In my mind, as an ally, it is my duty to show how reasonable I am when engaging with issues like this in a public setting. That means understanding where the other side is coming from. Most bigotry doesn’t come out of nowhere. There is a tiny grain of truth somewhere deep, deep down that they have just warped and skewed to fit their narrative. If we don’t confront the truth that they buried down there, we won’t be able to change minds. If we can’t change minds, well. It’s a democracy. We can’t change the world.
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I originally had a long post written out but instead I’ll just say caring more about optics than strong argumentation isn’t going to win anybody over. For example there were many instances my argument was turned into a strawman:
Nobody on the thread said this
What I said was that many of these issues can be linked to cis people, which they very much can. Unfairness in sport while yes, heavily linked to trans people has been an issue for a while. My point wasn’t merely “it’s unfair” it was presenting information and letting these “average joes” know that there is more to this than they’re seeing.
Again, I never said this and nobody else on the thread did. What I was saying in the actual context of my post is that there’s a huge outcry (which this whole thread is about) of people thinking transwomen are dominating womens sports when in actual fact they aren’t therefore their point is moot. That was what my point was against.
As for unfairness in sport, I mentioned it here
To expand I’ll mention that tbh everyone can have a body people call “optimised” to their sport which can in fact be true, hence thinking that people should put more energy into compaigning for different categories dependent of height, weight and relavence to the sport.
Not to toot my own horn but I did this, I didn’t ignore any legitimate concerns, I just also put them into context with cis people also being affected by unfairness in sport and not necesaarily as a victim, I also responded to the outcry I’d seen caused by media wanting people angry at trans people, which isn’t a surprise.
I stand by this, if we don’t allow transwomen to compete at all we can’t collect data on how unfair it really is, that’s just a fact.
Different issue but when people do send her this kind of thing, she ignores it or counters it with “it’s not as bad” and people who still support her after everything even recently, are still going to support her after seeing that. Of course, I’m not saying “stop giving information” I think we should keep giving information, I have a thread in the Restricted Section dedicated to debunking points on her Twitter I’d put one in this section but a lot of the topics are extremely sensitive.
Except I didn’t do this and there are many things that can challenge how “optically good” we’ll appear anyway, things beyond our control.
Optics are an ever changing goal post that no matter how hard we try, we’ll never reach it. Not to be Anecdote Andy but I’ve had far more experience with real average joes in my time at university, my foundation year didn’t require any previous qualifications aside GCSE and there was a range of age groups.
In one teams call there was around 100 people and when we spoke on trans rights issues we had a myriad of positive responses from people who said they knew nothing beforehand. Some people were even convinced through strong argumentation that while in your eyes would appear “unreasonable” did the job.
But if by Average Joes you mean right leaning or conservative, I have experiences with them too. But so as not to be too much of an Anecdote Andy I’ll just say you really really cannot win in most situations with them and if you go down the route of optics you’ll end up conceding all your points.
Confidence and backing up your points and responding to counter points with that same strong argumentation is going to win more people over, going along the lines of optics “weak argumentation, will always appear weak”
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Ok, so, I think I know what you’re talking about. Basically, I think that people should be allowed to compete with the gender they identify with, but only if they have something to level the playing field. Something like being on hormones for a certain time period.
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Yeah, pretty much. Better wording than me, same idea.
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