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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
When do you think the golden age of trans acceptance was? People are far more trans-accepting than they were ever were - it is just that the normie majority have responded to the increasing noise level by changing their view from "Whatever" to "Don't trans my daughter".
Trans acceptance circa Very Special Episodes of shows like Night Court and The Court and The IT Crowd and The West Wing and Sex and the City was basically 100% accepting but also viewed as exceptionally rare.
Trans acceptance tracks less with gay acceptance or Black liberation than it does with the status of minority groups in the United States like Chinese and Muslim immigrants: accepted easily but haltingly when they were rare, hated feared and excluded when they started to become common.
Yes, the thing about gay rights movements is that everyone (even in very conservative cultures in socially conservative times) knew of gay people in their community, in their family. You can ask grandparents or other old relatives or friends; even in little towns in Iran it’ll be village gossip. It was no surprise that gay people existed or that Bob from the office was gay, and it wasn’t even a huge surprise that your son or daughter was gay, whether or not you approved of it. People used to regularly have 6+ kids, too, so it really wasn’t unusual to have a gay child, sibling or uncle/aunt.
By contrast, very, very few Americans even in cosmopolitan progressive circles knew anyone trans before about 2010. The only people who did were those in very queer circles, the tiny number of doctors who worked with transgender patients and the men who frequented transwomen prostitutes, who presumably largely kept it to themselves. Trans representation on 90s shows like ‘Friends’ may have been ‘tolerant’, but it was also read by most of the audience as a quirky big city joke thing.
Even to the extent that someone might have encountered a trans person in their lives pre-2010, it was fairly uncommon to know they were trans, especially if you weren't good at clocking people. The framework of this as equivalent to the Witness Protection Program -- completely cutting ties with one's past life and community, moving across the country -- isn't exactly what was going on, but it was present enough to get pushback as recent as 2009. Transitioning-in-place was much less common, especially in rural and suburban areas, due to the relative difficulty of medical practitioners doing these services, the physical difficulties involved in many of them, and a variety of economic pressures.
It's probably also worth mentioning the vastly increased prominence of transmen qua transmen. The relative paucity of them as a group sometimes reflected data gathering problems -- most studies depended on that required legal name changes and/or bottom surgery that remain less common among transmen even today -- but it was pretty common for people, even people much into the broader queer or gender-nonconforming world, to not really have consideration of the category as a possible thing until the late-00s, barring very specific communities.
The vast majority of people vastly overestimate their ability to figure out "mysteries" like this irl because they don't go through life thinking anything is a mystery. It's only after you are tipped off to examine things that a mystery appears.
Prior to trans prominence, there was rarely any reason to doubt anyone's sex, and so you could rely on the most gross and simplistic shortcuts. Long hair, dress, makeup -- that's a woman. Perhaps an unfortunate looking woman.
One of the great tragedies of trans prominence is the way it leads to false-positives on "clocking" people. It's the most obvious demonstration of how trans prominence reifies gender norms. Forty years ago a middle aged woman with masculine features would never dream that she had to worry people would think she had a penis.
The same way that gay liberation did a number on close male friendships (ie made them more difficult to cultivate and maintain), trans emancipation has been strictly negative for masculine women (who of course greatly outnumber MtF transsexuals)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link