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 -
An interesting "false flag" in the transgender culture war: a mystery group is impersonating a transgender group and sending texts and flyers to the wrong people:
https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-politics/texans-receive-texts-impersonating-transgender-advocacy-group/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/trans-student-mailers-hit-texas-210015782.html
As far as I can tell, of course, the transgender groups in question have no disagreement with the contents in these messages, but they have been sent to the wrong people. They want this content to stay on the down low and for parents not to know about it. As on twitter poster put it "The trans people wouldn’t be stupid enough to send this out right before midterms unless they thought you were trans" (emphasis added). The pages on the websites that the pamphlets and texts linked to have been taken down, though archive links show they had content on them previously: https://web.archive.org/web/20261005063417/https://transtexas.org/trans-texas-takeover-tour/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260807023304/https://transtexas.org/resources/ which is a very interesting thing to do for a group that presumably wants people to attend their tour and have access to some resources.
This does reinforce the idea that the trans project is both unpopular and/or secretly transing kids without their parents knowing, as they reacting with horror that parents are being exposed to their message.
This hiding behavior is certainly not standard among all groups. Most groups would be thrilled to get free publicity pointed to their website, even if the messages are coming from an anonymous benefactor (assuming it doesn't get them on a spam shitlist or something). Nevertheless, it does seem like democrat ideology mandates that they support the maximalist trans movement, and their solution is to distance from it.
There is a longstanding mutual incomprehension on this question between activists and gender-criticals. Most activists would not deny that they are interested in helping children transition; they may downplay it during election season but it's not some great shameful secret, "Protect trans kids" is a widespread slogan. The reason "they're trying to trans your kids!" gets denounced as right-wing conspiracy-mongering is that active verb "transing". As the activists view it, they aren't transing anybody: they're trying to reach out to kids who are, in fact, already trans, and help them express their true selves. The implied accusation that they have some sort of program to brainwash cis kids into wanting to transition feels offensive and absurd - the only kids they're trying to reach out to really are trans, it's just that you can't tell who's in the closet, so obviously you have to shower everyone with "it's okay to come out, it'd be so brave, so life-changing" to ferret them out.
The problem is that to the typical trans activist, for a kid to "really be trans" basically means "this kid, if they knew transitioning was an option and faced no external pressure against doing so, would choose to transition" - anyone whose ideal self-actualized future self, given perfect information and absolute freedom, would transition, is ontologically trans. (Some theorists take this definition as-is, but the Blue Tribe activist on the street is more likely to hold some notion that if your idealized unconstrained future self would transition, this is evidence that you have in fact had the opposite gender written on your soul since birth.) So obviously, raising awareness of the possibility of transition will only serve to help kids who are, deep down, already trans - completely different from manipulatively "transing" cis kids. Whereas GCs, to the limited degree that they recognize the idea of kids "really being trans" - which wouldn't actually mean recognizing those kids' genders, of course, just acknowledging that they are of a kind with the population of "trans" adults in some deeper sense than parroting buzzwords they've been taught - would think that a "trans kid" must be a kid who already displays gender dysphoria and an active, persistent desire to be the opposite sex. So, of course, any intervention designed to raise awareness of transition among gender-conforming kids does literally constitute an effort to "make" them trans. And so the activists go on loudly and sincerely decrying accusations that they're transing kids while visibly and openly doing what their enemies mean by "transing kids".
On one hand, in the activists' defense, mainstream consensus has largely accepted that "encouraging closeted people to come out as gay" is not the same thing as "making them gay"; many Rowling-type moderate-left GCs would never endorse that conflation, yet take it absolutely for granted where trans is concerned. But on the other hand, in the GCs' defense, the trans activists' definition of "being trans" is obviously so confusing, radical, and esoteric that their continued misunderstanding of what their opponents mean by "transing kids" can only be some mixture of willful ignorance and unfathomable insularity, depending on individual levels of sincerity. Whoever you want to blame most, it's doing the state of the discourse no favors, and some people on both sides clearly like it that way.
(On the third hand, the right-wing discourse around "transing kids" is also riddled with motte-and-bailey rhetoric surrounding the spicier phrasing that trans activists are grooming kids - where, although it can always be claimed that they are simply using the word "grooming" to mean "manipulating impressionable youths" without connotations of literal pedophilia, this is often genuinely a cover for a veiled accusation that the activists are only telling kids to transition because they get some perverse sexual thrill from doing so, or even because they want to physically molest the kids they initiate. There, I think the anti-trans side are clearly at fault, and the activists are justified in rejecting the label even if the innocuous "motte" meaning of grooming is a defensible description of their behavior. I mention this because this reply turned into a bit of an effortpost, and an overview of the topic would not be complete otherwise; but I think the basic, less one-sided conflict outlined above would be with us with or without the "grooming" buzzword in the mix.)
That would make a great deal of sense if, when these exact same kids detransition after a couple years, they didn't say "you were never really trans" when the share the sordid details of how exactly the "gender affirming care" was provided to them.
I don't see the objection; this seems precisely consistent with my claim that trans advocacy in schools is intended to target the "really trans". Those cis kids who give it a go but turn out not to like it in the long run are, indeed, told they were never really trans, and thus only collateral damage of a program which was intended to help those of their classmates who really were trans. You may shudder at the brute-force utilitarianism - I certainly do; it's why I'm opposed to children undergoing medical transition! - but I genuinely don't see where the internal contradiction is supposed to be.
If they were never really trans, but underwent hormone therapy and got surgeries, surely that means they got transed?
No; it just means that they were mistaken for trans, by themselves and others. You wouldn't say that someone who got spooked by a very forceful "are you sure there's nothing deeper to your occasional twinges of bowel pain" campaign, was given an erroneous colon cancer diagnosis, and got unnecessary surgery they regretted, had been cancered.
I mean... why not? It's the job of the medical professional to say "calm the fuck down, you don't have cancer" rather then "your wish is my command, cash register go 'cha-ching'!". If they go for the latter, that does sound like getting cancered.
Well, I'm not saying the medical system would have acted correctly - though they might; the optimum number of erroneous cancer diagnoses is not necessarily zero. But I'm not asking you to picture shills who get kickbacks for every colonectomy or anything. Picture, instead, sincere people so keen not to let any actual cancer patients die preventable deaths after ignoring early symptoms that they forget about the effects of their rhetoric on people who are, in fact, healthy. We may criticize such people, but we wouldn't accuse them of only caring about turning as many people into colonectomy-seekers as possible, or of being dishonest when they said their message was targeted at people who actually had cancer. And it certainly doesn't prove otherwise if what they tell the people who got unnecessary surgery is "sorry, turns out you never actually had cancer".
But to the extent we don't do that, it's because they have objective-ish diagnostic criteria that tell with a high degree of accuracy (even if it never reaches 100%) whether or not they have colon cancer, and in the event they degree of accuracy is not high, that information is shared with the patient. If the official diagnostic criteria was "patient says they have colon cancer, and does not change their mind for the period of 6 months" we would, in fact, accuse them of only caring about turning as many people into colonectomy-seekers as possible.
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