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 -
According to NPR, 43% of Americans support criminalizing gender-affirming care and 54% oppose it, whereas two years ago, 28% supported it and 65% opposed it. What caused the surge in opposition? Did people just not know what gender-affirming care was two years ago? Did they assume that psychological evaluations of trans kids were more thorough than they actually were?
I'd estimate that a very high percentage of parents of teenagers and college students, at least 90%, now know of actual gender non-conforming kids in their children's schools.
Two years ago schools weren't even open.
Reputable pollsters say that about 5% of young people identify as trans or nonbinary. That's far greater than I remember the dominant counter-culture in my high school, goths. At a school with about 1,800 kids, we had maybe 10 goths. Remembering that high school figure isn't as hard as you might think, they always sat together at the same lunch table. People also tended to ditch their goth aesthetics once they got to college.
This statement might take the cake for the biggest rift between most defensible motte vs least defensible bailey.
minimum non binary: someone who does not perfectly fit into the locally & temporally defined boxes of male & female.
max_trans : someone who feels so uncomfortable in their body, so as to under-go surgical mutilation of their most sensitive body parts to avoid suicide
I could be convinced that 100% of a population is non-binary. Afterall, no one perfectly fits into the definition of male or female gender roles. On the other hand, we would have seen significantly higher suicide rates by feminine men and butch women in preceding eras if the rate of trans-ness ever exceeded 1%. (even 1% is very ambitious).
Combining Trans and non-binary identities (no matter how fake or real) makes zero sense. You could defend a vanilla version of the non-binary claim for eternity for any slice of the population. On the other hand, most claims about 'medical intervention necessitating' trans people fall apart the second you see integer numbers in the base population.
Even trans alone is a greater proportion than my remembered goths. The survey says 2% trans, 3% non-binary.
I think non-binary self-identification also entails gender ideology buy-in. There are no non-binary TERFs.
If I was a billionaire, I'd love to fund a study on social contagion base-rate.
What percent of an adolescent population with adopt 'anything' as a genuine belief, given sufficient conditioning ? What percentage can fully drop those beliefs once the social norms change, and what does the rate of adoption/abandonment look like ?
Talking about anything having to do with sociology is what medieval doctors must've felt like : all intelligent men, strongly concerned about the well being of people, with a bunch of anecdotes and rules-of-thumbs. At the same time, there was no goo way to know when to believe a result, because experiments were nigh impossible to run as RCTs. In a similar vein, I wonder if our discussions are similarly futile. It's not like a consensus will mean a better truth, just a bunch of blind people agreeing on which direction to collectively move in.
That being said, one consistent inference that can be drawn from all under-researched fields is : "avoid irreversible damage". Let's not blood-let, lobotomize, or chop off genitals if we don't know any better.
More options
Context Copy link
I thought gender abolitionists would be essential to the enby movement, but from what I understand, TERFs made the term unpalatable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I suspect this is a story similar to collecting signatures on a petition to end women’s suffrage.
I'm still working on fixing my dihydrogen monoxide addiction.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you don't know what it is, "gender-affirming care" just sounds like a good thing. It's the reverse of the old gag about insulting someone by declaring that their brother is a known homo sapiens and their sister is a thespian. Since then, more people know what it is.
More options
Context Copy link
This seems likely. While trans issues have been floating around the culture war for several years now, two years ago, the media was mostly talking about COVID (in March 2021 most people didn't have access to vaccines yet, so COVID, along with the culture wars surrounding it, was still a major news item) and the George Floyd protests (although mostly in 2020, that Wikipedia page says the trial wrapped up in mid-2021; BLM and CRT were very much in the public consciousness). Given that, I'm pretty surprised the sum of support+oppose only changed from 93% to 97%; I'd have expected a lot more "Don't Know" answers to that question, especially two years ago.
I'd bet on them knowing it has something to do with transgender people, but having a very rosy picture of it. Even now, you still occasionally get the argument that minors don't go on HRT or get surgeries from trans activists.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
These polls are always funny. People have no skin in the game and therefore lie. Many people who are voting to "criminalize" are really just voting for "less trans stuff please".
More options
Context Copy link
In a brighter timeline, “gender-affirming care” would refer to men going on TRT or doing a steroid cycle. “Yeah bro, I’m undergoing some gender-affirming care. Currently on 500mg Test a week and 50mg DBol a day.”
IMO this has far too many side effects for me to consider this a good idea in most cases. In particular, the mood-related effects can impact the rest of us too.
Although I'll concede that it's absolutely happening already, and could probably be better-managed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Important distinction:
I'd bet you get a very different result if you ask more generally whether it should be legal for people to seek medical assistance in transition. I believe the increase in preference for criminalizing these "treatments" for minors is a product of better information becoming available on what exactly "gender affirming care" means, who is getting it, and how diagnoses are done. The euphemism doesn't exactly call to mind surgical mutilation of mentally ill teens, but many people now understand "gender-affirming care" to include surgical mutilation of mentally ill teens.
I would agree I’m much more knowledgeable on the issue. I didn’t know anything about why we had a surge in trans and what these trans clinics were doing to them.
I’m well past criminalize gender affirming care. Trans is entirely bad and should be suppressed everywhere. It’s ruining and hurting lives. And the fact that we are changing people physically with health care and it’s not just some weirdos dressing weird during the teen years is even worse.
Trans being a social contagion is not the same as saying trans people "don't actually exist". I think in debates like these we need to choose our words carefully if you want to have any chance of convincing the other tribe.
When they use the word trans they mean people are actually females with male bodies etc. By they don’t exists that is what I mean. Instead they are like people who got really into Victorian dress except they got into wearing opposite gender clothing.
That being said I’m getting to the point of not caring about convincing the other side. It’s evil and I’m fine with authoritarian suppression.
I don’t think this is a very good descriptor of most trans people. Out of the ones I know, only one is really vocal about clothing. She’s also got the best claim to an actual sex hormone disorder.
Even Blanchard had two types: the effeminate gay man and the autogynephiliac. Both are umbrellas for a bunch of related behaviors and preferences, including but not limited to crossdressing. The modern discourse includes far more categories and is aggressively against gatekeeping, so crossdressing is by no means required. Non-binary, in particular, seems to come from a very different motivation.
All in all I think there’s a lot more going on here than just getting into a kink.
More options
Context Copy link
Great. Prepare to be authoritarianly suppressed.
I’m in Miami. We can do what we want. USA not going to war us.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
On current trends, it's people with your views that will be subject to authoritarian suppression.
Then the game has been laid out very clearly. My enemy must be totally vanquished before they do the same to me. Reconciling with the opposition is a fool's errand; at best providing a minor speedbump, at worst enabling my opponents to snag a few more miles out from under me. It's not like being patient and reasonable was slowing anything down.
It should be said that I really hate this, and that I write those words with some measure of guilt and shame. I'm not even 100% sure "this is the way", but I am frantically looking for another path and coming up empty. Trans activists have boxed in this debate with such immense dishonesty, with no effective antibodies to push back with.
I'm far from pleased to have Matt Walsh and various other SocCons being champions for my views. But this displeasure is starting to feel like a prissy holdover from a prior era. On some level, there is still a well-honed instict that conservatives have cooties. It's probably in my best interest to fully get over that at this point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's important to still care about convincing the other side, because it's useful. We live in a democracy, therefore more public support for our side increases our chances of successfully implementing it. If we lived in a dictatorship with you or I in charge and could just ban it immediately, then authoritarian suppression would be the way to go to guarantee it stops as soon as possible.
If, in the current environment, everyone on the right gives up on persuasion and just decries their opponents as inhuman monsters then all of the areas controlled by the right will ban it, all of the areas controlled by the left will not, and everyone in the center will see one side pretending to be kind and compassionate while we superficially look like authoritarian bigots despite being the ones actually helping people.
In general, the right has a huge optics problem. Or rather, the left has an optics advantage because the majority of their positions are chosen based on optimizing for feelgoods and superficial appearances, which makes them look better than they are in practice. The only way the right (and moderates, and logical people who don't optimize exclusively for optics) can stand a chance is by being logical, persuasive, and thorough enough that the superficial appearances are stripped away and the actual superior policies are revealed to the people around.
Gender affirming care for minors is an evil policy with horrible results. Most people who support it from a distance aren't evil people, they're naive people who haven't actually looked into the details and have just bought into the propaganda that all anti-trans arguments are founded on bigotry and hatred. And you don't change their minds by acting the same way someone who irrationally hated trans people would act, if you try then they'll stop looking further as soon as you confirm their prior beliefs. You change their minds by being kind, compassionate, logical, explaining this in detail, and then banning child mutilation because it's the kind, compassionate, and logical thing to do.
Do you know of any historical instances in which this kind of behavior bore fruit?
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like being kind and compassionate works better with IRL acquaintances. Although IME they too have a persistent habit of just turning off their brains the moment the arguments get more detailed than anything they've gleamed from an activist's TikTok video.
But in the public sphere, there is observable value in being mean. The Left has been really good at employing mockery and mean-spiritedness to their own ends. It makes hay for the true believers, and cows fence-sitters into snapping into the cool, trendy orthodoxy of the day out of fear of being embarrassed. When I was a younger man on the Left, it was a popular sentiment that to really destroy bad ideas, you had to ruthlessly mock and ridicule them (with facts and reason on our side, but of course!).
Admittedly, I don't think this breaks any cycles. Grudges will be held, vengeance may be enacted further down the line. It's not lost on me that that much of the progressive zeitgeist is a reaction to some conservative Christian status quo ante. This ain't exactly stable.
But maybe being an uncompromising, loudmouth fucker is the only way you stay in the fight.
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
I'd bet anything its the kids that moved the needle. Also the explosion of it, such that more people had proximate experience with how off the rails it's gotten. Schools socially transitioning children without telling their parents. The repeated lies about how "Kids below a certain age never receive cross sex hormones/double mastectomies/penectomies" and then just straight up seeing it happening. The obvious at the time and increasingly proven lies about how "hormone blockers are fully reversible". The constant mealy mouthed crocodile tears about how "Republicans are banning books!" because parents don't want books with graphic details about how to have gay sex in middle school libraries. Or books that say sex work is like any other kind of work, and a good way to pay for your hormones. The fact that increasingly Democrats and trans activist are messaging that they want to take away your children if you don't "affirm their identity".
It's just lies, lies and more lies the whole way down. People are given more reason to distrust trans activist every day.
This kind of political 'analysis' is omnipresent in normal politics spaces - "the other team are doing , it's lies all the way down, more and more people are leaving the democratic plantation / republican hate machine every day!" isn't really enlightening. What should 'banning books' have to do with puberty blockers? An even-handed attempt to articulate why a poll changed wouldn't exclusively be insults and exaggerated culture-war anecdotes.
What if he's just right, though? What if all of that is an honest-to-god explanation for the change in public approval? I undertsand we expect a level of charity, rigor, and definition for arguments in this space, but we are now talking about John Q Public "normies", and they are not beholden to any such considerations when they reach their verdicts, imperfect as they may be.
Maybe those seemingly disparate things are all sinking each other because they are not being offered piecemeal for individual assessment, but as a total package that needs to be accepted or rejected wholesale - an ultimatum I certainly didn't bring to the table, nor did most conservatives.
Sure, you and I could break it apart and evaluate the merits of any given piece as an intellectual exercise. But I don't live here on this forum. My online presence is spread across places and platforms beyond TheMotte, and I can see what an average person may be bombarded with just from opening a new tab in Microsoft Edge
If WhiningCoil is being uncharitable, perhaps it's because the population we're discussing (those switching from supporting to resisting GAC) have run out of charity. That's as real and honest an explanation as anything else.
Sure, partisan claims are sometimes correct, even in extreme forms. "THE RIVERS ARE BURNING" is dramatic, but that did contribute to the Clean Water Act. But if you want to understand 'why environmental regulation succeeded' - you want less of 'THE PEOPLES EYES HAVE OPENED TO THE DESTRUCTION WROUGHT ON MOTHER NATURE BY THE BRUTALITY OF INDUSTRY' and more 'environmental incidents increased in frequency from [number] to [larger number], the surplus left by technological development left enough slack to cut down on pollution without significantly reducing economic productivity, the environmental movement led by [list of people/organizations] grew in influence, something about changes in the dynamics of politics or the media'.
OP's list contains many claims about "lies" without clarifying who specifically is telling the lies, or who specifically is noticing them. Not distinguishing between relatively common phenomena (trans kids) and relatively rare phenomena ("Democrats and trans activist are messaging that they want to take away your children if you don't "affirm their identity""). And partisan non-sequiturs like "mealy mouthed crocodile tears about how "Republicans are banning books!" [...] about how to have gay sex in middle school libraries" and "books that say sex work is like any other kind of work, and a good way to pay for your hormones".
Even with mostly the same content, consider a post like "Parents noticed, in their childrens' schools, the quadrupling of the transgender child population in the past ten years. At the same time, social media, e.g. @LibsOfTiktok, drew attention to alarming situations - schools transitioning children secretly, teachers promoting trans issues in the classroom, and 'affirming a child's gender' being considered in a custody dispute. This intensified as it became another prong of the "anti-woke" right-left culture-war." Much better. Compare to OPO's "It's just lies, lies and more lies the whole way down" - which is neither true (lies are mixed with truths, as always) nor explanatory (plenty of culture war issues are similarly infested with lies, consider guns or immigration, and those aren't any less popular as a result).
Fair.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is entirely true. Normies see trans activists saying things that don’t seem true and then hitching their wagons to people who insist that yes, actual literal gay porn belongs in school libraries and we should encourage kids to engage in sex work and by the way parents shouldn’t have any rights to know what their kids are being taught in school.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link