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Did you know that 10 people were killed by a (potentially transgender) school shooter in Canada yesterday?
There is hardly anything about this in the American media today. It’s the third-billed story at best, behind Nancy Guthrie kidnapping updates and the FAA closing airspace over El Paso. Right-wing influencers have mentioned it, but it almost seems as if they are going through the motions. It’s not even trending on Twitter. I don’t feel the raw anger and hatred from when the Catholic school in Minnesota was hit.
The only explanation I can think of is that the shooting happened in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which is in the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants to send reporters to Yukon-lite in February, so we get no coverage.
No wonder Bezos laid these people off.
The trans thing was politically useful because it showcased the most extreme, least defensible positions on the progressive side (like that even biological sex was fake) during peak woke that had very low mainstream public approval. In a way, it was similar to eg factions on the academic far-left being sympathetic to extreme sexual deviancy in the late 1970s, which was also useful for the right at the time leading into the comparative backlash in the 1980s.
Today it feels like we’re no longer even close to that level. Yes, progressive wine moms and aunts are still very pro-trans, that’s true. But even the NYT is now no longer as zealous about the topic as it once was, and the whole right is in agreement. It feels like this chapter of the culture war is largely closed, albeit without a total victory on either side.
I don't know. APnews has a main story that studiously uses she and her. That strikes me as still zealous on the issue given it's a mass shooter.
Lukewarm support for trans rights looks like "studiously use preferred pronouns but avoid materially contentious questions like kids, prisons, sports and bathrooms", not like "use preferred pronouns for nice people but not for murderers". I'm not actually sure if there's anyone in the world who does the latter, it would imply a very weird outlook where ability to change one's social gender is some sort of… revocable privilege? By and large, "anyone can change their pronouns" vs "no one can change their pronouns" is a binary debate, nuance vs zealotry is a question of what else someone in the former camp believes falls under the umbrella of inalienable trans rights.
While not an intellectually consistent approach, many people are not intellectually consistent. The worldview that 'we should be nice to trans people, but changing your sex isn't really real, so we should humour it for the goodies but not the baddies' doesn't seem terribly uncommon among moderate progressives.
Indeed, the core argument of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ is that using preferred pronouns is something you should to do to "make a little effort to be nice to people," in the same way that you might tell a little white lie to spare your friend's feelings (or, in the example that Scott uses, humor someone who jokingly declares himself Emperor of the United States).
A journalist reporting on a mass murderer probably doesn't owe them the same level of social nicety.
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