At the very least, if done outside the Pit it would get modded for accusations of lying.
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Disbelievers in gender identity are not saying people are all lying about their feelings. We’re saying feelings are not the thing that determines whether a person is a man or a woman.
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In this thread @Bill_Door implies that hardly any religious people really honestly believe in a god and @kanicbird opines that actually everybody really believes in a god but just don’t know it. Neither gets mod noted, and nobody does anything more strong than disagree. So I dispute your assertion that “nobody believes in any gods” would be mod noted on this board
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Can’t say I care what “gender essentialists” think since I’m not one, and it’s not necessary to be one in order to think that gender identity is not a meaningful category
Hold up, what?
The person you’re quoting routinely states that all conservatives are lying about their motivation and actually just want to genocide anyone they can get their hands on. Why would stating “people don’t really believe in their religion” be any different?
Because that’s not the hypothetical.
You can’t tell a religious poster they’re lying about believing in a god (or any other poster that they are lying about something). Unless you’re in the Pit of course.
If the hypothetical was just an atheist saying in general that they don’t believe religious people, it would depend on the circumstances of the discussion. Usually I would think that wouldn’t get modded.
You know, I am an old fart, and yeah, I had this same issue for a while. Then I learned the error of my ways. Old dogs can learn new tricks.
Now, to be fair- if someone is a fellow oldster, and has these views, i do not think they are bigoted just for this. I understand that it is hard to give up stuff that has been the Truth all your early life. But I hope they will learn and be educated. This is why I am not calling out J.K. Rowling, etc as a bigot- just sad they havent moved on and learned.
Three years ago I was more or less aligned with progressive orthodoxy.
So actually my opinion progression has gone in the opposite direction to yours. I believed (mostly) that transwomen were kinda sorta something like women, then I met more transwomen and transmen, and then I stopped believing it.
I think Rowling is the same. It’s an absolutely canonical terf pathway
Scientific racists were nearly always calm and polite in their posts saying an entire continent of people were sub-human morons.
Calmness and politeness are not antonyms of hateful.
I think actually if they called a whole continent of people morons, that was by definition not polite.
“Moron” is a slur.
And I think telling some women they’re not really women is also not polite.
They didn’t use the word itself. They just loved linking to the work of some pseudoscientists who asserted the continent’s inhabitants met the original technical definition.
But “are people women on the basis of their birth sex or their perceived gender identity?” is the entire debate.
Essentially what you’re saying here is that the subject cannot be discussed unless the people who disagree with you lie and say that they actually agree with you
No, the debate is “should we take the side of science and compassion, or lie in the favor of violent bigots?” Because this isn’t an argument where both sides have anywhere near equal support by the facts, nor is it one where both are well meaning. Not even close. Which means that demanding “fairness” is demanding that everyone lie in the favor of the bigots, because any actually neutral account makes them look horrible and wrong.
This is an example of the common situation where “politeness” is just a euphemism for “lie and censor in the favor of the bigots because otherwise it’s too obvious they are both wrong and bigoted”. The factual side of the claims of transphobes falls apart at the slightest examination, and they outright make a public spectacle of how bigoted and cruel they are.
What is the point of having 50 rules that de facto add up to “the maximalist position on every issue related to trans rights is to be accepted without question and is not subject to debate on this board’s politics sections” instead of just saying that’s the rule?
On a more meta/overall note, it is problematic, IMHO, to argue that linking to hate speech is the same as endorsing it. I can think of plenty of non-Nazi or anti-Nazi reasons why someone would want to link to an excerpt from Mein Kampf, for instance.
If the rule is that allowing a link to Mein Kampf is allowed as long as it’s broken into two clicks, then okay, but still - I think it misses the point.
And “Are Africans congenitally stupid” was the debate in the race realist threads. What’s your point?
No. I’m saying that I would consider such a debate point to be impolite. That’s not actually against the GD rules here, though. I believe according to the rules as they are currently, a transphobe could still make such debate points, as long as they didn’t misgender anyone or call them mentally ill while they did it.
I can’t think of a non- or anti-Nazi reason why you’d link to an excerpt from Mein Kampf which contains hate speech after saying, “This matches what I feel about Jews.”
It’s not linking to it that has people upset, it’s endorsing it. It’s playing a game where you can thumb your nose at the rules of the board and its community by letting something off-board break the rules for you, while making it clear that it’s what you’re doing.
Imagine a rule where you can’t write hate speech, so instead you embed a picture in a post and the picture has hate speech on it. You’re technically not violating the rules, because you found a loophole you can exploit that has the same effect.
This is a request to close one such loophole this board has.
No, not really. What you describe isn’t a question about how to run society; it’s a question of metaphysics, and one that’s really completely unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
The question is how society should treat people, and the way we should make the decision is by looking at outcomes. And societal outcomes are better when we accept trans people as the gender they identify with. When we do that, trans people become productive and happy members of society; when we do not, they suffer greatly.
You are mistaking policy for metaphysics.
The rule just says we aren’t going to debate “wHaT iS a WoMaN” for the umpteenth time with people who clearly don’t understand metaphysics well enough to debate it in the first place.
When it comes to policy positions, you can still argue that this or that space should remain dedicated to cis women, or to cis and post transition trans women, or should be open to all women, cis or trans.
It just means that if you want to argue that trans women don’t belong in a certain women’s space, you have to make an actual argument as to why, beyond “well because they aren’t really women”.
Many people who are opposed to trans rights don’t like that because they don’t actually have any arguments to make, and this kind of rule exposed that. Tough luck, come up with a more well reasoned position next time.
Mind you, I’d also apply this the other way around. I don’t find trans activists who say “trans women belong in this women’s space because they are women” to be convincing*. What is convincing are arguments that show that two things are true:
- In this particular space, the physical differences between cis and trans people are irrelevant
- Trans people would benefit in some way (mental health, etc) from the change
*I just saw a really good and pretty short ContraPoints video that expressed that exceedingly well, but now I cannot find it… Meh.
I should have known it wasn’t a short video - I don’t think short ContraPoints videos exist - but it’s this one, with the relevant discussion to my point starting about 27 minutes in and going for maybe 5 minutes.
That said, the whole video is probably a good one for both DemonTree and Aspidistra to watch.
I don’t know that I’d ever thought this through before, but it makes me wonder about the board policy.
Like you just said, imagine someone hereabouts claims that trans women don’t belong in a certain women’s space, but doesn’t make any real argument as to why — prompting me to (a) recall this post of yours, and to (b) wonder if they’re exactly the sort of poster you had in mind. “Hey,” I ask them, “I’m just curious: is it that you just believe They Aren’t Women, and that you have no argument to make beyond Well Because They Aren’t Women, yes or no?”
And imagine they reply: “Uh, as I understand it, I’m not allowed to give a truthful answer to that question.”
Would they be in danger of drawing a warning for indirectly relaying a view they’re not allowed to directly express? Would I be in danger of drawing a warning for placing them in that position?
I think the question is, why do we have the policy that we have?
Is the board policy “The inclusion of trans women/men in women’s/mens’ spaces is not up for debate because debating the question is tantamount to hate speech”, or is it “the metaphysical discussion about ‘what is a woman’ is tiresome, irrelevant, and has been done to death, so we aren’t doing it anymore”?
Depending on what the answer to that question is, the rule probably needs to be adjusted to work better with that goal in mind. I think the rule could use adjustment whichever goal we want to achieve, to be honest.
I’ll note that I thought the topic was on the list of “tiresome topics”, but it doesn’t look like it is, at least not anymore?
Instead, there’s a whole separate heading for “transgender issues”:
So I’m not sure if that discussion even *would be" against the rules anymore?
When was this changed? I could have sworn “wHaT iS a WoMaN” was a tired topic at one point. Am I crazy?