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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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While I don't know the exact details of your situation, I would be extremely wary of including any "theory portion" in this sort of email. Unless you regularly have the sorts of abstract discussions of social and political issues with this person that we do here, and I quite doubt that if you say he has never been exposed to these counter-arguments, I don't see how it will make you look like anything other than a crazy right-wing conspiracy theorist in his eyes.

It was pointed out in a previous thread that we can map this issue onto two axes. One is the practical axis, dealing with real world actions: what pronouns we call people, the details of sex-change surgeries, who can play in what sports leagues, etc. The other is the metaphysical axis, dealing with our theory of the world: the definitions of man or woman, whether the interests of each sex are in eternal conflict, what gender identity feels like, etc. If your goal is to prevent a specific action in the real world and not to change someone's fundamental beliefs (and the truth is most people don't really have any, apart from the autists that congregate in places like this), you should stay on the practical axis.

If you can convince him that there are specific, measurable harms that might come to his child if he pursues transition, then he will be forced to at least weigh the costs and benefits of this course of action. Things like medical studies about puberty blockers and the anecdotes from detransitioners that you mention in passing are much stronger arguments than anything you could possibly say about "norms, culture, and language." Like it or not, we live in a world where in some places parents could face great legal and social repercussions for standing in the way of their child coming out or transitioning, and so you need that much more evidence that going against the flow will cause their family less suffering in the end, and not in the context of joining some grand culture war struggle against biological denialism that they are never going to care about.

Thank you for your response, other commenters made similar points which I responded to here: https://www.themotte.org/post/454/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/89837?context=8#context