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I don't follow. If I want to heavily regulate or ban pediatric gender affirming care, and you point out that the amount of children going through these procedures is small, what does that do to consider the harm done to unrelated parties? Who even are the unrelated parties here? We both seem to be focusing strictly on the children going through gender affirming care. I can understand the disagreement if my claim is that GAC hurts children, and your claim is that it helps them (the usual debate that happens with trans activists), but I don't understand how your "come on, it's just a couple thousand" is supposed to parse as anything other than "it might hurt them, but there's so few of them you shouldn't care".
If you want to say that concerns over children shouldn't limit the rights of adults, I'm mostly with you. I still have plenty to say on the subject, as I don't think the evidence for adult GAC holds up very well either, but I don't think blanket bans are the way to tackle that.
That's a fine principle to follow, but for me it would mean no federal policy at all. Let the states sort it out internally. Some will be restrictive, some will be permissive, and time will tell who was right.
Your approach would just result in kicking the can down the road, and people fighting over what is "biologically impracticable" (Is putting male rapists in female prisons "biologically impracticable"? I mean clearly, it can be done).
I don't disagree, but I resent having a wet blanket thrown on a conversation I care about, when I've just been forced to seriously consider several grievances that felt frivolous to me. As for the reaction causing more harm than good, it's all in the reaction, rather than the issue being overblown. Like I said, I think BLM was frivolous, but body cams were a great idea. This is why the numbers conversation feels like such a deflection, if you're worried about a particular policy being an overkill, I'm sure we could hash one out that will be more acceptable to your classical liberal sentiments. In fact, from everything you're saying it doesn't sound like we even disagree on that much when it comes to policy, which is again why it's so frustrating to get served the numbers argument, and have it implied that it somehow refutes my concerns.
In a perfect world, yes, I'd be happy to let science sort itself out. In the current world science is held hostage to ideology, and political action is part of the self-correcting process you're asking me to trust in, so I feel like I have no other choice than to participate in the politics.
Right, and I'd never demand that from you, but then surely you must understand why I was bemused when asked to answer to some "existential threat" claim that you said was implicit in my position.
That's absolutely fine, it's just the *crickets* bit I took issue with.
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