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 -
α
My answer¹ to "What is a woman?" is "It depends on the context."
In most contexts, a woman is a person whose gender identity is that found more commonly in people who have, or feel viscerally that they ought to have, concave genitalia. This is both trans-inclusive and non-circular, although one could, I suppose, model it as an expanding spiral.... (Note that 'born with concave genitalia', 'born with organs to produce large gametes', and 'has XX karyotype' are strongly correlated; thus, substituting any of them would still point to the same identity.)
In medical contexts, a trans person might be a man for some purposes and a woman for other purposes; the same can apply to some cis patients.
¹Unless the question is being asked by someone rudely shoving a camera in my face while I'm busy, in which case my answer will be "A large happy pile of public information". (If you know, you know.)
β
Part of the reason 'adult human female' rubs me the wrong way is that using 'female' as a noun in reference to humans is associated with misogyny. 'Adult female human' would avoid this, but 'female' as an adjective picks up much of the same flexibility in meaning as 'woman'. For the biological categories to which I believe you are attempting to gesture:
Less biologically:
If and when we figure out how to grow new gonads in vitro, 'gonadally' and 'gametically' can be modified in the same manner as 'anatomically'.
γ
I have noticed a certain form of argument over the years, of the approximate form "My opponent knows that I am right and he is wrong, and is continuing to contradict me out of less-than-honest motives." It is annoying when it is Evangelical preachers assuming that non-Christians 'know' that Jesus Is Lord and reject Him in order to continue sinning, it is annoying when it is the Blue Tribe telling the Red Tribe "You know what an assault weapon is, and you know you don’t need one.", and it is annoying when it is the gender-critical assuming that everyone 'knows' that the True Definition Of Woman does not include trans-women.
Atheists actually believe that God doesn't exist, 2nd-Amendment advocates actually believe that they have legitimate reason to own firearms that the Blue Tribe thinks look scary, and progressives actually believe that trans-women are women.
δ
With regard to whether Islam is right about women, there are two clarifiying questions that need to be asked:
What variety of Islam? If Fred Rogers and Fred Phelps can both be Christians, even both be Protestant Christians, and have such a wide gulf between them, I don't see why a similar gulf cannot exist between Zohran Mamdani and Abdul-Rahman Ballout.
What are we comparing it to? Attitudes that seem retrograde compared to XXI. century progressivism look a lot more enlightened when compared to ante-Islamic Arabian paganism.
To most people, such an answer would make you appear suspicious and dishonest, not unlike responding "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
Which is to say, your definition of the word "woman" rests on unfalsifiable claims people make about their own inner experiences. And despite many of these people claiming that they viscerally feel that they ought to have female genitalia, the overwhelming majority of them choose not to undergo a surgical procedure which would give them an approximation (however crude) of said genitalia, even though many of them could presumably afford to do so.
It's also a strange definition in that you're using the exact same word for people who are X and people who wish that they were X, which is not how we define any other word in the English language. The word "billionaire" does not mean "a person with a net worth of at least 1 billion, or someone who wishes they had a net worth of least 1 billion": it only means the former. For the latter concept, we have "aspiring billionaire" or "wannabe billionaire".
This, again, makes you appear weird and dishonest.
Why would your answer change depending on whether a camera is being rudely shoved in your face? Does a word have a different meaning depending on whether the person defining it is being observed or not? Is "woman" an example of Schrödinger's word?
But not referring to female people as "menstruators", referring to mothers as "birthing parents", or referring to their genitals as their "front" or "bonus" hole. Curious.
A nonsensical categorisation. A bodybuilder is not "more male" than a nerdy coder.
I will reiterate that the vast majority of trans-identified males have not undergone bottom surgery. I genuinely don't know what "would have given the opportunity" means here. Many trans-identified males do have "the opportunity", and voluntarily pass it up. But this appears to have no impact on your opinion that they ought to be categorised as women.
This is not generally how I see the phrase "male/female presenting" being used. It's usually used to mean "this person is dressed in a conventionally feminine manner" without passing judgement on whether they successfully pass.
Some and some. I don't think Swinson's response to this question is remotely consistent with her "actually believing" that trans women are women. The purpose of this "gotcha" question, as I said, is designed to expose ideological rifts: separating the true believers in gender ideology from those who are merely pretending to endorse it out of convenience. I think Swinson falls into the latter category.
Even among those progressives who do actually believe that trans-women are women (and I acknowledge that such people do exist), the question is useful in exposing how many of these individuals are unable to provide a definition of the word "woman" which is coherent and non-circular, thereby demonstrating how fundamentally nonsensical gender ideology is. On some level you obviously know it's nonsensical, given that by your own admission you would refuse to define the word "woman" if you knew you were being filmed.
We're not comparing it to anything. I take the assertion "Islam is right about women" to mean "the collection of factual and normative assertions the Islamic faith makes about women are correct". If I say "the statement '2+2=4' is true", it's meaningless to ask "compared to what?": factual claims are true or they aren't ("directionally correct" notwithstanding). Likewise if I said "respecting people's preferred pronouns is the right thing to do", you would never ask "compared to what?"
And the Greek characters are such a pretentious affectation.
Which is why I elaborate on the various possible answers, the contexts in which each would be relevant, and possible terminology that would allow one to specify each unambiguously.
Yes, sometimes a question rests on a point of fact which cannot be empirically determined, and we face a choice between a non-zero rate of dishonest people getting away with it, and innocent people suffering burdens which are in our ability to ameliorate.
I was attempting to give an extensional definition, akin to Charles Sanders Peirce's proposed definition of lithium:
If you take all the people in the world, put everyone with convex genitals in a blue room and everyone with concave genitals in a pink room, there will be one gender identity that is more common among those in the blue room and another more common in the pink room. The one more common in the blue room is the 'man' identity; the one more common in the pink room is the 'woman' identity. A woman is someone with the 'woman' identity.
If you take everyone who feels that they have the wrong genitals and move them to the other room, the correlation will be even stronger.
Putting people with XY chromosomes in the blue room and people with XX chromosomes in the pink room, or people who produce small gametes in the blue room and people who produce large gametes in the pink room, would have the same gender identities more prevalent in the same rooms, and thus would not change the identity-based definition.
The operative word there is 'rudely'. If I am giving testimony before a governmental organ, or a scheduled interview on television, I will expound on the answer given above. If I am coming home from the shops, and am accosted by a less-respectable individual looking for a sound bite, I am likely to give a crankier answer carrying the message that I do not take him/her/them seriously.
These terms are not widely used by people who hold misogynist attitudes.
The former two are an attempt at rigorous disambiguation. 'People who menstruate' or 'menstruators' is pointing to a category that, in addition to including some trans-men, also excludes many cis-women, who do not menstruate due to age, removal of relevant parts, malnutrition.... 'Birthing parent' is probably an attempt to unambiguously indicate that, if trans-woman Alice and trans-man Bob have a baby, we are at this time referring to Bob rather than Alice; I would consider 'biological mother' or 'reproductive mother' to be acceptable in that instance. Re terminology for genitals, that area of the body has accumulated a vast array of less-than-formal nomenclature (cf. an annotated edition of Shakespeare).
I have previously questioned the use of the term 'chestfeeding'.
I was more gesturing at 'cis-men, trans-men on artificial hormones, and trans-women not on artificial hormones' versus 'cis-women, trans-women on artificial hormones, and trans-men not on artificial hormones', or 'on a graph with testosterone levels on one axis and estrogen levels on the other, someone in the part of the graph with natal-anatomical men/women'.
People who can't afford it. People who can't find a chirurgeon who does it. People who can't afford the time off work for recovery.
I don't know what the distribution of these or other reasons is, as the source previously cited did not divide the 'trans without bottom chirurgery' group by why have not gotten it; it didn't even separate out 'has bottom chirurgery scheduled' or 'in early phase of transition'.
Among the Kamilaroi of what is today New South Wales, Australia, women are divided into four groups: an Ippata is the daughter of a Buta, a Buta is the daughter of an Ippata, a Mata is the daughter of a Kapota, and a Kapota is the daughter of a Mata. (Men are similarly divided: a Kumbo, a Kubbi, a Murri, and an Ippai are, respectively, the sons of an Ippata, a Mata, a Kapota, and a Buta. Marriage is only permitted between a Kumbo and a Mata, a Kubbi and an Ippata, a Murri and a Buta, or an Ippai and a Kapota.) (S. Alexander, review of Arguments About Aborigines, July 2025)
No Kamilaroi could offer you a non-circular definition of Ippata; is their kinship system non-sensical?
Please refer back to the third section of my previous post.
Which still leads us to the same two questions.
Ù¡, Islam is not a monolithic hive-mind; the factual and normative assertions made by Saudi-funded Wahhabists are not the same as those made by Sufi mystics.
Ù¢, outside the realm of formal logic, 'correctness' isn't black and white; things can be more or less correct.
The assertion "the collection of factual and normative assertions Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab made about women are more correct than the collection of factual and normative assertions the in-this-house-we-believe crowd make about women." is not the same as the assertion "the collection of factual and normative assertions Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd made about women are more correct than the collection of factual and normative assertions the ante-Islamic Hijazi society made about women.".
Only because I can't think of more than one obvious answer: "Compared to referring to people with the pronouns of their ASAB regardless of how many times they have asked you to stop."
And prexactly what has that got to do with the price of tea in China?
Supposing you meet a male person who is independently wealthy, doesn't need to work for a living, and lives in an area with numerous cosmetic surgeons experienced in vaginoplasties. The person claims to identify as a woman, but makes it perfectly clear that he has a penis which he has no desire to remove.
In your opinion, is such a person "really" trans?
This is not an armchair hypothetical. Consider the National Transgender Discrimination Survey from 2011, which polled over 6,000 people who describe themselves as transgender or gender non-conforming, of which 3,870 were male. Of these, only a quarter claimed to have undergone a penectomy, while 23% claimed to have undergone a vaginoplasty. 14% said they had no interest in undergoing either procedure (this finding is on the page numbered 79, or page 85 of the PDF). In your opinion, are these 14% "really" women? (The finding is even more striking among trans-identified females, 72% of which report no desire to undergo a phalloplasty.)
For a more recent source, consider the US Trans Survey from 2022, which surveyed over 30,000 trans-identified males. Only 11% had undergone an orchiectomy, and only 9% a vaginoplasty. 21% affirmatively said that they did not want either procedure, while 27% said they were "unsure" if they wanted the former and 25% the latter (pg 48).
One-in-five trans-identified males have not undergone a vaginoplasty and explicitly do not want to, while a further one-in-four have not undergone one and are unsure whether they want to. Someone who's on the fence about whether they want something can hardly be said to "viscerally feel they ought to have it". By the terms you specified, nearly half of all trans-identified males in the US are not women. I'll ask again: if you meet a trans-identified male who has not undergone a vaginoplasty and doesn't want one, do you consider that person a woman?
Well, I think quite a number of trans-identified males hold misogynistic attitudes. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the median autogynephiliac male is more misogynistic than the median cis man.
As I've argued repeatedly before, it sure is interesting that trans activists are so keen on "rigorously disambiguating" different categories of people and using maximally clear terminology
... right up to the point where someone points out that, regardless of how they identify, a male person remains male, with all that implies, at which point these trans activists throw a tantrum and call you a Nazi. Dora Moutot bent over backwards to avoid using language that trans-identified males might find offensive, insisting that women need to be wary of "people with penises", and she still got slapped with a €1,000 fine. Don't dare tell me these trans neologisms are just about maximally unambiguous language. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.
Yeah, sounds like it.
Nothing, just that I find it annoying, along with many of your verbal tics (including "prexactly"). Even in the comment I'm replying to you used the term "chirurgeon" for no earthly reason I can discern.
Yes, I consider her a woman for any purpose that does not involve her genitals. Gender identity strongly correlates with genitals, which is why the major gender identities are 'man' and 'woman'. If you draw a teal circle around everyone with a penis, an orange circle around everyone with a vagina, and a provisionally non-coloured circle around each of the two gender-identity clusters, one of the colourless circles will mostly, but not entirely, overlap with the orange circle, and the other will mostly, but not entirely, overlap with the teal circle; thus we colour them respectively pink and blue. Anyone in the pink circle is a woman, even if she has no interest in leaving the teal circle, unless you are personally interacting with the parts between her legs.
The implications of which you speak are the objectionable part. I am not disputing the factual accuracy of the statement "A person born with testicules remains a person born with testicules."; I am disputing the claim "Alice having been born with testicules is more salient than any other characteristic, to such a degree that it deserves the one-or-two-syllable terminology.", and the claim "Because Alice was born with testicules, she should be treated as a delusional patient at best and a sex pest at worst.".
The issue as I understand it was not the language used, but the endorsement of the notion that individuals may rightfully be held to account for the misdeeds of those with whom they share features; i. e., discrimination not on the basis of individual conduct but on the basis of group membership.
A town in the Southern United States removing a sign saying "[Anagram of ginger], don't let the sun set on you in ______" with one that says "Persons with greater than x amount of melanin per square inch of skin...." has not absolved itself of racism.
Well, I find it annoying that you persistently refer to trans-women as 'trans-identified males'.
I thought rigorous disambiguation was a good thing?
It's more the smuggled-in assumption that the masculine aspects of a trans-woman are always more relevant than the feminine aspects.
It's not a question of aspects. If you actually believe in the whole "sex is biology, but gender is a social construct" thing, than "trans identified male" is 100% true and unambiguous, unlike "trans woman", which can be interpreted in either direction.
No, because 'biology' can include more than one variable. 'Biologically male' could be 'people with XY chromosomes, including women with androgen-insensitivity syndrome who never knew that they were anything other than cis-women until they sought medical treatment for infertility', 'people born with dangly bits, regardless of later modifications thereto', 'people who currently have dangly bits, including pre-vaginoplasty trans-women and post-phalloplasty trans-men', or 'people with a lot of testosterone and not a lot of estrogen, including trans-men who have been on artificial hormones for some time and trans-women who have not'. All of these categories are biological.
Furthermore, 'male' can also be the adjectival form of 'man'.
I don't think 'trans-woman', in common usage at least, is ever applied to Elliot Page or Chaz Bono.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link