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 -
Gender Identity and Sports - Once More Around The Track
There has been ample discussion regarding whether trans women should be able to compete in women’s sports, ranging situations as unpopular as Fallon Fox celebrating the bliss of fracturing women’s skulls in cage fights to the silliness of the Boston Marathon extending women’s qualifying times to anyone that says they’re non-binary. For better or worse, some of this is starting to wash out to actual policies at the highest levels of sports, with World Athletics banning trans women from competing as women in the Olympics. Personally, I would regard this as an obvious and easy decision, with no reasonable debate to be had. For the other side, here’s trans sprinter Halba Diouf’s feelings on not being allowed to compete as a woman and here is Science
insistingarguing that the null hypothesis should that be trans women don’t necessarily have an advantage.This is sufficiently well-worn territory that I don’t really expect anything fresh to be said at this point. Instead, I want to focus on something that I’ve always personally thought was quite a lot more difficult to judge correctly, which is athletes that were assigned female at birth, but have conditions that cause them to have abnormally high testosterone, such as XY chromosomes. In recent years, this seems to be coming up more often, possibly because of awareness of it being a thing that happens, possibly because the increased money and visibility of women’s sports has begun to select for increasing levels of biologically unusual people, or possibly because of something that’s not occurring to me. The first one I was aware of was Castor Semenya, who I’ve always had a soft spot for because it seems like a really tough break to have been born labeled as a girl, lived your life as a woman, competed and won at the highest levels, then get told, “nope, sorry, your chromosomes don’t match, so you’re banned in the future”. I hope that regardless of my positions on these issues to always extend that basic level of empathy to someone who truly was not at fault in the creation of a difficult situation.
I recently bumped into an article tying the plight of Diouf to a Senagalese sprinter who turned out to have XY chromosomes and high T, resulting in a ban from the Olympics and this is what gets to the heart of the matter:
First, I’d like to note that this objectively is discrimination and that takes us right to the heart of the point - having a women’s category in sports is inherently discriminatory. That’s the whole point, to discriminate men from women and create a category that is feasible for the best women to win, hence we must determine what a woman is for the purposes of that competition. That a policy is discriminatory simply cannot suffice as an argument against it, particularly when the whole point of the category is to implement a form of discrimination!
Second, I think Coe’s answer is correct and neatly covers all of these scenarios. I used to have a tough time with them, precisely because of the desire to be fair to women like Semenya, but the reality is that Caster Semenya simply isn’t a female and the whole point of women’s sports is to allow women to compete on equal footing against other women. That this will feel unfair and exclusionary to some tiny percentage of the population that has either a gender identity disorder or chromosomal abnormality is barely an argument at all - elite athletics isn’t actually an inclusive activity, it is exclusive and filters for the absolute best in the world for a given ruleset. Within track, use of performance-enhancing drugs is strictly monitored, with spikes in biological passports used to ban athletes even if what they used cannot be identified. With such tight constraints and rules on what physical specifications athletes are allowed to have, I no longer favor something so inclusive as to allow XY or other gender-abnormal athletes to compete - the women have to be actual women competing against other actual women. If nothing else, Lia Thomas has helped provide me some clarity on the absurdity of muscle-bound, testosterone-fueled males in women’s sports.
As @rae alludes to below, the culture war implications of trans women in sports overshadow any actual concern for female athletes. The attitude of conservatives towards women's sports in my lifetime has been blase at best and condemnatory at worst. The most popular women's sport by far is tennis, but even there, a quick perusal of the world rankings reveals no household names. The biggest women's college event of the year is the NCAA tournament, and that isn't exactly a hot ticket. When Pitt basketball student tickets were hard to come by, the lottery system in place gave you credit for the number of women's games you went to just to boost attendance. The discussion about Title IX below had an air of incredulity about it, suggesting that if it were costing OCR this much to enforce equality among men's and women's sports, perhaps we were better off without it. I doubt many conservatives would care too much either way; they might not exactly rail against the idea of a school being forced to spend ungodly sums on unprofitable women's sports because they spend millions on the football team, but if the law changed tomorrow and colleges started shutting down women's teams or at least restricting them (playing locally as independents rather than flying them all across the ACC footprint or whatever) I imagine the arguments would mirror those they make when one someone suggests WNBA salaries should be on par with the men.
And then when a trans person goes from being ranked 400th nationally to 38th in a sport no one cares about regardless of what gender is playing it because they won some tournament that most people haven't heard of but is supposedly kind of prestigious, women's sports become a sacred thing that must be protected at all costs. I understood that there was real concern in the early days of the trans saga when advocates were arguing that personal identity trumps all and it raised the specter of failed male athletes ticking a box differently just to get a chance to compete, or for scholarship money, or whatever. But the relevant governing bodies imposed testosterone limits, and while we can argue that those limits are too high or too low, we can't argue that no man is meeting the most lenient ones without taking supplemental estrogen. The effects of taking supplemental estrogen are such that it's doubtful that any man would undergo this treatment just for a shot at playing organized sports in a discipline that offers no hope of making any money as a professional. Do they have a competitive advantage? Maybe, but I don't really care. The trans population is small enough that it's probably not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, and you never hear about the trans athletes who don't win anything. One thing you never hear about is what the actual women athletes have to say about this. Governing bodies don't seem to be too concerned, and polls have repeatedly shown that the competitors aren't either. And if those most at stake don't care, then why should we? After all, when it comes to the priority of things, sports are pretty far down the list.
This frequently made point is over stated, at least unless by 'conservatives' you mean the online presence rather than the actual constituents . Conservatives with daughters want their daughters to be able to compete and while I've met plenty of liberal parents with kids in sports nearly every conservatives parents I've met has had their kids do sports. Sports in general are conservative leaning(this again is not to say that most normie left leaning people aren't also involved)
I always find this comparison facile, the men's sports are profitable, they subsidize other parts of the school not the other way around.
And without the conservative railing this might not have happened, and it still doesn't seem fair. Fairness really matters in sports, violating it is a big deal. Did you actually ever play sports growing up? It takes a substantial amount of time to be competitive, undermining that with unfair practices is crushing. You can see how upset unfairness makes whenever a referee makes a call that people think is incorrect.
Of course you don't, they'd be canceled.
Like all appeals to "Why do you even care about this? It's so unimportant". The response is obvious. If it's not important and we care more than you do then let us have our way. If you think it is actually important enough to fight over then drop this shaming act.
There is actually an asymmetry here that invalidates this argument, because the pro-trans contingent and the anti-trans one claim to be defending different terminal values rather than arguing in opposite directions over the same one. The pro-trans camp will say that trans representation in women's sports is important because [grand matters of fairness and justice in our society]; the anti-trans camp, on the other hand, generally says that no trans representation is important because [small subset of women can't win prizes at little league competition anymore]. There's nothing particularly inconsistent about saying that caring a great deal about the former is natural and caring a great deal about the latter is suspect. Now, of course from our vantage point it is of course clear that the anti-trans camp actually also is in it for grand matters of how our society is structured, rather than a weird dogged obsession with giving cis women a small chance to win that cup; but game theory forces them to dissimulate and assert even when pressed that they are really in it for [giving more nice things to women] (a societally comparatively accepted goal) rather than [giving fewer nice things to mtf trans] (a goal that is easily painted as vindictive or outright Voldemortian).
Allow me to rephrase this as fairly as you have represented my position. The pro-trans camp tries very hard not to actually think of the ground truth of what transgenderism means. If they do the farce of trying to hold in their head that gender is both a social construct and also an innate characteristic will cause painful cognitive dissonance. So when a topic, like sports, comes up that noticing the physical reality of trans people comes up they just obfuscate and point to the applause lights of "We're doing something important to blah blah blah past injustice, blah blah blah equality blah blah blah representation". It doesn't matter even a little bit to them that the ground truth of what they're arguing for is impossible to justify. That including trans women in women's sports defeats the entire purpose of the division. It is not about women's sports at all to you, it is about dissolving the category and you do not care about the costs.
It is my opinion that there is literally no such thing as an MTF trans person. It is a made up category that will not exist in two decades. It is incoherent to reason about giving or taking things away from people who share a common memetic delusion. You and your allies have created this suffering you are attempting remedy.
Saying MtF trans people don’t exist is a bizarre viewpoint - what do you call the obviously real number of people who are born male, have gender dysphoria, and are transitioning to have the characteristics of females by taking hormones and going through surgery? Those people clearly exist, and MtF is an apt descriptor, as they are going from male to female - in some cases successfully enough to pass, in some cases not. The “MtF” term is useful to distinguish between MtFs and FtMs - I don’t see any commonly used alternative words that avoid confusion (many times I’ve had to explain to people the direction of transitioning of people I know - e.g. X used to be a girl and now is a boy).
Also trans people have existed since recorded history, there’s ancient Sumerians trans priestesses called Gala, the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, and kathoeys (aka Thai ladyboys) are not a recent western phenomenon.
I’m a trans woman (so not surprisingly in the pro-trans camp) and I have thought very hard about the ground truth of transgenderism, and am exceedingly aware of the physical reality of being trans - the entire point of transitioning is to have fewer of the physical traits of your natal sex, as those are what’s causing psychological distress. There’s nothing requiring cognitive dissonance there, HRT and gender reassignment surgery do make you take on the characteristics of the opposite sex, albeit not all and with varying degrees of success.
The social construct of gender is a very real thing in that other people will identify you as a man or a woman and treat you differently, and that may not align with your preferences. If you transition, your goal is then to be perceived as the opposite sex (again, you may not be successful). I don’t see how this requires any cognitive dissonance, or creates any contradictions with my position towards sports, which is allowing trans women in women’s sports if they didn’t go through male puberty or if it can be medically proven that they have no physical advantage resulting from their natal sex.
There is no epistemicly coherent method to differentiate between the experience of being a man who actually has the internal experience of a woman and being a man who mistakenly believes they have the internal experience of a woman but in fact has typical male internal experiences. The difference between the two interpretations of experience is purely memetic, as one of these interpretations leads to pathology it is a harmful meme. Taking hormones and mimicking the opposite sex is a behavior and esthetic decision and has no bearing on the person's sex. Just their presentation.
These are other memes and are nothing like actually transitioning from one sex to the other. In every one of these cultures this is a third state, usually of weaker men who could not provide being used by the other men rather than being simply killed.
You don’t transition because you have the internal experience of the opposite sex - you transition because you have distress at having the experience of your natal sex. You don’t need any exposure to the modern trans gender discourse to develop gender dysphoria, simply existing in a society with different genders is enough.
Trans people don’t believe they are actually changing their sex, which is which the term “transsexual” was abandoned in favour of “transgender”. But hormones are not purely aesthetic and feminisation/masculinisation of the brain is actually scientifically observable - not only on MRI scans but also on test scores, e.g. post HRT, visuo spatial ability is enhanced in FtMs, while verbal working memory is enhanced in MtFs (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306453020301402).
If anything, I’d say trans people experience distress at their internal experience not aligning with their desired gender and post HRT it does - many anecdotal reports of how your mental state changes on estrogen or testosterone, not only from trans people but cis people who also undergo HRT (e.g. men with low T who report increased energy, confidence, etc).
As someone who has dysphoria and tried many ways to deal with it, I have yet to see any treatment that’s better than transitioning - it’s the current medical consensus for a reason - but if you know of any, feel free to link them.
Shouldn't it be "MtW" then?
(This is not a semantic complaint, it cuts quite deeply to the tendency to mix-and-match sex and gender as is most convenient for the given situation; ie. changing the name of "Women's sports" to "Female's sports" would probably not generate an acceptable situation for those who think that male trans people should be competing in those.)
More options
Context Copy link
This both not at all universally the definition trans advocates use and in fact a minority opinion(see truscum discourse) as well as a phrasing that obscures more than it enlightens. What is distress? What are the experiences of a natal sex and how do you differentiate them from those of the complimentary sex having only experienced one of them(or in the case of prepubescent children neither of them)? Memes are powerful things, anyone in the wrong side of a social media pile on can attest to their ability to induce distress.
I was tempted to just respond to this part because it's all the is really necessary for the local debate. So why the push for trans women in women's sports? If we're all in agreement the males and females are and remain different and these differences are the obvious motivating factor for the different leagues(as well as the vast majority of the sex based discrimination tolerated and mandated in our societies) then what possible ground could you be standing on?
I do not contest that hormones have huge impacts on many things we care about. All the more reason to be careful with them. And to make my position more clear, I have no actual problem with consenting adult trans humanist practices, if men want to take hormones to be more feminine, bolt tits on any part of their body or hell, more exotic stuff, more power to you. What I reject is appropriating a place in society that was not carved out for you and the attempt to colonize my mind and the mind of my kin with your memes. It is not normal to do these things, and that's fine abnormality is fine, but there is such a thing as normal that should be maintained. It's the path most likely to lead to good ends, deviating from it should be done with full knowledge of the consequences and I am very unimpressed with the signposts.
More options
Context Copy link
This is rather misleading. While it's true in the sense that even without exposure to the discourse, there will still be individuals exhibiting dysphoria (as proven by their documented existence prior to them being exposed in mass media), it's also true that exposure to the discourse absolutely dwarfs whatever factors make someone transgender absent the exposure, as shown by the massive increase in referrals to gender clinics, and the flip in age/gender ratios of people being referred there. The fact that we can observe something similar with other disorders like anorexia, multiple personality / DID, TikTok Tourette's, or outright delusions like recovered memories or alien abductions, would also indicate that this isn't merely a case of more people coming out due to increased acceptance.
That sounds plausible, and even detransitioners talk about it, but it's an open question what it all sums up to in the grand scheme of things. For example, how come it inevitably turns out that 90% of women in communities like this turn out to be trans? How come trans bros hardly ever show up?
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link