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I gave several examples of people wanting to strip long-standing rights, which are probably some of the first examples people would think of when you mention "t

• yanderekko 5y ago
  >I gave several examples of people wanting to strip long-standing rights I don't think you did. You threw out terms like "sports bans" but I don't think trans individuals being able to compete based on gender identity is a "long-standing right". If you're referring to other stuff you'll have to be more specific. >Gender dysphoria is a pretty painful mental illness that often leads to suicide, so forbidding a transgender girl from getting treatment and forcing her to go to the boys' room does seem both dehumanizing and dangerous to her life. Many policy issues will have some sort of effects on overall mortality. But I think it's pretty important in functional democracies that you should be able to have policy disagreements where these sorts of stakes are present without believing that the people taking the opposite stance are sadists or murderers instead of individuals who come to these debates with somewhat-different priors of empirical reality and somewhat-different but not fundamentally-abhorrent values. Trans issues seem to lack this normal presumption, however.
  • chc 5y ago
    > I don't think you did. You threw out terms like "sports bans" but I don't think trans individuals being able to compete based on gender identity is a "long-standing right". If these bans had already been in place, they wouldn't have needed to pass them. Trans people have been using the appropriate bathroom for their gender for ages, but now that transphobia is on the rise, they're actually being prevented from doing so. Trans people have been allowed to compete in the Olympics for longer than many Olympians have been alive, but now than a trans woman has actually made it in, for the first time ever, suddenly it's a debate. Some people have always preferred inclusive language, but now that people are on the lookout for "gender ideology," there's a decent chance that using it in passing will get you 10 thinkpieces and a JK Rowling tweetstorm about whether the phrase "menstruating people" erases women. > Many policy issues will have some sort of effects on overall mortality. But I think it's pretty important in functional democracies that you should be able to have policy disagreements where these sorts of stakes are present without believing that the people taking the opposite stance are sadists or murderers instead of individuals who come to these debates with somewhat-different priors of empirical reality and somewhat-different but not fundamentally-abhorrent values. Trans issues seem to lack this normal presumption, however. I don't completely disagree, but I think this is not so much about trans issues, and more an unfortunate product of the way bigotry works in our age. You don't have the KKK out burning crosses in front of people's houses anymore, instead you have people who are "race realists" and are just "worried about preserving culture." Nobody — not even virulent transphobes who believe all trans women are pedophiles — identifies as a transphobe, they are "gender critical feminists" who are "worried about preserving women's sex-based rights" or "worried about the children." Bigots have realized that bigotry isn't cool anymore, so they've learned to dress it up as moderate concern-trolling. So it's harder to tell who's speaking in good faith, especially since some actual moderates who haven't thought deeply on issues will parrot the bad-faith actors' talking points.
    • livueta 5y ago
      Regarding your last point, what do you think the practical implications of this are for those who seek social change? While there are plenty of obvious examples of what you're talking about, I worry that it's dangerously psychologically attractive to dismiss any and all criticism as bad-faith bigotry, at the expense of potentially convincing those actual moderates. That's especially true if the topic is personally sensitive and/or it's the nth repetition of a particular talking point. In a moral sense an explanation might not be owed, but that often seems like ceding a pragmatic opportunity to push for change. It feels like there's a narrative metagame where there's a risk that taking concern trolling too seriously is a vector for being baited into savaging increasingly innocuous questions from actual moderates. And since people seem, generally speaking, to not like being told to sit down and shut up even in the service of causes they could otherwise be brought to support, I worry that could broadly harm public sentiment towards movements that go too hard into these kinds of tactics.