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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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There may be no gold in the hills, but there’s at least some silver.

This is, I think, the core of our disagreement. I think there is pyrite in those hills.

Perhaps I can summarise; as a trans person, I don’t think I’m the opposite sex in any way, instead I’m in deep distress over being the sex I am, and I take medication that alleviates that distress.

I can at times be talked into believing in some quite rare version of gender dysphoria analogous to body integrity disorder. The 'Truscum' faction of the the trans discourse I think makes the most sense of any 'pro-trans' faction by quite a large margin. But I very quickly lose patience for this when it's used as cover for the excesses of the much larger vocal and powerful rest of the 'pro-trans' movement. Transwomen in women's sports is one such excess, it is an attempt to pass pyrite off as gold on the open market - no matter how much it matches the luster and no matter how much you adjust the alloy in it to match the weight they are simply different elements/compounds. Pyrite at a fundamental level is different than gold and if you try to use it in electronics as you would use gold your electronics will not function. Likewise males and females have fundamental differences and society has developed special cases for these difference in things like sports, romance, prisons ect. We could perhaps take a look at some of these but it needs to actually be a discourse, it cannot be demands by people who refuse to even acknowledge fundamental difference and society is not in a place where we can have this kind of frank debate.

And more important than how we handle relative trivialities like sports we need to address the faction of the 'Pro-trans' side of the aisle that is actually running the narrative because they don't agree with you about this whole dysphoria requirement thing and without that all of the points you have made fall apart. To be as frank as possible and truly with no joy, if the trolley problem is people like you with Dysphoria on one track and an order of magnitude or three more kids who will be pushed down an unnecessary and life altering transition that they would not have wanted without the messaging on the other track it does not look go for you. Part of why I say this, and why I find the current state of the discourse so distressing is that I recognize that there but for the grace of god go I. I was precisely the kind of kid that would have ended up being put on blockers as a child and the kind of kid that would have become a zealot for the "pro-trans" side. I now know, and I would not have known in this counterfactual, that I grow up to be very happy to be a man. I think this kind of susceptible kid outnumbers people like to greatly and I am very unimpressed with the guardrails in place. It's like the section in Scott's old old blog post The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo Where he goes into the dangers of eliminating all false negatives at the expense of sending runny noses into surgery.