WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
Well, that's one thing. What I'm saying is that there's no consensus on equating personal detransition with questioning the overall construct. There are trans spaces where even "I thought that I was trans but I'm not" is viewed with suspicion, but equally, there are many where it's viewed as a perfectly valid thing to say, so long as it doesn't entail doubting other people.
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
yet by the standards of the leftist community, bringing up desistance or detransition is itself transphobic
Not all of us. The sentiment is sadly common, but I wouldn't call it a consensus, there's very much an alternative, more positive viewpoint floating around - e.g. the whole "Cis+" concept.
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
Well, I don't think mainstream Blues in America have "we should make all Christians renounce the faith and ban indoctrinating children into Christianity" as an explicit or even implicit goal in the way that a lot of mainstream Reds would proudly endorse "we should make all transgenders detransition and ban indoctrinating children into questioning their gender" as reflective of their agenda and beliefs. And as I said, I think that such large-scale policies are much better grounding for a cultural-genocide claims that acts of individual violence - i.e. whatever degree of validity the "trans genocide" case enjoys, it rests on the existence of political will towards dissolving trans identity, not on anecdotal claims of thugs beating people up.
But certainly, to the extent that policies intended to erase Christians as a cultural identity exist, there is a valid case that they would fit the bill of "cultural genocide" as leftist theory defines it. For example, I think that to the extent that the application of "genocide" to crimes that aren't literal mass murder is ever reasonable, it's reasonable to call Muslim jihadis genocidal even if they ideally want to forcibly convert all infidels rather than slaughter them.
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
My understanding is that defendants have tried to use it, although it's not actually been used to successfully get away with murder in the way activists have tried to claim. If there were actually idiots with one Jewish great-great-grandmother who tried to get off on a religious-freedom technicality by repeating the blood libel, I think most actual Jews would be in favor of banning that line of argument, whether or not any judges had ever bought it. I agree things would be different if the defense only existed as a paranoid trans fantasy, but that doesn't seem to be true.
Similarly, I wouldn't say "the trans genocide is overblown", I'd say "the trans genocide is fictitious".
Better to say, I think, that the trans genocide is a motte-and-bailey. What queer theorists mean when they discuss "trans genocide" among themselves is rarely anything to do with the murder rate - the actual analogy is to residential schools, not Auschwitz; cultural genocide, forced assimilation and reeducation, an attempt to stamp out trans as an identity. I think it's hard to argue that this isn't happening, given that a majority of conservatives on and off this forum would openly advocate for it. There's just a root disagreement about whether it's actually a bad thing or not.
(There's also a terminological dispute about whether it's ever appropriate to use "genocide" to talk about processes that don't involve literal mass murder, or if that's always, inherently, motte-and-bailey. I can see both sides of that argument, but I don't think we should over-focus on it in the trans case, because advocates of the "trans genocide" terminology are ultimately just drawing on what is, as per the Wikipedia link, a widespread use of the term in their intellectual milieu. They're doing a separate disingenuous thing when they try to bring up the sloppy statistics to justify the trans-genocide thing, deliberately blurring the line between genocide-as-murder and genocide-as-assimilation more than they need to.)
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
Do you mean that the relevant states banned a defense that no one had actually used? Or a defense that had never been successful? If the latter, I still think it makes sense to ban it even if it hadn't historically bought its claimants as much leniency as the activists claim. More sense, even. No more time should be wasted on a legal strategy that rests on mistaken assumptions and doesn't even work. (See also "the Devil made me do it".)
As ever, misleading hyperbole is a tempting Faustian bargain when you're dealing with a problem that is widespread but not intense enough to spark much outrage if you stick to the facts. The same thing happened with rape-culture discourse - the real problem that made activists' blood boil was the staggering number of women who get socially pressured into sex they didn't really want, but calling that out for what it is is difficult without sounding either mealy-mouthed and unconvincing, or hysterical and overreacting. So they gesture at an epidemic of violent rape that just didn't exist to the degree they needed to, in an attempt to reconcile public feeling to how unbearable things felt to them.
I think this is exactly the devil's bargain trans activism has struck with these laughable statistical manipulations - trans people feel unsafe in a generalized, exhausting way, but by any rational accounting, outside of specific circumstances like sex work or prison, most of what they're feeling is inchoate intimidation, not an ongoing bloodbath. So people don't care and they feel they "have" to doll up the story in lurid claims about murder rates to get their emotional pain taken seriously. If it bleeds, it leads.
Unrelated:
Various US states have passed laws banning defendants from using the "trans panic" defense (i.e. the defendant was so shocked upon discovering that an object of their sexual desire was transgender that they lost control of their faculties) in murder trials, under the historically dubious claim that this defense has resulted in vastly reduced sentences or even outright acquittals.
I am a little confused as to how this fits into your argument. Surely this is a sound legal decision in the world where transphobic hate crimes aren't meaningfully a thing (so murderers shouldn't get to appeal to a supposed widespread, sympathetic understanding of "who among us would not feel compelled to strangle a tranny if we saw one up close?", because it's not true), just as it is in the world where transphobic hate crimes are widespread (and are thus a plague that needs to be stymyed by throwing the book at bigots).
WandererintheWilderness
22d ago
Granted, and I think many more still might just make a doomed attempt to make everyone get along, one big family Thanksgiving dinner that never ends. My point is just that a liberal woman having a rule against dating conservative men isn't necessarily purely about personal preferences/purity standards; it can be a practical matter on a level with "I have three cats, swipe left if you're allergic".
WandererintheWilderness
23d ago
I think this depends on the woman's social circle and what kind of behavior "conservative opinions" entail. If you have enough queer friends then you just can't be in a long-lasting relationship with someone with anti-LGBT views, for example - something's got to give.
WandererintheWilderness
24d ago
While I can sympathize with the plight of men who want children more than they want romance, I object in the strongest possible terms to a dichotomy that writes off love as a Disneyan fantasy and otherwise irrelevant. It is in fact perfectly reasonable to want one's romantic partner in one's life primarily because one is deeply in love with them. Being deeply in love with someone is indeed fun and wonderful - for men and women alike. And if what you're looking for is such a relationship, rather than a transactional arrangement geared towards child-rearing, then it is perfectly reasonable to reject a partner who is offering the latter and uninterested in the former. This isn't a gendered thing - it's the same reason men are afraid of their wives turning out to be gold-diggers. They don't regard themselves as buying sex and kids for a fair price (in which scenario "wife" and "gold-digger" would be synonymous), they want to be married to someone who loves them.
WandererintheWilderness
25d ago
Having good intentions and believing their policies are especially good are not necessarily the same thing. They may believe, for example, that they're doing good simply by holding a given office, taking up space that could have gone to that bastard who ran against them.
WandererintheWilderness
28d ago
Not me I would think, except insofar as some would object to me being here at all. But abstracting that fact away, I don't think so.
You say "but", but I didn't intend my comment to take a position one way or the other on whether the feeling of intimidation is justified - merely to put forward an explanation for why they feel compelled to engage in these statistical misrepresentations, other than cackling machiavellianism.
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