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 -
This might seem petty, but 99% of the transgender debate is about the meaning of words, so I have to object to your usage of the phrase “sex assigned at birth”:
They most certainly do not, because radical feminists like the ones behind Giggle do not believe in ”sex assigned at birth” at all. Rather, they believe in biological sex, as a property of the real human body a person inhabits, and as it exists before medical interventions are taken to turn healthy boys and girls into transsexuals.
Google confirms that sex assigned at birth as a term did not exist before 2014. It is a neologism invented by transgender activists to downplay or outright deny the existence of biological sex.
The term is nonsensical because sex is never assigned, it is simply observed, not just at birth but on many occasions through a person's life, the first time often long before birth, as part of ultrasound screening. In the overwhelming majority of cases sex is determined at conception, based on whether the sperm that fertilizes the egg cell carries a Y chromosome or not.
What commonly happens at birth is that a doctor or midwife performs a visual inspection of a newborn baby, makes a diagnosis, and records the observed sex on a birth certificate. But that's the map, not the territory, and sometimes the assessment is wrong (as in the case of intersex males born without visible external genitalia), and sometimes it is not recorded at all (increasingly, western countries allow omitting the observed sex from the birth certificate).
Of course, the absence or incorrectness of government records has no bearing on reality. Humans have a biological sex whether that sex is recorded or not, and this is what the Giggle moderators try to assess, imperfectly, using photos and other metadata as proxies. They certainly don't believe in a nonsense concept that human sex is assigned at birth.
https://columbialawreview.org/content/sex-assigned-at-birth/ would suggest otherwise. "Not common on the internet" hardly means the term wasn't ever used. A simple Google search suggests there's examples of usage dating back into the 40s.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=AMAB&year_start=2000&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=1 I mean, it seems really odd that "AMAB" goes back to 2000. Did it used to mean something else?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22assigned+male+at+birth%22&year_start=2000&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=1 If nothing else, "assigned male at birth" takes off a couple years earlier, 2012
Very shoddy methodology - basically all noise and no light here.
More options
Context Copy link
I used that phrase because of something the judge wrote at the start of page 3:
While I’m sure Ms. Grover would not use my phrasing, especially the word “assigned,” I needed a way to distinguish the immutable view from the legal one which Queensland embraced.
You could just say “biological sex”, “medical sex”, “natural sex” or “real sex”.
Even “sex of a person at birth” is preferable to “sex assigned at birth”, in that it acknowledge that sex is a property of a person, rather than being assigned to that person.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That is not true, as a Google Books search can easily demonstrate. It was mostly (though not entirely) used to refer to intersex people.
Yes, “sex assignment” was used to describe cases where the biological sex was indeterminate, and thus some judgment must be made because biological sex was unclear. But “sex assigned at birth” to describe a person's natural unambiguous biological sex was unheard of until recently.
In 1995, absolutely no person wrote “Abraham Lincoln was assigned male at birth”. As in: I claim nobody on the planet has written that combination of words throughout that entire decade. Do you disagree?
Meanwhile, I could easily imagine that line being written today, and rather than being considered weird, it would be considered quite woke.
You're the only person to say it ever, if Google is to be believed, so it is perhaps unsurprising that you can't find anyone from 1995 saying it
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link