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I'll grant you diversity quotas as a culture war topic the left is actively pushing on... but from my perspective the abortion and trans rights issues look entirely defensive from the left. The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade and wants trans people to be left alone. The right is the side making those into culture war issues, not the left.
Just say you want this and stop the equivocation and gaslighting. https://twitter.com/TheLaurenChen/status/1543405646049058816
And don't you fucking dare pretend it's "defense" to push this shit.
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By their revealed preferences, they do not; they knew it was going to get repealed in that leaked decision and they did nothing, and then it was repealed and they still did nothing.
If they cared that much, I would have expected a bill on the floor of the House the next day- but they didn't even bother to even do that. It's not like they're incapable of throwing together a law quickly; after all, they do that for assault weapons bans at every opportunity- so they must not value it that much. (That said, the ruling by and large didn't affect the people agitating for abortion rights.)
There was nothing stopping a Blue state from making their abortion laws even more liberal than they were in the RvW times. You can certainly argue "the right is imposing its standards on us" in the context of, say, Bruen (imposing gun rights on Blue states), but not so much for this.
I definitely saw social media comments on the left annoyed at this... but also, this is all about noisemaking, not policy. No one was under any illusion that such a bill would pass the Senate, so it's just a question of whether it was good politics to force a (virtual filibuster) vote in the Senate. Maybe the Democratic Party made a tactical error by not forcing a vote (i.e. maybe making Republican senators commit to their abortion views would have been bad for them in the midterms... but I'm guessing the Democrats would have held the vote if they believed that), but they lacked the power to pass a bill so it seems strange to blame them for not doing so.
Hence why I brought up the gun bills; they still present them even if the same thing would happen (passes House, stalls Senate). Just because it's (locally) bad politics doesn't mean they're not going to do it anyway; this is true to an extent for the Republicans winning the abortion battle in the first place, if you believe the pundits.
Interestingly, the only thing that makes sense here (and their failure over the past 40+ years to actually back up abortion rights with legislation) is that making Democrat politicians commit to their abortion views would be bad for them. But then again, this makes sense if you assume the left's distance from "center" is larger than it is for the right's.
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Does it really? Can you really look people in the eyes who've been ordered to put pronouns in their bios and stop using the word "mother", and say that you are just defending yourself against them?
Tell me, do you keep a diary of your political goals and beliefs? I think it would be very interesting to see how it evolves over time as the Overton window in your head is shifted by party doctrine.
Banned for a day. You've been told repeatedly to knock this shit off.
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I don't like lying to my face. They don't want trans people left alone, they want them brought front and center, celebrated and glorified, shoved in my face relentlessly. If only I could simply leave them alone, but no, that hasn't been the case for years.
The left took the W from Obergefell v Hodges, then immediately escalated and moved on to the next fight, which was the T. This is the culture war of leftist aggression.
The slippery slope has proven to be prophecy, not fallacy.
Don't accuse people of lying unless you can prove they are lying. (Hint: unless you can read minds, you probably can't.)
@token_progressive may be demonstrating exactly what @hanikrummihundursvin is talking about (and man, it is not often that I agree with him...), that he is a fish who doesn't recognize what water is, but that indicates a difference in perception, not dishonesty.
Talking about how we genuinely see things differently, even if you literally can't believe that someone else sees things the way they say they do, is what the Motte is for. Calling people liars because they see things differently than you and you don't believe it is not.
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And I might even have believed that, were it not for things like the Kermit Gosnell case, and now the whole "Drag Story Hours" rubbish. Are trans people disproportionately represented in modern drag is a theoretical discussion I have no idea about. But taking primary school children to drag shows for some nebulous notion of "allyship" or even worse is stupid. If anyone suggested "let's bring kids to strip clubs because sex work is real work" then they'd be pilloried. "Let's bring kids along to a club with signs like this in the background, but oh no it's nothing sexually-tinged at all, how dare you say that you bigot" is the new orthodoxy.
And then we get stupid, stupid clashes like antifa versus Proud Boys because both sides want an excuse for a rumble, and some UU church was dumb enough to provide them with one.
So "the left just wants trans people to be left alone" is not going to wash anymore.
Don't give anyone ideas.
If I left this comment at that, I'd have to mod myself for low effort, so to expand on this: among the things that have nudged me further into sympathy, if not allyship, with the right, is the speed at which drag shows - which have always been explicitly sexual events, the whole point is for men who like to dress as women and act slutty to parody and exaggerate female sexuality - have been relabeled as "family-friendly" events that are intended to show children the beautiful rainbow of diverse gender expressions. Like, no, everyone knew until a minute ago that a drag show was meant as adult entertainment. The fact that a child too young to know much about sexuality or "gender expression" just sees a man dressed as a lady clown doesn't mean it's children's entertainment.
And I'm not even addressing the sexuality of drag show participants, because it doesn't matter if all or most of them are gay or trans or just straight men who like dressing as women or whatever. Their costumes, their dances, their displays, are very obviously sexualized. I would have qualms but not severe apprehension about a drag queen just going into a library and reading books to children who only see a pretty clown, but apparently sometimes they do the routines too. This really pushes it over the edge for me: I definitely do not think most drag queens are groomers, but I do suspect some groomers are drag queens.
Right now, if you suggested taking children to a strip club to show them that sex work is real work, yeah, you'd get pilloried. But if I were, say, the leftist accelerationist groomer out of right-wing nightmares who actually wanted to achieve that, I do not have a hard time imagining a campaign to first introduce strippers and the concept of sex work as legitimate and worthy of respect, and then some strip club putting together a very cleaned-up version of a strip show (no actual exposure of R-rated parts) for kids, who just see a pretty lady dancing in swimwear, and that being pushed as a family-friendly event. (I mean, pole-dancing is now marketed as a kind of aerobic exercise and you can buy pole-dancing kits for children, ffs.)
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Only in the "cries out in pain as he strikes you" sense, holy cow.
It's really interesting that you simultaneously suggest that "the left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade," (nevermind that was imposed by SCOTUS and not anything like the result of a legislative process where all citizens had their say) because when it comes down to it the right wants the "status quo" of people with penises and Y chromosomes to have separate bathrooms, prisons, sports teams, and certain other facilities from people with uteruses and lacking Y chromosomes.
And definitely prefers the status quo where it doesn't matter what the person claims to identify as, the term 'man' and 'woman' has an easily verifiable component that isn't subject to the individual's personal preference. And that, on it's face, is entirely compatible with trans people being 'left alone.'
If trans people 'just want to be left alone' that message REALLY hasn't gotten through to the actual left.
Why else are, among other things, the existence of a biological male competing against biological females and unsurprisingly dominating the sport supposed to be celebrated as an achievement, even if this ruins the competition for biological females?
In what sense does this gel with trans people being 'left alone,' if it imposes on people who are trying to compete on something like a fair playing field?
Because blanketing a whole town with flags that represents your identity is almost fundamentally opposed to the concept of 'being left alone.' By this very act you are demanding people confront, acknowledge, accept, and support your particular beliefs. In so doing, you are requiring them pay attention, which is the opposite of leaving you alone.
Similarly when you make biological females wax your penis. That's not 'wanting to be left alone.' Nor is insisting to be allowed into a women's changing room with pubescent females. If this isn't some version of culture warring, then what is it?
You don't get to call it 'defensive' and then literally threaten to take people's kids away for failure to comply with your beliefs.
Or appoint openly trans officials to high ranking federal government positions seemingly only on the basis of their trans identity. This is not behavior that implies a desire to be 'left alone.' It is being openly stated there:
What is 'the faith' in this case?
"Just want to be left alone" but if you disagree with them, people at the very highest levels of government are ready to come for you.
I don't know that you're even arguing in good faith, but assuming you are, please put forward a plausible narrative of the last twenty years in which the right is the side that pushed trans issues to the forefront of public conciousness as a culture war issue.
I think this is a major part of the disagreement. Genetic testing for Y chromosomes is not exactly something done often. Literally checking people's genitals to determine which sex-segregated group they belong in as opposed to relying on appearance of secondary characteristics which can be faked with varying levels of success (generally much easier for trans men than trans women, the latter usually requiring some amount of surgery to pull off) or just trusting their identification or (possibly faked) documents also seems like an escalation.
Yes, this is why one designs laws that punish defectors who manage to evade detection, since we choose NOT to adopt more intrusive measures and trust people to follow generally accepted social edicts. You're just quibbling about the enforcement mechanism, not the validity of the norm it enforces.
A trans person who wants to be 'left alone' need only choose the bathroom or facility that corresponds to their biological sex and I daresay they will be left alone. Maybe they're a bit offput because social norms aren't 'accepting' their identity, but we COULD have a discussion to weigh the costs/benefits of accepting their identity vs. enforcing said norms.
But we HAVEN'T had that discussion and at present CAN'T have that discussion because even attempting it will get you literally banned from most social media sites. And that's not the right doing the banning.
But you'll have a hard time convincing me that the left is willing to cede any ground on this debate.
Prisons, of all places, are CERTAINLY capable of checking people's genitals before admission, and yet:
https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/transgender-rikers-inmate-gets-7-years-for-raping-female-prisoner/
If the left is incapable of even admitting that there exist valid reasons to keep people born with penises out of facilities delegated specifically for people who menstruate (I don't know what the most up-to-date prog terms are and don't care enough to check) then THEY are the source of the disagreement here.
But then again, if they admit to such valid reasons, this pretty much unravels the entire "your gender identity is what you believe and say it is!" logic.
Back a few years ago I saw multiple social media posts along the lines of this selfie of a trans man in a woman's restroom with a caption asserting the absurdity of that belief. Following the hashtags in that tweet finds some similar ones (although mostly a lot of screenshots of that one as far as I can tell).
Again, you're just quibbling about the enforcement mechanism, not the validity of the norm it enforces.
Do you think there are valid reasons for the social norm of penis-havers and people of menstruation being assigned separate lavatory facilities?
Why should the extant status quo be altered?
Just to be clear, you're asserting that the person in the photo I linked should indeed use the women's bathroom? And you expect that to be the popular (or at least red tribe) consensus?
I'm rejecting the claim that that was ever the actual status quo.
I have one of those for you too. According to your rules, which bathroom should this person use:
https://twitter.com/pic/media%2FFi6TZG1XEBIcEvu.jpg%3Fname%3Dsmall
That link is broken for me, it just says "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.". Maybe try linking to the tweet instead of the image from the tweet? Or doing a Google Image search on the image to see if you can find it hosted elsewhere.
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I do not assert that. I dare you to show me where I asserted or implied that.
MY assertion is that the entity that owns the property in question can set up it's bathrooms however it likes and have whatever policy regarding gendered usage they care to, and it's up to them to enforce such policies. I think passing laws regarding bathroom usage on private property is actively stupid and detrimental in the vast majority of cases.
However I think there are simple and logical reasons to have gender-segregated lavatories, which are mostly related to the comfort of the females, especially females accompanied by children.
I think similar reasons apply even more starkly in, e.g. women's sports and in prisons (and I am not a fan of the whole concept of prisons, either). Bathrooms are just the ur-example that tends to impact everyone.
I'm rejecting the claim that the right is the side that brought this matter to the forefront of the culture war. I'm claiming that the left deliberately pivoted to and advanced the transgender rights cause immediately after achieving victory on the same-sex marriage matter in mid-2015.
So what, then, do you believe the 'status quo' on this issue was prior to 2015? As I asked at the outset, what narrative of the last 20 years do you think shows the right pushing these issues and the left merely defending?
Accepted. I conceded this point to you in a different reply to you in this thread where you provided evidence for it.
I made some attempt at answering this in a reply to someone else in this thread.
I apologize for the misunderstanding. I did not mean to put words into your mouth. The position you assert does not appear to be a popular one, so going further would be delving into your personal position, which is unlikely to shine much light on the greater culture war.
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Yes. That proves we used have a high trust society, where people expected everyone to follow the rules without having to be verified, not that we as a society used to believe in the concept of "gender identity", by which we decided to segregate our bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, and prisons.
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I think the majority of trans people probably do want to just be left alone. But the loudmouth activists, and the mentally ill, have captured the microphone and are the ones getting all the publicity, and then you have the cis 'allies' who want to be patted on the head as one of the Good Ones who are marching right alongside them in the increasingly bananas demands.
To me, this is what should be front and center in any discussion about trans issues or more broadly the culture war. The so-called "pro-trans" activists have absolutely no credibility when it comes to representing what trans people actually want. They didn't take a poll of all trans people, they didn't win an election held by trans people, they didn't even take some survey of a randomly selected distribution of trans people. As it is now, none of these things might even be possible, since we don't have some Great List of All Trans People that we can refer to.
It's just some people, some of them trans, claimed really loudly that the things they want are the things that are good for trans people. This isn't "pro-trans" in any meaningful way, and neither is opposing them "anti-trans" in any meaningful way.
So maybe a majority of trans people just want to be left alone. We have no way of knowing. What we do know is that there's no reason to believe that what any activist says has any sort of relationship to what the majority of trans people want.
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Most likely. But that position blows up the claim that its the right who opened up this particular culture war front.
The left, once they won on same-sex marriage pivoted to this specific battle and pushed it forward with aplomb, anything the right did was directly in response to that.
The left pushed it forward? To my memory, the North Carolina "bathroom bill" was what pushed the trans rights discussion to the national stage. You apparently remember things differently? Wikipedia does mention various events leading up to the passage of that bill.
Yes, it is right there in your link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Facilities_Privacy_%26_Security_Act#Background_and_passage
The right was responding to a direct action the left took in favor of removing the status quo.
"Oh, but the right escalated it!"
Okay. Remember what happened after that?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/13/obama-public-schools-transgender-access-restrooms
Or is it ONLY an escalation when the right does it?
But let's wind back the clock a bit further:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-quiet-transgender-revolution/2015/11/30/6879527e-95e4-11e5-b5e4-279b4501e8a6_story.html
Obama being the same guy who ran on the concept of marriage being between a man and a woman then oversaw the enshrinement of same-sex marriage into the constitution. Remember?
You notice that the left isn't HIDING the fact that it is pushing this agenda? Indeed, celebrating it? Back in late 2015?
Obama wasn't doing all this stuff in response to the right attacking transgender persons or passing laws that oppressed transgenders in particular.
He was doing it because, as mentioned, THE LEFT IMMEDIATELY PIVOTED FROM SAME SEX MARRIAGE TO TRANSGENDER RIGHTS. As stated multiple times now.
This is a basic fact that I am pretty convinced on, and you've presented no evidence to change my mind.
Indeed, it looks like the left was planning all along on this tactic, and what we're seeing now is simply the continuation of their long-term strategy.
Thanks for the reference. That answers my question by providing actual evidence that the political discussion of trans rights in the past ~decade was in fact not an out-of-the-blue move by the right.
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The original pushing forward of LGBT issues was actually still done with gay rights, when they sued that Colorado bakery, and we went from "just leave us alone" to "bake the cake, bigot".
As for trans issues, was the enstunnening and enbravening of Caitlyn Jenner before or after the bathroom bill?
Quoting Wikipedia:
The NC bathroom bill passed March 23, 2016. The Wikipedia article claims it was in response to a Charlotte city ordinance passed February 22, 2016. Both of those dates are after April 2015, so I guess Caitlyn Jenner coming out as trans was first.
(I honestly did not know who Caitlyn Jenner was past "famous trans woman" until looking up the Wikipedia article to make this post.)
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I mean, have you tried getting anything through to Twitter activists? They will call LGBT people bigots just as easily as straight white men for disagreeing with the agenda. In short, I agree, but I'm not sure we chill trans people can do much about it.
I will say there's a few concessions I'd really like, such as having gender neutral cubicles available as standard (often there's a disabled bathroom that works for that, but also often not).
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A lot of people have already given the Red Tribe arguments, but I think there's a more complex underlying one that's easy to miss.
This morning, literally, I had a discussion about whether overheard joking or misunderstood naming or pronouns applied against a trans person (in this case, trans male, but I've had the awkward 'you know she used to be a he' version before from a guy who apparently thought I was very clueless) could be unlawful harassment. It's not wrong, either as a matter of law or a matter of policy.
And yet, it's hard to understate how much of a change this is from even local Blue Tribe norms less than ten years ago! I'd had similar conversations in deep Blue Tribe LGBT-friendly spaces at that time, but the equivalents were over things like when and how it becomes appropriate to handle pronouns without risking involuntarily outing someone. There was interest in passing something like GENDA, but it was far from an obvious and certain thing. Even in LGB-specific spaces, trans men are pretty new to a lot of people's radars.
That's not to say that makes the novel standards wrong. But they are, to a very large part of society, both novel and potentially ruinous to violate, while also completely unknown to one side and wildly obvious to the other. I don't think people understand the extent this make the 'defensive vs' offensive' framework even less useful than it might otherwise be.
Women secretly passing as men is a common literary trope partially because there are multiple instances of it happening historically. How many of those would identify as trans men by today's definitions is impossible to know (probably some, certainly not all?). But all of them would have expected to be treated as their identified, not birth, gender.
That said, putting trans people on people's radars is exactly what the left is accusing the right of here. Until the right started making noise (and laws) about which bathrooms people were using, it wasn't something people were paying attention to, so trans people were often able to fly under the radar.
This seems like reversing cause and effect to me. Isn't it quite likely a more accurate explanation that people simply noticed some odd presences in their bathrooms, that those who objected to them were the only people who had any reason to "mak[e] noise" about it, and that those people by implicit virtue of objecting to them automatically became right-sorted on the issue (even if they're perhaps otherwise fairly centrist (or even left-wing, those exist) or politically apathetic)?
Your version implies that, for example, the classic image of the "MtF" aspiring transsexual who looks, in terms of the general strength and direction of their biological secondary sex characteristics, somewhat like "Macho Man" Randy Savage in a dress (and though this obviously isn't all of them, they absolutely do exist and in many cases the volume of their behavior matches that of their appearance) was just hanging out in women's bathrooms with nobody the wiser or concerned until some dedicated, already dyed-in-the-wool right-wingers (like I'm imagining a MAGA cap-wearing "bathroom patrol" clothed in all red, not that I imagine that you meant to imply something quite so strawmannish) started "making noise" about it. Even a heavily toned down version of that doesn't seem realistic to me.
Do I think that your Average Joe who wasn't personally affected by the issue was paying attention to it? No, as they rarely do to any issue other than to maybe drop a quick virtue signal about the designated cause of the week. But it wouldn't have been something that "noise" was fit to be made about unless actual real people were affected by it. I guess what I'm trying to say that is that right-wingers by no means invented the inherent weirdness and discomfort for many people of certain gender/sex presentations and characteristics showing up in contexts where they traditionally had never and that "noise" almost certainly would have been made about it in any case. (I certainly remember much "noise" being made about it before any laws regarding the subject were even proposed much less passed.)
People were going to notice if they had seen so much as more women with prominent Adam's apples in their bathrooms (and even left-wingers probably would have "ma[de] noise" about this if they hadn't been given the appropriate ideological mandates), much less the more extreme retention of masculine secondary sex characteristics by many feminine-identifying aspiring transsexuals. You can stop many people from declaring their findings out loud, but, at least for now, you can't stop most of them from simply noticing (in the unofficially illegal sense) themselves.
There's a gradient here between more and less gender-non-conforming (to be clear, I mean identified gender, not sex-assigned-at-birth; I am intentionally not using "trans" here because gender-non-conforming cis people are also affected). I expect that more gender-non-conforming people have always had trouble in gender-segregated spaces while only moderately/lesser gender-non-conforming people may have been more likely to go unnoticed. The recent culture war over the issue means some people are a lot more aware of looking for gender-non-conforming people and therefore noticing ones that are only slightly gender-non-conforming that would have gone unremarked on before.
The question is who made the first attempt to move the Chesterton's fence of what level of gender-non-conformance is acceptable in gender segregated spaces. I had pointed to the North Carolina bathroom bill, but there was apparently a year or so of lead-up involving the left winning court cases and making rules at various legal levels that that was in response to. Of course, with court cases, it can be difficult to determine the aggressor (e.g. was it an intentionally set up test case), but it looks like the left started it, not the right.
That's just like if a few high-profile heists make shopkeepers more alert and thus more likely to detect petty shoplifting though. Nobody's fundamental values have been changed.
That is, similarly to how there's never been a "Chesterton's fence" among shopkeepers declaring any amount of shoplifting acceptable (as opposed to simply too financially trivial and difficult to detect to be worth worrying about), I don't think there was ever any "Chesterton's fence" declaring any level of "gender-non-conformance" in regards to not belonging to the biological sex conventionally associated with a particular space acceptable. (Meaning I don't think there was ever any point at which people who objected to the more extreme cases of highly visible biological males in spaces generally reserved for biological females accepted the less visible ones, just that, like petty shoplifters, they weren't worth trying to detect because the overall general risk of having any biological male in such a space was seen as lower.)
So unless you deny people's rights to those values/boundaries, a positive service has been performed in increasing their vigilance in enforcing those values/boundaries.
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There's a darkly humorous irony there. Transmen hitting the point where they're completely ignored and no one acknowledges their existence is a big sign that they've made it and are passing. Welcome to manhood, brother, no one gives a fuck, have a beer and deal with it.
Ah, sorry, that is the case to some limited extent in a few subcultures now -- furry treatment of the topic isn't great, but it's closer to the 'have a beer and deal with it' than anything else -- the post I'm linking to is more about a period where it was not really understood as a possibility, even for people who did not pass and were recognized. There were some places that were aware enough: eg, Norah Vincent's Self Made Man is further complicated by her own politics, but recognized the possibility of a "man trapped in the wrong body", as did some NPR interviews with her. But a lot of places could and did just treat as butch female, and not in a 'just one of the guys' tomboys extent even then.
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There's a "funny" corollary to that with detransitioners, where everybody's focused on the harm done to FtMtFs, while MtFtM's tend to get the "have a beer and deal with it" treatment.
This is somewhat justified with FtMs being the majority of trans people, but given their invisibility while trans, your theory is probably more likely to be correct.
FtMs are the majority? Maybe recently but historically the ratio is 10:1 in favour of MtFs
Yes. They now outnumber MtF 3:1. The recent flip in age and gender ratios, combined with the exponential increase in referrals, is one of the big arguments for the social contagion theory.
Wow that’s a crazy reversal. Probably the largest and quickest in the history of psychiatry
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Obligatory Norah Vincent reference.
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It is not.
It is not defensive to tell confused teenagers that they might be trans, hide any concerns from their parents and then push them into the pipeline, where they're quickly given hormones, hormone blockers without any serious evaluation.
It is not defensive to redefine asking confused people whether they're sure they want to undergo irreversible medical procedures as 'conversion therapy', which, in case you don't remember was trying to condition homosexuals with aversive stimuli so they'd stop being same-sex attracted.
The clockwork orange treatment. Didn't really work to no one's surprise.
All without proper psychiatric evaluations or any sensible measures that are standard in somewhat well-run countries such as Finland or Sweden.
It does seem all the PR efforts have paid off. I'd feel pity about all the female to 'male' types who get into this.
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People have already addressed the trans issue, so I'll tackle the Roe v. Wade one. With regards to abortion rights, the right views the "status quo ante" of Roe v. Wade as being premised on illegitimate grounds and essentially sees it as a form of imperialism where liberals are imposing policies they want on largely conservative states that would otherwise not adopt them. I think this view has merit, given that Roe v. Wade was quite honestly a bad ruling with the flimsiest of rationalisations offered up to justify overriding state autonomy on the issue, and so the right likely views what they've done to overturn it as defensive action on their part (returning things to how they should be). They probably identify the moment Roe v. Wade was decided as the attack, and I don't think they're wrong.
I'm not actually very strongly opinionated about abortion myself and I think it is a complex issue with a lot of moral greyness involved. But it seems to me that the pro-democracy move here is to allow states more decision-making power on the topic of abortion, and it's fairly easy to see that the left's position on this is "It's perfectly okay for the Supreme Court to explicitly misconstrue the U.S. Constitution and pretend it protects an activity that it clearly does not - if we think it is for a good cause".
Not just the Right, frankly.
Legal theorists on the other side have criticized the grounds for Roe.
The difference is that the Left obviously has a pragmatic incentive to maintain it and many feel like the outcome was right, if not the reasoning.
No reason why a conservative would adopt that position so, to them, the problems are disqualifying.
Certainly it's just an empirical fact that Roe wiped out a bunch of anti-abortion laws across dozens of states. The fact that it took this long for the GOP to respond effectively doesn't mean that that wasn't an attack. If you are defensive only insofar as you've pulled off a Pearl Harbor-like legal coup, you're not really defensive imo.
Seems like an entirely arbitrary place to draw the starting line.
You should be telling the OP that, not the users providing arguments as to why the OP's starting line is flawed. The OP was claiming "The left is defending against conservative attempts to attack Roe v. Wade" when in fact the right-wing attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade can be seen as a defence against a very questionable attempt by the left to impose their preferred policy decisions on states which would not otherwise have adopted them.
The left doesn't get to claim "I'm defending against an attack" when the act that they are purportedly defending against is, in and of itself, an attempt at defence against something that was initially done by the left. You might be able to push the starting line back further and place conservatives as the first stone-thrower if you could prove that 1: before Roe v. Wade conservatives were imposing their preferences regarding abortion on liberal states or something along those lines, and 2: Roe v. Wade was a leftist attempt to defend against this somehow, but you'd actually have to convincingly make your case instead of simply claiming that Tanista's argument is an arbitrary one.
And Roe v. Wade can be seen as a defence against attempts by the right to impose their preferred policy decisions on women who would not otherwise have adopted them.
Okay, I thought this was so obvious it didn't require explanation, but clearly it does. You are coming at this from a specific moral standpoint and presupposing that the liberal position on abortion should be treated as an assumed default, but I see no reason why it should be treated as such. Conservatives would tell you that abortion is not a right at all, since actions that infringe on other people's rights do not qualify, and that abortion itself is in and of itself an unjust and costly imposition of one's will on another that they want to prevent since it allows someone to strip the developing human of life and limb when they are helpless to do anything about it. Legalising abortion is as offensive to the conservative moral sensibility as banning it is to the liberal's, the two views are irreconcilable and it's likely that you will not get a consensus on it because of the complexity of the issue.
Yet, it is interesting that we have a situation where liberals have on very shaky grounds tried to circumvent the state-by-state process of lawmaking to push their preferred policies through, whereas you have as of yet not provided such an example of conservatives doing the same on the topic of abortion (despite conservatives being able to similarly rationalise their policy preferences with "well, it's a defence against people's attempts to impose their will on another"). As such, I think it makes sense to characterise the "attack" as having originated from the left.
Well that's because the state by state lawmaking is also a branch on this tree. The default for nations is that it isn't sub-division by sub-division for major laws, so that the Constitution and federalization itself is the "attack" against the normal way of operating where major laws are decided centrally.
It's just turtles all the way down in other words. Each side can choose an arbitrary point to show they are the ones defending against an attack. But in neither case does it have any real meaning. It's just a values difference and which side attacked first is both unable to be determined and irrelevant in any case, I think.
Whether federalism is an attack or not is really only tangentially related to the whole topic of abortion at best, that's more to do with a larger meta-discussion that centres around what system of government to adopt.
All politics have to build on a system of deeper underlying rules that guides how things are done. You can discuss what these rules should be, but once they're in place you have to abide by them when you're trying to make policy changes, and in the case of the U.S. the system in place happens to be a federal one. If we allowed for the political decision-making systems that undergird everything to be questioned as an attack in that manner, the second anyone doesn't like the processes involved because it prevents them from achieving their goal they can just call it an attack on some basis (an attack on the prior natural state of tribal anarchy, perhaps?) and use this as justification to circumvent it.
Additionally, Roe v. Wade can't claim to be "defending against" the system of federalism as a whole - rather, it was simply carving out an exception for abortion using a very flimsy appeal to the already existing system to do so, and it can't really be argued to be part of that larger meta-discussion as a result. It wasn't trying to modify the existing system and make it into something else, it was falsely claiming the existing system protected something it did not.
Even if the U.S. wasn't a federal system, the argument can still be made that Roe is an attack. As mentioned many times before in this thread, they would still have to answer for the method through which they struck down abortion restrictions, and this problem remains regardless of whether the US is unitary or federalist.
The Supreme Court stepped outside of its ambit by performing mental gymnastics to pretend the Constitution protected something it did not, and used that as justification to restrict lawmaking. Whether the Supreme Court was preventing state governments or the federal/central government from putting in abortion bans is irrelevant to the fact it was judicial activism. That's enough to call it a "Pearl Harbour-like legal coup", I think, and enough to qualify it as an illegitimate attack.
EDIT: added more
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I'd argue that demanding other people to use neopronouns or different pronouns or in general pushing for hate speech laws or pushing DEI trainings and initiatives is exactly opposite to your claim that left wants to "leave people alone". I do not think we need to rehash the whole CW discussion of left vs right that is discussed here every day.
Rather the point is that whatever the case - be it "leave trans people alone" or "go back to Roe v. Wade" - is automatically taken as natural and proper value to hold, everybody who argues against it is evil. Which would BTW mean that the SCOTUS members who struck down the law are somehow evil and they should not even be allowed to discuss ever weakening these "human rights".
Even if we assume that the left is "just defending", I do not see why this should be redeeming in any way. This means that any left wins are to be enshrined in sacred text as unassailable rights? Why should the left have power to create this new holy book of human rights, which is then used to forcefully prescribe social values and that can never be questioned? Who defines what is a "right", what is the source of the legitimacy for it and who adjudicates in case when different rights are in conflict? Apparently it is not SCOTUS as the left went bonkers after the judgement, immediately questioning legitimacy of the ruling and rehashing all the possibilities like packing the court and so forth. Also what you say would basically guarantee that the Cthulhu can ever only move left or at worst stay in place. Why can we not say that conservatives are just "defending" a position that existed prior to Roe v. Wade? What made the year 1973 so special that we can never move before that in any shape or form?
I think that most people on the left do not even think about these issues - as the OP said, they just swim in the water of their own values and do not even consider them as such. They see them as something natural, as "a right" and enforcing those values as "doing good" and unlike religious people they are often unable to articulate source of those values. I think that it is a feature and not a bug. Every other value system is "ideology", our own value system is the default and correct one, and thus above even being included in ideology category.
The comment I was replying to started
The "just defending" is relevant because it's a claim that if the other side stopped talking about it, it would no longer be an active culture war fight leaving more air in the room for discussions about economics or whatever other political issue is more important. You and the other replies have given some reasonable pushback on that actually being the case for the two issues I mentioned. Maybe it is true in the other direction for diversity quotas?
Or more likely, the next culture war issue the left wants to push.
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Actually, yes. Diversity was pushed offensively in some spaces a few years ago, but now it's just how things are run, and it's the non-progressive side launching attacks.
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Pushing for minors to be allowed to have surgeries and drug therapies with permanent effects over the wishes of their parents, is not wanting "trans people to be left alone" under any reasonable definition.
I regularly see claims like that with no evidence that anyone actually believes that. The closest I've seen is arguments over whether puberty blockers are appropriate for trans teenagers (and the pro-trans people like to point out that no one thinks puberty blockers are inappropriate for cis teenagers when medically indicated). I'm not sure exactly what age children are normally allowed to make medical decisions without parental approval, I'd assume 16? But it probably varies by jurisdiction. And it isn't a trans-healthcare-specific thing.
Puberty blockers are in fact considered inappropriate for cis teenagers in all use cases that I'm aware of -- they are normally given to kids experiencing puberty many years before they come teenagers, to delay it until a more age-appropriate time.
The use-case for trans teenagers seems to be mainly "park 'em on blockers until they are old enough to consent to hormones/surgery"; this seems quite different, most obviously in that the patients never do experience puberty.
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In Washington state a child can access certain "sensitive" health care services starting at age 13 without their parents being in the loop. These are services related to reproductive health, sexually transmitted diseases, substance use disorder, gender dysphoria, gender affirming care, domestic violence, and mental health.
So, your kid can be addicted to heroin, have been beaten and raped by their older brother and have contracted HIV, be suicidal about the whole mess, and you have no right to even be consulted about it, or even know about it.
Oh, and they can also surprise you when they show up with bandages where their breasts used to be.
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That seems to be around the general age, yes. But fear not, WPATH is out there fighting for the rights of 14 year olds to start on hormones!
Look, my position on this is: you're 18, you want to chop your breasts off because you're mentally ill, I don't like it but you're a legal adult. Go ahead, even if a few years down the line you will then be suing the doctors who did the surgery you are now demanding:
You're 14-16, you're too damn young to know and evaluate the long-term effects of this stuff. Your parents are not horrible monsters who want to mistreat you, they are genuinely trying to do what they believe is good for you by not giving permission.
Even this requires precision because it may concede more than we otherwise do, a sign that the Overton window has been shifted.
My framing would be: if you wish to cut off your own breasts you are free to attempt it and take the attendant risks. But you are not entitled to help from licensed medical professionals to do this, anymore than someone who has alien limb syndrome gets to have that procedure or any teenager with body dysmorphia but wants to get jacked instead should get on demand access to test.
Because, before this started, those things were unquestioned as being unacceptable.
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Well, if no one actually believes this, can you go to whatever progressive hangout you have, and say "I believe parents should have the right to prevent their children from getting blockers, hormones, or trans-surgeries, until whatever age people are allowed to make their own medical decisions", and tell me how it goes?
Sure, and if you express the sentiment that you don't want your kid to take puberty blockers, you will be called every name in the book, and it will be implied that you want to kill trans children. That's not a defensive posture.
And it's not just blockers. Minors are also getting surgeries.
That argument does not make sense, when the validity of the medical indication is precisely the thing in question.
Exactly. "Rights of parents" are red herring - no one except of few ultra weirdos, least of all the left, respects decision of parents to deny their children medical care necessary to save their life and health.
Try "in this house we believe in Bible and prayer, not surgery and blood transfusion", you will not get too far anywhere. Many such legal cases.
Is "trans health care" really necessary to save life and health? This is the question what is it all about.
Are you familiar with Jehovah's Witnesses? They refuse blood transfusions, and have won every court case that has challenged that practice.
Not every case clearly, when dealing with kids:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/08/judge-rules-jehovahs-witness-boy-blood-transfusion
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/jehovahs-witness-blood-transfusion-1.4299992
"This principle is not absolute, as is the case when a JW parent refuses blood for their minor child. While the U.S. Constitution protects the freedom to practice religion, courts have not interpreted that freedom to include the right to refuse lifesaving treatment for a child on the basis of that religion (11). Instead, courts confronted with the issue have upheld a hospital’s ability to provide blood even against a parent’s wishes (11). Some states even have specific laws that authorize a court to order treatment under certain circumstances, though such laws are not required since a court can make an independent determination based on the state’s inherent interest in protecting the child (11,12,13)."
"In addition, 17 of the states and territories that have exemptions specify in their statutes that, in some cases, a court can order treatment for children, regardless of the parent’s religious wishes. Colorado’s law states: “The religious rights of the parent shall not limit the access of a child to medical care in a life-threatening situation.” Florida, similarly, states: “This exception does not preclude a court from ordering medical services or other treatment to be provided when the health of the child so requires.”
First two are UK and Canada, last two are the US.
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In actuality the question seems to be about who has the power to determine what "necessary to save life and health" really means, by imposing a conclusion on the matter on the entire populace and quelching dissent.
That is, much like certain other important questions of our time, they claim 'the science is settled' and then use this as a basis to impose the outcome they wanted anyway because who can argue with science?
There seems to be no desire to engage with the question you brought up because that would imply being willing to meet the opposition on somewhat equal footing.
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To be fair, I'm perfectly willing to sacrifice as many progressive and Jehovah's Witness' kids as it takes, to secure my right to prevent gender experiments on my kids.
More seriously, I think those are parallel debates. There might be parental rights ti decide this stuff (why do parents get to veto tattoos or piercings otherwise?), and it may or may not be true that trans-medicine is life saving.
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