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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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Freddie continually insists that criticising policies intended to be trans-inclusive is functionally the same as criticising trans people as a group. This is precisely the same kind of facile reasoning he’s so elegantly skewered in other political domains - the notion that opposition to this or that policy necessarily implies hatred of black people, or the mentally ill, or what have you.

I'm just glad he's right half the time. That's progress.

Anyway, yes, 'I have no problem with group X, I'm just really worried about (blood libel against group X), why can't we talk about that?' can be a frustrating thing for the few people who actually mean it. The problem is that 99% of the people who want to talk about the blood libel against group X don't mean that, they just want to destroy group X by any means necessary, and the antibodies society has formed against them on that basis are right and correct. It sucks if you get caught up in the inflammatory response unfairly, but, that's immune systems for you.

But, anyway: the reason that we don't talk about that stuff is because it happens once or twice across the whole nation, or it's already flatly illegal and there are already policies in place to correct it, or the other side already agrees with simple policies to address it, or it has nothing to do with the topic at hand in the first place.

If bathroom policies come up, and one side says trans women should use the women's room, and the other side says 'it should be illegal for cis men to go into the women's room', then congratulations! Both sides agree 100% on what should happen, and can start talking about optimal policies to accomplish it.

But the side that says they're worried about cis men entering women's bathrooms never sounds like they're 100% in agreement with the trans activists and ready to work together on policy proposals, funnily enough. They say they're just against something that teh trans activists are also against, but it sounds like they're trying to oppose trans women using women's restrooms at all. That's certainly what the laws they propose and pass say!

Same for the rest of it. If your point were to agree with trans-activist policies on what happens to trans women, and just wanted to shore up the edges to guard against bad cis actors, there'd be no disagreement. In reality, the people bringing up these issues are trying to curtail rights for trans women, that's why they're bothering to mention it whenever the topic of trans rights comes up. Society is not wrong to notice this coincidence, and group them on that side of the issue.

[And if you insist that Freddie needs a principled reason to treat trans discussion differently from HBD discussions along this axis, the answer is incentives. There's currently a ton of policy leverage, votes from republicans, and money for pundits in anti-trans rhetoric; there's currently very little money//power available for people making HBD claims. That's because society considers the latter a generally-closed issue, and the former is central to right-now-today culture war fights and political campaigns. So the incentive for a grifter to pretend 'I have no problem with trans rights, I just worry about males rapists' is many orders of magnitude stronger than for a grifter to pretend 'I have no problem with black people, I just worry about meritocracy being preserved' or w/e. Along with the orders of magnitude stronger incentive for anti-trans grifters making that argument dishonestly come the orders of magnitude more people actually doing it, which is why the prior probability on someone saying those things being a grifter you should ignore or condemn is also orders of magnitude higher.]

  • -18

'I have no problem with group X, I'm just really worried about (blood libel against group X), why can't we talk about that?'

If you're accusing me of blood libelling trans people, I'm curious to know what in my post constitutes a blood libel.

And if you insist that Freddie needs a principled reason to treat trans discussion differently from HBD discussions along this axis

Honestly, I think Freddie is almost exactly as evasive about HBD as he is about the trans issue.

But the side that says they're worried about cis men entering women's bathrooms never sounds like they're 100% in agreement with the trans activists and ready to work together on policy proposals, funnily enough. They say they're just against something that teh trans activists are also against, but it sounds like they're trying to oppose trans women using women's restrooms at all.

I've already explicitly stated (in the OP and in a comment replying to you) that I don't really have an issue with gender-neutral bathrooms. As I also pointed out in the OP, it's not the fault of gender-critical people that there's no reliable way to distinguish between trans women and cis male bad actors. Setting up a standard in which a trans woman is anyone who claims to be one and trans women are under no obligation to communicate that they identify as women by presenting themselves in a conspicuously feminine way is a recipe for disaster. No one should be labelled a bigot for the crime of being unable to read minds.