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 -
What are the limits of the weak man?
Note: Although this post cites specific real-life examples, the intent of the discussion is intended to be entirely at the meta level.
Scott Alexander's definition is apt to cite:
Also instructive is Bryan Caplan's gradation:
What Caplan is describing as "collective straw manning" seems to be a good scale for weakmanning's range. And lastly, consider also Julian Sanchez's disclaimer:
At least in theory, I think weakmanning should be avoided, but I struggle with how to draw the line exactly. If your goal is to avoid weakmanning, there's at least two axes that you must consider:
All the possible arguments for position X, ranked on a spectrum from least to most defensible.
All the possible arguments for position X, ranked on a spectrum from least to most *representative *of believers in X.
Weakmanning is not much of an issue if you're arguing against a single individual, because they either endorse the particular arguments or not. You can't showcase the error of one's ways by refuting arguments they never held.
But generally we tend to argue over positions endorsed by many different people, where each person may differ with regard to which argument they either advance or prioritize, so what should count as "representative"?
For example, many people believe in the theory of evolution, but some believers do so under the erroneous belief that evolutionary change occurs within an individual organism's lifespan. [I know some smartass in the comments will pipe up about some endangered tropical beetle or whatever does demonstrate "change-within-lifespan" evolutionary changes. Just remember that this is not an object-level discussion.] If you use a crude heuristic and only poll relevant experts (e.g. biology professors) you're not likely to encounter many adherents of the "change-within-lifespan" argument, so this could be a decent filter to narrow your focus on what should count as "representative" for a given position. This is generally an effective tactic, since it helps you avoid prematurely declaring victory at Wrestlemania just because you trounced some toddlers at the playground.
But sometimes you get a crazy position believed by crazy people based on crazy arguments, with a relatively tiny minority within/adjacent to the community of believers aware of the problems and doing the Lord's work coming up with better arguments. InverseFlorida coined the term "sanewashing" to describe how the meaning of "defund the police" (DTP) shifted [TracingWoodgrains described the same dynamic with the gentrification of /r/antiwork. Credit also to him for most of the arborist-themed metaphor in this post.] to something much more neutered and, correspondingly, much more defensible:
Keep in mind that this is not an object-level discussion on the merits of DTP. Assume arguendo that the "sanewashed" arguments are much more defensible than the "crazy" ones they replaced. If someone were to take a position against DTP by arguing against the now obsolete arguments, one of the sanewashers would be technically correct accusing you of weakmanning for daring to bring up that old story again. This fits the literal definition of weakmanning after all.
As Sanchez noted above, for most people for most positions, intuition predates rationality. They stumble around in the dark looking for any sort of foothold, then work backwards to fill in any necessary arguments. Both the sanewashers and the crazies are reliant on the other. Without the sanitization from the hygiene-minded sanewashers, the position would lack the fortification required to avoid erosion; and without the crazy masses delivering the bodies and zeal, the position would fade into irrelevance. The specific ratio may vary, but this dynamic is present in some amount on any given position. You very likely have already experienced the embarrassment that comes from a compatriot, purportedly on your side, making an ass of both of youse with their nonsensical arguments.
If your ultimate goal is truth-seeking, weakmanning will distract you into hacking away at worthless twigs rather than striking at the core. But sometimes the goal isn't seeking truth on the specific position (either because it's irrelevant or otherwise already beyond reasonable dispute) and instead the relevant topic is the collective epistemological dynamics [I dare you to use this phrase at a dinner party without getting kicked out.]. InverseFlorida's insightful analysis would not have been possible without shining a spotlight on the putative crazies — the very definition of weakmanning in other words.
Here's the point, at last. Normally someone holding a belief for the wrong reasons is not enough to negate that belief. But wherever a sanewasher faction appears to be spending considerable efforts cleaning up the mess their crazy neighbors keep leaving behind, it should instigate some suspicion about the belief, at least as a heuristic. Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.
It's possible that this inquiry unearths just another fun episode in the collective epistemological dynamics saga; it's also possible the probe ends up exposing a structural flaw with the belief itself. In either circumstances, a weakmanning objection is made in bad faith and intended to obfuscate. Its only purpose is to get you to ignore the inconvenient, the annoying. You should pay no heed to this protest and continue deploying the magnifying glass; don't be afraid to focus the sun's infernal rays into a burning pyre of illumination. Can you think of any reasons not to?
There is also the dynamic of movements that are composed of many contradictory cores, maintained by sanewashers who's arguments contradict each other, pointed in the same direction that all have their own sets of features. Feature sets that can't possibly be sane washed all at once but are all vaguely in the same direction and are all held simultaneously by some weak men. I think the trans movement has a lot of these and it makes it very difficult to argue against either as a whole or in detail. You have people who believe in sexual dysphoria to argue with whenever you go after whether transgenderism is even a meaningful concept but when you go after whether you should be able to gatekeep certain institutions you are met with claims that gender is a social construct that we can define any way we want. You may even get meta sane washing that can cover both of these two features at the expense of some other feature but the glue that holds it all together are the weak men that really don't put any effort into reconciling their beliefs into a coherent whole. This all leads to arguing against any movement like this feeling like moving through mud where you spend most of the time just hashing out the particular axioms the interlocutor is even operating on today which just so happen to be perfectly tuned for this one subject and totally incapable of defending a different topic.
I guess I’m one of those people that sanewashes the transgender movement - I don’t agree with 100% or maybe even 50% of the movement, but I do feel compelled to defend it to some degree because at least it defends my right to be accepted in society and have access to healthcare I need, unlike the current anti-trans conservatives in the US. That’s one of the downsides of the culture, you’re thinking about picking a fight with an ideological monolith and losing all the nuances from discussing individual philosophical differences.
However I feel obligated to point out that you picked a wrong example from the transgender movement; how is sexual dysphoria contradictory with gender being a social construct? You can argue that they’re unrelated, you could feel dysphoric about having the physical characteristics of your biological sex, and you could have gender dysphoria about being treated as a man or a woman in society; the latter would go away in a theoretical society where men and women were treated 100% the same, whereas the former would be present even on a desert island.
If you wanted weak men of the transgender movement, pick the tucutes who believe gender dysphoria isn’t necessary to be trans, that gender presentation isn’t related to gender identity, and that it’s transphobic to be a gay man and not want to pleasure a trans man’s vagina. Those are actual beliefs held by some people in the community and much more contradictory in that they devalue the very concept of gender identity.
I'll split this into two parts and you can respond to both, either or neither as you please.
If you're making a coherent argument or at least making a good faith attempt at a coherent argument I do think I owe you actual arguments in return and the follow section will contain those. That said it actually does matter that your faction has decisively lost the mainstream and that the people driving the movement call you 'scum' precisely because of some of the axioms your arguments rest on in order to remain coherent.
To reverse the tables at least on myself. I believe in the importance of gun rights because they are a ward against tyranny. I don't particularly find self defense reasoning all that compelling. If it turned out that my pro-gun position was an extreme minority that would not get its way if not for the self defense position, and the self defense position ends up being bogus then I think that should matter politically. The people making the wrong argument about self defense should rightfully be convinced against their position(again assuming it's wrong) and I should actually have to convince those people of my position as well. If I fail then I fail and the power wielded in my interest by my larger faction was never mine to wield at all. Now it might be the case that these other people, even if convinced against the self defense portions of gun control might fall back to my ward against the tyranny of the state position but if they frequently called people who believe my argument 'wardscum', because I wasn't in favor of policies that might aid in self defense but not have any impact as a ward against tyranny like more guns in schools, well that's evidence against the possibility.
Again, you may philosophically owe me an actual argument against my position but if, given everyone heard all the arguments, you have the votes and I don't then you win. If I only have the votes for reasons totally unrelated and unsupportable by my position then I've only gotten lucky and this should concern me because, if for no other reason, my luck could change.
The problem with this being a 'weak man' is that it's the majority opinion espoused both by practically every expert and every activist. While I may owe you an argument we both know the arguments that would defeat the majority of the movement and we both know that they're resistance to the arguments has nothing at all to do with them having a coherent and workable worldview. And while from your perspective the world where they rule, warts and all, is worth it for your own reasons from my perspective there are a lot of kids who will be mutilated by these people on this pyre. Just like many kids will die in school shootings for lack of gun control I have a hard bullet biting answer for it being worth it but I recognize I'm biting quite a bullet here.
Let me see if I can pass the ideological turing test on your position and let me know where I fail:
You believe, bolstered especially by your personal experience, that there is a condition similar to body integrity disorder centered on primary and secondary sex characteristics. You call this 'sexual dysphoria' and believe the best treatment is hormones and possibly surgery as analogous to a BID patient getting an offending arm amputated. It's a rare and unfortunate condition that we wish we could solve without these drastic actions but this is unfortunately the best we can do. We should all do our best to accommodate people, like yourself.
Further for historically contingent reasons there are many behaviors and practices that society "genders" with two categories which have traditionally people have been assigned to at birth by their sex. These behaviors are largely arbitrary, in the past boys were associated with pink and now girls are. These barriers are silly and limiting. Society would be better to rid itself of them and treat everyone as they want to be treated.
I have problems with this position but I'd like you to correct/bolster it where wrong before I got off arguing against something you don't believe.
Bit of a late reply but unfortunately I lost my previous attempt, so here goes:
I do think there’s a very good point you’re making about the risks of allying with people who are ostensibly after the same end goals but for completely different reasons; but I think the differences between say, your position on firearms and one motivated by self-defence are smaller than between you and someone pro gun control. Ideological purity is a fractal and I don’t think it’s possible to agree 100% with any individual on policy or societal goals, but that doesn’t mean there’s not individuals with whom you agree more than others.
I’m not American so the concept of the 2nd amendment or frequent school shootings is very foreign to me, but I admire the fact that you don’t brush them aside. I do understand the concerns with surgeries on minors, but the number is very low (56 genital surgeries between 2019-2021, 776 top surgeries) and my experience is that there is a significant amount of gatekeeping - I’m not sure about the US but in my country you need a gender identity disorder diagnosis + referral letters from two psychiatrists and that’s as an adult. Calling it “mutilation” is emotionally charged language that brings to mind violent traumatic maiming, when the end goal is a surgery that improves the patient’s life.
Your attempt at the Turing test is mostly correct except for the comparison to a BID patient getting an arm amputated; no pro-trans rights person would make that point.
Firstly, the end goal of becoming an amputee vs becoming the opposite sex is very different; if done perfectly, the former will impair your daily functioning and makes you unable to do things the average healthy person can, while a perfect sex change wouldn’t - unless you want to argue that 50% of the population is somehow impaired compared to the other.
Current technology doesn’t give you a perfect sex change, but I don’t see how any of the modern treatments give you any impairments to your daily life, let alone any that are comparable to amputation. Fertility is the main thing that is impacted; but you can plan around it by freezing sperm or eggs beforehand (or by halting HRT - at least for MtFs, it’s possible to have normal sperm counts once T levels are back to normal). Fertility is also not relevant to your daily life in the same way having limbs is, and I personally wanted a vasectomy anyway which is something that’s available to cis men.
Let’s go step by step for each modern treatment;
You can go on HRT and have the hormone levels of the opposite sex, giving you some of their sexual secondary characteristics. The main thing you risk is loss of fertility, but it’s generally reversible at that stage. Otherwise, there are no changes that make your daily life worse than either the average man or woman.
If FtM, you can get top surgery. This is a cosmetic procedure but you will be unable to lactate after; this is desirable for many, as men don’t lactate. Larger breasts will have visible scars but this is a purely cosmetic feature once they’re healed.
Bottom surgery is more complex; the loss of fertility is permanent at that stage, and you have to remain on hormones for the rest of your life. But, if it goes well, you can have a healthy, fulfilling sexual life with genitals that you actually like, instead of ones that you can’t stand.
Also as a side note, did you know that there was a study in the mid-20th century on institutionalised patients that showed that castrated males lived on average up to 12 more years than intact males (depending on age of castration)? See also medieval eunuchs who had a considerably longer lifespan than their aristocratic peers. So a transfem patient could very well have a longer healthier life by going through the so-called “mutilation”. Personally if any procedure could give me an extra decade of life, I would heavily consider it.
I think you've missed the point that I was emphasizing from @ymeskhout's OP. It's not just about whether it's tactically sound or not, it's a question of what people in our position are supposed to do when there is a significant difference between the popular variant of a movement and the many competing variants that are actually reasoned. Especially when the popular one in its confused way prescribes things then more reasoned variant wouldn't. We might believe that the popular variant is harmful itself and it's worth addressing it and trying to oppose it and engaging with these other variants is not necessary for that. But at the same time these variants are often brought up as defenses of the whole, deployed at their strongest points, even though they can't all fit together cohesively in a way that justifies the greater movement. If as you've said gender and sex incongruencies are entirely separate issues, one is physical and one is something that might not exist on a deserted island then we can't use the sexual dysphoria as an argument for gender affirming care and yet this move is constantly made, and when it's made the movement is disagreeing with you because you are not useful to it at the moment.
This all has the effect of every trans discussion being several long posts drilling down on what a particular interlocutor actually believes and at some point the thread dies when it becomes necessary for the TRA poster to actually start throwing some of the popular trans movement under the bus for ideological consistency. It's a tactic that produces a movement that can argue for or against anything whenever it is convenient.
I do not trust the gatekeepers, I have seen their "yeet the teet" advertising, I am unimpressed.
In the cases where it was not necessary, which are the cases analogous to school shootings, it is a violent and traumatic maiming. There isn't a way to sugar coat unnecesarilly flaying a healthy person's penis that would not have ever desired the procedure if not exposed to this idea. The question of what percentage of patients this describes is of course up for debate but the horror it should invoke can't and shouldn't be sugar coated. I understand why you flinch away, I have the same reaction to pictures of dead kids being used to argue against my position, but the instinct is a weakness.
I was mainly comparing them on the mechanism for an unexplainable physical "wrongness" of the body, I wasn't actually trying to compare the outcome itself. That said I honestly would take losing a limb over being reduced to the trans version of my sex, in my case an FTM. I would rather not have a leg than be FTM. I do not think this is an unusual position.
But going on the rest of the statement of belief, how do you bridge or do you not bridge support for trans women in women's sports?
Do you mean that you shouldn’t give gender affirming care (i.e. medical treatments) if someone has only social dysphoria and no physical dysphoria? I agree with that and from what I can see that’s the general position many trans people have. The most frequent manifestation is trans people with no bottom dysphoria not getting bottom surgery, which is where the whole “women can have penises” angle comes from. Some trans people won’t take HRT (often they will just identify as non-binary tho), however many that have mostly social dysphoria will still go on HRT in order to pass.
I think from the start I have tried to be clear that I don’t agree 100% with all of the modern day trans rights beliefs? Going back to the very interesting point you made about defending a position from whichever mutually exclusive variant is most convenient, I would be interested in seeing whether or where I did that - I am trying to be as ideologically consistent as possible, if only for my one sake, although it is possible I am adjusting my position as new arguments are made.
The difference is that a kid being shot is always a horrifying thing, while gender affirming surgery can sometimes be horrifying, and sometimes the best thing to happen to someone.
That is honestly extremely difficult for me to comprehend. You use your legs every day, having a prosthetic leg would be a severe inconvenience in your daily life to say the least, preventing you from doing many activities you take for granted. Meanwhile the FtM version of you would probably still pass as a male socially. I could perhaps understand preferring to lose a leg than your genitals if your genitals are your only source of sexual pleasure, but the FtM version of you would still be able to enjoy sex, if in a different way.
Hm… although perhaps that can be a good analogy for you to understand gender dysphoria? What you feeling about becoming an FtM version of yourself is how I feel about being a biological male. To me what’s horrifying is not “flaying my penis” but having a penis at all, and I am filled with utter disgust every time I have to look at it. As I said in a previous comment, I wanted it removed as a child who had 0 awareness of the existence of trans people - there was a point where I honestly thought of taking a kitchen knife and faking a bloody accident.
I can’t see how someone would undergo bottom surgery without having similar feelings, and I certainly can’t see how they would go through it if they valued it as much as you seemed to value yours, just by being exposed to the idea. There’s certainly plenty of trans women who value theirs and keep it, and I don’t see the number of minors getting SRS as anything concerning at the minute.
If It's not offensive to you, and let me know if it is and I'll switch to something else, I'm going to call the physical dysphoria variant transsexual and the social variant as transgender because this comment was difficult to make readable without two terms.
No I mean something different. Because both the transsexual people and the transgendered people are under the same umbrella term of "trans" every discussion on the topic has the group under discussion shift as is convenient to the argument. And it's not clear the mainstream trans position actually ever bothers to differentiate between these groups. Puberty blockers are frequently pushed as something all kids who identify as trans should get, with trans being inclusive of transgender kids. But this is an insane thing to suggest for a social phenomenon, even if it might make sense if we had some reliable way to detect transsexuality(which I do not believe we do). If I oppose blockers, which I do for a number of reasons, it may as well be as if the transgender segment doesn't even exist. And as I said above, I do not trust the gatekeepers on this, they do not seem to share your belief that there are different segments here.
I'd like to just comment on how confusing this must be to kids going through the normal discomfort of their bodies changing during puberty. Combined with normal teenage insecurity and identity formation and you have a perfect storm for false positives that will stick. I am incredibly unimpressed with how unserious the movement takes this massive potential hazard.
Yes and I believe you. It's not that you agree 100% with them, it's that we don't have a choice between what you believe and what we(We being broadly the trans skeptical side) believe. The choice is between what the mainstream trans side proposes and what the mainstream trans skeptical side proposes - and I also don't 100% agree with the main stream trans skeptical side.
So we can go back and forth given this bifurcation of trans and maybe reach a raesoned compromise but what is that worth if you're not at all representative of the movement? At the end of the day we're either confiscating guns or not and it has nothing to do with either of our positions. So when arguing against things like puberty blockers, it might be worth it just for the exercise and curiosity to find how your unique position feels on the topic but if the mainstream position is going to be to add them to the k-12 water fountains(hyperbole) then your more sane position isn't really useful.
The life saving gender affirming care in this metaphor is akin to a good shoot that saved lives.
It's not just the sex life it's being thrown entirely off of the normal life path. I can have my own children, have normal parameters in all other areas of my life without a leg. It's difficult to fully explain all the differences it would make. What would you give up to have been born a woman?
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