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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18457 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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New Aella survey post on child sexual assault just dropped: https://aella.substack.com/p/a-whole-lot-of-csa-data

I think her analysis is generally unobjectionable, but do find it notable that she buries the lead on the "non-cis" sexual assault findings. I didn't dig into the crosstabs, but non-cis people are plausibly getting sexually assaulted even before they become openly non-cis. And while there's plausibly causation in the direction of abnormal pre-egg-breaking/transition behavior being more likely to attract sexually assault, the data re: non-cis people reporting more CSA still very much supports the hypothesis that either:

  • Being sexually assaulted causes people to become non-cis
  • Some root factor makes people both more likely to be non-cis AND more likely to report being sexually assaulted

It might be that these hypothesis are both correct, but for different population subsets. For example, nonbinary people might be disproportionately motivated by a desire to escape a concept they associate with their assault, while transgender people are the ones afflicted by a root factor. (Or vica-versa, either explanation would be possible.)

I would personally bet on the second hypothesis predominating, though. And in particular, the associations re: social class/parental age/trauma are suggestive of some specifically anxiety-related problem. Working hypothesis: If you grow up poor or insecure or to young parents or female you become anxious and depressed, which leads you to be more likely to suffer sexual assault, more likely to interpret past events as sexual assault, more likely to start identifying yourself as non-cis (because of body image issues? Data is obviously underspecified and outside the scope of aella's post), and more likely to be negatively affected long-term by sexual assault when it does happen.

...So if you have kids, and want to maximize their chances of identifying as cisgender into adulthood, your top priority should be reducing their opportunities for anxiety. Openly worrying about drag queen story hour and queer books would be ironically counterproductive.

Ideological disclaimer: as a catholic I believe there are only two genders, fixed at birth, but as a transhumanist also I'm in favor of letting anyone, including children, do whatever they want to their own bodies. (I accept some nuance re: having to get psychologists/a judge to sign off that someone is truly acting in their own uncoerced self-interest, with increasing scrutiny in proportion to the danger posed by the modification and the mental irresponsibility of the requestor.)

I would have thought that an obvious "common factor" in both identifying as a CSA survivor and identifying as non-cis would be "being left-wing".

Becoming left or right wing is downstream of other life experiences. It's more plausible that whatever common factor causes the other two things also causes the left-wing-ness.

Becoming left or right wing is downstream of other life experiences

I think being a CSA survivor is itself a pretty major reason someone might grow up as strongly leftist, though (and, separately but compoundingly, that someone identifying as "a CSA survivor" in a survey is more likely to be left-wing than right-wing even assuming equal rates of actual experience of CSA between blue and left respondents). The therapists are woke, the books about coping with trauma are woke - if dealing with trauma is a huge part of your life then you'll grow up marinating in a generally left-wing worldview. And if you don't absorb that worldview you're less likely to continue identifying as "a CSA survivor" in adulthood - as opposed to compartmentalizing it away as just some shit in the past you don't need to think about, unlike all those fragile left-wing snowflakes who bootstrap themselves into chronic anxiety by fixating on their bad experiences.

So that gets us "CSA survivors are more likely to be left-wing"; and surely I don't need to justify the "left-wingers are more likely to question their gender" part of the chain of reasoning?

I don't think this explanation works.

  1. The ratios between cis vs. non-cis people reporting sexual abuse in the 0-12 range remains similar for household vs non-household penetrative assaults.
  2. (My prior is that) people who are abused by non-family-members are more likely to receive therapy (because they're less likely to be abused by the people who would otherwise be responsible for getting them that therapy)
  3. However, your explanation predicts that likelyhood that a child recieved therapy should increase CSA reporting rates relative to baseline.

2 and 3 contradict.

I admit that there probably is some relationship with therapy->liberalism->non-cisgenderism, but I don't think it's central.

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