the women's room, where's the adverse effect? I'm perfectly fine with going into the men's room.

Meanwhile, in the other direction, if men are allowed to enter the women's room, there would be a tremendous amount of sexual harassment that would occur. Arguably, abolishing gender segregation is a shortcut to accomplishing the "justifiable purpose" of... making it so trans-identifying men can deny reality... at the cost of adverse effects on innocent women. Well, I suppose an important difference is that the number of innocent women affected would not be a small number.

I am attempting to apply the same standard to your side that you apply to mine.

A consistent 'silence = disavowal' standard would support your statement, but would undermine claims of relevance of the more extreme pro-trans voices.

A consistent 'silence = approval' standard would mean that you can blame the trans activists for their more insane allies, but you will then be blamed for the eliminationist attitudes on your side.

My standard is more nuanced than that. I explained how if someone appears to support the Kiwi Farms, they will be confronted with the mainstream narrative that we facilitate harassment, we're linked to 3 trans suicides, we swatted MTG, etc. Regardless of the fact that all these claims are false, the person will be asked to disavow this lest they be considered a supporter of harassment/suicide/swatting, and more often than not, they will indeed disavow harassment/suicide/swatting.

So it's not as simple as "silence = disavowal" or "silence = approval". It's "silence = unknown, ask for further clarification". Now I ask you again, and I want you to answer the question this time: Do you genuinely think that, if a trans activist was asked to disavow the cotton-ceiling activists, that they would do so?

And the dispute at hand is what gender certain people are; thus I am attempting to replace the symbol with the substance.

To echo @FtttG (replace sex with gender):

In what sense is the word "sex" disputed?

You're not replacing the symbol with the substance. You're replacing a common-sense word with a dysphemism that normal people find creepy and alienating. This is a tactic that trans activists have a strange predilection for ("pregnant people", "menstruator", "chestfeeding", "birthing parent"), under the guise of "accuracy" and "inclusion". And trans activists have the nerve to ask why people find them and the way they talk so off-putting.

And as for this:

To point to a category that includes Taylor Swift and Elliot Page, and excludes Breakfastnook Cowcatcher and Caitlyn Jenner, I can either refer to 'karyotype=XX' or 'parts at birth=ovaries'. The former runs into the issue that, sometimes, someone with one set of chromosomes will develop the organs usually produced by the other chromosomes; the hormones, and all other biological features, will follow, and the individual will not know that anything unusual has happened unless they have their DNA tested, which is not a universal procedure.

The former is an extremely rare issue and not a reasonable consideration for which word to use 99.9% of the time. If you need to disambiguate, you can just say natal women or even cis women, neither of which requires reference to genitals or gonads.

I wasn't the one who brought up hair colour. You asked, anti-quote, "So I can't take notice of other people's bodies at all, even things which are obvious like their hair color? Am I supposed to pretend to be blind and not know what color someone's hair is?". I was merely applying my principles to your example.

I brought up hair color as an example of an obvious trait to notice, as obvious as gender. I was not bringing it up as an example of a trait that's easy to change (which gender is not), or for any other purpose.

No, it is a caution against asserting that "My claim is different from that one because it just is!" while ignoring that, from outside, they look veeeery similar.

Why does it matter what they look like from the outside? If you want to discuss the validity of a claim, I'm happy to elaborate and make arguments for it. If you want me to elaborate, then say so. But what it looks like from the outside is not really relevant.

Again, if I have to care about what my claims look like from the outside, then I can't assert that the Earth goes around the Sun because from the outside, that claim looks very similar to the claim that the Sun goes around the Earth.

Then why do so many cis-women get accused of being men in disguise?

Dani Davis, Lake City, Florida, 2025.

Jay Rose, Las Vegas, 2023.

Aimee Toms, Danbury, Connecticut, 2016.

Jasmine Adams, Staten Island, New York, 2023. (Not even in a women-only space!)

Kalaya Morton, Tucson, Arizona, 2025.

I was referring specifically to enforcing gender segregation by someone who asked everyone who entered, even obvious women, whether they had a penis. That just never happens, but you asserted that "usually happens", hence why I asked. Even in your examples, people only asked "are you a man or woman", nothing about genitals. So again, since enforcing gender segregation does not require asking about genitals, I would not characterize it as "prying into other people's bodies".

But since you brought up several instances of women accused of being men, I will address those too. I think there's an important confounder here with any cases like these, and this can be seen most clearly in the Staten Island case. It's obvious to me that the shopkeeper had a short temper, or was looking for an excuse to assault the woman. That he called her a "transvestite" doesn't mean that he assaulted her solely on the basis that he thought she was a man. (It doesn't even mean he thought she was a man, he was probably just insulting her looks, but that's tangential to my main point.)

My point being, there's always going to be people who start confrontations and incidents, because they had a mistaken belief, or even because they had a bad day and were looking for an excuse to take their anger out on someone. The fundamental attribution error applies here: I wouldn't attribute these incidents to anti-trans sentiment, any more than I would attribute a guy angrily pounding on a vending machine to him being the sort of guy who's just angry as opposed to external circumstances I don't have knowledge of.

I don't believe that abolishing gender segregation would have prevented these incidents, because the instigators were just looking for something to be mad about and would have found a different reason without gender segregation. However, abolishing gender segregation is sure to create a significant amount of sexual harassment, particularly from men directed toward women.

As for your claim that "so many cis-women get accused of being men", well, the number of cases here falls within lizardman's constant. I don't think there's an epidemic of women being falsely identified as men, that we have to abandon the use of our eyes lest we misidentify a woman as a man. I think that 99.9% of the time, women are accurately identified as women. In particular, I think the number of such incidents pales in comparison to the number of incidents of sexual harassment that would happen were gender segregation to be abolished.

If Alice is a trans-woman who looks more feminine than 20% of cis-women, the only reason that 'Alice was born with XY chromosomes and everything downstream thereof' isn't considered 'private medical history' is to support the house of cards that is our narrow concept of gender roles, some of which are younger than some members of the U. S. Congress.

I sincerely doubt that there is a "trans woman" who looks more feminine than 20% of women. And why exactly should gender be considered private medical history when... people can just look at someone and see? It's just like hair color. (No, I am not saying that we should segregate based on hair color, or that it's easy to change gender like it is to change hair color, or anything else besides that hair color, like gender, is obvious.)

And, gender roles? Exactly who is pushing gender roles, and what exactly are those gender roles? Because I would say narrow gender roles are being enforced when someone sees a boy playing with dolls and declares him to be a girl, and trans activists are far more likely to do exactly that than gender-critical people are.

That 'right' ought to have gone out the window in the 2010s when a supermarket floated the idea of using Big Data (the predecessor of AI) to identify which customers were on a fixed budget and make their experience deliberately unpleasant so as to drive them away and focus on people to whom they could upsell.

I don't understand what this has to do with the right to refuse service. And even if it's true and even if it's morally justifiable in some "you wronged me, now I can wrong you" sense, it's not like literally every private business in the world participated in feeding their customers to Big Data in this way. There are many private businesses who have done no wrong, who should keep their right to refuse service to anyone.