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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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First of all, no, teaching ideas is not a hostile act. If it is then we would need to have a serious conversation about teaching religion, and everything else.

Some ideas are sufficiently terrible that teaching them to impressionable children is a hostile act. For a nonpartisan example, let’s imagine that schools were teaching time cube(it does, after all, have about the same evidence as modern gender theory, albeit more poorly written). This would be recognized as a hostile act worth getting upset about even though as far as I know the only person who ever ruined his life over believing in time cube was Dr Gene Ray, the cubic and wisest human himself.

Trans is like that, except true believers have a strong tendency to mutilate themselves instead of just declaring themselves the wisest human and naming their personal website ‘abovegod.com’.

Yes, if a primary school curriculum ever has a unit test on the contents of abovegod.org, you will indeed have a valid point.

Until then, I still think you're crying wolf.

Partially by equivocating between very banal and anodyne discussion of what some people believe about gender being social and sex being biological vs the most extreme weird views of niche online trans content providers, and partially by massively overstating how common and central even that banal anodyne discussion is in schools.

And, again: if schools were teaching timecube, that would certainly be very stupid and something we'd want to fix. But it wouldn't be the same type of aggressive and dangerous action as creating a situation where your expected outcome is for a child to be abused by their parents. Violence is worse than speech even if the speech is bad.