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 -
In the trans debate, I encountered an argument the other day which to me reads like a textbook example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis. I would like to run it by you good people to see if there's something I'm missing.
My woke, far-left sister was complaining about a male person she knows who claims to be non-binary, and yet behaves in a manner entirely consistent with certain negative stereotypes about masculinity, specifically "mansplaining", the tendency of certain men to condescendingly talk down to women, even if the women in question are more knowledgeable about the topic in question than the man himself is. She said it was abundantly obvious from his demeanour that this person was a man, not something intermediate between male and female.
I thought to myself "wow, my sister's gotten redpilled somewhere along the way" and enthusiastically agreed with her, arguing that I think the concept of "gender identity" has essentially zero predictive power, and that self-declared trans people almost invariably behave in a manner more consistent with their natal sex then their claimed gender identity. The specific example I gave was that trans women are 6 times more likely than cis women to be convicted of a crime, and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime. Which is exactly what you'd expect on the basis of their sex, not their gender identity. If trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, why do they commit crimes at the same rates as men?
My sister's rebuttal was that, even though trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, they were still socialised to be male prior to their coming out as trans, which compels them to behave in a manner consistent with the masculine norm.
This strikes me as a perfect example of the adage "if a theory explains everything, it explains nothing". If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a female person to behave, that demonstrates that she's really a woman. If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a male person to behave, that demonstrates that she was socialised into behaving like a male person against her will. Under this framing, there is literally nothing a trans woman can do which can ever point away from her "really" being a woman.
What would it take to falsify this hypothesis? Is there some piece of the puzzle that I'm missing here? I'm sincerely looking for a steelman.
Well, for example, you could look at adult differences in people who socially transitioned at age 6 and went on puberty blockers at age 11, versus people who did no transitioning of any kind before age 20.
You could also look more broadly at statistics from the 1970s and 1980s when transitioning was a weird thing that an underground community of adults only could barely imagine and get access to, vs today when it happens much younger and easier and is more accepted, and see if that has changed the correlations across the population overall.
Of course, we're talking about small sample sizes with fundamentally unlike populations at that point, which makes it hard to trust the statistics (for example, I don't trust your statistics on crime for basically this reason; aside from the sample size, I don't trust that what happens to trans people in 1973 Sweden has anything much to do with what happens in 2023 US, the context is too different).
But there is a big difference between a theory being unfalsifiable, and a theory being hard to gather good data about. A lot of theories about quantum mechanics are very very hard to gather data about, but are also very good and useful theories.
There's the danger that bad actors will design theories that are deliberately hard to gather evidence against, of course, but you can ussually discover and dismiss bad actors for other infractions.
Also, I'd just like to note that, in a sense, the broadest plausible interpretation of your claim is on its face absurd, and therefore the claim probably needs to be more narrowly specified before we can fruitfully talk about it:
Things like wearing dresses or using makeup or referring to yourself with a specific pronoun or voting Democrat or etc. are all behaviors, which we would expect to correlate with trans identification (let me know if you dispute that).
Saying 'I am trans' is a behavior, and correlates very highly with trans identification. So obviously trans people don't behave like their natal sex across all behaviors.
Crime and mansplaining may or may not correlate with trans identification in the same way, but it's not a neutral inference to act as though those are the type of behaviors that determine the truth of your broad claim. Determining which behaviors do or don't correlate with trans identification, and how we should feel about those facts once we agree on them, is pretty much the entire field of the debate on this topic.
I'll also note, in a divergence from the progressive rhetoric, that I think binary and nonbinary trans are qualitatively different concepts that shouldn't really be used to make inferences about each other. I see nonbinary trans more as a cultural movement, the way we had 'androgynous' celebrities and fashion in the 80s corresponding to attempts to loosen and alter gender norms more broadly. Whereas binary trans is much more 'society has two options, I'm that one.
If you have statistics demonstrating that trans people in 2023 exhibit vastly different patterns of criminality compared to this report, I would love to see them.
Note that I said "self-declared trans people almost invariably behave in a manner more consistent with their natal sex then their claimed gender identity". I never said that literally every single behaviour exhibited by a trans person is the same as those of a typical person of their natal sex. If a male person is sexually attracted to women, works in a STEM career, served in the armed forces, likes watching football, fishing and drinking beer, occasionally gets into drunken fistfights, prefers sci-fi films to romantic comedies, gets uncomfortable talking about his feelings, but enjoys wearing women's clothes and sometimes asks people to address him as "Sheila" (but has never reported psychological symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria) - prior to ~2010, we would have referred to such a person as a "crossdresser". It's only very recently that we've collectively decided that this person - conventionally masculine in every way that matters, aside from an incidental fondness for women's clothing - is actually a "trans woman".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link