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According to NPR, 43% of Americans support criminalizing gender-affirming care and 54% oppose it, whereas two years ago, 28% supported it and 65% opposed it. What caused the surge in opposition? Did people just not know what gender-affirming care was two years ago? Did they assume that psychological evaluations of trans kids were more thorough than they actually were?
Important distinction:
I'd bet you get a very different result if you ask more generally whether it should be legal for people to seek medical assistance in transition. I believe the increase in preference for criminalizing these "treatments" for minors is a product of better information becoming available on what exactly "gender affirming care" means, who is getting it, and how diagnoses are done. The euphemism doesn't exactly call to mind surgical mutilation of mentally ill teens, but many people now understand "gender-affirming care" to include surgical mutilation of mentally ill teens.
I would agree I’m much more knowledgeable on the issue. I didn’t know anything about why we had a surge in trans and what these trans clinics were doing to them.
I’m well past criminalize gender affirming care. Trans is entirely bad and should be suppressed everywhere. It’s ruining and hurting lives. And the fact that we are changing people physically with health care and it’s not just some weirdos dressing weird during the teen years is even worse.
Trans being a social contagion is not the same as saying trans people "don't actually exist". I think in debates like these we need to choose our words carefully if you want to have any chance of convincing the other tribe.
When they use the word trans they mean people are actually females with male bodies etc. By they don’t exists that is what I mean. Instead they are like people who got really into Victorian dress except they got into wearing opposite gender clothing.
That being said I’m getting to the point of not caring about convincing the other side. It’s evil and I’m fine with authoritarian suppression.
I think it's important to still care about convincing the other side, because it's useful. We live in a democracy, therefore more public support for our side increases our chances of successfully implementing it. If we lived in a dictatorship with you or I in charge and could just ban it immediately, then authoritarian suppression would be the way to go to guarantee it stops as soon as possible.
If, in the current environment, everyone on the right gives up on persuasion and just decries their opponents as inhuman monsters then all of the areas controlled by the right will ban it, all of the areas controlled by the left will not, and everyone in the center will see one side pretending to be kind and compassionate while we superficially look like authoritarian bigots despite being the ones actually helping people.
In general, the right has a huge optics problem. Or rather, the left has an optics advantage because the majority of their positions are chosen based on optimizing for feelgoods and superficial appearances, which makes them look better than they are in practice. The only way the right (and moderates, and logical people who don't optimize exclusively for optics) can stand a chance is by being logical, persuasive, and thorough enough that the superficial appearances are stripped away and the actual superior policies are revealed to the people around.
Gender affirming care for minors is an evil policy with horrible results. Most people who support it from a distance aren't evil people, they're naive people who haven't actually looked into the details and have just bought into the propaganda that all anti-trans arguments are founded on bigotry and hatred. And you don't change their minds by acting the same way someone who irrationally hated trans people would act, if you try then they'll stop looking further as soon as you confirm their prior beliefs. You change their minds by being kind, compassionate, logical, explaining this in detail, and then banning child mutilation because it's the kind, compassionate, and logical thing to do.
Do you know of any historical instances in which this kind of behavior bore fruit?
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I feel like being kind and compassionate works better with IRL acquaintances. Although IME they too have a persistent habit of just turning off their brains the moment the arguments get more detailed than anything they've gleamed from an activist's TikTok video.
But in the public sphere, there is observable value in being mean. The Left has been really good at employing mockery and mean-spiritedness to their own ends. It makes hay for the true believers, and cows fence-sitters into snapping into the cool, trendy orthodoxy of the day out of fear of being embarrassed. When I was a younger man on the Left, it was a popular sentiment that to really destroy bad ideas, you had to ruthlessly mock and ridicule them (with facts and reason on our side, but of course!).
Admittedly, I don't think this breaks any cycles. Grudges will be held, vengeance may be enacted further down the line. It's not lost on me that that much of the progressive zeitgeist is a reaction to some conservative Christian status quo ante. This ain't exactly stable.
But maybe being an uncompromising, loudmouth fucker is the only way you stay in the fight.
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