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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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For now, I would recommend against trying to make an allegory about transness, because the trans movement appears to me to be still far too much in philosophical flux for me to have any confidence that an acceptable, compassionate understanding arrived at today will still be considered so a few years from now. Because some pretty basic questions still seem to be actively controversial:

What is transness, exactly? How does it relate to gender dysphoria? What is gender, for that matter, and how is it related to sex? And I could go on, but that's probably enough already to ignite a firestorm of controversy, perhaps from participants who would all insist that there is no controversy.

Can you be confident that an answer you give today will not be seen as either the bigoted hooting of a backwards troglodyte, or a preposterous strawman that nobody serious ever really believed, by the time your game comes out? (Or, in fact, that won't be seen as both at once by equally legitimate-seeming camps today?) Cardinal Richelieu once said that he could find a capital crime in no more than six lines written by the most honest of men; on this topic I'd expect it's closer to six words. Progress on the trans movement, more than anything else today, can move at breakneck speeds, and if you don't want to risk it breaking your neck, I recommend standing clear until it has arrived at its destination.

If you are confident that you see a coherent philosophy undergirding the present state of the trans movement, I would like to hear what it is, though I personally don't think I'm likely to expect it to hold.