site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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.

16
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I have yet to see evidence that rape is a failure mode of trans rights specifically and not just human nature generally. To restate, being trans does not cause you to be a rapist.

Generalizations aside, among all strategies to reduce prison rape, putting trans prisoners in with their birth sex population is surely one of the least effective ones. Anything else is honestly more likely to eliminate the problem entirely. For example, getting the guards to stop raping the inmates will make them more effective at preventing rape among the inmates, including rape done by trans people.

Housing sex criminals separately would be another good thing to try. In some of the articles and stuff I looked at while writing this post, some people proposed we house trans sex criminals separately. But housing all sex criminals separately would obviously address the problem too. Even if we had limited space, severity of crimes would obviously be a better way to prioritize than being trans.

I guess some people see other people getting worried about prison rape by trans people and think they're calling trans people rapists. Obviously they're not, but it's still fishy. To focus on prison rape by trans people instead (and, observably, it's very much instead) of prison rape generally implies there's something special about prison rape when trans people do it. Maybe one argument in favor of such specialness is that we can apply a very straightforward intervention (no trans women in women's prison) and it straightforwardly gets rid of this one subcase of prison rape. But there are even simpler interventions that obviously work better, such as not housing sex criminals with everyone else. In summary, it's more effective to target the "rapist" part of "trans rapist" rather than the "trans" part.

Re people abusing self-ID, see answer downthread, which I shall copy-and-paste for convenience (please reply there):

In that case, existing protections against rape in general should be enough. It shouldn't be difficult for the guards to observe creepy behavior leading up to any incident, for example. If the guards fail to prevent rape by a trans woman, then they would've failed to prevent any other sort of abuse between inmates. I continue to not see a problem with trans rights here.

Re guards, I find it straightforward that rapists foster rape culture, and non-rapists foster less rape culture. You might even get excellent RNG and get a guard who actively works against rape culture, but maybe that's a bit too much to ask for.

Re solitary, I did not intend that meaning: I just mean put all the sex criminals with each other. Yes, solitary confinement is pretty bad and should be avoided when possible.

Housing sex criminals separately would be another good thing to try. In some of the articles and stuff I looked at while writing this post, some people proposed we house trans sex criminals separately. But housing all sex criminals separately would obviously address the problem too. Even if we had limited space, severity of crimes would obviously be a better way to prioritize than being trans.

This is what is done in Ireland iirc. There are some sex offenders in every prison, but Arbour Hill is where they are concentrated as they have teams of clinical psychologists there to try and reduce recidivism rates.

Given the lack of female prisoners I don't think they have a specific place for female sex-offenders.