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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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I don't know how much of this was intentional on your part, but the major problem I see with your approach is how many unacknowledged assumptions you're glossing over. It all starts with what you're assuming [trait] to be. For example with race, we can boil it down to "difference in skin pigmentation" combined with "difference in societal hierarchy" and so this gives you relatively easy galaxy-brain template to play with if you were transporting this idea to another setting (e.g. "what if societal hierarchy was determined by another arbitrary aesthetic trait? Really makes you think"). To repeat what @WhiningCoil asks:

I mean, the problem is nobody knows what trans people are. Are they born that way? Is it a social contagion? Is it a fetish? A mental illness?

So yeah, what is trans? You're not explicit about it but you take it as a given that trans people are just people who happen to be somehow saddled with the wrong "birth gender" (I find this terminology extremely grating but I'll set that aside for now). You're implicitly accepting a mountain of implied assumptions here (people have a "birth gender", people can feel 'misaligned' with their "birth gender", people who feel this misalignment feel distress if they don't "fix" it, etc etc) and inevitably this will color how you approach the rest of your implementation.

On the other hand, if you believe that trans people don't exist, or rather if you believe that trans people are really just people who have fallen prey to a rigid expectation of gender stereotypes, well then that really changes things does it not?

I can think of a slew of examples of how I'd implement my understanding of transness into a fictional world. For example, let's say a world has a respected monk caste that relies on a moderately-difficult entrance exam that tests people's psychic defense abilities. As a way to designate membership within this caste, the monks get an ochre-colored glove (something something about the color used as a medium for psychic abilities). Here's Barbara, someone who has long been desperate to join the monk caste but continues to fail the entrance exam. After so many repeated failures, Barbara eventually just adopts the habit of wearing an ochre glove around town, with the goal of hoping that the people she encounters (erroneously) assume that she is part of the psychic monk caste.

There's a range of interesting dynamics that could occur which would perfectly be analogous to what we understand the contemporary trans experience to be. For example some people will see through Barbara's attempts and just humor her purely out of politeness, or maybe someone gets attacked by a mindflaying octupus and breathes a sigh of relief when they see Barbara's ochre glove only to then realize that her psychic defense abilities are actually worthless, etc etc.

You can't really start to implement these dynamics into a fictional world without a precise understanding of what it is you're implementing. And this is especially difficult with transness given the obfuscation combined with the myriad of competing theories (it's a gendered soul, it's boy brain/girl body, it's a hormone imbalance, it's just the patriarchy, etc etc)