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But the salient point is that in the progressive terminology, "being trans" maps onto "actually having cancer", not onto "seeking a colonectomy", whose actual equivalent is "transitioning". In the advocates' own view, the transness or cisness of the audience is already an immutable fact whatever you do, and the goal of trans advocacy is to persuade all the undetected already-trans people in the audience to seek transition; you can "transitionerify" people to some degree, much as you can "colonectomy-seekerify" people, and you might choose to do that more or less indiscriminately, but you can't actually "trans someone" any more than you can peer-pressure someone into actually having cancer, that's just not a thing, and moreover, it's not actually something they'd want to do even if it were possible, any more than the cancer awareness advocates would use a give-people-cancer ray on anyone if they had one. So anyone accusing them of "transing kids" comes across to them as a not-even-wrong MAGA zombie accusing them of something ghastly and made-up.
And obviously this is all semantics. That's the point. The right and left talk past each other on this issue because they're stubbornly using different definitions of "trans", sometimes without even realizing it.
But when people worry about their kids getting transed, they worry about them getting invasive body modification procedures for no reason, not about them discovering that they actually have a condition where the only way to avert suicide and lead a happy and fulfilling lives is to undergo said procedures, so the analogy seems pretty 1:1.
Yes. This is, in fact, what I have been saying. The discourse is a mess because trans activists actually are doing the thing GCs mean by "transing kids" ("making people seek potentially-frivolous colonectomies"), all while sincerely insisting that they obviously aren't "transing kids" because they understand that phrase as meaning something else altogether that they can't and wouldn't do ("giving people cancer").
I disagree. I get that sometimes you get these situations where if you taboo the word people suddenly find themselves agreeing about the substance, but I'm yet to see a trans activist agree that kids are getting transed in the GC sense, even if you describe the phenomenon to them without using the word "transed".
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