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In what way are they not?
70 years ago, the wage gap for women and minorities was much larger than it is today and they were widely considered to be mentally inferior (or 'different' in ways that excluded them from full economic participation), women and minorities were much less represented in media than they are today, and the modern category of 'trans people' didn't exist as a social construct.
Are you saying there's some non-strawman path back to that reality that I should have hypothesized instead of the way I described things? I'd like to hear it.
Or are you just saying that I should have interpreted 'defeat the SJWs' to mean something other than moving society backwards on those 3 things, even though the modern trends surrounding those 3 things are pretty much the main topics that people here complain about in relation to the SJ movement?
Because if that's what you mean, that's why I phrased it as a question, and then offered the alternative of just defeating cancel culture and loud annoying woke scolds and etc. (the 4th thing that gets complained about) while keeping most of the actual material advances. I offered that as an interpretation of what OP meant, and asked if that was what they meant, and continued to address that point along the assumption that they probably meant that. That was the actual point of the comment, which you (like many) are not bothering to engage with.
Again, this is the whole 'take a sentence and respond to it in-line instead of responding to the entire comment' thing.
The overall comment was 'When you say "defeat the movement," do you mean materially or rhetorically? Defeating them materially would actually be pretty nuts and hard to do and you probably don't actually endorse it, so probably you mean defeat them rhetorically? In which case, sure, that could happen, it just wouldn't mean very much if the material advances of the movement mostly remained in place. People have muddled thinking in general about what it means to 'defeat' a movement, and movements that are remembered as absurd or evil often accomplished many of their goals in reality; that's probably important for you to think about as you consider your question'.
But you don't read the whole comment, see the shape of it, and respond to the intent. You grab a few sentences, apply an uncharitable new context to them that doesn't match how they were being used rhetorically, and want to debate those instead.
It's tiring.
Yeah, and my point is, saying that treating trans people with respect is 'submitting' to them, like you're a dog rolling over to show your belly and whining so they won't hurt you, is just as uncharitable a phrasing of the progressive position as any of my phrasings in this comment.
Which is to say: it's a phrasing I'm totally fine with! I understand why it might feel like that to someone who's not on-board with the project, and while I think that phrasing misses really important nuance and misrepresents people's intentions, it still more-or-less points at the same empirical reality as the charitable phrasing I'd use, so whatever. I can be a good sport about it, and continue the discussion in good faith despite having my position uncharitably framed that way.
And if you think that these are different, that my phrasing of your side is a straw man but your phrasing of my side is totally fair, then you're the one who is too far into your own side's rhetoric to recognize where you're failing to understand your opponents.
Sorry, I can't even parse this. Are you implying that I was offering a hypothetical 'excluded' world where trans people aren't allowed on teams/in shelters for either gender and are thus 'excluded' at a societal level, assigning a preference for that world to my opponents, and saying that's bad?
Because, no, that's nuts, if that's how you're reading my argument then I really really wish you would take like 30 seconds to try to think of a more charitable interpretation whenever you get mad at something I write.
My point is that individual teams/shelters can choose to include or exclude trans people in their individual organization. And if any individual organization ever chooses to include them, that leads to the state of affairs that people like Rowling et al. are objecting to, with battered women sleeping next to what they would call men, with girls competing against what they would call boys.
You can't actually allow those organizations to freely choose their own policies on this topic without creating the situation that those people are mad about and want to abolish (or you'd have to change everyone's opinions so that those organizations never used that freedom to make a choice they'd disagree with). To get what they actually want, they would need everyone else to 'submit' to their preferences.
That was my point.
What are you talking about.
Like, literally, what are you talking about?
I already stipulated in the hypothetical I was advancing that we repeal any laws that would restrict your ability to speak however you'd like on these topics. That's already something I granted here.
So when you say 'It requires me convincing enough people that freedom speech is worth protecting', are you talking about repealing laws restricting speech in this area, and you just missed where I already granted that?
Or are you saying that people getting mad at you for saying things that they consider to be incredibly rude and dehumanizing is a violation of free speech?
Are you saying that if more people just agreed with your passion for free speech they'd be perfectly happy with hiring you so you can misgender and deadname their trans coworkers 20 times a day, and tell them how you're sorry that they fell for a social contagion and mutilated their genitals around the water cooler?
Again: outside of whatever laws in this area might exist, which I already granted you, it comes down to the fact that people have values and norms and preferences and social mores and rules of etiquette that you're violating, and they react the way people always react when someone does that. There's not a way around that without people either changes those preferences and etiquettes to match what you want, or changing to care about 'free speech' so much that they stops reacting to those violations in the normal way humans throughout history have always done.
Which I already said in my last comment, and you didn't address in your response, preferring to just insult me instead of addressing the argument. Again, tiring.
Yes, obviously.
You were more interested in attacking my character than responding to my points there, too.
Okay, thanks for confirming, Darwin. I have no interest in attacking your character, only in pointing out the pattern of bad faith you have displayed over the years. Please consider this conversation to have been completely and utterly "won" by you - or perhaps just "lost" by me for spending any sort of effort reading and writing arguments as if there was any chance of good faith discussion.
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