herbicide sucks. it’s always going to be an arms race. like everything else, violently forcing a monoculture does not build resilient systems, it only sets us up for more violence. we must learn to take our hands mostly off the ecosystems, and tread lightly, harvesting only what we need.
very few students are interested in what and how they’re learning
so you’d rather lose the trans people to violence or suicide than regulate hate speech against them?
so you suggest completely deregulating hate speech, then? how about direct incitement of violence? how about slander and defamation?
there are many restrictions on “freedom of speech” already, and it’s not like anyone is complaining that people calling in bomb threats shouldn’t get arrested. there NEED to be restrictions on speech. imagine if advertisers could just lie with no repercussions, or if you could state your intent to kill someone and it would be illegal to arrest you until you actually do it.
calling a policeman a pig is not hate speech. it is hateful, but there’s a big difference between calling a cop a pig and misgendering or using slurs against trans people.
minority groups are especially vulnerable to hate speech and there are already laws in place to protect them from certain kinds of speech. this is especially true with trans people, as we have seen their suicide rate linked very clearly with the presence of hate and absence of support.
we can say “the repercussions must only be social” but that leaves it up to the people to enforce it. what about minorities living surrounded by people who don’t support them? are they supposed to just grin and bear it? for a trans person, this could easily and quickly drive them to suicide.
I will never advocate that simple (especially accidental) misgendering should be grounds for arresting somebody. but these acts, when done intentionally, actively spread hate, misinformation, and tangible harm which touches the lives of trans people. this is why we must choose which is more important: the lives and safety of these trans people, or the comfort and “freedom” of people who want to see them eradicated. your freedom ends where it would violate another person’s freedom or basic rights.
this choice has been made on many other matters, which I touched on before. we have repeatedly found that certain kinds of speech are harmful enough to warrant legal repercussions. refusing to regulate this kind of hate speech just takes the side of the oppressor; it means trans people have no recourse and it becomes easy to spread massive misinformation campaigns (as Republicans are currently doing) which directly leads to people dying (dozens of anti trans laws have been passed in dozens of states, and those states have extremely high trans suicide rates).
why do we need to respect the opinion of someone whose opinion is “trans people should die or go to jail”?
Thatcher hated trans people and Rowling is a Holocaust denier. what do we gain by allowing her to continue spewing hateful rhetoric to a massive audience?
I strongly disagree. some opinions are literally harmful to express. the narrative that trans women are dangerous, predators, or not really their gender, is hate speech. it is statistically linked to increased violence against trans people, especially when coming from someone with a huge platform. it’s unclear whether Rowling actively intends to cause harm, but she has been associating with literal Nazis lately. we should respect each other’s opinions, sure, but when people hold exclusionary opinions, we have to decide whether their right to spout hatred is more important than trans people’s right to safety, comfort, and wellbeing. I choose the wellbeing of the trans community over Rowling’s right to bigotry.
the app is the piece of junk for taking so long to load on an incomprehensibly fast processor
I feel like this is the crux of it. do they think we WANT to be glued to our screens? social hubs are dead or dying, wrung out for profit. people have less time than ever, having to work and spread themselves thin just to stay afloat. mental healthcare is inaccessible to huge swathes of the population and our parents who can afford it refuse it. outside is a car dependent hellscape with increasingly unpleasant weather and increasingly agitated people. as a neurodivergent person it feels impossible to navigate. the phones don’t exactly help, but they’re certainly not the root of the issue. everybody on social media at this point is well aware of the drawbacks.
Thank you for being open-minded.
I disagree with this position in this context. I do think that there are cases where labels are unimportant, but they have a primary purpose. For people who feel broken, labels can help them put a word to something they didn’t understand otherwise. I didn’t realize I was asexual because I hadn’t heard the word, or didn’t understand it properly, until late high school. For me, my journey of discovery of many queer identities has largely been led by learning about new labels. Underpinning these labels is the perspective of the community that coined a term for it, to put a name to their shared experience.
I think it is incredibly important to remember that labels are descriptive, not prescriptive - they should always be seen as approximations of a person’s understanding of themselves, not strict categories, and I think that’s the essence of what you’re trying to say, but I disagree that we need to focus less on it overall.
8% of the population is a lot of people, and the self-report rate is much higher among younger generations. For queer people this is a show of strength. After all, we are a minority group whose rights and social status are being threatened. I find immense comfort in knowing just how many of us there are now, because unfortunately we do need sheer strength in numbers to achieve justice.
So I think it’s very important for queer people to be loud about their labels, I think it is a social good and seeing the sheer size of the community helps me sleep at night. The more people that know how common it is, the more likely it is to be fully tolerated and the easier it gets for people to recognize it within themselves.
The only people sowing division with their use of labels are majority groups touting supremacist ideologies (or bigoted gatekeepers within the queer community); everybody knows what “white pride”, “straight pride”, and “cis pride” really mean. It is frustrating to see this argument get made in the context of queer labels which are loud by necessity, as if they have the same motives or serve the same purpose.
“parent rights” is just a dog whistle for “I think children are property not people”
children deserve self determination just as much as anyone else. kids can’t even get their own medical issues addressed if their parents think they don’t need / deserve it, it’s nuts.
we live under capitalism.
I don’t check my notifications often
keep on with that whole “evil” thing, I’m sure you’re onto something.
capture, retention, rehabilitation if possible. get over your revenge fantasy.
buy floss picks. I floss daily and it takes all of 30 seconds.
if you hold a view that is intolerant, I will not tolerate you. simple as. we don’t have to agree but you can have basic fucking decency (don’t be racist)
you mean all the people who said they weren’t coming back even after the obvious rollback of the policy aren’t coming back? 😱
ngl season genders would go hard. autumngender? wintergender? 👀👀👀