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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Prelude: The Nashville school shooting is definitely peak toxoplasma, a day later: people cheering everyone who entered that school with a gun, both the shooter and the police. Aidan/Audrey’s acts are a near-perfect scissor statement.

The statement on the shooting by the Trans Resistance Network is particularly toxically tribal. It hearkens back to the days of trying to sympathize with the Columbine shooters, where the narrative is shaped solely by early reporting and people were asking “What made them do it?”

Tangent: drag shows. But the use of the word “genocide” in the TRN’s statement made me stop and ponder: the modern term “genocide” includes not only the actual killing of group X, but also the halting of cultural practices as a lead-in to the eventual rounding up and killing.

Here’s an odd little dynamic: halting drag activities in children's spaces is trans genocide for both sides, but in different ways!

  • For pro-trans activists, halting them is halting a ritual cultural activity, and hints at a wider cultural desire for eventual trans elimination through murders of the outed and the suicides of the closeted. It also removes an avenue for trans youths to discover their true gender and thus leaves them in a spiral of depression heading toward suicide.

  • For social-contagion theorists, halting the drag activities in children’s spaces is useful for preventing cis children from being memetically contaminated, and thus memetically sterilizing the trans community. Reasoning: since full transition includes sterilization (thus committing traditional genocide upon themselves rather effectively), trans people don’t breed genetically, but memetically.

I wrote off this story immediately after it broke, because mentally ill males commit school shootings two or three times a year in America. But now, over a day later, I just found out the shooter was biologically FEMALE. That makes it extremely different from other school shootings for reasons the media obviously won't comment on, and I'm extremely surprised I don't see any discussion of this aspect of the story online. Why is a biological female perpetrating this, when the trend has always been male? Could they have overdosed on testosterone?

Why would they need to have overdosed, isn't "someone with hormone profile of man exhibits behavior almost exclusively done by men" what we would expect? If men do 98% of mass shootings and trans-men have a similar "risk of mass shooting" and are 0.4% of the population we'd naively expect what ~1/250 mass shooters to be trans men? There are three trans shooters we know of (Alex McKinney, Snochia Moseley and the Tennessee shooter), all of them trans masc. There are only two cis-female mass shooters who acted without male partners, and two who did. It's clear that trans-men are more likely to do mass shootings than cis-women, but not clear if they have meaningfully different rates from cis-men.

Unless new information comes out I'm going to assume this woman was mainlining testosterone. It seems like the most plausible mechanism for this behavior.

Then that's what conservatives should be talking about! Instead they're, at best, focusing on the mental illness, and, at worst, focusing on the ideological aspect. (I'm basing this on lurking headlines and overhearing my dad listening to Ben Shapiro and talk radio stuff.)

You don't shoot up a religious school as a trans-man without the mental illness aspect and the ideological aspect. The fact the media is working over time to ignore the shooter's manifesto tells me everything I need to know about the situation. Yeah the backlash is gonna suck for other trans-people but them's the breaks. The rhetoric about "trans genocide" and the insane levels of intolerance can lead only to this. It only takes one person to buy the whole "we are being genocided" line too seriously for shit like this to happen.

TBH my take is isn't not really the test hormone levels that's at fault here. It's social rejection and ostracism mixed with toxic antagonistic narratives on both sides.

I completely agree with you, but women typically just don't do this sort of very violent thing, no matter how scared they are. It's of course possible—she could be way in the point of the tail of the distribution, but, ex-ante, this was much more likely to happen if she was indeed taking test.

Ben Shapiro is surprisingly careful in what he says. He's fiery and provocative but tries not to get over his skis, so to speak. He's probably waiting until he has evidence one way or another whether they were taking testosterone before commenting on it, since they're plenty of red meat left for him to chew on with this shooting regardless.

Yeah because Conservatives want to treat trans people as their sex at birth and the idea that HRT changes human behavior to be more in-line with the gender they identify with brings into question their preferred policy of putting trans-men on T in bathrooms with cis-women and trans-women with breasts in men's bathrooms.

Also if trans-men are dangerous because they're on T, then aren't cis men just as dangerous?

MtFs commit crimes at the same rate as other men (and sex crimes at 5-6 times the rate).

I'd rather be in a sketchy womens bathroom with any randomly chosen male rather than one that deliberately wanted to be there.

That is the quiet part being spoken out loud. Social conservatives, the religious and right-wingers tend to believe all men are inherently dangerous due to their testosterone levels (or the devil), and therefore assault by men is more on women to defend from than men to change, because they can’t. An argument I have heard commonly is cis men are indeed just as dangerous, and ideally, women need to be chaperoned by their brothers/fathers (who are the least likely to assault due to being repulsed by incest) to prevent a man from succumbing to his instincts, and if feminists would stop trying to put women next to men (aka potential assaulters), we’d find a lot less assault on women by men.

That is the quiet part being spoken out loud.

I don't think it's even the quiet part. From what I've seen, conservatives are perfectly open about saying that men and women are fundamentally different, including men having a greater tendency for violence and general aggression, and openly use this as justification for harsher penalties on men and greater protection for women around men.

I'm assuming people who have a lifetime of experience swimming in testosterone manage better than those who dose up later.

The levels of aggression and horniness seems to catch many FtM by surprise.

Yeah could be, I wonder if there's FTM crime data available.

There's three FTM mass shooters that we know of, trans people are ~0.4% of the population (though probably a larger share of young people who do mass shootings) so you'd expect 240 cis shooters per trans shooter. How many mass shootings we've had varies based on the casualty threshold you use. The Gun Violence Archive uses 'four or more people killed or injured' which means there's 300-700 mass shootings a year. Everytown only counts incidents where four people were killed excluding the shooter and finds 20-30 mass shootings a year.

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