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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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I don't think "it is often a sex thing" actually follows from "trans women often dress more provocatively than cis women". I believe the main reason for the latter fact is, rather, that once you've broken one taboo, you're more likely to break another. Or to put it another way, when you've already made yourself a freak in the eyes of an appreciable fraction of society simply by transitioning, when you've already joined a class that a good deal of normies will find disgusting on principle and decided to love yourself in spite of their contempt, you're well on your way to unlearning all other socially-constructed shames. You're very likely to think "to hell with fatphobia, I don't have to disguise my figure to gain the approval of a bunch of snobs"; to think "radical feminists had the right idea, forcing women to shave their legs is patriarchal bullshit, body hair is natural, body hair is beautiful, why should I hide mine if I don't want to?"; and so on, and so forth. I believe there's a fair number of trans nudists.

And like… I think this explanation is broadly neutral? You might believe, as I do, that this is a basically healthy, enlightened attitude and that the kinds of cis women you describe, who regard small breasts and body hair as "defects", would be a lot happier if they adopted at least parts of. Or you might believe that it's a slippery slope of post-modernism where throwing out the basic division of the sexes leads inexorably to the breakdown of any belief in aesthetic principles or social norms of any kind, in favor of a kind of feel-good hippieslop. Either might follow. The point is that your observations are handily explained by my framework of "people who've transed their genders have basically thrown out the social rulebook already, so they're likely to be unconventional and scandalous in all sorts of other dimensions", with no need for transness to itself be a sex thing.

Your explanation is "They have freed themselves of society's lame constraints."

My explanation is: "It's a fetish."

Your explanation is more charitable than mine, but I think my explanation is more realistic. It more closely matches what I have observed about trans behavior, and it more closely matches what I observe about the specific ways in which they choose to present themselves.

Of course you could be right and I could be wrong. But it will take more than an alternative, more charitable theory to convince me.