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 -
Does anyone who is pro-trans want to steelman gender ideology for me and try to field questions? It's always seemed rather ridiculous to me (for example, the idea that someone with XY chromosomes, a penis, and the physical size of a man might actually be a woman) but I realized the other day that I haven't looked carefully at the details of pro-trans arguments.
I realize that this is something I could probably look up elsewhere online, but I would like to follow up with critical questions so that the whole argument is laid bare without any motte/bailey pivots.
To start things off, I understand that those who adhere to gender ideology draw a distinction between "sex" and "gender." "sex" refers to the markers such as male versus female genitalia; XX versus XY chromosome; etc. which have traditionally been used to distinguish between human males and human females. "Gender" (according to gender ideology) refers to a person's internal feelings in regards to their sex. So that a person who is of the male sex, might possibly be of female gender and vice versa. The purpose of sex reassignment procedures (hormones, surgery, etc.) is to align the disconnect between the person's sex and their gender. But even in the absence of such procedures, a person who is of the male sex and the female gender should be treated by society as a female (and vice versa). Even to the point where a another person's sexual preferences should go to the gender, not the sex, of a potential romantic partner. So that a straight man or a lesbian woman should be okay dating an individual who is of male sex but female gender, and if not they are a "transphobe."
Is that a fair summary of gender ideology? If not, what did I leave out? Or what did I include that's incorrect?
You say vague things like "pro-trans" but it is better to stick to specific claims and policies. You mention a particular kind of framework called "gender ideology" but of course it's not clear what that framework specifically entails. For the first, I will talk about dating expectations since you mention it; for the second, I will give arguments that actual woke people seem to give.
In another reply, you bring up the superstraight TikTok trend. Here is something you missed: Woke gender ideologists are still relatively libertarian from a love perspective. They would not require a lesbian to suck any particular girl dick, or for anyone to date any particular trans person. The same non-entitlement arguments used on resentful incels apply to resentful trans people.
The key is understanding sexual orientation and gender expression. The only valid sexual orientations are those based on a certain allowed list of things: personality (pansexual), gender expression (hetero-, homo-), maybe some other aspects, whatever. This means "attracted only to people with college degrees" is not a sexual orientation. The reason is that "having a college degree" is not an aspect of gender expression. This is also why "attracted only to people with tattoos" or "attracted only to people with certain genitals" is not a sexual orientation.
College degrees, tattoos, and genitals -- these things are mere preference. (Flashback to Amy Coney Barret's verbal blunder!) So you can be attracted to someone and later lose interest once you find out they don't have a college degree or whatever.
One intuition pump for you is (assuming you are a normal straight guy): imagine a very attractive young woman, and then imagine learning later she has a penis. You probably don't want anything to do with her anymore. That's fine! But it is proof you can be attracted to trans people.
The woke way for a transphobe (or undercover-racist) to date: "Yes, I'm attracted to trans (or black) girls." And then just don't actually date any of them.
I don't understand how this wouldn't be a demonstration of the exact opposite: that a transwoman being a transwoman (i.e. male) is exactly what makes them unattractive to a straight man, overriding how they appear superficially.
If genitals were the actual thing that "attractive" meant, then this thought experiment would be incoherent. If genitals were the actual thing you meant by "attractive," then "imagine a very attractive young woman" would cause you to visualize a scene where the woman has taken off her clothes for you to inspect her.
My thought experiment is perfectly coherent to you, because you intuitively treat "attractive" as what the woke call gender expression: makeup, face shape, personality, stuff like that.
Of course, realizing that you can be attracted to trans people is alarming and offensive, which is I guess what causes all this kind of reaction.
This is just word games around what "attractive" means, though. If you mean "someone that I am sexually attracted to," as in, "imagine a very attractive young woman" means "imagine a young woman that you are very sexually attracted to," then yes, obviously it's a scene where it's a woman for whom I have some knowledge of her genitals and all that (likely personality too). But that's rarely what people mean when they say someone is "attractive," which is really just short-hand for referring to those "gender expression" characteristics, since most interaction with most people happen on surface-level, and often has little to do with "am I sexually attracted to them?" I find Hanry Cavill an "attractive" man, but I'd find sex with Oprah Winfrey - whom I find "not attractive" - to be more appealing than with him.
Obviously, those are two different things. Again, your thought experiment perfectly demonstrates the opposite: that a straight man is unlikely to be "attracted" to trans males, even if they might find their superficial characteristics to be "attractive."
Also, I would prefer if you did not engage in Bulverism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Imagine you like the colour red but you want to paint your shed green, and when the person you paid to paint your shed buys a pot of green paint and opens it they find that it's full of red paint, and you get annoyed that they've painted your shed red and their explanation is that the label says that it's green, and besides colour exists on a spectrum and what we call red is a neuro-socio-linguistic construction, and you're failing to account for people who are red-green colour blind.
Imagine if the painter tells you they have painted all of their own sheds red because they believe that red sheds are better than green sheds, but they reluctantly agree to repaint your shed and then go and pour the leftover "green" paint into a new pot of green paint, making it neither red nor green. How is that possible to add red-called-green to green and get something that isn't red, red-called-green, or green? Does it matter if they show you their revised work in a black-and-white photo where you can't tell what colour the shed is? Does it matter if they show you the lid from the new pot they used that objectively proves the new paint was green before it was opened, or that the labels on both pots say green?
More options
Context Copy link
Agreed, that's why I started the thread. I am trying to understand the mainstream progressive/leftist/woke view on transgenderism and to scrutinize it. If you are saying that no such consensus view exists, fine, but that's a different issue.
Ok, and who gets to decide what is on the allowed list?
Sure, if "attracted to trans people" includes "unknowingly attracted to trans people." But so what? What's your point here?
I'm a normal straight guy. I have no sexual attraction for men (as that term is traditionally defined). This includes trans-identifying-men, no matter how traditionally feminine they are in their appearance. (By "sexual attraction," I am not including unknowing sexual attraction.) I suspect that because of this, many Leftists would label me a "transphobe" and imply (or state) that there is something wrong with me. Do you agree that many people would do so? And would you agree with those people?
Oh, woke people do of course.
The point is an illustration of what the words "attracted to" and "preference" actually mean in practice.
Hopefully you're starting to understand the woke argument? If you have to say "By X I am not including certain kinds of X" then there's a problem here.
I think they would say you are not actually attracted to femininity at all! The core gender-ideologist claim is that Caitlyn Jenner is in the same bucket as Angelina Jolie, and they call that bucket femininity. They wouldn't quite say "you are attracted to genitals" because genitals are not a kind of gender expression. (I want to re-iterate that 'attracted to college degrees' is incoherent, but 'preference for college degrees' is not.)
Finally, they'll darkly hint that you seem to view women as bodies attached to a hole, or something.
Well the problem is that some ambiguity has been injected into a commonly used word.
In any event, thank you for answering my questions. Assuming that your responses are consistent with mainstream progressive thinking on transgenderism, I am satisfied that it's a bunch of ridiculous nonsense propped up by silly word games.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with this. I am not pro-trans, but I understand it enough I'd say. The entire "gender identity" idea starts with noting that some people have a condition that causes them to feel like they have the brain of a woman but the body of a man, or vice versa. Take the idea that said people feel uncomfortable being reminded of their sex, and work backwards to make sex as irrelevant as possible. With the exception of an extreme fringe, they won't directly insult you for not wanting to date a trans person. They just insist it be called "genital preference" and avoid pointing out that it's because they're trans, in keeping with never mentioning what sex a person is.
Though they will occasionally imply that "genital preference" is internalized transphobia conditioned by society, so they can tell themselves they aren't pressuring you to change, simply offering a helpful suggestion.
Yes, trans people have a lot of trouble dating and are the left-coded version of incels. For transwomen, most are disgusted by them and society sees them as stealing valor. For transmen, they have the typical difficulties. I think the quagmire of being unwanted nicely explains the resentment that incels and (some) trans people feel about all this. This is opposed to the other, Just World narrative where (e.g. Incel's) moral failings cause dating problems.
What is interesting to me, and I'm not sure if this is a coincidence, is that so many trans women start off looking like nerdy and loser guys -- these guys seem like they would be vulnerable to becoming incel in the first place. Likewise, a lot of nonbinary girls start off with an unattractive face shape and are probably fat.
Yeah, I have some acquaintances like that. Sometimes people will show me their transition glow-up pics and say things like, "I used to be a fat ugly dude, now I'm a pretty girl," and while they often do look much better than they did before, it often strikes me that they lost weight and started to put effort into their appearance, and I sometimes wonder if it's like veganism, where lifestyle improvements that come from paying attention to what you eat and working on a balanced diet are attributed to the vegan lifestyle specifically.
The downside is that I also have some acquaintances that seem to struggle with broader body image issues (my belly pooch makes me fat, my forehead is too big, my butt is too small) and I wonder sometimes if the gender dysphoria is related to more complex body dysmorphia that goes unaddressed because transition becomes the panacea for body image issues.
That said, on the ftm side, this is complicated by the relationship between being overweight and PCOS syndrome, which describes an increase in testosterone that can cause male-pattern physical changes like hirsutism and sometimes even increased libido. A friend of mine believes that some young women with PCOS begin to identify with the male-pattern traits and transitioning becomes a way to 'embrace' them.
The typical difficulties?
More options
Context Copy link
"Transmaxxing" or the "incel-to-trans pipeline" has been joked about for as long as incel was a commonly used term. I've seen at least a couple of memes that take on some form of "which way, autistic man?" with 2 diverging paths towards "trans" and "incel" or the like. My pet theory is that nerdiness/near-autism tends to make young men extremely unattractive to women (citation needed), which pushes them to becoming incels, which leads some of them towards "transmaxxing" for cultural reasons.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
? This seems very dumb. Imagine I surgically modified a great ape to look like a very attractive young woman from a distance, and you had any flicker of sexual interest upon seeing the ape from a distance. You are therefore an enthusiast in Apes. Elsewise, imagine I put a hologram of an attractive woman nearby and you had a flicker of sexual interest. This proves you are robosexual.
Also clear AI response.
The believer in woke gender ideology would just tell you that the sting of your analogy is precisely that robots and apes are not people. Which by the way, makes your analogy dehumanizing and problematic, etc.
Furthermore, my guess is you are being "sex-essentialist" and focusing on the person's genitals. As I explained, having a genital preference is fine, but is not a sexual orientation. This means the analogy's conclusion should not be "you are robosexual" but rather "you can be attracted to a robot." A nitpick, I know.
If I got an early bloomer 12 year old girl, dressed her up and made some mild surgical enhancements then went 'gotcha you're a pedophile' it's the same thing, though.
I think there is an empathy gap where you don't know what woke people think. they would consider you, not the "pedophile," to be the bad guy in this scenario, if your enhancements made the girl look like an adult.
(obviously, some consider any 30 year straight guy wrong for liking girls 18, for reasons unrelated to trans issues, which muddies the waters, but...)
To turn it around on you, suppose you took an adult woman and did something to her to make her look 12 or whatever. Turns out woke people think its pedophilic to be attracted to that!
So, hopefully I am getting across the point that to woke people, "attracted to" really means that initial gut feeling about the outside characteristics, it doesn't refer to preferences and important dealbreakers.
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