alt Hacker NewsOne of the trans acceptance movement's main problems comes, as is often the case in politics, from some of its most militant and passionate activists. To put it simply, those extreme activists overreached and annoyed people. That's not the fault of trans people in general, but it explains some of the backlash and the focus on niche cases.
Basically, the activists I'm talking about overreached by:
- Pushing for speech control around preferred pronouns
- Being overrepresented among Reddit mods, thus becoming to some extent the "face of censorship" for many highly online people
- Equating the mere act of disbelieving trans people's chosen gender identities with out-and-out bigotry of the KKK kind
- Talking about a mythical "trans genocide" and getting angry when people questioned its existence
- Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that
Etc.
So what we have now in the highly online discourse is essentially a battle between niche militant trans activists who seem to illogically believe that they are on the brink of being put into extermination camps, on the one hand, and niche militant anti-trans fanatics who exaggerate the relatively rare cases of trans people doing bad things for the sake of pushing an overall anti-left agenda.
The militant trans activists I speak of seemingly just can't stop themselves from continuously providing people who actually hate trans people and people who just hate the left with more and more ammunition by having a prominent online presence while saying a mix of untrue and highly questionable things.
Before anyone jumps in with an angry reaction... yes, if it's not already clear from what I wrote, I also think that the right has a problem with insane deluded militant people.
Replies
> Now, one might say, this is just a matter of basic politeness... why wouldn't you use them?
because enough people don't have any basic politeness left any more, to the contrary, they're actively pissing someone off.
> However, consider the situation if a white coworker started insisting that people refer to him as black, and you could get fired for not referring to him as black.
That one has been a thing for far longer than the entire trans issue, with it peaking in the rise of rap/hiphop music (and leading to the term "whigger" [1]). It eventually sort-of sorted itself once it was no longer edgy to troll people with such moves.
> If we use the common meaning of the word "genocide", the one that is intended the vast majority of the time the word is used, there is no trans genocide.
The common meaning is "a group of people, almost always the national majority, tries to get another group of people extinct". Given that trans youth already have among the highest suicide ratios, it is likely that policies restricting trans youth lead to more trans youth attempting suicide - and guess what, there's proof of exactly this happening [2].
> Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that
Part of that is the ridiculousness in how many bathrooms are built. On festivals (portapotties), airplanes, trains and most if not all toilets for the disabled, there is no such thing as gender segregation at all - you wait in line, enter the next free booth, do your thing and that's it. Pretty much everyone has used a gender-neutral bathroom at least once in their life, chances are high you used one of them in the last 12 months.
There is no reason at all why toilets cannot be converted to "equal designations". I'd even go as far as to say that "equal" bathrooms are safer for everyone, simply because the facility will be higher frequented.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigger
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/09/25/nx...
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“Militant” trans activists? How is just using someone’s pronouns “speech control”? It’s no different than using a name. If trans people tell you who they are, just believe them, it’s not that hard. There’s nothing mythical about the ongoing trans genocide. Genocides don’t just happen in gas chambers.
https://translegislation.com/
I am not going to say much more here because I’m fairly certain none of this will get through to you given the tone of your comment. Trans people are far more likely to be victims in washrooms than to be perpetrators.