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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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But to the trans-ness being invisible. The platonic ideal of a trans man is someone who everyone looks at and says "yes, that is a man, I have no doubt in my mind", and then never thinks twice about. The "trans" part, ideally, vanishes

Could you elaborate on if the trans-ness going away is kind of like a mental category thing, where onlookers know they are trans but it is as unremarkable as knowing someone's blood type; or if trans-ness going away refers to empirical predictions, where onlookers can't tell if they are trans?

Defining sex and gender as separate implies that someone can be obviously male and obviously a woman, I think. And there is not a woke consensus that trans people should pass as cis gender.

As for your trans allegory, what about the Matrix, or plastic surgery, or dyeing ones hair? Are these too mundane to be trans allegories?

I think the problem is the requirement for Virtue Signalling. A game or a book or a movie where 'it is the far-flung year of 2005 and transgender isn't even an issue anymore' and trans people don't stand out, or if they do, it's because non-binary, agender, gender-queer and all the rest of it exist and are socially acceptable so the people of that universe don't blink at someone with a bald head, full beard, breasts, and dressing femme, but it stands out to us isn't good enough for Representation Purposes.

If you have a trans character who looks (say) perfectly female and is accepted as such and is referred to as a woman (without the qualifier 'trans') so that they are indistinguishable from a cis woman, then that will not be good enough for a set of people. If they can't tell This Character Is Trans, they'll assume you are being transphobic or whatever by only having (presumed) cis men and women in the future.

So the creator needs to be able to signal "I'm fine with transgender, look here is my diverse and inclusive cast of characters, here are the trans ones" in order to be able to ward off such accusations. The problem is that this then conflicts with "in the far-flung future everyone is equal and accepted" because to be internally consistent, it has to be "we don't notice trans people, they're just treated like everyone else" but that conflicts with showing obviously "see, see how onboard I am with the right side of history? here's my trans non-binary queer differently-abled neurodivergent poly multiracial characters!"

Could you elaborate on if the trans-ness going away is kind of like a mental category thing, where onlookers know they are trans but it is as unremarkable as knowing someone's blood type; or if trans-ness going away refers to empirical predictions, where onlookers can't tell if they are trans?

I think, with the Ideal Trans Model, it's "onlookers can't tell if they are trans". I think the sort of archetypical trans person wishes they were born in their chosen gender and they never experienced the other gender in the first place; showing up in the wrong body was a bug in the genetic code and they would rather that bug never have existed.

As for your trans allegory, what about the Matrix, or plastic surgery, or dyeing ones hair? Are these too mundane to be trans allegories?

I guess I'm not sure how this ends up practically working out. I don't think hair dye works; it's just too common. Plastic surgery isn't a bad allegory but it has similar issues, in that you can't tell someone got plastic surgery unless it's really obvious.

The Matrix is a pretty big plot thing to pin a game around, although there have been some cool ideas regarding that in this thread.