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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.
On current trends, it's people with your views that will be subject to authoritarian suppression.
Then the game has been laid out very clearly. My enemy must be totally vanquished before they do the same to me. Reconciling with the opposition is a fool's errand; at best providing a minor speedbump, at worst enabling my opponents to snag a few more miles out from under me. It's not like being patient and reasonable was slowing anything down.
It should be said that I really hate this, and that I write those words with some measure of guilt and shame. I'm not even 100% sure "this is the way", but I am frantically looking for another path and coming up empty. Trans activists have boxed in this debate with such immense dishonesty, with no effective antibodies to push back with.
I'm far from pleased to have Matt Walsh and various other SocCons being champions for my views. But this displeasure is starting to feel like a prissy holdover from a prior era. On some level, there is still a well-honed instict that conservatives have cooties. It's probably in my best interest to fully get over that at this point.
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