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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Most of the culture war over transgenderism hinges upon the definition of "women".

I would put it a different way. Because the history of feminism has been to erode men's only spaces (see female sports reporters fighting to be let into men's locker rooms, the erosion of old boys clubs, etc.), there are basically no men's spaces left to fight over with any cultural cache or legitimacy.

Virtually no man feels physically unsafe if a trans man is using the same restroom as him, and there otherwise aren't any widespread "men's safe spaces" in society for trans men to invade.

The reason people are fighting over "what is a woman?" is two-fold: 1) women's safe spaces and women's spaces in general actually exist in society, and 2) the reason they exist is because there are physical size and strength differences between men and women that matter in a number of circumstances. Figuring out how to deal with biological males who want to enter women's safe spaces, or other women's spaces is a genuine conflict between two opposing sets of rights (or claims to harm or risk) that must be resolved to somebody's dissatisfaction.

What I suspect happens with those people who identify as "trans" is that somehow (either indirectly via hormonal changes or via social proof and feelings of not belonging) they start to "feel" like, say, a woman despite being a male.

I don't think being trans is any one thing. I'm one of the more vocally pro-trans people on the Motte, but even I'll admit that the breakdown of trans and non-binary people today probably includes a small minority of non-culture bound trans people who would be trans no matter what society they lived in, and a large number of people who are only "trans" or "non-binary" because of the social environment they grew up in.

My main point of departure is being socially liberal enough that I think adults should be able to make risky medical decisions about their own bodies, and that in the face of ambiguous or bad evidence for childhood transition it's still probably better to let a combination of parents, kid and doctor decide how they want to deal with a child who wants to live as the opposite sex. Trans maximalists might call even my fairly liberal position "transphobic", but I view it as a fairly middle of the road position to say, "I think people should generally have enough freedom to make even bad decisions that might make their lives worse."