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There are. Hello! AMA! (I'm not trans myself, just very, very committed on this issue.)
It depends on what you mean by "bad actors" and "slippery slopes".
When you say "bad actors": are we talking about cis perverts pretending to be trans? About trans women pretending to be be cis women? About trans women who are genuinely trans, insofar as that means anything, but for whom it's more of a sex thing than they admit?
The liar in the breastfeeding story sounds like an example of a genuine bad actor of the second type. Lying bad. Hot take, I know. But that's just it: the problem with that behavior was the lying. The 'taking advantage's of people's sympathy on false pretenses'. The fact that the pervert was lying about biological sex is incidental. An infertile cis woman lying about having lost a child would be just as scandalous, to me. And more to the point, while I haven't been following the story very closely, I don't see what it has in common with the Zizians. They don't seem to be trying to deceive anyone about just who and what they are; as you say, the leader is non-passing. Calling her a "her" isn't a lie, it doesn't obfuscate the facts; no one's walking away thinking she's got a uterus here. Not that it matters.
And as a side-point which I feel is worth mentioning, re: "fulfilling some sort of fantasy to which the women were made non-consenting participants"… I mean, tough. I don't believe in thoughtcrime. Calling the moral brigade because someone somewhere might be having Dirty Thoughts about a woman is rightly derided as one of the worst excesses of a certain brand of feminism: this should apply here too. Yes, being perceived as a sexy woman is a sex thing for some trans women. (Not all of them; I know many trans women who are straight-up asexual. But a good number.) …So? Men aren't asked if they're foot fetishists before they're allowed on beaches where women go barefoot. Women who take men to task for the suspicion that the men are imagining them with their clothes off, even if the men in question don't make a single suggestive remark, are universally viewed as crazy puritans by anyone who doesn't share their neuroses. Let trans women jerk off about being trans women in the privacy of their own home, if they're not being indecent in public it's their own business. The mothers in the Facebook group chat have a perfectly valid grievance about being lied to, but whether the liar's motive was sexual or not in the privacy of their own mind, won't magically change the level of harm if the 'victims' couldn't tell at the time.
Many people find this to be their main sticking point with the pronoun stuff. Not only is somebody lying, they want everyone else to lie too.
I'm aware, but, for a couple of reasons that isn't a position I have a lot of respect for; sorry if the following two-point reply is a bit on the curt side.
First, because it relies on a kind of obtuse definition of "lying" that breaks down completely as soon as you look at, for example, non-binary people. If I'm telling you to call me "ze", there is no sense in which I am telling you to lie about what my junk looks like. "Ze" implies no factual statement about that whatsoever.
Second, because treating that as the genuine crux yields an insane position which only a few contrarians have ever endorsed. Are you seriously saying you're fine with a man getting bottom surgery, breast implants and estrogen shots, renaming himself 'Alice', and wearing dresses - but once he demands to be addressed as 'she', that's where you draw the line? Really? I'm sorry but I just don't believe this could be any serious person's root objection to transgenderism.
Nonbinary people are still either men or women -- he/her. Asking for ze is asking for a lie.
Yes?
None of the other stuff impacts me in the slightest; it's (aspirationally) a free country. "Demands to be addressed as she" is maybe the least sticky of the demands that are being made IRL, but it's still sticky enough.
Only in a very exotic sense that I just can't fathom. No one is asking you to pretend that a single cell in that person's body is arranged differently than you believe it to be. Your beliefs about physical reality are perfectly aligned with the 'ze's. You have a disagreement about social norms but the trans person isn't asking you to lie about what you believe to be the ground-level truth. I brought up the non-binary thing because in the case of e.g. a trans woman, you can kinda sorta argue that you're being asked to act-as-though this person has a vagina, even if you're not being asked to believe that they really physically do. But a non-binary person? There's nothing there.
What if I don't believe in this novel conception of social norms?
What if I asked you to not use any gendered pronouns at all and to use "comrade" instead in every occurence? Would you not have any objection based on your own belief system?
Telling the truth is not limited to truths that pertain to material reality. As it happens.
Not really, no. I would find it cumbersome, and, as a result, I'd probably try and avoid having to talk about you at all. But if I absolutely had to write about you, particularly somewhere you or another comradegender person could see it, I'd honor your request.
In total honesty, I find tolerating that imposition incomprehensible.
Must be a cultural thing.
Right? It wasn't that long ago that asking others to call you by a nickname was cringe. It wasn't that long ago that if your name kind of sucked, people would just choose a different one for you.
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