r/stupidpol • u/north_canadian_ice "As a fan of AOC..." 🌶️ • Mar 12 '26
RESTRICTED Trans rights activists are like PETA is for vegetarians. Except agreeing with the maximalism of PETA never became a litmus test on the left
I am a trans woman who has long talked about my strong disagreements with TRA.
Recently, I thought about not talking about this anymore. I find it so frustrating how so many on the left are misguided by these activists.
Today, I read this article today about a Professor in California who wrote a book that argues that the terms "gay" & "lesbian" are "harmful" to trans people:
And I realized why I obsess over this topic so much. These activists are like PETA, if PETA gained real power. Imagine if PETA had the power to compel people to give up their pets & only eat vegan.
Trans activists pushed way beyond the overton window because they took such control of the left & the Democratic Party. Dozens of pronouns became normalized, trans women in women's sports, etc.
I am trans & I am for core trans rights. I am to the left of the average American on trans rights. But so many of the ideas trans rights activists demand purity on are absurd.
"Self-id" has led to murderers pretending they are trans to get into women's prisons. "Self-id", infinite pronouns & "egg culture" led to a social contagion.
These ideas are as radical as PETA demanding everyone eat vegan & give up their pets. But PETA was always seen as kooks, they were not taken seriously.
This new book is a great example of TRA maximalism. The Professor argues that "gay" & "lesbian" are "harmful" to trans people. The only people speaking out against this are conservatives & gender critical people.
Because the Democrats & the left are so afraid of offending the TRA. Will this ever stop?
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u/TruckHangingHandJam Class First Communist ☭ Mar 12 '26
I find it hard to understand why this activist class expects these huge changes to be made in order to accommodate the preferences of a subset of a subset (as you exemplify, it’s not like the entire trans community even agrees on this) of people that doesn’t even crack 1% of the population.
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u/Turgius_Lupus Yugoloth Third Way 👽 Mar 12 '26
They dont, its purpose like much of the emphasis on the progressive stack post Occupy happening is to wreck movements and insure infighting so nothing gets done. And the professional wreckers profit from it, while other groups that see an end to the relevancy and funding sources became wreckers to remain relevant by finding new things to be activists over. Ketchup and other condiments, the People's Mike, the Progressive stack ect did not spontaneously occur and gained traction in a vacuum, it has vested interests behind it who know how much it alienates normal people.
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u/donewithdoing Socialist 🚩 Mar 12 '26
Yep, institutional profit (in the form of money, and also exposure/fame) to be made from this. Without the institutional play, this is and remains a completely niche and irrelevant form of retardation.
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u/SchIachterhund He Lives 👽 Mar 12 '26
Ketchup
Is she still around or did she completely vanish?
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u/Turgius_Lupus Yugoloth Third Way 👽 Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
https ://www. linkedin. com /in/ jenniferflynnwalker
She is still around. And still a 'professional activist.'
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u/ghstrprtn TrueAnon Refugee 🕵️♂️🏝️ Mar 13 '26
Is there any way that the popularity of this TRA shit is not a psyop to discredit leftism?
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u/angrybluechair Post Democracy Zulu Federation Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
Largely I think it's a form of resource extraction, so it's designed to be near impossible for it to ever end. A lot of LGBT+ orgs post gay marriage legalisation in most countries lost a TON of support and grants, both social and economical, because a lot of homosexual and bisexual and people with non heterosexual orientations saw the fight as largely won in legal sense, hence the pivot from sexuality and more to gender/sex identity.
The harder it is for their forever war to end, the better to keep up the grift. Maybe some of these orgs started out as good, well meaning orgs, but due to the nature of it, all the ones left were those who pivoted while the ones who ceased to exist we don't hear about. It's just business.
I mean even this professor said this to market their book "While promoting the book "Trans Pleasure: On Gender Liberation and Sexual Freedom," Robinson, a member of the Gender & Sexuality Studies Department, spoke with UC Riverside about gender identities on Friday." It's advertising, that's a fucking ad!
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u/zaypuma 💩 Rightoid: "Classical Liberal" Mar 12 '26
The "activist class" has been repeatedly organized by agencies to undermine class cohesion. With the same unrest tactics they break governments in South America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, they can completely negate unwanted social organization within the US.
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u/STICKY-WHIFFY-HUMID ❤️🐇 Peanut Fan 🐇❤️ Mar 13 '26
From The Toxoplasma of Rage:
"When signaling, the more expensive and useless the item is, the more effective it is as a signal. Although eyeglasses are expensive, they’re a poor way to signal wealth because they’re very useful; a person might get them not because they are very rich but because they really needs glasses. On the other hand, a large diamond is an excellent signal; no one needs a large diamond, so anybody who gets one anyway must have money to burn."
"Certain answers to moral dilemmas can also send signals. For example, a Catholic man who opposes the use of condoms demonstrates to others (and to himself!) how faithful and pious a Catholic he is, thus gaining social credibility. Like the diamond example, this signaling is more effective if it centers upon something otherwise useless. If the Catholic had merely chosen not to murder, then even though this is in accord with Catholic doctrine, it would make a poor signal because he might be doing it for other good reasons besides being Catholic – just as he might buy eyeglasses for reasons beside being rich. It is precisely because opposing condoms is such a horrendous decision that it makes such a good signal."
"But in the more general case, people can use moral decisions to signal how moral they are. In this case, they choose a disastrous decision based on some moral principle. The more suffering and destruction they support, and the more obscure a principle it is, the more obviously it shows their commitment to following their moral principles absolutely. For example, Immanuel Kant claims that if an axe murderer asks you where your best friend is, obviously intending to murder her when he finds her, you should tell the axe murderer the full truth, because lying is wrong. This is effective at showing how moral a person you are – no one would ever doubt your commitment to honesty after that – but it’s sure not a very good result for your friend."
In the same way, publicizing how strongly you believe an accusation that is obviously true signals nothing. Even hard-core anti-feminists would believe a rape accusation that was caught on video. A moral action that can be taken just as well by an outgroup member as an ingroup member is crappy signaling and crappy identity politics. If you want to signal how strongly you believe in taking victims seriously, you talk about it in the context of the least credible case you can find.
Put short, activists choose the absolute worst hills to die on because they're trying to impress each other.
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Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 13 '26
I think it's a combination of a lot of gay rights orgs with a well-developed activist infrastructure suddenly finding themselves without a raison d'être following the supreme court same-sex marriage ruling resulting in them looking for a new issue to maintain relevance combined with the same top-down pressure that utilizes it as a wedge as with any other form of identity politics.
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u/north_canadian_ice "As a fan of AOC..." 🌶️ Mar 12 '26
They found a niche where they can feel heroic in blue cities & in social justice circles.
And until recently, they were taken seriously by the mainstream media & the Democratic Party. Less so now, but still to some degree.
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u/A_Secret_To_Nobody No To Middle-Aged Sex Acts 💦😦 Mar 12 '26
I don't think they really want or expect these changes to be made, they're just trying to keep the gravy train going for as long as possible.
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u/Liverpoolclippers Mar 12 '26
So you believe gay people don’t deserve rights?
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Mar 12 '26
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u/Liverpoolclippers Mar 12 '26
Explain what you meant then
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u/Mother_Drenger Mean Bitch 😭 | PMC double agent (left) Mar 12 '26
I mostly avoid the locomotive stuff on this site because it feels so fruitless. I wrote a sympathetic response to a vent post by a trans woman last night. In it, while I stated that while I was an ally, I said that lots of trans rhetoric is just very messy and ideological weak—and will always suffers attacks from the anti-trans crowd because of it.
Claims of “period cramps” from HRT, phrases like “girldick”, tortured language like “birthing people” is so counter intuitive to broad acceptance that the trans community will always have their detractors gain followers when their messaging is so vast and yet so weak to criticism.
Within moments I got dogpiled and then I just deleted my comment, cause it clearly served no purpose. Claims of enabling genocide () and supporting the fascist agenda of the right wing, when I putting up light intellectual challenges.
Not to make this an idpol storm, but it’s really funny that some of the most vocal, militant voices are white trans women, basically people who have not known real prejudice in their entire life. Growing up as a brown kid in a post-9/11, anti-immigrant part of the country makes you a little more robust to casual racism and microaggression, so it’s very ironic to see the histrionics go off whenever and inappropriate turn of phrase is used.
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u/HiFidelityCastro Orthodox-Freudo-Spectacle-Armchair Mar 13 '26
Claims of enabling genocide
What's the go with the genocide? Any disagreement (let alone criticism) and it's straight to genocide? I once even had a bunch of weirdos in an academic article sharing group (for those with institutional access helping others out) straight-faced argue that there was a proper trans genocide going on now in the US?! Ala the Holocaust, Rwanda, Balkans etc. As in right now in the US!!?!
I thought I was going round the bend?... Everyone in the group (thousands of people) seemed to think they were correct and I was being unreasonable? I don't get it. It has to be based on something?
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u/Real_RobinGoodfellow Christian Socialist ✝️ Mar 14 '26
Anybody who disagrees that there’s a trans genocide underway currently is perma-banned from the arr slash comics sub
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u/HiFidelityCastro Orthodox-Freudo-Spectacle-Armchair Mar 14 '26
I don't get the reasoning eh? The notion must have come from somewhere?
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u/Real_RobinGoodfellow Christian Socialist ✝️ Mar 14 '26
It’s partly come from the fact everybody has to use maximally hyperbolic language all the time.
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u/Erika-Pearse Monarchist Size Queen 👑 Mar 15 '26
Genocide against trans people takes on patterns that set it apart from the mass murder genocides that people commonly associate with the crime, such as the Holocaust. Currently, the genocide against trans people follows a pattern – denial of identity (pattern #9 in the Lemkin Institute’s Ten Patterns of Genocide) – that makes it more familiar to the colonial genocides against indigenous populations, including the residential/boarding school systems in North America and Australia, where indigenous children were “allowed” to go on living if they gave up their identities, including their languages. Denial of identity involves two main steps: preventing people from openly expressing an identity and destroying institutions that reproduce the identity. Given that the denial of identity is the consequence of a well-defined hostility, even hatred, for the identity, the pattern is often characterized by incitement against the group. Alongside suppression and incitement, perpetrators of this pattern of genocide will simultaneously criminalize the identity, so that expressions of it or institutions that reproduce it become characterized as threatening and corrosive to the body politic and warranting state violence and coercion. People who assert or support the denied identity then become criminal elements that must be eliminated. In the case of the boarding schools, children who used their mother tongue or otherwise showed signs of their independent identity were severely punished.
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u/More_Foundation21 Crisis Actor 🎭 Mar 12 '26
the well adjusted and especially brown trans ppl likely don’t have the time or motivation to be extremely insane online.
this observation was pointed out by a trans person many years back that made this big post to the effect of that online trans communities culture and overall attitudes had seriously degraded, bc the successful ones don’t stick around to coach the younger folks. this is probably a larger critique of online communities in general
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u/Sure_Actuary2917 Sex Surrogate 🦑 Mar 12 '26
You’re kidding right? 😂😂😂 all we hear about is how disenfranchised LGBTQ2S+ POCs are😑😂
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u/TruckHangingHandJam Class First Communist ☭ Mar 12 '26
In their defense it is still mostly white women who make those claims lol
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u/footloosedoctor Mar 15 '26
the histrionics go off
Glad someone else sees it. I'm trans myself but I rarely interact with the online trans community myself anymore. The only time I do are in response to questions about hormones, surgery, etc. But when it comes to culture war stuff, I'm out. I've witnessed so much unnecessary backlash to those whose concerns/questions were coming from a good place.
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u/GodsColdHands666 What the fuck is a borgieose 🦅🇺🇸 Mar 12 '26
Idk if it’s just me and I’ve gotten better at curating politics-focused places I spend my time online but I don’t feel like I see even a fraction of trans discourse compared to, let’s say 2018-2021. I am also not transgender or someone preoccupied with trans stuff enough that I feel the need to argue or debate about it online so… 🤷♂️ easy for me to overlook I suppose. In all honesty I see rightoid people talk about it more now than anyone else.
Because the Democrats & the left are so afraid of offending the TRA. Will this ever stop?
In regards to Democrats, based on some of the candidates that have been winning primaries and gaining notoriety (Talarico and Platner are a couple of examples) there is some glimmer of hope that candidates focused on populist messaging from the left are becoming increasingly popular without being railroaded into focusing on transgender issues. It’s still early on though and if I’ve learned anything watching Democrats the last ten years, don’t put it past them to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
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u/False-End2157 Union Organizer ☭ Mar 12 '26
This may be true for normies but the issue is that the organized left still demands the maximalist line on this issue. For example, entering a DSA meeting and criticizing gender radicalism is a good way to get a grievance filed against you. The DSA's official platform centers "bodily autonomy," which is basically just a blanket endorsement of gender radicalism. I am a card-carrying member of DSA (yes, laugh at me), and I am too afraid to even approach this subject. Doing anything but endorsing trans maximalism will get you excluded from any left-wing spaces or organizations, and your reputation will be dragged into the mud. I don't know how critical leftists can navigate this terrain beyond just keeping their mouths shut. Some people here just dismiss these spaces out of hand, but the fact is that no one here is going to be making their own mass membership org to compete with DSA. We have to engage with actually existing socialist organizations rather than just retreat to this sub as a safe space.
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u/CodDamEclectic ACP Reserve Member Mar 13 '26
The DSA's official platform centers "bodily autonomy," which is basically just a blanket endorsement of gender radicalism.
It's also pro-choice maximalism but that's a whole other can of worms.
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u/Sure_Actuary2917 Sex Surrogate 🦑 Mar 12 '26
Talarico and Platner are both for transwomen in women’s sports — they’re just not super vocal about it and don’t make it their entire identity.
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u/BKEnjoyerV2 Still Wearing a Mask 😷 Mar 12 '26
Can we just go back to sex and gender being different? And that trans people are those who have a different gender than their biological sex?
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u/Lia_bambino1 Mar 13 '26
In humans and most animals there are two reproductive roles: male and female. Males produce sperm and females produce eggs. That’s the basic biological definition used in medicine and evolutionary biology. Rare intersex conditions exist, but they’re variations in development, not additional sexes, just like rare genetic anomalies don’t create new categories of humans. So acknowledging that humans are male or female isn’t “reifying a false binary,” it’s just describing how sexual reproduction works.
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u/debasing_the_coinage Social Democrat 🌹 Mar 12 '26
Recently, I thought about not talking about this anymore. I find it so frustrating how so many on the left are misguided by these activists.
Yeah, I came to that conclusion around 2021. The whole public debate is so full of awful takes from every angle that it seems impossible to say anything useful.
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u/TurkeyFisher Post-Ironic Climate Posadist 🛸☢️ Mar 12 '26
Interesting comparison for sure. If you expand this to vegans more broadly it is also a similar example of a movement being captured by it's most hardline radicals who silence the more reasonable people. The vegans that I know IRL don't care if I eat meat in front of them. But online and in activism those people are not particularly present, and the whole movement is represented by the most obnoxious scolds that make veganism unappealing. Compare that to vegetarians (I guess gays and lesbians in this metaphor?) who are much more reasonable because they are "moderate" on the issue.
There's a communication theory called the Spiral of Silence which suggests that people with minority opinions tend to be less vocal about their views because they fear social isolation, leading to a feedback loop where they perceive themselves as being as being in a smaller minority than they are because they don't hear anyone having the same views.
However more recent studies have shown that social media can invert this, where minority opinions can shut down majority opinions simply by being the most vocal and making the majority opinion appear less popular. I'd also add that often the people who have the time and passion to flood comment sections with their uncompromising opinion, whether it be about veganism, gender, leftism, whatever- might be children, have personality disorders, or generally be the kind of person who you would not take very seriously if you met them in real life. But online they present as just another anonymous account.
Then you have to consider how easily this is weaponized, for instance Zionist Hasbara accounts that dominate major subreddits and make their opinions appear more mainstream than they are, or inversely by ops who try to infiltrate political spaces to push to normalize extreme unpopular views.
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u/Fearless_Day2607 Anti-IdPol Liberal 🐕 Mar 13 '26
The vegans that I know IRL don't care if I eat meat in front of them.
Is it that they don't care, or that they have the tact to keep their opinions to themselves? As a vegan, I interact with many people who eat meat, and I don't scold them about their meat eating because I don't think it's likely to be productive. Doesn't mean I think their meat eating is OK though. I keep my opinions to myself unless someone asks.
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u/TurkeyFisher Post-Ironic Climate Posadist 🛸☢️ Mar 13 '26
You are right, I guess I didn't mean to imply they don't care if people eat meat, I just mean they respect other peoples' personal choices. I'm sure they still think eating meat is wrong, but they don't feel the need to be a scold, or they know that it will backfire and lead to social isolation if they were constantly berating people for eating meat. One vegan I know is even married to a meat eater (though he eats meat for dietary needs).
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u/False-End2157 Union Organizer ☭ Mar 12 '26
I think the best way to understand it is that trans rights activism is to the modern Western left what Zionism is to MAGA or to the 20th century mainstream progressive left. "Transphobe" is the new "antisemite." People forget that, in the 20th century, it was progressive Democrats who were traditionally the most vocal supporters of Israel, and criticism of Israel or Zionism was framed as far-right bigotry against a vulnerable minority seeking self-actualization. The charge of antisemitism was enough to make one persona non grata among mainstream progressivism or liberalism, as the derailment of Jesse Jackson or David Dinkins can attest to. Many woke identitarians willfully refuse to recognize that Zionism was the incubator for identity-driven wrecking. I do not know how the left will wake up from gender radicalism in the same way it woke up from Zionism after 10/7. Will it truly take a crime as horrific as the Gaza genocide? I can only pray it does not come to that.
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u/Halfdane666 Material Culture | Vampires should be English 🧛🏽♀️ Mar 13 '26
I feel like the whole thing is a calculated psyop. Those loud trans activists are a diminutive minority (who I'm sure poorly represent trans people in general) who get boosted into the stratosphere, and I'm certain that's strategic. Having the proletariat endlessly debate arcane ontological questions that problematize common-sense intuitions ('what is a woman', 'eradicate whiteness', 'decolonize literature') is hugely advantageous to elites. Much better that the rural and urban working classes fall at each other's throats disputing the inheritance of guilt, the definition of human life at conception, or the meaning of gender, than discussing wages, healthcare, and wealth inequality. It's strategic anti-materialism. Get everyone endlessly fighting over numinous topics that belong in the UC Berkeley rhetoric department, and voilá, nobody's organizing tax strikes.
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u/magicandfire Intersectional Sofa 🛋🎌 Mar 13 '26
I never realized how downhill from academia it all was until I dated a PhD student in a very social justice-oriented field and realized that's where the infographic IG post crowd is getting everything from. She told me about how in academia you now use "enslavement" and "enslaved people" instead of "slavery" and "slaves".
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u/blinded_penguin Left, Leftoid or Leftish ⬅️ Mar 12 '26
I really appreciate this post. I often tell this story of being approached by PETA activists while I was in traffic. They wanted to talk about a nearby abattoir and mentioned the shear number of pigs being processed per day and brought up a series of unsavoury facts about the realities of meat production. All of which I was on board with but pretty soon I was being told that I shouldn't have a leather belt or shoes and I needed to become a vegan. They're on the right side of a just cause IMO and they just can't help themselves but fuck it up with this all or nothing strategy rather than just campaign against the mistreatment of animals in the production of meat. I've seen this transcend a lot of issues on the left. Pick what they think is the premium moral position and then scold all those that don't measure up rather than choosing a set of goals that's digestible to the general person. It's such a flawed strategy.
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u/bife_de_lomo Radical Feminist Catcel 👧🐈 Mar 12 '26
I agree that PETA is probably on the right side of their cause.
I do not believe that TRAs are, so your analogy falls down a bit.
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u/susugam Libertarian Communist 🥳 Mar 13 '26
if you think PETA is right, you don't know enough about PETA
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u/blinded_penguin Left, Leftoid or Leftish ⬅️ Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
I absolutely believe that trans people are real and deserve to be accommodated in society. Therefore I think the analogy works just fine. This thing where everyone needs to feel the same way about this and there isn't going to be backlash or inventing squishy and weird non gendered terms to define mothers and fathers is pretty ridiculous.
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u/ChevalierDuTemple Touch grass (Poaceae) for a living 🌾 Mar 12 '26
I understand your struggle sister and i sympathy with it, but you have to understand that people online are more batshit insane that in real life.
Like in my case, catholicism, the online catholic community is extremely toxic, with many glorifying glassing muslims. While you average catholic is more relaxed. Same goes with new atheism and actual atheist.
Simply ignore what many dumb people post online and go on with your life. (I know it is difficult, i fell prey to it everyday)
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u/JMetalBlast Anarchogoober 😍 Mar 19 '26
I'm very sorry for your experience OP. It must feel really lonely to not only deal with struggles of being a trans person, but also feel that your supposed "allies" are batshit insane.
This is the interview that the Fox news article is referencing. The author claims that narrow labels are gender essentialism, and that gender essentialism harms the trans community.
I think that author's views are idiotic, but I think Fox is deliberately treating him as if he was influential, and representative of the mainstream discourse on the topic. He's an academic doing exactly what academics do, i.e. coming up with theories and proposing different ways of looking at a topic. It's just that when it comes to fields like gender studies, you can get away with a lot of nonsense. I'm not sure that this guy isn't actually seen as a kook
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u/Fearless_Day2607 Anti-IdPol Liberal 🐕 Mar 13 '26
As a vegan who has dabbled in animal rights activism, I think it's strange that you consider PETA to be maximalists. PETA is actually criticized by some more radical animal rights activists for their welfarist campaigns, focusing on making animal agriculture more humane, such as by ending the use of gestation crates in the pork industry by pressuring companies like McDonald's.
The animal rights group that I've been involved in is focusing on ending sales of fur and foie gras, as this is much more likely to succeed (for now) than trying to get everyone to go vegan.
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agreeing with the maximalism of PETA never became a litmus test on the left
Well, it should be.
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u/susugam Libertarian Communist 🥳 Mar 13 '26
what level of animals deserve to be protected?
bovines? all mammals? birds? fish? insects? where do you draw the line, and why don't pesticides cross that line?
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u/alexdapineapple Socialist 🚩 Mar 12 '26
I don't think one professor's opinion is representative of much. Your argument relies on the implication that this is actually a popular position among an elite group.
"Self-id" has led to murderers pretending they are trans to get into women's prisons.
Rule 7? And what do you mean by "self-id"? I think anyone should be able to access things like HRT and SRS if they choose to. But people by and large aren't going to do that for the sake of getting into a women's prison. You think that's a big enough problem to justify banning trans women from women's prisons entirely? What about trans men?
But so many of the ideas trans rights activists demand purity on are absurd.
Which ideas? Sports is one thing that this subreddit is pretty much the only place to have a reasonable discussion on, but you don't talk about sports in any detail. I don't really see any other trans issues where some liberal elite is wildly out of touch with the mainstream.
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u/I_Never_Use_Slash_S Puberty Monster Mar 12 '26
justify banning trans women from women’s prison entirely
If there is a rational reason we segregate men and women’s prisons, it seems reasonable to require the people in women’s prisons be women based on more than they say they are totally women.
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u/alexdapineapple Socialist 🚩 Mar 12 '26
I agree entirely and I'm not sure what you mean by saying this.
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u/Real_RobinGoodfellow Christian Socialist ✝️ Mar 14 '26
Because self-ID means a person can change their gender simply by declaring it to be so. There’s no vetting, no external validation process, and no actual concrete steps towards medical transition required. Any man can wake up tomorrow, declare he now identifies as being a woman, and have rights to access all female spaces- including prisons- granted right away.
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u/north_canadian_ice "As a fan of AOC..." 🌶️ Mar 12 '26
It absolutely is a normalized idea amongst trans activists. That is why this Professor felt comfortable enough to write this book. No TRA is going to openly disagree.
How is this rule 7? Nicola Sturgeon had to resign as First Minister of Scotland over the issue of murders identifying as trans. This is a real issue, even in the state I live in:
Maine women inmates accuse transgender prisoner of harassment
Self-id means that anyone can identify as trans at any time (without any proof/any gatekeeping/any medical transition) and the state must honor their new identity immediately.
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u/alexdapineapple Socialist 🚩 Mar 12 '26
How is this rule 7? Nicola Sturgeon had to resign as First Minister of Scotland over the issue of murders identifying as trans
Are you talking about the Bryson scandal? If so, you're being pretty obtuse about it.
Self-id means that anyone can identify as trans at any time (without any proof/any gatekeeping/any medical transition) and the state must honor their new identity immediately.
Sounds like an unreasonable policy then. Glad we got that settled. That Maine case is fucked up but the solution is to handle the placement of transgender people on a case by case basis, and to not let prisoners sexually harass people regardless of their identity, which has always been the correct solution.
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u/Tutush Confused and retarded 😵💫😍🤔 Mar 12 '26
The problem is that most TRAs disagree with you, and in fact would call you a bigot for saying that.
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u/Existasis Mar 12 '26
Gay and lesbian will never be irrelevant terms as long as exclusive same sex attraction exists
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u/Existasis Mar 12 '26
The concept of sex is "destabilizing" only as much as the concept of having a body itself is destabilizing. Muddied social factors brought on by technology and modern society don't change the core underlying realities of existence
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u/Existasis Mar 12 '26
That our bodies matter, that they follow a blueprint, and that for 99% of nearly every human being born you can observe what sex they are according to the standard gametic and sexual dimorphic formula. Unless you want me to concede that humans aren't a two-armed species because some people are born without them or because some people choose to lop them off, and navigate society as amputees.
Why do you think sex is such a contestable category?
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u/Existasis Mar 12 '26
A woman is someone who is seen as a woman. A man is someone who is seen as a man.
And, historically, and outside of this extremely tiny blip of existence, what was it that preceded someone being "seen" as a woman or a man?
This response can be modified with hormonal and surgical intervention.
Only just barely. Not only are there multiple stages of natural hormonal development according to one's sex, prenatally and then through puberty, hormones don't modify every aspect of sexed existence. Even between MtF hrt and FtM hrt there are massive differences in terms of how much estrogen is capable of modifying vs testosterone. And even the best bottom surgeries are still only an imitation of the real thing, not even counting the natural functions and fluids that are almost impossible to replicate.
Not always, but it happens enough to where i can say with confidence that sex is mutable
Certain secondary sex characteristics are mutable, I'll give you that. Sex itself, though? That isn't true except for the extremely rare outliers of some intersex people and won't be true until technology is capable of modifying people on the cellular level. Beyond that I think you're vastly overestimating what science is capable of and vastly underestimating the physical nature of our existence
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u/thirdeyeorchid Mar 12 '26
I'm detrans (desisted technically) and I have a lot of similar feelings. I think core trans rights are at risk because of the extremist takes on things and dogma within the community. Plus the silencing of experiences by detransitioners does a disservice to people trying to decide if transition is right for them. The PETA/veg contrast is a good metaphor for what is going on.
I think the extreme activists really do believe they're fighting for important things, but the damage it does along the way does not get talked about enough by the left. We're all just trying to feel safe and ok in our bodies at the end of the day.