This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Hogwarts Legacy continues to generate controversy. Turns out there's a... transwitch in the game, and a mod that gave that person a more femme voice has already been purged from Nexus Mods. Is not passing a virtue or a source of trans pride now? Just a few years ago, I've been reading Tumblr discussions that went "if there was a magic pill that turned you into an afab woman, would you take it?" - "yes duh".
Yes, I have to admit feeling confusion generated by the reaction to that particular character.
I have encountered zero evidence that the transwitch is characterized poorly, or is made out to be a bad person, or that any other character in the game reacts as if their existence is absurd, offensive, or subhuman. The contempt sometimes shown in-universe to 'mudbloods' seems vitriolic in comparison.
So the stated objections to her depiction are literally her appearance, her voice, and her name, of all things. And actually the name thing is a little weird because Sirona Ryan does imply someone intentionally leaned into the character's identity when choosing it.
But the HP universe is fucking PACKED with weirdly offensive naming conventions, from the Weaselys (I intentionally mispelled for emphasis), to Draco Malfoy, to Luna Lovegood, Rita Skeeter (who literally turns into a bug), and Draco's henchmen, literally named Crabbe and Goyle.
I would argue Sirona's name is completely within the expected conventions of HPverse names, and that even if it was intentionally meant as a nod to her character's nature that isn't good evidence that it's trying to undermine the character.
The appearance, as it happens, doesn't strike me as overtly masculine, although she's certainly on the more butch side if I were to describe it. The voice is also a presumably deliberate choice, but as mentioned the complaints seem based on a Catch-22 wherein if the voice is too feminine then it's erasure, but making it 'non-passing' you're apparently calling attention to their nature as trans?
I get the sense that there is not any way to satisfy the complaints here since 'trans representation' presumably means adding in characters that resemble actual trans people and I'd guess that most transwomen are close to Sirona's phenotype.
And so making the transwoman extremely feminine such that the only way to tell they're trans is to have them straight up say it would come across as erasure.
or should they have gone completely the other way, and had Sirona display full on stereotypical male traits, including a beard, and just had them claim they identified as a woman without a hint of irony?
I think the complaints are based entirely on a bad faith reading of developer intent and thus working backwards to interpreting this character as a malicious, stereotypical depiction meant to demean the trans community. And of course attempted mind-reading like that is a process that tends to reveal one's own biases.
And going against my own advice, I would naively read the developer's intent here as simply normalizing a trans character's existence inside the HPverse by portraying them as what the player might expect a trans woman to look like, and not leaning into caricaturization whilst also avoiding idealization so that the character can stand on her own merits and thus not be a source of controversy within the game. i.e. if all the other characters treat it as fairly normal, there's no need to call extra attention to them or make it a plot element.
And I gotta say, I wonder how one even maps modern gender theory onto wizards, given that there's a clear binary between wizards and muggles, those who have magical power and those who don't, and while there's terms for certain subclasses of each (muggleborns and squibs) I can't think of any way the concept of a 'transwizard' would make sense. A muggle who identifies as a wizard would presumably not display any magical powers.
And with the existence of animagus and polyjuice potions and transfiguration, even if wizards consider gender to be fundamentally binary, they are probably less likely to care about someone modifying their own bodies to conform to any kind of identity different than the one they were born with.
I don’t know about less likely to care.
There’s really two dimensions to the gender theory discussion- one is ‘is gender real, important, and tied to your sex’ and the other is ‘can you change it’. Obviously there’s a correlation in our world where you can’t actually change your sex. But in a world in which you can, there could easily be a much stronger taboo against transgenderism because it’s actually possible to change sex.
The wizarding world may not have super-strict gender roles, but it does have a clear divide between witches and wizards. The use of poly juice potion and human transfiguration seems like something that it would have to work through, had already worked through the implications of, and the wizarding world is obviously alien and has alien social norms. There’s no reason to assume it would import muggle progressive attitudes.
More options
Context Copy link
That sums it up, doesn’t it? It characterizes the slapdash claims of antisemitism pretty well. It also catches the bizarre observation that “you can’t make white enough people” from last week’s thread. Actually, that last one is somehow remaining relevant, as commenters can’t seem to stop debating how hot the characters are or aren’t.
People are heavily invested in mining this game for anything they can use.
Also, I don’t think “trans witch” is supposed to mean magical-ability-fluid. It means a character who is magical and also trans.
Hmm. Transmagical?
Either way, kinda gets at the point that there's no known way in the original HPverse for a non-magic-user to gain magical abilities, so there's clearly a binary which can't be hopped across merely by modifying one's body to match their internal beliefs, and so it would be a little ridiculous to portray a person who was born a muggle but later became a wizard in the series.
Would there exist wizards who identify as muggles and thus refuse to use their magic to better conform with their identity?
Show me some books or games that examine that!
And THAT comes across as a way to try and further tar JKR in a way that gets the Jewish community aligned against her. I don't think the people making the complaint truly care if there's serious antisemitism afoot, it's just a tool/weapon for beating the enemy.
Although you can maybe see a point there if you squint and look sideways at the goblin characterization as these ugly little creatures who maintain a separate/parallel society and run all the banks.
But then they start trying to compile 'evidence' for it in a way that starts to resemble Qanon posters.
Right, and I’m saying nothing about this game or its surrounding conversation suggests that people can or should be transmagical. It’s kind of a separate hypothetical.
I concur that the mining expedition is intended to give ammunition against Current Enemy.
More options
Context Copy link
Well, it's looking increasingly plausible that some writing committee in US corporate HQ made the decision to include such a character, presumably in a meeting that opened with mandatory pronoun announcements and an "indigenous land acknowledgment", then handed all the work off to some eastern european programmer who decided to have a little fun
>trannies went into the code and found out that the NPC character model's name is "MrGirl"
I have no way to verify that tidbit of information as of now.
But I would expect that the majority of players aren't going to come away with a diminished view of trans people so not sure what that would achieve in any event.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Every character that talk's about Sirona Ryan is incredibly in favor of them, trusts them implicitly and has only fond memories of them. Even the villains, when confronted by them, treats them with unusual respect and mainly denigrates the downward quality of the pub by the reputation of characters like the PC. My fiancé, who is on the social justice side of things, squealed in excitement at the "Some of them took a while to realize I was a witch and not a wizard line" confirming them as trans.
I'm not sure there is any way to make the trans community really happy, they have so many sacred cows that are, in aggregate, incoherent that there is simply nothing someone can do that can't be taken as hateful if done by someone not in the good graces of the community. It's pure who, whom.
I'll say that I don't think it's the trans community in particular that is causing the controversy. Definitely appears to be the subset of extremely online SJW types who insist that only TOTAL WAR against TERFS is acceptable, and no matter how many other talented people actually put work into the game, the fact that it puts any money into JKR's pocket is an attack on trans people.
Meanwhile I think the reaction of most normies is "Finally, some high-quality escapism." It sells like gangbusters.
I think my favorite part of all this is how it has demonstrated that Reddit is neither representative of the tastes and preferences of the 'real world' at large AND it has minimal power to influence that real world. It is safe to ignore any controversy originating from that site.
True, it is sometimes difficult to separate out the trans advocate group and the trans group. I have some qualms with both on epistemic grounds but despite me thinking the trans group is wrong about their fundamental claims I have no problem living and let live with them. The trans advocates, or whatever I'm to call them, are the problem.
Just note that this difficulty in separating them is the point.
They want to be able to claim that any backlash or counterarguments against their advocacy for trans people is hurting actual trans people.
Meanwhile, I can't trace a single actual harm to any trans person that could be attributed to JKR, who is apparently the final boss of transphobia.
I, too, could easily accept a "live and let live" posture and would happily advocate for protecting trans persons from violence from bigots.
But I just notice that once you grant the motte of "trans people are people and should be accorded full human dignity" then the advocates aggressively pull you down to the bailey:
"That means you have to let them use whichever bathroom they choose;"
"AND you have to let them into womens' sports leagues;"
"AND you have let them into womens' prisons;"
"AND you should be arrested if you misgender them;"
"AND you can't reject sex with them just because they're trans;"
"AND you have to permit pubescent children to get hormone blockers and invasive surgery:"
"AND you have to let us teach your kids that they might be transgender;"
"AND we don't have to tell you if they decide they're transgender, that would put them at risk."
And if you suggest that maybe it would help to slow things down a bit and discuss the implications of all this and set up some reasonable policies this gets you accused of transphobia or maybe even fascism.
And of course there ARE legitimately transphobic people out there who genuinely do see trans people as less-than-human so being lumped in with them is incredibly distasteful to say the least.
I just find it even more distasteful to be gish-galloped into a position that doesn't follow from the premises I actually agreed to.
I think the clearest examples of "harm" would be JKR publicly speaking out against the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill that would have made it easier for people to transition, and which was blocked from receiving royal assent by Scotland Secretary Alister Jack. It's hard to say if the Scotland Secretary would have acted the way he did without prominent voices like JKR preparing the public with arguments about why it should be shut down. To the extent that JKR made it easier for this to happen, she could be blamed for throwing her weight behind the movement to stop the bill from becoming law, for those who believe the law would have been good, pro-trans policy.
The only other "harm" I can think of is the cis-only women's shelter JKR opened up. I'll admit, the argument for harm is a little more esoteric here. It's the same kind of "harm" that the Salvation Army does in occasionally turning away gay people. Is it better that a flawed charity exists than no charity? Absolutely. But perhaps in an ideal world gay homeless people would also have shelters in such places, and trans-women who are the victims of violence would have a space they could go as well.
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that she merely "added another option" to the market. The shelter is private property, and she has every right to deny service to anyone she wants of course (subject to any laws her area may have about discrimination against protected classes.)
However, I think if some eccentric billionaire opened up a new homeless shelter in a town that already had one, and denied service to people whose names started with the letter U, the billionaire would probably be within their rights and also be acting as an arbitrary jerk. Don't get me wrong, the good the billionaire is doing is almost certainly outweighed by any pettiness or arbitrariness he is exhibiting, but I think it would be completely reasonable for people to protest and advocate for the billionaire to start admitting U-namers to his shelter. The main thing here is that A) the infrastructure to help is already there, and B) the group being denied service is small enough that adding them to the pool of people served won't dilute the resources by an appreciable amount.
Ciswomen are obviously capable of sexually attacking ciswomen, and I am sure women's shelters already have ways of dealing with potential abuse between the women they are helping. Especially considering that something like 50% cases of intimate partner violence are "reciprocal" with both partners acting violently against one another.
I have heard anecdotes about the very first women's shelters having to find ways to deal with violent and abusive women who made things worse for other women at the shelters. That being the case, I don't actually see much reason to be concerned about transwomen being admitted - screen them with the normal risk-assessment profile they use for everyone being admitted, and if the risk is too great ask the woman involved to find some other service to help them.
More options
Context Copy link
perhaps even after that men may get their own shelter.
Sure, in an ideal world there would be sufficient resources for society to organize to help all people no matter what difficulties life throws at them. In our imperfect one, we're left to rely on what limited resources charity and government intervention can bring to bear on various problems.
I've already said that I'll accept imperfect charities as a practical matter, but I think the criticism with something like the Salvation Army or JKR's Beira's Place is that the populations they're denying service (gay people, trans women respectively) aren't going to add that much strain on their resources, and it seems petty to deny them.
Hopefully, if it is felt that there is some large unmet need for rape crisis centers for men in the Lothians area, someone will try to open such a facility.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I take a lot of inspiration from "don't negotiate with terrorist memeplexes."
The negotiating with terrorists analogy goes both ways. If you read their books they explicitly say that all negotiation is tactical: luring the victim into a moment of vulnerability to line up a kill shot, just like you would offer to deliver a pizza to a hostage-taker so your sniper can shoot him when he opens the door.
We had some wonderful posts from leftists just a few weeks ago who just couldn't understand why anyone would be foolish enough to keep the terms of a social compromise when they had the power to impose their will; the concept was utterly alien to them, like saying it's wrong to lie to Kant's axe murderer. All compromises are a temporary restriction to be abolished the second they hinder rather than help your goal.
Any negotiation you do isn't between two people who can come to a reasonable accommodation, it's between an agent of a totalizing ideology that will not stop until its goals are accomplished... and a victim that stands in its way. At the very best you might experience "united front work":
To it, you are the criminal that needs to be lied to, negotiated with in bad faith, and ultimately betrayed because no agreement with you is valid or enforceable. Because the goal is not coexisting with you, it is winning and erasing you and everything you believe in from history. Assurances like "nobody is coming for your children" don't actually mean anything: it's just a soothing noise, like an ambush predator instinctively imitates to make its prey feel safe. Or, like in that linked essay, a 1940s Chinese communist party liaison assuring the gullible Americans how much they love democracy and the USA, yee-haw boy-howdy.
So to the extent that being realistic about the intent of these actors is "denying their personhood", I deny it. "Less than human" would be an odd way of putting it, because in some sense being one component of a massive group-mind makes someone more than human, just not in any way that allows genuine person-to-person relationships to exist.
Putting it another way, a soldier wearing an enemy uniform is not less than human. If he was not wearing the uniform you might be friends. But if you walk up to him and offer to talk things out he will just shoot you, because that is the job he put the uniform on to do for his state, becoming the tool of a massive, uncaring, inhuman intelligence that seeks total victory rather than mutual understanding.
If you want to go full galaxy-brain on this, you can strip away another level of abstraction and say this: on the full biopolitical scale, there is no ideology, there are no goals, and there is no stop.
An ideology does not exist. What exists is a set of political organisations (thinktanks, ideologically-captured media, etc.), whose policies and membership are fluid but which retain some degree of institutional power.
Given large horizontal memetic transfer (schools, universities, social media), and a pre-existing tolerance for radicalism, it's not too hard to sketch out the Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution of those organisations. Reaching a goal doesn't destroy an organisation; it just causes those people who are satisfied there to leave and thus evaporatively-cools the organisation's policies. Organisations that actually are set up to self-destruct upon reaching a set goalpost do, and thus are not around for very long if the Overton Window isn't static. Radicalism draws both ire and interest, which is good for the organisation because interested people can join but irate non-members can't directly hurt it. And so on. I don't claim this to be the One True Lens to view things through, but it's an interesting one.
That said, this isn't a full blackpill way of looking at things. You can adjust the pressures on those organisations and prevent them from being self-sustaining enough for Lamarckian evolution. There's obviously the Hitlerian way of doing that, but that has its own terrible spirals and I don't advocate it. Here are some relatively-Actually-Liberal suggestions:
-Disestablish schools, replaced in whole or in part with homeschooling or community-schooling by an otherwise-unqualified parent living in the neighbourhood.
-Strangle university by scrapping government loans (and if you want to get really clever, disallow wage garnishment for unpaid private university loans; sounds pro-student, but forces a market failure).
-Sin-tax political nonprofits and social media (no need to be politically discriminatory about it; we all know which side benefits more from them).
-And, obviously, kill "disparate impact" and anything else legally forcing organisations to hire enemy saboteurs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not even sure this is true. At least not in any large number. I think there are tons of people who think "trans people" is an illegitimate category, but to think that 'trans people' are less than human requires you to first think 'trans people' is a meaningful term. It's a strange person indeed who thinks 'trans people exist and I hate them for it'. But then I take your point that whatever reference the general bigot group that thinks all deviation from the norm is contemptable uses to describe people who describe themselves as trans is not an endearing one. And agree with you that a lot of the problem is the false dichotomy of 'you either 100% endorse this worldview rife with incoherent beliefs or you live in irrational fear of trans people'.
I am not afraid irrationally or otherwise of people who believe they are metaphysically a different gender than their embodied sex. They seem a sad bunch with plenty of problems that I don't envy and am in fact empathetic to, this empathy actually forms some of the foundation of why I don't want it to spread to others if preventable. I just think that they are deeply confused. I am somewhat afraid of what might come of a militant ideology that takes these confused views as bedrock truth coming to power and I don't think this is an irrational fear. Obviously they do. If I'm wrong I suppose I'll be trans-advocate-phobic in the end.
I would like to help self describe trans people if I can, I am not convinced blindly agreeing with their deluded reality is helping.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's often true that doing what you can to add someone from a supposedly oppressed group will not be looked on kindly by that group's defenders. Remember the fried chicken and watermelon lunch that recently became an issue?
There are posible reasons why this is the case, but many of them could sound uncharitable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link