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 -
#”We’re coming for your children.”
The LGBTQ+ movement kicked out NAMBLA, genuine pederasts, in the 80’s in order to get sodomy laws aimed at consenting adults off the books. The American anti-pedophilia majority took a generation to accept this disavowal at face value.
The Pizzagate section of the Q or QAnon movement revived the bailey that gay people generally want to rape children to cultural relevance, and did so around the time the trans rights movement was pushing acceptance of transition. The motte version is that the gay community reproduces through social memetic contagion since they won’t reproduce sexually. One potent variation is the ironic and practically self-parodying “trans genocide” meme
The drag queen story hour program made the idea scarily realistic even to parents who didn’t subscribe to any of that conspiracy theory nonsense. And now there’s a new twist.
As chronicled by NBC News:
In the 21-second clip, circulated by a right-wing web streamer channel, dozens of people march in the streets and are clearly heard chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping.” But one voice that is louder than the crowd — it’s not clear whose, or whether the speaker was a member of the LGBTQ community — is heard saying at least twice, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”
To conservative pundits, activists and lawmakers, the video confirmed the allegations they’ve levied in recent years that the LGBTQ community is “grooming” children.
But to Brian Griffin, the original organizer of the NYC Drag March, if that’s the worst they heard, it’s only because he wasn’t there this year.
Griffin said he chanted obscene things in the past, like “Kill, kill, kill, we’re coming to kill the mayor,” and joked about pubic hair and sex toys during marches. People at the Drag March regularly sing “God is a lesbian.”
“It’s all just words,” Griffin said. “It’s all presented to fulfill their worst stereotypes of us.”
The “coming for your children” chant has been used for years at Pride events, according to longtime march attendees and gay rights activists, who said it’s one of many provocative expressions used to regain control of slurs against LGBTQ people. And in this case, they said, right-wing activists are jumping on a single video to weaponize an out-of-context remark to further stigmatize the queer community.
Conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly referred to advocates for LGBTQ rights as “groomers,” associating people who oppose laws that restrict drag performances or classroom discussions of gender identity with pedophiles. The charge is an echo of a decades-old trope anti-gay activists have used to paint the community as a threat to the country’s youths, an allegation that some advocates say endangers LGBTQ people. And the intense reaction to the video has scared some attendees, who insist the quip has been taken out of context.
“It’s really scary to us,” said Fussy Lo Mein, a drag performer and activist who was at this year’s march and declined to give their real name because of safety concerns. “It doesn’t represent everybody — it represents that individual. I thought it was a dumb idea, and I started chanting on top of it with alternate verses.”
This seems to be equivalent to the Charlottesville “White Rights” event where “Jews will not replace us” was supposedly chanted. The outgroup only hears “WE ARE A THREAT TO EVERYONE YOU LOVE AND EVERYTHING YOU HOLD SACRED,” while the ingroup appreciates the nuance and gets a bit freaked out at the outgroup seeing only the surface level interpretation.
Controversial, but I suspect that sissy hypno porn etc viewed by terminally online males is responsible for more MtF conversions than what middle aged LGBTQ activists are advocating in schools.
The former has a direct pipeline to transition (along with programming, nerdy pursuits, being an incel etc). The latter doesn’t seem to, it seems unlikely that some fuddy duddy old teacher interrupting the usual sex ed lessons students don’t pay attention to anyway in order to talk about whatever trans activists want them to somehow leads to large numbers of otherwise completely normal boys deciding they’re transwomen.
The material responsible for the huge uptick in trans identification isn’t taught in class, it’s available freely online in huge volumes and dealing with it is much more difficult than banning kids from attending drag performances.
TL;DR: Autogynephilia isn’t caused by cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom lol.
Regarding trans children at least, I don't know how many parents take their cues on child-rearing from online porn. I think there's a general heuristic that the internet is a crazy place, and whatever hot new fad or kink that is expressed from online spaces is just "that weird meme crap my kid ocassionally references that I don't understand or feel like understanding, because the 'net is crazy". It's hard to separate it from "The Grimace Millshake Challenge" or whatever bizarre FOMO meme is being reported on, and you can see your Mom's face screw up in judgmental confusion as you attempt to explain it.
If this is just crazy internet shit, you can hold onto the hope (somewhat reliably) that the fad will pass and all you need to do is hold down the fort as the storm moves past you. Codifying it into education sanewashes and perpetuates the phenomenon, because you can't so easily dismiss an army of smart-sounding educators who supposedly knows what's best for your child and are 'experts' on teaching kids - since you're just some dummy that has the humility to understand some things are beyond your understanding and intellect, so might as well to defer to your betters even if it makes you uncomfortable
I think many people are wising up to the idea that this trusted dynamic has been utterly abused. And resisiting the trans push into education is 'holding down the fort'.
The idea is that the child will take a lot of cues from online porn, and considering the child is the one who might transition, that's more relevant than whatever the parent thinks. Consider teenage socialists - are they getting that socialism from their middle or high school teachers? Their parents? No. Either their friends or the internet!
I think the number of kids who would want to transition is within 1% of where it would be if schools didn't mention trans issues at all, and political incentives to get parents (potential R voters) riled up plus whatever caused the moral panics about satanic child abuse explain the focus on trans in schools.
They aren't? It seems to me that over the last 15-20 years there has been a massive influx of teacher-activists whose entire raison-d'etre is to turn their students into activists for progressive causes, with LGBTQ+++ only the current fad. A key part of the Left's slow march through the institutions over the last 70 years has been through the education pipeline, trickling down from academia to grade school (and younger), and that the current credentialing system for emerging teachers is essentially a factory line for producing good little socialists. This is not, IME, dissimilar from how higher education has done the same to journalism programs, leading to the current situation with a media that is 90+% ideologically captured. Control the narratives through school and TV, and even the kids who aren't political will grow up with the socially approved understanding of the world. By the time the teenagers are being riled into activism by their cool young green-haired teachers (at my kids' charter school a few years back, they all worked on a class project to obstruct drilling at Standing Rock, even though we are thousands of miles away) they've already been primed with 8 years of socialist righteousness.
Go back to the 1990s and you will find socialist-driven environmental messaging seeping into every pore of the public grade school experience. A bit farther back, at my large suburban American high school in the late 1980s, the advanced history class used as its primary textbook Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. This isn't new; on the contrary, it's just so normal it's hard to notice.
I said that from personal experience with teenage socialists over the past decade. The specific far-left tropes and sayings they repeat do not come from their teachers, they come from places like twitter or discord, or youtube, or possibly their classmates who got them from the internet. I agree that there are left-wing teachers, but they are not the direct cause here.
More options
Context Copy link
This was almost completely absent from my education in the 2000s.
Since I didn’t take AP enviro science, I got more environmentalist messaging from Magic School Bus than from actual school. Honestly, I find it kind of odd to label that as socialist rather than just…left-wing.
Government was a civic religion class with a focus on judicial review. Same for US history. Even world history spent far more time on the ancients than on anything post-Marx. The closest to endorsing socialism was probably the AP Econ admiration for Keynes.
Wait. South Carolina state history was openly apologist for the South, both for the John C. Calhoun and Strom Thurmond periods. That’s as political as I remember it getting.
I don’t think I’m just putting my head in the sand here.
Well, maybe location matters. I'm in Oregon, part of the "left coast," to be sure. And the 1980s -- when I was in high school -- and through the 1990s there was a massive influx of Californians looking to escape the results of hard-left politics while recreating them somewhere else. I imagine the American South was quite different.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And my point is that assuming children's gender identities or sexual orientations are being shaped by exposure to online porn, then we are from and away from 'born this way', and parents may feel they have a duty to restrict and deny access to such material, its relatives, and all their associated theorycrafting if they they deem it ultimately harmful for their offspring - without having to deal with a decentralized mass of sneering 'betters' who repeatedly/fraudulently cite The Science as being on their side, and who will utilize any mass of power they've accrued to culturally coerce you into behaving differently, up to calling CPS (and why believe it would stop there, left undeterred?).
Parents are often reliant on the integrity and validity of our institutions so they know what to expect, preempt, encourage, or ameliorate when it comes to the acculturation of their children. Instinct can probably get you far, but in a complex society with layers of social/economic/political abstractions, parents are looking for a consensus guard rail that reinforces their beliefs, gently reminding them "Yes, encourage that!" and "No, do what you can to curb that!". Validating the trans phenomenon as 'just some other way of being' after saying something that layman's ears might interpret as "The porn is mind controlling your kid and nobody should be concerned because #Pride" is seriously messing with the credibility of that rail, and the more it is emedded and officiated, the more concerned parents will be left out to dry, because...
"...Holy shit, I can't believe you disagree with the doctors and the teachers and about 75% of politicians (see, this is a totally non-partisan thing!) about the utility of teaching gender fluidity in Kindergarten! You still think it's a memetic contagion run amok? That is soooo 2023. Jordan Peterson is calling, and he wants you to clean your room! Haha."
I'm not sure if the above counts as uncharitable or inflammatory. But I was compelled to write it out and illustrate my point because these are very real conversations I've had too many times to count. I'm not too keen on the consequences of that dismissive disregard getting heavier.
nobody is calling CPS over parents preventing their kids from watching porn. there is no culture war over parents preventing their children from watching online porn. This is because 'kids and sexuality' is a taboo pressure point for almost everyone in the US. Which is why conservatives try to associate trans with child + sex (grooming!). The culture war issues are all about trans in schools, drag queen story hour, etc.
If your concern is that schools or institutions embrace trans, then ... they embrace trans because everyone does, so we circle back to the original 'is trans real and good' debate, 'society as a whole' isn't going to suppress something most people think is good. If your concern is your kid becoming trans, then said institutions have basically no causal role in an individual kid deciding they are trans (other than 'not explicitly opposing it it', which brings us back to the first point). Nowhere does it make sense to specifically attack schools. The entire 'trans in schools' issue is based on a bunch of false premises that spread because they rile up disconnected but concerned parents.
I think they embrace trans because they want to, and they have Bostock vs Clayton County gave them a fig leaf to push through in every space they could.
Everyone certainly does not embrace trans.
This is only true if it is not a social contagion. I think it is a social contagion, much like suicide or anorexia, so I think schools are actively making more children trans just via exposure.
My proposed alternative was 'Schools? no. Their parents? No. Either their friends or the internet', which is as if not more compatible with social contagion than teachers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The entire thrust of my post wasn't a concern over the porn, but how we expect society to react to it and its attendant psychologies. You do not need to put some bizarre scenario in my mouth about 'CPS being called because the parents don't show porn to their kids'. You can ready my post again, notice that the 'CPS' comment was in reference to the generic 'coerce you into behaving differently' (which does, can, or may soon include affirming your child's stated gender and using their preferred pronouns at home, depending on where you are) - and since you are a regular poster here, you could probably reasonably assume that's what I was referring to, instead of inserting an absurd caricature of my statement.
The existence of leather fetish porn does not necessitate a Grade School level understanding of fetishism and sexuality for young children, nor does it require some passive acceptance and validation of every strange, oddball choice or behavior a child may exhibit. It's not that I want children who are soon-to-be fetishists to be locked out of any understanding of themselves. But if social contagion is real and the teachers are installing 'Leather Week' on the calendar where they dress up and make the whole thing a fun game and are way too interested in preemptively identifying their student candidates and absentmindedly 'nudging them along the path', I don't think it's a worthwhile tradeoff. Consider that reality, and then compare it to another one where every PTA or school faculty member might say "Hey, your 6 year old probably doesn't know what they're doing, but it might best if he doesn't wear the Kink Boots/Dog Mask/Ass Chaps he steals from your closet to school every week". If you are concerned that the internet is leading your kid astray (and quite likely is), it is of no help to you when all your institutions shrug their shoulders and ask what the big deal is.
And of course, I consider this whole thing to be an element of a multi-part problem. Candidly, I think a world where everybody is 'OK with trans' is a world where huge swathes of the population (if not a majority) have been so buried under propaganda and deprived of sound critical arguments (that do exist); to such a degree that they have to delude themselves and preempt serious argument to maintain their views, or are too brow-beaten and self-preserving to argue against it. I say that based on what I see today as extremely flimsy evidence with a disproportionate level of dismissiveness of counter-arguments and emotional blackmail ("If you don't affirm, your kid will commit suicide"). Now, should these people be catered to any way? Maybe so! That is certainly a valid possibility! But 'the majority decides what's right and just' is so boring and obvious. I am interested in separating good ideas from bad ideas, to the best of my ability. And if society wants to gorge itself on a bellyful of bad ideas, I can't stop it, but I can record it.
My point is that the state is not preventing you from taking the kinds of action that might actually prevent a child from wanting to transition, they are doing things like 'sometimes awarding the pro-trans parent the child in custody disputes'. So the entire character of the oturage over this just doesn't make sense. And I am not sure if 'not giving a child gender-affirming care who wants one in an otherwise normal household' is/will be a legal reason for CPS/similar to take a child away in any US state? If it is, I'd appreciate a link, I couldn't find anything with a quick google. If not, then with the only similar thing I'm aware of, I don't think 'taking your child away because they are trans' is a particularly useful way to represent 'considering trans acceptance in custody disputes'. Even if I disagree with that, it's much less obviously EVIL than weighing evidence in a custody dispute, where there are two parents' 'natural rights' in conflict as opposed to a clear violation of one parent's 'natural rights'
This is like worrying about getting covid from surfaces and ritually washing your hands. I'm sure one person got covid from a surface, but it was much less common than airborne transmission by like 1000x. Leather week (does that exist in a school? I'd be surprised, leather is a very bdsm-adjacent/kinky queer subculture) isn't, causally, anything if every child is watching porn by age 12 and has seen /r/egg_irl a few times by age 14.
No, what I'm saying is if most people, including those in power, believe something, and are acting on it, the only argument of interest is 'convincing them otherwise'. Side-arguments like ' is in our schools and brainwashing our children' don't really help you, because the people in the schools and most of the parents in the schools authentically believe being trans is vaguely good and think said brainwashing is probably fine as a result. You can't not brainwash a child who will just mimetically absorb whatever they see.
California here I come, right back where I started from:
The bill hasn't passed yet and they are still adding and deleting parts, but in general Scott "Leather Man" Weiner is co-sponsoring this little gem:
"Existing law governs the determination of child custody and visitation in contested proceedings and requires the court, for purposes of deciding custody, to determine the best interests of the child based on certain factors, including, among other things, the health, safety, and welfare of the child.
This bill, for purposes of this provision, would include a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child."
"SECTION 1. Section 3011 of the Family Code is amended to read:
(1) (A) The health, safety, and welfare of the child.
(B) As used in this paragraph, the health, safety, and welfare of the child includes a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Everyone does not embrace trans. Even pro-trans people spend a lot of time denying that the trans things that are happening, are happening, which would indicate lack of support.
How do you know that? I've heard stories of troubled kids that were more neglected by the school system, and the moment they came out as trans, they got full support of all the adults in the school. Do you think that sort of behavior plays no role?
There's also the small issue of hiding it from parents, which a lot of schools are doing.
Everyone was flippant, most people are vaguely pro-trans, especially most 'elite' people. As a result, the 'cultural background' is vaguely pro-trans. I don't understand how not supporting fake penis surgery for 15yos makes one anti-trans in the context of 'a cultural background of being pro-trans' that leads to schools supporting it.
This doesn't even allege the school played a role in the student coming out as trans, which was (presumably) related to the influence of the internet or their friends? The same goes for hiding it from the parents - note that the child is already intentionally hiding it from their parents, and the school is just continuing that.
I dunno, I would think that myself, but all the pro-trans people seem to be attacking anyone who's criticizing penis-surgery for 15yos, and calling them transphobic. I'm taking their word for it.
You said what the school has zero impact on the kids decision. I'm saying, maybe Tumblr put the thought in their head, but the response they're getting from their immediate environment, including the school staff, can indeed contribute to them taking the step.
Same for the school hiding it from the parents.
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