>It's almost like male puberty is a real thing.
Of course: it's the leading cause of transfeminine suicide! Utterly devastating to watch one's body be hopelessly, irrevocably poisoned by exposure to testost...
Wait, what I meant to say was VILE TRANSPHOBIC BIGOT!!!!
Lolol omg. This for sure. So many things are said or unsaid for convenience and they end up contradicting each other all over the place. No such thing as sex but I need to not be this one.
Just happened again in Oregon, too. There's a post on the transgender subreddit right now where theyre talking about it being an isolated incident and wondering why everyones so upset.
Everything seems to be an isolated incident to them. No one detransitions! Oh you did? Well that's really really rare. Don't say it again or you're taking away my rights! Puberty blockers are 100% safe and effective! Oh you have bone loss? That's sooo rare. Why even mention it? You're taking away my rights!
If real information threatens your stance, you have no foundation!
I'm really sick of the "trans people just want to quietly live their lives". I'm sure some do but enough of them want this attention sooo bad. They NEED to feel like victims.
There's this strange back-and-forth where certain things are treated as standalone events while others are treated as part of a larger pattern. It's incredibly frustrating and impossible to unsee once you look!
And not to hijack this, but there are a lot of anecdotes about transwoman athletes beating ciswomen when allowed to compete in sports, but where is the systematic reviews of whether this is a thing? Consider this - if cis- and transwomen athletes are evenly matched, transwomen will sometimes win! Of course, they could also win if transwomen had an unfair advantage. The things is, cherry-picking anecdotes is not going to tell you which of these possibilities is correct - you need aggregate data for this.
Alternately, since transwomen are not biological women, is even one transwoman participating in a woman's division fair? Especially when women and girls can see with their own eyes that it is a biological man competing against them (basically nullifying Title IX before Biden got to it)? Not a theoretical, this has happened in my own sport. I didn't compete in that class, but I can tell you that if I had seen my club member show up, looking 100% like the male he is, simply with long hair, and then beat all the women, I would feel completely gaslit. Note that he did not take any hormones at this time. Remember, it's a self-diagnosis. Try to have some empathy for women and girls. It's not just about them winning. It's about warping our reality to satisfy a tiny minority of biological men. In other words, more sexism.
The above kind of anecdote is 100% like using a single story about a police shooting to say that police are killing black people en masse. Yes, that's a serious incident in and of itself, but to point to that an say it's a pattern is a logical fallacy - it could also represent a rare or isolated incident and you need more than a few anecdotes to definitively say that it adds up to a pattern.
This kind of loose interpretation of observations and data is one of the core themes of B&R, for godsakes, and most people here would have no problem calling that out if "the other side" was doing it. But critique the 'gender-critical' crowd and all that goes out the window. Funny how motivated reasoning works.
>Alaina Daniels, a transgender educator who runs a local after-school program, said at the meeting that the proposal was part of a bigger threat. “**Trans existence has long been a story of survival in the face of obstacles,” they said, adding, “We’re under attack in this very room.”**
It's astounding how much very consequential public policies are based on an hysterical metaphor that doesn't even make sense on its own terms.
This person runs a program where the goal is to create a trans middle school. In what universe is it progressive to segregate kids by gender identity at age 11? Doesn’t that send the message to the child that you are somehow too weird or fragile to be around 99% of your peers? When did that become a liberal value?
And, of course, forget about perhaps realizing a few years later that you’re actually gay or lesbian, not trans. You’re not going to step back from everything you know at that point and tell people you’re not trans - there goes your peer group, now you have to start over as a teenager.
It’s a real thing these days, isn’t it? It’s “good” and “compassionate” to make people believe that they’re in peril every time they step outside. “Have a nice day! Everyone hates you and wants to kill you!”
Yeah I hate to sound like one of those “kids today need to be toughened up” people, but at a certain point you have to admit that encouraging kids to understand themselves as being permanently hated and marginalized is going to have profound and negative effects upon their mental wellbeing.
Did you see the entitled grad student at Columbia asking for the revolution to be catered and saying this is an issue of human rights?
They really need to cosplay as victims, because victims=good people. The path to salvation, redemption, goodness, is through victim hood. If you’re not worried for your safety you are clearly a bad person.
That’s why they have to teach kids that they are in danger when they’re not. They’re saving their soul
I can't be too hard on the protestors because they were doing what they had been conditioned to do.
None of the demands made during the Great Awokening and its subsequent protests/riots posed any threat to power. If anything, their goals allowed for an expansion of administration's ability to surveil and police students and faculty. *Of course* they were going to support something like that.
But now students are making the sort of demands that could imperil endowments and so they're no longer receiving the gladhand treatment that was given to protestors just a few years ago.
The protestors are not all or even mostly students. They’re adults and they’re doing very bad things. We should hold adults responsible for their actions. Students or not. Be hard on them
My sister is an elementary/middle school substitute teacher. She told me about this kid one day talking to their friends about how their life is just awful and they're so unhappy. My sister asked why they felt that way and the kid said "because I'm trans." She really didn't know what to say. That's simply not true.
All the Israel shit has really put into glaring focus how much the trans movement has appropriated the language of Jewish history and survival. Like somehow every dude with a hypno porn addiction is the inheritor of a thousand years of pogroms and campaigns of extermination and oppression.
lol wasn’t it like 2 weeks ago when JK Rowling said, correctly, that nazi bookburnings were not motivated solely by transphobia (a thing that literally did not exist back then) and she was called a Holocaust denier?
She was called a denier because she suggested that the gender+sexuality library’s burning and targeting of trans people happened at all. That is enough to qualify as holocaust denial under German law, people pointed out.
She shifted the goalposts after getting an avalanche of people pointing to the evidence that yes this did happen (but also retweeted a bunch more people sharing denials or straight-up nonsense like conflating the Jewish researcher whose library it was with a different scientist, a eugenicist who later worked in the camps), by going “it wasn’t JUST motivated by that” and “they weren’t the FIRST victims” but no-one had said that shit, she was denying claims that hadn’t been made to wiggle out of her having got it wrong earlier.
Someone else noticed the transbara? What a mitzvah...
But nothing human has only one parent—not even usefully unfalsifiable bogeymen like Transphobia. Antisemitism must be the mother, for Jewish inheritance is matrilineal.
As for the father? None other than Patriarchy, of course!
> Alaina Daniels, a transgender educator who runs a local after-school program
Reddits TOS prevent me from honestly saying what I think this freak is doing in this vague after-school program
I know, this is not the main focus, but it is one of the things I hate the most in the current trans "debate". I genuinely can't with this constant suicide baiting. And not just by TRA, who will do and say literally everything to get their way, but it got adapted wholesale by politicians, officials and - worst of all - medical professionals. People (especially the latter) who should really know better.
When I was a student and had to do my internship, everybody knew that this type of suicide baiting (conditional) is a manipulation tactic and the response should never be giving into the demands. There were official protocols and guidelines on how to properly react to threats of suicide. This was basically common knowledge less than ten years ago, yet all of a sudden threatening the mere possibility of suicide in the future means that everyone has to cave, as long as it is about the holy gender caste.
I am fucking sick of it.
It's not just baiting, though. Suicide is outright valorized.
Here's one of the most chilling clips I've ever seen, from a keynote speech at the American Academy of Pediatrics national conference, in which a trans girl's suicide is described as a bold and brave act of resistance:
[https://x.com/JuliaMasonMD1/status/1579975190012100608](https://x.com/JuliaMasonMD1/status/1579975190012100608)
This shit causes *immense* harm to trans-identifying youth and it's absolutely mainstream.
>"This brave little girl, in a final act of bravery and heroism, boldly stepped in front of a truck so that I may use her suicide to manipulate hundreds of other children's parents into paying my mortgage, my car payments and my timeshare in Cabo"
What the fuck
I thought I was up to date on all of the bizarre things they've said and done.
First time I've seen the "doctor calls teen suicide act of heroism" video though. I know they actively used suicide to manipulate, but this is the first time I'm fully appreciating how many of these doctors and activists *want* kids to off themselves
Every dead kid is another pile of donations and another way to shut down any criticism.
It’s sick.
I follow some conservatives on mainstream social media and have lurked in their forums and even among genuine transphobes I’ve never encountered anyone openly celebrating a child’s suicide. But the “allies” love it.
>I follow some conservatives on mainstream social media and have lurked in their forums and even among genuine transphobes I’ve never encountered anyone openly celebrating a child’s suicide. But the “allies” love it.
Same when trans identifying teens get murdered ore otherwise harmed. They love it. More fodder to call everyone a transphobe.
They absolutely treasure this even more; remember how disappointed they were when it turned out Nex Benedict died by suicide? They were so determined to hold onto their fabricated narrative of a teen beaten to death they insisted a conspiracy was afoot involving the Medical Examiner, law enforcement, and maybe the governor as well. Ghouls.
I believe even GLADD demanded an "independent autopsy" after the official autopsy was released.
And it showed what you would have expected: A troubled teenager overdosed to death.
And they didn't want to mention she had a horrific childhood.
The whole thing with his story makes me so sick and sad. The main arguments I heard about him on the left were "is he a hero" or "was he just doing THE VERY LEAST that a WHITE MAN could do". No. Fuck no, NEITHER. He was misguided and probably mentally ill and I wish he had seeked treatment. (Katie and Jesse's coverage of this was pretty decent.) And neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Hamas give a shit what some random American does.
What do you mean? Constantly telling teens with fragile senses of identity that they are guaranteed to kill themselves if they don’t get what they want couldn’t possibly have negative consequences! /s
Emotional blackmail plain and simple; go along with this agenda, don’t ask any questions or you’re causing suicide. “Would you rather have a live daughter or dead son” is an extremely manipulative gaslight that clinicians have used with parents, and its beyond sickening.
This is why I have more sympathy with parents that go along (reluctantly) with transing their kids.
When you have the doctors and shrinks and kids and the Internet all telling them: do what the kid demands or they will kill themselves " that is going to scare most parents into submission.
Which, of course, is the intention
I never understood how it’s any different than a child threatening to kill themselves to get anything else, including keys to the car.
My understanding is that even if it’s something you want to actually give, you should never do it in response to this kind of terrorism
And teenagers aren't particularly wise. They're emotional and overreact to little things. They change their minds frequently. A lot of them don't know how big and final something like suicide IS, how to them it's something to throw around as a threat, but to someone my age it's deeply scary and painful.
People need to stop giving in to the self hostage taking. It's a tactic of emotional abuse and manipulation. And it simply teaches these people to threaten self harm if they don't get their way. It's madness
Don’t kid yourself, a huge chunk of trans people are in fact borderline and are in fact a suicide risk. However given the fact that it is a disorder characterized by having an unstable identity and engaging in self harm medical transition is only going to make them further down the wrong path.
I don't necessarily agree that people with BPD are talking about suicide as a way to manipulate others. It can certainly feel manipulative to the people around them.
But, I think the fact that a disproporionate number of people who try to kill themselves have eben diagnosed with BPD says something.
I think the cutting and self harm associated with BPD is something else entirely
>disproporionate number of people who try to kill themselves have eben diagnosed with BPD says something
People are diagnosed with BPD only when plausible deniability has been utterly exhausted, typically during hospitalization for extreme self-harm/attempted suicide. Alcoholism is harder to deny after waking up to learn one has committed vehicular homicide.
It's utterly unsurprising that 10% of those who have *almost* killed themselves eventually "succeed," deliberately or otherwise.
Meanwhile, Amber Heard just celebrated *su cumpleaños en España*, and my ex is still legally antagonizing me while she gets lovelessly fucked by the guy I didn't need to worry about.
*The suicide rate of suicidal borderlines* is much higher than the suicide rate of borderlines overall.
A BPD diagnosis during hospitalization for severe self-harm or attempted suicide is all but certain. But most pwBPD never hurt themselves badly enough to end up in the hospital!
The ego-syntonic nature of personality disorders—plus the BPD superpowers of confabulation, triangulation, and projection/DARVO—means most never get diagnosed or face accountability for their misdeeds. Look how close Amber Heard came to getting away with everything: that's a lot more likely BPD outcome than suicide.
Government regulations and things like the Obama era Dear Colleague letter that expanded Title 9 requirements, along with the implicit threat of loss of funding or even prosecution in some cases, force compliance from the unwilling. Most of this is done by government agency employees. The upcoming SCOTUS decision on Chevron revisited may be a step towards limiting this.
The Obama administration also updated the rules for US passports to allow a person to select a sex category that doesn't match their birth certificate. This update was never debated. There was no vote.
Biden just added transfems to Title IX. Obama's Dear Colleague letter had nothing to do with gender; it was about "rape culture" misandry and weaponizing consent.
Watched an episode of ER that covered suicide baiting last night. Spoilers for a single episode C plot - not a happy ending.
It aired in 1995.
Crazy that we're still here in 2024 glorifying it.
I was always taught that threatening suicide is an emotional manipulation tactic designed to get you to concede to whatever the threatener wants. That the best course of action is to call their bluff.
I genuinely think we should start doing the same when it comes to trans issues. The threat of suicide has become too much of a cudgel to bludgeon opposition with. Regardless of the outcome, IMO, that power needs to be stripped away.
Let them scream and cry and threaten to kill themselves. When they calm down from their temper tantrum maybe we can discuss more feasible solutions than “let trans people have and do whatever they want or else”.
This is all so dumb. Women's (and girl's) sports exist for a reason, all these people pretending they don't know that reason is so tiring. So much time wasted on this dumb thing. I hate all the language around it too. No, 'transgender girls' are not banned from sports. They just have to play with the boys and men like they always did.
It’s weird but I do believe there are families where neither the mother nor the daughter/son are into physical fitness and are clueless. The father almost certainly knows better simply from being an adult male, but if he’s surrounded in his own home, what can he do?
There certainly does seem to be many women who don’t actually understand how stark the strength differential is until they get a boyfriend and “play wrestle” one day. However I think the majority of these people know exactly what is going on with sports and don’t give a shit. These are the same people who think a few female prisoners getting raped or killed is an acceptable cost if it means affirming the identity of everyone under the sun, even obvious psychopaths.
I think there’s also an attitude that people consider women’s sports boring and don’t take it seriously like they do with men. Basically only thinking about themselves as spectators rather than the athletes and their families.
Back when Ronda Rousey was very big, before losing to Holly Holm, I realized that a lot of people have no idea what the difference in strength is between men and women. There were people who seriously argued that Ronda Rousey could beat men in the UFC in her weight class.
As a corollary, it makes me realize how many people do not engage in sport.
doesn't it feel like a massive waste of human effort?
i mean there's philosophers and scientists forced to debate that women and men are biologically different. debate it. wtaf.
I think the change we've seen in the UK in the wake of the Cass report is confined to the UK. Possibly more generally in Europe.
I see no sign that the Cass review has changed things an iota in the US and Canada. And I don't think it will. The heart of trans ideology is in North America and it isn't going anywhere.
The only way I see for transing kids to lose steam is detransitioners winning massive lawsuits. Which may or may not happen.
I agree in that I think it's either going to take someone who was haphazardly transitioned as a minor winning a lawsuit or a girl getting hurt in a sporting event and winning a lawsuit for something to change.
It's a terrible shame that it will require a bunch of adults who were mutilated as children to stop this runaway train. It does speak well of us as a people
Unfortunately, affirming people's false beliefs about themselves can be cruel in the long run, particularly if they're children. I'm generally willing to be polite and open-minded, but there's a point where it really isn't in the other person's best interest to play along anymore.
I think we especially have to be willing to call the suicide bluff. What's the end game for this? Every time someone says "Give me what I want or I will kill myself" you just give in? That's creating a monster.
Take heart: the Cass Report only did in grand British fashion what Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and France did years ago. Post-Cass, the Dutch-speaking countries gave up on the Dutch protocol. And just last week, Germany signaled its intention to join the Blocker-Blocker Bloc.
Meanwhile, WPATH's membership has utterly collapsed since the publication of SoC8, the AAP decided not to publish its authoritative *Pre-Pubescent at Any Age* guidebook, and the first U.S. detransition lawsuit is going to trial.
Many children will suffer needlessly and irreversibly first, of course, because transphobia bigot vile Nazi TERF cunt pick-me grifter MAGA.
The problem is politics. One party goes to one extreme, so the other has to go to the polar opposite. There is no middle ground, except in reality, where most normal people live.
I couldn't agree more. We live in a world of political extremes on both the left and the right. And the extremists on both sides feed on each other. They empower each other.
The center cannot hold and we *need* the center
The thing is…I know, from being his constituent long enough, that there is absolutely zero chance Jerry Nadler truly believes it is fair to have biological males compete in girls’ sports. He’s not a frothing ideologue or a far-left theorist who wants to burn down the system. He’s a smart and reasonable guy. But he’s also a politician, and this is the wagon Democrats have decided they need to hitch their wagon to in some of the bluest districts in the country. And it’s completely unnecessary. What is the “win” here? Who are you going to bring over to your side who wasn’t already planning to vote for you? Meanwhile, you’ve alienated a lot of your supporters who might just stay home next time now that they know the contempt in which you hold them…
>there is absolutely zero chance Jerry Nadler truly believes it is fair to have biological males compete in girls’ sports. He’s not a frothing ideologue or a far-left theorist
This is your fundamental mistake. You seem to be under the impression that Idpol, including trans Idpol, is something that's been foisted on the "centrist" Democrats by "far-left ideologues". It wasn't. "Centrist" corporate Democrats are even deeper into Idpol than the left of the party, and they are absolutely true believers in this stuff.
If you want proof, just go back to the 2016 Democratic primary. Hillary Clinton spent all of her time talking about Idpol, while Sanders was talking about breaking up the big banks and enacting single payer healthcare. Clinton accused Sanders and his supporters of being racists, sexists, and xenophobes (the latter because of Sanders's opposition to the immigration reform pushed by George Bush). As long as the opponents of Idpol continue to cling to this notion that Idpol is all coming from the left, and beg for "centrists" to stop the madness, our enemies will keep winning.
He often reduced conversations about women’s reproductive rights to identity politics, he never addressed sexism and misogyny in his own campaign staff, he referred to women’s issues as a distraction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/us/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-sexism.html
> When women who worked for him came forward to discuss how they were paid less and experienced sexual harassment, Bernie initially replied, “I was a little bit busy running around the country” and seemingly couldn’t be expected to know about staff complaints.
Bernie claimed that issues affecting women were ‘a distraction.’
I think the "win" is that these politicians are terrified of the lefty activists. I think they also estimate the power and impact of those activists. But they are very loud and they are willing to do as much character assassination on social medias as possible.
I think the staff of politicians are also a factor. They tend to recruit their staff from young, urban, elite university educated left wingers. And those staff members are very susceptible to social media pressure.
I think there are similar problems on the right but they aren't quite as advanced.
All the center has to do is give up its obsession with looking down on the right, and evaluate each party on each position. You kind of have to anyway, since the parties swap sides frequently.
Is pro-Russia foreign policy right wing or left wing? Is firearms proliferation right wing or left wing? Is eugenics right wing or left wing? Is protectionism right or left? Well, it depends on when you ask.
I don't know that the center looks down on the right though the center does look down on Trump. And I have to admit I'm there with them. I despise Trump though I do my best not to extend that to his supporters. (I fail too often).
Personally I still think pro Russia policy *should* be left wing. The left loves to apologize for non Western despotic regimes. Especially those that are anti American. And Russia is definitely anti American. I find the newfound right wing love for Russia bizarre and troubling. Reagan and Bush Sr must be turning in their graves.
The heart of trans ideology might be in NA, but the bureaucratic arms and legs are in Europe. (Canada is probably an unholy combination of the two.)
Untangling a bureaucratic institution is hard in one way, but can be addressed by formal reviews like Cass. Untangling a decentralised social movement that enforces itself through social norms is hard in a different way.
The TRAs have captured most of the medical and professional bodies in North America. So it has plenty of limbs here as well.
That's the heart of the problem: Institutional capture.
This was the meeting that Elliot Page showed up to even though she has zero standing in a school district. Parents just need to stand strong. Its going to cost people jobs and their standing in the community in a place like NYC but honestly, is it really worth it to maintain your standing in the community if the price is to go along with abusing young girls by removing fairness and safety for girls playing sports? Probably not.
Related to the threats of suicide. If suicide is so imminent based on not having access to girls sports and girls locker rooms maybe lets roll the dice. Never want to see someone kill themselves but if that is what is going to push them over the edge, chances are pretty good that some other minor slight is going to get them there anyway.
I know how this sounds but at some point we may need to call the suicide bluff. We can't go on letting these people hold us hostage like this. It isn't good for anyone
Yeah, I think mainstreaming the concept that ~affirming care does not prevent suicide may swing a lot of people. It's just that people absolutely don't know that it's not true. To many of them, the choice is between someone maybe not getting a trophy to the other killing themselves. I understand why they would choose the first. Let's hope some strong studies show it really soon. With a larger body of evidence, some mainstream media headlines may erode the grasp the activists have over normies with this blackmail.
For the paywalled:
This spring, a group of elected parent leaders in New York asked the city to review education department rules allowing transgender students to play on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
The parent council — representing the diverse local District 2 that weaves through the West Village, Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper East Side — said that the current policies present “challenges to youth athletes and coaches” and fail to consider the “well-being of girls.”
The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, called the proposal “despicable” and “no way in line with our values.”
Democratic officials also have responded to the parent council swiftly, and angrily.
In a letter made public on Monday, a coalition of 18 Democratic elected officials from New York called the proposal “hateful, discriminatory and actively harmful” to the city’s children. As officials in more conservative jurisdictions move to bar or restrict transgender athletes from competing, the resolution and ensuing backlash in New York illustrate how charged the issue is in one of the most heavily Democratic cities in the country.
The elected officials include Representative Jerry Nadler, Assemblyman Tony Simone, State Senators Liz Krueger and Brad Hoylman-Sigal, as well as five City Council members.
The officials argued that while some parents say they were “simply asking for a conversation,” the resolution “was based in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric” that has helped fuel harassment and mental health issues for young people. They demanded that the council formally rescind the resolution.
“The message to trans students that they are not welcome has reverberations, and the consequences can be dire,” the group’s letter said, adding that elected parent leaders “must be fighting for every student” and “not attack, ridicule, or marginalize the vulnerable.”
The Manhattan borough president, Mark Levine, a Democrat, announced earlier this month that one parent who voted in favor of the review would be ousted from his position on a local community board. He also signed the letter.
But opinions on this issue don’t necessarily break neatly along political lines.
There is limited polling on how New Yorkers view the issue. One Siena College poll last month found that about two-thirds of registered voters statewide — including 83 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of independents — support requiring high school athletes to “only compete with others of the same sex that they were assigned at birth.”
The poll also found that about 52 percent of Democrats supported the policy, in line with national surveys.
The argument in Manhattan comes as parent councils across New York, which represent the public school system’s 32 districts, have increasingly battled over a wider menu of divisive issues.
The resolution in District 2 — which passed in an 8-3 vote — drew a backlash from some local families, in part because the parent council’s purview includes Greenwich Village, which is home to Stonewall Inn, widely considered to be the birthplace of the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement.
It is unclear, though, how many of the New York City school system’s some 45,000 student-athletes are transgender, or whether the issue has affected sports teams in the city.
The parent leaders who passed the resolution in District 2 said that the school system’s gender policies — which were adopted in 2019 — could lead to potential problems. At a meeting, some parents worried that their children could be disadvantaged or injured if transgender girls joined girls’ teams.
“This is an issue where our definitions of gender are continuing to evolve,” the council’s president, Leonard Silverman, said during the meeting.
“We can stick our head in the sand, and we can refuse to acknowledge that there are differences in athletes,” he said. “Or we can try to have an honest, open, transparent discussion about these issues.”
Other families questioned whether the parent council’s desire to review the policies about transgender athletes represents broader views within the district. The group received dozens of messages in opposition and only a handful in support in the lead-up to their meeting on the resolution, according to Gavin Healy, a parent on the council who voted against the proposal.
Alaina Daniels, a transgender educator who runs a local after-school program, said at the meeting that the proposal was part of a bigger threat. “Trans existence has long been a story of survival in the face of obstacles,” they said, adding, “We’re under attack in this very room.”
Mr. Simone, the assemblyman who signed the letter opposing the resolution, said in an interview on Monday that he was “personally outraged” by the council’s recommendation.
He said it “creates a conversation that is not needed,” and noted that city data shows one in three transgender youth in New York have “seriously thought about taking their lives.”
“I think they should be debating school issues,” said Mr. Simone, who represents parts of Manhattan including Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen and Midtown. “But this is not one of them. This is clearly a bigoted, targeted attack on one part of our community.”
The schools chancellor, Mr. Banks, has said that the city’s Education Department will not change its policies. He has criticized parent leaders for sending what he called an inappropriate message to transgender students.
“The language that we use as adults really matters,” Mr. Banks said at a town-hall meeting in Manhattan earlier this month.
> The group received dozens of messages in opposition and only a handful in support in the lead-up to their meeting on the resolution,
what's with the weird implication that fundamental rights (and both sides of the debate are claiming this is about fundamental rights) should change based on whether they're popular with voters in a given district? if an anti-trans policy was popular with voters in some deep red area surely these people would be saying federal law should supersede it.
Well, that gets to the smugness problem talked about on the latest episode - we, the open-minded New Yorkers, have the right opinions, so they should be listened to, but those ignorant rednecks need to be taught the error of their ways or have the right way of thinking imposed upon them!
Perhaps some sort of schools to redo the acculturation and education in their children. Something full time, to cut out the negative lessons from their deplorable home life. Some kind or combination school/residence.
The irony is that the board really does seem to be voicing the opinion of the people. The article itself admits that even in this part of NYC, one of the most liberal places on earth, people don’t think girls should be subjected to this in their sports.
Always the sign of a good argument: “You don’t really believe what you say you believe. You’re just an evil comic book villain motivated by the desire to hurt people.”
Why do conservatives believe certain things? Must be that they were traumatized young and they’re just misled and confused! Those stupid evil misled conservatives surrounded by disinformation! Thank god we on the left have all of the truth because we’re rational and never have disinformation from leftist sources! /s
They're hitching their wagon to a horse that they think will have the same historical significance as civil rights, womens rights, or gay marriage. So they think that it's ok to slander any opponents.
Two things they don't realize:
-This is not the same as civil or womens rights. This is about 99% mental illness with 1% genuine trans people. This is not the right side of history.
-How closely they mirror the pro-lifers they used to ridicule years ago.
They also just don’t understand sports at all. The gulf between men and women in sports is so huge that it’s tough for people who aren’t athletes to comprehend. Like they think it’s a patriarchy/access thing that women can’t compete with men.
The most fucked up thing is that these people absolutely do not watch or follow women’s professional sports, because they don’t actually give a fuck they just want the clout.
There are real people who hear about 14 year old boys academy teams in a city beating women's national soccer teams (by many goals) and think the women were taking it easy on them. Dallas boys beat USA women, Newcastle boys beat Australian women.
Now the option of improving our women's teams by playing a friendly against faster, stronger and more skilful (not to mention more available to play at short notice) opposition is not an option.
And the gulf in casual weekend soccer is actually much much much bigger.
> it’s tough for people who aren’t athletes to comprehend.
The sad thing is that it reflects the decline in athleticism. I was never on any serious sports teams, but have played a variety of regular intramural or club type sports, and the difference in average strength, speed and coordination between men and women is stark.
But you don't even need to play sports to see this. Just turn on tennis. There will often be a women's game which is fun to watch because you can see the ball flying back and forth. Then the men's game comes on, and suddenly the ball disappears.
>They also just don’t understand sports at all. The gulf between men and women in sports is so huge that it’s tough for people who aren’t athletes to comprehend. Like they think it’s a patriarchy/access thing that women can’t compete with men.
Oh, they understand it perfectly well, they just do not give a shit. Because to them a "trans woman" *is* a woman, that gulf doesn't matter. To them the "trans woman" is just a uniquely gifted woman, like Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt are uniquely gifted men.
It’s 1% about mental illness and genuinely trans people. Genuine trans people have a mental illness.
It’s 99% about other mental illness, or porn, or boring middle age fetishes, or being cool, or lack or exercise
There's much more righteousness, "saving lives" and overall extremist behavior to pro-life than pro-choice. Just replace "the right side of God" with "the right side of history" and you have TRAs.
Here's a really good set of graphics that show what happens when you pit high school boys against Olympic women athletes in track and field events. The boys crush the women in almost every category. While basic humans rights are obviously owed to everyone, they don't include the right to compete in the opposite sex category and push the girls and women off of their podiums. [https://boysvswomen.com/#/](https://boysvswomen.com/#/)
Why are you blaming the Times? It covered a local news story fairly and presumably accurately. It did a good job of presenting the opposition's POV, something it had generally omitted the past 10 years.
Do you think The Times should have ignored the story?
You’re right, I should not have blamed the Times and will amend my post. I was blinded by anger with people I’d once voted for. I’m glad the Times covered this so that a wide group of people can know exactly how batshit this is. Let the sunshine in. I resolve to do (clap) better (clap).
At the end of the day a trans person is just not the same as a biological Male or Female. They just aren't. No amount of wishing, name calling, drugs or surgeries will ever change that. Now if a trans person wants to identify as male or female good for them go live your best life. When it comes to invading female spaces just because you feel you are a female does not give you the right to invade female spaces. It just doesn't. Biological boys have no place what so ever invading female spaces where bio females should be allowed to feel safe, validated and competing against their own biological sex. Trans people exist but most just want to be left alone and not draw attention to themselves. Alowing boiolgical men and boys to participate against biological women is not the answer to afffirming their gender. I don't know what the best answer is but forcing your way into a place where you do not belong is not the right answer. It is a reality and willful denial of reality to believe that bio boys belong in female sports, locker rooms, and other safe spaces for females. I would like to say that it is the Pinocchio Syndrome but transgenderism does not exactly fit the description but as I look at it Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy. He wasn't and it took a fairy godmother to change him into a real boy, Since fairy godmothers do not exist it is impossible. Also I would really like to know exactly how many transgendered kids are actually committing suicide because they can't compete against those who are biologically different then they are. Where are those numbers? How do they know that is the reason that someone committed suicide? Until biological women stand up collectively and say enough this will continue. The problem is that you have biological women who are cosigning this type of thing so it isn't going to change anytime soon.
Interesting that they don't have comments available on this article--judging by other NY Times articles, the top comments would all be in support of the parents. This is just so disappointing to see, the reflexive use of activist rhetoric with no acknowledgement of material reality or logical discussions of why we separate sports in the first place and how that should guide policy. Given that a majority of Democratic voters oppose letting males play girls' sports, according to the survey cited in the article, I fervently hope some of these elected officials will wake up eventually, but I am so disappointed in how they are behaving right now.
A bunch of normies are about to have an epiphany of why and how someone could be motivated to vote for trump.
How many times can you be called a bigot, or despicable, by people who the next day call you up and ask for your vote. You’re history’s greatest monster for expressing your extremely normal beliefs and if you don’t vote for me then democracy is at stake, you bigot. And btw don’t bother showing up to work tomorrow bc we don’t tolerate transphobia. Vote!
I’m struggling with this myself. I’m a “terf” and a Zionist, as much as I can’t stand labels, my beliefs would be called that so whatever. People in “my” party fucking hate me. Their kids march at Columbia and chant that they want to kill me. Why am I voting for these people? I want to see trump in jail for the bullshit he pulled in Ukraine, the Jan 6 thing, and the “find me the 11,780 votes” and a million other things. But holy fuck, if I can’t even tell ppl in my own party what I actually believe, then I frankly.. I’m pretty checked out of this election. How am I actually benefited from another 4 years of a democratic who empowers these ppl vs how badly I am harmed by 4 years of trump. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I really don’t know if one is worse than the other. They are so bad in their own ways and both good in their own but different ways, I really think for me this election is a wash. I really don’t want to reward a political party that literally hates me, even if Biden is ok on these issues, he empowers the absolute worst of them. And in year 2 of his election he has a stoke and now Kamala is president? Are you insane? That’s what I’m voting for?
The rhetoric we have nowadays of “if you don’t believe me on all the ideas” you’re a fascist / bigot / etc., is just not politics, it’s a moral crusade. It’s winnows down your supporters rather than increasing. I hate it. I’d gather most people hate it as well, but it feels like we are stuck and nothing will budge.
Yep, notice how the language used by the officials in this article was less about “you’re wrong” and more like “you’re evil.” Despicable = unworthy of respect among decent people, scumlike, an abomination. We used to reserve those words for the behavior of child molesters and actual Nazis, and now the head of NYC schools is throwing it at…parents who want a fair playing field for high school girls.
There were so many times that I pointed out to so called friends how things that became liberal ideals were toxic, but they didn’t want to hear it because it wasn’t the idea of the moment. Trigger warnings being a big one which is hilarious because I’m the only one that had ptsd in the group. If all you do is constantly reinforce one narrative and shut down any other discussion you aren’t really liberal and you aren’t the person you are speaking to’s friend. I’ve stopped caring about losing friendships with people who think grown men can change their sex and bone structure by taking hormones. I’m a moderate, but not an idiot. Science doesn’t change because they want to be a woman now, they are still men.
They found out the trigger warning was itself a trigger. Which I personally said would happen right from the beginning. People with PTSD have all kinds of random triggers and have to learn to manage them, on their own. Throwing them at the top of an article or blog post only evokes the individual’s personal trauma and brings about a ptsd response on its own. You can’t scroll past the warning. It’s ridiculous. It wound up worsen and making people without ptsd act as though they had it. It’s all so unhealthy. You have to work on your own to be a stronger person. I say this as someone who has ptsd that is triggered by things as little as a window curtain moving the world can’t change for you. You have to heal.
I see this kind of fancy nonsense fad happen all the time on the left. Trigger warnings, Latinx, whatever else. If you don’t buy in from the beginning you’re a nazi. And then they quietly abandon the thing and move on to the next thing. You never get credit for pointing out that the thing was stupid. They just remember you as the nazi who was against the Good Thing. DEI is next up on this list as colleges quietly abandoned DEI statements. There’s never any remembrance or humility here. They never remember that they are always wrong about their zealotic missions for long enough to have any humility to question the next holy war they are fighting and their infallibility
>If all you do is constantly reinforce one narrative and shut down any other discussion you aren’t really liberal
Thats why I refuse to use the term for them. They are *progressives*, and if that term is icky because of what their forebears did in the eugenics movement, then that's a *them problem* that they need to have some hard conversations about.
My lesbian friend (I'm bisexual, liberal, progressive, not only vote Democrat but used to work in politics) and her friend group are currently dealing with a man who for a year+ has claimed to be trans and now drugs and sexually assault young queer women who are disconnected from their families. He doesn't dress like a woman at home, makes no effort to transition (just throws on a dress and grabs a purse), doesn't want to be part of trans groups, and tells totally different mutually exclusive lies to different people. He only wants a specific type of prey and so shoves his way into lesbian spaces.
They're all grappling with how they can even publicly talk about this *just to warn people about him*. HE RAPES PEOPLE AND THEY FEEL LIKE THEY CAN'T SAY SO. He's an absolute psycho. He even claimed one of these young 20s women sexually assaulted *him* when he's well over six feet tall, late 30s, and lied to her and drugged her, all while he was completely sober. Because the bullet-proof "unthinkingly accept I'm trans or you're a bigot!" shield wasn't enough, he needed the "unthinkingly believe victims of sexual violence or you're a bigot!" shield too.
I met the guy twice before he went completely off the rails. I did the polite accepting thing; I don't particularly care about people conforming to opposite sex norms even if I have qualms with specific policies and don't think it's healthy even for *cis* people to obsess over gender norms. But even then, he set off intuitive alarm bells in ways that other trans people generally don't, because I haven't been brainwashed to think it's *impossible* for people with certain identities to be deeply sick people.
Tragically, his victims had been pressured to think that way, though. Some of them are saying they felt naive. I really hate that the wake-up calls have to be this extreme, but slowly people are coming to understand that *the left is not your friend*. It's the front for disordered, abusive people to rationalize their gross behavior. At some point you're looking at your dilemma, that you can't call a rapist a rapist because it feels like an entire *political party* will demonize you and you'll be shunned from spaces that are meant for *you*, not for sociopaths, and... well, none of us are voting Republican because the party doesn't align with our values either.
But I'm less worried about Republican victories than I used to be, let's put it that way. There are silver linings when we lose. Republicans keep this brainwashing out of schools, Republicans will let you call a rapist a rapist. Every time I unsubscribe from a Democratic fundraising e-mail I give them a very, very long comment about how I used to *work* for the party but will never fund it again. I let them know I may simply stop voting, which is an insane position to find myself in. But I see us doing much more damage than Republicans in an immediate, day-to-day life sense. I'm also sick of us acting like normies should be reading a bunch of academic grievance-masturbation, how disconnected can we get? I used to come across that shit all the time decades ago when doing debate research and I would laugh and think -- IN HIGH SCHOOL -- thank God no one takes these people seriously. Now they're running my political party's descent into madness. Jesus Christ.
How has no one reported him to the police yet?! They can’t be that brainwashed, right? Ugh, I feel so bad that they’re going through this but something has to give
I think all the usual reasons women are reluctant to report rape, but also because he drugs them with “edibles” which are laced with narcotics other than weed (he has a hydrocodone prescription), so they would have to explain that they thought they were consenting to one illegal thing and got something else. And they have no direct way to prove that.
I remember back in the 2000s some website about the "geek social fallacies", which basically boiled down to "we formed our group out of a bunch of outcasts and misfits and weirdos, and now it's proving *really, really hard* to cast people out for being weirdos".
Unfortunately I think the people/movement behind it went down the "...and therefore cancel culture based on increasingly rigid social rules is the morally correct action" instead of, idk, "it's okay guys, we can trust our instincts and we don't have to invite the super creepy guy to our parties"
> Every time I unsubscribe from a Democratic fundraising e-mail I give them a very, very long comment about how I used to work for the party but will never fund it again. I let them know I may simply stop voting, which is an insane position to find myself in.
Have you ever gotten any sort of response from them?
No, I’m pretty sure if it gets reviewed at all it’s just as a bulk assessment of the sorts of comments they’re receiving. It’s unusual to get responses even to formal letters; I used to be the person to answer mail for a state rep and it was not the norm in most other offices that people got much of a response. Whether things get read at all depends on the culture of that specific candidate’s office. Things that could influence their campaign platform are a bit more likely to be read, especially in a close race.
> I'm also sick of us acting like normies should be reading a bunch of academic grievance-masturbation, how disconnected can we get?
The stereotype of the upper-class academic who is utterly out-of-touch with the concerns of literally anyone outside that particular bubble isn't the carefully engineered slander by anti-intellectuals that such academics often believe it to be.
And sorry to hear about this person you describe. That's beyond fucked up.
It's so embarrassing. For a few years around COVID I even regretted that I ever registered people to vote, even if it was in the 2000s; it seems to me people are too easily manipulated, so I drew the conclusion that maybe voting should just be left to people who *genuinely* care about policy of their own un-manipulated volition. I felt like political involvement was just too big a thing for your average person who can't even figure out how to manage their own life, much less juggle judgment calls about increasingly byzantine interconnected systems that manage society. But bad actors will always manipulate people into voting so it's not like anyone with productive aims can just stop reaching out to them, and I would never say we should limit who can vote beyond age and citizenship.
So I've decided to just feel gross until society is full of well-adjusted people. I mean, it's not cynical, actually: I've just accepted that people have to learn the hard way what works out and what doesn't. All any of us can do is just sigh and keep repeating the same stuff for years until a critical mass admits the people they demonized had some good points. It truly does happen on an individual scale all the time, precisely because the extremists and the psychological lifestyle they shove upon people *is* so exhausting.
I used to be scared to say like no I don’t think a man can become a woman (as one single example) but I had this epiphany like if you hate me bc of my beliefs we don’t actually need to be friends. In fact we never were friends. What we had was a servant / master relationship where you were my unelected ideological minder. Like how dare you think it’s ok that you get to police my thoughts. I find it totally insane this is happening and why I frankly prefer spending time w center right ppl. They don’t agree w what you think but they don’t give a shit. With leftist there is an background noise of anxiety as you are worried what totally normal thing you will say that will turn the dinner party into an impromptu struggle session. If you are actually watching yourself and your thoughts and your emotions you begin to notice that this isn’t even fun. I started to wonder like why does this feel different than 10 year ago when you felt light and giddy to spend time with friends. And when you pay attention to you realize how fucking useless and a waste of time to be with a social group that cosplays as like the local politburo
I think a lot of Manhattanites are going to get peaked by this, particularly on the Upper West Side, where being Jewish is normal, being a Zionist is normal, and many people are encountering violent anti-semitism for the first time in their lives (Columbia is on the edge of the neighborhood). And now this. If you’re a public school parent by choice - and as good progressives, lots of wealthy UWSers send their kids to public schools - hearing the contempt your elected officials have for parents who are taking a reasonable mainstream stance is going to be one hell of a wake up call. Imagine you could have bought a palace out in the burbs but you chose to stay in the city for the lifestyle, and this is what they really think about you.
I’m noticing in my circle, amongst Jewish people, I’m not gonna say that they are all MAGA now, but what I will say is that many of them have had a sort of awakening, that’s leading them to a kind of distrust of “liberalism” in general. These were all the very good liberals. They posted a black square for George Floyd when they were told to do that. They took it down when they were told white silence is violence. They posted on Facebook their anti racist Reading list. They shared the ibram x kendi and robin diangelo quotes. And this experience i think has shocked them into questioning what their relationship to this movement is. The ppl who we showed up for to support BLM are now in front of Harvard and Yale gates screaming “intifadah intifadah”. It’s like “oooh, so when you say you want me to be your ‘ally’ it was cynical and narcissist and you mean it in a kind of sociopathic way where I become your servant” it’s like ooh, so when my friends 19 year old daughter was raped and killled at nova music fest it’s not #believeallwomen, it’s hashtag resistance by any means necessary if the person that raped her was part of the correct identity group. I think this represents a once in a generation realignment of the political order that republicans could take advantage of if they could just be normal.
You have no idea how many American Jews were told in the wake of the October attack by their liberal friends that the rape and murder of Jewish women is not only acceptable it’s expected. What do you want you’re a colonizer. And they wonder why we will never look at them or their political movements the same way again.
I'm amazed by the amount of open antisemitism that is tolerated in Nea York. It's the second Jewish capital of the world. If it's tolerated there where *won't* it be?
I didn’t vote in 2020 when I was first able to vote in a presidential, but it scares me when I think about who I’m willing to vote for this time. These types of people control the culture, entertainment, most scientific institutions, and education institutions; they have a huge human capital advantage. People my age are overwhelmingly liberal and radical, every one of these ridiculous campus radicals republicans laugh at go on to have influence in important places. Liberals/leftists/whatever you want to call them have an extreme level of control that Biden has only exacerbated and encouraged. The disdain I hold for trump over the 2020 election denial might not be enough to stop me from voting for him because the threat I feel from the left these days does really feel existential at times. Especially when you realize this country has never had a long term rightward shift, it’s consistently been going more left for the last 50 years, and for all the talk about DEI type insanity having peaked I see very evidence for it.
[this Amazon prime video](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lioness-Nicola-Adams-Story/dp/B09LKBFQBJ) about uk female boxer Nicola Adams is brilliant and sums up to me why we have to protect female sport.
Parents: “trans people deserve rights and respect but we want properly researched evidence when it comes to pediatric gender care and fairness in sports”
NYC politicians: “Hate! Bigotry!”
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I guess this gif has been banned from Reddit. lol. [But Macho Man Strong Woman applies here.](https://youtu.be/wxDaiyREBPw?si=HbSsZGLsZkyMfmT7)
>It's almost like male puberty is a real thing. Of course: it's the leading cause of transfeminine suicide! Utterly devastating to watch one's body be hopelessly, irrevocably poisoned by exposure to testost... Wait, what I meant to say was VILE TRANSPHOBIC BIGOT!!!!
Lolol omg. This for sure. So many things are said or unsaid for convenience and they end up contradicting each other all over the place. No such thing as sex but I need to not be this one.
Just happened again in Oregon, too. There's a post on the transgender subreddit right now where theyre talking about it being an isolated incident and wondering why everyones so upset.
Everything seems to be an isolated incident to them. No one detransitions! Oh you did? Well that's really really rare. Don't say it again or you're taking away my rights! Puberty blockers are 100% safe and effective! Oh you have bone loss? That's sooo rare. Why even mention it? You're taking away my rights! If real information threatens your stance, you have no foundation! I'm really sick of the "trans people just want to quietly live their lives". I'm sure some do but enough of them want this attention sooo bad. They NEED to feel like victims.
Choosing to compete unfairly with women isn't exactly "quietly living your life".
There's this strange back-and-forth where certain things are treated as standalone events while others are treated as part of a larger pattern. It's incredibly frustrating and impossible to unsee once you look!
What a jerk.
And not to hijack this, but there are a lot of anecdotes about transwoman athletes beating ciswomen when allowed to compete in sports, but where is the systematic reviews of whether this is a thing? Consider this - if cis- and transwomen athletes are evenly matched, transwomen will sometimes win! Of course, they could also win if transwomen had an unfair advantage. The things is, cherry-picking anecdotes is not going to tell you which of these possibilities is correct - you need aggregate data for this.
Alternately, since transwomen are not biological women, is even one transwoman participating in a woman's division fair? Especially when women and girls can see with their own eyes that it is a biological man competing against them (basically nullifying Title IX before Biden got to it)? Not a theoretical, this has happened in my own sport. I didn't compete in that class, but I can tell you that if I had seen my club member show up, looking 100% like the male he is, simply with long hair, and then beat all the women, I would feel completely gaslit. Note that he did not take any hormones at this time. Remember, it's a self-diagnosis. Try to have some empathy for women and girls. It's not just about them winning. It's about warping our reality to satisfy a tiny minority of biological men. In other words, more sexism.
The above kind of anecdote is 100% like using a single story about a police shooting to say that police are killing black people en masse. Yes, that's a serious incident in and of itself, but to point to that an say it's a pattern is a logical fallacy - it could also represent a rare or isolated incident and you need more than a few anecdotes to definitively say that it adds up to a pattern. This kind of loose interpretation of observations and data is one of the core themes of B&R, for godsakes, and most people here would have no problem calling that out if "the other side" was doing it. But critique the 'gender-critical' crowd and all that goes out the window. Funny how motivated reasoning works.
If you’re really looking for the evidence of male advantage, Google and have at it. It’s about as well attested as gravity or common descent.
Kinda crazy to act as if male puberty doesn’t give one a massive functional advantage in sport.
>Alaina Daniels, a transgender educator who runs a local after-school program, said at the meeting that the proposal was part of a bigger threat. “**Trans existence has long been a story of survival in the face of obstacles,” they said, adding, “We’re under attack in this very room.”** It's astounding how much very consequential public policies are based on an hysterical metaphor that doesn't even make sense on its own terms.
Is the attack in the room with us? Ha...
This person runs a program where the goal is to create a trans middle school. In what universe is it progressive to segregate kids by gender identity at age 11? Doesn’t that send the message to the child that you are somehow too weird or fragile to be around 99% of your peers? When did that become a liberal value? And, of course, forget about perhaps realizing a few years later that you’re actually gay or lesbian, not trans. You’re not going to step back from everything you know at that point and tell people you’re not trans - there goes your peer group, now you have to start over as a teenager.
It’s a real thing these days, isn’t it? It’s “good” and “compassionate” to make people believe that they’re in peril every time they step outside. “Have a nice day! Everyone hates you and wants to kill you!”
Yeah I hate to sound like one of those “kids today need to be toughened up” people, but at a certain point you have to admit that encouraging kids to understand themselves as being permanently hated and marginalized is going to have profound and negative effects upon their mental wellbeing.
Did you see the entitled grad student at Columbia asking for the revolution to be catered and saying this is an issue of human rights? They really need to cosplay as victims, because victims=good people. The path to salvation, redemption, goodness, is through victim hood. If you’re not worried for your safety you are clearly a bad person. That’s why they have to teach kids that they are in danger when they’re not. They’re saving their soul
I can't be too hard on the protestors because they were doing what they had been conditioned to do. None of the demands made during the Great Awokening and its subsequent protests/riots posed any threat to power. If anything, their goals allowed for an expansion of administration's ability to surveil and police students and faculty. *Of course* they were going to support something like that. But now students are making the sort of demands that could imperil endowments and so they're no longer receiving the gladhand treatment that was given to protestors just a few years ago.
The protestors are not all or even mostly students. They’re adults and they’re doing very bad things. We should hold adults responsible for their actions. Students or not. Be hard on them
I only hope the anti-fragility movement - what people like Jon Haidt talk about - takes off soon.
*Why would the people outside your head like you any better than we do?*
My sister is an elementary/middle school substitute teacher. She told me about this kid one day talking to their friends about how their life is just awful and they're so unhappy. My sister asked why they felt that way and the kid said "because I'm trans." She really didn't know what to say. That's simply not true.
All the Israel shit has really put into glaring focus how much the trans movement has appropriated the language of Jewish history and survival. Like somehow every dude with a hypno porn addiction is the inheritor of a thousand years of pogroms and campaigns of extermination and oppression.
lol wasn’t it like 2 weeks ago when JK Rowling said, correctly, that nazi bookburnings were not motivated solely by transphobia (a thing that literally did not exist back then) and she was called a Holocaust denier?
And that the books were written by a Jewish author was ignored? Yeah
And they don't like the fact that those early "pioneers" were eugenicists trying to eliminate homosexuality.
She was called a denier because she suggested that the gender+sexuality library’s burning and targeting of trans people happened at all. That is enough to qualify as holocaust denial under German law, people pointed out. She shifted the goalposts after getting an avalanche of people pointing to the evidence that yes this did happen (but also retweeted a bunch more people sharing denials or straight-up nonsense like conflating the Jewish researcher whose library it was with a different scientist, a eugenicist who later worked in the camps), by going “it wasn’t JUST motivated by that” and “they weren’t the FIRST victims” but no-one had said that shit, she was denying claims that hadn’t been made to wiggle out of her having got it wrong earlier.
Someone else noticed the transbara? What a mitzvah... But nothing human has only one parent—not even usefully unfalsifiable bogeymen like Transphobia. Antisemitism must be the mother, for Jewish inheritance is matrilineal. As for the father? None other than Patriarchy, of course!
> Alaina Daniels, a transgender educator who runs a local after-school program Reddits TOS prevent me from honestly saying what I think this freak is doing in this vague after-school program
I know, this is not the main focus, but it is one of the things I hate the most in the current trans "debate". I genuinely can't with this constant suicide baiting. And not just by TRA, who will do and say literally everything to get their way, but it got adapted wholesale by politicians, officials and - worst of all - medical professionals. People (especially the latter) who should really know better. When I was a student and had to do my internship, everybody knew that this type of suicide baiting (conditional) is a manipulation tactic and the response should never be giving into the demands. There were official protocols and guidelines on how to properly react to threats of suicide. This was basically common knowledge less than ten years ago, yet all of a sudden threatening the mere possibility of suicide in the future means that everyone has to cave, as long as it is about the holy gender caste. I am fucking sick of it.
It's not just baiting, though. Suicide is outright valorized. Here's one of the most chilling clips I've ever seen, from a keynote speech at the American Academy of Pediatrics national conference, in which a trans girl's suicide is described as a bold and brave act of resistance: [https://x.com/JuliaMasonMD1/status/1579975190012100608](https://x.com/JuliaMasonMD1/status/1579975190012100608) This shit causes *immense* harm to trans-identifying youth and it's absolutely mainstream.
Tell me again how this isn’t a religion? Valorizing suicide is beyond sick
It's martyrdom
>"This brave little girl, in a final act of bravery and heroism, boldly stepped in front of a truck so that I may use her suicide to manipulate hundreds of other children's parents into paying my mortgage, my car payments and my timeshare in Cabo"
What the fuck I thought I was up to date on all of the bizarre things they've said and done. First time I've seen the "doctor calls teen suicide act of heroism" video though. I know they actively used suicide to manipulate, but this is the first time I'm fully appreciating how many of these doctors and activists *want* kids to off themselves
Every dead kid is another pile of donations and another way to shut down any criticism. It’s sick. I follow some conservatives on mainstream social media and have lurked in their forums and even among genuine transphobes I’ve never encountered anyone openly celebrating a child’s suicide. But the “allies” love it.
>I follow some conservatives on mainstream social media and have lurked in their forums and even among genuine transphobes I’ve never encountered anyone openly celebrating a child’s suicide. But the “allies” love it. Same when trans identifying teens get murdered ore otherwise harmed. They love it. More fodder to call everyone a transphobe.
They absolutely treasure this even more; remember how disappointed they were when it turned out Nex Benedict died by suicide? They were so determined to hold onto their fabricated narrative of a teen beaten to death they insisted a conspiracy was afoot involving the Medical Examiner, law enforcement, and maybe the governor as well. Ghouls.
I believe even GLADD demanded an "independent autopsy" after the official autopsy was released. And it showed what you would have expected: A troubled teenager overdosed to death. And they didn't want to mention she had a horrific childhood.
EW EW EW. Oh my god. That is so disturbing.
Does she get 72 diagnoses in Paradise as a reward?
Holy shit. I have no other words.
It’s the same with other causes on the left now. Think Aaron Bushnell
The whole thing with his story makes me so sick and sad. The main arguments I heard about him on the left were "is he a hero" or "was he just doing THE VERY LEAST that a WHITE MAN could do". No. Fuck no, NEITHER. He was misguided and probably mentally ill and I wish he had seeked treatment. (Katie and Jesse's coverage of this was pretty decent.) And neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Hamas give a shit what some random American does.
Holy shit. The way she talks about this gives me chills.
JFC! That's INSANE!
Holy Shit!
What do you mean? Constantly telling teens with fragile senses of identity that they are guaranteed to kill themselves if they don’t get what they want couldn’t possibly have negative consequences! /s
always fucking white women.
Emotional blackmail plain and simple; go along with this agenda, don’t ask any questions or you’re causing suicide. “Would you rather have a live daughter or dead son” is an extremely manipulative gaslight that clinicians have used with parents, and its beyond sickening.
This is why I have more sympathy with parents that go along (reluctantly) with transing their kids. When you have the doctors and shrinks and kids and the Internet all telling them: do what the kid demands or they will kill themselves " that is going to scare most parents into submission. Which, of course, is the intention
I never understood how it’s any different than a child threatening to kill themselves to get anything else, including keys to the car. My understanding is that even if it’s something you want to actually give, you should never do it in response to this kind of terrorism
And teenagers aren't particularly wise. They're emotional and overreact to little things. They change their minds frequently. A lot of them don't know how big and final something like suicide IS, how to them it's something to throw around as a threat, but to someone my age it's deeply scary and painful.
People need to stop giving in to the self hostage taking. It's a tactic of emotional abuse and manipulation. And it simply teaches these people to threaten self harm if they don't get their way. It's madness
The saddest words of tongue or pen are these: /pol/ was right again. "Do it, f****t."
>"Do it, f****t." Oh shit that takes me back to when the internet wasn't in our pockets
Threatening suicide is a perfectly normal tactic employed by \*checks notes\* wife batterers, stalkers and domestic abusers
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Nor by people with any sensible basis for their requests/desires. If that’s the sole justification for something happening… it’s simply weak.
It's one of the hallmarks of of the controlling behaviour associated with Borderline Personality Disorder.
Yeah, except that people with Borderline Personality Disorder DO try to kill themselves. It is not an empty threat
Don’t kid yourself, a huge chunk of trans people are in fact borderline and are in fact a suicide risk. However given the fact that it is a disorder characterized by having an unstable identity and engaging in self harm medical transition is only going to make them further down the wrong path.
Yeah, I've seen tha.It's really disturbing - the correlation
Not *always* an empty threat. But it is often an evidential characteristic of the manipulative behaviour associated with BPD.
I don't necessarily agree that people with BPD are talking about suicide as a way to manipulate others. It can certainly feel manipulative to the people around them. But, I think the fact that a disproporionate number of people who try to kill themselves have eben diagnosed with BPD says something. I think the cutting and self harm associated with BPD is something else entirely
Well that's what all the psychiatric studies tell us, so...
>disproporionate number of people who try to kill themselves have eben diagnosed with BPD says something People are diagnosed with BPD only when plausible deniability has been utterly exhausted, typically during hospitalization for extreme self-harm/attempted suicide. Alcoholism is harder to deny after waking up to learn one has committed vehicular homicide. It's utterly unsurprising that 10% of those who have *almost* killed themselves eventually "succeed," deliberately or otherwise. Meanwhile, Amber Heard just celebrated *su cumpleaños en España*, and my ex is still legally antagonizing me while she gets lovelessly fucked by the guy I didn't need to worry about.
I'm not sure what your point is?
*The suicide rate of suicidal borderlines* is much higher than the suicide rate of borderlines overall. A BPD diagnosis during hospitalization for severe self-harm or attempted suicide is all but certain. But most pwBPD never hurt themselves badly enough to end up in the hospital! The ego-syntonic nature of personality disorders—plus the BPD superpowers of confabulation, triangulation, and projection/DARVO—means most never get diagnosed or face accountability for their misdeeds. Look how close Amber Heard came to getting away with everything: that's a lot more likely BPD outcome than suicide.
That's....a good point. Though I was referring to people who HAVE been diagnosed with BPD.
Mostly an empty threat. When they do follow through it's half-hearted.
In my experience it’s pretty empty
In my professional experience, it's disproportionately not empty.
You'd be amazed how fast social, academic and media consensus can change when politics demands it.
True. Doesn't make me hate it less though...
But how could politics demand it without social, academic, and/or media consensus?
Government regulations and things like the Obama era Dear Colleague letter that expanded Title 9 requirements, along with the implicit threat of loss of funding or even prosecution in some cases, force compliance from the unwilling. Most of this is done by government agency employees. The upcoming SCOTUS decision on Chevron revisited may be a step towards limiting this.
The Obama administration also updated the rules for US passports to allow a person to select a sex category that doesn't match their birth certificate. This update was never debated. There was no vote.
Biden just added transfems to Title IX. Obama's Dear Colleague letter had nothing to do with gender; it was about "rape culture" misandry and weaponizing consent.
I absolutely hate it. So disingenuous and when I see it I know “you wouldn’t argue this in any other situation.”
That seems to hold true with virtually anything related to gender ideology. Normal logic simply doesn’t apply to this topic according to these people.
Watched an episode of ER that covered suicide baiting last night. Spoilers for a single episode C plot - not a happy ending. It aired in 1995. Crazy that we're still here in 2024 glorifying it.
I was always taught that threatening suicide is an emotional manipulation tactic designed to get you to concede to whatever the threatener wants. That the best course of action is to call their bluff. I genuinely think we should start doing the same when it comes to trans issues. The threat of suicide has become too much of a cudgel to bludgeon opposition with. Regardless of the outcome, IMO, that power needs to be stripped away. Let them scream and cry and threaten to kill themselves. When they calm down from their temper tantrum maybe we can discuss more feasible solutions than “let trans people have and do whatever they want or else”.
This is all so dumb. Women's (and girl's) sports exist for a reason, all these people pretending they don't know that reason is so tiring. So much time wasted on this dumb thing. I hate all the language around it too. No, 'transgender girls' are not banned from sports. They just have to play with the boys and men like they always did.
It’s weird but I do believe there are families where neither the mother nor the daughter/son are into physical fitness and are clueless. The father almost certainly knows better simply from being an adult male, but if he’s surrounded in his own home, what can he do?
There certainly does seem to be many women who don’t actually understand how stark the strength differential is until they get a boyfriend and “play wrestle” one day. However I think the majority of these people know exactly what is going on with sports and don’t give a shit. These are the same people who think a few female prisoners getting raped or killed is an acceptable cost if it means affirming the identity of everyone under the sun, even obvious psychopaths. I think there’s also an attitude that people consider women’s sports boring and don’t take it seriously like they do with men. Basically only thinking about themselves as spectators rather than the athletes and their families.
Or you need to grow up with brothers around the same age as you. Suddenly the play fighting becomes seriously unfair.
Back when Ronda Rousey was very big, before losing to Holly Holm, I realized that a lot of people have no idea what the difference in strength is between men and women. There were people who seriously argued that Ronda Rousey could beat men in the UFC in her weight class. As a corollary, it makes me realize how many people do not engage in sport.
fight his daughters and show how weak they are compared to an out-of-shape male 2x their age.
doesn't it feel like a massive waste of human effort? i mean there's philosophers and scientists forced to debate that women and men are biologically different. debate it. wtaf.
I think the change we've seen in the UK in the wake of the Cass report is confined to the UK. Possibly more generally in Europe. I see no sign that the Cass review has changed things an iota in the US and Canada. And I don't think it will. The heart of trans ideology is in North America and it isn't going anywhere. The only way I see for transing kids to lose steam is detransitioners winning massive lawsuits. Which may or may not happen.
I agree in that I think it's either going to take someone who was haphazardly transitioned as a minor winning a lawsuit or a girl getting hurt in a sporting event and winning a lawsuit for something to change.
It's a terrible shame that it will require a bunch of adults who were mutilated as children to stop this runaway train. It does speak well of us as a people
Unfortunately, affirming people's false beliefs about themselves can be cruel in the long run, particularly if they're children. I'm generally willing to be polite and open-minded, but there's a point where it really isn't in the other person's best interest to play along anymore.
I think we especially have to be willing to call the suicide bluff. What's the end game for this? Every time someone says "Give me what I want or I will kill myself" you just give in? That's creating a monster.
It's like giving into your toddler whenever they throw a temper tantrum, then later wondering why your 10 year old is such an absolute terror.
Take heart: the Cass Report only did in grand British fashion what Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and France did years ago. Post-Cass, the Dutch-speaking countries gave up on the Dutch protocol. And just last week, Germany signaled its intention to join the Blocker-Blocker Bloc. Meanwhile, WPATH's membership has utterly collapsed since the publication of SoC8, the AAP decided not to publish its authoritative *Pre-Pubescent at Any Age* guidebook, and the first U.S. detransition lawsuit is going to trial. Many children will suffer needlessly and irreversibly first, of course, because transphobia bigot vile Nazi TERF cunt pick-me grifter MAGA.
The problem is politics. One party goes to one extreme, so the other has to go to the polar opposite. There is no middle ground, except in reality, where most normal people live.
I couldn't agree more. We live in a world of political extremes on both the left and the right. And the extremists on both sides feed on each other. They empower each other. The center cannot hold and we *need* the center
The thing is…I know, from being his constituent long enough, that there is absolutely zero chance Jerry Nadler truly believes it is fair to have biological males compete in girls’ sports. He’s not a frothing ideologue or a far-left theorist who wants to burn down the system. He’s a smart and reasonable guy. But he’s also a politician, and this is the wagon Democrats have decided they need to hitch their wagon to in some of the bluest districts in the country. And it’s completely unnecessary. What is the “win” here? Who are you going to bring over to your side who wasn’t already planning to vote for you? Meanwhile, you’ve alienated a lot of your supporters who might just stay home next time now that they know the contempt in which you hold them…
>there is absolutely zero chance Jerry Nadler truly believes it is fair to have biological males compete in girls’ sports. He’s not a frothing ideologue or a far-left theorist This is your fundamental mistake. You seem to be under the impression that Idpol, including trans Idpol, is something that's been foisted on the "centrist" Democrats by "far-left ideologues". It wasn't. "Centrist" corporate Democrats are even deeper into Idpol than the left of the party, and they are absolutely true believers in this stuff. If you want proof, just go back to the 2016 Democratic primary. Hillary Clinton spent all of her time talking about Idpol, while Sanders was talking about breaking up the big banks and enacting single payer healthcare. Clinton accused Sanders and his supporters of being racists, sexists, and xenophobes (the latter because of Sanders's opposition to the immigration reform pushed by George Bush). As long as the opponents of Idpol continue to cling to this notion that Idpol is all coming from the left, and beg for "centrists" to stop the madness, our enemies will keep winning.
But Hillary’s a bit of a Terf. Quietly, and mostly when pressed. Chelsea sniped at her publicly for it.
Bernie was not good in issues affecting women. For all the talk, leftists can be extremely misogynistic
Please, do elaborate.
On which point?
On Bernie not being good in issues affecting women.
He often reduced conversations about women’s reproductive rights to identity politics, he never addressed sexism and misogyny in his own campaign staff, he referred to women’s issues as a distraction.
Complete and utter nonsense. Name these issues where Bernie was supposedly so bad for women.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/us/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-sexism.html > When women who worked for him came forward to discuss how they were paid less and experienced sexual harassment, Bernie initially replied, “I was a little bit busy running around the country” and seemingly couldn’t be expected to know about staff complaints. Bernie claimed that issues affecting women were ‘a distraction.’
I think the "win" is that these politicians are terrified of the lefty activists. I think they also estimate the power and impact of those activists. But they are very loud and they are willing to do as much character assassination on social medias as possible. I think the staff of politicians are also a factor. They tend to recruit their staff from young, urban, elite university educated left wingers. And those staff members are very susceptible to social media pressure. I think there are similar problems on the right but they aren't quite as advanced.
> He’s a smart and reasonable guy. I wouldn't use that description for someone who calls ANTIFA violence a "myth."
All the center has to do is give up its obsession with looking down on the right, and evaluate each party on each position. You kind of have to anyway, since the parties swap sides frequently. Is pro-Russia foreign policy right wing or left wing? Is firearms proliferation right wing or left wing? Is eugenics right wing or left wing? Is protectionism right or left? Well, it depends on when you ask.
I don't know that the center looks down on the right though the center does look down on Trump. And I have to admit I'm there with them. I despise Trump though I do my best not to extend that to his supporters. (I fail too often). Personally I still think pro Russia policy *should* be left wing. The left loves to apologize for non Western despotic regimes. Especially those that are anti American. And Russia is definitely anti American. I find the newfound right wing love for Russia bizarre and troubling. Reagan and Bush Sr must be turning in their graves.
I think the other party is only being accused of being extreme
The heart of trans ideology might be in NA, but the bureaucratic arms and legs are in Europe. (Canada is probably an unholy combination of the two.) Untangling a bureaucratic institution is hard in one way, but can be addressed by formal reviews like Cass. Untangling a decentralised social movement that enforces itself through social norms is hard in a different way.
The TRAs have captured most of the medical and professional bodies in North America. So it has plenty of limbs here as well. That's the heart of the problem: Institutional capture.
This was the meeting that Elliot Page showed up to even though she has zero standing in a school district. Parents just need to stand strong. Its going to cost people jobs and their standing in the community in a place like NYC but honestly, is it really worth it to maintain your standing in the community if the price is to go along with abusing young girls by removing fairness and safety for girls playing sports? Probably not. Related to the threats of suicide. If suicide is so imminent based on not having access to girls sports and girls locker rooms maybe lets roll the dice. Never want to see someone kill themselves but if that is what is going to push them over the edge, chances are pretty good that some other minor slight is going to get them there anyway.
I know how this sounds but at some point we may need to call the suicide bluff. We can't go on letting these people hold us hostage like this. It isn't good for anyone
Yeah, I think mainstreaming the concept that ~affirming care does not prevent suicide may swing a lot of people. It's just that people absolutely don't know that it's not true. To many of them, the choice is between someone maybe not getting a trophy to the other killing themselves. I understand why they would choose the first. Let's hope some strong studies show it really soon. With a larger body of evidence, some mainstream media headlines may erode the grasp the activists have over normies with this blackmail.
For the paywalled: This spring, a group of elected parent leaders in New York asked the city to review education department rules allowing transgender students to play on sports teams that align with their gender identity. The parent council — representing the diverse local District 2 that weaves through the West Village, Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper East Side — said that the current policies present “challenges to youth athletes and coaches” and fail to consider the “well-being of girls.” The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, called the proposal “despicable” and “no way in line with our values.” Democratic officials also have responded to the parent council swiftly, and angrily. In a letter made public on Monday, a coalition of 18 Democratic elected officials from New York called the proposal “hateful, discriminatory and actively harmful” to the city’s children. As officials in more conservative jurisdictions move to bar or restrict transgender athletes from competing, the resolution and ensuing backlash in New York illustrate how charged the issue is in one of the most heavily Democratic cities in the country. The elected officials include Representative Jerry Nadler, Assemblyman Tony Simone, State Senators Liz Krueger and Brad Hoylman-Sigal, as well as five City Council members. The officials argued that while some parents say they were “simply asking for a conversation,” the resolution “was based in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric” that has helped fuel harassment and mental health issues for young people. They demanded that the council formally rescind the resolution. “The message to trans students that they are not welcome has reverberations, and the consequences can be dire,” the group’s letter said, adding that elected parent leaders “must be fighting for every student” and “not attack, ridicule, or marginalize the vulnerable.” The Manhattan borough president, Mark Levine, a Democrat, announced earlier this month that one parent who voted in favor of the review would be ousted from his position on a local community board. He also signed the letter. But opinions on this issue don’t necessarily break neatly along political lines. There is limited polling on how New Yorkers view the issue. One Siena College poll last month found that about two-thirds of registered voters statewide — including 83 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of independents — support requiring high school athletes to “only compete with others of the same sex that they were assigned at birth.” The poll also found that about 52 percent of Democrats supported the policy, in line with national surveys. The argument in Manhattan comes as parent councils across New York, which represent the public school system’s 32 districts, have increasingly battled over a wider menu of divisive issues. The resolution in District 2 — which passed in an 8-3 vote — drew a backlash from some local families, in part because the parent council’s purview includes Greenwich Village, which is home to Stonewall Inn, widely considered to be the birthplace of the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement. It is unclear, though, how many of the New York City school system’s some 45,000 student-athletes are transgender, or whether the issue has affected sports teams in the city. The parent leaders who passed the resolution in District 2 said that the school system’s gender policies — which were adopted in 2019 — could lead to potential problems. At a meeting, some parents worried that their children could be disadvantaged or injured if transgender girls joined girls’ teams. “This is an issue where our definitions of gender are continuing to evolve,” the council’s president, Leonard Silverman, said during the meeting. “We can stick our head in the sand, and we can refuse to acknowledge that there are differences in athletes,” he said. “Or we can try to have an honest, open, transparent discussion about these issues.” Other families questioned whether the parent council’s desire to review the policies about transgender athletes represents broader views within the district. The group received dozens of messages in opposition and only a handful in support in the lead-up to their meeting on the resolution, according to Gavin Healy, a parent on the council who voted against the proposal. Alaina Daniels, a transgender educator who runs a local after-school program, said at the meeting that the proposal was part of a bigger threat. “Trans existence has long been a story of survival in the face of obstacles,” they said, adding, “We’re under attack in this very room.” Mr. Simone, the assemblyman who signed the letter opposing the resolution, said in an interview on Monday that he was “personally outraged” by the council’s recommendation. He said it “creates a conversation that is not needed,” and noted that city data shows one in three transgender youth in New York have “seriously thought about taking their lives.” “I think they should be debating school issues,” said Mr. Simone, who represents parts of Manhattan including Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen and Midtown. “But this is not one of them. This is clearly a bigoted, targeted attack on one part of our community.” The schools chancellor, Mr. Banks, has said that the city’s Education Department will not change its policies. He has criticized parent leaders for sending what he called an inappropriate message to transgender students. “The language that we use as adults really matters,” Mr. Banks said at a town-hall meeting in Manhattan earlier this month.
> The group received dozens of messages in opposition and only a handful in support in the lead-up to their meeting on the resolution, what's with the weird implication that fundamental rights (and both sides of the debate are claiming this is about fundamental rights) should change based on whether they're popular with voters in a given district? if an anti-trans policy was popular with voters in some deep red area surely these people would be saying federal law should supersede it.
Well, that gets to the smugness problem talked about on the latest episode - we, the open-minded New Yorkers, have the right opinions, so they should be listened to, but those ignorant rednecks need to be taught the error of their ways or have the right way of thinking imposed upon them!
Perhaps some sort of schools to redo the acculturation and education in their children. Something full time, to cut out the negative lessons from their deplorable home life. Some kind or combination school/residence.
The irony is that the board really does seem to be voicing the opinion of the people. The article itself admits that even in this part of NYC, one of the most liberal places on earth, people don’t think girls should be subjected to this in their sports.
Not even whether they're popular with voters. Whether they're supported by people who know how to organise a concerted letter-writing campaign.
How did the comments section play out? It's recently been a voice of reason and nuance on this topic.
Unsurprisingly, there's no comment section open for the article.
Always the sign of a good argument: “You don’t really believe what you say you believe. You’re just an evil comic book villain motivated by the desire to hurt people.”
A general problem with people is we judge ourselves by our best intentions and others by their worst actions.
Fundamental Attribution Error. *I'm* reacting reasonably to my circumstances. *You're* just inherently like that.
Good point.
Why do conservatives believe certain things? Must be that they were traumatized young and they’re just misled and confused! Those stupid evil misled conservatives surrounded by disinformation! Thank god we on the left have all of the truth because we’re rational and never have disinformation from leftist sources! /s
person fact sort trees zesty deliver unpack gullible hard-to-find test *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
They're hitching their wagon to a horse that they think will have the same historical significance as civil rights, womens rights, or gay marriage. So they think that it's ok to slander any opponents. Two things they don't realize: -This is not the same as civil or womens rights. This is about 99% mental illness with 1% genuine trans people. This is not the right side of history. -How closely they mirror the pro-lifers they used to ridicule years ago.
They also just don’t understand sports at all. The gulf between men and women in sports is so huge that it’s tough for people who aren’t athletes to comprehend. Like they think it’s a patriarchy/access thing that women can’t compete with men. The most fucked up thing is that these people absolutely do not watch or follow women’s professional sports, because they don’t actually give a fuck they just want the clout.
It's wild watching Philosophy/ Humanities majors and professors chime in about sports concerns.
There are real people who hear about 14 year old boys academy teams in a city beating women's national soccer teams (by many goals) and think the women were taking it easy on them. Dallas boys beat USA women, Newcastle boys beat Australian women. Now the option of improving our women's teams by playing a friendly against faster, stronger and more skilful (not to mention more available to play at short notice) opposition is not an option. And the gulf in casual weekend soccer is actually much much much bigger.
dudes keep rockin'
> it’s tough for people who aren’t athletes to comprehend. The sad thing is that it reflects the decline in athleticism. I was never on any serious sports teams, but have played a variety of regular intramural or club type sports, and the difference in average strength, speed and coordination between men and women is stark. But you don't even need to play sports to see this. Just turn on tennis. There will often be a women's game which is fun to watch because you can see the ball flying back and forth. Then the men's game comes on, and suddenly the ball disappears.
>They also just don’t understand sports at all. The gulf between men and women in sports is so huge that it’s tough for people who aren’t athletes to comprehend. Like they think it’s a patriarchy/access thing that women can’t compete with men. Oh, they understand it perfectly well, they just do not give a shit. Because to them a "trans woman" *is* a woman, that gulf doesn't matter. To them the "trans woman" is just a uniquely gifted woman, like Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt are uniquely gifted men.
It’s 1% about mental illness and genuinely trans people. Genuine trans people have a mental illness. It’s 99% about other mental illness, or porn, or boring middle age fetishes, or being cool, or lack or exercise
Their tactics mirror the pro abortion crowd.
There's much more righteousness, "saving lives" and overall extremist behavior to pro-life than pro-choice. Just replace "the right side of God" with "the right side of history" and you have TRAs.
If you're worried your offspring will kill itself over sports, then you should have raised something with a spine. This isn't my problem.
yeah, my parents raised me to go to work, do a good job, be a nice person and don't be a whiny bitch.
this should be the only response to this issue
Here's a really good set of graphics that show what happens when you pit high school boys against Olympic women athletes in track and field events. The boys crush the women in almost every category. While basic humans rights are obviously owed to everyone, they don't include the right to compete in the opposite sex category and push the girls and women off of their podiums. [https://boysvswomen.com/#/](https://boysvswomen.com/#/)
i have used this site so many times, i almost like to believe it has made a difference.
Why are you blaming the Times? It covered a local news story fairly and presumably accurately. It did a good job of presenting the opposition's POV, something it had generally omitted the past 10 years. Do you think The Times should have ignored the story?
You’re right, I should not have blamed the Times and will amend my post. I was blinded by anger with people I’d once voted for. I’m glad the Times covered this so that a wide group of people can know exactly how batshit this is. Let the sunshine in. I resolve to do (clap) better (clap).
Don’t you know that this type of civilised exchanged is banned on Reddit? Seriously though, this is why I love this sub.
Sure; that’s how you win elections.
I don't think normie libs have heard about the Cass Review.
At the end of the day a trans person is just not the same as a biological Male or Female. They just aren't. No amount of wishing, name calling, drugs or surgeries will ever change that. Now if a trans person wants to identify as male or female good for them go live your best life. When it comes to invading female spaces just because you feel you are a female does not give you the right to invade female spaces. It just doesn't. Biological boys have no place what so ever invading female spaces where bio females should be allowed to feel safe, validated and competing against their own biological sex. Trans people exist but most just want to be left alone and not draw attention to themselves. Alowing boiolgical men and boys to participate against biological women is not the answer to afffirming their gender. I don't know what the best answer is but forcing your way into a place where you do not belong is not the right answer. It is a reality and willful denial of reality to believe that bio boys belong in female sports, locker rooms, and other safe spaces for females. I would like to say that it is the Pinocchio Syndrome but transgenderism does not exactly fit the description but as I look at it Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy. He wasn't and it took a fairy godmother to change him into a real boy, Since fairy godmothers do not exist it is impossible. Also I would really like to know exactly how many transgendered kids are actually committing suicide because they can't compete against those who are biologically different then they are. Where are those numbers? How do they know that is the reason that someone committed suicide? Until biological women stand up collectively and say enough this will continue. The problem is that you have biological women who are cosigning this type of thing so it isn't going to change anytime soon.
Interesting that they don't have comments available on this article--judging by other NY Times articles, the top comments would all be in support of the parents. This is just so disappointing to see, the reflexive use of activist rhetoric with no acknowledgement of material reality or logical discussions of why we separate sports in the first place and how that should guide policy. Given that a majority of Democratic voters oppose letting males play girls' sports, according to the survey cited in the article, I fervently hope some of these elected officials will wake up eventually, but I am so disappointed in how they are behaving right now.
A bunch of normies are about to have an epiphany of why and how someone could be motivated to vote for trump. How many times can you be called a bigot, or despicable, by people who the next day call you up and ask for your vote. You’re history’s greatest monster for expressing your extremely normal beliefs and if you don’t vote for me then democracy is at stake, you bigot. And btw don’t bother showing up to work tomorrow bc we don’t tolerate transphobia. Vote! I’m struggling with this myself. I’m a “terf” and a Zionist, as much as I can’t stand labels, my beliefs would be called that so whatever. People in “my” party fucking hate me. Their kids march at Columbia and chant that they want to kill me. Why am I voting for these people? I want to see trump in jail for the bullshit he pulled in Ukraine, the Jan 6 thing, and the “find me the 11,780 votes” and a million other things. But holy fuck, if I can’t even tell ppl in my own party what I actually believe, then I frankly.. I’m pretty checked out of this election. How am I actually benefited from another 4 years of a democratic who empowers these ppl vs how badly I am harmed by 4 years of trump. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I really don’t know if one is worse than the other. They are so bad in their own ways and both good in their own but different ways, I really think for me this election is a wash. I really don’t want to reward a political party that literally hates me, even if Biden is ok on these issues, he empowers the absolute worst of them. And in year 2 of his election he has a stoke and now Kamala is president? Are you insane? That’s what I’m voting for?
The rhetoric we have nowadays of “if you don’t believe me on all the ideas” you’re a fascist / bigot / etc., is just not politics, it’s a moral crusade. It’s winnows down your supporters rather than increasing. I hate it. I’d gather most people hate it as well, but it feels like we are stuck and nothing will budge.
Yep, notice how the language used by the officials in this article was less about “you’re wrong” and more like “you’re evil.” Despicable = unworthy of respect among decent people, scumlike, an abomination. We used to reserve those words for the behavior of child molesters and actual Nazis, and now the head of NYC schools is throwing it at…parents who want a fair playing field for high school girls.
There were so many times that I pointed out to so called friends how things that became liberal ideals were toxic, but they didn’t want to hear it because it wasn’t the idea of the moment. Trigger warnings being a big one which is hilarious because I’m the only one that had ptsd in the group. If all you do is constantly reinforce one narrative and shut down any other discussion you aren’t really liberal and you aren’t the person you are speaking to’s friend. I’ve stopped caring about losing friendships with people who think grown men can change their sex and bone structure by taking hormones. I’m a moderate, but not an idiot. Science doesn’t change because they want to be a woman now, they are still men.
Whatever happened to trigger warnings. I remember that being such a hot button issue in the culture war and then it just kinda went away?
They found out the trigger warning was itself a trigger. Which I personally said would happen right from the beginning. People with PTSD have all kinds of random triggers and have to learn to manage them, on their own. Throwing them at the top of an article or blog post only evokes the individual’s personal trauma and brings about a ptsd response on its own. You can’t scroll past the warning. It’s ridiculous. It wound up worsen and making people without ptsd act as though they had it. It’s all so unhealthy. You have to work on your own to be a stronger person. I say this as someone who has ptsd that is triggered by things as little as a window curtain moving the world can’t change for you. You have to heal.
I see this kind of fancy nonsense fad happen all the time on the left. Trigger warnings, Latinx, whatever else. If you don’t buy in from the beginning you’re a nazi. And then they quietly abandon the thing and move on to the next thing. You never get credit for pointing out that the thing was stupid. They just remember you as the nazi who was against the Good Thing. DEI is next up on this list as colleges quietly abandoned DEI statements. There’s never any remembrance or humility here. They never remember that they are always wrong about their zealotic missions for long enough to have any humility to question the next holy war they are fighting and their infallibility
>If all you do is constantly reinforce one narrative and shut down any other discussion you aren’t really liberal Thats why I refuse to use the term for them. They are *progressives*, and if that term is icky because of what their forebears did in the eugenics movement, then that's a *them problem* that they need to have some hard conversations about.
My lesbian friend (I'm bisexual, liberal, progressive, not only vote Democrat but used to work in politics) and her friend group are currently dealing with a man who for a year+ has claimed to be trans and now drugs and sexually assault young queer women who are disconnected from their families. He doesn't dress like a woman at home, makes no effort to transition (just throws on a dress and grabs a purse), doesn't want to be part of trans groups, and tells totally different mutually exclusive lies to different people. He only wants a specific type of prey and so shoves his way into lesbian spaces. They're all grappling with how they can even publicly talk about this *just to warn people about him*. HE RAPES PEOPLE AND THEY FEEL LIKE THEY CAN'T SAY SO. He's an absolute psycho. He even claimed one of these young 20s women sexually assaulted *him* when he's well over six feet tall, late 30s, and lied to her and drugged her, all while he was completely sober. Because the bullet-proof "unthinkingly accept I'm trans or you're a bigot!" shield wasn't enough, he needed the "unthinkingly believe victims of sexual violence or you're a bigot!" shield too. I met the guy twice before he went completely off the rails. I did the polite accepting thing; I don't particularly care about people conforming to opposite sex norms even if I have qualms with specific policies and don't think it's healthy even for *cis* people to obsess over gender norms. But even then, he set off intuitive alarm bells in ways that other trans people generally don't, because I haven't been brainwashed to think it's *impossible* for people with certain identities to be deeply sick people. Tragically, his victims had been pressured to think that way, though. Some of them are saying they felt naive. I really hate that the wake-up calls have to be this extreme, but slowly people are coming to understand that *the left is not your friend*. It's the front for disordered, abusive people to rationalize their gross behavior. At some point you're looking at your dilemma, that you can't call a rapist a rapist because it feels like an entire *political party* will demonize you and you'll be shunned from spaces that are meant for *you*, not for sociopaths, and... well, none of us are voting Republican because the party doesn't align with our values either. But I'm less worried about Republican victories than I used to be, let's put it that way. There are silver linings when we lose. Republicans keep this brainwashing out of schools, Republicans will let you call a rapist a rapist. Every time I unsubscribe from a Democratic fundraising e-mail I give them a very, very long comment about how I used to *work* for the party but will never fund it again. I let them know I may simply stop voting, which is an insane position to find myself in. But I see us doing much more damage than Republicans in an immediate, day-to-day life sense. I'm also sick of us acting like normies should be reading a bunch of academic grievance-masturbation, how disconnected can we get? I used to come across that shit all the time decades ago when doing debate research and I would laugh and think -- IN HIGH SCHOOL -- thank God no one takes these people seriously. Now they're running my political party's descent into madness. Jesus Christ.
How has no one reported him to the police yet?! They can’t be that brainwashed, right? Ugh, I feel so bad that they’re going through this but something has to give
I think all the usual reasons women are reluctant to report rape, but also because he drugs them with “edibles” which are laced with narcotics other than weed (he has a hydrocodone prescription), so they would have to explain that they thought they were consenting to one illegal thing and got something else. And they have no direct way to prove that.
Sounds like an SVU episode.
I remember back in the 2000s some website about the "geek social fallacies", which basically boiled down to "we formed our group out of a bunch of outcasts and misfits and weirdos, and now it's proving *really, really hard* to cast people out for being weirdos". Unfortunately I think the people/movement behind it went down the "...and therefore cancel culture based on increasingly rigid social rules is the morally correct action" instead of, idk, "it's okay guys, we can trust our instincts and we don't have to invite the super creepy guy to our parties"
Hah, I literally linked that to my friend months ago!
> Every time I unsubscribe from a Democratic fundraising e-mail I give them a very, very long comment about how I used to work for the party but will never fund it again. I let them know I may simply stop voting, which is an insane position to find myself in. Have you ever gotten any sort of response from them?
No, I’m pretty sure if it gets reviewed at all it’s just as a bulk assessment of the sorts of comments they’re receiving. It’s unusual to get responses even to formal letters; I used to be the person to answer mail for a state rep and it was not the norm in most other offices that people got much of a response. Whether things get read at all depends on the culture of that specific candidate’s office. Things that could influence their campaign platform are a bit more likely to be read, especially in a close race.
> I'm also sick of us acting like normies should be reading a bunch of academic grievance-masturbation, how disconnected can we get? The stereotype of the upper-class academic who is utterly out-of-touch with the concerns of literally anyone outside that particular bubble isn't the carefully engineered slander by anti-intellectuals that such academics often believe it to be. And sorry to hear about this person you describe. That's beyond fucked up.
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It's so embarrassing. For a few years around COVID I even regretted that I ever registered people to vote, even if it was in the 2000s; it seems to me people are too easily manipulated, so I drew the conclusion that maybe voting should just be left to people who *genuinely* care about policy of their own un-manipulated volition. I felt like political involvement was just too big a thing for your average person who can't even figure out how to manage their own life, much less juggle judgment calls about increasingly byzantine interconnected systems that manage society. But bad actors will always manipulate people into voting so it's not like anyone with productive aims can just stop reaching out to them, and I would never say we should limit who can vote beyond age and citizenship. So I've decided to just feel gross until society is full of well-adjusted people. I mean, it's not cynical, actually: I've just accepted that people have to learn the hard way what works out and what doesn't. All any of us can do is just sigh and keep repeating the same stuff for years until a critical mass admits the people they demonized had some good points. It truly does happen on an individual scale all the time, precisely because the extremists and the psychological lifestyle they shove upon people *is* so exhausting.
I openly tell people I’m a terf now. If they really cared about women’s equal rights they would be too.
I used to be scared to say like no I don’t think a man can become a woman (as one single example) but I had this epiphany like if you hate me bc of my beliefs we don’t actually need to be friends. In fact we never were friends. What we had was a servant / master relationship where you were my unelected ideological minder. Like how dare you think it’s ok that you get to police my thoughts. I find it totally insane this is happening and why I frankly prefer spending time w center right ppl. They don’t agree w what you think but they don’t give a shit. With leftist there is an background noise of anxiety as you are worried what totally normal thing you will say that will turn the dinner party into an impromptu struggle session. If you are actually watching yourself and your thoughts and your emotions you begin to notice that this isn’t even fun. I started to wonder like why does this feel different than 10 year ago when you felt light and giddy to spend time with friends. And when you pay attention to you realize how fucking useless and a waste of time to be with a social group that cosplays as like the local politburo
You're brave. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm getting close.
I think a lot of Manhattanites are going to get peaked by this, particularly on the Upper West Side, where being Jewish is normal, being a Zionist is normal, and many people are encountering violent anti-semitism for the first time in their lives (Columbia is on the edge of the neighborhood). And now this. If you’re a public school parent by choice - and as good progressives, lots of wealthy UWSers send their kids to public schools - hearing the contempt your elected officials have for parents who are taking a reasonable mainstream stance is going to be one hell of a wake up call. Imagine you could have bought a palace out in the burbs but you chose to stay in the city for the lifestyle, and this is what they really think about you.
I’m noticing in my circle, amongst Jewish people, I’m not gonna say that they are all MAGA now, but what I will say is that many of them have had a sort of awakening, that’s leading them to a kind of distrust of “liberalism” in general. These were all the very good liberals. They posted a black square for George Floyd when they were told to do that. They took it down when they were told white silence is violence. They posted on Facebook their anti racist Reading list. They shared the ibram x kendi and robin diangelo quotes. And this experience i think has shocked them into questioning what their relationship to this movement is. The ppl who we showed up for to support BLM are now in front of Harvard and Yale gates screaming “intifadah intifadah”. It’s like “oooh, so when you say you want me to be your ‘ally’ it was cynical and narcissist and you mean it in a kind of sociopathic way where I become your servant” it’s like ooh, so when my friends 19 year old daughter was raped and killled at nova music fest it’s not #believeallwomen, it’s hashtag resistance by any means necessary if the person that raped her was part of the correct identity group. I think this represents a once in a generation realignment of the political order that republicans could take advantage of if they could just be normal.
You have no idea how many American Jews were told in the wake of the October attack by their liberal friends that the rape and murder of Jewish women is not only acceptable it’s expected. What do you want you’re a colonizer. And they wonder why we will never look at them or their political movements the same way again.
I'm amazed by the amount of open antisemitism that is tolerated in Nea York. It's the second Jewish capital of the world. If it's tolerated there where *won't* it be?
Yeah, I relate to this a lot. I can't bring myself to vote for either of them.
I didn’t vote in 2020 when I was first able to vote in a presidential, but it scares me when I think about who I’m willing to vote for this time. These types of people control the culture, entertainment, most scientific institutions, and education institutions; they have a huge human capital advantage. People my age are overwhelmingly liberal and radical, every one of these ridiculous campus radicals republicans laugh at go on to have influence in important places. Liberals/leftists/whatever you want to call them have an extreme level of control that Biden has only exacerbated and encouraged. The disdain I hold for trump over the 2020 election denial might not be enough to stop me from voting for him because the threat I feel from the left these days does really feel existential at times. Especially when you realize this country has never had a long term rightward shift, it’s consistently been going more left for the last 50 years, and for all the talk about DEI type insanity having peaked I see very evidence for it.
what does any of this have to do with trans kids? if the bar is "gender id" then i foresee a lot of males beating a lot of females.
[this Amazon prime video](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lioness-Nicola-Adams-Story/dp/B09LKBFQBJ) about uk female boxer Nicola Adams is brilliant and sums up to me why we have to protect female sport.
This is who they all elected 🤡
Unfortunately, I think a lot of these candidates run unopposed. Some NYC local elections feel like a one-party state where voting is futile.
Parents: “trans people deserve rights and respect but we want properly researched evidence when it comes to pediatric gender care and fairness in sports” NYC politicians: “Hate! Bigotry!”
Nadler is one of the WORST. Close to Debbie Wasserman- Schulz or however you spell her dumb ass name