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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Huh. I wonder what extent that drives a lot of the differing reactions : I've worked with trans women that would be the spitting image of that link, modulo a purple sweater if it's winter, and even a lot of fairly obnoxiously political trans women tend closer to its look than to drag.

Historically, there was a lot more overlap between day-to-day trans people and drag, largely downstream of WPATH v6's three-to-six-month lived experience requiring hyperfeminine behavior by someone not yet allowed to do anything but clothing, but that's faded pretty aggressively over a decade ago.

I've worked with trans women that would be the spitting image of that link, modulo a purple sweater if it's winter

Judging by what I have hanging in my closet I am intimately familiar with the concept (and why you would do that).

But I can't wear that outside (or on camera), for the same reasons I would have problems conducting same-sex PDA- others have plenty of good, evolved, biological reasons to find that disgusting and off-putting, and I feel that's going to get in the way of my other objectives. (And even worse, it also marks me as belonging to the faction that gets off on making that fact everyone else's problem, so I believe I would alienate both the traditionalists and the low-information liberals upon whose support I largely depend. Something about "fisher of men".)

So now I get to suffer the "if my initial conditions and social circle were different I conceivably could have gone that way" outlook for a very good reason, and get to be just as much on the back foot on that topic as any of the dozen other principled libertarian is. I guess the only prosecution for bad actors is that they simply find themselves mysteriously excluded, but the State (and its supporters) are naturally only interested in making sure I bear the costs for those bad actors.