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This is the one that I really don't get.
The irony is, as ex-trans myself I'm strongly-inclined to believe that the conservatives are right about iatrogenic GID and thus about trans-awareness among kids being a catastrophe. I think that argument is strong enough on its own without introducing sexual pearl-clutching - and I'm mostly on team "exposing kids to sex is NBD*; we did it for millennia without issues", so in fact when I'm claiming a disequivalence I'm saying trans-messaging is worse than sexualising kids outside of specific abuse cases.
*Unfortunately, it's pretty well-known by this point that trauma is a self-fulfilling prophecy; if society assumes people will be traumatised by X, they will often be traumatised by feeling abnormal over not being traumatised. The proper place to break that is with society, though.
The reason I think trans-messaging is worse, and [also, to answer your earlier question] why I think it's a way for women to sexually abuse children (mostly boys, but it affects girls too), is that it's an intentional failure to teach constructive sexual behavior for what are ultimately sexist/sexual reasons.
"Men are so evil that to remove their inherent threat to women they should either [become a reasonable approximation of a woman, sexually-speaking] castrate themselves to remove that threat or only focus their sexual energy on men" is what I believe the trans-ally's motte to be, because that is the way feminism-laundered-misandry works. Which is why it's important to start impressing those messages upon kids early- most kids think sex is just fucking gross [right up until they don't] and the youth who have discovered they want it should be selectively denied knowledge of (and discouraged from, even simply by downplaying) healthy straight sex lest they grow up seeking it instead. If you encourage gay sex (and any of the other
I Can't Believe It's Not Pussy"healthier alternatives") the hope is that you get less demand for straight sex, so women are "forced" to have it less and can get a better deal for the sex they choose to have.The obvious problem with this is that you've both broken down the pipeline to turn boys into the kinds of men the average woman will actually like, and made it so that they don't exhibit the characteristics that they want. Many women want to be the only woman in the relationship (and so do many men) to the point you might as well consider someone who doesn't half-trans anyway (a label they will not be particularly happy with for other reasons but which describes their outlooks, especially on sex and gender roles, quite accurately).
The problem with misandrist-feminist thought is that it ignores the fact that sex is frequently constructive, and everyone who has good sex will point this out, even those who were legal-fiction-raped (exhibit A: '70s-'80s band groupies). And if you want to have constructive sex the sexes need to be working correctly and how much of a big deal the average person thinks sex even is needs to be correctly calibrated (just as it was in the pre-AIDS time; and I'd argue the reason people could even feasibly call sex child-friendly at that time)- so men need space to develop as men and not constantly be told they're defective women (which is what trans ideology as a logical outgrowth of misandry-feminism is designed to do), and as a second-order consequence half-trans women need to not constantly be told they're defective men ("tomboy erasure").
And since what you should be traumatized by is itself an Overton Window thing, you can conveniently become retroactively traumatized years later, especially if that trauma is politically convenient.
I had a misandrist mother, and the dysphoria started going away shortly after I ran away from her. Trust me, you don't need to sell me on misandrist abuse being terrible.
But you're really stretching the definition of "sexual" abuse here. Sexist, yes, obviously, but you really have to squint to get to sexual.
A lack of active and/or claimed sexual intent doesn't mean it isn't sexual abuse.
Then again, I do agree that "sexual abuse" is not something that has a particularly coherent definition (since most of the time the definition is weaponized; if sex isn't special, rape is neither meaningfully nor mechanically distinct from other kinds of battery).
So I'm willing to concede it's mostly just bog-standard emotional abuse, but then, why are we permitting that on an industrial scale again?
Preaching to the choir, lad. As I said upthread, I think this kind of poison is worse than showing kids porn (physical molestation is more complicated because there are staggeringly-huge variations in child outcomes from that). I just like to keep definitions straight, and to not have weird buckets that contain things with little relation to one another.
I'll stick to calling this "emotional molestation", then. The typical mind appears to me to equate "sexual abuse" to "physical molestation", and this just isn't that (which is why it flies under their radars and why attempts to equate female public school teachers to physical molesters are all wrong and thus fail). Nobody has any words for it so they can't even recognize it happens, and the people who can recognize it don't have any words for it.
What a revelation, human beings like having sex with people they find sufficiently attractive but don't like being raped or feeling raped after the fact if the relationship falls apart in certain ways (and calling it 'physical molestation' is the equivalent of 'automatically assuming she screamed by default' where that defines the difference between rape and fornication). Couldn't have seen that one coming at all.
I think the porn the emotional molesters favor (Gender Queer, Flamer, etc.) is the distaff counterpart to the rape-porn that certain tend to complain about "giving men harmful ideas, and giving women harmful ideas that that's what men want".
Just make porn where they actually give a shit about each other to the point the sex is superfluous rather than it just being a human fleshlight with extra steps. Though, because sex isn't supposed to be constructive (it's all just conquer/submit or getting off on the selection process), how would anyone ever come up with or be satisfied with that or just using it as a way to smuggle in those baser instincts?
(And honestly, what the fuck? There used to be that understanding that the sexes interacted in this way except for the people that didn't, the people that didn't published their findings, and then the people that did just took the fragments that told them what they wanted to say, and not only preferred to use them as weapons but weren't even able to understand that's what they were doing. Guess things never change, three cheers for nobody, and may God have mercy on our souls.)
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