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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7558 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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I think most people can easily make sense of the idea that you might wish that certain aspects of your life were different. Someone might wish they were taller, or they had a million dollars, or they lived in Germany instead of America. These are all considered normal and comprehensible; most people don’t have trouble with the mere notion of a counterfactual.

You're gerrymandering because these are all harmless as desires. Consider another example: I understand why people might want another roll at the die of high school. This is normal, in the sense that people often have regrets.

It's not normal, nor does it make sense to me, to actually make this into a life project. In fact, it would be very alarming and I would not trust the person who sincerely attempts to redo their high school experience (at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars and medical procedures with non-trivial effects) to have a good view of what would fulfill them since they seem mentally imbalanced/lacking basic prudence and social insight to explain why this is a very bad thing to try to impose on people (the mental health comorbidities make it even harder with trans).

In any case, it would not suffice as a justification to let them pull a Steve Buscemi even if they could convince me they'd be happier. High school doesn't exist for the pleasure of adults.

You’re conflating two things that I never conflated. There are two separate questions:

  1. Whether the desire for SRS (or being trans in general) is coherent and understandable, outside of being a product of “mental illness or brainwashing”.

  2. Whether society should rearrange itself to accommodate the desires of trans people.

I was only addressing (1). Personally, I answer yes to (1) and no to (2).

I don’t believe that, at our current level of medical technology, men can become women. If you’re born a man then you’ll stay a man. And as a corollary, I don’t believe that MTFs (i.e. men) should be given access to women’s spaces, nor should they expect to be recognized as women by other people. But, in line with my general libertarian priors, I think that consenting adults should mostly be free to dress how they want and get whatever medical procedures they want, and I understand why some people would opt for SRS for psychological comfort, even though it can’t actually at the end of the day fully realize their desires.

I don’t believe that MTFs (i.e. men [by chromosomes and natal biology, women by identity]) should be given access to women’s spaces

I'm not sure that there ought to be separate men's and women's spaces, if their existence leads to things like a trans woman dying of cancer because she isn't allowed in the women's ward, and also isn't allowed in the men's ward.

Bro I'm gonna be deadass honest with you, there are a lot of freaks who are just gonna hang out in the bathroom and listen to women fart and piss if we don't have separate bathrooms. But if women are cool with that then sure, tear down those walls.

As a resident of a PNW city with a large trans population I'd say the way things are going is many newly constructed spaces have only a gender neutral single shared room with sinks and a mirror and then a series of stalls that have full floor to ceiling walls and wooden locking doors. This is certainly more expensive than "two rooms with plastic dividers around stalls" but it would be difficult to hear anyone fart or pee through the doors (which honestly I appreciate for entirely non gender issues reasons).

I personally welcome the proliferation of single-occupancy bathrooms, as I feel that American-style public restrooms are absolutely barbaric. But there's a challenge here besides cost, especially visible in PNW cities, which have drug users as another large population, which creates a pressure for public spaces to take things the other way.

I've never seen that, the more common adaptation where I live is that all bathrooms have a keypad and you have to enter a numeric code so the door unlocks. You have to ask the staff for the code, and I assume they will not give it to you if you are a visibly disturbed drug user.

I assume they will not give it to you if you are a visibly disturbed drug user.

...resulting in the rest of us having to step around bio-hazardous land-mines on the pavement.

If you're implying that society should be exerting itself for the benefit of the publicly drug-addled...yes, agreed, to the extent that they should be picked off the streets, thrown into the back of a truck, and dumped into the nearest landfill.

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