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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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I forget whether I already posted this, but it occurred to me recently that it may be more accurate to say that J.K. Rowling, and perhaps TERFs in general, are sexist than to say that they're transphobic. Rowling supports the right of people to dress however they like and receive whatever medical intervention they desire. She uses preferred pronouns in polite company. But she wants spaces to exist that discriminate based on biological sex, without taking someone's gender identity or expression into account. The term for sex-based discrimination is sexism.

Words gain meaning through usage rather than from first principles, so I'm not sure "accurate" is the right way to describe this. You make a compelling argument for why one ought to call TERFs "sexist" rather than "transphobic," but my sense is that this argument wouldn't be particularly convincing to the types of people who actually tend to use these terms "in the wild" and thus have the most influence in what these terms mean.

Well, is it sexist to say "people with dicks should not be in women's prisons"? Is it sexist to say "people with vaginas should not be in men's prisons"? It's a very cutesy-poo logic-chopping way of approaching the subject, but I think trans activists would be outraged because "trans people are the sex they identify as, you bigot!" and the rest of us think that this is just dumb to say that "you're being sexist against a guy in a bad wig and skimpy dresses pretending to be a woman".