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
More options
Context Copy link