The costs of trans visibility

I’m going to hazard a guess that your disagreement with climate activists isn’t that far down the causal chain. I am recklessly speculating right now that you and climate activists have different views on the precarity of the earth’s climate and how much reducing carbon emission’s will salvage the planet’s fate.

If that just happens to be true (big if, I know) then I would say that difference is what’s leading you and climate activists to different conclusions on whether we should take steps to reduce carbon emissions, not your willingness to die to keep beef and lamb prices stable or their naïveté on the knock-on effects of their legislation on said prices. If I were a mediator charged with having you and climate activists see eye to eye, I’d start with the stuff in the first paragraph.

So if all that’s the case, then why put the focus on the thing way down the causal chain rather than the much more fundamental disagreement sitting right there at the heart of the issue?

Well, I SUSPECT it’s because saying you’re passionate about your right to eat meat is a more popular stance that puts you on stronger footing to win arguments in a politics sub forum of a poker website than making it all about how you don’t believe the science.

I gave the mask mandate example as well from another slippery slope example, which is something most people in this forum either were fairly indifferent about, or mostly in favor, at least given my conversations on the topic with them in the past.

And afaik most people in this forum would agree with higher regulations for animal farming which would increase prices, even if they would more for "ethical" considerations than for CO2 emissions considerations, so I dont think you can claim I defend low stable meat prices because it's a popular take here, I don't think it is

As a policy matter, the mask mandates did not follow from seat belt laws in any real material or functional capacity. Different slope, different ski resort entirely.

What common sense traffic regulation HAS paved the way for is making an easy analogy for people to draw from, making it harder for you to win an argument about mask mandates in a politics subforum of a poker website.

It's funny because I thought you were going in a complete other direction about how traffic violation enforcement schemes can lead to "horrific violence" (like, actual literal violence), but we've already got plenty off-topic items to clear off the docket so let's let that lie...

If we were to conduct a 2-question poll to the members of this sub:

1) Do you believe we should be forbidden from eating meat?

2) Do you think climate scientists are wrong in their assessment of how much harm carbon emissions will have on the planet?

I FEEL like the shrewd political arguer in you has already intuited which is more popular and have chosen your attack line on climate legislation accordingly. But who am I to say, I'm just a down-home LLSNL poster.

this is common, believe it or not, the nra does not approve of people owning assault rifles

they do however fight every attempt at banning them simply because they know once assault rifles are banned it becomes exponentially easier to widen the scope of that ban

also luc, at the risk of derailing this thread, masks were not a big deal, not the inconvenience people made them out to be and at the time were the best known option to employ

i was also in china for most of the pandemic where wearing a mask was never politicized and it was 100x better - yes there were plenty of chinese who didn't wear masks but nobody was like "oh that stupid conservative" it was instead "oh i guess he doesn't like masks" - it was no different than "i guess he doesn't like wearing polos"

Mask mandates followed seat belt mandates in public acceptance and in legal acceptance in many places.

The horrific violence was torturing children with mask mandates in schools. Yes it was torture. Yes i will never forgive the torturers and those who agreed with them.

5/8/2020 CNN

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/05/us/se...

The debate over masks today is a lot like the decades-long fight to mandate seat belts

Both are touted as essential safety measures to prevent people from dying. Both are minor accessories that, when first introduced, drew opposition from a vocal few who felt they were too restrictive.

But seat belts have succeeded. Yes, it took decades of jumping legislative hurdles, an effective and catchy campaign (“Click it or ticket”😉 and the eventual buy-in from carmakers to make them a reflexive part of driving.

Today, the same arguments against seat belts are being used to oppose masks.

WaPo in 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2...

And so on.

[QUOTE=rickroll;58721092]
also luc, at the risk of derailing this thread, masks were not a big deal, not the inconvenience people made them out to be and at the time were the best known option to employ

/QUOTE]

You are utterly wrong for kids (and for people with beards which insanely were mandated them anyway even if ALL guidelines in healthcare re people who actually have to wear masks for actually useful reasons, tell people they can't with a beard, they don't work).

8 hours masked at 6y old with only 30-60 min interval to eat (spaced out, away from others) is torture. And some places in the USA (not in the EU afaik) mandated masks from 2 years. That was utterly criminal, people should be in jail for that.

And yes if seatbelt mandates had been fought and considered illegal under the "the state has no right to mandate your safety against your will", mask mandates would have been impossible.

In other to mandate for third parties, you have to prove they are contagious, you can't assume they "might be" and limit their freedom, that's basic law.

anyway back to the topic of thread, if someone disagrees with the idea that minors could be sterilized and mutilated if they have gender disphoria , as it happened and is still happening (albeit less than 1-2 years ago) in several countries, it's absolutely reasonable to fight trans activists at every legal step from the first one , which can be pronouns or bathrooms.

Any legal recognition anything has to be changed in society to accomodate them (with the force of the law, not just because of courtesy) increases the chances of physicians being allowed to prescribe puberty blockers, then hormones, the surgery to minors.

That specific slippery slope *proved real already*

maybe all the people advocating for sterilizing trans minors are the real transphobes working deep undercover?

If that is "torture" then having your posts take up so much space is also "torture".

If you were mandated to read them 8 hours/day yes, they would be (same would apply to most posters content)

We're a million miles off-topic (not just with the examples, but even the broader discussion on slippery slopes was a tangent), so this will probably be my final response on it:

This somehow feels like the opposite of a slippery slope argument. This is more like two slopes running parallel to each other and we slid the same distance down each of them.

It's just two different instances of the government mandating a similar thing using a similar cost-benefit analysis with minimal cost incurred with life-and-death stakes on the benefit side.

Poll pre-pandemic audiences walking out of the theater for a movie about a pandemic, and no one is going to say that the scenes of people wearing masks really goes to show the dangerous knock-on effects of seat belt legislation.

Based on the fact that you put "science" in scare quotes and that you're using terms like "torture" and "horrific violence", I'm going to infer that the REAL breaking point for you between seat belt laws and mask mandates is that you disagree with others on both the cost and the benefit of wearing masks. That's the crux of the argument. The rest is rhetorical flourish.

Some doubts come to mind when the most extremists people do stuff that is so out of line with majoritarian opinion, it is bound not to help "the movement". But some people actually believe they are all fighting for a "slavery abolition" kind of right, whatever topic they discuss.

So you get climate activists making most people angry because they block infrastructure, and people advocating for surgery for minors or for biological men to play in the olympics against women and so on.

It's not rethorical flourish to claim that mask mandates couldn't have happened if we had been succesful in considering seat belt mandates illegal.

Back to trans issues to give proper examples, even if it costed very little to accomodate uncommon pronouns in official IDs, we shouldn't. We shouldn't give any legal consideration to the whole topic. When it's not a medical issue, it should be simply a private issue in all occasions, same as the color you choose to give your hair. When it becomes a medical issue, if it ever can be one, they are just patients like all other patients.

Oh, I don't read most of your words. I just scroll on by. It's still torture on the level you're assigning to six-year-olds wearing masks.

The logic heads out there might spot something unusual about the bolded statements and phrases above.

Because it's a different slippery slope than the seatbelts/mask mandates one (which was a basic paternalistic one with vicious repercussions for daily life down the slope, 2 examples of the same qualitative phenomenon, wide quantitative changes).

In the trans issues slope, it's about acceptance of gender theory as a fact with legal consequences.

In this forum we can't properly express all criticism to gender theory because of moderation rules; but rest assured in general it is not obvious at all that what activists call "gender identity" exists in the exact form activists define it.

Until it has legal effects though, it's not necessary to define it in objective, actionable terms for the state. So they can claim whatever they want and i can disregard all or part of their claims with no repercussions and no effects on my life or the life of the people i care about.

Now if we start to accept it has legal effects even in the most innocuous forms (pronouns on government issued IDs, bathroom access) , we are *legislating gender theory to be true*.

That automatically paves the way for the same to have legal effects for, among others, physicians. Which then become allowed to do stuff based on other parts of that theory

Sorry man but you don't get to decide how much my kids suffered.

You have failed to spot the unusual thing about the bolded statements.

I'll elaborate:

Passing a law banning patients and their doctors and families from getting prescribed gender affirming care IS legislating gender theory. It just happens to be the gender theory you subscribe to.

Your credo that "The state has no right to mandate your safety against your will" went away the second the state was mandating a safety parameter you agree with.

So again, the crux of the argument is yours and trans activists' differing theories on gender. Arguing about anything else is just talking past each other.

I understand you can't argue about that in this thread, so I can't blame you for not sticking to that discussion in this instance. But it's just a pattern I'm noticing in our short time together...

Alright, my last game of spot the logical inconsistency was unfair, I'll give you an easier one this time:

the mandated the masks in schools to protect the teachers, and adults in the family, at least here that was the motivation.

If it was for them they would have mandated 3y+ but they didn't in any place in europe.

RaiseA let's clarify for the nth time then move back to the thread as I tried many times to do already.

I am not against babyseat mandates in car for babies ok?

I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’re saying about the dynamic between the pragmatic and the ideal. The only issue is that a) my point of view is much more progressive than 90% of society and b) I’m not convinced that categorically we can think of trans and other rights the same way. That’s because in other groups, there’s not really a question of what it means to be a woman or black biologically. And in the case of gay rights, I mean if you have sex with someone of the same sex you are gay pretty much unless they are a passing trans person ig. However in the case of being trans, I mean that can vary by culture and even period of time, plus there is absolutely no foolproof test to 100% determine someone is trans. Also in other groups, they might have identity specific medical needs but they don’t rely as heavily on medical practices just to exist. Furthermore how we integrate them into society is really important, and the gender abolitionists have really done a number on the community by undermining that integration.

Yeah when we zoom out and look at a general analysis of social movements, people can try to make analogies about how I am akin to the people that didn’t support gay marriage but wanted gay people to be left alone. But what you have to understand is that it’s more like I’m actually fighting the people that want to abolish marriage in general as a way of reaching equality between the sexual identities and AM advocating for gay marriage in this analogy. Meaning my beliefs are pretty progressive on this subject and has been for some time, it’s just that I don’t buy into the extremists and want to make sure we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot by buying into the most extreme vision of society that pro-trans gender abolitionists/anarchists are arguing for.

I’ve heard the arguments, they’re bad and they harm trans people. That’s my point.

So to sum up, you do not under any circumstances endorse restricting adult behavior to protect them against themselves, and you see a minors' liberties of such equal importance that you do not endorse restricting THEIR behavior to protect those around them, but you DO support mandating children's behavior (even endorsing state-sanctioned "torture" and "horrific violence" against them) if it's expressly and exclusively in the interest of protecting THEMSELVES, and in fact you're so passionate about protecting children from their own decisions that you don't see barring adults' from use of public bathrooms as a problem because (if you think about it) that's going to eventually lead to minors being allowed to receive treatments you deem unsafe.

Got it. Glad we had this talk. I'm perfectly clear on everything.

I just have one question: Isn't it just easier to say you don't think trans identities are valid? You've already said that's what you believe. It's clear to everyone watching you ride this logic rollercoaster that that's what's motivating you to your conclusions. I feel like it'd be really freeing to just be like "I'm against climate legislation because I don't believe the climate science. I'm against mask mandates because I'm not too worried about the spread of COVID. I'm against neo-pronouns and trans people using bathrooms because I don't believe in trans people."

Appealing to some broad principles of liberty seems like an active waste of time because the second you dig into those principles they have so many caveats and unique use cases that it's apparent if you had opposite views of the efficacy and costs of masks/gender-affirming care/reducing carbon emissions, you would come to the opposite conclusion. So just argue about that. That is where you and the people you're arguing with differ.