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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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I confess that I am confused by this response. Who is being officially deputized by whom to kill whom? And how does any of this make sense in the context of @FarNearEverywhere's parent comment, which already posits a massive change in how the official parts of society deal with trans stuff?

Trans people are being deputized by the state to wreck the lives of normal people. They've been granted official "victim" status, which gives them a frankly absurd level of protection from normal criticism, which they then routinely abuse in a variety of novel ways. When normal people who haven't kept abreast of our mercurial social reality object, they get hammered, often as not via state or pseudostate enforcement mechanisms.

You're saying that it would be better for people to be kinder to Trans individuals. But only a vanishing minority of the objections to Trans individuals have to do with their Transness, as such. People are objecting to the active "recruitment" of children by agents of the state, the vociferous defense of actual perverts, the extension of charity to sexual criminals, the weaponization of serious state power to enforce fringe ideology, and to the damage done to ordinary people who attempt to exercise their purported civil rights in response. Trans people, as such, wield immense, absurd, and almost entirely unaccountable power under our current system, a highly visible fraction of them are quite gleefully abusing that power in highly visible ways, and the rest are refusing to restrain this fraction, refusing to criticize or hold them accountable, and vociferously attaching anyone else who tries to do so.

You are right that they need help, but they need to be stopped more, because they are cooperating with efforts to do serious damage to our society.

I guess I don't see how this has much to do with what I'm saying. The post I was originally responding to suggested:

And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts

as a way to dissuade these people from transitioning. In other words, tell people with autogynephilia that they are disgusting and should go away, which seems both cruel and unlikely to work. I'm proposing compassion instead, because I don't want these people to end up deciding they are trans, I want them to get help.

For whatever it's worth I have little love for the trans lobby and am pretty incensed at all the propagandizing and abuse of state power to enforce their ideology. I just happen to think that many, probably most, trans individuals are also victims here, in much the same way that lonely people who get targeted by lovebombing and join a cult are.