I'm fairly open-minded to a critical take on trans issues, so I gave the linked podcast a listen, and I just want to report back that it's pretty straight-up conspiracy theory thinking. For example, the author of the book notes that it was only two weeks between the SCOTUS gay marriage decision and Caitlyn Jenner's cover on Vanity Fair - saying it was "obviously coordinated". There's talk of "putting pieces together", etc. If you're not conspiracy theory inclined, you can save yourself the trouble.

What you describe as "fascinating" is just a crazy conspiracy theory. The link you give also just throws homosexuality and bisexuality in there as well and while not exactly saying that all those things are "unhealthy for a society" basically alledges this in the first few sentences.

These guys interviewing him are right-wing Christians, who are the only people who would ever interview this guy, as he wouldn't get past the woke filter on just about any other podcast, so you'll just have to accept that they're going to have that point of view to begin with.

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.

Using an obviously derogatory term for trans people really doesn't help your point at all. It hints to the possibility that you have a personal belief that sees trans people as unnatural and because of that belief it's easier for you to believe in an outlandish conspiracy theory than simply accepting that the reason for an increase in visible trans people is acceptance by society.

Edit for context since OP has edited his comment without acknowledging it: Where it now says ""transsexuals"" it said "trannies" before.

What's the derogatory term for trans people? I missed it.

Op has edited his comment, see my edit.

Not a native speaker here. How come it's supposed to be a derogatory term? I mean, you would say "granny" because "grandmother" is too long. So saying "tranny" instead of "transsexual" makes sense, it even has more syllables.

There's no consistent grammatical rule. Certain words and phrases are obvious warning signs about the speaker, but you have to be somewhat immersed in the culture to notice. Usually the literal meaning of the word / phrase really is an innocent neutral descriptor.

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.

Why is any word considered derogatory? Enough people used it derogatorily.

Both are diminutives. The thing with diminutives is that they can show both affection and disrespect.

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.

That's not how words work. It's definitionally derogatory, it doesn't get points for being an abbreviation.

Why is any particular word derogatory? Every language has taboo or offensive words. This is one of them in English.

You're right, I don't take the transexual movement seriously. I edited my language as that's the word they called themselves back in the sex club days and I wouldn't want to hurt someone. In fact, their was a nightclub where you could meet Transexuals in the late 1990s in San Francisco called "Trannyshack" that was pretty obscure back then, but is now hugely famous now that the "transexual" movement has grown into an industry. "Transexuals" are just as big of victims of all this as everyone else and why cause them more trauma by calling them something that offends them. I would call someone walking around in a full body fury costume by whatever they're comfortable with too.

There are plenty of popular rap songs that use what Americans call 'the n-word' quite liberally as an in-group identifier. Use that word in polite conversation and you get labelled, quite rightly, a bigot.

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.

Have you considered that oppression of trans people causes them to hide and the more widespread acceptance of other LGB identities causes trans people to let themselves be more visible in everyday life? Just because you didn't see them before doesn't mean they weren't there.

> 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.

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)

Rofl... Yes - only in San Francisco... Yeah you're obviously either very uneducated or willfully ignorant about global history and culture. In countries and times that weren't dominated by the christian ideas of moral oppression - that lead to criminalization or at a minimum being outcast because of a social stigma and fear of violence of everyone not straight - LGBT were and are a visible part of society - not especially visible because nobody cared about making them especially visible because it was normal and accepted. Now after the first wins against oppression due to activism the right produces this fear and panic of the 'wokeness' to again demonize these people and 'liberals'. It's the new fear of socialists basically - a useful buggyman for reactionaries and religious fundamentalists. I wouldn't even know what woke meant wouldn't I be on social media and being confronted by all this alt-right nonsense troll-posts where they blow up a noname 'dumb woke' liberal strawman-post on a daily basis.

This is fairly obvious if you read fashion magazines. It is presented constantly in the same way that bell-bottoms or skateboarding shoes used to be. Which doesn’t mean that it’s all made up, but it does certainly appear to be amplified by the media.

So what's in it for the billionaires? That looks like a pretty weak spot of this hypothesis.

This is ridiculous; I've known people through their transition. It is not a fad.

Has everyone forgotten famous hacker Sophie Wilson?

How do you explain groups or clusters of young children suddenly becoming trans?

Misreporting? Statistical accident? Or latent dysphoria that meets a "wait, you can do that, I didn't know it was a possibility" discovery?

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.

What's the evidence it's sudden? Everyone cites a single study by Lisa Littman. She didn't ask any trans children. Just their parents. And she selected for parents who didn't accept their children coming out as trans. Children don't tell their parents everything. And parents don't hear things they don't want to sometimes.

Imagine you're afraid to do something. Someone else does it. Nothing too bad happens. Wouldn't it encourage you?

Let me help, Someone gets into a new school, he finds someone relatable that someone introduces him to a group of people who faces the same or similar issues like he does.

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.

The only "study" reporting this problem is so unbelievably obviously flawed it is incredible.

> I think it's fascinating to think that our entire culture could just be made up by a bunch of mischievous billionaires fucking with us.

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 mean I dated a transgender person, were they being paid or something? explain to me what was going on there.

They were being influenced. Influence is real. Advertising is not a trillion dollar business because it doesn't work.

Transgendered behavior has been recorded for quite some time. Advertising as a trillion dollar business is relatively new. How about applying Occams Razor? The simpler explanation of transgenderism is that the confluence of nature and nurture is as complex as all other biological processes we know about and leads to all sorts of expressions of gender self identification. I know it’s tempting to succumb to the notion that the universe is so orderly that aberrations must be explained by some overarching conspiracy (or godlike behavior), but that does fly in the face of observed behavior.

Every trans person I know knew this about themselves as a young child. They were not "influenced." Many of them had no idea that being trans was possible and thought they were gay, if they knew what that was.

Perhaps it's not that they've been influenced into becoming trans, but that more people than we knew were already trans, but didn't have the confidence to show it because society was so unaccepting?

I think you've got cause and effect mixed up here.

I don't think so man, I think you're being influenced. Paying people to be gay just doesn't make sense. I'm not going seriously argue this with you, you need help.

At no point did they say anyone was being paid to be gay. Only you stated that, twice. They are saying people can be influenced. Take LGBT representation in contemporary media. A casual interpretation would be that nearly 1 out of 4 people are gay, lesbian, etc., since nearly every popular TV show has one or more of these characters. However, when you look at the actual numbers, they tell a much different story.

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...

Floyd wasn’t shot so he wouldn’t even be one of the 13 in that list ;-)

Did you just use the sentence “only 13 unarmed black men were shot by police”? That’s still outrageous. For context in the same year the UK police had 13 occasions total where officers fired their weapons, resulting in 3 fatalities. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/319246/police-fatal-shoo...)

I said “only” in relation to the myth that hundreds of unarmed black men were being shot by the police. I’m not saying 13 is good, but it’s objectively better than more than 13. There was a poll some months ago, which I can’t find, that asked people with different political beliefs to estimate how many unarmed black men were killed by police in the previous year and the liberal and progressive left had outrageous numbers. These are the same people watching the mainstream media constantly pushing the narrative that it’s open season on black men.

Yes the UK police might be better than the US police. Without knowing how many unarmed men of other ethnicities suffered the same fate (and the frequency of the respective ethnicities), it's a meaningless number. It could be "only 13 unarmed black men" because it isn't unusual for the US police to shoot unarmed men.

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.

Being gay, or bisexual has always been with us, and the author acknowledges that, but the transgender thing as it exists today is what the author is claiming is made up.

Cultures through history had genders we would call transgender.[1]

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".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history

The "Myth of the 20th Century" is a podcast that is banned on all podcast services because they will interview people on extremely controversial topics. If you play the game of "this person believes X and a crazy person also believes X, therefore they're crazy," then you shouldn't listen to this podcast and just go about your life as you normally would. This is only if you want to deeply question your reality, and possibly ruin your life by becoming aware of things that go against the mainstream.

The vagrant around the corner from me is banned from all stores in the area for his controversial refusal to abide by "no shirt, no shoes, no service". He's extremely not mainstream. You should only listen to him if you want to deeply question your reality and possibly ruin your life by becoming aware of the things that go against the mainstream narrative pushed by the drugstore-industrial complex. Showering every day is a myth pushed by the trillion dollars advertising industry. I consider being banned from places a sign of credibility, and refuse to believe the official story that we were banned for "smelling like shit".

But you at least have to admit that it seriously undercuts the credibility of that site if they engage in every conspiracy theory out there. It's very hard not to simply dismiss somebody else's arguments if they believe that the Holocaust and Covid are just made up. Human attention is limited.

Why would you want to dismiss someone's research because you disagree with one of their premises? Do you automatically assume they've fudged their findings to fit? Because that sounds like source picking as well.

Are you familiar at all with the folks over at http://radiochristianity.com ?

Ockham's razor would suggest that if somebody finds documentaries about flu vaccines containing coronaviruses and a blog post highlighting the Jewishness of all the people it considers guilty of "debasing" Weimar Germany compelling, they are relatively unlikely to have spotted truths everyone else missed involving transgenderism, Davos billionaires and 14th century Jewish practices because of greatness of medical knowledge or lack of bias...

I haven't read the links you posted but from the title it doesn't sound like either of them imply the holocaust or COVID were made up. IMO GP's comment applies doubly here, you're just conditioned to have a kneejerk reaction over any non-mainstream opinion.

>I haven't read the links you posted

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.

That would be relevant if someone claimed modern billionaires invented child sacrifice and slavery.

The United States has legal slavery today (prison labor), and it's hard to see the push to keep schools open during the pandemic as anything other than sacrificing children on the altar of the market.