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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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Regarding the listed contents, I do think it is inappropriate to be teaching four-year-olds about "leather" - in a sexual context - or even "drag queens", the attempted desexualization of which I find more than a little bemusing. I don't believe crossdressing itself is inherently sexualized, but drag as a subcultural tradition has always had a strong erotic element, and it's kind of bizarre to teach children about it when they quite possibly haven't even properly done the birds and the bees yet.

"Intersex flag" I would, however, strongly defend. Being intersex is an anatomical trait, not a sexual behavior. Four-year-olds can very well be intersex themselves. Teaching them to be at peace with it, and teaching their classmates that it would be wrong to bully people for being intersex, seems perfectly defensible. Indeed, viewed in this context, the intersex flag is just about the only pride flag which could apply to a four-year-old.

"Intersex flag" I would, however, strongly defend. Being intersex is an anatomical trait, not a sexual behavior. Four-year-olds can very well be intersex themselves. Teaching them to be at peace with it, and teaching their classmates that it would be wrong to bully people for being intersex, seems perfectly defensible. Indeed, viewed in this context, the intersex flag is just about the only pride flag which could apply to a four-year-old.

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the likelihood of any individual child being intersex or knowing an intersex child is vanishingly small (e.g. Klinefelter syndrome only affects 223 out of every 100,000 male babies, and often isn't even obvious until the subject starts puberty). This isn't like myopia, which affects nearly a quarter of the population. Even if I received credible assurance that the four-year-olds in question would only be taught about intersex conditions in a strictly medical context and would not receive any education about queer theory, gender ideology or pseudoscientific nonsense about "sex assigned at birth" - I would still question the utility of teaching four-year-olds about extremely rare medical conditions which affect such a tiny proportion of the population. Of course no hypothetical child suffering from motor neurone disease should be ashamed of themselves or face bullying because of their condition, but teach a class of four-year-olds about motor neurone disease, and no matter how many caveats you include about how rare it is (never mind statistics, these children don't understand addition yet), we both know what would happen: the dumber half of the class wouldn't know what you were talking about, while the smarter half would go home in floods of tears and have nightmares for weeks afterwards about being paralysed and dying young.

I suspect know that the only reason that children are being taught about intersex conditions at all is the same reason these conditions have been brought up 99% of the time they've been raised by anyone since the turn of the century: as a means of smuggling in gender ideology by the back door.

The situation where a lesson on a medical condition is appropriate is when there's a child with that condition in or about to join the class. That's a known way of preventing shame and bullying.

So yeah, if there's a kid with CAH in the class, teach the class about CAH. Or if there's a wheelchair user, teach about wheelchairs, etc.

But that (ISTM) is why many standard blues support teaching trans stuff--the idea is "We can't know in advance if such a child will be in the class! So we should just assume one might be, and teach everyone!" It makes sense (is also why people put random wheelchair users into stories, for example). The problem is the side effects swamp the benefits. Well, IMO. But you gave a good description of some of the kind of side effects you'd see from any plan to "Just teach every 4-year-old about [some rare condition]!"

(Then when it comes to trans specifically, an additional problem is we don't actually know the truth of the assumptions underlying this plan, that "It's just like a medical condition that is 100% physical! It has a fixed rate of occurrence and you never know who will get it and you can only treat it one way!" And there's even some evidence that those assumptions are false. People often really want those assumptions to be true, I think because it'd make life / "doing the right thing" simpler for them. I sympathize...but I'm inclined to believe they aren't true. So they end up being harmful. And we shouldn't impose curricula based on them.)

Or if there's a wheelchair user, teach about wheelchairs, etc... It makes sense (is also why people put random wheelchair users into stories, for example).

Such a large proportion of people will require the use of a wheelchair for some period of time at some point during their life that it makes sense for schools to proactively teach children about wheelchairs, even if none of the pupils in the school are wheelchair-bound. This is also what I was getting at with the myopia example. Mass-release children's books in which the characters are a Five-Token Band wherein one child is shortsighted, one is wheelchair-bound, one is autistic etc.? Given the statistical frequency of these conditions, completely unobjectionable and even commendable. Now, mass-release children's books in which one character is trans, one character has CAH, one character has Huntington's etc.? That I find a lot more difficult to get onboard with.

And there's even some evidence that those assumptions are false. People often really want those assumptions to be true, I think because it'd make life / "doing the right thing" simpler for them.

There's also an obvious celebration parallax effect, in which activists will deny up and down that social contagion plays any role in trans identification, and yet are fully aware that teaching children about the concept of transgenderism (particularly when it's defined using an extremely broad constellation of "symptoms" which just about everyone might experience from time to time) is a surefire way to guarantee that at least some of them come out as trans. But of course they'll rationalise this away by claiming (unfalsifiably) that the children in question were already trans, but simply lacked the language to describe their experiences until they were educated about it.

The double standard/isolated demand for rigour is also on full display: any adult who's interacted with a child for more than five minutes knows perfectly well how impressionable how children are. If you teach a class full of children about X (where X is a medical condition, mental illness etc.), by the end of the class half of them will be convinced they suffer from it. (Never mind small children - how many first-year psychology undergrads have become convinced they suffer from schizophrenia after a single introductory lecture thereon?) But these same adults will turn around and insist that transgender identification is governed by a completely different set of psychological dynamics, wherein false positives simply do not exist under any circumstances.

wherein false positives simply do not exist under any circumstances.

Not quite. False positives exist when you start regretting cutting off your breasts or dick-n-balls, at which point it turns out you were never trans, and it's your fault for asking for those surgeries in the first place.

As a last resort, perhaps. They're much more comfortable just implying that detransitioners don't exist and trying their best to keep them out of the conversation entirely.

I don't believe crossdressing itself is inherently sexualized,

I disagree even on this point. There are literally NO subcultures in the western memeplex where crossdressing isn't involved in either a fetish or a sexualised lifestyle.

Welllll.... wearing the clothes of the opposite sex in a non-sexualised way was part of old Hallowe'en traditions (men dressing up as women in aprons etc, women wearing trousers and caps before it became common or usual for women to wear pants). it was all part of the theme of disguising yourself to protect against the malign spirits and the upheaval of the normal rules (this being the night the borders between the Other World and our world opened, and spirits and ghosts could cross over into the human realm and humans could cross over into the other world). Think of it as the spirit of Saturnalia. It's known as guising in Scotland.

The English pantomime tradition carried this on in a way, as well as the comedians who dressed up as women - Les Dawson was not portraying a drag queen, though the humour did depend heavily on double entendres.

There have been plenty of edgy comedians who cross dressed in nonsexual but still not exactly child-friendly ways.

don't they do that as part of their bit BECAUSE it is inherently sexual? after all sexual humor is one of the more universal forms of comedy.

There is a sexual element involved, in that it used to be inherently ridiculous for a man to dress as a woman, the opposite sex. But not as in relating to sex - 'ordinary men doing ordinary things, but they're dressed as women' was enough to sell Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari's Bosom Buddies to ABC! However once they started developing romantic plot lines for the characters in the second season, people got uncomfortable with it.

Sometimes it’s just edgy incongruity. Not granny approved, but not purely sexual and/or relating to other male/female differences.

Pantomime dames in the UK/Australia, which leads into crossdressimg comedians/entertainers like Dame Edna Everage and Mrs Brown?

Do panto dames, Dame Edna and Mrs. Brown (might also innclude Mrs. Doubtfire) represent a subculture in the same way as Glitter & Titter Cabaret, where London's finest burlesque stars, drag queens, and comedians light up the stage? Their audiences I suspect are different. Is there much crossover amoungst the performers?

Lily Savage (Paul O'Grady) was a pretty standard Drag Queen until they broke out to become a prime time TV star with what was essentially a panto dame performance. So some crossover at least. I'd say panto dames certainly used to be what I would call a sub culture, I don't think it is as big a thing as it used to be though.

Drag brunches tend to be PG (with some light innuendo) and remind me pretty heavily of panto dame performances, which is what made me think of it.

According to Wikipedia

O'Grady obtained his breakthrough into television when he played the character of a transvestite prostitute informant, Roxanne, in three episodes of ITV's police drama The Bill between 1988 and 1990.

Sometime later

He turned down ITV's subsequent offer of a weekly show because it would air before the watershed and thus force him to drastically alter his act into a form of light entertainment.

Is there much Panto that would have to be after the watershed because it's inappropriate for children?

Also Paul O'Grady was a homosexual, neither Barry Humphries (Dame Edna) nor Brendan O'Carroll (Mrs. Brown) were members of this particular peculiar subculture.

But also did appear as Lily Savage on Breakfast programs and primetime television shows. Pantomime humor from Panto dames is built heavily on innuendo and adult jokes that go over children's heads, but can entertain their parents. Lily Savage was very close to this, just dialled up a notch. Seriously go on Youtube and pull up Blankety Blank which was a primetime show. They call it risque but it's just the same kind of innuendo you would find in panto. Now it is on a spectrum and Savage is more crude than a panto dame at his worst, but he settled into a fairly generic prime time career.

Lily Savage's prime time persona was fairly tame. Whether the actor playing the character is gay or not has no real impact on what the character said. Indeed O'Grady himself was much tamer than Savage in his TV persona once he switched out. He himself made the point he only dressed as a woman for money, just like Humphries et al.

We're Humphries or O'Carroll as risqué as O'Grady?

Humphries was mostly g-rated, his persona was that of the spinster aunt with delusions of grandeur who made innuendo sometimes but was mostly oblivious - like a drag version of Hyacinth Bucket. She claimed to have a son who lived with his chum, and she was sure both would find Mrs right one day. But right now they're looking in all the wrong places (with a suspicious glance at the audience) - for an example of the Dame Edna kind of risque.

More comments

I have not watched all their output, but I would say Humphries was the least risque, Mrs Browns Boys does have a lot of adult humor and vulgarity and the like and may be more of a match for O'Grady's non-primetime stuff. Some say: "With its emphasis on profanity, drag, vulgar sexual humour, physical clowning and sentimental family values, Mrs Brown’s Boys is a show that unashamedly taps into an end-of-the-pier comedy tradition"

Mrs Brown: I remember one night, me and Redser, walking along the beach at Portmarnock. He started chasing me into the sand dunes…so I was lying there, I said (flirtatious, sexy voice), ‘What do you want?’ (laughs remembering). He said I want your knickers around your ankles (flirtatious laugh). I had to get my feckin’ handbag and put them on!"

This is a bad argument. What the parent poster was claiming was that crossdressing does not imply sexualized lifestyle. What you are claiming is that sexualized lifestyle implies cross-dressing (a claim I don't follow btw, I don't think that there is that much cross-dressing in the straight vanilla hookup culture).

It is as if someone claimed to argue that skin contact does not imply sexuality, and you tried to refute them by (correctly) observing that almost all sexuality involved skin contact.

I mean what comes to mind are two things done in the West. First, acting. People wear costumes. To represent the character they are portraying. Second would be fraternitie using dresses as humiliation or just as a quirky costume for a party. Those things are rare, but I don’t think it’s true that no contexts in any culture have cross dressing must be sexualizing it.

Also, Milton Berle.

You should go to the theater more often. The pantomime dame of traditional British panto, for example, is a perfect example of a performance style that's quite similar to gay drag, but intended to amuse a wide audience (including young children), not to arouse in any way. You would also be hard-pressed to argue that a hyper-traditonalist production of Hamlet where Ophelia is played by a young lad in period dress, as she would have been in Shakespeare's time, is shooting for "fetish content".

I think we were implicitly talking about men dressing as women rather than women dressing as men, but you'll find an even greater wealth of 'wholesome' examples of crossdressing if you start looking at crossdressing women and girls - the archetypal Eowyn/Mulan/etc. story is hardly a bodice-ripper.

And all that is without wading into the Trans Question in anyway, as that would be tedious and probably unproductive.

I think @WandererintheWilderness is correct on this point. For example, I have a friend who wore a dress for Halloween one year. He doesn't have some weird fetish or lead a sexualized lifestyle, he just did it for a lark. Or for another example, Trey Parker and Matt Stone wore dresses to the Oscars the year they got nominated, because they thought it was funny as hell to throw people for a loop as they pointedly refused to answer questions about why they did it. So crossdressing isn't inherently sexualized. But it is certainly true (imo) that the typical example of crossdressing is sexual in some way.

There is an argument that a man wearing a dress for Halloween is doing something sexualised; he's just doing a sexualised thing as a joke rather than as an integral part of his identity.

Well, no surviving ones, at any rate; the most famous one was the mass of women cross-dressing in the '60s and '70s. Of course, that movement was so overwhelmingly successful that it's just the room temperature now.

There's also tomboyism, though that's not really an organized subculture so much as an emergent phenomenon.

The main way to tell whether a particular crossdresser is doing it for fetish/sexualized reasons or not is to look at how well they fit into the surrounding environment. If they're in formal wear when everyone else is casual (which covers both your average drag queen and Sam Brinton) it's 100% fetish/sexual, but if it's not then it's reasonable to assume they have other goals (where, sexual or not, they're unlikely to try and make it your problem).

I too am bemused at kids being exposed to drag, it puts me in the same weird headspace as Las Vegas. (Caveat: I'm aware actual people with families live and work in Las Vegas, but I'm talking about the touristy stuff). It always struck me as quite odd that Las Vegas at least in its marketing, had tried to clean up their act and put on a family friendly sort of facade. You can search for family friendly attractions and find official Vegas tourism guides that just pitch Vegas as a fun spot for the whole family. I am still astonished at how many corporations think Vegas is an excellent place to hold their trade shows - and then are somehow caught off guard when the HR reports of inappropriate behavior start piling up.

The thing is, when you are actually there on the Strip, the "family friendly" facade is paper thin. The smell of weed is everywhere. Aside from the many scantily clad costumed characters you'll see roaming around in broad daylight, the many leaflets for various erotic shows, it's common to see tourists themselves cutting loose because, hey, it's Vegas baby!

I went for work events three or four years in a row, and my boss always looked for some attraction or some show we could see for a night out. And no matter how family friendly it was billed (of course the explicit stuff would have been way off limits because work function) I left afterwards wondering if I needed to make a report to HR. There was one occasion where we ventured off the Strip - that was a big mistake. I don't know the name of where we ended up but it was highly awkward to be there with my coworkers, let me tell you.

Drag shows hit me in a similar way. Like it's so clearly designed with particular content for an adult audience. The fact that this one person wants to tone down their act this one time and read little kids a book does not to me, take away from the fact that this is fundamentally an adult-oriented performance art, made for adult consumption. I am absolutely baffled why people want to sanitize it and pretend it's something other than what it is.

I think, if you want to be more charitable than "activists doggedly and automatically want to normalize anything which scandalizes prudes without stopping to think if maybe, sometimes, the prudes have a point", it's a response to anti-trans attempts to equate trans women presenting female in public with drag. The right-wing firebrands say "so-called trans women are doing drag, a sex thing, in *public", and the activists maladaptively decide to respond with "uh, actually, drag isn't inherently sexual" instead of sticking with "yeah, well trans women aren't the same thing drag queens".

Didn’t drag queen story hour predate trans as a culture war battlefield?

Per Google, DQSH first started in 2015 in San Francisco. The first big national-news-grabbing fight over trans bathroom access was in 2016 (North Carolina), but there had been several state- and local-level squabbles over trans issues in the years before.

I don't think so? It wasn't until several years after the enstunnening and enbravening of Caitlyn Jenner, and the general topic of bathroom drama, that I even heard of drag queen story hour. Maybe in some deep-blue strongholds?

I'd speculate that what actually happened here wasn't "deep-blue strongholds", but the opposite - an increasingly noteworthy phenomenon of deep-red strongholds who somehow managed to ostrich-with-head-in-the-sand their way through the entire LGBT activist phenomenon until recently. They can wind up thinking of things like drag queen story hour as opening blows in the conflict because they weren't paying attention before that.

it's a response to anti-trans attempts to equate trans women presenting female in public with drag.

Drag Queen Story Hour co-occurring with the rise of trans as a prominent... subculture? ideology? post-Obergefell claim-staking? surely plays a role in that conflation. Not sure if it can be meaningfully disambiguated.

Being intersex is a disease state. It’s too complex a topic for a 4 year old to grasp adequately

I mean, it's pretty straightforward. You can argue it's rare and not worth bringing up unless you have an intersex kid actually there in the classroom at risk of being bullied for it. But "too complex"? "Normally girls' bodies look one way and boys' bodies look another way. Very rarely, people are born a little different, with a mix and match. This is fine." Pretty straightforward. Hell, bearded women used to be sideshow attractions and remain one of the Stock Circus Characters that children might very well be exposed to in a comic book or cartoon. They'll mostly just think it's funny. They certainly won't think it's complex.

I am not sure if you mean to imply more depth than you give explicitly, but the version you wrote is not the same as Magusoflight’s. I think it’s misleading to say, “This is fine,” without qualification, at least where kids are involved.

Consider teaching children about paraplegia. You want children to respect its victims and to be aware of what they really are and are not capable of. You want them to understand that disability is not a moral failing. But you don’t want them to think that being wheelchair-bound is just as good as being able to walk, that it’s no affliction at all, and that given a choice between being healthy or paraplegic there is no reason to prefer one over the other.

I think that the folks adding intersex conditions to the preschool and grade school curricula are trying to say that there is no reason to prefer not to be intersex; they are looking to deconstruct sex and gender in the minds of children as young as they can get them. To teach that this is an affliction, to add that little bit of complexity, would undermine their goals.

If we want to play it that way, I don't think changing "This is fine" to "This is unfortunate and you should feel sorry for them" would add too much complexity. "Sometimes people are disabled, and you should give the sympathy rather than mockery" is also something children are perfectly able to grasp. (Of course, I disagree with the premise. Many intersex conditions are perfectly harmless, in which case I see no reason why they should be taught as "afflictions" any more than, say, being left-handed.)

I see no reason why they should be taught as "afflictions" any more than, say, being left-handed.

I dunno, being left-handed sounds kind of sinister to me.

Boooo!

(I upvoted. But boooo!)

I will admit to overusing that pun, but I shall never apologise for it.

We shield kids from a lot of complicated real-world things that could affect them. 4-year-olds can have degenerative diseases. Or be sexually abused. Both are much more common than being "intersex" (unless you allow for the much more expansive definitions touted by activists for activist reasons). So I guess schools should have mandatory picture books showing a little kid dying in agony, while their sister gets played with by their uncle, right? So that these kids can be "at peace" with it?

...Of course not. Indoctrination is the only reason people are pushing for teaching kids about intersex medical conditions. Kids inherently know that biological sex is real, and can tell the difference between men and women. Undoing that knowledge requires concerted effort, and the younger you start, the better.

The comparison strikes me as a strawman. Degenerative diseases and sexual abuse are inherently upsetting topics. Being intersex is a minor, harmless anatomical deviation from the norm. I cannot imagine a child of any age being upset at being told it exists. They might, at most, giggle a bit.

  • -10

Being intersex is a minor, harmless anatomical deviation from the norm.

A large proportion of intersex people are congenitally infertile. As noted by @vorpa-glavo, "people with Turner syndrome have physical differences (low set ears, short stature, lymphodema of the hands and feet), they don't normally undergo puberty, often have issues with spatial visualization and mathematics, and are prone to certain diseases (heart defects, Type II diabetes, hypothyroidism, and conductive hearing loss)". People with Klinefelter syndrome tend to have issues with reduced strength, cognitive impairment and mood disorders. People with Trisomy X tend to have IQs a standard deviation or more below average, among other cognitive impairments. And so on and so forth.

Yeah. I remember there was a big thing a few years back about whether or not leather should be welcome at pride, because pride has become a family thing for some people and there are kids there now. But that's a matter of "should leather be pushed out of a space because kids are entering the space".

But bringing leather into a space that is specifically for young kids is beyond the pale. Enough so that I would expect that even the majority of the queer-and-proud population would be against it.

WTF was the school board even thinking here?

Edit: or am I just being gullible, and the books the school board pushed didn't have leather except in the literal sense that one of the characters in one of the books wore a leather jacket?

The school board wasn’t thinking. They’re teachers and they were going with the flow. It is literally incomprehensible to teachers that ‘the experts’, however defined, can be wrong. Like if you suggest it they’ll stare at you blankly, literally not understanding the words you just said. And the experts suggested kids should be taught this stuff, so teachers concluded ‘parents who want to shield their toddlers from learning about BDSM should lose custody of their kids’ instead of ‘the experts should be shot’.

As to why the "introducing little children to drags" thing exists, see my thoughts here — my best guess is that it's a bizarrely misjudged attempt to counteract the anti-trans argument that goes "trans women are functionally drag queens, drag is a sexual practice that shouldn't be allowed in public, therefore trans women shouldn't be allowed in public" by denying the 'drag is inherently sexual' step of the reasoning, instead of the 'drag queens and trans women are the same thing' step.

Regarding this particular school board, though, I don't think they looked too closely at the material in the first place. They saw a generally-pro-LGBT book and rubber-stamped it without even trying to judge its specific merits.

They saw a generally-pro-LGBT book and rubber-stamped it without even trying to judge its specific merits.

The topic is integrated into the teaching materials and suggested answers for addressing student questions, and it's difficult to get around the board's bigoted animus.

Sure, I buy that the school board just rubber-stamped this book without much thought. That part is not surprising to me. The bit that's surprising to me is that they decided to double down, and then double down again, and continue until they're now showing up in front of the supreme court. This case (edit apr 24: as described in the top-level comment) is a giant gift to social conservatives, at a minimum in the court of public opinion and I expect also in the court of law. So I wonder if the school board just doesn't realize that, of if they do realize that and just don't care - I just have a burning curiosity as to what their thought process was when they decided to escalate to this level.

Because they’re public school teachers. ‘The experts being wrong’ is to them like ‘a triangular circle’ or ‘a purpley sort of orange’- not so much wrong as making so little sense that nobody could believe it.

They just don’t realize not everyone thinks this way.

So I wonder if the school board just doesn't realize that, of if they do realize that and just don't care

Your brain does weird things to you once you're in the realm of true belief, I saw the same kind of thing around trans stuff. My conclusion is that they know and care, but consider the actions that got them into trouble axiomatically good. Getting pushback is no argument for backing down. Getting pushback so huge it could set back the whole movement might be an argument for a tactical retreat, but not for conceding that any wrongdoing took place. Then there are more trivial matters like overestimating their own competence, or how much support they have from either the public or the elites.

"good trouble." The phrase was a mantra in 2020.

Definitely do not care. Schools and libraries near me have basically taken the position that nothing short of the 101st Airborne will get them to stop showing pornography to children. They don't care about elections, court cases, funding, irate parents at school board meetings, nothing. Showing sexually explicit material to children is their terminal goal, and nothing can possibly stop them from doing their favorite thing.

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