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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25701 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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Last year I made a prediction about 2023 marking some sort of turning point regarding the Trans issues. But how does one judge the accuracy of a prediction that boils down to "the vibes are shifting"? To attempt that, let me explain where I was coming from when I made it.

My first exposure to trans issues was on weird rat-adjecant Internet forums, Somewhere between 10-15 years ago. Either a trans person would join the forum and bring the subject up, or, interestingly, a cis regular would bring it up, and a trans-poster would appear, seemingly out of nowhere (and in retrospect it's somewhat scary how often it turned out to be Zinnia Jones, speicifically). They spoke with confidence, they knew the Science (and in those places we respected the Science), and could dispatch any argument coming their way like pros. Through it all I had many doubts - is it really wise to let minors make that decision? How exactly can puberty blockers be reversible? How do you even diagnose dysphoria? But that was just my stomach grumbling, and they had the Science, they seemed ubeatable.

Fast forward a few years, and a whole bunch of things have happened. The replication crisis cast doubt on the Science writ large, and critical look at some of the foundational research in Trans-Science turned up massive issues in that specific branch, detransitioners started showing up, massive shifts in the demographics of transitioners started making it's way to official statistics, not to mention an exponential increase in the raw amount as well. Instead of confidence, I started seeing trans activists genuinely flustered, not dumbfounded, but clearly things were happening that they weren't expecting, and didn't know what to make of yet. For my part I still felt uncertain, maybe some new information is going to come up that will contradict what flustered them? Maybe they'll dig out some detail the critics overlooked? Maybe they'll come up with a really good argument to address the issues raised? By the end of 2022 I felt like clicked through the dialogue tree several times over, with several different people, over a long enough period of time - if they could come up with something, they would already.

So what would a vibe shift look like?

Around that time I saw the documentary The Minds Of Men (it's quite rambly, very conspiracy-theory-y, but if those aren't deal breakers, and you have 3.5 hours to kill, it's well argued, and I recommend it), it is about MK-Ultra and psychosurgery, and it is in fact what inspired me to get that copy of Time Magazine as well as a bunch of historical documents I could dig out online. One recurring question I had when watching the documentary was “how the hell did I not hear about tthis”? It's not like I'm an expert, but this is the sort of stuff that felt like it should pop up along the way in my areas of interest. I heard about the Rosenhan experiment, I heard about the Stanford prison experiment, the Milgram experiment, even the 30-50's era lobotomies, why not the late 60's to early 70's era of psychosurgery? Was it just not a big deal? Well, it was big enough to be covered in Time, it was big enough for a best-selling thriller based on the premise, and it's movie adaptation (I wasn't sure when I wrote the post originally, but the Terminal Man is indeed based on the case of Leonard Kille, sometimes referred to as Thomas R. by the media, who was treated in the clinic that was covered in that Time article), the documentary featured footage I also recall from edgy 90's grunge MTV videos, hell my mother remembered hearing about it at the time, through the Iron Curtain, no less!

So assuming psychosurgery was indeed a decently-sized issue, could it just disappear into the mists of history? I asked that very question and the consensus response seems to have been “yes, definitely!”. Your theory on that may differ from mine, but I ended coming to the conclusion that memory of such events needs to be actively maintained or it will fade. We remember things that are useful for people writing history books (or the ones who employ them) and forget the others, so while a similarly sized scandal like the Tuskagee experiment has a certain “Never Again” quality to it, others, like psychosurgery will fall by the wayside. And before you bring it up - no, this is not due to the affected demographics, which are largely the same. If you read the Time magazine article, you'll see doctors Sweet, Mark, and Ervin were planning to deploy psychosurgery as a cure against the race riots of the 60's.

Some might notice that the hypothetical I linked to in the recent paragraph is specifically about trans issues. Indeed, all these thoughts were bubbling in my head for over a year now, and I pretty much expect the hypothetical to become reality. What does a vibe shift look like? That. Was the prediction accurate? Well, I was avoiding specifics because I don't know how to even begin to pin those down, but looking at the state of the discourse on this forum, the pro-trans side seems to have officially moved from “that did not happen” to “and if it did, that's not a big deal” regarding medical interventions on minors. But it is perhaps the reactions of relative outsiders to the debate that are more indicative of the vibe shift and it:s mechanics:

As I've been arguing for some time, the culture war's most important front will be about AI; that's more pleasant to me than the tacky trans vs trads content

Without this guy, even though (as many, not just you, have noted) he’s a troll, we’d be back to the usual conversations about trans bathrooms, abortion, guns and childhood transition making up 70% of regular threads, and those were in many ways played out discussion topics by the end of the last Bush administration.

If we were to see a vibe-shift-fueled memory-holing of the issue, would it not happen through People of Status suddenly finding the subject “tacky”, and “played out”?

Now I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow, timing is exactly the thing that's going to be hard to get right in a prediction like this. It also might feel silly to make sweeping societal predictions off of changes in internet discourse, but who ended up being right, people freaking out about the changes in Internet discourse seen in Tumblr Social Justice Warriors, or people claiming it was just a couple crazy kids on the Internet?

I think the only thing you're seeing is that those formerly pushing it are playing it down until the US elections are over. It worked to stop the backlash which was happening, even at ground zero in the US (the Loudon County School Board). It'll be back once they've won in November.

To push back on this a little bit; Trans activists can't stop themselves from leeroy jenkinsing away and the progressive-activist industrial complex hasn't previously demonstrated much ability to rein in their loonier fringes going leeroy jenkins.

It's just a question of coverage. Black Hebrew Israelites Leroy Jenkins every day, and are ignored.

And the one time their antics actually got in the news, it was somehow reported as "racist smirking MAGA kid is racist to elderly native man".

BHI’s have some connection to the progressives, but they’re technically condemned as hereticsa hate group, so ignoring them when they get themselves in trouble by going off the reservation(were never there) is easy. Trans activists, no such luck.

Black Power groups are inherently part of the progressive grouping, that BHI manage to get thrown out of the grouping is itself remarkable. Black Power : Black Hebrew Israelites :: Gay Rights : Trans Rights?

I mean there really isn’t a shortage of black power groups that the ADL/SPLC/etc call hate groups and no one(in the progressive mainstream or the broader establishment more generally) challenges this. I haven’t done deep dives on what these groups believe but I’m given to understand that many of them, once you get past the schizoposting about Yakub or Jewish west Africans, are just the black version of fundamentalist Christianity in terms of practice.

You can look up lists of hate groups on mainstream progressive groups’ websites- I know at least the SPLC has an entire category dedicated to black power hereticshate groups. Establishment criticism of the SPLC being overly broad in referring to hate groups almost never uses them as examples, either.

I don't think this is something that will be changed through electoral politics. I suppose bans on transing minors are part of the spat, but it won't end through a legal ban. It's been pointed out that a lot of the this is driven by social contagion. The psychological mechanism behind deciding to transition is probably a lot more complex than a mere grift, but for a while it was patently obvious that transitioning is a quick way to get positive attention (and in some cases money). Unless they manage turn it into a literal religion, with trans people constantly built up and maintained as some kind of sacred caste, at some point people will just get bored, and move on to the next thing. When that happens it's over.

It will be interesting to see what happens if the only option remaining to get positive attention for people who transitioned, will be to loudly complain about being misled. That's probably enough to set off a domino of it's own, which is why there's such a strong cordon sanitaire around detransitioners among progressives. I'm with @OracleOutlook, probably they'll find a way to turn it around and blame it on conservative gender norms, or something.

with trans people constantly built up and maintained as some kind of sacred caste

But that's kind of the central issue here. Trans people are sacred insofar as Progressives are concerned, as they seek to prohibit speaking the blasphemies (as every other religious society tries to ban saying "God and the saints aren't real", and perhaps more relevantly here, debating the scientific merit of, uh, trans-substantiation).

Thing is, we already have a word to describe people who have their sex organ(s) removed (either they made it that way themselves, or were made that way by others), and everything beyond that (including the refusal to acknowledge that they're the same thing) is just tribal politics. It's taxonomically accurate for those who have the surgeries and the people in eunuch-advocacy organizations are obviously well aware of this- I doubt any given late-antiquity person would draw a distinction between eunuchs in their time and ours (aside from the fact that the "man" part of "castrated man" now refers to women as well) and so I don't either.

at some point people will just get bored, and move on to the next thing

I think Progressivism as it is right now has too much "angry women trying to stick it to men" to survive a future where that is no longer a viable political strategy, and LGBT are neutral-at-worst to that goal (since, with respect to men, G is not interested in women by definition, B is not meaningfully distinguishable from G, and T are not only intensely effeminate but also infertile... hence not a threat either).

[Come to think of it, there might be something to say in here about "why so many effeminate men today" in the sense that effeminacy is a strategy to pull resources from elders being way more relatively powerful than that generation usually is for the same reason/along the same biological pathways it works for women in general, but that's out of scope for now.]

The social contagioning tiktokers are, granted, not social conservatives, and when they vote they almost assuredly vote democrat, but they don't seem to be backed by democrats(you can usually tell when influencers have backing from the DNC. These guys aren't running get out the vote drives, after all). It's more like some influencers coming up with this stuff on their lonesome and then a bunch of abortion doctors offered them medical assistance for reasons, and this didn't really become associated with mainstream progressive politics until after it blew up.

So yes, I agree with you; the endpoint won't be political, and this stuff isn't driven by politics, it's driven by something else(I think declining mental health among liberal adolescents+fallout from the sexual revolution cannibalizing itself).

Yeah, I dont think this is literally sponsored by the DNC, but "all on their lonesome" sounds way too innocent to me. Granted, this is when I crack out the tinfoil, and start drawing charts explaining the structure of global conspiracies.

I agree that "all on their lonesome" sounds a bit innocent, but I really don't think mainstream progressive establishment types were backing this all along. My tinfoil hat tells me that the poster children wouldn't be mentally ill if they were(sure, liberal adolescent mental health is bad, but it's not that bad).

My best guess is that some progressive NGO got a grant for "helping gender minorities raise awareness through new media" or something, and so coached a trans-type on social media to exploit the algorithm before spending the rest on a conference in the bahamas, then it just became a fad.

I would blame the progressives for having standards which enable it. If you say no gatekeeping, if you try your best to keep parents out of the process, if you go out of your way to laud how trans people are brave strugglers against the outside world, if you make sure that anyone speaks up against the trans gets fired from their job, you're going to get a lot of social contagion trans, regardless of whether you're backing them explicitly.

I think this is a really bad model of what motivates a lot of transitioners, especially younger ones. You're a lot more likely to see stuff redirect into enby or dissolve-the-gender-binary, in the unlikely case 'classical' gender transition gets depopularized. Far too much of modern culture is built around telling everyone to hate masculinity and women to fear their vulnerability in their femininity.

((That said, I recognize I'm a lot more sympathetic to trans stuff than the average person.))

Maybe, but enbyizm will only get you so far. You might get gimmicks like enby bathrooms in progressive spaces, but the trans issue crosses too many boundaries that people won't back down from. Enbies won't give you males in women prisons, sports, etc.,or Trans Women Are Women.

Some people pointed out that the whole trans thing is just a subculture like Goth, except it also involves permanent body modifications. Non-medicalized enbyizm will be literally just another subculture.

A lot of enbys medicalize to a extent I expect you or the median social conservative would not be comfortable with, and have for longer than enby has been well-recognized as a term. Literally today in my tumblr feed discourse for a ratsphere example. And while it would be a 'retreat' on some matters to some extent, I'm not sure it's as big a retreat as you'd think.

There's a tendency to round the more obnoxious nonbinary people into more standardized trans categories (including legal and statistical measures!), and to round the less obnoxious trans people into the nonbinary category, but there's a lot going on in those communities that isn't obvious to outside observers.

Well, I agree this would turn a victory into a hollow one, but I don't see that particular scenario working out. I think it's more likely I'm straightforwardly wrong, and the trans movement wins. "We were wrong about transing kids into men/women, but now we know better! The Science clearly shows we should have been turning them into Nullos instead!" feels way too out there.

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