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Im a little drunk on thanksgiving. Can someone tell me the pope having lunch with transgenders is false.
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1727444933207056730?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
This was low effort. I think a 7-day ban is too much. But this is still something where as a Catholic you would be like what I’m seeing has to be wrong. I will eat it. This isn’t an unworthy culture war post if it fact checks which from Hannania I assumed he did.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries. But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.
But I don't give Christianity a pass. When people tell me that they are Christian, I have pretty much the same reaction as I have when people try to convince me that a trans woman is a real woman. In both cases, I think that their beliefs are ludicrous and deeply irrational.
I don't think this is a fair comparison.
One is an empirical claim about the actual literal nature of reality, the other is a normative semantic claim about how we should draw category boundaries on a word (and cultural/legal/etc category boundaries as a society).
Even if they were both equally silly, one is a mistake about the actual physical nature of reality, the other is just a request to do language and culture differently.
The latter can be dumb but it can't be wrong in the same way.
Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex. That is to say they are claiming to be able to distinguish between the experience of "being a male who correctly thinks they have the internal experience of a female" and "being a male who mistakenly thinks they have the internal experience of being female". This is epistemically impossible as we each only have one experience and cannot triangulate reality.
Hmm? I disagree that self-assessment is the be-all and end-all in gender, you have to pass as the opposite sex, but your analogy doesn't make sense to me.
Consider someone with phantom limb syndrome, say it's present since birth despite them lacking an arm (I know that's not how it works, bear with me). Are they allowed to claim that they are correct in having the sensation of a missing limb? They never had one in the first place. Or more prosaically, someone left-handed and raised right-handed who always felt that something was off, until they learned about dexterity or learned that in many places, it's a benign quirk that is easily accommodated instead of squashed.
I have also heard accounts of children who were raised as the opposite of their phenotypical/genetic sex, be it by an insane mother who wanted a daughter and made one out of her son, or a child with ambiguous genitalia or who had their penis botched around birth and were reshuffled off as female. Quite a few of such cases had the kids rebel against the perceived gender roles they were made to follow, even if that's how they'd been raised.
That's not to say that trans people are all like that, I think autogynephilia and a delusional memetic contagion account for most of it, so I'm arguing with the given reason for your conclusion even if I agree with the conclusion itself, mostly.
If I reduced transness to desire to undertake hormone therapy with no justification needed or given with no further implications what percentage of the trans activist community(or trans community writ large) do you think would sign onto it? What percent do you think would call me a transphobe?
... if you actually intended to allow that and grant legal recognition and full rights and no persecution or mockery? I think most would be fine about it.
The reason for all the more complicated narratives is to try to come up with something that will convince conservatives to give them rights and leave them alone. The gay rights movement went through the same thing with Ellen and 'born that way' and etc., it's all politics.
Legal recognition of what? Which rights are people missing? To go with the gay rights metaphor I was in favor of taking the state out of marriage and building out civil unions to be the state equivalent with no reference to gender. I'm deeply suspicious that what you're implying is you want to use the state to enforce some views you have on gender and sexuality and not just as a meditating body for letting people live peacefully with those who disagree with them.
I'm not talking the modern real world, I'm responding to the hypothetical you're proposing.
Yes, trans people do have most relevant rights today in real-world USA, the world in which they used the tactics I'm outlining (and which I think you're objecting to? Kind of hard to parse) to get them.
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