Moreover, even if being gay or trans is just the result of cultural influence doesn't mean we should respect it any less. That said, it's worth asking the question isn't it?
People had precisely this same concern about gay people over the past few decades. And the same concern about things like heavy metal music.
When your argument rhymes so well with these obviously broken prior arguments, it is worth re-evaluating.
https://medium.com/@QSE/when-you-say-i-would-never-date-a-tr...
Others would say they're not saying that, but that your preference is influenced by transphobic culture:
https://www.curvemag.com/blog/transgender/the-often-misunder...
I'm sure others would be fine with it.
On the other hand, I'd like to know what the OP, shtps, would think if they dated a transwoman without knowing she was trans and later found out about it. People have committed violent crimes because they didn't know, or at least claimed they didn't know as a defense.
So there is something there that needs clearing up. If you're attracted to someone and then later find something about them and decide you're not attracted to them after all, that's not the fault of the person you initially found atttractive. Agreed?
It's not about 'who's at fault' really. It will sooner or later come up and it is better sooner than later for both parties. If I'm dating a woman and she doesn't mention that she already has children, which is a big deal for me, then we're both just wasting our times because that's something I can't compromise on.
I don't know why this even needs to be stated, but violence is not an option in either of these cases.
It needs to be stated that violence is not an option because many times violence has been used against trans women and the defense of the perpetrator was "I didn't know she was trans".
I guess nowadays people also informally call "having casual sex" dating. I'm also not sexually attracted to trans women if that's what you're getting at. We would not even be able to have sex.
Ok, we're on the same page regarding the violence.
I guess the alternative would be that you have to be willing to have sex with everybody of your preferred sex? Are there people who actually think this?
Sure, but my preference for being solely with brunettes is not as strong as my preference for being solely with straight people, so the deception is not equal in its merited response. Perhaps this is bigoted, but I’m sincerely interested in your conviction.
Feel free to exclude based on physical criteria common in trans people, be it from masculine features, to larger frames to a set of genitals you're not attracted to, but "trans people" as category is way to broad. Because they can functionally be cis women. Unless you have a breeding fetish I guess.
Insisting on a separate category feels like people are holding on to bioessentialist feeling that trans women must be men, which would make a cis man gay. Pair that with toxic masculinity and you have one of the reasons for violence particularly against trans women.
(I have no personal stake at this, like many trans people I mostly date other trans people, less complicated and your partner has less of a hard time relating to you)
Best of luck!
It's probably still the right thing to do, purely because the trans panic defense is still a thing and it would be unsafe, but I see no moral obligation here.
However if a person driving a Ferrari wearing a 5k suit and a 50k watch asks someone on a date, that person may be under the impression that they are going on a date with a rich person and that they will not be going to McDonald's.
I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with taking your date to McDonald's. Plenty of people love McDonald's. But it is not the same thing and that date may not go well.
If you're saying it to prove a point I mean yeah people see through that
I have to keep these opinions quiet now because of the negative social backlash I’ve gotten.
I can’t believe we live in times where we have people in the lgbt community who criticize homosexual men as being “genital fetishists” for being attracted to only men of the same sex.
Now what? Are trans people not allowed to have different opinions and ideas about anything? As a gay man, would you say that all gay men see everything in the same way? For example, if I ask 100 gay men their opinion on gay marriage, will I get 100 identical answers, or...?
What I'm trying to say is, whenever someone says something stupid to you, remember that they are just one person expressing one opinion and that this opinion may well change as time goes by. Don't assume that all of society, or all of one particular segment of society, has the exact same, or even similar, view.
Also to be blunt, I doubt this "negative social backlash" you've gotten is as bad as that, or even that it's the kind of backlash you get outside of Twitter. But maybe I'm old. I transitioned in the 90's when most transwomen I knew identified as gay men. Try that one for a woke debate, some day. Anyway we didn't have Twitter back then so you wouldn't be called a "genital fetishist" to your face for not liking vag else most transwomen would have been decried as "genital fetishists". Eeew, fish and all that.
My point is I think that people will come up with all sorts of dumb ways of thinking when something becomes an "issue". We're still at the point in the curve, with trans issues, where they are "issues" whereas being gay has more or less been assimilated in mainstream culture (and that's part of why gay men are being attacked by "woke" folk). Wait it out. In a few years people will be reading all those woke tweets and blogs and tumblrs and laughing, mostly good-heartedly.
And why does there need to be a "backlash" even? Do we absolutely need to have a big old culture war everytime somebody says something stupid?
It's just a really shitty thing to do, and it's not even accurate. Attraction models do not solely work based on genitals, there's a lot of other characteristics that go into that.
But you don't know how his argument with his friends went, so it's a little arrogant to tell him "they were probably mad at you because you said X".
It is also wrong to call a lesbian transphobic because she finds testicles unattractive and vaginas attractive. She is entitled to be honest about her sexuality.
Nobody says you're not allowed to have genital preferences. Chromosome preferences (with everything else equal) however seem legitimately transphobic to me. They're more a rejection of trans people than stemming from a preference in attraction.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It’s becoming more and more mainstream, and there’s no party to turn to in order to help halt this nonsense.
Politics is the process of distributing power, and left wing politics aims to distribute power more widely, whereas right wing politics aims to concentrate it.
I never stated that (you did). I merely pointed out the fact that humans are largely hypocrites and duplicitous by nature. ALL interactions between humans is underpinned by power.
In the past, the power grab was explicit, nowadays said power is sought after behind the veneer of "civility" and "niceness".
It is basic human nature that I'm criticising. The left are just as bad as the right - but at least, with the right - you can see them coming, because they are mostly explicit (at least relative to the left).
The left are just as power hungry as the right, but are very well versed in this "we are nice, caring people" act - this is why I (a seeker of the truth - and nothing but the truth), am enjoying their dirty inner workings coming to light.
> The left ... was never about equality and justice, it was always ... being about POWER
It feels more than a little reductive to attribute this behaviour to "the left" as a whole, when in fact it is a very small number of people. Perhaps you feel it is appropriate in your own context, but again this is a (common) presentation that purports to dismiss an entire "wing" of political thought, but actually just presents crude stereotypes.
Finally, I think the idea that the right present their attempts at power in a more naked fashion just isn't borne out by the evidence. Right wing policies are frequently presented as being dictated by either reason or common sense (often depending on the audience), and those of their opponents dismissed as unrealistic. This is the same kind of veneer you decry on the left, just a different colour - one that some find more appealing.
You're conflating two very different things here: "I would not do this", and "If someone does this they're not really gay".
It feels like a motte-and-bailey fallacy to me.
I could understand if you'd find some to most trans women not attractive, but a categorical exclusion seems transphobic to me.
There are trans women where you really can not tell, even if you're in an intimate relationship. At that point it moves from being a genuine preference to bigotry.
But I can see what you're actually asking: Is anyone going to yell at you because you're not dating them. The answer is no.
Unless you real question was not a question, but more of an implication that something that literally never happens must happen on a grand scale. Damn the woke mob forcing me to fuck trannies!
As a trans person I do not believe in a firm sex/gender distinction. The evidence clearly suggests gender identity (unlike race) has a major biological component.
Case studies like David Reimer are pretty definitive, in my opinion.
So, other, actual evidence, please? A citation in a journal would do. E.g. Yu & Yu 2017 "Gender identity has a biological component" or something of the sort. Something we can accept is "evidence" in a mainstream, standard sense, not in the sense given to "evidence" by the internet, like "I know of something that agrees with my personal beliefs so it's evidence that I'm right".
Not being attracted to this or that person is perfectly natural. Reminder: a lot of trans people "pass" perfectly.
"ostracized by the woke community" in another strawman.
Perhaps there's something else going on?
(I am sure that trans people far more often have far worse experiences still)
I've heard stories, both online and from my sisters (who live in a pretty woke neighborhood and have a pretty woke circle of friends) about kids and teens who were "criticized" for being "too gender conforming" by "concerned" parents and friends alike. And stories about teens and grownups being ostracized and called names for politely rejecting trans or same sex people flirtations[1].
While I don't think these anecdotes are outright bullying, of course, it shows a certain direction, and it shows certain parental and peer group pressures building up in certain cohorts of society. All this can cause a certain amount of trauma and confusion[0], especially in kids and teens who haven't had a chance to explore and form their personality and identity on their own to a sufficient degree yet, when e.g. you as a kid get a sense that your parents are unhappy about you or when friends and peers call or at least insinuate you are "a bit of a" transphobe or homophobe because your brain is interested in the opposite sex and opposite sex genitalia.
[0] I am NOT saying all trans people are just confused. But I do think that some kids and younger teens are in fact just confused. Well, all kids and teens are constantly confused about everything, that's part of growing up, which is to a great part trial and error and trying to make sense of things and experiences. But this kind of confusion I am talking about relates to the old stories of "My parents wanted a boy and only got me, a girl, so I tried to be as much a boy as I could growing up trying to please them", but with a new slant to it, that might possibly involve hormone therapy at worst.
[1] One more slightly related anecdote, I am directly biased here: When I was like 17 or 18 (still in school, so, long ago), I was at a party and had a guy hit on me. I am a guy myself, but straight. Fine no worries, I told him nicely I am not interested. He (admittedly quite drunk) would then follow me around for some time, trying to convince me with zingers like "only a man knows how to suck another man's cock to perfection, I can show you, follow me!". The following days people would ask me why I "hate gays". What happened after that guy struck out with me is that he went around telling people I am a "gay hater". It took quite some effort to explain myself to people that I in fact do not hate gays and am not "grossed out" by gays, etc, just do not find them to be sexually attractive partners for me personally. I am sure some of my peers still thought I am a rampant homophobe afterwards. The more you defend yourself, the more guilty you look and all that. I am convinced this affected some of my friendships negatively and certainly messed with my mind[2]. I dread to imagine what it's like growing up now in some hyper-woke community, socialized by shit storms and parents and teachers who think math is racist and it's OK to punch "nazis".
[2] One openly bisexual girl from my grade remarked to me "Now you got a glimpse at what it is like for me a lot of the time". True that, only a glimpse, but bad enough for me already.
They have lives, responsibilities and dependants. Unlike children they can’t change their identities on a whim without repercussions, or negative impacts on people they care about.
I imagine that many people would rather ignore their “true” identity, than risk losing a spouse they care about, or disrupting their children’s futures.
Who said that? It's probably becoming less of an issue, but it's definitely not disappeared.
There's also the little detail that people tend to cluster based on interests and personality traits in the first place, so I could see many ending up in the same circles even if none of them were out yet.
A lot of the things they described had a "wait that's a symptom??" reaction. I have since suggested to a couple of friends to get checked for ADHD in a similar manner if they seem like they might be struggling with it. Worst case they're now in the mental healthcare system and have access to a therapist who can figure out what they're struggling with
When you find a good place you tell your mates about it
• People with shared experiences often cluster together in friend groups. (There are autistic friend groups, yet you'd get laughed out of the village for saying “Sally caught autism off her friends”.)
• People tend to come out around people it's safe to come out around.
• Seeing your friends coming out as [whatever] might make you properly consider whether you might also like guys, or Minecraft, or not being a woman.
And they're the same effects in anyone with a socially-frowned-upon interest. Think of the tabletop-RPG-playing “nerds” of yore.
Broad acknowledgement (though there remains some sharp and often violent denial, so while better than the best the current situation isn’t at the limit of this) that gender identity can differ from socially ascribed gender and that such a difference is cause for realigning socially ascribed gender to gender identity means that people whose gender identity differs from their socially ascribed gender both are likely to have:
(1) a framework for understanding the source of their discomfort that would not exist absent the degree of acceptance, and
(2) a license to identify their understanding of the source of their discomfort to others that woud not exist without the degree of acceptance, and
(3) a hope of relief that would not exist without the social norm of realigning ascribed gender to match gender identity.
Naturally, this means that more people aren’t just going to keep quiet and attempt to fit into the box society has assigned them at whatever pain it takes, as would previously have been the case because there was no visible alternative.
> but it was also a time when society encouraged the view of everyone being unique and mysterious and don't put labels on things.
I'm glad, for your sake, that you felt like this about society, but I can assure you that at no time that any living person grew up was it the case; and, particularly, the labels put on those who failed to outwardly conform to gender norms tended to be quite harsh.
> I appreciate it’s a bit of a stretch but in some ways it does feel now in society there is a growing pressure to box people’s identities in more.
That’s, literally, the opposite of the case.
Wondering what started the labeling too though, I’ve also been teached the value of individualism and fended off any label applied to me.. maybe it’s about realizing that most people out there want to apply labels, so a response to their rigid labels is coming up with unlimited new labels.
Don't downplay the influence of interracial mixing in the Americas, where I will perhaps incorrectly assume you live. Large amounts of body hair are not a universal male trait. Europeans and Mediterraneans are much hairier than Native Americans. If your ancestors were mostly on one side of that, then sure, they were hairier. Many of my more distant ancestors had no body hair at all.
You may notice a tradeoff here, as the same sensitivity to DHT in your hair follicles that causes facial hair to proliferate also causes male pattern baldness, and Europeans go bald much more often.
You're effectively presenting a transgender person as a second class person, or a mistake.
You're also aligning the ability to grow a beard with being a 1st class citizen.
I'm in my 50's, and can remember a time when there wasn't this awareness of men's bodies. While it was admirable to be fit, and women certainly appreciated muscles and a lack of a beer gut, it wasn't seen as that important. Men could be flabby and still seen as physically attractive.
Moobs are normal. Not being able to grow a thick beard is normal. Body hair, or any hair, or not, is normal (I could count the number of hairs on my chest in my 20's and never once considered this to be unusual or in any way affecting my masculinity). I have friends who were balding in their mid-20's and that was normal.
The difference between 30 years ago and now is not in men's bodies. It's in our attitudes to men's bodies.
Men (and women, as always) are being taught to hate our bodies because businesses can profit from that emotion. We are being told that no-one will love us unless we're taller, stronger, hairier. We're being fed images of "perfect" men as aspirational targets that we should aspire to match (and to get there we need to buy a bunch of products, obviously).
We need to learn that all bodies are different, and all are acceptable. It's normal to have flabby bits. If you have to hate something, don't hate your body, hate the people telling you that your body is not good enough.
Just watch one of those old “Berlin in the 1920s” or “NYC in the 1970s” videos. You’ll quickly notice the almost complete lack of overweight people.
I have never had my testosterone checked. I knew one guy who had has checked, and it was by a female doctor who put him on pills.
I've always wondered where that testosterone level database is?
Maybe they test in the military? I don't know, but would like to know.
I just found a study, but didn't dig into it:
"Travison and his team analyzed data from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a long-term investigation of aging in about 1,700 Boston-area men. Data from the men were collected for three time intervals: 1987-1989, 1995-1997, and 2002-2004."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17436...
People 50-70 years ago on average lived a very different life style in the US. The fear was that people weren’t getting enough food in the United States and the modern food industry was born and kind of over corrected and now obesity is the problem we are trying to solve.
On top of that I am shocked by how little the average American exercises, and I just don’t mean going to the gym and running, I mean basic, walking and doing something, anything physical.
marcus_holmes correctly points out that in some cultures men are under more pressure to fit into a gender stereotype around being really muscular.
(And it's well known that women receive even more pressure to be slim and so on)
This is true regardless of the worsening food quality and availability making people fat. Or environmental factors reducing sperm count and so on.
Looking at the time frame, I don’t think the other things you mention fit either. They just haven’t changed that much since the 70s. And they don’t explain wild and lab animals also being fatter now.
Being fat in the 80s is being skinny today. It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.
Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.
But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.
Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.
No, its not.
> It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.
The distribution of body types in film (in the 1980s and otherwise) represents the fashions of the motion picture industry, not (except coincidentally) broader society. The relation of that fashion to broader society is very much not consistent.
> Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.
Being an actual person from the 1980s (70s, in fact) I can say with some confidence that this is not true.
And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.” Millions of video clips are available right now online.
They’ve increased to “a very large minority, even in the fattest state”.
What used to be “fat” has not become “thin”, its just “fat" has become more common.
> And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.”
Yes, and they’ll show that overweight and obese people are greater proportions of the total. That I didn’t argue against.
The ridiculous hyperbole is what I took issue with.
>>Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.
>>But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.
Dear god you can at least read the part of the post where I already answered that point.
Testosterone levels have been decreasing for decades, in significant amounts. https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-t...
Interestingly, the Forbes article you're referencing is partially based on this paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26126... which confirms a link between advertising and voluntary testosterone testing (entirely supporting my point). Men are being targeted by advertising that encourages them to think about their bodies differently.
Instead of completely ignoring their point and just telling them to accept themselves as they are, why should we not also be looking at our environment and asking if it is impacting us?
Do you by chance sit around at a PC all day and get less exercise than you really should? I'm not sure I'd pin this on a biology thing just yet, there's so many things that could cause that
Losing weight and getting exercise gave me all sorts of "manly" traits. Turns out sitting around letting your muscles go to goo can mess with your systems a bunch. I have to shave too often now if anything haha
However if we wanted to turn this into a hypothesis our first stumble is that not all gender dysphoric people are overweight, so it's probably not that
Like all the “why are people gay‽”-type nonsense, I also think it's not that – but people are complicated. There is not going to be a single factor for anything, so I don't think that's a valid reason to discard the hypothesis. “There is no real correlation in the first place” would be.
Who said this?
I do four hard weight focused workouts per week of 1.5h each so 6h of exercise. I probably need to address diet, but even so, lots of fresh home cooked meals in there. Maybe need to do more cardio but that tends to set off my SVT. Thanks for asking.
It came up as a thought because you mentioned manboobs, which I have personal experience with hence the rest of my comment, but aside from that my words are my own
How is this true?
How will these men mean there are more transgender people in the world?
Also gender is independent of sexual apparatus.
What exactly do you think being transgender means?
If you've never been fit enough to do something like a muscle up then you have no idea what having testosterone feels like.
I'm saying this as a former blob who got fit during covid by accident. You are your body and your body happens to have a mind, not the other way around.
You see the same thing with people who attempt suicide. People who attempt suicide have better life outcomes in general because they are given more help. Notably suicide is infectious and can trigger copycats.
This doesn't mean I think transexualism is fake -- there's a really interesting nature article where they use ML to identify the sex of brains separate from the body's apparent sex. But there definitely are incentives to ID as trans.
I'm expecting a pretty harsh backlash against all this gender politics at some point. I'm not sure when or how it will manifest, but even some of my LGB friends privately tell me they think it's gone too far. For the most part, though, they are too afraid to say anything in public because they don't want to get attacked and possibly lose their jobs over it. It's clear that the gender radicals have wielded online bully tactics to gain full control over the range of acceptable discourse.
LGBT are often portrayed as some kind of monolithic entity in mainstream media, but the reality is that there's a lot of ideological tension in the mix between the cis and trans people. The only place I see these tensions spilling into the open is in the UK, where the LGB Alliance and Stonewall organizations are at odds. Wondering when the same will happen in the US.
Let me lay out the tension for those who may not be familiar. On the one side you have LGB people who mostly say their sexuality is immutable and based on attraction to specific sexes. "Baby, I was born this way" in the words of Lady Gaga. As an example, maybe you're a lesbian which means a woman who is attracted to other women; for most of history this was understood to mean a person of the female sex attracted to another person of the female sex. Meanwhile you have trans activists trying to stretch the meaning of words like "man" and "woman" to the point that they don't really mean anything anymore. Anybody can be a woman if that's how they identify today, which has the effect of broadening what it means to be a lesbian in a way that some lesbians may not agree with. The status quo today is that if you're a lesbian and not willing to include the "female penis" in your sexual orientation, you're at risk of being called a TERF/transphobe. This seems like an irreconcilable difference of views.
Despite what you might think if you've read this far, I do not hate trans people. I have sympathy for them and whatever lack of self-acceptance has led them into their current path. I make an effort to use preferred pronouns and be respectful to those I work with. But I'm also extremely concerned about what the collateral damage to LGB people will be when Republicans capitalize on woke extremism at the ballot box.
For what it's worth, i think the gender fight in the media is not worth it for anybody. I dont see an end anytime soon, and i'd rather have gay marriage settle, add counseling in schools for kids who need it, and then maybe the LGBTQ+ community can start fighting this gender fight. Transversal fights are surely worth it (as Fred Hampton and the BPP proved), but i think this one we might want to avoid until we fix the rest.
Also, I'm hearing more and more what It would be conservative opinions from the gay people I have more trust with. Which is quite unexpected for me.
You can only say you have a real gay friend when they show you their Nazi Furry dungeon and start talking about degenerates.
The number of homofascists in the closet is hilariously large.
Have you considered that they may have been talking about it privately, and decided to come out at the same time to reduce the risk of being singled out for it? I don't see how the timing implies a "bandwagon". It seems obvious that doing that together is less scary than alone.
I remember ~20 years ago, when I knew nothing of being trans-gender as a concept, and I bearly heard of some people being trans-sexuals.
These days I am fairly on board with the concept of gender as being a role in society you choose to play, that is often informed by your sex, but doesn't have to.
There are a lot of people who don’t feel strongly gendered, I’m one of them, and I suspect you are too from that sentence. Seeing gender as a social role makes sense to us.
However, there are other people who do feel strongly gendered, and for them gender isn’t just a social role but part of their core identity. I suspect at least half of cis folks and nearly all trans folks fit into that group.
What has changed recently is that many more trans women transition later in life, after having lived for many decades as men, having married and had children and careers well outside sex work etc. Perhaps because of a more general shift of ideas about gender and sexuality (gay men are nowadays not considered effeminate or feminine just because they fancy men) most transwomen in western countries were generally of this later kind.
Then the wheel shifted again. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the number of people transitioning later in life and in a context that had nothing to do with underage sex and sex work, helped convince society that transition does not have to mean sex work (although in most of the world, it still does, by and large, so what I say applies to more western societies) and that gave more space to younger trans women and also young trans men to express their identity without fearing that a life of humiliation and inevitable sex work awaited them.
In my part of the world, when I was transitioning in the late 90's a trans woman who was not into sex work was something unheard of and indeed I had to immigrate to be able to do anything with my life. As to concerns about giving young children puberty blockers etc, I would have to say that this is much better than 13 year olds taking cross-sex hormones without medical supervision and then going to the red light district to display their budding breasts with pride.
I hope all this doesn't come across as "wokeness". My concern about other trans women has always been the limited opportunities they've had in life, in my part of the world, and the squalid, degrading and dangerous conditions in which they had to survive as a result (google a bit about the transgendered community in Istanbul if you have strong nerves). I tend to think of all the outrage about identity issues on Twitter as a pleasant change of tone from the grim darkness that was before.
A link to that book:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo362138...
The guy has a lot of documentation for where this all came from out of nowhere. I bought the book and it's fascinating how much documentation the guy has on how the whole thing got astroturfed in no time. I don't know how old you are, but before the early 2000s, the only place that I ever encountered "transexuals" was in San Francisco sex clubs. Then all of a sudden, in the span of less than 10 years they're everywhere. How the heck did that all happen? Reading through his research is a really interesting deep dive into how to bootstrap a radical cultural change from scratch.
Edit for context since OP has edited his comment without acknowledging it: Where it now says ""transsexuals"" it said "trannies" before.
No one ever starts a sentence with "The Jews control" and ends it with "the home owners association on our block and have done a phenomenal job managing it."
No one ever says "The Japs" followed by "have really contributed to our culture in the form of anime".
No one ever says "that n***" followed by "is an inspiration to us all and we are proud to have him in our community."
No one ever uses the word "tranny" followed by something well thought out and respectful of transexual people.
None of these words/phrases have an offensive dictionary meaning, but they are all rightfully associated with offensive speech.
It's usually the first if referring to familiar people and the second if referring to strangers. Even exactly the same word can cut both ways. "Dear" is affectionate towards family members, calling a coworker "dear" is condescending.
Also, as other posters have said, rule-based logic can only get you so far. It's all in the context.
A gay man might jokingly call himself a poof (or one of his straight close friends might in the same vein based on a mutual understanding), but again, you don't use such words in a polite, neutral setting without coming across as a very nasty person.
Some women are trying to reappropriate the word 'slut' from its negative connotations (cf. The Ethical Slut, Easton and Hardy, 2009) and some use it proudly, but again, anyone calling any woman who has an active sex live with more than one lover a slut will be met with derision.
This is no different.
The way I remember the pre-2000s there was definitely mention of trans people in popular culture. The big difference is being trans was being treated as the punchline, or otherwise derogatory. (The first example that comes to mind is Tone-Lōc's 'Funky Cold Medina', and also that Aerosmith song https://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/desmond-child)
Has everyone forgotten famous hacker Sophie Wilson?
Almost every trans person will tell you they were in denial for years. If that period shortens, it will manifest like this.
See also: better diagnosis of autism.
Imagine you're afraid to do something. Someone else does it. Nothing too bad happens. Wouldn't it encourage you?
They grow up and when financially independent go through surgeries, hormone therapy etc. and come out as LGBTQ.
Should this be questionable?
If yes then, How do the majority of kids who are interested in programming/computers become software engineers? should be too.
Not "could" but "is".
That's how media works, if all media agree to say something wrong during some period of time, that will become true. (Example : Aztrazeneca vaccines, masks, ...). And most media belongs to billionaires. The only thing is that they don't belong to the same billionaires and thus don't most of the time push in the same direction which creates some diversity
I'm not saying this is the case here, but media and propaganda are very close things
I think you've got cause and effect mixed up here.
This is similar to what happened with the 2020 protests around George Floyd. Many people thought, and many still do, that unarmed black men were being hunted by police. Surely hundreds or even thousands a year were being murdered by the police, yet according to the WaPo database of police shootings only 13 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Why do people believe in the myth of endemic police killings? Because the media continues to push that narrative.
Read this USAToday “fact-check” trying to debunk the 13 unarmed black men statistic by saying things like the WaPo database is incomplete and may not show the whole picture, or conflating the number of unarmed black men shot with the percentage of total black men shot, etc. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fac...
On second thoughts, I guess you're right: it doesn't make sense to use the quantifier "only 13" without knowing all the other numbers. This might be trivializing the matter.
Your source's references include "How The Jews Of Weimar Germany Ensured The Rise Of National Socialism" and "Plandemic Documentary: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19".
The links posted are from http://radiochristianity.com.
They are explicitly holocaust deniers. http://radiochristianity.com/holocaust-deprogramming-course/
The Plandemic "documentary" nonsense alleges that there is a decades-long conspiracy involving Big Pharma, the CDC, Google, climate scientists, John Oliver, and Bill Gates to cause the pandemic in order to benefit from the vaccines. They go on to make other specific allegations. Here's a sample.
1. That Italy's COVID-19 epidemic is linked to influenza vaccines and the presence of coronaviruses in dogs.
2. That SARS-CoV-2 was created "between the North Carolina laboratories, Fort Detrick, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the Wuhan laboratory.
3. That flu vaccines increase the chance of contracting COVID-19 by 36%.
4. That despite the goal of preventing coronaviruses, flu vaccines contain coronaviruses.
5. That "Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus. You're getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions."
And more.
Are you conditioned to having a kneejerk reaction when people call out bullshit? Automatically posting a dismissive comment without bothering to read the provided sources sounds like a kneejerk reaction to me.
The kids aren't being transed. I know there are several mostly British authors having extremely loud voices spreading FUD about "rapid onset gender dysphoria" but that's not even a thing. It's based on a paper that used answers from parents about trans kids. Follow-up research has demonstrated that to the kids it was anything but rapid. You might as well invent a phenomenon of "rapid onset body size" to explain why grandparents will insist "how can you already be so big, it feels like you were a tiny baby only such a short while ago".
You're overthinking this, but to ease your mind: people aren't undergoing HRT and surgery because all the cool kids are doing it. They might experiment with neopronouns and gender identity labels for a bit but there's literally no demonstrable harm in that.
Also if you think identity politics is a new thing: US politicians literally put God on the dollar bills to appeal to Christian conservatives (prior to that the national motto was always "E pluribus unum", not "In God we trust"). We just don't tend to think of things as identity politics when we take the identity for granted.
EDIT: That you see more trans people is a good thing actually. Visibility is the result of social acceptance. And social acceptance is the biggest contributor to reducing suicidality and improving quality of life. Trans people haven't been killing themselves because they're trans, they've been killing themselves because everyone kept telling them they're not. You can't trans a kid any more than you can make them gay.
That’s not the proper way to treat depression. No amount of social acceptance will lower the suicide rates of people with mis/untreated depression.
Also the proper way to treat depression is to identify the underlying cause, which can be simply rooted in brain chemistry but can also be environmental.
If you're suicidal because your family and social circles reject you for who you are and society in general treats you unfavorably and you are constantly harassed or fetishized by strangers, the problem isn't your brain chemistry.
The question isn't whether or not to treat gender dysphoria as a mental disorder (though in part, of course that is a question too, though one that seems to have been settled) but whether social rejection and harassment are harmful or helpful for trans people. And I'm saying evidence shows it's incredibly harmful and drastically increases suicidality and decreases quality of life (because otherwise social acceptance wouldn't measurably have the opposite effect).
If your concern is health (and mental health) outcomes, not making sure people stick to the gender and presentation they grew up with, the best course of action for trans people seems to be to accept them for who they say they are and make them feel welcome and valid.
There are of course other arguments against accepting trans people but those can be disproven separately and there's no reason to shift the goal posts if we're just talking about suicidality and quality of life.
PS: Of course trans people can also be depressed independently of their transness and in that case they will need to be treated for depression as well. But the specific suicidality rate that is talked about with regard to trans people seems to be evidently linked to their social acceptance, which tracks with other groups. Alan Turing was literally driven to suicide because he was sentenced to chemical castration for not being able to deny being gay.
No, there hasn't. You've been lied to.
There was no treatment for trans children (in the UK). Then a clinic opened up. We went from zero trans boys to some trans boys.
Anti trans campaigners misuse percentages to show an "alarming" rise, when in fact we've simply gone from "none" to "some".
You should consider why you feel comfortable pushing something that's obviously bollocks, just because it supports your anti-trans activism.
This is an interesting case [2]. The concept of ROGD was introduced in an article in a scientific journal [1], by an assistant professor in Brown University. Then there was a strong reaction from people from outside the scientific community (blogosphere, activists). Later, there's been scientific debate back and forth [2]. But it is interesting, if people from outside the scientific community can win the public debate and get to decide what is science and what is not.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_c...
[1] https://www.gdaworkinggroup.com/blog/2018/12/5/psychology-to...
I think therefore that anyone can judge for themselves whether said publication is "anti-science" or "anti-fact" and your help is not required. I feel perfectly comfortable allowing people to think for themselves, especially since this publication is not obviously bollocks: it was awarded both the Economist and Times book of the year prizes.
Finally, based on what I've seen from the scientific community around politicised topics like this one, any link (especially from US-affiliated organisations) should be by default open to questioning and not unassailable proof. Although given that it's psychology it should probably just be outright ignored for a couple of decades until they manage to form a coherent opinion.
> anti-science and anti-fact
This combination of words doesn't make sense to me. Science constantly discovers new "facts" that invalidate old "facts". I understand stuff like "the current scientific consensus", but I don't understand how you can call people who question the current scientific consensus on something "anti-fact". Especially in the context of psychology and psychiatry, where lately the facts have been superseding themselves rather rapidly.
Tldr, if you're pro science, shouldn't you by definition be ever so mildly sceptical of facts?
EDIT: note, I'm not trying to attack you personally nor weasel in some alt right talking point. I've seen words like "anti-fact" used a lot lately, I think I understand where it comes from, especially in the context of American hyper-polarized politics. I guess i wrote.my comment hoping to contribute to slightly more constructive language, at least from the sane side of the aisle.
> sane side of the aisle
That's not how constructive language is done. You don't improve "hyper-polarized politics" by saying one pole represents sanity and the other the opposite.
Disclaimer - personally, I'm sceptical about the concept and scientific grounds behind transgenderism and I expect my comment to be downvoted.
And furthermore, if you weren't expecting the majority to disagree you've just certified the comment as disingenuous anyway.