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I appreciate you responding, as I do any trans or trans-sympathetic posters here in a very unfriendly space. Now I have to admit the trans issue is one of those that has come close to tilting me away from what used to be my very strong liberal affinity. I really want to be sympathetic to them. I still remain very much "live and let live, and you do you" in my personal ethos. But I think your response is typical in that you see people who object to trans ideologies merely reacting out of disgust, or dislike that trans people are engaging in delusion. That's a lot of it, I'm sure. But:
Okay, fine, fair enough. If a trans woman is actually getting off hanging out with women in a locker room and imagining herself one of them, or fantasizing about being a pretty pretty girl being railed by a totally straight dude who either doesn't know or doesn't care that she's trans, yes, I agree, it's "whatever" as far as what is going on in her own mind.
The problem is that when we talk about "bad actors," we're not just talking about trans people having dirty thoughts they keep to themselves. We're talking about, for example in the Gabrielle Darone case, a trans woman who got women who had miscarriages kicked out of a support group because they won't go along with her fantasy of having miscarried. We're talking about trans women who walk around in women's locker rooms sporting a very obvious erection. It too often is being indecent in public, and then bullying any women who object.
If they stuck to jerking off at home, neither I nor anyone else would know or care. If they posted on Twitter about how much they like jerking off while fantasizing about being a woman, maybe some people would be disgusted but no one has to read their posts. But it's the public behavior which tipped me over the edge. And the thing is, I realize that only a small fraction of trans women do things like this, but the rest of them, and their defenders, seem determined to justify such behavior. It makes it a lot harder to believe the line about trans people who "just want to live their lives."
I understand your frustration. If it were up to me, there would certainly be a lot less sweeping-under-the-carpet of genuine bad behavior from trans folks. But still: let he whose in-group has not closed ranks around a problematic tribe-mate, rather than let the lynch mob have him, cast the first stone. It's a natural tribal instinct, particularly when you think your community is facing an existential risk.
Maybe your beef is only with trans women who happen to genuinely be sexual predators; but if trans activists have reason to believe that there is a genuine political will in America to tar them all with that exact brush to - to classify all trans people as perverts and sex offenders by definition - are you going to publicize their existence? Are you going to give conservative media the satisfaction, are you going to give them the ammo to oppress you?
(If you're a prominent Jew in early-20th-century Germany and you find conclusive evidence that this Jewish banker you know has been defrauding some goyim clients, you would be insane to publicly accuse him and call the state police. Even if you're pretty sure the law enforcement personnel who'd handle that specific case aren't particularly anti-Semitic. Now, personally I think "trans genocide" is an ill-chosen phrase, but its merits don't matter here: this is the world trans activists think they live in, so of course they act accordingly.)
The theory that transgenderism as a movement is secretly very permissive of sexual assault on cis women doesn't survive contact with reality. The purity spirals of highly trans spaces from Tumblr to leftist Discord servers are infamous for good reason. Making excuses for trans predators is nothing more or less than a PR move - call it desperate or call it craven - it's nothing more than bog-standard respectability politics.
If I was a prominent Jew in early 20th century Germany and had a gun, I would be justified in finding the local Nazis and killing them in cold blood.
If the situation is bad enough that you are justified in shooting people dead, you're also justified in doing a lot of lesser things that you normally wouldn't be justified in doing. And if you're deluded into thinking the world is that bad, you're a menace to society; this isn't some minor disagreement.
"Permissive" doesn't have to mean "deliberately intends to". It often means "has standards which rule out being able to handle". You don't have to be intentionally trying to bring about X for your actions to enable X.
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While covering for bad actors in your ingroup is certainly a normal thing to do, I will die on the hill of insisting it is unprincipled and ultimately unproductive. Would I feel differently if I were a Jew in Nazi Germany? Probably, but I cannot emphasize how much I think "trans genocide" is absolute bullshit. This is like the feminists who think we are literally on the verge of The Handmaid's Tale. If you justify closing ranks around predators because your enemies are Literally Hitler then you pretty much lose any appeal to rational acceptance and tolerance.
I don't disagree. I'm just saying: everyone does it, from queers to Pentacostals. It tells you very little about the moral integrity of the average member of the group, and ~0 about the merits of their ideology. So you shouldn't let this stuff affect how you think of trans rights qua trans rights, unless you're prepared to throw overboard any position whose proponents commit this kind of epistemological sin.
(And let's be fair. Literal concentration camps for trans people might be science fiction, but a plurality of conservatives would proudly own up to wanting to make crossdressing/being-publicly-transgender illegal, and a majority would at least want it to be socially shunned. Calling that "genocide" might be hyperbolic but trans activists can't be faulted for worrying about it a fair bit.)
Which propositions do you think have majority/plurality support among conservatives in the united states, or even if you limit it to red state conservatives?
I think you'd have majority support for 1, 3, 4, and 10, and plurality support for 8. I don't think anything else on that list rises to that level.
Interesting that you phrase all of these as requirements/restrictions/what-have-you as opposed to permissions/freedoms/what-have-you. Interesting that you have 9 for children & adults, and 10 for children, but no 'for adults'.
I suspect you'd get different responses between the following categories:
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I agree, though with the caveat that this only describes today's conservatives. Salami tactics aren't the sole purview of the Left; in a world where 1, 3, 4 and 10 become hitching points of the Overton window, hardliners will find it easier to drum up support for the rest of the list. For example, if you had 3, 4 and 8, 12 might not be codified into law overnight but would run a high risk of quickly becoming the unspoken norm, in exactly the same way that DEI-style measures became endemic even in institutions with no hard legal mandate to apply them.
I also think you phrased 4 as a needlessly weak version of that particular fear. With things like the withheld Disney cartoon, it goes beyond drag shows qua drag shows: the concern is that conservatives want to legally equate "being publicly trans" with "drag", and qualify any media depicting transition as adult-only media, not just live drag shows. I couldn't care less whether minors can go to drag shows, but I would consider it very damaging and illiberal to restrict their access to non-sexual books, comics and cartoons with trans characters in them. And I'm pretty sure you could get majority support for that among today's conservatives, albeit perhaps by not that wide of a margin.
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I am, actually. The Roman Catholic Church justifiably took a huge hit because they chose to protect a tiny handful of bad actors rather than let them be properly exposed and punished. And to be fair, the Church never claimed that what their child molesting priests did was okay, or that it didn't happen. Which is different from trans activists, who generally take the position that no trans woman is ever a bad actor, and if there are any, they are singular exceptions and only bigots would notice them.
I think that's a reason to think less of the Catholic Church as an organization, but not of random Catholic laypeople, or Christianity as a belief system in general.
(I almost wrote: "or of Catholicism as a belief system", which isn't true, but only because Catholicism is inherently self-referential, affirming the holiness and infallibility of the Church as an article of faith. The basic points of gender ideology in no way imply, let alone rely on the assumption, that today's trans activists and community leaders are heavenly-appointed and infallible.)
Would you say the same about all organizations? Or is this specific to a subset thereof? If so, what is the criteria for an organization to be in said subset?
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Sure, and generally speaking I do not think less of individual Catholics even though I think their religion and their Church is hokum. I also do not think less of individual trans people - the ones I know are generally pretty nice and chill. That said, I can tell the Catholics I know (if it comes up) that I don't share their beliefs or support their Church, and they might argue with me but they generally won't take offense as long as I'm not being an asshole about it. I cannot tell the trans people I know that I am only being polite and I don't really think they are women (or "non-binary"). They might suspect that's how I feel (they probably know that's how many people feel) but if I were to let the mask slip, even unintentionally and without malice, there would be social consequences. I resent this, and I do think it comes pretty close to being unquestionable holy doctrine in the minds of many activists.
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