Try a less clear cut debate topic. One where intuition works against you.
Like the wave of anti-trans legislation and framing of our mere existence as grooming in red states. It's much harder to see the outright wrongness and evil.
It's easy with the Russians. We got propaganda pieces where the message to foreigners is always "we fight nazis in Ukraine" and the message inward is "we fight against having to go to pride parades and having our children turned gay by satanists". [1]
Now trans people? Hardly anyone bothers to read up on us, but we're the wedge anyhow. Even most democrats seem to have little interest in defending us beyond some surface level posturing. This debate solely exists to mobilize republican voters with a heavily framed appeal to their intuition and disgust reflex. We're just the next cataclysmic threat that can only be averted through national rebirth (hey, wanna make america great? again?). Because apparently CRT lost steam.
I think I earned the right to be cynical about both bloodsport-type debates and this "just be like, nice, dude" because the outcome of this debate has a really good chance at fucking up my life.
From the other side of this debate: we genuinely believe what we’re selling, just like you.
It’s not “intuition and disgust reflex”, but research, questions, and genuine reasoned thought that brought people like me to a very different point of view.
I’m not directly addressing the issues we disagree on in this comment - just making the case that I’ve thought through these things in great detail, believe that my thinking is as close to objectively correct and ethically correct as I can reasonably manage, and yet, have likely come to a completely different set of conclusions than you.
I’d probably question your motivations before your arguments. You really can’t deny it is in the spotlight because we have elections coming up and this is a polarizing topic to mobilize voters with. Many of which will not understand any of the nuance.
And then I’d be wondering if your point requires dismissal of wide consensus (or - I have experienced this - sociology as a legitimate field of study all together) in favor of few outliers.
Also, I’m genuinely not sure which conclusions we are talking about here. I purposefully avoided sports and early medical transition and mentioned the DeSantis groomer / libsoftiktok stochastic terror against trans healthcare thing first - because that’s as close to objectively bad as anything related to this topic gets.
