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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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The Mistake Theorist in me says that we need a -cide word for culture, then. If genocide is essentially attempting to keep a population or demographic from being able to replicate itself into the future, then we need a word for when it happens to a culture that could include anyone of different backgrounds. Now, I don't imagine people would actually use "culturocide" (or whatever word would roll off the tongue better) instead of going to the genocide argument, but still.

I think the woke theorists call it erasure.

It'd be useful, and it's definitely part of the debate (and not one specific to trans- or LGBT-stuff!).

But I think there's also a few other concepts included and that are in many ways more primary parts of the discussion:

  • "Exist" as in being possible to recognize or know about, even under assumptions that they don't need to replicate themselves into the future. This is more overt for transmen, which were probably vastly undercounted in every statistical analysis for a decade, but the flip side of 'LGBT culture is trying to glom onto every crossdresser' is that Eddie Izzard has come out as genderfluid -- a lot of people who were part of the 'not-labeled' set demonstrably do want to go with these deeper categorizations when they become aware of them, some of which were not previously things that even had names.

  • "Exist" as in be able to go through society in a viable manner. The classical example here is the older WPATH SoC that required six months of lived experience before hormone therapy or hair removal: this wasn't physically impossible, but at best involved a bunch of really bad decisions and never being able to use a public restroom.

  • "Exist" as in being visible to other people. This is the other side to the 'you can be trans as long as you pass and I never have to hear about it anywhere'; not only are some people just never going to pass well enough to meet every critic's standards, but there's going to be at least some people who don't want to pass in every metric, either because their desired presentation isn't going to 'fit' (eg, transwoman who wants pants with pockets), or because they've grown to like things like Pride parades or obnoxious amounts of lipstick.

  • "Exist" as in be discussed in specific places where (they believe) other matters of similar level of complexity are discussed. This is the other side of the conversation about whether gender nonconformity is appropriate for middle-school age groups.

  • "Exist" as in live. This is somewhat based around overestimates of not-transitioned suicide rates and of transitioning and post-transition reductions in suicide rates (and sometimes overestimates of bias crimes), but you can still end up getting a giant pile of bodies with even more skeptical estimates.

deleted

Memocide?

...That could work, yeah.

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