Transphobes don't think they're just ruining some poor innocent trans people's lives for fun and enjoyment, but they actually think they're improving society by combating bad people. They think trans women are just an evolution of "I can turn the lesbians straight with my dick" misogynist men, or out to abuse children. If those things were true, they would be entirely justified. But they're not.

If trans people hypothetically were the abusive creepy harassers that they make them out to be, it wouldn't matter how few there are in society. I am also sure child rapists or terrorists are a very small part of the overall population, but nobody would argue that people who try to combat child abuse or terrorism are "unfair" or "unreasonable" just because child rapists and terrorists are a small part of the population and there's bigger problems to worry about. It doesn't matter how few evil people there are if you want to combat evil.

The point that we should instead argue over and over again is that trans people are not perpetrators, and that gender is genuinely a social construct and not majorly biologically determined, so their genders are as real as others' since they're just a social performance anyway.

It's like playing the women's autonomy card against anti-abortion people. These people genuinely believe that abortion is cold-blooded child murder. And if that were true, then obviously a woman's right to commit murder would be ludicrous. No wonder they think we're crazy from their POV. The problem is, abortion is not child murder. We need to argue against their wrong world view.

[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We've been through this before in the German Reich. It didn't matter to antisemites that blood libel was a myth or the stab-in-the-back myth was contrived fiction to explain how sacred Germany lost the Great War. These people want to believe Other people are vermin and their precarity will be solved by deporting them to elsewhere.

So it is with the recent propaganda pushes against trans folk (also LGBT+) The groomer myth is so old we have PSA movies warning boys about The Homosexual in from the 1960s, when our society still gave zero fucks about children's welfare.

The fear of the trans woman in the women's rest room is the same as the fear of the black family in a white neighborhood. They are eager to believe violence is justified. And no piles of statistics about incidents and crime rates is going to change their minds. They want a valid cause to purge Americans, and will settle for a vicious rumor perpetuated by FOX News and OAN.

[–] LtLiana@startrek.website 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah. That's why no amount of appeal-to-morals arguments is going to convince them. Nor will facts. The reason why we should argue against their world view is to convince those still on the fence, those who are at the beginning of the pipeline and can yet be saved.

If someone is on the fence between "trans women are rapists pretending to be women to gain access to women" and "please don't be mean to us", then the latter is going to look like a weak argument and the former is going to look "reasonable". Hence the "facts versus feelings" narrative.

We constantly need to reiterate the central point: that gender is entirely fluid and a social construct not set in stone. Because that's a genuine argument that could convince people.