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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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I'm confused by your argument. A person's gender identity is orthogonal to their criminality. I agree that there are some people who are being knowingly deceitful when they claim to be trans but they aren't, and I don't really feel bad about someone "misgendering" or "deadnaming" Karen White, who is obviously a bad actor exploiting a poorly-designed policy.

But I don't understand the argument "I thought you were a legitimate trans person, but then you committed a crime, which proves that you were malingering all along!" The two things don't have anything to do with one another. "Legitimate" trans people (i.e. people diagnosed with gender dysphoria by a qualified mental health professional, and receiving medical treatment for that condition) commit crimes all the time. Committing a crime isn't a rule-out diagnostic criterion for gender dysphoria.

Maybe Audrey/Aiden Hale was suffering from gender dysphoria, maybe they weren't. If they were, the fact that they committed a horrific school shooting doesn't change that. If they weren't, likewise. It's just a completely irrelevant fact, like what colour shoes they were wearing at the time. Committing a crime doesn't stop a person from being authentically trans - this almost strikes me as a no true Scotsthey argument.

But I don't understand the argument "I thought you were a legitimate trans person, but then you committed a crime, which proves that you were malingering all along!" The two things don't have anything to do with one another.

That's not the argument, though. Charitably, the argument would be more like, "My choice to respect your preferred pronouns as a trans person is contingent on you not committing a crime (implied: of certain severity)." And that's also not my argument, and I don't subscribe to it myself. My argument is that somebody who does subscribe to that argument is not denigrating all trans people by subscribing to and living out such an argument, certainly not in a way similar to denigrating all black people by calling a particular black person "nigger."

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