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 -
I've long since lost the reference, but probably 6 years ago I saw some segment on The Hill about a study done by a trans advocacy group. And basically it was a policy document pointing out that putting penises in women only spaces, especially women only spaces with minors, is about the most unpopular policy you can possibly run on. So what needs to happen is that trans friendly politicians need to lie, and then quietly do it anyways. Don't worry, trans friendly advocates in media, and trust and safety teams on social media will cover for you.
No matter what mouth sounds Democrats make, I will never trust them on this subject ever again. And unfortunately for them, until all my children are over 18, it's literally my number one priority. We already live in a world where Democrats sanctioned the state taking kids away from parents, and putting them on a path towards mutilation and sterilization. You don't just get to walk away from that and hope nobody brings up all those children you sterilized.
What if one frames it as "Outside the bedroom or the doctor's office, other peoples' genitals are none of your business, and should not be taken as an input to whether $PERSON is allowed to $VERB_PHRASE."?
The problem with that, naturally, is that one’s genitals are an unusually effective predictor of certain undesirable behaviors when they introduce themselves into places where the opposite genitals congregate, especially when they insist upon a certain kind of obvious lie.
Now, of course the same argument naturally applies to racism too. But for racism we sacrifice that predictive knowledge on the pyre of “so that maybe advantaging the people of race X that don’t act as predicted eventually changes the circumstances”, and that’s very emphatically not what’s meant to happen in the genital cases (because it’s pushed with the intention of bullying everyone else by proxy).
More options
Context Copy link
That was the propaganda they lead with. A few obviously preventable rapes later, people started to see through it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think even if they “distance themselves” this one is going to be hard to get trust back on. They’ve already been caught several times outright lying on this issue, and worse, lying about exactly what they’re doing in schools. Millions of parents are not only aware, but angry. I know a person I’m working with who has a daughter who briefly decided she was queer. Her mother was absolutely terrified of this because she knew what would happen the minute a psychiatrist heard any sort of gender confusion from her daughter. At school, this stuff was encouraged. The girl seems to be growing out of it now, bullet dodged. But multiply that by all the parents out there knowing that the schools are teaching this and going behind their backs, who know that trans identified men can go into any locker room they want, and that books that are nearly pornographic are available to grade school kids. I don’t think you can slip one by here.
What books are you referring to?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've noticed that trans advocacy seemed to be copying along with the successful gay marriage advocacy of the past, and this looks like another possible example. Back in 2008, when presidential candidate Barack Obama came out explicitly against gay marriage, it was considered just common knowledge among my peers that he was lying in order to help the good guys gain power. Obama's stance on gay marriage hasn't been relevant in a long time, but as of the last time I talked about it with friends, they seemed to still believe that Obama had been lying at the time, rather than that his position changed at some point while he was in office.
I have no idea how many people actually believed his lie, assuming that it was a lie, but certainly telling such lies in order to sneak in more "extreme" positions wasn't disapproved of and, by my perceptions, quite lauded. So it does seem reasonable to suspect similar things going on with trans advocacy. However, this doesn't seem to be working in this case for a variety of reasons, including the fundamental physical differences between what gay marriage and trans advocacy demand. There seems to be a sort of cruel cosmic joke here with trans advocates trying to follow in the successful footsteps of the gay marriage movement but as a cargo cult just copying along the superficial aspects.
Ezra Klein actually brought up Obama's lie to the Pod Save America guys who worked for him. No one contested that it was a lie btw.
He identified a different reason the trans stuff sunk Harris: both Harris and the ACLU are fucking stupid.
That sounds harsh but that was the tone. He was as angry as Klein gets, furious that the ACLU would even send out an exam (a paper trail!) on a policy that was almost designed to be maximally offensive and that Harris was dumb enough to say she supported and actioned it on tape instead of ignoring it or simply handing it in.
In essence, they didn't lie as good or as smart as Obama did.
I think the trans thing legitimately is a heavier lift but I think he has a point.
It's harder to get away with a lie the second time.
More options
Context Copy link
Obama had a somewhat similar paper trail https://time.com/3816952/obama-gay-lesbian-transgender-lgbt-rights/
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Agreed. This is more than people with dicks dominating women's sports. And it's more than a few perverts stealing women's underwear or using women's locker rooms.
Those stories understandably get the most engagement, but they are relatively rare.
The bigger issue is how the spread of trans ideology has resulted in some pretty huge number of children getting placed onto the trans gender track which, if not quickly arrested, results in awful life outcomes. I think the best comparison is anorexia, which is similarly terrible for one's health and mostly the result of social contagion.
In my mind, Democrats are permanently tainted on this issue. We need more than a minor pullback in wokeness. We need investigations. We need groomers to get fired and potentially prosecuted. And we need clinics performing gender surgery on minors to be shut down, their owners sued into bankruptcy, and their practitioners delicensed.
More options
Context Copy link
Assuming that instead of trans advocates losing ground, it's shadow-speak, or fingers crossed in the background.
Seems like a particularly miserable way of viewing the world. It's a victory for your team. Take the W.
More options
Context Copy link
I really doubt you can find anything from a major politician that supports that claim. This isn't even "making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike", it's just plain making things up.
There is written record of the Secretary for Health demanding that the WPATH removes minimum age requirements from their Standards of Care so that the Biden administration can better pursue their goals related to trans issues. WPATH did comply, in violation of their own procedures of how the SOC is supposed to be determined.
More options
Context Copy link
Washington State literally passed this fucking law last year, please just stop lying to our faces that it's not happening (and also it's good), if only to prove you can notice it doesn't work and try some other tactic.
More options
Context Copy link
Some schools secretly socially transition children. Some locales will take children out of parents' custody if they fail to support transition. This is not all right wing paranoia.
Can you provide a source for the claim that schools are forcing uninterested, non-consenting children into transition? Or are you just searching for the maximally inflammatory way to say "some kids don't trust their parents not to disown them"?
Really? "Fail to support" transition, or "try to block their kid from accessing the relevant medical treatments"?
Neither of those is an example of "mutilation"
Without doubt, the former. There's a high profile case of a sex-trafficked teenager that the authorities refused to release to her grandparents, because they used her birth name, which resulted in her being sex-trafficked again.
This is without going into the question of whether there are any relevant medical treatments to begin with, or if it's just glorified cosmetic surgery/intervention.
More options
Context Copy link
I certainly never claimed that, so I won't be championing it. You may not take my statements, make an exaggerated looney version of them and then foist that wild view onto me.
Whether these are valid medical treatments for minors or horrific butchery that we will look back on like elective lobotomies for strange children is the matter under dispute.
More options
Context Copy link
To be fair, the parent poster only talked about a "path towards mutilation". I assume that the "mutilation" in question is gender reassignment surgery, which typically involves cutting off external sexual characteristics. Is it not fair to say that this is a typical or at least commonly desired endpoint of transitioning, so actions that make it more likely that someone will reach this endpoint in the future could be fairly described as putting them on a "path towards mutilation"?
I figure the assumption of the anti-trans side is that children can't meaningfully consent, nor be held accountable for their interest or lack thereof in the context of a managed social environment like school that may encourage or discourage said interest. Either way, the poster you are responding to didn't claim anything about interest or consent, did they? They are only talking about secrecy, presumably from the parents.
Mind you, it also seems strange to first claim that the driving concern is parents disowning the kid, but then to also defend a forced disowning if they refuse to let the kid access transition-affirming medical interventions. In a scenario where the parents find out anyway and are not willing to "own"/support a transitioning kid, your preference is evidently for the kid to be separated from the parents anyway. If you are willing to use deception to make the parents make a sacrifice (of money? time? support?) that they would not make willingly, why can't you instead support a policy that at least respects them as adult citizens and simply says that they will lose visitation/influence rights if they interfere with the transition but will still be compelled to provide financial support for the kid?
More options
Context Copy link
I was thinking, gun to my head, I'd rather my daughter was molested by a catholic priest (unlikely as that is, being a girl and all) than fall in with your ilk. But that got me thinking... what if the Catholic Church leaned into LGBTQ+ shit 30 years earlier than they did?
What if, instead of covering up the priest abuse scandals, they leaned into it. Claimed they were just protecting young gay boys. In fact they had a moral duty to keep these young boys sexual behavior a secret from their parents. They might not accept them after all. Furthermore, the Catholic Church should probably just take custody of them from those bigoted parents.
It's preposterous and totally insane. But that's what you sound like.
It's preposterous and totally insane sounding because you analogized a situation where a child is raped without consent to one where the child willingly undergoes a medical procedure (regardless of whether you think it's warranted or not). That is a preposterous and insane analogy to make so it's no wonder that's what your conclusion is.
Frankly I find it more preposterious and insane that you don't see removing parental authority as the salient category.
What's your position on castrati? Willing undertaking of medical procedure or abduction of minors for sinister purposes?
Can you elaborate on what you want me to respond to? Are you referring to singers who in the past were castrated for their singing voices? I don't think that was a morally good practice.
I obviously would agree that 'abduction of minors for sinister purposes' is bad, you literally put sinister in the description. I suspect we disagree on what sinister purposes refers to, so you need to describe something more specific if you want to prompt my thoughts to see our differences of opinion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your right, i forgot to include the priest telling some wild yarn about how the kids actually want it. Despite everything we know about kids not being able to consent to that. Good call. Now its perfect.
Do you actually not understand the difference or did you just want to get a cheap dig in?
Do you see all medical interventions in under-18's as 'grooming'? No? Just the one you already have a prior about not liking?
If I'm wrong please tell me how. There's a huge host of reasons why they are different, but I'm only going to bother explaining them if you're not going to respond with another sarcastic one liner that is indistinguishable from an inflamed partisan spouting nonsense about 'the transgenders grooming my kids to want to be raped'.
You are correct, I perceive no difference between children "consenting" to sex or "consenting" to sterilization.
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
Do you think parents who love their children and will not disown them, but refuse to go along with either social or medical transitioning, should lose their parental rights? Do you think they should not be allowed to veto the school facilitating transition, without their knowledge or approval?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They almost certainly know that. It's just mouth sounds.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link