Many people have lost jobs or other opportunities for publicly disagreeing with this idea, on the basis that they are being ‘hateful’.
Since being convicted of a literal hate crime results in jail time, it remains a straw man. Yes, people can lose their jobs over public displays of bigotry. I am okay with that.
This seems to be the new way of doing things. You (the general you) take a position, and then declare opposition to that position to be “bigotry” which places it outside the realm of discussion such that people fear a loss of a job for holding it, and then you win by default.
Are you now fighting against at will employment?
The number of people who have lost their job for holding a bigoted opinion is zero. People typically are losing their jobs due to bigotry when they display their bigotry in a manner that can cause financial strain or embarrassment for their employer.
Because the employer is caught up in the same thing as everyone else. As you (the general you) have called the employee’s position bigoted, then it is just easier to fire the employee than for the employer to get pegged with the label as well.
Okay. And?
It’s really not okay. You (general you) have came up with a pretty nice scenario to always be right and to stifle any debate. It’s not healthy for democracy.
How is that stifling debate? People have often suffered in support of their publicly-aired views over our history and they continued to espouse those views. If it turns out they were right, they typically win out when society catches up with them (sometimes helped along by those publicly-aired views), either for themselves or those who come after them. If they were on the wrong side, oh well, they tried.
That’s typically how we progress as a society.
Moderator Note
ATMB is not the place to discuss transgender (or other) issues as a whole. Discussions of things like employment issues or hate crimes belong in other forums. Keep the discussion in ATMB relevant to the rules and moderation here, please.
The debate is stifled when factual or reasonable lines of discussion are de-facto censored by first creating a category of heinous, secular thought crime that’s analogous to religion’s exploitation of the concepts of sacrilege and blasphemy and then labeling any discourse contrary to either an ideological axiom or poorly reasoned logical deduction as an instance of that heinous, secular thought crime.
Even the acceptable language used to discuss the issues is fraught with traps that shift over time in a Newspeak fashion. It becomes almost impossible to articulate a line of argument that isn’t pounced upon with accusations of some form of thought crime which not only instantly destroys perfectly reasoned arguments but can also destroy the lives of the accused.
You can see some of the ramifications in the rules Ed set out. He’s censoring himself not due to reason or science or even compelling rhetoric but due to fear of social outrage and the implicit threats that that means in the modern environment. That’s unhealthy in a society that’s nominally classically liberal.
What does @Riemann want exactly? @What_Exit linked to the board rules in the thread so the OP could familiarise himself with them. Is @Riemann saying these rules are not sufficient for respectful debate and the mods should create extra ones, or that the OP broke these rules and should have been more vigorously moderated?
Calling people what they want to be called is now a “heinous, secular thought crime that’s analogous to religion’s exploitation of the concepts of sacrilege and blasphemy”?
Wow! You can read minds! Why are you wasting time here and not winning Randi’s million?
James Randi passed away last October. 
They cancelled that five years before Randi died, actually. Which is a shame, because it was the go-to response to anyone who claims paranormal powers.
I knew Randi died. It makes me all the more frantic to find an RPG book with a character named Randi “The Amazing” James who tests psychics, that I had autographed by Randi when he gave a lecture at the Franklin Institute a few years ago. I was unaware the challenge did not continue.
The bottom line is that in a forum like Politics or Great Debates as soon as topics arise that are contentious at a fundamental or axiomatic level concepts and the tools used to express said concepts such as language are going to be problematic to fervent devotees. The solution is not to censor or prohibit discussion it’s to restrict discussion to those who have the emotional maturity to participate in said discussion in a civil manner. Not every thread need appeal to every poster and participation is voluntary. We don’t cater to the devout of the religious sort by prohibition of atheistic or agnostic language nor do the rules tolerate explicit religious bigotry. The space in between those boundaries still allow for almost the full range of debate on religion. This is becoming less true with secular issues.
What other issues? Please be specific and it would help if you could provide cites
Why keep asking that when I’ve made it perfectly clear?
If we’re talking about trans girls, whatever people’s opinions are on the controversial issues, they should have the basic human decency to call them trans girls, not “boy------->girl”, and most certainly not trans boys. And the use of the word “converted” seems like vocabulary more fitted to Transformers.
If that OP doesn’t fit the definition of “insulting” I don’t know what does. And since people are already trying to lawyer the rules, for the avoidance of doubt the prohibition on misgendering should explicitly encompass generic misgendering, referring to trans women as men or trans men.
The only two possibilities for an offensive OP like that are a level of ignorance that is unacceptable in civilized discourse, or deliberate antagonistic transphobia. I think an OP like that or any post written in such an offensive manner should attract much stricter moderator directions - not immediate warnings, but granting the benefit of the doubt on ignorance. Thus, thread closure if it’s an OP, and instructions not to post again on trans issues until the poster has the decency to spent a short time educating themselves on how to discuss trans folk respectfully. We could facilitate this by adding links to resources via the rules section, although it really shouldn’t be necessary - for anyone who actually wants to learn, it’s hardly difficult to find resources online to help understand what it means to be transgender, and to learn what is appropriate and respectful vocabulary.
And again, since somebody will inevitably straw man this yet again, I’m absolutely not suggesting any limitation on discussing the controversial issues. Just using language that treats people with basic respect for their human dignity.
Here, the moderators. In the real world, your government. Both have banned various forms of hate speech, and as time goes on will ban more.