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 -
This feels like a fairly neat closing point to this thread. We've more or less reached our cruxes and the way things would have to move forward for you and I to be mutually content I think. Though, I am weird. It would seem I can't just speak for TRAs in general.
I don't want to speak for the emotions of everyone who's ever transitioned- I could just be wrong here. But here's my honest working model.
For me- the version I experience- I think it's the same emotion some president elects have felt, or that some people feel after liposuction. For me it's not a qualitatively different phenomenon than other identity based euphorias, just contextually different. Euphoria caused by having your self image map up with your aspirational self image.
So in my model I don't think of gender euphoria as anything unique to gender. I think it's become such a talking point because the people historically who transitioned when things were just starting up- were people with debilitating self image issues that were solved by transition, so they experienced identity euphoria with respect to gender with a huge contrast of prior dysphoria. And now- I think most people experience some level of identity euphoria, but if you've been told about gender euphoria in the context of transition, you're much more likely to experience this emotion and remember it and contextualize it and discuss it in the context of transition. I don't want to use the term 'placebo' though. I think it's easy to understate the long term effects or gloss over the structure of shared emotions by calling them 'placebo'. Being placebo doesn't make it less real, meaningful, powerful, or even categorizable- and if you think transition is bad- you should still be considering how the experiencing gender euphoria plays into the development of the identity.
I'm not certain, but I have a hunch that you're trying to get at the idea that- if it's a social/placebo phenomenon that makes it more arbitrary, it makes it weaker evidence of transness being an underlying condition, and- I think that's a fair assessment of the implications of my model.
But- well. You probably understand by now that I don't have as much skin in the game on the details as most TRAs. I just think of transition as another transhuman thing you can do. My ideological roots aren't concerned with the 'reality' of transness to begin with (I've heard things about white-matter grey-matter balance differences between trans and cis people for instance. but I didn't care, so I never verified the information, and if I had, I'd only want to talk about it for the sake of our edification on related matters... hmm. I suppose I should be looking for better diagnostic identifiers for predicting outcomes at this point. Maybe I should look into it...). So I don't think you can model yourself as seeing a typical TRA position right now.
More options
Context Copy link