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This line of reasoning always gets me. Person claims to be of different gender. People point out that this person isn't actually behaving like the target gender. Person claims have wrong views about what that gender is like.... well then what makes you think you are of that gender? Maybe the gender you currently have is also misunderstood and your biology actually got it right but societies views of it is not right?
You say "what is a woman and what would be required to be one" and I say if someone cannot answer definitively what a woman is then how can they possibly claim to be one.
Pretty sure that gender to progressives is something you self ID as and not something you are. Yes, this seems obviously stupid and at least a little inconsistent, but more people are stupid and inconsistent than they are deliberately evil.
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The best way to understand this ideology is to assume its trying to destabilize society by trans-ing as many people as possible. The purpose of destabilization is to facilitate a revolution toward some nebulous utopia. The individual agents of this ideology may or may not explicitly recognize this, and even fewer say it out loud and in public. Most have internalized some incoherent set of arguments which superficially appeal to liberal principles, and they intuitively understand what they are expected and forbidden to say and think. It is low status to be seen to disagree or oppose this ideology, and the worst fear of many people is to be mistaken for the wrong sort of person.
The arguments are just tools deployed strategically to increase the number of trans people given the context. There are no unifying principles, and there is no explanatory theory that ties it all together. Water is wet when saying so increases the number of trans people, and water is dry when saying so increases the number of trans people. Those individuals within the fold who try to stick to a principle or rationalize the theory inevitably find themselves as outcasts, because at some point they derive a position that doesn't increase the number of trans people.
Incoherence is swept away by continuously redefining and coining new terms. Both the theories and social dynamics encourage dogmatic thinking and suppression of wrongthink. Agents are led to enmesh their personal identity, their sense of self-worth and purpose, with the ideology, such that they cannot be separated. Attacks on these ideas are then reflexively construed as attacks on people. Objectivity is impossible. Rational discussion is prohibited. Conflicts can then only be resolved by manipulation and power relations.
These are the dark arts.
Please. "destabilize society in pursuit of a vague utopia" does not seem like a reasonable motive without some strong supporting evidence. I think what we're actually looking at is self expression values taken to their logical conclusion, not some kind of agenda against society because society being able to be undermined from inside just doesn't occur to them.
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