US 2024 Presidential Election
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I'm suggesting people don't care about the culture war because they are trans, rather people believe themselves trans by virtue of being sucked into the culture war.
A belief held solely by people who don't genuinely interact with trans people-- a convenient rationalisation for prejudice.
How would that work? How would the far right saying trans people are mentally ill and that they plan to bully and harass them cause people to turn trans. It’s not exactly a sales pitch
Also didn’t people everyone now says were on the wrong side of history say the same about gay people?
Gender is a social construct. A person uninvolved in social norms and the potential conflict around them cannot perceive the apparent mismatch of gender and sex. There is no such thing as transgender in a social vacuum because there is not such thing as gender in a social vacuum. The fight over gender norms is the cause, not the effect of transgenderism.
The concept of gender being employed when categorizing people as transgender arises from feminist scholars. You think of the culture war as a front of the right, but a reactionary reacts, it always starts as an attack on the status quo, usually from the left. And that's fine, we live in an imperfect society in an imperfect world, it is good to want to correct or improve things, but the constant need to make it a team sport, our team vs their team, keeps people from ever considering when they maybe made a mistake. The thing about social constructs is not that they are unimportant, it's that they are malleable. We can't define sex however we like, that's not just a social construct, reality is going to contradict you if you try to pretend there aren't two categories of people necessary for sexual reproduction. We can define gender however we like, we can even create a category of transgender if we collectively choose to, that is what people have done. But if the consequence of those social constructions is that more people are depressed and killing themselves, that is a mistake being made, and people should stop promoting those views.
About "the right side of history", 100 years from now, nobody is going to look back and say "gosh, I can't believe they thought there were intrinsic differences between men and women", they are rather going to look back and say "holy crap, they were cutting depressed people's penises off!?"
Yes, but if Tstorm actually listened to trans people, he might find it harder to maintain his prejudices.
So a person in total isolation from the rest of the human race and all its cultural output? This is not a promising start to arguing anything about individuals and society.
Yes, and if you read some meaningful science about trans people, you might find it harder to maintain your prejudices.
That's not a response. "Read a book" is not a meaningful response in any context, but in this case it is a total non sequitur on top of that. Imagine someone claiming that race as a social construct currently is the source of unnecessary conflict and distress, and that we should collectively approach it differently, and you respond by calling them prejudiced against black people.
A neat rationalisation: one built entirely without interaction with the actual subject of discussion.
There is no such thing as a human mind, as we understand it, in a complete vaccuum either. There would be no such things as socialisation, interpersonal relationships of any kind, identity, the concept of self, or any mental/psychological state. Yet these things have all developed, because we do not live in this hypothetical, impossible absolute vaccuum.
Creatures develop traits that exist in relation to their actual environment. Go figure. Your argument is equivalent to the notion that since giraffes are only said to have long necks to reach tall leaves, and therefore they wouldn't have them if tall leaves didn't exist, therefore giraffes cannot have long necks-- and that there's no point in actually interacting with a giraffe to check.
That depends wholly on what the "different approach" is, doesn't it?
The equivalent would be a white person arguing that since the construct of race has been a source of unnecessary confict and distress, therefore "non-white" people don't exist, and anyone who believes they're non-white is actually a deluded white person. "Race" wouldn't exist in a total hypothetical vaccuum, after all!
And someone employing such an argument could quite fairly be called prejudiced.
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They certainly do.
But how many trans voters are there and how many of them would flip Republican if the Democrats would not push their issues ?
Culture War lets the Republicans win votes. While Dems should still remain pro trans, they should not make it a campaign issue. Campaign issues should be things that gets them votes.
Not at all. I'm not suggesting that all trans people are actually cis-gendered. I'm saying that both trans and cis are unnecessary concepts causing substantially more harm than good. You are not intrinsically any gender or any relationship to gender. The very concept need not exist. It did not exist in its current form for millennia. Sure, there were social norms related to sex the whole time, but the idea of that as an aspect of the individual rather than the behavior is very new, and causing significant social harms.
You put down an argument which amounts to "Trans people are just depressed and if we sort that depression out they'll not want to change gender".
So, what's your scientific basis for that argument?
You don't need to answer that: because we all know you don't have one. You just magicked it up out of prejudice: that's what prejudice is and does.
He's not wrong though. Dems would fare much better if they didn't discard but just de-emphasized certain positions. Hell, my state was safely blue for most of it's history and now it's the reddest red state. Why? We were blue because of the unions, we went red when Dems started actively opposing the largest union industry in the state instead of letting it die more slowly from market forces while making real meaningful plans on how to help workers transition (and yes, Hillary had one but it was terrible, over a decade late and holy fuck did she ruin the messaging). Literally that simple. Blame Gore.
GOP are a lot better at messaging in general, and part of that is knowing what parts of their policies are going to be unpopular and just not going on about those.
This is, in essence, what you're saying. You're saying nobody actually experiences that disconnect. The rationalisation you've based this on is immaterial; you're nonetheless claiming the group does not exist.
In its current form, i.e., with the language we currently use it did not exist. Concepts of identity based around masc/fem, separate from biological sex, did in fact exist for millenia.
Of course, plenty of other phenomena-- such as Abrahamic faith-- certainly did not exist for most of human existence. Somehow i doubt you consider this to invalidate them.
I can safely conclude you have no genuine concern for the wellbeing of the community, because you advocate the approach that has the most abusive track record, and oppose the approach that conveys the most improvement.
Flip republican? Not many. Decide that nobody represents them and not voting as a protest? That's another thing, and while not as harmful to the Dems, also not great.
Conversely, how many GOP voters are the Dems going to swing by abandoning minority group X?
This is unpleasantly close to, "X vulnerable minority is too small to provide many votes, so they're fair game to scapegoat".
It can be, yes. That is why i qualified it with "Democrats should still remain pro trans".
But in the two party system where each party supperts dozens of positions that the other one opposes, they have to choose which of those issues gets to be highlighted in the campaign. And it should be those that are popular.
They are still to few in number. Other issues can mobilize more voters.
There is a reason the Republicans always try to talk about trans rights. While many leftists are supportive, they tend to be not particularly invested. Many of them would just see the Democrats doing unimportant stuff while financial equality measures, healthcare crisis, policing issues, gun violence, environmental issues, worker rights and cost of living continue to get ignored.
When the Democrats are seen as the "trans rights party" instead of the party of all the other issues, it already has half lost.
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Of course that would still be better than the Democrat performance on Gaza.
The big irony of course is that Republicans are far more into trans issues than Democrats. They're practically obsessed with making things hard for at best 1% of the public
In terms of political messaging and tactical emphasis, i agree.
But honestly, the US Democratic Party already talks about cost of living much more than culture war stuff, from what I've seen. It falls a bit flat because we expect the opposition to talk about cost of living, and nobody is in principle against lowering it, so it passes people by without impact. Besides which, when the Dems were in power they didn't do well on it anyway, so the trust isn't there.
Well, yes, but are the Dems suddenly going to make meaningful change in regards to those if they abandon trans issues?