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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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I think the distinction between a trans woman and a cis woman is going to emerge at some level of the discussion, because there are goal-directed reasons to make the distinction. If a cis man wants to have his own biological children, then he'll want to impregnate a cis woman and won't have much luck with a trans woman. But... the distinction exists. Even just "trans woman" and "cis woman" captures the distinction pretty well. I think the fight over the specific word "woman" is a distraction. We have "toy bears", which we're happy to call "bears" despite them just being paint and plastic. In a trivia game asking for "famous bears" most of the "bears" will actually be fictional representations of bears, and not flesh-and-blood bears. So, why can't a "trans woman" be a "famous woman" in a trivia game?

I think this starts to raise questions when there's...

I'm not sure how to put this. I think it has something to do with the noncentral fallacy, but thinking about it for a moment I think it's a bit more broad.

I think the audience would feel somewhat cheated if you:

  • Had a list of the "Greatest Admirals Ever", and put Kirk and Ackbar over Nelson and Yi Sun-Sin; or

  • Said you were researching "Oldest bears in the world and how they age" and in actuality you were researching wear-and-tear of bear statues that have lasted for well over a century; or

  • Asserted that the war between the GE vs FPA had "the highest body count ever", and it turns out that it's a fictional war between the fictional Galactic Empire vs the fictional Free Planets Alliance from the fictional Legends of the Galactic Heroes.

Something similar is in play when you celebrate "female achievement" when a trans woman is the first person to break into a field or hold some record, or if you find more trans women than cis women working in some certain company after affirmative action in favour of "women" as a category (I've heard someome mention something about this in tech, but it seems too ridiculous to be true from experiences of tech people I know in the Bay Area. Nevertheless, even as a theroetical example it stands)

It seems to me that these sorts of equivocations only work in very specific circumstances and contexts.

It seems to me that these sorts of equivocations only work in very specific circumstances and contexts.

I think it's largely a function of what is common in a particular social and material environment, and what expectations are common in a particular question-asking environment.

In a culture that's crazy about pigs, the trivia category "Famous Pigs" will probably be about non-fictional pigs. In our culture, where most people hardly interact with real pigs, the names are going to be "Babe", "Piglet", "Wilbur", etc. In both worlds, additional context can disambiguate (e.g. "Famous Literary Pigs" vs. "Famous Real-world Pigs")

I don’t think this works out as well as you suggest. Most people don’t know any pigs, but these same people know hundreds of women at least. The social and material context is simply too different for “most famous pigs” including fictional pigs vs “most famous women” including transwomen.

Like, I don’t have a deep-seated aversion to and am quite open to treating genuine trans people with their “adopted sex”, like I did before the whole trans craze blew up in the last decade, simply as a matter of convenience and kindness. I also think there’s likely a small number of people who are genuinely “trans” in the sense that something has gone wrong in their neurobiology. But I don’t think the reasoning you put out is a strong justification for why we should treat trans women as women.