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Going to keep my comments short since this is a well-trod culture war battlefield.
But its truly annoying to have to listen to the standard anti-gun positions trotted out once again without grappling with any of the other factors at play.
When only a couple months ago an attempted mass shooting at a church was stopped by at least TWO armed staff... and a guy with a truck.
Yes, it turns out that 'good guy with a gun' can be an effective counter to these threats.
So when the Dems once again trot out the gun control agenda I can only assume they're acting in bad faith because the only other explanation is having the memory of a goldfish.
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.
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.
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