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Your example reminds me of this other example from a Church of Christ.
My Christian friends often wonder aloud with me what it'll take for us to again recognize an in-group cultural identity among ourselves (a conversation typically prompted by the construction of our brand new fuck-you enormously gargantuan Islamic cultural center), and my answer is always something that this is an example of: innocent Christians being persecuted.
And I wonder how many Christian children killed by trans gunmen will be enough. It's actually quite remarkable how much less sensitive than Jews Christians are to this kind of thing. Remember that Baptist hospital (now run by Episcopalians) that was bombed in the first few weeks of the war in Gaza? No?
Canada had an outbreak of church burnings over that Indian burials on schoolgrounds hoax, and not a word about it from any of my church staff. I'm not even sure if they were aware! NPR certainly kept quiet about it. Edit: NPR was not quiet about church burnings in 2006 and 2015, as long as you were a black church. I also briefly googled about the 2021 burnings and most forum discussion and coverage are contemporary, and they're taking the burial narrative at face value. Most sympathetic pieces are from very partisan sources.
Not closely related to what you just said, but it's something I think about more and more.
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.
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.
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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