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 -
[Yes, it's my monthly post about my hobby horse.]
Perhaps the most recurrent complaint made by the trans activist coalition is that transgender people in Western countries face an elevated risk of violence and murder, and that this increased risk is directly attributable to anti-trans bigotry. The Transgender Day of Remembrance is observed every November 20th, to memorialise those murdered as a result of transphobia. Organisations like Human Rights Watch claim that violence against trans people in the US has reached "epidemic" levels. A Trump-instated genocide of trans people is either claimed to be imminent or already ongoing, albeit in its "early stages" (conveniently). Various US states have passed laws banning defendants from using the "trans panic" defense (i.e. the defendant was so shocked upon discovering that an object of their sexual desire was transgender that they lost control of their faculties) in murder trials, under the historically dubious claim that this defense has resulted in vastly reduced sentences or even outright acquittals. The increased risk of violence and murder that trans people ostensibly face is sometimes used to justify other policy demands made by TRAs (e.g. trans women must be permitted to use ladies' bathrooms, because if they're forced to use the men's room they'll get beaten up).
Gender-criticals like myself routinely push back on these claims, pointing out that one cannot simply attribute every murder of a trans person to transphobia (any more than every murder of a white person can be attributed to anti-white animus): many of the victims touted by Human Rights Campaign were murdered by a close acquaintance or a domestic partner, and in some cases the perpetrator was also trans. Similarly, a disproportionate share of the cited murder victims are usually sex workers, an already at-risk demographic even leaving transgender identity aside. A simple per capita analysis indicates that, in Western countries, trans people face a vastly reduced risk of murder compared to the general population. A major limitation of the per capita approach, however, is uncertainty over both numerator and denominator: it's possible that there are some murder victims whose transgender identity was not made public knowledge, and getting hard data on the absolute number of trans people in a given country is remarkably difficult and dependent on inherently noisy methods like polls and surveys (which become all the noisier if the question is worded in such a way that it's likely to be misinterpreted by a non-native English speaker).
Two academics at the University of Oxford, Michael Biggs and Ace North* (!), have developed a novel method of investigating the claim that trans people face an elevated risk of violence: comparing the ratio of murder victims to murder perpetrators. If the ratio for a particular demographic is greater than 1, murder victims in that demographic outnumber murder perpetrators, and vice versa. If trans people in the UK face an elevated risk of violence, one would expect the ratio of victims to perpetrators to be greater than 1; if their risk of violence has reached "epidemic" levels, one would expect the ratio to be much higher than other demographics (such as female people).
One detail I particularly like is that the researchers sourced their figures for transgender murder victims from a trans activist website, while their figures for transgender murderers were sourced from a gender-critical website, in hopes that the two organisations' respective incentives to make each figure as high as possible would offset each other. To be as generous to the trans activist coalition as possible, the researchers disambiguated murderers who already identified as transgender prior to their arrest and those who only began doing so afterwards. After assembling a dataset of victims and perpetrators, the researchers analysed their respective media coverage in the national broadcaster, the BBC.
What did they find?
Stray thoughts:
*Sounds like the name of an American character in an anime.
How did transgender issues become your hobby horse? Personal interactions with trans people (online or offline), gender issues of your own, workplace politics…? I’m generally curious as to why non-trans people get invested in this when it seems easy to ignore (especially now that it seems to be fading from the culture war issues du jour).
In any case I agree that white Western trans women probably aren’t at an extremely elevated risk of murder and that the trans genocide narrative is overblown, but even in the West, being trans can lead to discrimination, being ostracised by your friends and family, and make you more at risk of low level violence and hate crimes.
I’m not sure that follows. A romantic partner might commit murder because of the shame of being publically outed as being in a relationship with a trans gender person, and honour killings of trans people by their family members do occur. This is more common in cultures that do not accept trans people, which is why victims tend to be non-white or non-western. If transphobia becomes more widespread and accepted, it seems obvious that violence and discrimination will increase as a result.
As a trans woman, I don’t avoid the men’s room because of the risk of violence, but to avoid unnecessary attention and disruption when I’m in a public place. It’s not as dramatic and convincing as saying I need to use the men’s room or I’ll get punched, but eh, I don’t see why I should needlessly inconvenience myself, and a bathroom bill would just make things even worse due to false positives, enforcement issues, etc.
Not the OP, but a couple of points here. I could very easily say:
(I've omitted the ostracisation part, as I don't think that's supported in my parallel; but I don't think omitting it fundamentally changes the idea.)
The above is just true. But if men then had a culture of saying there was a "male genocide", and that their society was "androphobic" because of this, I'd get very annoyed, because -- as @WandererintheWilderness says -- it's an attempt to parlay a weaker, true claim ("men are more likely to be victims of violence") into a hysterical false one ("society is systemically murdering men!!")
Part of why I'm raising the parallel: one way trans activists misrepresent this stuff is by comparing trans women to women rather than to men. IIRC, men have a higher rate of being victims of violence than trans women? (It might require some statistical stuff like "once you correct for dangerous occupations like being a sex worker", or it might just be outright; I don't remember.)
There's something kind of ridiculous about this world model:
Like... no? This isn't even epicycles; this is no model at all. The dangerous portion of being (1) trans and (2) biologically male... is not the trans part. If a soldier chooses to call themselves a "trans accountant", they don't get to go "My workplace death rate is higher than cis accountants -- this is discrimination".
I appreciate you saying so, but this does seem like a weaker formulation than what you should probably agree to. "extremely elevated risk"? Is your position that white Western trans women are at an elevated risk of murder -- possibly even a very high one -- but it just doesn't rise to the level of "extremely"? Because I'm reasonably sure the accurate version of this would just be "they aren't at an elevated risk of murder". Similarly, I wouldn't say "the trans genocide is overblown", I'd say "the trans genocide is fictitious". We can certainly discuss different patterns of violence and how they interact with being trans, but framing that as "genocide" needs to be immediately met with "you are lying for political expediency". (The generalised "you", I mean; you're not lying.)
It's also a bit of a motte and bailey: the bulk of trans activism focuses on white Western culture as performing some kind of trans genocide. Then when criticised, it becomes "Well, in this non-white, non-Western part of the world, these non-white-non-Western cultures are dangerous for trans people!" Again, you're not personally responsible for what other people are arguing; but you get how this is frustrating, right?
Better to say, I think, that the trans genocide is a motte-and-bailey. What queer theorists mean when they discuss "trans genocide" among themselves is rarely anything to do with the murder rate - the actual analogy is to residential schools, not Auschwitz; cultural genocide, forced assimilation and reeducation, an attempt to stamp out trans as an identity. I think it's hard to argue that this isn't happening, given that a majority of conservatives on and off this forum would openly advocate for it. There's just a root disagreement about whether it's actually a bad thing or not.
(There's also a terminological dispute about whether it's ever appropriate to use "genocide" to talk about processes that don't involve literal mass murder, or if that's always, inherently, motte-and-bailey. I can see both sides of that argument, but I don't think we should over-focus on it in the trans case, because advocates of the "trans genocide" terminology are ultimately just drawing on what is, as per the Wikipedia link, a widespread use of the term in their intellectual milieu. They're doing a separate disingenuous thing when they try to bring up the sloppy statistics to justify the trans-genocide thing, deliberately blurring the line between genocide-as-murder and genocide-as-assimilation more than they need to.)
Would it be useful to compare this to the Christian Genocide, for which I am confident an equivalent and much more strongly-evidenced argument could be made? I have examples of Christians who show themselves in public being beaten by uniformed thugs while the police look the other way in Blue territory. Does that sort of thing happen to Trans people in Red territory?
Would the above argument be one you likewise see both sides of?
Well, I don't think mainstream Blues in America have "we should make all Christians renounce the faith and ban indoctrinating children into Christianity" as an explicit or even implicit goal in the way that a lot of mainstream Reds would proudly endorse "we should make all transgenders detransition and ban indoctrinating children into questioning their gender" as reflective of their agenda and beliefs. And as I said, I think that such large-scale policies are much better grounding for a cultural-genocide claims that acts of individual violence - i.e. whatever degree of validity the "trans genocide" case enjoys, it rests on the existence of political will towards dissolving trans identity, not on anecdotal claims of thugs beating people up.
But certainly, to the extent that policies intended to erase Christians as a cultural identity exist, there is a valid case that they would fit the bill of "cultural genocide" as leftist theory defines it. For example, I think that to the extent that the application of "genocide" to crimes that aren't literal mass murder is ever reasonable, it's reasonable to call Muslim jihadis genocidal even if they ideally want to forcibly convert all infidels rather than slaughter them.
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
More options
Context Copy link