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[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.
First let me obligatorily clear my throat and say I appreciate your willingness to participate here in what I know is a fairly hostile environment for you despite our rules.
For me, trans issues are not a big "thing" for me. They are not my hobby horse. In a sense, I push back on trans ideology for reasons similar to what @FtttG said, and similarly to why I keep getting into it with the annoying Joo-posters despite antisemitism not really being a big issue personally for me either: sometimes you see people saying offensively retarded shit that makes you feel like Roger Rabbit trying to keep it together while someone is tapping out Shave and a Haircut
"But," you protest, "most trans people aren't saying offensively retarded shit! We just want to be left alone!"
Well, yes. And no.
See, even the moderate, normal, well behaved trans people will generally be reluctant to criticize the strident activists,.the cancel mobs, the social censure that falls on anyone who clears their throat and says maybe trans women shouldn't be put in women's prisons. Sure, you might agree that Jessica Yaniv is crazy and acting in bad faith and maybe not even actually trans. But you still want us to take Caitlyn Jenner or Rachel Levine seriously.
In my personal experience, trans people I know are mostly chill. Most of the time.
Until you Ask Questions. Until they sense Doubt.
Then you get the Side-Eye. The "friendly reminders." The questions that aren't really questions. And you find yourself having to make Decisions.
I have had to make advance Decisions, simply because I know trans people. If they break the detente, if they sniff heresy, if they sense my Wrongthink and decide to press me, what is my response and how will I deal with the social fallout? Which friends am I willing to lose? Which online groups will I be forced to abandon?
Since I won't lie, I mostly stay quiet and Avoid the Issue and hope they will maintain the unspoken detente. Most do. But I know some won't. So whenever I am interacting with a trans person, besides having to suppress the occasional eye rolls at the inevitable water-testing declarations to claim ideological space (never met a trans person who didn't do this at least once), I have to be prepared for what happens if I am caught out.
And I resent this. I really fucking resent this.
If I were allowed to just admit "Look, I don't really think you're a woman and we can disagree about trans women in sports and JK Rowling, but I'll respect your pronouns and I honestly do want you to live your best life however you wish to," that would be fine.
But too many trans people, having had a taste of power, will not accept that. Not when they can Punish you. Not when they can either make you bend the knee and say deer-horse, or have you (socially) executed.
I resent this. And it makes me less well disposed towards trans people in general, to the point where even though I wish no ill to any individual, yourself included, I begin to cheer when trans people take losses even under the clammy auspices of Trump.
I'm sorry, but I wish we could go back to the detente where everyone agreed it didn't matter what's in our hearts as long as we outwardly treat each other with respect and civility. Can we do that? I'd like to do that.
I'm in the same position. I would love to just wait for the trans fad to blow over (as long as we minimize the long-term harm to kids - THAT'S something I truly can't ignore). Unfortunately I'm a shut-in whose only socialization comes from various online videogame and puzzle and rationalist circles... and they are absolutely rampant with trans activists (and far-left activists in general). My experience with them has been dreadful.
There's a giant yearly puzzle event that's run at MIT, and I used to be on a particular team. I didn't have a lot in common with them, except that we all liked math. Actually, most of them came from a math club whose emeriti included, um, Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison (cough). But this was enough to unite us. ...Until around 7-8 years ago when the social contagion factor really kicked in, and now 40% of them are trans and another 30% various other flavours of sexual activist. And one year we were doing the puzzle event, and the people running it made the mistake of making one of the events a funny riff on a gender-reveal party. Long story short, it ended in the organizers - who were volunteers who had spent a year of their life working hard to bring us this free event - visiting and tearfully (yes, literally) apologizing to us for their thoughtcrime. It felt almost like a struggle session. I was absolutely disgusted with our team, and I never felt comfortable around them since.
Even though I've since switched teams, the problem is endemic almost everywhere I go. Want to watch people solve sudokus on Twitch? You're 50% likely to hit a stream plastered with LGBT and trans and various other sexual tags (and they're all talking to each other, so you'd better not inform the guy with a male voice and a big-breasted avatar that he looks ridiculous). There are puzzle Discords that I'm on that I rely on to find good puzzles, but Discord servers are closed, controlled, ephemeral communities - the opposite of the old ideal of the Internet - and I will lose this access if I ever let a hint out of my actual centrist politics. (I'm actually a little surprised it hasn't happened already; at some point maybe people will connect my Motte posts with me, it's not like my identity is disguised.)
People often think of "The Emperor's New Clothes" as an inspirational fable, where the innocent child saves everyone from their plight. But in real life, it would not end well for the child. I try to be a genuine rationalist. I want to be able to say things that are true. And I'm simply not able to in any of my social interactions. It eats away at my soul.
The apology from the organizers at that club sounds ridiculous, but it's the only anecdote you actually mention to justify your idea that "your experience with [trans activists] has been dreadful". All the rest of your post is just complaining that you meet a lot of them, and possibly that they, uh, don't tend to like it when you tell them they're "ridiculous" out of the blue?… I don't mean this as an insult, but it's hard to avoid the impression that what fundamentally feels unbearable to you is their sheer existence in your vicinity, not anything egregious that they actually do.
Yes, I do find it extremely uncomfortable dealing with people who make everything about their sexuality (especially very weird sexuality). This used to be considered normal. And now I am not allowed to voice this preference, lest people like you call me a bigot. (You very clearly did mean it as an insult.) But I don't think you read "the rest of my post", because I clearly mentioned that I will lose access to my hobby if I ever inadvertently expose my true feelings. That's a rather different kind of dreadful than "gosh I sure hate that these people exist".
I meant it as a reasoned accusation of inconsistency in your argument - you tried to justify your rancor as based on specific "dreadful experiences" with trans activists, then failed to actually prove this claim. I take the point that your complaint is the fear of "losing access to your hobby if [you] ever inadvertently expose [your] true feelings" but that's still not an actual lived experience, just an assumption about a hypothetical scenario. I don't think your post was honest. If your genuine complaint is that you find it extremely uncomfortable existing in the vicinity of trans people, at a basic vibes level, then don't act like your actual problem is a particular subclass of "activists" behaving in specific dreadful ways! By your new, more honest claim, you'd still be extremely uncomfortable with having to share your hobbies with totally apolitical trans streamers and gamers who gave you no indication that they'd cancel you for your opinions.
(Also, I think you are wrong that trans people are "people who make everything about their sexuality". I know too many asexual trans people not to laugh that claim out of the room. I have too many relatives who I just don't buy are incestuously involving me in a kink by asking me to use their new pronouns. But I grant you that if you're talking about an instinctive "ick" you can't suppress, rather than a rational position, this doesn't necessarily make a difference - if it feels sexual to your lizard brain, it is what it is. I can sympathize: I find the sight of people with piercings very uncomfortable, no matter how many times my higher consciousness repeats to my empathy reflex that the other monkey doesn't actually have a dirty nail driven into its flesh.)
Well, not all of them, but let's say a disproportionate share. I've met hundreds of women in my life, and to the best of my knowledge not one has ever left the house wearing a T-shirt with the word "CUM SLUT" emblazoned across it. I do, however, know a trans-identified male (whom I'll call Bob) who has done this several times. Bob was doing a Secret Santa thing in work, for which the company was using a website in which you could add items to your wishlist and they would be visible only to the person assigned to be your Secret Santa. Bob requested a mug with the words "I LOVE GIRL COCK" emblazoned across it. One of her colleagues complained to a mutual friend that was profoundly inappropriate conduct for a workplace. ("He ain't persecuted, he just a asshole.")
To the best of my knowledge, Bob has never been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria, gave no indication of a desire to transition as a child, and only came out as trans in his mid-twenties. Prior to coming out, Bob admitted to a close friend (who in turn mentioned it to me) that he was consuming so much pornography that he was debating whether he really ought to financially support the "content creators" thereof. I have a very hard time believing Bob's pornography consumption is wholly unrelated to his subsequent trans identification. I would go so far as to say that I don't think Bob identifies as a "woman" so much as he identifies as the hypersexualised portrayal of femininity which exists in porn and nowhere else: women in real life don't wear "CUM SLUT" T-shirts, but women in porn certainly do.
Another example. Before we met, my girlfriend once worked as a tour guide in her home country, in which role she met a trans-identified male from an English-speaking country (whom I'll call Charlie). Literally the first time my girlfriend met Charlie, Charlie admitted that he'd fully medically transitioned, and asked my girlfriend if she'd be interested in seeing Charlie's neovagina. I believe they'd known each other for all of an hour.
I know, I know, generalising from a small sample size, Chinese robber fallacy, yeah yeah yeah. But I'd appreciate it if you could answer the following questions in complete honesty. Do you know any female people who habitually walk around in public wearing a T-shirt with "CUM SLUT" emblazoned across it? Do you know any female people who think it's appropriate workplace conduct to anonymously ask one of their colleagues to buy them a coffee mug reading "I LOVE COCK"? Do you know any female people who consume so much pornography (and so often) that they're debating whether they ought to financially support the companies or individuals who produce it? In your experience, when a female person meets another female person for the first time, do they typically expose their genitalia to one another? In your opinion, what is the difference between what Charlie proposed doing to my girlfriend and what Louis CK was cancelled over?
Like, when you have Pulitzer Prize-winning trans journalists openly admitting that they became trans as a direct consequence of watching too much "sissy hypno" porn, I think the cat is out of the bag. I'm not saying every trans-identified male is a pornsick fetishist (indeed, per Blanchard's typology I suspect that the homosexual variety has a completely different etiology to the autogynephiliac). But I am saying that trans-identified males are disproportionately likely to be pornsick fetishists when compared to males in general (and especially when compared to the females these TIMs supposedly identify as), and that this goes double for the terminally online trans-identified males which it sounds like @SnapDragon was interacting with.
And as an aside, I find it a profound insult to my intelligence that I'm expected to believe that males like this "identify as woman" or have an "internally felt sense of womanhood", when it's abundantly obvious to everyone that they are performing a misogynistic caricature of femininity that owes more of its particulars to Hugh Hefner and MindGeek than it does to any actual flesh-and-blood woman. I can't imagine how offensive I'd find it if I was a woman and I was expected to nod along with this and pretend that I believe that wearing a "CUM SLUT" T-shirt is just the sort of thing women do, that there are no meaningful differences between me and a male person wearing a T-shirt like that.
And if, after all of the foregoing, you still want to accuse me of Chinese robbering, then fine, I accept that. But at least meet me halfway and acknowledge that, even if not all trans-identified males behave anything like the above, it is perfectly reasonable (and not bigoted or hateful) to be creeped out by males who behave like the above, even if they identify as trans, and that they should not get a pass on their inappropriately sexual behaviour just because of how they identify.
Ironically, and I don't know whose case this helps if anyone's - I do, but they're biological females who identify as male. (No, not my trans relative. I know multiple FTMs.)
I do know of the type of trans woman you describe, but I still think parsing their lifestyle as a sex thing is reductive. For a start, many of them consider themselves lesbians - that is to say, they are, in biological terms, heterosexual - so I don't really buy that they get a sexual thrill from being acknowledged as women by men. Mostly, I think it's a combination of the queer community having relaxed sexual mores, and of biological males starting out hornier than the average biological female, but suddenly unlearning all the specifically male norms that cause men to disguise and obfuscate anything to do with their raw sexuality.
'Bob' is perhaps a different matter if she really was so taken with pornography, but 'Charlie' seems a very good example of the kind of thing I mean: boys in a state of nature love showing their willies to people, including straight boys showing theirs off to other straight boys. The only reason men don't do it to women is that society teaches them it's very, very rude indeed. (Perhaps ruder than it actually is, I daresay, but then, as I said, I have naturist leanings at a philosophical level, though the actual hobby has never appealed to me.) Now here comes 'Charlie', who, because she now holds herself to be a woman socially, no longer feels bound by the "it's very rude for a man to ask women if they want to see his willy" rule. But neither is she especially aware of a "it's very rude for a woman to ask women if they want to see her foofoo" rule; even if she knows of one, she'd would write it off as patriarchal prudishness. So the exchange you witnessed ensues.
I don't want to claim that the boyish impulse to show off one's cool willy is a wholly non-sexual one, or that this end result is okay; but I think it'd be wrong to necessarily treat expressions in trans women's behavior of this kind of spontaneous exhibitionism, or even more explicit male-style horniness, as a specific form of fetishism, or to conclude that they're sneakily getting off all the time just from being perceived as female.
(I don't deny that some trans women arrive at their decisions through sexual fantasies; but I don't think this means that their subsequent female identification need be a purely sexual thing, in much the same way that attraction between two people can start as sexual desire and blossom into the full spectrum of romantic love. You might put on a dress because you think it's hot, then look at yourself in the mirror, and realize, oh wait, this feels right, I want this even when I don't have an erection. It might be helpful to think of a certain kind of transition as a process of falling in love with a person you're becoming.)
Oh, the perfect-platonic-essence-of-gender-written-on-your-soul approach isn't my position either.
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I think you are being dishonest. Nowhere in his post (or mine) did we indicate that we are uncomfortable with trans people "existing in our vicinity."
See, this is exactly what I am talking about. You pretend that it's all about irrational "icks" and that trans people aren't actually doing anything. Are you seriously denying that to reveal an "ick" (and I don't mean by declaring something offensive, just revealing with a slip of the tongue that you don't really think of someone as female or that you aren't wholeheartedly onboard with Trans Rights Are Human Rights) has social consequences? Do you think someone deserves to lose their social circle for not being properly aligned?
You say we're imagining hypothetical scenarios. Come on. If you pay any attention to left leaning hobby spaces ( which is almost all hobby spaces) you know it's not hypothetical what happens to someone who says JK Rowling isn't a monster, actually.
As for being inappropriately sexual, I believe you that you know lots of asexual trans people. Do you believe me that most trans people I know dress or behave in off-puttingly sexual ways, at least occasionally, in a way that seems intended to test boundaries and tolerance? Do you think this common experience is something us "transphobes" make up?
Not in SnapDragon's original post - but SnapDragon's original post began with a claim that "[his] experience with them has been dreadful". And then most of the post amounted to listing all the spaces in which he encounters a high percentage of trans people, without actual elaboration on what made his personal experience with them "dreadful". This naturally led me to suspect that it was the sheer experience of interacting with them which he deemed "dreadful", rather than any particular objectionable behavior on their part - making the framing of the argument as "I'm only so worked up about trans people because they've been awful to me" deceitful.
I'm not saying that the worry over hypothetical scenarios where SnapDragon is ostracized for gender-critical views is paranoid or irrational. But I don't think it's honest to start with "my experiences with trans activists have been dreadful", and, when pressed, admit that in fact nothing dreadful has happened to you, you're just constantly afraid that it might. Imagine a black activist saying he's only anti-white because of his personal "dreadful experiences" with white people, but, when questioned, he admits that he just means the stress of interacting with random white people with a constant background fear that they're violent racists who'll beat him up if he ever accidentally does something to offend them. I think this would be disingenuous even if we imagine our activist living in a genuinely very racist town, where that fear isn't actually irrational. He hasn't had that experience. He just hasn't.
Moreover, I took SnapDragon's reply as agreeing that he ultimately felt an "ick" about interacting with trans people ("I do find it extremely uncomfortable dealing with people who make everything about their sexuality", where, FWIW, I glossed him as equating being trans with making everything about your sexuality, not just saying that a lot of trans people happen to be over-sexed). I'm not accusing all transphobes/GCs of only being motivated by such an ick; but SnapDragon's first post gave the impression that he, in particular, was, and his second post seemed to confirm it explicitly.
Hence:
I believe you, but this is a completely different claim from the claim that being trans is inherently a sex thing and therefore discomfort with being surrounded by trans people is justifiable as discomfort with people being off-puttingly sexual in your personal space without your consent - which is what I took SnapDragon to be saying.
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