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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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Steven Crowder has leaked portions of the Nashville shooter's "manifesto": https://nitter.cz/scrowder/status/1721545965402726734

I put manifesto in scare quotes because the leaked portions seem to more part of a "schizo mass shooting planning diary" as opposed to "schizo essay on motivations for the shooting." That said, the leaked pages do reveal some insight into the shooter's motivation. The biggest surprise to me is that it doesn't really mention being discriminated against for being trans. Instead it focuses on the shooter's perceived perpetrators being rich privileged white kids with daddy's money. Basically the lyrics to The Dead Kennedys's song Holiday in Cambodia if they were written by a mass shooter. Also semi-surprising to me is their repeated use of the word "faggot" as an insult. I wouldn't have been surprised to see this in a mtf trans shooter's diary, but it's a bit surprising to see from ftm trans. Maybe some sort of performative masculinity?

In any case, the documents appear to be genuine though they haven't been 100% confirmed. Currently there's a lot of hubbub over whether or not they were appropriate to leak in the first place, but I see very little questioning of their authenticity. What are your thoughts?

Seeing that it reads as a diary moreso than a manifesto had me, for a moment, believing in the possibility that trans women are indeed real women and this is the evidence. Then I realized it was a FTM.

Biology is inescapable.

But then again, mass shootings take balls so there might be something honorary in it for her.

Well, the hand writing certainly looks like it was written by a boy…

The word "home" is encircled by a love heart. I've never even met a gay man who'd do something like that.

That's not what I'm referring to. I'm talking about how the letters are formed and how consistent they are. Look at the note where she's calling her targets faggots. It's all over the place. The letter formation isn't consistent from one word to the next, let alone inside words that have multiple of the same letter. The letters that stick up or go below the line are often smushed to the point of looking like a completely different letter.

None of this makes it completely illegible. You can still tell what letters they are based on context. But that doesn't mean it's neat. Girl handwriting is almost always clean and consistent. Their neatest handwriting gets close to looking like a font.

I agree a lot of women have very neat penmanship, but I wouldn't say neatness is synonymous with femininity. The handwriting in Hale's manifesto/diary/whatever looks broadly similar to this, and both look distinctly feminine to me, even though the latter example is far from consistent (although certainly neater than Hale's penmanship). It's hard to pinpoint exactly what makes penmanship look "feminine", but for me it's something to do with the broadness and roundedness of the characters: the lowercase As are much larger and rounder than I would write mine. It's referred to here as "bubble" handwriting which I think is an apt description. I think men, regardless of whether their penmanship is neat or messy, generally have a preference for narrower and straighter characters.

I shouldn't even be surprised that (like vocal pitch or gait), this is a trait that transgender people are aware is gendered and go out of their way to train themselves into doing.

While I'd hum and haw a bit about "girls and boys have different writing styles", I can see why the transgender lobby is so desperate that "biology not real". The amount of determinism there about gender roles based on biology, that there really is rigidly a gender binary and two sexes, so that your real sex will show up in the tiniest ways does mean that if you genuinely feel you are the wrong sex (because by now 'sex' and 'gender' have become interchangeable terms and people seem to have ditched 'being transgender is only about the gender you express, not your biological sex' talk) then you have to insist on advanced biology in order to argue that no, this is not a disorder or mental illness, it's totally natural, look earthworms are hermaphrodite!

Your advanced biology link leads to a thread about Lady Gaga having a funny hat. It seems to happen every time someone shares an old.reddit link. The exact same thing happened to me this morning.

It looks like a user-side problem with the Old Reddit Redirect extension:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/164uqjg/why_do_ireddit_image_links_go_to_that_ancient/
https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/15p1ctt/why_does_clicking_any_image_on_reddit_open_the/

https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect/issues/99

Developer says it's fixed but as suggested on the Github page I removed and reinstalled the already updated addon and still have the problem.