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Part of the problem is that the most visible people are the crazy extremely online types. Is Sam Brinton looking like such a great role model for nonbinary representation now? But these are the cases that most people hear about, because they get the most publicity.
And the crazy extremely online types are the ones with the most niche, extreme, and bizarre demands, and are not representative of the majority of trans people. But because nobody is willing to stand up and say "Yeah, this person is crazy extremely online, please ignore" because that would be bigotry and transphobia and policing and all the rest of it, then they aren't challenged and the tone of the debate is then set for ordinary people that "They want to dress up like clowns and teach three year olds that they're trans and secretly give hormones to underage kids".
Rowing back on the most extreme outliers by trans groups (and before anyone jumps in with "there is no one body that speaks for all trans people", there sure are a lot of bodies calling themselves Trans This and LGBT That willing to give media interviews on every topic when asked) would do more for calming down the debate than all the scolding about "that never happens, and if it does, it's a good thing".
Sure, I used the Westboro Baptist Church as a cudgel against Christians back in the day, I know the drill.
But, you know. I was like 20 at the time and didn't really understand how to argue honestly and fairly, but that was a scummy and dishonest tactic when I used it back then. It still is now.
If the only version of Christianity that anyone not a Christian ever encountered was the Westboro bunch going around, then hell yeah I'd be "they're not representative and in fact here's a list of how they're heretics in faith, doctrine, and discipline". I do that anyway for other arguments over historic and global Christianity.
But if every Christian said "Well, it's unfortunate that the extremists get all the publicity, but if we say anything about them then non-Christians will just use that as anti-Christian propaganda so we have to back them up" - then would you really be surprised that non-Christians got their views of Christianity from the crazy people? Would you not expect other Christians to explain why the Westboro bunch were not representative? Would you not take from their silence that maybe the Westboro lot were in fact closer to how Christians believed?
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But other Christians are willing to say "the Westboro Baptist Church is crazy and we don't believe what they are saying is true". This doesn't happen for trans issues.
Would you know if it does happen? How much time do you spend hanging out with trans activists, how sure are you that your media channels would promote examples of them being reasonable and moderate to your attention? Our media isn't designed for highlighting people being moderate and reasonable in full generality, let alone on adversarial culture war issues.
As someone who does hang out in those spaces some of the time, I can say that there is nothing like consensus among the trans community and trans activists on most of this stuff, denouncing others for making the cause look bad and being extreme/cringe is common, etc. It is true that this happens more within those like-minded spaces than in press releases, I suppose; in the middle of the culture war battle with bills on the ballot in many states, there is a lot of circling the wagons and presenting a unified front. I think Christians had a much more secure position from which to denounce their own members, and used it, which is good. But I don't think it's as completely one-sided as you may think.
Every mainstream Christian was opposed to the WBC, or near enough, and the ones who remember they exist still are. Most of their reasons for opposing them didn’t boil down to ‘they’re making us look bad’.
Can you demonstrate leaders of pro-trans groups, or simply prominent individuals within the community, opposing the fringe weirdos for reasons other than ‘making us look bad’?
WBC wasn't just making Christians look bad, they were actively harassing people and making their lives worse.
I expect I could find trans leaders denouncing, like, actual pedophiles who claim to be trans, or whatever, for that harm.
I don't think it's common for Christian leaders to denounce other Christians merely for being annoying or having bad opinions, which I think (?) is what we're talking about here?
But anyway, this is a bit vague. I'm going to be busy the rest of the week, but if you have a specific trans analogue to WBC you want to ask about ,I can see if I have time to look around.
Ok. What trans leaders have denounced child drag shows on the grounds of ‘kids don’t need to be seeing that’? I genuinely don’t know of any.
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So if mainstream Christians tolerated and supported Westboro in public and refrained from criticizing them, you'd totally give them a pass as long as someone told you that-- trust me bro-- they get an ambiguous amount of pushback somewhere in private that nobody knows about?
I doubt that very much.
If trans activists aren't pushing back at the crazies anywhere that anyone else can hear them, then there's absolutely no reason to exepct anyone else to care. Mumbling about how the media works is just empty excuse-making for the deafening silence.
I can avow that when I was a crabby internet atheist in my teens/20s, I was not exposed to whichever Christians were disavowing the WBC. 'Why won't Christians denounce the WBC' was a big Atheist talking point for years on end.
If you want to have a standard of 'the denouncements have to be big and publicized enough that their opponents hear them and are convinced', then no, Christians didn't meet that standard back then.
I was in that trench, too. I don't share your view of that period. Plenty of Christians condemned WBC, and this was casually disregarded as inauthentic or meaningless because we perceived very little daylight between WBC's stance on homosexuality versus Christianity on the whole. "WBC is disgusting, but at least they're honest" was the kind of thing you'd read (or write yourself) in a lot of those spaces.
Worth remembering that WBC was paid attention to primarily for its protesting of soldiers' funerals - an act that I'm sure you can easily imagine pisses off people of with all sorts of different politics and faiths, including Christians who were against gay marriage! The image of some Jesus-loving Good Ol' Boy passively accepting Phelps and co picketing his dead son's funeral is a bit hard to swallow.
And since we're comparing notes on history - I don't know why anybody should go hunting for the unicorns of consensus-bucking trans spaces when a lot of us here have spent the last 10 years watching their political movement steamroll nearly every forum and platform we used to be part of, and got to see first-hand how these spaces got captured, converted, and degraded. I am not lacking examples of what I see as the default MO of trans and trans-supportive spaces. If somebody wants to show me a trans space that goes against a lot of the current progressive orthodoxies, I'll happily peek at it. But then we will be clear that the thing making their lives harder isn't right-wing bigotry, but a prog-aligned media that doesn't consider them worthy of attention. I think you have a good point that perhaps they are reluctant to criticize their messengers out of fear that it may result in wave of Red Traditionalism crashing over them after tampering with the barricades. But I think if you're already subscribing to that dynamic on anything, it's too late. You're practically a foot soldier, whether you're enthusiastic about it or not.
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Gosh if only someone had come along back then and posted a vague "trust me bro" anecdote about Christians ambiguously denouncing the WBC behind closed doors. That totally would have been a cogent and meaningful response to that particular atheist talking point... right?
I like how you try to make this standard sound unreasonable. Like if everyone were reasonable they'd just ignore the entire public face of the trans activist movement and instead base their perception on your little post about how you totally saw them denounce their crazies in private once.
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Christians saying that the Westboro Baptist Church doesn't speak for them are blatantly obvious about it almost every time it comes up at all. There's no need for me to hang out at a church or a Christian subreddit in order to find out about Christians disclaiming any association with the Westboro Baptists. Why would I have to do something like that for trans activists?
While the media likes to promote controversy, that doesn't explain it. The media reports on the Westboro Baptist Church to stir controversy, but the media also shows Christians calling them a bunch of homophobic nuts. The media doesn't report on the WBC uncritically, nor does the media treat them as just another pressure group, no different from someone calling for farm subsidies.
The media does not behave this way for trans activists. Reasonable trans activists don't appear in the media calling extremist activists nuts, and the extremist activists are treated as perfectly normal, not objects for derision like the WBC.
There's a big difference between the media signal-boosting someone for controversy and signal-boosting someone out of sympathy.
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I've listened in IRL on the clique of trannies, non-binaries, and tranny-hags that infested a local bar's drop-in RPG night. A 3-minute sample got them calling some neighbor of theirs a disgusting bigot, and something to do with freeing palestine. Their games are also fuckawful. It drove all the non-terrible players to come on a different night.
Not exactly damning airtight evidence, just funny that I walk in on them right at that point. They...failed to win me over.
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