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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Thanks for taking questions! I would like to understand better if/where you draw the boundary of your principles.

  • Somebody else already brought up transracialism in a different subthread, but that discussion went nowhere. What about a very concrete scenario: a Caucasian-American person demands to be identified as African-American, including addressing "other" African-Americans using everyone's favourite n-word? Can they demand equal treatment and claim a university scholarship set aside for African-Americans? If you don't like these, does it make a difference if the individual was adopted by African-American parents and raised in a homogeneous African-American community?

  • @Bartender_Venator's examples here: what about titles of honour for a head of state that you don't respect, or even actively look down on? What about homeopaths or faith healers wanting to be addressed as Doctor? Imagine in the latter case that they would be genuinely hurt and feel that a core part of their identity is being rejected if you didn't do so.

The reason these examples are particularly relevant is that to many people who are uncomfortable with trans language norms, the demands register as similar to the latter because they consider women to be a socially privileged class, and non-women asking to be treated as women are therefore people arrogating themselves a status they do not have. (That's why nobody is ever upset about transmen, except in a "these are women being duped into harming themselves" capacity)

This suggests a class of "bad actors" that you did not address: men who only want to be identified as women for material and social benefits. Material benefits can simply take the form of hiring priority (at least in academia the handful of individuals I know who went trans in grad school wound up significantly beating the curve in terms of subsequent employment), and social benefits can either be an expectation of some of the social benefits enjoyed by biological women, or a pure power play as you can force people to walk on eggshells around you, or make them uncomfortable (if they have the common adverse reaction) but incapable of voicing or acting upon their discomfort due to the threat of severe sanction.

(If you think that the existence of such bad actors is unlikely, we probably have very different priors on the prevalence of male sociopathy.)

I wonder how much overlap there is between the discussion on gendered pronouns and the discussion on common names for substitute foods.