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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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They're clusters that were originally based around sex, yes, but plenty of cultures use the categories without referring back to sex these days. It's like how "2024 AD" means "two thousand and twenty four years after Jesus died"; you're making a fairly simple error if you think our calendar system relies on the existence of an actual biological Jesus.

Those cultures are wrong. Not in the way that using AUC dating instead of AD dating would be on a sufficiently different page that answering '2777' to 'what year is it' would functionally be wrong, but wrong in the sense that it doesn't actually tell us anything. Pink skirts being associated with femininity doesn't have a particular reason behind it; skirts being associated with masculinity still exists in certain contexts, such as kilts or fustanella(this garment is even frilly). Pink is for girls and blue is for boys was the other way around in (barely)living memory, and in fact I can readily imagine a counterfactual world where girls wear blue because Virgin Mary and boys wear pink because that's what blood looks like on a white shirt. On the other hand, uteruses being feminine is obviously biological. Most historical cultures defined, and most cultures today define, femininity as uterus having, and the claim of transwomen is that in every way except having a uterus they are more like having one than not. This is functionally self-defeating for any claim to separate the biological fact of sex from the cluster 'women'.

Yeah. Just since the points of measure are arbitrary it's still an absolute distance that is being communicated whether you do so in Meters or Feet.

If you remove the uterus, does someone stop being a woman? Are you really excluding anyone who, via birth defect, didn't develop a uterus? If we figure out how to grow artificial organs, does that mean trans people become acceptable?

The category ‘women with severe health problems’ exists.