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Well, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez removed her pronouns from her twitter bio. Does this represent Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability? In addition to her we have a representative from Massachusetts, Seth Moulton facing criticism over expressing sympathy with the anti-trans in women's sports position, and in part blaming the election loss on some of the demands of ideological purity on this issue in particular.
Even Reddit seems to be sensing this shift and top comments are reflecting unease with trans orthodoxy. Even the comments from many Democrat supporters on Reddit seem to be avoiding a full-throated defense of trans orthodoxy and instead blaming Republicans for making an issue out of something that hardly affects anyone.
Is this a sign of things to come? Will they actually move against gender orthodoxy or just make it slightly less visible while pursuing the same policy goals behind the scenes?
Edit: Just wanted to share this clip as well as it seems germane
I've long since lost the reference, but probably 6 years ago I saw some segment on The Hill about a study done by a trans advocacy group. And basically it was a policy document pointing out that putting penises in women only spaces, especially women only spaces with minors, is about the most unpopular policy you can possibly run on. So what needs to happen is that trans friendly politicians need to lie, and then quietly do it anyways. Don't worry, trans friendly advocates in media, and trust and safety teams on social media will cover for you.
No matter what mouth sounds Democrats make, I will never trust them on this subject ever again. And unfortunately for them, until all my children are over 18, it's literally my number one priority. We already live in a world where Democrats sanctioned the state taking kids away from parents, and putting them on a path towards mutilation and sterilization. You don't just get to walk away from that and hope nobody brings up all those children you sterilized.
I really doubt you can find anything from a major politician that supports that claim. This isn't even "making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike", it's just plain making things up.
This is not sufficiently charitable. Specifically,
It's fine to raise questions about source veracity, but if you're going to respond to others, you need to actually be responding to the substance of their posts--not ducking into your motte when they raise points you don't care to substantively address. Actually several of your comments in this thread do the "law of merited impossibility" and "Russell conjugation" thing, where you oscillate between "this isn't happening" and "it's good, actually" while rhetorically re-framing specific concerns. This kind of engagement creates frustration and lowers engagement quality, even though it basically keeps to the rules on tone. If done deliberately and repeatedly, it amounts to a kind of trolling. Please engage with what people are actually saying, rather than substituting your rhetoric for their substantive concerns.
I am responding to what was literally said. They picked the word "mutilation", not me. There is no actual mutilation happening.
If you want to discuss "children are transitioning", we can have a conversation about that. But that's a very different conversation from "children are being mutilated."
Would you really allow this sort of insulting language to fly in the other direction? Can I talk about how conservatives are routinely voting to kill women? Is it fair to say conservatives have once again elected a fascist rapist?
Your response was insufficiently charitable.
First, other people's bad behavior is irrelevant to your own. Second, I already banned WhiningCoil for comments in this thread. If that wasn't enough to stifle your whataboutism, then I don't know what else I could possibly do to assuage your persecution complex.
There are ways to make substantive assertions along these lines, and people often do. But they have to do so within a context of following the rules, which you have failed to do here.
Okay, fair enough. My complaint was entirely that if "child mutilation" was considered acceptably charitable, I think I was more than matching that level of charity. If we're in agreement that "child mutilation" is an insulting and deeply uncharitable description, then my objection is pretty well resolved.
I do think I've been consistent in my stance: SRS is a surgery like any other, and calling it "mutilation" is ridiculous hyperbole. Calling it "child mutilation" is doubly ridiculous, since as far as I know, kids under 18 genuinely are not having surgery. I'm not saying kids don't transition, I'm saying they don't get surgery under 18, and that it's not mutilation.
If someone really has a source for SRS being common in kids, I'd love to see it. I've tried to find numbers, and basically every source has said "low enough to basically round off to zero."
I agree that "mutilation" can be unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric. I would stop short of calling it inflammatory per se, however. Referring to the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes as "mutilation" seems like a supportable framing, but context and charity matter.
That can be your stance, but you aren't entitled to its adoption by others. Many humans object to cosmetic surgery generally, and those kinds of surgeries do not usually interfere with bodily functioning. Interfering with bodily function seems to raise the stakes. "Mutilation" may be ridiculous hyperbole in some contexts, but it does not seem per se to be so.
The main reason I am replying to you again, here, is that you still don't seem to have grasped where you went wrong in the first place. WhiningCoil did not say "children are being mutilated," but rather that children were being put "on a path towards mutilation and sterilization." You cannot charitably read this to say "children are being mutilated," but rather "children are being channeled toward life outcomes that eventually include sterilization and the removal of healthy organs." Demanding evidence of children having functional tissue removed for aesthetic purposes is failing to address what WhiningCoil actually said, and hence a rules violation.
(For whatever it's worth, "gender affirming mastectomies" clearly involve the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes, and do not appear to be terribly rare in adolescents aged 12-17. If someone were to call that "child mutilation" I would probably need to spend some time weighing whether I regarded the rest of the comment as inflammatory, "boo outgroup," or otherwise rules-violating, but that characterization of the data in isolation does not look like a per se rules violation to me.)
Referring to a major medical condition as "aesthetic purposes" also seems pretty uncharitable.
I disagree. A lot of posters here are in fact doubling down on "actual under 18 children ARE having surgeries". "Children are on the path to making a consenting decision, as a legal adult" really lacks the same oomph, but it would be a lot more honest if that's really what you meant to convey.
When people talk about tobacco companies putting kids on the path to a lifelong smoking addiction, I don't think they mean "kids might take up smoking when they turn 18." They're worried that actual kids are actually smoking cigarettes, right now, as kids.
To quote the source: "A total of 209 patients underwent gender-affirming mastectomy between January 1, 2013 and July 31, 2020."
That's 30 people a year. Out of 150,000 trans adolescents, and, what, 25 million adolescents overall. So literally one in a million. I'll admit that's a lot more than I thought, but it's still incredibly, vanishingly rare. Those are exceptional cases, and I'd be extremely shocked to learn that a single one of those was done without parental consent.
I did say "low enough to basically round off to zero", in case you want to argue this is somehow moving the goalposts. I dare say 0.0001% rounds off to zero. Even 209 patients over 150k trans kids gives us 0.1%. So even given your kid is trans, this is still a vanishingly small subset of the discussion.
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