The furthest ~25% on the left and right have an increasingly extreme, partisan, borderline psychotic view of the world that you're either with us or against us. That polarization has become radically more aggressive over the past decade.
Just to use a simple example: someone might might say it's not enough to not oppose men becoming women and dominating female swimming/sports (neutrality), you must support it. Anything else and you're an "enemy" and not an "ally." The left in particular has created an increasingly large vocabulary designed to polarize and split the population and draw lines between people (either or lines).
This doesn’t really make sense what you described isn’t actually a neutral stance — hell just the framing alone betrays your feelings. You’re already using extremely polarizing vocabulary in your attempt to be neutral.
Someone in support of trans men and women being able to compete would take issue with:
* “men becoming women” — transitioning doesn’t change your gender, it only aligns your outward appearance to the gender you have always been.
* “dominating female sports” — the whole point of the opposing view is specifically that trans women don’t dominate sports.
You’ve twisted it in such a way that even accepting the premise of your “neutral” statement is already super political.
Here’s a real neutral stance that would be accepted by people on both sides of this particular issue.
“I’m not qualified to have an opinion on this matter, the decision is best left to the athletic clubs and people more knowledgeable about the effects of HRT.”
> transitioning doesn’t change your gender, it only aligns your outward appearance to the gender you have always been
Is that really true? There's a growing body of evidence that "the gender you have always been" doesn't really apply as a general case. For example: detransitioners, autogynephiles, abusive parents attempting to 'trans the gay away' in their kids, and so on.
Of course there are people who also report having felt like their dissonant gender identity for as long as they remember, and will for the rest of their lives. But this is not universal.
Seems there are many reasons why one may decide on transitioning, and not all of them are positive.
First, since you used a throwaway for this, kudos for asking this in a way that is respectful and seemingly genuinely curious.
I think at some point it becomes a little bit semantics. If you transition for reasons other than your dissonance or because you suffer from dysphoria then you’re probably gonna have a bad time. And if you’re forced to transition by abusive parents or government you’re gonna cause dissonance or dysphoria.
Detransitioners are an interesting case because while it’s absolutely possible for people to be wrong the majority of cases of people doing it are because of external factors like violence, discrimination, and unsupportive friends and family. However, there are lots of safeguards to keep people from making mistakes. You need the sign off from a doctor, two psychologists, and have to be living as your post-transition gender for at least a year to get reassignment surgery, HRT is broadly speaking reversible, nobody is giving HRT at all to kids, teens only get puberty blockers until they and their doctors are sure, and adults still have to go through an interview. This process is supposed to catch autogynephiliacs (although this terminology is really really dated) and I suppose someone could lie their way into getting reassignment but that’s on them then.
So yeah, I think we’re basically in agreement. I think a better way to say it so it’s universal is “transitioning doesn’t change your gender.” A gay woman forced to transition against her will is still a woman, a man who detransitions because it doesn’t alleviate problems misidentified as dysphoria is still a man, and a trans woman is and always has been a woman.
It does not seem like the solution to the problem would be change the mission of the mainstream platform. It would undoubtedly fall victim to whatever these mysterious forces are.
I haven't encountered a single person in my young, left-wing, NYC bubble that demands I actively support trans women in female sport leagues, as opposed to not opposing them. I don't even know what the difference is between these things (does active support mean lobbying or volunteering?).
I do, however, have some family members that demand I actively oppose this, and get very mad when I profess neutrality.
- Claim that Twitter is a private corporation and its their rules (Btw, you can check my history in 2020 where I did support purge of Trump from social media, but I am now comtemplating).
- But, anyone who starts a new platform (let's assume similar to r/conservative which is absolutely not neo-nazi or fascist), gets intense pushback from the existing incumbents not with market forces, but rather with censorship, algorithms, political and misinformation driven opposition.
So now we have public square that enjoys monopolistic powers (yes, government officials exclusively publishing on Twitter. Your tax money cannot buy a platform where you can listen to the constitutuents that you voted for), but also prevents incumbents from rising through political proxies that I mentioned earlier.
What scares me to no end is foreign interference by intelligence agencies in domestic affairs done via social media. That is the real danger here. We are seeing the destabilizing effects of that since 2015.
I also just don't see the widespread censorship of conservative opinions that you do. JK Rowling is still there with her TERF views (which I actually largely agree with). Jordan Peterson is still there denying the predominant view on human-caused climate change. r/conservative; nobody wants to censor this or anything like it. Bret Weinstein is still there spreading his Covid vaccine misinformation. Donald Trump got kicked off after repeated ToS violations. Far-leftists also get kicked off (I know they recently shut down a bunch of far-left subreddits) and you don't see that because of your echo chamber.
When someone says that _Twitter_ does heavy handed exercising of censorship or algorithmic manipulation just shows me that most people don't actually use Twitter and instead consume it view headlines. That wouldn't be surprising considering is the 15th largest social network by MAU globally. The Twitter product today is still largely the same as it was 10 years ago; Meta & friends do far more to stifle "free speech" but are never given the same sort of criticism because they do the "right" kind of amplification and moderating. Twitter is probably the least moderated of all the big social networks but it gets the most criticism for having too much moderation. What people actually want from Twitter is freedom from criticism from the mob, i.e "free speech for me, but not for thee".
>But, anyone who starts a new platform (let's assume similar to r/conservative which is absolutely not neo-nazi or fascist), gets intense pushback from the existing incumbents not with market forces,
Not with market forces? You mean to say that censorship is what is actually holding Gab back from mainstream adoption? This sentiment has always been incredibly myopic. I don't know why American conservatives are always surprised when their flavor of politics aren't popular. For some reason Europe and the rest of the West, who are farther left than Americans, cease to exist and the reasons why sites like Gab aren't huge is because of censorship.
There seems like there's a presumption that already successful companies are not subject to the same forces as other companies, despite all the evidence (including Twitter's experience) to the contrary.
