ChemicalRascal

It really doesn’t have to be a “fact of life”, and it isn’t in many places, such as Australia and England – nations with very similar degrees of economic prosperity, and very similar cultures, to the USA.

Point three seems entirely noncredible to me. They were doing a thunder-run, by all appearances. That doesn’t just happen. You don’t accidentally cross the Rubicon, you don’t just happen to go “whoopsie, we’re in the Moscow Oblast, aren’t we goofy goobers!”.

And then the assertion: “However, I want to emphasize that image has always been a secondary concern for Putin.” Isn’t that just… objectively false? Image has always been huge for Putin. He presents himself as a strongman, a man able to lie to your face, but is so powerful that you, the Russian citizen, can do nothing about it.

I think Beau of the Fifth Column’s hot take is more likely – Wagner wanted out of the war for a host of reasons, they especially didn’t want to be taken control of by the MoD and essentially dissolved into the state apparatus. So Prigozhin decided to gun for Moscow in order to be able to force Putin’s hand and let Wagner return to Africa, doing the PMC stuff that Wagner has been running around doing for years. This has probably been something he’s been trying to negotiate for a year or so, but it all just came to a head with Bahkmut and the new contracts MoD was trying to push.

If the answer is “I am cis” or “I am trans”, what is the question?

The question would, to be blunt, be “are you cis or trans?”, because “cis” and “trans” are just shorthand for “cisgender” and “transgender”.

It’s a question of very limited scope – even if you were to reword it – because in modern society, the exact detail of if someone is cis or trans isn’t really practically important. If someone is a man, say, society cares a lot more about them being a man rather than being a cisgender man or a transgender man. (I’d say the same about women, but there’s obviously a subset of society that is in the process of demonising trans women, so…)

I think the core issue you’ve found is that cis/trans-ness is something that only makes sense in the context of something else, the gender identity of the person in question.

The submersible that imploded near the Titanic wreck.