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Are they really "Christian children" just because they're going to a christian school? I doubt many of them were given a choice in which school they were sent to.
It seems like the disproportionate number of shooters at these schools should also raise some questions. To me it seems obvious that subjecting kids to religious values is a bad idea.
Do you have even the slightest shred of evidence to suggest that a disproportionate number of school shootings take place at private religious schools by students who attended private religious schools?
No, I'm working under the assumption that these two shootings by trans alumni of christian schools are significant. If that's not true, I'm not sure what the whole point of this thread is. I'm just pointing out that it fits perfectly with my worldview. I believe that transgenderism is probably biologically innate, so a person with transgenderism who is raised in an oppressive fundamentalist religious environment could end up harboring resentment toward the people who forced those values on them.
As for transgenderism being biologically innate, the shooter admitted that he was tired of being trans, but felt that if he cut his hair short and detransitioned, he'd lose face in front of the (presumably numerous) people who'd earlier advised him that coming out as trans was probably a bad idea. This whole pointless massacre came about because of a misguided sunk-cost fallacy, an arrogant nutcase who was too proud to publicly admit he'd made an error as an adolescent (also known as "the period of your life when making mistakes is most understandable and forgivable").
I suppose next you'll tell me that the shooter's transgenderism really was biologically innate, but years of exposure to toxic Catholic propaganda left him confused and suffering from internalised transphobia. It's so easy to claim that trans is something fixed and unchangeable as long as you dismiss all the counter-examples that suggest it might not be.
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I will politely point out that "the people who forced those values on them" emphatically does not include "small children mercilessly gunned down who weren't even born at the time the shooters attended the schools in question".
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Stop trolling.
Trolling? Are you implying that I don't sincerely believe this? I believe that raising kids under Christianity is harmful, just as raising them in radical Islam is harmful. In my liberal bubble this is not a controversial belief, at all.
As I understand it you are allowed to post this argument but you haven't put the requisite amount of effort into it.
That would be blatantly biased if true. People are allowed to post zero effort anti-trans posts where they assume consensus. I've never heard anyone here make an actual argument against transgenderism.
Yeah, you know what? You have a bit of a point there. I don't usually argue against transgenderism so much as point out that it's an utterly ridiculous premise that completely blows all common-sense fuses. How the hell would I even argue against it? "Men can be women" is so very obviously and blatantly and outright ridiculously false. And yes, I'm sure there are some verbal acrobatics and semantic games that perfectly reason why actually it can be, but that doesn't make the conclusions drawn from them any less false.
The fixed and unchangeable gender binary is, for all practical intents and purposes, a biological law of the universe. Attempts to dislodge it, or downgrade it to a social construct, or to artfully sidestep it while still trying to cherry-pick parts of it, may even sound sensible step-by-step, but when the end result is in denial of obvious reality it just collapses. Yes modernity is sick, humans suffer all kinds of ailments of the mind, and maybe you can get some of them to endure it better when you screw with their (quite possibly already screwed-up) hormones and they distract themselves with a funny new identity.
But it's not real. "Trans-Men" aren't men and "Trans-Women" aren't women. It's so extremely obviously not real. How could it? It's so very obviously a social contagion, a fashion, a delusion. Humans have always been men and women, and always will be, and whatver the hell is going on nowadays is very much smoke and mirrors, and not some true and honest third way hitherto hidden by malicious social convention.
It seems so brain-meltingly stupid. Quite on a level with flat-earthers, far beneath even creationists or anthoposophy or astrology, somewhere down there in the otherwise unplumbed depths of outrageous falsehood presented as soul-saving truth.
Or so it strongly seems to me. Obviously it does not do so to you. Obviously there are many people willing to modify and mutilate themselves for this belief, or at least to make themselves ridiculous for it. But also quite obviously, most if not all of them are mentally damaged, aligned with leftist-extremist politics, and otherwise not to be taken at their word. But obviously again, I would say that. "Obvious" does a lot of work here, and obviously "obvious" is not an arugment, no matter how obvious it may seemt o me.
Plese give me the actual argument for transgenderism. Or the strongest ones. I promise to try my damndest to take it seriously. Maybe you can wear me down over time. I might be wrong. I often am.
Well I certainly would never claim that "men can be women" or other such rhetorical nonsense. What I mean by "transgenderism" is the right of individuals to alter their sex characteristics with hormones, without government interference. Whether that makes someone a "real woman' is a meaningless question. Obviously it doesn't change one's chromosomal sex. But it does change things in superficial ways that do matter to some extent.
Okay, I'll stipulate to this meaningless tautology. I don't know what it means or why it's important to you, but sure.
This is the only statement you've made that is testable and has real-world implications. but you've also not made an argument for it. I don't have strong evidence that transgenderism isn't a social contagion, but the burden of proof would be on you. To me, it is obvious that some people would be unhappy with the biological sex they ended up with at birth. Gender is an intrinsically important part of the human experience, and our bodies all have the potential to express different secondary sex characteristics to the ones that are activated during our development.
I think transgenderism is certainly a social development that has resulted from the technological development of hormones and surgeries, as well as the relaxation of puritanical values. It certainly can spread from one person to another in that people can learn that hormones exist, or that other people are going by different pronouns, and decide they want that for themselves. But to me that doesn't seem like it meets the definition of a social contagion.
If 5% of the population likes the idea of changing genders, and then the knowledge that changing genders is possible gradually diffuses through society, I would expect the growth rate of transgenderism to follow a logistic curve. At the beginning it could look like exponential growth, but not everyone can be infected with transgenderism, only those 5%. To me that is not a social contagion, that is a pre-existing demand being satisfied by a new product.
I've previously argued here that Christianity is a social contagion, and in my opinion it is the most infectious social contagion of all time. In a matter of a few hundred years, it went from an obscure middle eastern religion to a global phenomenon that has reached even remote uncontacted tribes in the amazon. And it's no surprise, given that Christianity has built-in mechanisms for perpetuating itself. Once someone is converted to Christianity, they attempt to convert everyone they interact with. Does transgenderism have a mechanism like that? In my opinion, no.
Sure, in a sufficiently liberal and individualistic society that's a fair thing to permit. Let's just hope that the government also stays out of health care, and stays out of defining how transgender-people must be treated, and stays out of promoting specific views on the matter...
That matter, socially, to the extend that they correspond to chromosomal sex. If they don't - they're noise that interferes with the correct functioning of society. Obviously not to a massive extent, but within that it's clearly counterproductive.
Those people are wrong to be unhappy with that.
And artificially causing such delayed and partial expression results in completely meaningless signals.
Does it not? Christianity co-opted or synergized with the Roman empire (and future European government structures), and wielded that power to promote itself. Transgenderism is promoted by the broader left, and they absolutely also use institutional power to promote their favored social contagions and hinder hostile ones. In this ideological promotion, transgenderism is indeed pushed onto anyone who might be remotely receptive, and everyone else is conscripted into an "ally" role and expected to support the transgenderism of others. Neither leftism nor (historical) Christianity left much room for competing social contagions.
Certainly the internet had a lot of 'cracking eggs' and 'if you feel this way you're transgender' and 'if you like yuri anime (that is, if you find two girls hot) you're probably transgender', etc. Trans people can be very evangelical, especially in spaces they control.
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I take personal exception to that, frankly.
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People do this all the time, I don't know why you would say this with a straight face. There are lots of arguments, like that the belief that someone can be a gender other than the one associated with their birth(if this formulation of gender as separate to physical sex is even reasonable) is entirely unfalsifiable even to the person supposedly experiencing it. If there isn't one single argument against "transgenderism" it's because there are something like at minimum two and probably more like a dozen different entirely incompatible ideas of what the transgender phenomenon is under the trench coat of the trans movement. Is being trans synonymous with experiencing gender dysphoria(a thing itself with myriad definitions) or is it a purely social, you're trans if you like to wear the opposite gender's traditional garb?
If I didn't know you had in fact participated in past debates on this site on this subject I might think you had just somehow managed to not stumble upon those threads but no, you have and are either experiencing extreme amnesia or are lying.
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Gender roles are important because society can do many bad things, but 'not work' isn't one of them. At a fundamental level people have to know their job in broader society and gender roles are a major part of figuring that out.
At the end of the day, a functioning society is based on the idea that 'sorry, you(personally) have a job to do. It doesn't really matter if you want to do it, that just makes you a bad person if you don't rather than making it not your job. Get it done. No, you don't have an unlimited say in the matter. Your sex, your age, your class- these all say what you're supposed to be doing. Much more of a say than you have. Keep the wheel of civilization turning even if it crushes you underneath it.' We should be very careful about allowing defections. People should conform to the wisdom of their elders because their own ideas are normally bad ones.
Trans undermines this whole memeplex by making gender roles a weird sex thing, not a fundamental attribute.
And what about all the elders saying to trust The Science on gender identity? I don't understand the idea of blindly accepting authority when you have so many different authorities saying different things. You have to decide which authority and which traditions to trust, so you're still forming your own opinions, just with extra steps.
I could see an argument for this back when physical labor was critical. You could make an argument that females are more suited to domestic labor, and males more suited to hunting and fighting. But now domestic labor is done by dishwashers and vacuum cleaners and fighting is done by drones. Soon even intellectual labor will be automated. Trying to fill the traditional housewife and breadwinning husband roles will be a cartoonish larp, even more than it already is. Those roles existed for practical reasons, but the situation has changed.
That's a fair response to @hydroacetylene's argument, but the "this goes against what our elders say about gender roles" argument against transgenderism is itself a rather weak one.
I think a stronger one is the following: transgenderism, in its common form as I understand it, is totalitarian and intrusive, because it demands that I rewrite my mental categories in a particular way. It is fairly clear that, from the point of view of the transgender activists, someone who perfectly abides by all etiquette demands (pronouns, social grouping/shunning, social expectations in line with the person's chosen identity) but internally continues to believe that the person is, for all purposes other than adherence to the preceding rules of etiquette, a member of their biological sex, is morally evil, and this pattern of thought is one that ought to be rectified even if there is no evidence that it will lead to any etiquette violations. This is intrusive and totalitarian, in a way that otherwise only religions are allowed to get away with (you can't just go to church on Sundays and say the prayers, you have to really believe, and there will be busybodies trying to figure out if you secretly don't and do their utmost to fix you); and as a price for being allowed to keep that power, liberal societies have severely circumscribed the power of religions in other ways (they are not allowed to threaten you into conversion, use your belief or lack thereof as a criterion in hiring, etc.).
None of these restrictions are being applied to transgenderism, and in fact acting outside of those restrictions is central to its existence as a movement! "Test if your professor secretly thinks that transwomen are men, and get him fired if it turns out to be the case" is praxis. This is not some tangential feature of religions, either - if one were to create a quick summary of what was bad about religion before our present framework of regulating them, "they perform intrusive tests to distinguish true believers from fakers and exclude the latter from society" will probably feature prominently in some form.
It sometimes seems to me that progressives have performed a horse-cart inversion regarding the relationship between biological sex and "gender roles", and typical-mind themselves to assume that everyone else must have constructed their categories likewise. The traditional gender role believer will think, "you are a man; therefore you must wear pants, wield violence and hide your emotions", but the progressive instead sees something like "you must wear pants, wield violence and hide your emotions; therefore you are a man". The former is a statement of fact, followed by a statement of "socially constructed" expectations contingent on that fact; the latter looks like a statement of arbitrary socially constructed expectations, followed by a socially constructed label for that set of expectations. I don't care if you think that way, but realise that it is not standard!
As it happens, I am not particularly attached to gender roles myself; if a man wants to wear dresses and makeup and act like a caricature of a Victorian damsel, I am happy to let him. There are plenty of people who do things that are more aesthetically displeasing or outright harmful to those around them. However, I will continue to think of him as a man, and I will consider a demand not to, for whatever reason, to be as presumptuous and intrusive as a demand that I make myself believe that Brahma created the universe. Hindus are free to believe this; they are free to be sad that I don't believe it; and they are even within reason to demand that I will not walk up to them and yell in their face that Lord Brahma does not exist/is an aspect of Satan/is a minor god that my god would make mincemeat of. However, if they presumed to demand that I publicly affirm Brahma as the Lord Creator of the Universe, made employment contingent on the belief, or subjected me to tests to see if my polite silence during their rituals wasn't because I secretly thought it is all bollocks, I would feel in my right to gently remind them that last time someone did that to my people, in the end we sent them to build railways in Siberia or gave them a one-way limousine ride to a nondescript downtown basement.
(...and to be clear, the asymmetry that I view "transwomen are men" as a statement of fact while you view "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are men" both as statements of belief/social construction does not matter, insofar as the demands of transgenderism would be hardly less presumptuous if we both accepted your premise that gender is socially constructed. Long before Europe went secular, it successfully figured out rules that prevented believers from forcing beliefs on each other!)
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Was the comparison you made between Christianity and radical Islam deliberate? Is non-radical Islam less harmful in your view than Christianity?
No that wasn't deliberate. Christianity is obviously less bad than Islam. Christianity converts people through relentless propagandizing, guilt-tripping, cultural subversion, and indoctrination from a young age, whereas Islam still converts people with physical violence.
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Until approx. 5 years ago I would have agreed with you, and maybe 8 years ago I would have strongly agreed with you. But it has not escaped my notice that most "normal Christians" I see just seem to have their lives together so much more: they're happier, kinder, started families sooner (or at all), haven't had to rediscover from first principles a reason to get out of bed and do anything, ...
I say this as an atheist who has gone to more masses in the past couple of years than the rest of my life combined, but has not and probably doesn't expect to find faith.
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There is no value neutrality. If they aren't getting your values, they're getting someone elses. And since liberalism is a quokka factory producing naive and easily duped hothouse flowers, perhaps religious values aren't so bad after all.
There may not be complete value neutrality, but telling kids you've figured out exactly how the world works and that they have to obey a specific list of rules otherwise they'll burn in hell is very far from neutral. Closer to neutral would be having conversations with them and telling them what you personally believe, but not forcing your values on them.
Liberals do that too except 'burn in hell' is substituted for by social ostracism and killing their reputation right here, right now.
That's wokeness, not liberalism. Wokeness is highly illiberal.
Sure, if by liberalism we mean something that doesn't exist anymore and has been supplanted by wokeness in practice.
Classical liberalism is larval wokeness, or more precisely, wokeness came into being to profitably exploit liberalism. There's no reason to be extra careful about terms here, both are very bad news.
There’s always a reason to be careful.
For example, I really really disagree that classical liberalism is bad news. It outcompeted most other ideologies for good reason. History gave us plenty of examples of the kind of ideas which profitably exploit totalitarianism, and they’re much worse.
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Strongly disagree, classical liberalism and wokeness are opposites. Wokeness imposes a universal moral value system, it tells you how you must act and think. Liberalism is about freedom to act and think however you want as long as nobody else is being hurt by it.
Well I think it's fair to say that the illiberal side of the spectrum is winning. Currently the culture war in the west is dominated by two puritanical ideologies, wokeness and conservatism, competing with each other. But that doesn't mean liberalism doesn't exist anymore as a concept. We can always go back to it.
All moral systems are by necessity universal moral systems, because that is, at the end of the day, what the word "moral" means in this context. To a first approximation, all moral systems allow "freedom to act and think however you want as long as nobody else is being hurt by it." There is no objective definition of "hurt" available, nor will there ever be one, nor can a given definition be kept stable over long periods of time.
From the frame you are using, Wokeness and American conservativism are both isomorphic to Liberalism, the three being differentiated only by mutually-exclusive definitions of morally-significant harm. You yourself have already posited that Christianity "hurts" those who adopt it or are exposed to it, which seems like a perfect illustration of the problem; "hurts" by what definition, on what criteria? Why those criteria and not others? Why your criteria and not mine? Liberalism begs these questions while providing no answers within its framework, and so people recognize that under liberal structures, the least-cost alternative is to establish their own answer through socio-political dominance. Hence, Wokeness and Conservatism.
We cannot get back to the prior liberal order, because that liberal order depended on ignorance of the subjective nature of morally-significant harm to exist. Now that this subjective nature approaches common knowledge, liberalism devolves into an incoherent tautology: "We should tolerate good things and not tolerate bad things." Sure, everyone knows that. The problem is that we have no common definition of which things are good and bad, and likely never will again.
Obviously people can't be protected from all harm. When I said that Christianity hurts people I meant more in the sense that viruses or natural disasters hut people. It's nobody's fault in particular that Christianity exists, it's a mental parasite whose purpose is to perpetuate itself. It's inevitable that such mental parasites will exist.
When I said that people shouldn't be allowed to hurt other people under liberalism, I meant in a literal sense. You shouldn't be able to use force to coerce other people, or restrict their freedom of speech or bodily autonomy.
Because I said so. At the end of the day morality is subjective, and it's about who has the most power to enforce their beliefs. I hope that liberalism can build up that power, and then use it benignly. Of course there is no objective reason why freedom, bodily autonomy, and free speech are correct.
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"No enemies to the left" typical American liberals and progressives passively keep quiet while extremists and the woke wage culture war. Then fight like cornered animals when conservatives push back. Wokeness is indeed illiberal and modern self described "liberals" are its chief enablers.
Not of course principled classical liberals. But they are an endangered species with little in common with modern common "liberals".
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What if you actually believe that the options are Christianity or Hell?
That said, if aren’t to some degree enforcing your values, they won’t take them seriously. Why should a kid believe that you really think pornography is bad if you don’t have any enforcement of rules against pornography? They won’t.
And that's why religion is so dangerous, you can justify anything with that. If I sincerely believed that I might burn in hell for eternity if I didn't do something, that would be a very strong motivation. A much stronger motivation than any human should ever have. That's what makes people strap on bomb vests.
Well maybe they would be convinced if you had a rational argument for it. If people need external consequences to know that something is bad, maybe it's not actually a big deal.
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Stop taking the bait.
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