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 -
As with a lot of situations where people talk about "LGBT" these days, I think 99% of this is about the T and maybe 1% about the LGB.
The shift towards acceptance of gay people is very broad across society. It's not just young people, not just progressives, not just the nonreligious, but just about everybody. Yes there are evangelicals and online weirdos who still freak out about gay people but they're the minority. I don't think there is going to be a substantial backlash to gays and lesbians. Maybe with respect to some of the more gauche and outwardly freakish gay men, but that's the 1%.
I think what it boils down to, and similar to what you're getting at, is people just don't like freaks. They don't care much about labels; they don't understand them anyways. But freaks make them uncomfortable. They don't want to be around freaks. They don't want their kids seeing freaks. They don't want to turn on the television and watch freaks. And the freaks are overwhelmingly concentrated in the T part of LGBT.
Even when it comes to this lots of people don't care that much. What shifts a lot of people from "whatever" to "fuck off" is being told they're awful and/or stupid for not agreeing with trans people's conception of "gender", the accompanying entitlement to women's-only spaces, their kids being encouraged to change their identities etc.
This was one difference between gay rights (sans gay marriage) and transgenderism. You didn't have to assert a factual claim as a result of homosexuality being legal, gays being able to adopt, gays being able to serve in the military etc. Gay people weren't insisting that e.g. "You must say that gay sex is identical to heterosexual sex" or "There is no difference between gay people and straight people."
The T seems conceptually revolutionary to a far greater degree than the LGB part, which only aimed at moral and legal changes.
Instead, most people were forced to assert factual claims prior to commenting on legal matters. You had to assert that an 'orientation' is a thing that is objective, on a known, fixed spectrum, that cannot change, because one is born that way, something something genes/brain structure, etc. If you displayed even the faintest of doubts about this bundle of factual claims, you got stared at like you were an alien. It was only after being forced to assert such factual claims that people were then asked, "...and would you really be okay with denying, say, your child, from having these various legal rights, if they happened to be factually born that way?" That's why proponents themselves say that it was critical to make people believe the factual claims in order to win the political victories.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah. "You can think those guys are nuts and everything they think is bs, but just don't say that to them and don't be a dick about it," is what the ask used to be, and I think most people are happy enough to accept that. Now it is, "you must actively affirm our bs and act in all ways as though it were true and having your own opinion will be met with consequences" which is fighting words.
I think the general attitude isn't even necessarily thinking those guys are nuts or weird; people take a laissez-faire approach and are broadly apathetic, with the dominant thought about them being "I don't think about them." You may like carrots, I may hate carrots, but there are plenty of ways we can get along without fighting over carrots; there should be more to us as people than that.
The friction comes when one side starts making demands that everyone talk about their favorite kind of carrot, that social situations have to begin with saying the last carrot dish you cooked was, and that we have a struggle session whenever someone expresses something that can be construed as lachanophobic ("I personally just make parsnips for my family, we don't really do carrots").
Cross-dressing as a full-time lifestyle choice is weird, some might say it's Wrong, but both the people participating in it and the people condemning it could at least agree on what it was.
Transgenderism on the other hand, which is at its base essentially the same thing, makes unjustifiably radical epistemic claims.
People-pretending-to-be-the-other-sex became a live wire when those people wilfully abandoned the pretending part. That's the core perversion that engenders such a hostile reaction; the perversion of meaning itself. That those positions came to be enforced by coercion just makes it that much more objectionable.
Some objected to gay 'marriage' on substantially similar grounds.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link