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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Reminds me of how, some time ago, I was hanging around the centre of my old neighborhood and witnessed a drunk/drugged shirtless psycho, in a very short order, first going to the booth of the local Greens who were campaigning in an election and shouting how they were commies and traitors, then wandering off to shout racist slurs to passing immigrant kids, then going to the tram stop to harass young women and make them very uncomfortable (then the tram came and he took off elsewhere). It's the kind of an anecdote one can't even tell often because it sounds so stereotypical you'd get some right-winger accusing you of inventing it to make the right look bad.

I've always seen transvestigation as at least partly an evolution of the "if you watch this shitty vid where it looks like some celebrity's eyes look weird or their skin bulges unnaturally it proves they're LIZARD PEOPLE" conspiracy theories. After all, trans people exist whereas lizard people don't.

I've never seen one transvestigator actually show examples of what they'd consider properly "male" or "female" facial shapes or body language patterns on a non-trans celebrity, presumably since other transvestigators would then rush to claim that actually such shapes and patterns present telltale signs of secret transness. Peak transvestigating I've seen was a standard transvestigational body language analysis claiming that (I think) Chelsea Manning was actually a cis woman who is only pretending to be a trans woman for some unstated nefarious deep state reason.