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That's only barely related to what I was talking about. What I meant was that it's easier to gather people to a cause when you make a clear effort to keep that cause reasonable and guided by good faith, good evidence and good arguments.Uh, how do "those people" endanger anyone? lol If what you're trying to say is that people won't pay attention to real discrimination because some people talk about things like the depiction of women on TV, for example, that's BS. Those same people wouldn't pay attention to "real" discrimination anyway.
We see it in both conservative and progressive circles, but really it's a commonality of all ideological authoritarians: skepticism of the narrative is a threat, not an opportunity for reflection; facts counter to preconceived notion were assembled in a bias manner and dismissed out of hand, rather than being addressed on their own merits or flaws; and more.
But I'll give you an example of what I mean when trying to draw a distinction between actual activists and 'SJW's.
Have you seen or heard of people who adopt ludicrous personal pronouns to match a similarly bizarre choice of gender, such as a plant or a cloud? Or those who claim that gender dysphoria isn't needed in order to be considered transgender? Or the ones who champion the de-medicalisation of dysphoria as one of the best ways to help trans people?
Maybe the number of people who hold all of these views is very small (though they do seem to have a a degree of concurrency), any one of these views is not only not helpful to the cause of aiding transgender individuals, but can hurt it very easily.
Absurd pronouns and genders make a mockery of those who just want to be referred to by their preferred reasonable pronouns. I'm not talking about zhe/xhe (or similar attempts at non-binary gender-related pronouns) or similarly non-binary or neutral genders. I'm talking about people who consider their gender to be a plant or a cloud because they happened to note some symbolic similarities they share with these things, and who want to be referred to as 'plantself' instead of himself.
Imagine someone who's opposed to trans people because of the rampant misinformation about them within conservative circles, or someone who hasn't made up their mind but is willing to listen. They come across a person such as this, maybe in person, maybe as the writer or subject of an article, maybe on Tumblr. What do they think when they see someone labelleing themselves as trans but also 'plant-kin demi-girl'?
They are dismissed as delusional, attention-seeking or both. But more than that, they will extend that same derision to actual transgender individuals, because they share a feature with these types of people we might call 'special snowflakes' (more on that later): They both claim to fall outside of the gender they were assigned at birth. So someone just wanting to feel special, or believing gender has anything to do with personality or interests, has the potential to bring more ridicule upon trans people thanks to guilt-by-association or to dissuade potential allies.
The trans label exists to describe those whose biological sex and gender do not match up, which results in gender dysphoria. Being transgender and having dysphoria are inherently linked - I've yet to see any decent evidence or arguments that make sense that say otherwise. While in the strictest sense, the trans label only has to do with dysphoria, it is linked to so much more: the ridicule, discrimination and worse that can come from stepping outside your standard gender presentation, trying to be referred to by the correct pronouns, the hassle and even dangers that come with trying to transition, and more.
Trans is not a label for people who will never have to actually deal with that shit, but I see pretty regularly people who want the definition to be expanded. Difference of severity aside, it's as ludicrous and as pitiful as people who say a man can rape a woman 'with his eyes' or other such absurdities. No, rape refers to a particular kind of act. Trans refers to a particular kind of people.
The effort to address privilege and oppression has had a subtle bleed-over into attaching negative connotations to being straight, white, cis and/or male. Frame it as you will - trans is fine, cis is bad; or straight is fine but gay is better. This is not a 'poor cis white male me' argument I'm about to make, rather I'm just reflecting on emerging but still unhelpful attitudes.
An unintentional side effect of this is that possessing one or more of these minority traits, you can gain a certain level or social or progressive credit within certain circles. Even slightly, it becomes better to have these additional minority traits attached to you than to not have them, if you're in progressive circles.
You have ill-informed young people who view being cisgendered as blasé, but being trans has these connotations of nobility or even goodness through suffering attached to it. Maybe Billy is comfortably a boy (so far as dysphoria is concerned) but he's never really felt attached to the fact he was a boy (his parents didn't care about teaching him to be macho, maybe), or thought about it that much (cis being perceived as a kind of default). But then Billy also sees there are these trans people who are very attached to their what their gender is, and feel strongly about it.
So Billy thinks to himself, even though he's never experienced dysphoria in his life, Maybe I'm trans too. Billy's probably not going to get very far in any attempts to transition to a girl, but just that little idea - that being trans isn't inherently related to experiencing dysphoria - has unhelpful knock-on effects that can mess with people's sense of self, or even their very body, if someone labouring under this notion knows what lies to tell the psychiatrist and doctors.
And the whole medicalisation of the trans issue. Whether it's hormones or surgery or psychiatric help, trans people need medical help to alleviate their condition. But some people have taken the attitude that because there's stigma associated with mental illnesses, we should stop thinking of being trans as a medical condition so that it has less stigma associate to it. It's absurd, but it's a big point of discussion about how to deal with or help trans people. The right move would obviously be to de-stigmatise mental illnesses.
But gender dysphoria needs to be treated as a medical/mental issue so that it can get treated through the right channels. So that government programs, health insurance, charities and more can help as much as possible. If gender dysphoria isn't a medical condition, then how do you go about getting it treated? Wishful thinking? Do you just buy hormones online from god-knows-where, and move down to Mexico or Thailand where sex reassignment surgery is cheaper? Hell no.
Another issue is the term means very different things depending on who you ask. If you ask a bigoted conservative, then they'd characterise just about anyone left of them as those terms. Ask a moderate and they'd probably talk about the more extreme left-authoritarian as that. Ask progressives who value skepticism, intellectual honesty and a degree of freedom and you're pretty close to what I think SJWs are. This same mixing-up also happens with the word 'gender' too. A lot of groups have very different ideas of what it means and what its relationship to sex, identity and gender roles is.Tartarus said:I find most people that use words like PC Police, SJWs, Feminazis, etc. are usually self-centered (and largely white, straight male--I know, I'm shocked, too). They're just as much a part of the problem.
That being said, I can't think of a time in recent memory where I used the term 'feminazi' even ironically, or 'pc' as a buzzword for that matter. You gotta interact with actual people and ideas to have a useful discussion, and unfortunately the utility these phrases might have used to have - as a neat shorthand for complex ides and groups - has been lost by the fact that they mean different things to different groups.
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