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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   31472 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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It’s unfortunate that discussing the link between transgenderism and sexual fetishism has been made taboo in public discourse. If you spend any amount of time in online transgender communities you’ll see that the fetishistic aspects are clearly a huge component of it.

You can't call it a fetish, because if it's a fetish, then I get to say "keep that shit away from me, don't involve me in your fetish."

That's the angle I find the least interesting. Even if true, it doesn't say much about where we should take the discourse on trans issues.

What I find absolutely fascinating is the entryism aspect, or laundering ideology through respectable-looking institutions, and our system being either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

Yeah, that's the thing. Ordinary trans people have been used as the stalking horse for the fetishists and the grifters taking advantage of "hey, if I say I'm a woman, I can get sent to women's prison not men's prison".

Few years back, when I was discussing the trans rights stuff with other people on another site, I and those who were dubious about the whole thing like I was were being assured that "What you fear will never happen; no man or boy is going to go to all the trouble of saying they are trans simply in order for some peeping tom opportunities". A little later, after the first offences by individuals claiming to be trans, the line was "they're not really trans, they're ordinary perverts/criminals" (this, despite the simultaneous line that "you're trans if you say you're trans, no gatekeeping").

I think people have nailed their political colours to the mast and invested too much time and effort, often for personal reasons, into trans rights activism so they feel any backing off or accepting the cases where conservatives were right are going to mean giving up everything, so they grit their teeth and ignore this stuff and if they have to, they come out and support it. Because otherwise, the right-wingers were right about the things they said would happen if trans activism got its way about social normalisation, and that undermines everything they've fought for.

I and those who were dubious about the whole thing like I was were being assured that "What you fear will never happen; no man or boy is going to go to all the trouble of saying they are trans simply in order for some peeping tom opportunities".

I feel like there's an interaction with the binary oppressor/oppressed model here. I've seen similar contentions, where the premise is that nobody would ever claim a marginalized identity falsely or lightly, because the experience of the Oppressed is categorically worse than the experience of the Oppressor. There is nothing that could possibly be worth the agonies of the soul one would be taking on to claim an Oppressed identity, save the pure truth of the matter itself.

The binary model cannot permit any recognition that it is ever, under any circumstances, in any way, better to be a member of the Oppressed group than the Oppressor; the binary all-or-nothing thinking would make such an admission tantamount to claiming that it is always, under all circumstances, in all ways, better to be a member of the Oppressed group than the Oppressor, in which case you're claiming that their real statuses are reversed, and are attacking the moral justification of the Oppressed group. Attempts at nuance or complexity or using one's head instead of one's gut will feel, on that gut-level, like nothing more than a direct enemy attack.

Does this really happen or am I just making this up? Well: have you ever heard someone say "[so you're saying that Xs are] the real oppressors" or "...really oppressed", when the matter of a potential advantage to belonging to an oppressed group is discussed?

I have.

Certainly knowing the etiology of a phenomenon is an important step towards developing a holistic understanding of it.

I'm not saying that all cases of transgenderism can be reduced to a fetish, but, it's still something to keep in mind.

How /d/are you >_>

In seriousness, one major problem is actually having to talk about the subject knowing people are going to reply "ok, let's see your open tabs Kurt Eichenwald."

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