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Notes -
That’s because it’s the easiest topic to grandstand on because it gets almost no opposition. Even our few trans posters have had very heterodox opinions on the subject, and everyone else (again, including the liberals and leftists) tends to be opposed to the standard libleft position on the subject.
If you don't care about the issue, feel free to not care about it, but your insistence that others shouldn't care about it either is bizarre. Throughout my time on here the discussion went from me always feeling like I'm on the back foot, to feeling like I've some chinks in the pro-trans side armor, to the current state where I can kind of understand how one might call it "almost no opposition" (it's not true, but I can understand). I'd imagine that chronicling the rise and fall of the trans movement might be worth it as a matter of historical social commentary, if nothing else, but for you the issue is not only "minor", it "was played out by the end of the last Bush administration". No matter the state we're currently in, we apparently always have been pre-ordained to be in it.
That's all beside the point anyway. The whole point of this place is to have civil conversations even when they aren't allowed on mainstream forums, and you're telling me I should just shrug off a gag order on my hobby horse, and accept it as not a big deal.
Admins constricting the Overton window are one thing, but the real value here is that you can speak without being shoved into a box by the other commenters the moment you open your mouth:
I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. If there’s another space where people don’t instantly go for your throat the moment they spot "outgroup", I’d love to know. The Motte lets me post long comments that people actually read and respond to. Here, charity is the norm. On Reddit, it’s a punishable offense from all sides. Twitter is just a cesspool. Substack is dividing the community even more.
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The whole time the subreddit was up, it is categorically true that places like /r/politicalcompassmemes, /r/4chan and /r/redscarepod had much more objectionable (to the admins) content than we had. The admins were most concerned about slurs and they have always been a bannable offense here when used against someone else.
The mods even confirmed directly that there was no ban coming immediately down the pipeline, it was purely theoretically pre-emptive in case things got worse, and in fact they didn’t, first because of the general anti-woke backlash and then because of Trump’s reelection.
There were times when there were more pro-trans voices here, sure, but most people are clearly of the same opinion now as they were then (“it’s not real but it’s reasonable to be individually nice to trans people in your life”).
People were getting their accounts slapped with some regularity though -- not sure whether anyone got a site-wide perma, but there were a lot of site-wide temp bans being eaten due to drive-by report-to-admins of tranny stuff. That makes meaningful discussion of these issues difficult even if it weren't the case that admins were warming up to kick the sub itself. (which I doubt they would have thought twice about if it came to their attention)
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You could say the same thing about /r/GenderCritical, they still got nuked.
It has nothing to do with the amount of pro-trans voices, and everything to do with the arguments themselves.
Originally pro-trans people where running around saying how The Science Is Settled, how there's a robust diagnostic process, and how younger people are only put on reversible treatments, and trotting out paper after paper. It took several years for people to catch on that the papers were flawed, raise questioned that the trans activists had no good answer for (exponential increase in dysphoria diagnoses, sex-ratio flip, age-ratio flip). It took several more years still for things to start to come out like detrans people testifying how much of an utter joke the "diagnostic process" was, whistleblowers coming out, the Cass Review, senior Biden admin officials putting political pressure to abolish age limits in the latest Standards Of Care, or WPATH commissioning systematic reviews from John Hopkins, shitcanning them when they didn't like the results, and demanding that any further reviews be approved by a trans person, while also demanding that they be published with a statement that WPATH had no influence over the process.
If all you got from all these years was “it’s not real but it’s reasonable to be individually nice to trans people in your life”, then you simply weren't paying attention. Which is ok, if you aren't interested in the issue, but why are you acting like you know anything about it, and like the conversation hasn't shifted at all over time?
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