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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Conservatives and TERFs often state that allowing trans women into women’s spaces allows any male sexual predator to access them by identifying as a woman, but if you go the other way and say trans people should go where there biological sex says, what’s to prevent a man from going into the women’s bathroom and saying he’s actually a trans man?

Well, it doesn't quite work the same way, right off the bat for prisons "hey I'm actually a trans man, send me to a female prison" is not going to work. Neither is it going to work sports. They might let someone through initially, but if they see them blow everyone else out of the water, the organizers can ask for proof they're female, or else have the person disqualified after the fact. Even in more informal spaces like locker rooms you at least have a way of resolving the dispute, even if the whole conflict will be awkward for everyone involved.

I think the middle ground of having people go where they pass as makes the most sense.

It might work, but doesn't that grant women in locker rooms the right to say "sorry, you don't pass well enough, try harder next time"? I don't know that this would go down well with the current batch of activists. And anyway, I don't think that will work for prisons and sports.

I'm tempted to say there might not be a good solution here one way or the other.

Getting rid of the autists would be a disaster for humanity tho, who would be crazy enough to obsess over computing or electromagnetism or breeding if it weren’t for autistic people? I don’t know what share of modern inventions we can credit to autistic obsession but it’s probably quite high :)

Yes, I think it will be a disaster. Half of our tech stack runs on trans women and furries.