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Why doesn't the Blue Tribe contest this for height, date of birth, or race?
Should I go through the list and address every one of them? None of these people were killed solely for being trans. I'll do just one to start.
Talk about being economical with the truth! In reality, Ariyanna and his friend (another trans-identifying boy) got in a fight with Jimmy's girlfriend, who then suggested he shoot the party up. He showed up with an assault rifle and asked who was fighting, to which Ariyanna admitted to. He then asked "Are you a boy or a girl?" and Ariyanna said he was a boy, and that's when he fired.
So a guy killed another guy for beating on his girlfriend. Now, could he have had some hateful bigotry in his heart that led him to use the beating as a pretext? It's not impossible, but I doubt it when there's no evidence of such. It makes far more sense to kill someone for a perceived slight to honor (e.g. because you beat my girlfriend) than because you're just a transgender who exists. Taking this death and extrapolating it to be a part of some trend of anti-trans murders is, frankly, irresponsible when it's just as likely a normal person would have died in these circumstances as a trans person would.
It makes far more sense to go with the angle of black-on-black crime, or male/youth violence, or even "this is why we need gun control". But going with an anti-trans angle is confusing at best and malicious framing at worst.
The rest of the list proceeds similarly. Don't even get me started on Brianna Ghey.
That's not really a gender standard so much as a privacy standard. If people aren't allowed to find out what gender someone was born as, do women's spaces and women's locker rooms and women's bathrooms just not exist anymore, when enforcing them requires that knowledge?
Who? I'm sure some conservatives still expect boys to play with trucks and girls with dolls, but I would be hard-pressed to find conservative parents who maintain gender standards so much that, should their son play with dolls, they declare him a girl. Meanwhile, a blue triber is more likely to do exactly that.
Is there some sort of epidemic of parents grooming their children into being homophobic bigots that I'm unaware of?
To my knowledge, this largely doesn't happen. Kiwi Farms, a site that documents trans and gay grooming, doesn't accuse just anyone trans/gay of grooming merely for being trans/gay. They do it with specific, documented evidence of specific grooming actions.
I'm having a hard time finding a policy, blue or red, that wouldn't be indicted by this standard. 100.00% or even 99.99% is an extremely high bar to clear. Every policy that could actually exist in the real world must disadvantage someone somehow, even slightly. The nature of policies is that we have to choose the best tradeoffs.
I'm confused on what you mean by extending the maxim, since I thought that it was already a general rule that bad argument gets counterargument, does not get bullet.
But I wasn't assigned female at birth.
Ok, I know, "I did have breakfast". But I think this is an absurd hypothetical and to my knowledge a male has never been assigned female at birth, barring rare cases of malpractice or intersex babies. If I was somehow assigned female at birth despite clearly being male, I would suspect that the nurse who did it had a screw loose in her brain. It could even get as bad as filing a malpractice lawsuit due to potential knock-on effects from having the wrong marker.
I don't think this is related to the trans experience unless trans people think there is a conspiracy out to get them and deny them their real gender.
A photograph is not a foolproof method of identification alone and should not be used alone. People's appearances change and they can quickly be outdated, or they can look like someone else. Hence we use other markers, which should be kept accurate if they are to be useful.
That would be how one would back up the assertion that
If a trans person is murdered, and a cis person would not have been murdered ceterus paribus, that counts in my book as 'murdered for being trans', just as a black person who is murdered, if a white person in the otherwise exact same circumstances would not have been murdered, was killed for being black.
No, they try to shame and bully him into not playing with dolls.
Yes. People aren't born with the desire to victimise gay people, just as they aren't born with the desire to victimise any of the other categories of people their families teach them to hate. (Readers of a certain age might remember a Public Service Announcement that said "Hate is a four-letter word. So is love. Which one will you teach your children?")
Extending it to "A person hypothetically causing negative externalities does not give you unlimited licence to persecute them, even if not doing so means that the externalities will continue."
The hypothetical at which I was aiming was one in which you, with your current mind, had been born with female parts. Would you, in that case, feel that the 'F' marker was viscerally wrong? (Or would you look between your legs and conclude yourself to be a woman? In that case, you would be what Ozy Brennan calls 'cis-by-default'. [Thing of Things, January 2015])
But 'what do you have in your pants' isn't very useful outside a very narrow set of circumstances; 'what did you have between your legs when you were born' isn't useful even then!
I don't think it's productive to go through each case unless you also do your own research to find non-trans-related reasons for the murders. The burden of proof is on the ones who assert that trans people are being targeted for murder, not on others to disprove those claims. If there's a specific case that you think is particularly merited, sure, we can discuss it. But I'm not going to sit here and repeat almost the same thing every time. I'm comfortable saying that most of those deaths were unrelated to being trans and only gain media attention just because the victim happens to be trans.
Ok. Surely that's less damaging than declaring him a girl.
News to me. I would like some evidence or sources for this phenomenon.
I agree that people aren't born with hateful desires, but this doesn't make sense to me. I don't think families teach their kids to hate gay people. I think it's more complicated than that. People form their opinions usually through observation and interaction with the specific groups, and learned information from sources like the Internet. Sometimes they will have negative opinions, and that's not because they just irrationally hate them, but because they've taken everything they've looked at and come to their own conclusion. In particular, I think a lot of opinions about gay people can be traced back to the actions of gay people.
I agree with this in the abstract but I suspect that you and I might operationalize this differently. So let me ask, what policy do you think is giving unlimited license to persecute someone for a hypothetical negative externality?
No. I don't know on what basis I could say the marker was wrong.
A gender marker is extremely useful. You're talking about, at a glance, being able to distinguish between 50% of the population. Gender is often the first thing that people notice about others. Cops will call out "suspect is a male" (among other attributes) and so when they are searching, they effectively have 50% of their search space reduced just by ignoring females. Names have to be asked for, weight and height are estimable but fallible at a distance. Race is also helpful, but given that there are more than two races in the world, the reduction in search space is less than 50%.
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