Sadly I think you're right. People who have an intuitive, intense opposition reaction to this idea probably think anyone who advocates it are literally Jurassic Park style insane evil villains who want to genetically destroy the planet and make money doing it. Or something. And it's just not true, but changing anyone's mind about that is probably impossible.

I think that people who automatically frame every disagreement into a narrative of “two extremist parties making false dichotomies out of every topic” are profoundly confused. Specifically in issues that are actionable (as most issues are, as this one is), there is a true dichotomy with relevance to action: you either do something, or you don’t. There is simply no middle ground.

What’s so extreme about disagreeing with releasing genetically modified organisms into the wild? Even if a person believed that some combination of both options should be done instead, that person would still, by the end of the day, decide to disagree with releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in the wild as it is currently being done precisely because it is not how they believe it should be done. The extremists-fighting-over-false-dichotomies narrative is honestly so tired and lazy, IMO.

>you either do something, or you don’t. There is simply no middle ground.

Only in the narrowest sense.

Another valid response is "you can't do this as-is, but if you make changes X, Y and Z then you can." Or "do more experiments with captive populations first." Or "do this in an area where it's less likely to cause unexpected side effects (eg an unpopulated island somewhere)" Or "use a different set of genes or tweaks"

It's pretty rare that the _only_ possible choices are to do this _one exact thing_, or do nothing at all.

This is all a huge leap from what I said, which is that given action A, you can only either do it or not do it. That does not mean doing nothing at all and not thinking of other options, and that is why framing the disagreement as nothing more than binary thinking is shallow and lazy and wrong. People may ultimately be divided between for and against, but people who are against one thing may be for some other solution to the problem.

You may think it’s narrow, but whenever you can decide between yes or no on an action all arguments considered, that could just mean that the action itself is clear and specific, as in this case.