I am genuinely curious as to why, when you see dozens of experts saying something and a tiny handful saying something you already agree with, you seem incapable of weighing the evidence, instead doubling down on more and more fringe sources and inventing strange conspiracy theories as to why those who agree with you are being suppressed.
When I was a sophomore in college, I took a philosophy class at a community college over the summer. This was seriously one of the most valuable experiences of my life. My professor challenged me to challenge my own beliefs. Before then, I had a number of pillars in my belief system - things I held sacred, that I refused to touch. Sometimes I’d have thoughts that made me question them, but I’d shove those down. The professor basically called this out as hypocrisy, and asserted that we must be able to justify our own beliefs to ourselves - otherwise, how do we know we aren’t only holding on to them through inertia?
At the time I hated this class. It gave me doubts. I hated the way having doubts made me feel. But a couple years later, when I just couldn’t take it anymore, I finally gave in. I was intellectually honest with myself for probably the first time in my life. I sat down, and thought about what I believed in, and more importantly, I analyzed why. And I realized that there were some things I knew to be true that simply weren’t.
Before this point, I didn’t think of myself as biggoted against LGBT people. I was for gay marriage (a better way to put it is that I wasn’t against gay marriage, I think); I didn’t have anything against LGBT people. But the entire concept always made me deeply uncomfortable on some level.
It wasn’t until I was honest with myself, accepted that I was uncomfortable with LGBT stuff, sat down and REALLY thought about why, found places where I’d subconsciously internalized bigotry, and consciously forced myself to go through the uncomfortable process of facing these feelings head on, understanding them and dismissing them by reasoning through how irrational the underlying fears were that I overcame these prejudices.
For LGBT acceptance a key moment for me came about a year after I took the class. I was reading a book, 2312, about some people going on a scifi adventure throughout the solar system, which had been colonized. One of the characters is this lady who’s very heavily genetically and cybernetically modified. She is a few hundred years old, she can do all sorts of stuff with a computer, etc, and the novel in part deals with how the human mind copes with living that long. And of course not everyone has access to this sort of tech, and the societal ramifications of that are also dealt with. All of that is relatively standard SciFi fare and none of it made me think particularly hard.
But then there were the sex scenes. They weren’t gratuitous or overly frequent or descriptive or anything like that; stylistically they were pretty typical for a novel of this sort. But they challenged my worldview. See, this older lady was getting into a relationship with a much younger guy (like, he’s not super young or anything, but he’s still in his natural life - he hasn’t needed life extension yet). When she was younger, in her wild party days, she went through a procedure that takes your undeveloped opposite gender sex parts and lets them develop just enough to use for pleasure in sex. And she’s nervous that this guy is gonna judge her for it; but it turns out that he has had a similar procedure, and that while in her generation it was a weird thing to do it’s fairly common in his.
This whole concept made me deeply, deeply uncomfortable (to the point where it distracted me from the actual plotline) until I made myself stop and think. What about the society described in the book is actually bad? If I feel negatively about the situation, something must be wrong with it - what?
And yet, everything I could come up with was very obviously homophobic and irrational. “A straight man engaging in casual hookups might see a penis when he didn’t expect to!”. And that’s bad why? “Well… because then he’d be gay I guess? But no, that’s a horrible and homophobic reason. No one should be forced to have sex with someone they aren’tattracted to, but men shouldn’t get to control women’s bodies just to avoid accidentally seeing dicks.”
Or “Well, this would erode the concept of masculinity!” Would it? What are some positive aspects of masculinity - IE, not aesthetic things, but things that make society better? Things like loyalty, supporting a family - are those actually necessarily “masculine”, and even if so, do they depend on aesthetic considerations? Don’t aesthetic considerations change through time and across societies anyway?
I couldn’t come up with satisfactory answers to any of these questions, so I realized my discomfort with the society presented in the novel came entirely from internalized bigotry rather than anything I could rationally identify as a problem. And so, I had to overcome that discomfort by reminding myself of that fact every time I felt it creep up.
Now, the situation presented in the novel isn’t actually analogous to transgender people at all. The characters in the novel are both clearly cis and straight; neither questions their gender identity and it seems like their society has no problem labeling them as such. But the discomfort I was feeling with the situation in the novel came from exactly the same place as my discomfort with trans people. And once I identified the source as transphobic, it rapidly lost its power over me.
When someone says an operation with a risk of killing you is fine, but for gender affirming care we must be 99.999% certain - there’s a reason why they are holding these things to different standards. I encourage you to take a deep look inside and see for yourself where your fears come from. No one else can do this for you. It’s a deeply uncomfortable process, questioning your own beliefs. But to avoid doing so is the greatest and most destructive act of cowardice that most people will ever engage in.
The Law 