site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9191 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

[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?

  1. Since the beginning of this century, the ratio of trans murder victims to perpetrators in the UK was 0.8: there have been more transgender murderers than murder victims.
  2. Transgender people follow the male pattern of homicide, rather than female. For all British males in the period, the ratio of murder victims to perpetrators was 0.7, while for British females it was 2.9 (i.e. even though women make up a minority of murder victims, they are three times more likely to be a murder victim than to commit a murder).
  3. The BBC covers trans murder victims far more extensively than it does trans murderers, with an average of 12.5 articles per victim vs. 3.9 per murderer. (The researchers acknowledge that the primary cause of this discrepancy is the single outlier case of Brianna Ghey, something of a man-bites-dog story as both victim and perpetrators were only sixteen at the time.) If a murder victim was transgender, this is usually mentioned prominently in the article, whereas a murderer's transgender identity is often not mentioned at all, or omitted from initial reporting and only stealth-edited in after complaints from readers.

Stray thoughts:

  • I was surprised to find that the researchers' dataset of murder victims includes no female victims at all, while their dataset of murderers includes two female perpetrators.
  • As noted above, sex workers are overrepresented among the victims, making up 36% thereof, and it appears that several were murdered by their johns. Likewise, many victims were murdered by friends, romantic partners or family members, which suggests that transphobic animus plays a minimal role in violence against trans people.
  • While the number of male inmates in women's prisons ought to be zero, I am sympathetic (up to a point) to the idea that transgender inmates may face an increased risk of violence from their fellow inmates, and that they ought to be protected. (Some people think that extrajudicial violence from fellow inmates is just part-and-parcel of incarceration and if you can't do the time, don't do the crime: I am not one of those people.) However, I think the best way to accomplish this is by segregating violent offenders from non-violent (this is already the entire impetus behind minimum- and maximum-security prisons) and placing especially vulnerable prisoners on protection if necessary, on a case-by-case basis. @Celestial-body-NOS, while sensible enough to recognise that putting male inmates in the women's estate is a bad idea, thinks the best solution is to house all trans-identifying male inmates in a dedicated facility, lumping together those who've been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria with opportunists who only came out as trans post-conviction. I argued that, even from the narrow perspective of protecting transgender inmates, this policy proposal seems worse than mine: I'm not persuaded that the best way to ensure the safety of non-violent offenders who've identified as trans their entire lives is to house them in a facility with violent offenders who only started identifying as trans immediately prior to conviction. In light of this exchange, it was interesting to find that one of the murderers in the researchers' data set is Daniel (later Sophie) Eastwood, who was convicted of murdering a fellow inmate while serving a prison sentence for dangerous driving.
  • The researchers compare their dataset with comparable data in the US, and find that trans people in the US face an elevated risk of murder compared to the UK. But the US has a higher murder rate than the UK in general, and this is probably primarily explicable by the proportion of the population which is black.
  • The researchers compare their study with a Swedish study I've referred to many times, which followed trans people who medically transitioned over three decades, and found that trans-identifying men were twenty times more likely to be convicted of a crime than females, while trans-identifying females were ten times more likely to commit violent crimes than cis females of the same age (testosterone causing increased aggression?).
  • The prominent mentioning of the victims' transgender identity and omitting of the perpetrators' transgender identity is not entirely attributable to editorial bias, and may be downstream of official guidance for judges in murder trials.
  • Even some of the reporting about transgender murderers seems intended to promote the idea of trans people as uniquely oppressed and ostracised e.g. articles about Jenny Swift and Rowan Thompson emphasised their suicides in prison and only belatedly mentioned that they'd been convicted for murder, almost as an afterthought.
  • As I recently complained about, several articles about transgender murderers referred to the perpetrators as "women" without any kind of qualification or disambiguation. These are not our crimes.

*Sounds like the name of an American character in an anime.

I was surpised to find that the researchers' dataset of murder victims includes no female victims at all, while their dataset of murderers includes two female perpetrators.

Are you referring to Male-to-Female trans people here? Usually these are identified as "she" and treated as women.

You're finding the same things I found when going in to the figures; generally "X was murdered for being trans!" turns out to be "X was murdered in domestic violence incident/criminal activity/hit and run". That last category has left me with fond recollections of the transphobic motor vehicles, doubtless the latest iteration of the racist truck, where cars and other motors kill people just for being trans and not, for instance, ordinary traffic accidents that happen to cis people.

Are you referring to Male-to-Female trans people here?

No, the table lists the perpetrators' natal sex. (I wish we could just say "sex" rather than "natal sex": the sex you're born with is the sex you're stuck with.) Of the 20 transgender murderers, two were female (i.e. trans men).

I wish we could just say "sex" rather than "natal sex": the sex you're born with is the sex you're stuck with.

If, as is my understanding, a distinction between 'sex' and 'gender' uses 'sex' to refer to biological factors and 'gender' to refer to mental and social factors, then biological sex is a combination of things, some of which we currently have the ability to change and some of which we do not.

If one defines 'sex' as "If I look between this person's legs (and don't get a face full of pepper spray), will I see a tallywhacker or a hoo-ha?", at least 5% and possibly as many as 13% of trans individuals (per statistics linked in a previous post by above) have changed sex from that with which they were born, and an unknown fraction more retain the sex with which they were born only due to lack of opportunity.

  • -10

If one defines 'sex' as "If I look between this person's legs (and don't get a face full of pepper spray), will I see a tallywhacker or a hoo-ha?"

Well, that's not how any sensible person would define sex, so I really don't know why you're bringing up this hypothetical scenario.

I've made it abundantly, abundantly clear to you that when I use the term "sex", I'm referring to whether a person was born with the organs associated with the production of large or small gametes, even if faulty. Obviously one cannot change what organs one was born with, and medical technology currently admits of no way to transform organs which produce large gametes into organs which produce small gametes, or vice versa. If you were born with functioning testicles, the only kind of gamete you will ever be able to produce throughout your life is a small one, and emasculating yourself doesn't change that.

Your continued insistence on trying to imply that, by virtue of being gender-critical, I'm therefore a sex pest obsessed with the genitals of complete strangers is not just tiresome and dishonest, but also profoundly immature. If this is the best rebuttal you can think of, maybe just don't bother.

As an aside: your contention that the configuration of the genitals belonging to trans-identified males are some kind of jealously guarded secret is not at all consonant with my experience. This is information that trans-identified males seem disproportionately keen to volunteer, even (especially) to those who have expressed no desire to hear about it (that is, if the legions of such people inviting TERFs to "choke on my girldick" and similar are any indication).

Well, that's not how any sensible person would define sex

It's how they define it when a baby is assigned male or female.

when I use the term "sex", I'm referring to whether a person was born with the organs associated with the production of large or small gametes, even if faulty.

To the best of my knowledge, when parents ask whether they had a boy or a girl, doctors and midwives do not generally take biopsies from the gonads of infants and culture them to see what size gametes they produce.

They usually look between the legs to see whether they find a sticky-outy bit or a hole.

medical technology currently admits of no way to transform organs which produce large gametes into organs which produce small gametes, or vice versa. If you were born with functioning testicles, the only kind of gamete you will ever be able to produce throughout your life is a small one

Skill issue.

Your continued insistence on trying to imply that, by virtue of being gender-critical, I'm therefore a sex pest obsessed with the genitals of complete strangers

I do not accuse you of acting out of carnal desire. However, the fact that you are not thus motivated does not change the fact that other people's organs are none of your business. The reproductive system is considered especially private in most societies, but you would still be out of line if you insisted that people use bathrooms corresponding to the configuration at birth of their heart or kidneys.

If someone wants access to your medical records, do you think they should need a Good Reason, or is the fact that they are not touching themself sufficient justification?

If some wants to know the PIN for your bank card, not out of an intention to use it for fraud, but because they think it relevant whether it is a prime/square/triangular number, does the fact that they are not technically a thief mean that they are justified in prying it out of you?

your contention that the configuration of the genitals belonging to [trans-women] are some kind of jealously guarded secret

I do not contend that all trans-women keep the state of their genitals secret, so much as that an individual trans-woman ought to have the right to decide for herself whether and when to disclose it.

Skill issue.

Sincerely – what on earth are you talking about?

If some wants to know the PIN for your bank card, not out of an intention to use it for fraud, but because they think it relevant whether it is a prime/square/triangular number, does the fact that they are not technically a thief mean that they are justified in prying it out of you?

If the PIN for my bank card was tattooed on my forehead in 60pt characters and I didn't wear a beanie or a burqa, it would be meaningless to demand that people respect my privacy.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats