"liberal" transphobia is dangerous because it creates a political consensus. no, it's not going to move a lot of median voters, but it creates a space for bipartisan anti-trans policies. i watched this happen in the uk.
it’s wild how much of the left’s anger on this site is devoted to the NYT. media criticism is good and healthy but anyone who really thinks a newspaper that’s read mostly by coastal elites is the main obstacle to progressive policy goals in america in the year 2024 is living in a bubble
Anyway I have nothing further to add about the discourse du jour and my *complicated* feelings about how to engage or not engage with an establishment increasingly becoming radicalised against us.
at the risk of discoursing, i feel the guardian is a clear example of how liberal sign-off fucks up the whole thing and to then say "the nyt doesn't matter" is part and parcel of "who cares what terf island thinks" navel-gazing american-centrism. e.g. the precedent the US sets has really fucked NZ!!
It snowballs so quickly. Terfmania started in 2017 with like three columnists at the Times, the Guardian and the bloody New Statesman getting mad because Theresa May was looking into self-ID, and now we're here and setting terrible precedents for elsewhere
I distinctly remember when a major Irish Times writer (he's published a bunch of books) wrote an opinion piece that went 'well if all these British journalists who are my friends think this way there's probably something to it, and they're fair, reasonable minded people' and yeah here we are.
Yep. The thing to keep in mind is that pro-trans policy is the majority in the country. That the right wing is engaged in an all-out culture war on the subject is spitting into the wind, mostly pushing against the few points of contention (e.g. sports), but left-wing transphobes give them cover.
