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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29550 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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I think it's reasonable to assume that a male who's unwilling even to change his name to signal his commitment to his newly discovered gender identity is unwilling to remove his testicles or undergo hormone therapy.

Isn't this just the truscum/tucute divide?

FWIW, it does seem like the truscum side is at least coherent and it's possible to make meaningful policy based around their demands. Gender dysphoria (regardless of its etiology) exists, and adding a bureaucratic process to classify people as truly trans or not seems like a bare-minimum requirement if you want to have any social institutions that take into account sex/gender.

As someone who has become deeply radicalized (and the truscum types lost anyway so who cares?) I'm not sure that their position is attractive either.

Gender dysphoria existing doesn't necessarily justify turning everyone into, essentially, a care provider to people with that condition by affirming their identity. Or being forced to deal with the inevitable externalities that come with allowing such changes to their perceived sex. They simply aren't women, even if they have a condition that makes them want to be and acknowledging it is dangerous.

Arguably the attractiveness of the "truscum" position is partly because it coincided of both low visibility of transpeople and also just a lower level of ability in legally enforcing their claims. One of these is intrinsic, the other contingent.

And, of course, there's the argument that the sort of society that wants to Be Kind^(tm) in this way simply will not/cannot maintain that sort of sharp distinction.

We only have a couple of examples but...

Two years ago I wrote an article (https://open.substack.com/pub/firsttoilthenthegrave/p/pay-no-attention-to-that-opinion-banner-open-in-app; scroll down to section VI, everything prior is about motte-and-bailey fallacies) which included an argument that society might consider housing trans women convicts in women's prisons conditional on their undergoing an assessment by a qualified mental health professional to determine whether or not they legitimately suffer from gender dysphoria. As much as I might complain about the absurdities of gender ideology, I am sympathetic to trans males who legitimately suffer from gender dysphoria, and you don't have to be a genius to see that a small fragile male like that is going to absolutely get his shit ruined if he serves his sentence in a man's prison surrounded by violent, sexually frustrated men. Of course there will be false negatives and false positives, but I feel like a certain amount of medical gatekeeping would go a long way towards separating violent opportunists like Karen White and Barbie Kardashian from the harmless men in genuine psychic distress who wouldn't hurt a fly. I feel like this is a compromise most well-meaning trans activists could get onboard with (particularly as it's dramatically less restrictive than the other popular gatekeeping proposal: making access to women's spaces conditional on having undergone bottom surgery).

and you don't have to be a genius to see that a small fragile male like that is going to absolutely get his shit ruined if he serves his sentence in a man's prison surrounded by violent, sexually frustrated men.

  1. Why did "small" sneak its way in here? Is this an established thing with people who suffer from GD?
  2. This argument always runs into the "what about the twinks?" question. What about a feminine gay man? They should risk rape unless they get marked as a GD haver?
  3. Why are whatever solutions we use to prevent rape for all men not good enough? And, if not, why shouldn't they be improved for all men instead of letting some men secede?
  4. I don't actually know that we can know that these men "wouldn't hurt a fly". We separate men from women precisely because we can't know or we'd use this screening method to have mixed-but-peaceful prisons. Mental illness doesn't make men harmless, especially to women who are weaker and less aggressive. There's an argument that they could be less violent than the median male inmate and yet still be violent enough to change female prisons negatively for female inmates.

I agree, you're right that policy is based on tradeoffs not ranking holy victims who get all that they want. My argument would be that sex segregated prisons (like sex segregated sports) are that compromise and the new versions don't actually cause significant improvements for the problems they cause.

I don't see how we've even put aside the "absurdities of gender ideology" because at least three of the questions above seem to be responding to a view that depends, in some sense, on gender ideology. I do not see why transwomen should be treated as fundamentally different from other men with issues and women specifically should pay the price of fixing said issues unless gender ideology has some substance and truth to it and they are, in some sense, women. It feels like the ratchet gets turned by people who believe the absurdity and attempts to helpfix their problematic policy still grandfather in their assumptions despite us recognizing the absurdity.

I also just don't think it's politically viable. The very argument - vulnerable men can get raped and women should give up some of the public good of a prison that excludes males - that drives the argument will lead to people suggesting that maybe less men should be raped and standards will drop.

All excellent points which I hadn't fully considered at the time of writing.

The entire question of what to do with trans people in prison feels mostly like minority religious groups trying to help imprisoned co-religionists practice in prison. Kosher food, that kind of thing.

The entire small, vulnerable thing seems strange as a reason to be placed in women's prison. If a segregated unit for wusses is necessary, it can be created. But it isn't the women's prison.

Ironically, kosher food in prison is mostly served to non-Jewish inmates.

Of course you'd then run into the question "if you can create a unit for wusses, thus tacitly admitting there is unsanctioned violence in prison, then a) why is it there? b) why are you isolating only some prisoners?".

Having a bureaucratic process for transitioning is still better than the alternative. You've got to prove, to an outside observer, that you're "real." That gets rid of transparently opportunistic schemes, as well as empowering people to reject pure attention seekers as jokes.

It doesn't solve any of the root conflicts around "trans policy," but it makes them less salient and something you'd be less likely to have to deal with in your daily life.

That gets rid of transparently opportunistic schemes

The other thing that does this is let people transition socially if they want but simply insist that the only protected characteristic is sex.

It doesn't solve any of the root conflicts around "trans policy," but it makes them less salient and something you'd be less likely to have to deal with in your daily life.

The problem is that this danegeld has been paid once, and the outcome was predictable but not encouraging.

Related, but subtly different. The truscum/tucute debate is about who is allowed to call themselves "really" trans: truscums think that the category should be subject to medical gatekeeping, tucutes that it shouldn't.

I'm not debating whether or not these Spanish men are "really" trans, merely pointing out that it's reasonable to assume that they haven't medically transitioned, given that they've made only the most token effort at social transition. One would logically expect the set of trans women who have medically transitioned to be a subset of those who have made a full-fledged social transition (new name, pronouns, wardrobe, hair etc.).

Isn't this just the truscum/tucute divide?

Yes, and the tucute side has won through sheer exercise of social power. Now, we must suffer the consequences of the incoherence of their position.

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