I'm curious, why would these people not be considered extreme for treating you like a loon or treating you as an extremist?
I've seen similar stuff on other issues. For example, there are people who hate guns who treat gun owners as loons and extremists regardless of their actions/positions/etc. Just saying that some people treat others as extremists just because they hold an opposing view. My guess is it's often to prevent cognitive dissonance in examining their own beliefs (most people don't consider themselves extremists even if they hold extreme views).
I think you’re conflating both groups denouncing those extremists as denouncing you, because those extremists are who represents your group on the mainstream narrative.
Also, transgender people aren't a movement. We're people.
I’m not saying it’s fair or right…
But transgender people are a minority whose voice has been appropriated by a political movement to force their radical agenda under euphemisms like “inclusion”.
I’m not saying that you need to be outspoken about it — but if the only exposure most people have is that extremist view from TV, they will associate you with that due to how humans work.
> "Black people should have no issue proving they aren't criminals"
The equivalent would be black people debouncing the neo-racism of Democrats under euphemisms like “equity” and publicly denouncing nonsense done in their name, like de-policing.
Again, I’m not saying it’s fair or right… but I’d tell a black Democrat who was upset about being associated with that idiocy the same thing:
You’re tacitly letting your identity be used to push dumb policies — and you’ll be associated until you stand up and say “no, this doesn’t represent me”.
And again, am I supposed to be out here actively looking for people and views to disavow? Do I have to do this in front of everyone I meet, so then they'll be sure I'm one of the good ones and they can treat me like a normal person?
Whites not associated with racism are expected to denounce it.
Men not associated with misogyny are expected to denounce it.
I’m not holding double-standards, just acknowledging that humans work based on heuristics.
> Do I have to do this in front of everyone I meet, so then they'll be sure I'm one of the good ones and they can treat me like a normal person?
You don’t have to do it at all, but yelling at people because they’re human and their brains react to repeated exposure by finding patterns isn’t going to lead to the outcome you want.
So if you don’t like being associated with that kind of behavior — you probably want to do it some time, in some way.
That perception won’t change until there’s enough people out there denouncing the misappropriation of their identity by politicians to make it clear that they dont represent that group.
Besides, who are you expecting to do the denouncing and what are they supposed to denounce? Before I started this comment was I supposed to do a quick google search and see if there were any fringe activists saying something to denounce? What's the time scale I have to cover before I can reply to your comment. A week? A month? What if I already denounced it in another thread, do I have to do a recap of everything I've denounced in every thread?
I'm not calling you racist, No one asked you to denounce racism or misogyny, so why are you bringing it up?
> there’s enough people out there denouncing the misappropriation of their identity by politicians to make it clear that they don't represent that group
This is laughably unquantifiable and political forces ensure that even if this was happening you wouldn't know about it.
As Malcolm X explained, minorities are routinely used as a political cudgel in feuds between parties — and the promotion of extremist voices is part of that today.
> political forces ensure that even if this was happening you wouldn't know about it
…which is why it’s important to occasionally share those thoughts in your personal life, to help unwind that narrative for people around you.
As everybody knows off course, only the things you hate are actual and real, and you're being noble and virtuous by talking about them. While the things your opponents hate are disinformation and a mirage, and they're being hysteric and alarmist by talking about them.
Looks like you made it clear what you're doing.
It is a special breed of shamelessness to accuse others of your own vices.
It's hilariously disingenuous and backward how you mention the reaction to the encroaching transgender ideology without mentioning the action itself that prompted it. The bathroom and sports bills are defensive measures against the ideology infiltrating institutions and allowing the easy access of vulnerable spaces to mentally unstable individuals.
>what political power is the 'transgender ideology' wielding.
Other than
- In [1] an academic professor is fired for publishing a book critical of transgender beliefs
- In [2] a school covered for a trans rapist who raped a teenager in the girls bathroom, he was eventually transfered to another school where he raped a second teenager.
- In [3] an. archeologist is fired for trans critical views
- [4] documents several other cases of harassment perpetrated by trans ideology supporters in academia
- In [5], a British political party struggles with the definition of a woman, party representatives repeatedly refused to answer straightforward questions about basic female biology to avoid angering the trans lobby
- In [6], as in [5], a US Supreme Court judge refused to answer the question "What's a woman", citing that "She's not a biologist".
- The social media giants ban any dissenting discussion. Examples too numerous to mention, and can be empirically reproduced for yourself.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/may/22/kathleen-s...
[2] https://news.yahoo.com/judge-rules-loudoun-county-teen-13141...
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-01950-9
[4] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349967840_The_Gende...
[5] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labour-s-refusal-to-acce...
[6] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/22/blackburn-jackson-d...
Is your argument that people should just accept their lot in life and not challenge the status quo? Or more that they should do it in a way that doesn't upset anyone.
I see that you have some concerns here, I don't see why your response is to try and ostracize or ban this thing you don't understand.
"The bathroom and sports bills are defensive measures against the ideology infiltrating institutions and allowing the easy access of vulnerable spaces to mentally unstable individuals."
He considers transgender women to be mentally unstable predators who want access to women's spaces in order to attack them.
If that’s what you think then this wasn’t the debate I thought it was.
Do you think that all gay people are pedophiles too?
I do not argue for this, the existence of a systematic and widespread ideology does not necessarily imply that the ideology is all-powerful or has full support.
But you can't handwave away the rather obvious evidence that this "minority" has some curious methods to impose its will on a whole lot of people, can you ? How is this small, oppressed minority capable of terrifying the heads of political parties and judges of high courts away from answering questions that any 18 years old can reliably answer ? By the power of looking adorable and saying 'Please' ?
>Do you think that all gay people are pedophiles too?
I fail to see why this is relevant to the discussion now, but no. I don't think there is a link between sexual affinity to same sex individuals and sexual affinity to children.
For example, WA and CA are attempting to repeal civil rights laws to re-legalize government bigotry.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1000,_Affirmat...
Good, because concern trolling like this is pretty shitty, and definitely not fair or right.
Certainly not intellectually honest. You attack someone repeatedly for supposedly not standing up against "dumb policies" and "extremist" positions, without your daring to name what you think those are. After all, if you did that, you might have to defend your stance against criticism instead of attacking someone for not preventing the entire Democratic Party from committing unspecified wrongs of "inclusion".
But at any rate, your argument amounts to, "But he has to be disingenuous and chickenshit, because Hacker News is run by the SJWs!", which I find laughable.
My argument definitely isn't that Hacker News is run by the SJWs, both because I don't think HN moderation is particularly left wing and because I don't think "the SJWs" is a meaningful category. What I would say is that debates about the fundamental legitimacy of transgender stuff get too heated for most platforms to accept, because people have strong, passionate beliefs on the issue which can't easily be compromised on. It's an entirely reasonable moderation decision and I might very well make the same one if I were in charge - but as a consequence, those of us who are transgender skeptical sometimes need to carefully talk around the touchiest issues rather than engaging on them directly.
Then you're just being disingenuous, jumping into a thread responding to someone else entirely and talking about dead comments as if the person being responded to had made them.
That's a very strange interpretation of my comment. If you think my gender identity is invalid, you're not committing genocide, you're just an asshole. If you think my gender identity makes me a pedophile groomer who needs to be kept away from kids, and want to enforce that via imprisonment, then you're committing genocide. Unfortunately, that is a political position of the governor of at least one US state. It is not the political position of most of the people voting for him, but that's not a ton of consolation.
Dissent along those lines, no matter how politely framed, is simply an attempt to launder bigotry into "debate".
I'm trying hard to correlate "We were arrested and discriminated against in the past" to "We must teach impressionable pre-pubescents about gender dysphoria behind their parents' back and ban anyone who criticizes this off the internet in the present". A majority used to take your rights away, then it self corrected and gave you your rights back, then you... impose your views back on them and influence institutions to crush their dissenting views ?
Am I just naive or is "we used to be second class citizens but now we're not" cause for reconciliation with and gratitude toward the majority, not hostility and belligerent activism ?
Current bathroom bills, bans on transgender medical care, and efforts to equate LGBTQ+ acceptance and care with grooming are not "the past", they're happening right now.
Is that government/public bathrooms or private businesses bathrooms? Aren't LGBT++ people extremely fond of saying "It's a private business, it can do whatever it wants", or does that only work when people critical of them are banned off the internet ?
>bans on transgender medical care
I'm highly, highly skeptical that a western country really did ban transgender "medical" care. Most likely it's an obscure law that just made it a private expense not paid for by tax money.
You can prove me wrong though.
>efforts to equate LGBTQ+ acceptance and care with grooming
I have a feeling that people who are reacting to pre-12-years-olds being shown pornographic imagery of 2 boys doing a sexual activity by defending it as "Queer sex education", I have just the slightest feeling, that those people are, indeed, defending what amounts to pedophilic tendencies. When those people are the most visible parts of a community and they're shouting their rather unusual opinions without the slightest pushback or dissent from others in the same community, I have a feeling, again just a very slight feeling, that this community does, in fact, present a very attractive affiliation for pedophiles.
In other words, if some people want to be treated as equal, maybe they should start acting as equals, respecting the things that everybody else respect. Maybe they should stop being the spoilt children of corporate giants who call for banning/firing anyone who looks at them funnily, maybe they should disavow clearly criminal tendencies within their own. Maybe they should stop treating a joke as a genocide.
Maybe then, just maybe, other people would start seeing them as ordinry humans with the same duties, and consequently the same rights and respect, as the rest of us.
> Is that government/public bathrooms or private businesses bathrooms?
It is the government dictating how private businesses structure their bathrooms. That's ranged from attempts to flat-out ban businesses from offering multi-person gender neutral bathrooms to requiring businesses to attach signage "warning" people that they have LGBTQ+ friendly bathrooms. It's not only state governments attacking transgender populations, it is also the state interfering in private business.
> bans on transgender medical care
Texas's ban on affirmative transgender care literally just went into effect, how do you not know about this? Notably, Texas doesn't only ban transitioning, and it doesn't even only ban puberty blockers, it bans affirmative care of any kind including therapy for minors. There have been talks of extending those bans past 18 years up to 25 year olds.
> I have a feeling that people who are reacting to pre-12-years-olds being shown pornographic imagery of 2 boys doing a sexual activity by defending it as "Queer sex education", I have just the slightest feeling, that those people are, indeed, defending what amounts to pedophilic tendencies.
You're out of touch with the current discourse about transgender rights if you think that these are the only people being called pedophiles. Florida's "don't say gay" bill bans any discussion of gender/orientation regardless of whether or not it's sexual in nature. When schools are threatening students that they can't use the word "gay" during graduation speeches, then I'm sorry but this is very clearly not about protecting minors or preventing grooming, and lawmakers equating pedophilia with even just basic acknowledgement that queer people exist is dangerous, bigoted rhetoric.
You're arguing that this pushback is related to extreme or clearly inappropriate lessons, but again, even just a passing amount of research into the rhetoric being pushed out by mainstream governors and lawmakers would be enough to show that there is a coordinated effort happening to characterize LGBTQ+ identity as entirely sexual in nature and innately deviant. The intention is to create a perspective that someone openly identifying as gay inherently makes that person dangerous around children.
If it had just been left as the LGB, that's something people can get on board with much more easily, from an individual liberties perspective and the principle of equal treatment under the law.
However, the TQ+, with its fundamental reframing of what it means to be a man or a woman, in terms of gender identity rather than sex, is something quite different. It's compelling people to believe something very controversial: that some men are actually women, and some women are actually man, and some people are somehow neither.
No surprise that this is getting pushback. But it's unfortunate, and really quite galling, that the LGB are also being dragged into this mess, particularly given all the gains made in recent years on equality.
But whatever, this is mostly just identity gatekeeping anyway. Transgender people were always active in early LGB rights movements from the beginning, and the idea that gay identity is normal but transgenderism is "controversial" is just laughably ignorant of how controversial gay identity used to be (and how controversial it still is in many circles).
People have some really serious short-term memory loss if they think that the LGB rights movement didn't go through the exact same pushback that the transgender rights movement is facing today, and that pushback included a ton of people who were all too eager to talk about how "respectable" gays deserved rights, but the fringe gays who did stuff like hold hands in public or talk about their partners openly were holding back the rest of the movement.
In particular, the modern gender critical movement is a direct continuation of an ideological split amongst lesbian feminists back in the 1970s, one group of whom considered transsexual males to be honorary women and welcome in their spaces as lesbians, and the other who regarded them as straight men who were infiltrating and imposing themselves, and effectively erasing lesbians as a group.
In some parts of the world, LGB acceptance is very high amongst the general population. Over 80% in much of western Europe, Canada and Australia. And over 70% in the US and Argentina.
What we're seeing with this pushback against trans activism in these more accepting places isn't because people have suddenly become more homophobic, but for very specific reasons caused by this activism - effectively the same issue that the feminists of the 1970s were arguing furiously about, but in the public sphere.
Now you are right that some homophobic politicians have jumped onto this issue too, and used it as a lever to push against LGB rights. But they're doing so opportunistically. The more fundamental issue, opposed by many across the political spectrum who have otherwise discordant beliefs, is this elevation of gender identity above sex. For example, in the UK, on a grassroots level it's been mostly left-wing feminist women pushing back against this, not homophobic conservatives.
Because of activism in the face of people who called gay orientation unnatural or dangerous -- activism that trans-exclusionists now want to see stopped just because they're worried about backlash and because they feel that they personally, individually no longer need that activism in order to be accepted in mainstream society.
If you went back in time you would see the same conversation we're having now play out about both bisexual and asexual people who both have faced the same kind of "are they really gay" gatekeeping that's happening here. If you went back further, you would see another split among feminists about whether lesbians could be considered feminist or whether they were distracting from feminist goals. If you went back even further, you'd see the same splits in feminist circles about intersectionality and whether talking about racism made feminism unattractive to white people. At every step, these exclusions were justified by talking about how the "less proper" activists were holding the broader gay/feminist/whatever movement back from mainstream acceptance.
It's the same story over and over again with each pushback characterizing the people they want to exclude as if they're uniquely controversial or dangerous to the movement. But they're not; it's just gatekeeping. Excusing bigotry that labels transgender people as pedophiles as if that bigotry is just reactionary pushback is really historically ignorant, given that literally the exact same "gays are pedophiles and groomers" rhetoric was used against LGB groups (and was especially used against bisexual people). There are parallels here that are impossible to ignore.
> For example, in the UK, on a grassroots level it's been mostly left-wing feminist women pushing back against this, not homophobic conservatives.
If trans-exclusionists want to talk strategy, then arguing that identity is the same as sexual deviancy, and aligning themselves with homophobic reactionaries is extremely short-sighted, foolish, and dangerous to the overall gay rights movement.
From the beginning, transgender people have done just as much to fight for LGB rights as anyone else in the movement and they deserve acceptance and support. Transgender people helped these so-called feminists put up the ladder, you don't get to pull the ladder up behind you now.
Ah, but yes, you're right, that's preposterous.
It's really at this step where things start to take a wrong turn. I truly believe you're acting in good faith, so please take this as a gentle suggestion. Rather than telling trans/black/etc people anything, pause and really listen.
We are already told how to do everything else in our lives, being told how to stand up for ourselves and how to fight for our rights feels like another example of the same pattern. A better question is, "How can we help?" or "What do you need?"
> transgender people aren't a movement. We're people.
Every movement is ultimately a group of people with a purpose.
But even if it did refer to actually existing extremism, presuming a trans person should know about a sub-category of extremists that happen to be trans and make unprompted verbal attacks against them just to signal some kind of virtue at is a pretty weird demand of compelled speech on your part.
This kind of shameless bigotry and stereotyping is pretty transparent.
I have noticed that even the L and G (to say nothing of BTQ+) folks who've come out to me in the past 10 years have added "but I am nothing like those {unfavorable words here} who proclaim themselves L's or G's on the web" - generally so fast that I couldn't have gotten a word in edgewise.
Until that is requirement for then too, then this just amounts to support for anti trans extremists.
(Substitute the bit about appearance with "because I think we should immediately stop new fossil fuel exploration / capital investment and institute atmospheric carbon recapture taxes of $1-2 per gallon-of-gasoline-equivalent emissions")
Anyway, I think the premise of the article is flawed:
I don't care whether voters in some red state are queer-bashing, abortion-banning putin apologists that want to strip mine for coal. (Want them for neighbors, or not? Move!)
I care that the people they've voted in and appointed to the supreme court are all of those things, and this planet is not large enough to let the rest of us escape from their idiocy.
Do you care whether this belief (which may have the appearance of knowledge) is objectively and flawlessly true?
And it is very fair to guess it was plan from the start, despite pretention not. Despite calling those who guesses it 100% correctly exaggerating and hysterical.
>> I don't care whether voters in some red state are queer-bashing, abortion-banning putin apologists that want to strip mine for coal. (Want them for neighbors, or not? Move!)
>> I care that the people they've voted in and appointed to the supreme court are all of those things
> The abortion banning part is provably true at this point.
a) Not comprehensively for all people, as was claimed.
b) It is supreme court justices that would be banning it, not elected representatives.
c) How might one prove it for any given elected representative, short of an explicit confession?
d) Abortion banning wasn't the only claim.
> And it is very fair to guess it was plan from the start, despite pretention not.
"Fair to say" and "correct/true" are very different things.
> Despite calling those who guesses it 100% correctly exaggerating and hysterical.
Where "100% correctly" refers to perception of reality, but is typically perceived as reality itself.
Human beings are silly, I would say without exception - News at 11.
I dont think they are silly. I think that they prefer to good relationship with that political branch over telling truth. They think it makes them sound like smart and rational and dont mind throwing others under the bus in the process.
E.g., they have priorities.
> "Fair to say" and "correct/true" are very different things.
Ok, I will say out loud, it is correct thing to say.
> It is supreme court justices that would be banning it, not elected representatives.
Supreme court did not came out of skies. They were put in place by politicians who picked people guaranteed to make political decisions.
> Abortion banning wasn't the only claim.
No. But it was part I 100% agree with.
It may be a "correct thing to say" (aka: popular), but this is distinctly different from correct from en epistemology perspective.
> But it was part I 100% agree with.
You are welcome to agree, but I am discussing what is true (and indirectly, the nature of human consciousness, which renders the customized/unique "reality" that each person on this forum experiences, and tends to mistake for reality itself).
I see you haven't met my in-laws.
There's no way to do it accurately, but the mind "does it" all day err day without breaking a sweat, as it evolved to do. This phenomenon is what this paper is describing, is it not?
Possibly relevant:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/context-and-state-dependent...
There are hundreds of millions of party members. Did anyone truly think that a member of either party supports every policy the party supports, or that there are different factions within the party that take opposing stances on specific issues? There's no way we're able to fully map 100M to 1 on an innumerable amount of topics/solutions.