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Notes -
This is where I wound up as well. I was aggressively in favor of gay marriage, but I have to admit that I was plainly wrong about there not being any slippery slope. I genuinely thought that gay marriage represented the end point of winning equal rights for gay people, not just another battle on the way to whatever weirdness comes next. Such is the peril of youth, I suppose.
What's wild to me is how many of the activists that I thought I was on the same side as, but am now significantly to the right of, don't seem to have any personal memory of having held a position other than insisting that government funding of trans hormones for kids was morally obligatory and constitutionally required. The number that must have actually thought that a decade ago must have been vanishingly small (the term "gender-affirming" didn't even exist yet), but it is now the bog-standard Democrat position.
If I had to guess, those Democrats hadn't given any significant thought to the issue beforehand. So when it became a culture war topic, their first exposure to it was through the lens of the party-approved messaging. Thus, Democrats can credibly say that as long as they've been considering it, they've been in favor of giving "trans kids" hormone treatments.
The reason they hadn't considered it beforehand, of course, is that it's so completely insane that it would never enter an average person's mind except in the most cartoonish dystopian cartoons.
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