The Democratic Weakness
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Senator Charles Schumer escorts President Joe Biden through the US Capital. Photo by The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I’ve written a couple of articles about Republican weaknesses in the upcoming election over the past few weeks. Despite favorable polling at the moment, the abortion issue remains an Achilles heel for the party and Donald Trump’s recent resurrection of the effort to repeal Obamacare may turn out to be a similar weakness.
That doesn’t mean that Democrats will cruise to another election victory, however. The Democrats have problems of their own that the party must deal with and that voters will have to consider.
The economy is one of the obvious considerations. So far, the economy is doing well with inflation coming under control and unemployment low. Even gas prices, an economic measure that directly affects a large number of Americans, have fallen for more than 60 straight days. The problem is that consumers haven’t yet noticed the good news and are still in bunker mode.
The good news for Democrats is that it seems increasingly likely that the Fed will pull off the soft landing that avoids a recession. Even though some economists are still forecasting a recession, those predictions have been off the mark so far with the economy chugging stubbornly along. If Biden’s luck holds, consumer confidence is likely to be much stronger by Election Day.
There’s also immigration. The border has been a perceived weak area for President Biden, but this weakness might be somewhat offset by a proposed deal that would tie border security funding to a Ukrainian aid package.
The big weakness is not going to be Hunter Biden. The claims about Hunter didn’t resonate with voters in 2020 and three years later, Republicans still haven’t found a smoking gun that connects Hunter’s activities to any crime by Joe. Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) admitted as much on Fox Business earlier this week when she was asked, “Have you been able to identify any actual policy changes that Joe Biden made as a result of getting money from China?”
“The short answer is no,” McClain replied, despite a claim by James Comer (R-Ky.), who leads the impeachment inquiry, back in May that Republicans already had this evidence.
Facing a subpoena, Hunter has offered to testify in a public congressional hearing, but House Republicans want to keep the matter behind closed doors in a private deposition. Given the conflicting and inflammatory statements sans evidence coming out of the inquiry, I don’t blame Hunter for wanting his testimony to be a matter of public spectacle record, and if Republicans choose not to take him up on it, it will be hard to sway skeptical members of Congress and voters to back the impeachment effort or even convince them that Biden is corrupt. The investigation is at a point where Republicans must decide whether to poop or get off the pot.
Aside from the economy, there is one big issue where Democrats are out of the mainstream in the same way that Republicans are swimming against the tide when it comes to abortion and gun rights. The big weakness for the Democrats is their position on treatment of transgender children.
While Democratic positions on the issue of “gender-affirming care” are not monolithic, there is a wealth of polling that shows that Americans are very skeptical of policies that favor transgender people, especially when it comes to medical interventions. One of the most detailed and recent polls that looked at the issue was a Pew Research survey from last June. Among the poll’s findings:
- 60 percent say gender is determined at birth (up from 56 percent in 2022 and 54 percent in 2017)
- 58 percent support mandating that transgender people compete on sports teams that match their birth gender (17 percent oppose)
- 46 percent favor bans on medical care for gender transitions (31 percent oppose)
- 43 percent say the pace of change for gender identity issues is too fast (26 percent say too slow)
- 78 percent say transgender people face discrimination
- 69 percent say that it is important to use a transgender person’s pronouns (18 percent say it isn’t important and 12 percent say it shouldn’t be done)
- 64 percent say that trans people should be protected from discrimination (up from 60 percent in 2022 and 54 percent in 2017)
If the polling seems inconsistent, welcome to American public opinion. We can draw some broad conclusions, however. Even though most Americans believe that gender is a biological reality, most also believe that trans people should be respected and that they should not be discriminated against. The biggest opposition to the trans movement seems to be on issues that involve children, such as medical gender reassignment treatments on minors and in sports.
Transgender issues may provide an opening for Republicans, but it is an issue where they should tread carefully. Republicans should avoid attacking trans people directly but focus their efforts on regulating medical treatments and mandating that biological boys cannot cross over to girls’ sports.
It’s going to be tough to go that far and no farther though. The risk is that Republican firebrands will cross the line into overt bigotry and turn off moderate voters in swing states and districts. To some extent, I’d say that this isn’t a risk but a certainty. The question is how broad the problem will be.
If Republicans can control their radical fringe, the issue is an opportunity to paint Democrats as social radicals and anti-science. And this isn’t just a matter of conservative pundits parading their scientific opinions, Forbes reported last June that a number of European countries are acting to restrict “gender-affirming care” for minors on the grounds that “longitudinal data collected and analyzed by public health authorities in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and England have concluded that the risk-benefit ratio of youth gender transition ranges from unknown to unfavorable.”
This should be the focus of the Republican message. The party’s candidates and surrogates should stress that they have sympathy for the mental anxiety that gender confusion can cause but that scientific data has found that medically altering a person’s gender can make the problem worse. If possible, they should do this without uttering words like “pervert” or “groomer.”
Regulations and restrictions on medical treatments for minors have a long history, both in the US and Europe. Campaigning for a nationwide ban against the use of hormone blockers and sexual reassignment surgeries for minors is not fanatical, transphobic, or cruel.
It’s also reasonable to advocate that biological boys compete against other biological boys in school sports. No matter what gender is claimed, DNA and the male physical makeup create an unfair advantage for trans women over biological women.
Republicans are more in step with public opinion on these issues, but that does not mean that they constitute emergencies. Despite the headlines and the angst, the New York Times reported in 2022 that even though the population of young people who identify as transgender has “nearly doubled in recent years,” the share of minors who are transgender is still less than 1.5 percent of those age groups. Newsweek estimated that the number of transgender athletes was less than 100 nationwide.
Even though there are comparatively few trans people, the issue of transgender rights is a contentious one. Republicans currently have a more mainstream position on the issue so we’ll definitely see the topic come back up as the election nears.
Republicans should remember, however, that being a small minority does not mean that trans people lack humanity. The focus should be on helping them find the best medical and psychological help to navigate their condition rather than singling them out for harassment and ridicule.
The key is look to the scientific evidence and present it in a kind and caring way. In other words, don’t be a jerk.
“If Republicans can control their radical fringe…The key is look to the scientific evidence and present it in a kind and caring way. In other words, don’t be a jerk.”
Hmm, I think I’ve identified the problem here. We saw this with Youngkin in Virginia, who was hyped as the moderate person’s Republican, who had the unbeatable strategy of “Parent’s Rights”, and who would do exactly that, “look to the scientific evidence and present it in a kind and caring way”.
But he was eclipsed by the hordes of jerks who showed up at school boards and online, screaming about books which ordinary people find inoffensive.
The problem is, while you can haggle around the edges concerning medical procedures for minors or athletes, the basic posture in America is that trans people should be allowed to live their lives as they wish and be accepted with dignity and respect.
And for the Republican party base, that is anathema, something they just will not tolerate.Report
“If the Democrats can reforge Anduril, Flame of the West, the issue is an opportunity to paint Republicans as supporting a pretender to the throne of Gondor.”
Where is the control of the radical fringe gonna come from?
De facto party leader and primary front runner Donald Trump is not a great bet, given his approach to trans people in the military (kicking them all out for no reason), and runner-up Ron DeSantis was at the center of the bizarre “groomer” panic.Report
The so-called “fringe” is in fact about 80% of the party.
Mitt Romney, who was never a loyal party member, is now just a blurry spot next to Trump in the photo.Report
Lots of voters have daughters who are athletes. For them it’s not “fringe” to think that we split the sports by gender for good reason.
After that, what does “allowed to live their lives as they wish and be accepted with dignity and respect” mean? I’d think the normal rules for not getting involved with my coworkers’ sex lives prevents most issues.Report
The GOP wants to be involved inter sex lives because they believe transgender persons are having sinful sex.
That aside, I am
Not seeing much evidence that actual trans women are competing in female sports, much less that they are doing so and winning titles. Moral panics are never a good basis for policy.Report
It shows up on my news feed occasionally.Report
So lets segregate a whole sub populations based on something that shows up “occasionally.” No way that goes wrong.Report
Trans are close to an invisible minority as adults. As such they probably can’t be ignored. Maybe they are oppressed enough to merit sex protection under the various anti-discrimination laws but that might already be a thing.
It’s only a few corner cases that cause issues. Spinning that into “the GOP will set up scarlet letters and death camps” seems over reach.
The corner cases are athletics and children, where it seems Team Blue is on the other side of science.
IMHO the GOP is focusing on those corner cases because they don’t want to talk about Trump. Team Blue needs to nut pick hard to spin death camps and mass segregation because insisting there is no difference between men and women doesn’t play well.Report
Trans people won that protection based on that analysis (i.e. standard rubric of sex discrimination) in 2020 in Bostock v. Clayton County. The rationale is pretty strong. If you can’t discriminate against a woman for wearing pants you can’t discriminate against a man for wearing a dress.
Obviously none of it requires public institutions like schools to take a position on the nutty road a small number of people go down when they give their children off label cancer drugs or hardcore body modification surgery based on the made up idea that they have something called a gender identity and that it is in conflict with their physical body. The only place the GOP gets traction on this is in the places where, for whatever reason, public schools don’t understand they need to treat gender identity the same way as any other form of spiritualism, i.e. as outside of their jurisdiction.Report
I mean, I’d say sending CPS investigate parents for abuse simply because their kids are trans goes way beyond insisting public schools treating gender identity as “outside their jurisdiction”, yet that’s exactly what the GOP Governor of Texas has “gotten traction” for.
Likewise, the last time we had a Republican President, he precipitously banned trans people from serving in the military with a Tweet, and funnily enough he’s almost certainly going to be the GOP nominee this time around, and has a puncher’s chance of winning.
At some point, we as a country have to stop pretending that the GOP is a center-right party with a fanatical fascist fringe.
It’s a fanatical fascist party with a center-right fringe.Report
Like generally speaking, “nutpicking” the GOP means looking at the statements and record of the party’s most likely Presidential nominee, or of the governments of the largest GOP-run statesReport
I don’t disagree. I’ve said before I don’t have a problem with Bostock. My position on the issue is one of state neutrality, not state hostility.Report
We’ll see just how badly Trump loses if he’s not arrested before that.Report
Athletic associations have all sorts of intrusive rules into the body autonomy of the players. Rules against steroids, weight classes, age, and so on.
So setting boundaries of how much or little of the opposite sex hormones an athlete is allowed to have isn’t unreasonable.
But here we are again, imagining any “reasonable” argument that leads to a rational conclusion of “So therefore, a vote for the Republican is justified.”
A “reasonable ” candidate is not going to survive a Republican primary.Report
RE: A “reasonable ” candidate is not going to survive a Republican primary
Well then you won’t have a problem and you can continue to claim someone with a penis is a real woman and should be able to beat up other women.
People concerned about their daughters will understand that the alternative to that is a Na.zi and will vote for you in droves.Report
We don’t need to.
All we really need to do is quote the Republican candidate.Report
I don’t think that works except for the true believers who already think every member of the GOP is a Na.zi.Report
If you know any families who are accepting of their trans child, the Texas governor wants to send armed men to rip the child away and put the parents in jail for child abuse.
If you help a woman with a ride to another state to get a legal abortion, several Republican jurisdictions want to put you in jail.
If even one conservative person loudly demands a book be banned however innocuous, there are plenty of Republican school boards who will do just that, and your parental rights are meaningless.
If your wife or daughter has a miscarriage, in several states she may be forced to bleed out in the parking lot until she is at death’s door before the doctors are allowed to act.
If a husky bearded trans man goes to the same gym as your daughter, Republicans want to force her to shower alongside him.
These are not accusations or opinions, but simple facts attested to by Republicans themselves.
Maybe these facts work on undecideds, or not. I’m betting they will.Report
The word “wants” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.Report
“If even one conservative person loudly demands a book be banned however innocuous, there are plenty of Republican school boards who will do just that, and your parental rights are meaningless.”
Can’t you just buy it yourself? The ‘ban’ is on it being in the school library, not from you purchasing it yourself.Report
“[Youngkin] was eclipsed by the hordes of jerks who showed up at school boards and online, screaming about books which ordinary people find inoffensive.”
Were any of those hordes of jerks actually running for office?Report
I’m going to push back on this:
What evidence? What fraction of people experience this? What fraction experience relief from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation?
If a treatment helps 100 people but creates a problem for one or two, we still do it. These are called side effects. We do our best to minimize it, but we don’t ban the treatment that helps 100 people for the sake of one or two whom it creates problems for.
Furthermore, every single treatment that is given to trans children as gender-affirming care is also given to cis children for other reasons, and in much greater numbers. For instance,
That’s from the New York Times
Nobody is trying to ban this for cis girls. Which means it’s blatantly discriminatory to deny this care to a trans child. I don’t mind being careful and cautious about treatment, but that’s not what this is.Report
quit throwing facts into a political debate.Report
Are these facts relevant though? Clearly not the implants number for non-minors, and whatever portion of the reductions who are non-minors. But these aren’t breast removals.Report
Polls that don’t measure intensity don’t measure anything politically important. The Pew results aren’t surprising, but what reason is there to think that trans issues are going to a big enough deal, whatever one’s casual opinions on the subject, to be the Democrats’ major electoral weakness?Report
They were not down here in our governors election three weeks ago.Report
Mississippi is ruby red and California is diamond blue. There are always going to be places that defy general trends.Report
I agree. While opinions on trans issues vary, there are really only two groups of people who care enough about the issue for it to matter electorally:
1) Trans people and their friends and loved ones.
2) Complete and utter lunatics.
Being pro trans gets you group 1, and the Republicans have group 2 sewn up. If Biden needs to do anything, it just to deflect: “I believe a child’s health should be between them, their parents and the doctor” and then change the subject.Report
I disagree. Trans issues are the Left’s current source of their sense of righteousness. The Left needs a villain at least as much as the Right ever has, and just the reactions on this thread are an indication how much this issue means to them.Report
The very best way to destroy us is to accept trans people as equals and let them live in peace and deprive us of the villain we so desperately need.
We libs would be totally owned, our heads just assplodin’.Report
Subtract athletics, where trans-women have serious advantages, and children, where the science seems unclear as to what best practices are, and what’s left?
Terrible marketing campaigns need to be accepted as good marketing? If you engage in nut picking you won’t find anyone?
If you need to lower the bar for what “full equals” means to the point where you’re fighting over cake designs or what some nut says, then you’ve already won you just don’t want to admit it.Report
Subtract athletics, where trans-women have serious advantages, and children, where the science seems unclear as to what best practices are, and what’s left?
What’s left will have me repeating myself, because somehow the actual implemented policies of Republican governments are irrelevant to political debate around here:
1. Discriminating against adult trans people, which is not only endorsed by the contemporary right, but has been repeatedly been implemented by Republican leaders in a variety of ways, including banning trans people from the military with no more justification than a tweet, and ensuring that doctors and nurses be allowed to deny any sort of medical care to LGBT people.
2. Not sending CPS to take trans kids away from parents, which cannot be justified even on the grounds that the science is “unclear”.Report
First, the number of kids taken away holds steady at zero.
2nd, far as I can tell, we’re not sure whether having children change genders counts as child abuse. The whole “should this be done at all” thing seems to be unsettled science.
Quoting wiki: Prospective studies have reported that gender dysphoria in children is more heavily linked to adult homosexuality than to an adult transgender identity, especially with regard to boys.
Assuming I’m reading that right, if we allow “gender affirming care” in youth, then more often than not we’re mistreating a future homosexual.
This is why I consider trans youth and trans athletes to be corner cases where Team Blue may be wrong and inappropriately virtue signaling.
RE: The Military
Biden reversed Trump and I haven’t heard any squeaks about that causing problems so I’d guess Trump was wrong. Nor would I describe Trump as someone whose behavior & judgement should be copied.
However, the military bans people who have a wide range of mental illnesses including depression and/or anxiety. You can apply for a waver, but the default is you’re considered unstable enough that it’s likely to be a problem.
I’m not sure I’d pick “acceptance in the military” as the hill to die on here. Trans people suffer from breathtakingly high levels of depression and anxiety and the military has a culture which isn’t designed to be “fair” or promote “equality”.Report
The long term of this with children is going to be medical malpractice lawsuits. There may be a tiny number of people for whom the tradeoffs are worth it, and I take trans adults that say they are happy with their outcomes at their word. But it seems pretty predictable that a significant number of minors are going to have long term physical damage they didn’t really understand when they started these drugs (to say nothing of surgeries).
My father in law was on Lupron for years for prostate cancer (this is one of the drugs they refer to as a ‘puberty blocker’). In his case it was worth it in that along with a cocktail of other drugs it kept him with us nearly 15 years after a terminal diagnosis. But over time it caused bone deterioration to the point he could barely move, and was in constant agony. Ultimately the side effects killed him before the cancer did, when a minor fall resulted in a skull fracture and massive brain hemorrhage.
The idea that people are giving this to physically healthy children on anything other than a very short term basis for something like precocious puberty is nuts. I don’t believe anyone really knows what the long term effects of decades of these, along with cross hormones and other drugs will be, which is what minors are being set up for, even in the best case scenario.Report
That. That exactly.
And additionally more than half of the youth getting this are gay and not trans.
But if you question whether this is a good idea then you’re transphobic and the problem is you.Report
If you wonder why we think you are bigoted, maybe its because you are criticizing something about which you don’t know a G-D thing.
Seriously, you guys are ignorant as a stump regarding trans medical procedures, yet assume you know enough to override the wishes of the people and families and doctors involved.
And what’s darkly amusing is to see this coming from people predisposed to supporting “Parent’s Rights”.Report
I’m fine with the idea that I don’t know enough to make sound judgements.
The part that raises questions is when I check on wiki for “how often this is being done inappropriately” it seems to be more than half the time.
That “more than half” is by the medical establishment… which strongly implies that we’re looking at quackery and pseudo science (which pretty much by definition should be banned).
Blue’s “experts” testifying to Congress that trans-women athletes are no different from men because there are no biological differences re-enforces that implication.
The “moral panic” seems to be on both sides.Report
I’m fine with the idea that I don’t know enough to make sound judgements.
But the rest of us should just trust that Ken Paxton and Greg Abbot do when they send CPS after the parents of trans kids?
EDIT to add: If you wonder why I keep harping on this, it’s for three reasons:
1. It’s out of line with the assertion that the science is “unsettled” or “uncertain”. It might be appropriate if the science is 100% settled and certain, but even there it’s not obvious.
2. It proves that the stated motivation that the anti-trans movement has used to crack down on LGBT students, parents, and teachers throughout Red America–a commitment to “parental rights”–is actually a vicious lie.Report
The parental rights position is about education, not sterilization.Report
I don’t see how there’s anything bigoted about saying the government shouldn’t be out trying to eradicate the practice, while still acknowledging that people doing this are taking very serious risks with unproven medical interventions. And I certainly won’t have a lot of sympathy for any doctor that gets sued by the false positive patients, which I feel very confident is what’s coming next. Anyway calling bigotry at any concern about experimental medical procedures isn’t a sign of taking the issue seriously, really it’s the opposite.Report
I don’t see how there’s anything bigoted about saying the government shouldn’t be out trying to eradicate the practice, while still acknowledging that people doing this are taking very serious risks with unproven medical interventions.
OK, but, like, the government in huge swathes of the country is trying to do that.
Like pretty much every Red state has outright banned gender-affirming care for minors, many have also made it much harder for adults to get that exact same care, and (as I endlessly belabor) at least one Red state is sending CPS after parents for merely having trans kids.
Like the mainstream Right is doing exactly what you’re calling bigoted.
And it seems like every time this is raised, it’s just brushed aside with a “to be sure…” and then everyone is back to complaining how self-righteous the Left is being… and dude, if we’re being self-righteous how the heck should we characterize what DeSantis, Abbot, et al. are doing…?
EDIT to add: And it matters, because this kind of ambiguity about what the actual bounds and stakes of the debate are is extremely toxic to debate and crafting good policy.Report
RE: Like pretty much every Red state has outright banned gender-affirming care for minors,
As far as I can tell, no one here disagrees with…
1) Wiki being right about more than half of the people being treated not needing treatment at all
2) InMD comments about the long term drug side effects
3) My statements about Quackery and pseudoscience.
If all of us agree on those three points, then why is banning inappropriate?
Blue wanting to virtue signal isn’t a good enough answer nor is Red being an ass****. Both of those can be true and we’d still have serious red flags, and should be wondering if this is something that should be banned.
Similarly, if this is quackery/experimentation with serious drugs on children who shouldn’t have it, then we’re also in “child abuse” territory so having CPS look into it is appropriate.Report
I agree with your last paragraph completely. In terms of the nature of the debate I have a good sense of what the right is for. I don’t have much of a sense at all of what the slice of the left coalition that is really engaged on this issue is for. My question is what should the stance, policy, whatever be?
Should any preteen who goes to the doctor be prescribed something like Lupron right away? Do their parents have any say? What do people make of the fact that it seems every time these treatments and the places that provide them go under the microscope in other first world countries the result is to pull back, if not to discover outright scandal like in the UK? Do people believe that doctors, parents, and even the patients themselves reliably know that what they say they want at 12 or 14 will be the same at 25, 35, 45? I find that suspect, but do we have sound evidence either way? How much does it matter that we don’t know whether and to what degree any medical intervention is reversible, and that it may vary by individual?
I also think there’s deafening silence on the fact that, while adult transsexuals that went through serious vetting and medical gatekeeping have been with us for some time now, the movement towards it with children really came out of nowhere over the last few years. We’re putting far larger cohorts of them into some form of this protocol than ever have been in the past, all at the same time that an activist movement demands that no questions should be asked, and as much gatekeeping as possible torn down. That’s all in parallel of course with the push to replace the sex based equality regime with a ‘gender’ based regime, despite that no one is ever able to articulate what that looks like in a coherent way, the attack on parental rights at schools, the embrace of a lot of what clearly amounts to pseudoscience and woo woo, etc.
So my default here is, and has been, basically libertarian. But my opposition to the Republicans who I don’t vote for anyway due to about 100 much more pressing things than this doesn’t mean I have to just turn off my brain. As much as I am sure that causes annoyance with my political fellow travelers so too does the lack of willingness to deal with hard questions frustrate me. I’d of course be lying if I didn’t say I approach a number of the premises on which these interventions are based with great skepticism. Nevertheless I’m open to being convinced towards a workable compromise that is objective, based in reality, and respectful of the rights of all involved.Report
Should any preteen who goes to the doctor be prescribed something like Lupron right away?
No. And literally nobody I’ve seen has argued the contrary.This is an extreme outlier position.
Do their parents have any say?
Yes. Note: it’s the Right that has been far more aggressive in denying parents any say here, and at least one person (Dark Matter) is using your “hard question” approach to defend bans and CPS investigations both.
I’d say that does a lot to justify Chip and my resistance, frustration, and suspicion. Like the same ambiguity that you see on our part in refusing to address “hard questions” we see in the fact that the “hard questions” are, themselves, being used to justify exactly the oppressive state tactics you say we’re right to consider bigotry.
As for the rest, I actually am not quite up for a deep dive into the literature at the moment, but I will say that hostility to gatekeeping in general (regardless of whether it would be optimal policy if it were implemented well) is a nigh-universal activist reaction to unreliable or actively malicious gatekeepers who are trying to use the regulatory state in service of ulterior motives.
And pro-trans activists are definitely justified in perceiving that the likes of Ken Paxton and Ron DeSantis are exactly those sorts of gatekeepers, even before you consider the GOP’s enthusiastic participation in enacting bad-faith regulatory schemes (with formally identical rhetorical justifications) to hinder abortion rights, back before the GOP finally amassed enough power to just annihilate abortion rights entirely.Report
RE: hostility to gatekeeping in general
The first problem is you’re correct to believe there’s been a lot of bad faith and Team Red is looking for a good moral panic to drive voters.
The second problem is in 10 years we might see all states ban youth treatment because it’s that deep into bad ideas and bad outcomes.
Multiple red flags that large are something special.
These two problems don’t negate each other. If the second is true then the first doesn’t really matter.Report
So trying to get to substantive answers on hard questions is inherently suspect? Whatever happened to being the side that values empiricism? And, again, it’s not like on the occasions these procedures and institutions have been subject to independent scrutiny some rather disturbing information comes to light (which includes a lot of rushing headlong into medicalization).
But look, if the only way you (and Chip) are willing to talk about this is through the partisan analysis then it’s probably going to be hard for us to be productive. I’m interested in the subject because of the implications in a number of other areas, including maintaining functioning public institutions, parental rights, and the way we treat children generally. I am a father after all.
I’m also happy to put cards on the table with respect to personal beliefs. IMO there is no such objective thing as ‘gender identity.’ For all practical purposes the trans identity is no different than other forms of self expression, maybe with some psychological components involved that science doesn’t yet fully understand. Based on what we have, it seems that some very, very tiny number of people will, on balance, be happier living as the opposite sex for their entire lives and for them the very serious trade offs of medicalization are worth it. But there’s absolutely no reason to believe children know this about themselves in any reliable way, or that medical professionals (or anyone else) are currently capable of identifying them with any certainty, much less distinguishing them from people that will grow up to be gay or are suffering from some other problem.
These are of course legitimate matters of scientific inquiry. But when it comes out the other end of activist captured institutions as claptrap about how minors are completely capable of consenting to treatments that may well sterilize them or unfalsifiable silliness about gender identities? Well it doesn’t surprise me that on balance it tends to lose out through the democratic process. The assertions just don’t add up.
But hey, the good news is that I vote Democrat anyway, despite this issue. And I’m happy to be a constructive part of the coalition on things like fixing the healthcare system, investing in clean technology, raising the minimum wage, and other mode practical items on the agenda where the case is a lot clearer.Report
You talk about “empiricism” then in the third paragraph let loose with a string of arbitrary opinions without any empirical basis whatsoever.
There IS empirical reason to think gendered identity exists and is more fluid than traditionally imagined, and there IS empirical reason to think that children are able to know this about themselves.
You’re waving away solid scientific evidence then demanding to ask “hard questions”.
If your opinions reject the claims by trans people, well, that’s your right, but you can’t tell us you are being objective and empirical.Report
I’d be interested in seeing the scientific evidence that contradicts what InMD said in his comment, if you happen to have any.
My suspicion is that InMD’s statements are precise enough that anything you hurriedly google will be talking about something that he did *NOT* say but will be a point against some other argument entirely.
But, hey, I’ve been wrong before.Report
Lets focus on his two claims I highlighted:
1. “there is no such objective thing as ‘gender identity.’ For all practical purposes the trans identity is no different than other forms of self expression”
2. “here’s absolutely no reason to believe children know this about themselves in any reliable way”
I could Google the papers documenting this, but in the interest of time I can just ask everyone here to reflect on their own gender identity.
Everyone here has a gender identity of some sort. We all knew our gender identity at a very early age.
Indeed this is one of the main claims conservatives made against feminism, by pointing out that “most” children just naturally and instinctively gravitate towards certain toys- trucks for boys, and dolls for females.
Even when feminist parents urge their boys to choose dolls, most often they reject them in favor of traditionally male coded toys.
I emphasized “most”. This is because there is and always has been a certain percentage of children who didn’t gravitate towards the “correct” gendered toys, but preferred the opposite.
I believe that virtually everyone reading this has witnessed this phenomenon. You don’t need a scientific paper to be persuaded that it happens, you have witnessed with your own eyes.
So we know that children DO spontaneously and without adult pressure, develop an understanding of gender and that some children DO spontaneously and without adult pressure grasp that their gender identity is not the same as their biological one.
This is an empirical fact.Report
RE: “here’s absolutely no reason to believe children know this about themselves in any reliable way”
What do you want to do with wiki claiming more people are inappropriately treated (which presumably means they were gay and not trans) than appropriately treated?
“Reliable way” doesn’t work well with “less than a coin flip chance of being right”.Report
What do you want to do with wiki claiming more people are inappropriately treated (which presumably means they were gay and not trans) than appropriately treated?
…Read the rest of the paragraph?Report
Still interested in seeing the scientific evidence rather than your arbitrary opinions.Report
You wouldn’t understand it anyway.
No one here would, at least not on a level sufficient to interrogate it.
All you or anyone else here is capable of doing is saying “Wow thems a lot of sciencey words by people with letters after their names and kinda sounds logical”.
Which is why I rest my claim on things no one here is disputing.Report
If none of us here would understand it, why are you using it as evidence for anything?
I mean, I assume that includes you.
“I use evidence that I don’t understand to reach conclusions!” isn’t a great argument for a conclusion.
What’s worse is that maybe I *DO* understand the evidence and you don’t and you’re projecting onto everyone else.
Seriously, this is a poor argument.Report
Which is why I didn’t.
I ask everyone here to look at their own observations.
Like you. Are you disputing my two points?Report
I don’t have to dispute them if they’re groundless.
You’ve admitted that you don’t understand the evidence your points are based on.
I’m telling you that you have admitted to not understanding the evidence and so I am saying that the burden of proof for your assertions are on you.
And you’ve already admitted that you don’t understand the stuff in your burden.Report
Which of my claims is groundless?Report
The ones that rest on evidence that you, yourself, have admitted you do not understand.Report
I never made any such claim.
My claims are based on simple objective observations which are well understood.
So which one do you dispute? I can repost them if you like.Report
They’re “arbitrary opinions”, Chip. There’s no use in arguing against someone’s opinion.Report
My claim, that gender identity is innate and discovered early, is an arbitrary opinion and not an empirical fact?Report
Is it an empirical fact that has scientific evidence that people on the board are capable of understanding?Report
Yes.
Everyone here has witnessed children’s behavior and observed how most, but not all,, just naturally gravitate to gendered toys.
These observations have been observed through time and across cultures.Report
So they have opinions.
Great. Thanks.Report
Nope. Empirical observation is a fact, not opinion.
And don’t think it has gone unnoticed that you aren’t disputing the observation.Report
Um no. Science s the collecting of empirical observations under certain controls, the testing of those observations statistically against one or more hypotheses, and the drawing of conclusions based on the outcomes of those tests. The only place opinion might come into that workflow is the conclusion phase, and good scientists acknowledge that bias all the time in their writing.Report
Catch up a bit, Phil.
Go back and read the thread and see who is arguing what.
You may be surprised.Report
I read the whole thing, including where you asserted that empirical observations amount to opinions. Which is complete rubbish.
Nice try though.Report
Is it possible that two different people will have two different empirical observations?
Or will all of them have identical ones?
When does anecdata transubstantiate into data?Report
Has anyone here had any observations which contradict my assertions?Report
Sure.Report
My observations are that most , but not all, children instinctively gravitate to gendered toys.
What was the contradictory observation?Report
The part where you said that it contradicted what InMD said.Report
His claim #1: “there is no such objective thing as ‘gender identity.’
My claim: By objective observation, people discover their own gender identity. It isn’t a choice like fashion, and it is extremely resistant to outside pressure.
His claim #2: “There’s absolutely no reason to believe children know this about themselves in any reliable way”
My claim: Children reliably discover their gender identity at a very early age by gravitating towards gendered toys and expressions.
So far you haven’t offered any rebuttal of any sort.Report
RE: Your point #1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity
So there is backing by the medical community and experts.
Gender dysphoria stopped being a mental illness in 2019.
So trans is a thing, and it looks like it’s a thing pretty early.Report
Chip, these are exactly the kind of leaps that I find to be a problem. I assume the clinicians and professional researchers of the world are looking a little harder than that, but this popularized version is not at all sound, to say nothing of the disturbing implications.
Yes, we know that there are measurable statistical differences in the preferences of men and women that can be observed from an early age. The sexes are fundamentally different. But the idea that those who deviate too far from the median have something called a gender identity that is then and will forever be in conflict with their sex to such a degree that it requires medical interventions at a very early age isn’t just a jump. It’s wild-eyed, highly irresponsible speculation that taken to its logical conclusion would gobble up every boy that would rather color in pink or girl who likes to climb trees into a very serious regimen of interventions with all kinds of risks and tradeoffs. Now, do I think that’s going on today, on any kind of scaled basis? No. But the way we approach the issue of children struggling with what I can only imagine is a profoundly difficult situation needs to be worlds away from the direction you’re going in with that example.Report
Who is saying that a preference for another gender “requires” medical or professional intervention?
My claim, and that of most liberals, is that the people affected should decide for themselves how to handle their own understanding of their gender.
We can agree that irreversible measures should be extremely limited for minors not yet of the age of consent, which I believe is largely the case. Most measures like clothing and puberty blockers can easily be reversed.Report
I agree that it doesn’t matter what clothes people wear. I disagree on the puberty blockers, and think we don’t really know what the long term risks are of prolonged use, or if by preventing puberty we aren’t in at least some number of cases preventing natural resolution of the condition.
However having that debate doesn’t in any way require any of this gender stuff. If anything it’s forcing what should be a tough medical decision about a miniscule number of patients with an extremely unusual condition into a some larger social political culture war.Report
Yes. Exactly. This is what liberals are pushing back against most strongly, seconded by the hubris that parents should have total control over their child’s education (as well as the education of kids who aren’t their won) but should have no control or decision making in this instance.Report
“this instance”
This one tiny instance of mutilating children’s genitals, right? That’s the instance you’re talking about?Report
Gender reassignment surgery is not multination, any more then breast enhancement is. It’s never the initial treatment, and for kids, the standard of care is still a long (sometimes years) course of therapy, hormone treatments and other less invasive medical procedures, all under the care of both physicians and psychologists. There is no place in America that I am aware of where that would happen outside of parental control. Which makes all the huffing and puffing – including yours – laughably foolish and immature. Especially for apolitical party that claims individual liberty and freedom as its core principles.Report
It’s the Republicans’ inconsistency that bothers people so much. On the one hand, they’re against child pron in school libraries, and on the other hand, they oppose child genital mutilation. Get your heads together, Republicans! You’re like all over the place on this stuff!Report
Correct, liberals believe parents have the right to circumcise their boys.
Glad we cleared that up.Report
I can’t speak for Chip, but discussing actual empirical evidence in OT comments fellates ungulates.
Putting an hour plus into a a well-researched comment just to have it linger in moderation for an indefinite period of time feels pretty bad, man.Report
I’m remembering the commenter we had (since banned) who asked Kuznicki “SOURCE?” all the time and Kuznicki provided his source pretty readily.
The commenter would argue back with some outrageous claim and Kuznicki would ask “source?” and, suddenly, that was him attempting to shut down the conversation.
It makes me suspicious that there are a handful of people out there who see asking for sources as a way to shut down the opposing argument instead of actually providing evidence for what actually is.
I know that it’s always vaguely irritating when *I* am asked for a source and then provide one and it doesn’t freakin’ matter.
Usually, I’m pretty pleased to provide it. “See? I’m *NOT* crazy!”
But if you’re arguing against someone who sees it solely as a tactic rather than as a way to establish what is, it quickly becomes apparent.
Edit: Seriously. I wrote this comment before I saw Chip’s response.Report
I don’t think it’s just a tactic from InMD. I disagree with him on the topic but he’s a straight shooter.
I do think this is just an absolutely annoying forum for engaging in this kind of communication even at the, “Hey I clicked through a bunch of links, read a bunch of abstracts and discussion sections chased down key references, and my immediate take is ${IMMEDIATE_TAKE},” level.
And pace Chip, I am confident that I have the background necessary to evaluate the literature in question, but that would be a significant investment of time and effort in an absolute sense. Maybe I’ll build up the energy and time for it some day, but not today.
If you (or InMD or Dark Matter) want to read this as evasiveness, I find that mildly regrettable but not enough to be mad about it or something.Report
Fair enough. Though I will say that this particular social science has a great deal of wiggle room and there are a non-zero number of “detransitioners” who share personal stories that confirm a *LOT* of priors on the part of the skeptics.
InMD’s positions are nuanced and precise and they don’t strike me as particularly ill-founded.
Like, to the point where they should be argued against persuasively rather than with appeals to the ignorance of people who don’t agree.Report
Like, to the point where they should be argued against persuasively rather than with appeals to the ignorance of people who don’t agree.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Chip’s attempted refutation (of InMD’s second point, about reliability) holds much water.
If Chip is reading this, it’s not enough to appeal to existence of gender identity to establish that children or teens can assess their own gender identity reliably, or even can do so with clinical assistance.
That doesn’t mean I believe that InMD is right–I believe the opposite–but demonstrating that is real work, and real work that I, at least, am begging off from doing in an OT comment thread.Report
Fair enough.
For what it’s worth, I can see how someone could reach that conclusion.
But my suspicion is that there’s going to be a lot of additional evidence showing up in the coming years and, worse than that, evidence that previous evidence was suppressed.
“Well, you have to understand…” will be said fairly often.
But we’ll have to wait for that sort of thing and I don’t have a timeline.Report
I also don’t think a battle of the links is a useful approach to OT and I want to make clear my comment wasn’t intended as a challenge to you or to anyone else who disagrees with me to produce anything like that. Most of the time when it happens it devolves into a debate over the credibility of the source. The discussion at OT is by its nature a high level affair, so I don’t see it as evasive at all. There is no need to do extra homework on my account.
But look, suffice to say that if a day comes where a brain scan or genetic test or something like that comes out that is predictive about future preferences with a high degree of certainty my thinking on the subject would change. Such a test would also weed out false positives, which is my main concern. Despite my serious misgivings about medicalization of minors one of the reasons I don’t support all out bans or treating parents who make decisions I personally find to be misguided as criminals is that I don’t think we should be closing the door on good science just because there’s a lot out there that I think is bad.Report
The math of large populations dealing with rare conditions is nasty.
Large population (say 10 million people)
Small sub-set with a real problem (say 1000)
A test that is 99% accurate results in 100x as many false positives than people who really have the problem.
A test that is 99.9% accurate results in 10x as many false positives than people who really have the problem.
Those are made up numbers, but wiki claims more people are being inappropriately treated than helped.
And this assumes we aren’t dealing with other serious problems (quackery, pseudoscience, mental illness, self interested adults, powerful drugs not intended for children).
This is not my field and I have no dog in this race, but it should be deeply concerning that we have so many red flags here.Report
Re: “Concern for children” and “Parental Rights” and “hard questions”;
For more than 40 years, Mississippi had one of the strictest school vaccination requirements in the nation, and its high childhood immunization rates have been a source of pride. But in July, the state began excusing children from vaccination if their parents cited religious objections, after a federal judge sided with a “medical freedom” group.
Today, 2,100 Mississippi schoolchildren are officially exempt from vaccination on religious grounds. Five hundred more are exempt because their health precludes vaccination. Dr. Daniel P. Edney, the state health officer, warns that if the total number of exemptions climbs above 3,000, Mississippi will once again face the risk of deadly diseases that are now just a memory.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/us/politics/mississippi-childhood-vaccine-mandates.html
You will never guess who is pushing for giving parents the right to make medical decisions for children- Not just their own children, but ALL children- decisions which will have obvious and terrible consequences later on.
Go ahead, guess!Report
RE: 2,100 Mississippi schoolchildren are officially exempt from vaccination on religious grounds
In 2022, Mississippi had 457,954 students
It hits the radar as a bad idea which is easily abused… although if the total number is less than 1% I’d say it’s not that big of a deal yet.
For perspective, California allowed a “religious” objection to vaccinations until 2016 and Massachusetts still does.Report
Pillsy gets at my frustration here, which is that the concern trolling about “harm to children” is used as a fig leaf for rank bigotry.
We see it right here where feigned concern over bad DEI, unfair athletics or harm to children is offered as a reason to consider people like Youngkin as reasonable, then Pinky comes along and gives away the game by saying, yeah, its the existence of queer and trans people that is the problem.
Or how self-described moderates wring their hands nervously over a racy passage by Toni Morrison, then we find out the real target of the book ban is a book about two penguins raising a chick.Report
First, the number of kids taken away holds steady at zero.
There are families being actively investigated for abuse by Texas CPS now.
Nor would I describe Trump as someone whose behavior & judgement should be copied.
Something like 55% of Republicans disagree with you. So, like, I’m not sure why we’re talking about anti-trans discrimination as some sort of weird corner case.Report
search for “Palestine” 0 of 0 results
“race” 0 of 0 results
“crime” 1 of 1 results…it’s about Hunter Biden
double-checks title of articleReport
I think polls do not reveal much. Election results reveal much and 2022 and 2023 were generally pretty bad for Republicans in both special and general. The Red Tsunami ended up a red trickle and the GOP had high hopes in 2023 that were dashed in most purple states. Trump has never won the popular vote and more recent polls have shown an uptick for Biden.
Millennials and Gen Z are going to be 48 percent of the electorate in 2024 and they largely have no need for GOP theocracy or Trump. I am not convinced that the loudest voices of purity pony lefty tik tockers speak for Gen Z as a whole.Report
I find it hard to see Trump not getting the nod for running. I find it hard to see him winning. I’d say I’m pretty far to the Right and I’d have to vote for Joe over him. Trump is running on dismantling rule of law.Report
Against the run of some evidence, I’m inclined to believe this is right.
The GOP is defined by Trump, and the American voters hate Trump, even those who substantially agree with him a fair percentage of the time. Maybe even especially those. Push comes to shove that will end up carrying the day.
In more granular terms, polling quality has deteriorated horribly over the last ten years or so for a variety of reasons, and I don’t think those have been comprehensively addressed. In addition to 2022 and 2023, election returns for 2018 and 2020 also show profound antipathy to Trump. Also, there is some reason to believe that the improved polling for the GOP represents improved margins in states, where they are still a long way from being competitive, eg, New York and California.
If the Palestine issue goes away and Americans flip to the perception of an improving economy, the floor for a GOP debacle is very very low, much lower than people are allowing for imo.
But that’s not the end of the story. There’s quite a few things that might lead us to believe the worm is turning in favor of the GOP. First is an important but banal observation that the 2022 House election extrapolated to 2024 leads to a comfortable GOP victory. No one has really noticed this because that election was perceived to be (and was) a horrible disappointment for the GOP. But disappointment notwithstanding, GOP 3% win in the popular vote will lead to a comfortable Presidential victory for Trump or any other GOP nominee.
Furthermore, the GOP electorate now is less educated, less civic-minded, more minority-heavy than it was 15 years ago. As a consequence the GOP might be stronger in Presidential years as opposed to midterms.
Finally, I think Palestine is a huge net negative for the Demos, where they are bleeding votes from both the Left and Right. This has particular salience for me, since for the moment at least I have mentally flipped my own vote over it.
realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/11/28/no_really_biden_is_in_trouble_against_trump.html
Finally, Sean Trende wrote this a couple days ago. I have a lot of respect for Sean Trende, and he says Trump is winning. But for me, too much of the reasoning is about polls to completely believe.Report
The various court cases against him do the following:
1) Make his cult more determined to back him.
2) Keep his name out there so suck up the oxygen.
3) Make it more likely that those not in his cult won’t vote for him.
When we get to the later stages, we’ll also see them…
4) Suck up his attention. He’ll need to be in his criminal cases every day.
5) Run the real risk of putting him in jail. His constant threatening of the process and so on means he could even go before he’s found guilty.
So in the short term they’re actually a good thing for him. Long term, maybe even medium term, not so much.Report
Yeah, this is mostly probably right. It’s worth noting for me, that this is one case of a larger pattern: nothing meaningfully good is going to happen to Trump between now and Election Day. But there’s lot of things bad that can happen. In fact most of the things that are likely will be bad for Trump.
You could have exogenous things come out of the blue which hurt Biden and Demos, eg Gaza, but even there I think people will be looking for other options before making Trump the beneficiary.
It’s why even if the pro-Trump polls are right, I don’t think they are necessarily indicative of a Trump win. Even good polls are mostly a static snapshot of a dynamic process and even if the snapshot is right the dynamics are still against Trump, by a lot.Report
Polling is supposed to measure how likely someone is to win the Presidency but I seriously doubt that’s what we’re measuring here. At this point they’re more likely to indicate serious problems with the basic tools and/or expectations we have of polling.Report
Um no. Just … no. What little credible evidence there is says people experiencing gender dysphoria who are denied medical treatments up to and including gender reassignment surgeries are the ones suffering most, and the most likely to die by suicide. Preventing that treatment – as a growing number of states seek to do is to create and enhance well documented harm.
Consumers have not yet noticed because both the legacy media and the conservative new media refuse to tell them, albeit for different reasons. Even within the sanctified digital walls of OT, when we liberals point out the good news of the economy, we get lambasted for ignoring the feelings of normies. Call me nuts, but that’s not an easy problem to fix, no matter how good the economy actually is.
I remain darkly amused – nah ticked off – that the GOP thinks throwing more money at a system they refuse to reform will result in a different outcome, to say nothing of the hilarious stupidity of claiming to be small government fiscal conservatives yet demanding an expansion of government spending. Pick one and stick to it.Report
your comment starts:
“What little credible evidence there is says people experiencing gender dysphoria who are denied medical treatments up to and including gender reassignment surgeries are the ones suffering most, and the most likely to die by suicide.”
which suggests that Your Feelings About Your Personal Life Are Objectively Incorrect is an egregious violation of civil liberties and a vicious personal attack
but then you say:
“Even within the sanctified digital walls of OT, when we liberals point out the good news of the economy, we get lambasted for ignoring the feelings of normies.”
which suggests that Your Feelings About Your Personal Life Are Objectively Incorrect is an entirely valid mode of engagement
oh, they’re two different things? Seems like “your feelings, your problem” is applied in both cases, and it’s not clear to me why it’s bad for the first but okay for the second, other than Phil’s feelings about the people in question.
“I remain darkly amused – nah ticked off – that the GOP thinks throwing more money at a system they refuse to reform will result in a different outcome…”
it’s the strategy that you’d have us use for the US medical and education systems, so you seem to be okay with it!Report
@in-md:
So trying to get to substantive answers on hard questions is inherently suspect?
Contextually suspect.
One thing I’ve noticed, locally (to OT) and in the broader national conversation, is that the substantive questions–very much including non-empirical ones like, “How much say should parents have?”–are directed with much more force and frequency at the Left.
But the actual implemented policies from the Right are, at best, not obviously less hostile to parental rights than those from the Left. I’m not sure why this is unworthy of comment, notice, or consideration.
Only one person in this conversation has defended the position that parents should have no say in whether their kids receive gender-affirming care, and it’s Pinky, not me or Chip!
But look, if the only way you (and Chip) are willing to talk about this is through the partisan analysis then it’s probably going to be hard for us to be productive
I don’t know if I’d say it’s the only way, but I don’t think it’s irrelevant. I think my earlier answer about hostility to gatekeeping points out one of the reasons why–if we’re interested about activist capture of institutions, especially public-facing ones, we need to consider the possibility that the Rightward activists are going to capture and degrade the institutions as well as the Left!
Especially when we’re witnessing Rightward activists capturing and degrading those public institutions in real time!
IMO there is no such objective thing as ‘gender identity.’ For all practical purposes the trans identity is no different than other forms of self expression, maybe with some psychological components involved that science doesn’t yet fully understand. Based on what we have, it seems that some very, very tiny number of people will, on balance, be happier living as the opposite sex for their entire lives and for them the very serious trade offs of medicalization are worth it.
OK, but that small group of people is a key prediction of the “gender identity” hypothesis! Indeed, if they didn’t exist, that hypothesis would be falsified, which disposes of your “not falsifiable” hypothesis.Report
Again, the question of the parental role in education is different from the question of the parental role in sterilization.Report
Also, the sense that one’s own side gets more unfair pushback is a form of confirmation bias.Report
The sense that InMD hasn’t addressed any of his hard substantive questions towards you is a form of pushing Ctrl-F a few times.Report
Because your position is untenable, and also he agrees with me. You can’t project that to the broader national conversation. I daresay without checking that I’ve gotten more pushback than you have.
ETA: Quick check, I see four people on your side and four on mine. So much for either of us weathering the brunt of the criticism.Report
Because your position is untenable, and also he agrees with me.
If he agrees with you he should say so, and at least clarify the outline of the debate.Report
It’s his job to clarify his position on the core issue, and he has. You can’t have read this far in the thread and not know his position. No one wants to agree with me, and even I don’t agree with me on everything, but he’s stated an extremely skeptical position on gender treatments for minors.Report
His position is diametrically opposed to Red state bans (much less the abuses of the Texas DFPS directed by Abbot and Paxton):
I don’t see how there’s anything bigoted about saying the government shouldn’t be out trying to eradicate the practice, while still acknowledging that people doing this are taking very serious risks with unproven medical interventions
Emphasis mine, but the comment isn’t.Report
Maybe we’re disagreeing on what “substantive” means in this context?Report
If “gender identity” is subjective, then there can’t be hard science about it. Social science at best.Report
Social science is still empirical!Report
But a lot more speculative. Even the hardest social sciences are built on unprovable assumptions or philosophies.Report
That’s true of all science.Report
The rest of science is always one observation away from needing to be redone.
For example we’re getting data from the James Webb that is basically a massive F.U. to existing early universe theories and we’re not sure what to do about it.
Get rid of the big bang? Have two big bangs? Double the age of the universe? Different laws of physics at different ages of the universe? Have light age? Dark stars?Report
Or just other needs. From about 1820-1850 mathematicians threw out calculus as it was known then and rebuilt it from the ground up based on set theory. Not because the old way didn’t work, but because there were a bunch of ways the theorists wanted to expand the ideas and the old foundation didn’t support those.Report
It’s not so different in public health or social science. Like, it’s usually not one observation that will do the trick (since most of the theoretical content is statistical in nature) but the basic approach of observation and falsification is generally applicable.Report
I am just now seeing that this was directed to me.
On the question of context at OT I attribute a lot of that to where the debate saliences are. I am glad we still have some self identified conservatives to help keep things honest. My totally unscientific view though is that in the context of national issues the center of gravity in the OT commentariat is center left, with even the people playing the conservative role being more libertarian-ish. Whatever they are they are not particularly representative of the average Republican.
As for me personally I’ve said before with this issue there’s no possible way for me to totally separate out my experience in a bluest of the blue jurisdiction. I end up seeing and hearing things in my real life that I’d otherwise assume was crazy town Fox News propaganda. There are a lot of issues where I can think about the travesty in Texas or Missouri or wherever. But I can’t kid myself that activist capture in blue America on this particular subject is somehow more live and let live than bans in red America. It’s different approaches to force preferred outcomes.
Re: the small group of people living happily transitioned, I don’t think they prove anything about the larger concept of gender identity. As I understand it the theory of gender identity is that everyone has one (see Chip and I’s exchange above). The people doing well are evidence just that there are indeed people who, for whatever combination of nature and nurture, ended up with such a profound and persistent psychological conflict between mental and physical states that major medical interventions improved their lives. There’s no way though to grab random people off the street and prove or disprove they have a gender identity, and any attempt I’ve ever seen sounds like a bunch of stereotypes. There’s no objective thing to measure and no way to measure it.Report
Then why bother legislating against it?Report
Gender identity is not measurable. Sterilization is.Report
You seriously think you can make transgender people disappear (and thus your personal discomfort with them) by legislating away treatments that are medically supervised and undertaken AFTER lengthy psychological counseling and a whole host of other treatments? And you believe you have the RIGHT and the OBLIGATION to do that?
Wow. Just wow. The hubris bordering on pathological bigotry there is stunning, and yet entirely consistent. It is also deeply un-Christian. Well done you.Report
I didn’t say what you’re accusing me of saying, just like InMD didn’t say that sterilization wasn’t measurable or even that gender identity should be legislated against. This is like jumping on a high horse while it’s still being hauled to the racetrack.Report
You have consistently opposed treatments for transgendered persons, including adults. You do not oppose the legislation in Texas or Florida or Montana (to name three states) that seeks to strip away both parents right and standard of care, as well as blocks further treatments for adults. You consistently misrepresent the nature of the treatments given.
But sure, you didn’t say that. And wouldn’t have even broached a clarification had I not slammed your fingers in the proverbial door.
Nice deflection though.Report
Not a deflection; I’m just calling a wild pitch.Report
I pitched straight down the center given your stated positions. You might as well own it.Report
To Pinky’s point, I believe the laws are about medical procedures, not gender identity. Still, many of them are running into constitutional challenges which seem merited.
And as I’ve said elsewhere I wouldn’t legislate this. I just also wouldn’t introduce ‘gender identity’ which, as I’ve also said, is at best pseudoscience into public school systems, mandate affirmation without parental involvement, or allow schools discretion about whether to tell parents about purported ‘gender’ identification changes by their children. I also wouldn’t push to interpret the word ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity’ in statutes and regulations, or for failure by a parent to affirm a gender identity asserted by their child to be deemed as abusive. Nor would I attempt to capture various psychology and medical authorities and do all I could to discourage and eliminate any approach to children experiencing these issues other than affirmation of a gender identity. Goose, gander, etc.Report
Unfortunately for you and me, what we “would do” is largely irrelevant in the face of what is being done. Those laws are NOT mandating the stopping of those procedures when being used for other purposes – puberty blockers are routinely used for all sorts of other medical problems as Chip has noted. So you can’t decouple this legislative assault from gender or sex or the intersection of the two.Report
There’s no way though to grab random people off the street and prove or disprove they have a gender identity
A very strange thing to assert, since is is conservatives themselves who proved that gender identity is very real, and not externally imprinted.
Again, all of us here have an understanding of our gender. This is an understanding that springs from within us and is entirely resistant to cultural programming or external pressure.
As I mentioned, it is an objective fact that the vast majority of people will develop an understanding of their gender that corresponds to their physical body.
The difficulty for conservatives is that minority who don’t. There are two main conservative explanations for this observed phenomenon.
One is the religious- that these people are thwarting God’s law.
The second is secular- that these people have a mental disorder.
But of course the fly in this ointment is the observed existence of thousands of trans people living happy and well adjusted lives. If they have a disorder is doesn’t seem to be in evidence.
Conservatives are left unable to explain why they should be allowed the power to intervene in the most intimate aspects of other people’s lives, which is why they resort to lying about children.Report
I don’t think this is right. You’re saying that just knowing what sex you are is contingent on some separate force or phenomena, that at least to date has not been and is unlikely to ever be observable in physical reality. But there is nothing requiring that extra step, and by taking it, you’re removing the conversation from the objective and scientific to something else entirely. I am a man because of observable physical attributes, not because of what I think or believe.Report
Um … nope. Your manhood – and mine – has two components. Your physical attributes AND your psychological/emotional make up (mediated through nurture and environmental/cultural influences). That’s what science – and the empirical observations Chip keeps pointing to – tells us. If either of those is out of alignment (again likely mediated by genetics AND environment) then you get gender dysphoria. Which as you know is treated psychological AND biologically. You wouldn’t need to do both if both parts weren’t involved.Report
Woa! You understand how outrageously reactionary the implications of what you just said are, right?
But anyway, no that’s not true. Actions and preferences are not sex, and while statistically men and women diverge in preferences and behaviors those of each sex that diverge from the mean or median are not somehow less (or more of) their sex. Boys who like dolls and tea parties are still boys and girls who like to play catch with a football are still girls. It’s ridiculous that I have to even say this.Report
Being transgender is not at all related to being gay, nor is it about preferences. And I stand by my rather banal assertion.Report
According to your logic, you had been castrated at birth and given female hormones at puberty, your “observable physical attributes” would then cause you to think of yourself as a woman.
Which, ironically, is a definition of gender even more fluid than the most radical trans activists.Report
No. According to my logic I’d be a man who was castrated at birth.Report
How would you even know?
(Hint) This has actually happened.Report
As for me personally I’ve said before with this issue there’s no possible way for me to totally separate out my experience in a bluest of the blue jurisdiction.
For me, I see an asymmetry between the Bluest of the Blue jurisdictions and Texas (where Donald Trump pulled 52% of the vote in 2020) or Florida (where he pulled 51%). YMMV, but that’s where I suspect a lot of the disagreement comes in–I see Rightward activist capture is much more expansive and pervasive.
This is also true at the national level–I can’t think of a thing that Biden’s WH that comes close to being equivalent to throwing all the trans people out of the military with a Tweet. This is another thing that I harp on a lot because it was both egregious and completely mainstream on the Right.[1]
The people doing well are evidence just that there are indeed people who, for whatever combination of nature and nurture, ended up with such a profound and persistent psychological conflict between mental and physical states that major medical interventions improved their lives.
OK, but once you have the possibility of that variance or conflict, it makes sense to give a name to what it is that’s conflicting, and hypothesize that in cis people, the two are aligned. And there is some brain imaging evidence showing that trans women’s brains look more like those of cis women than cis men. This may not be conclusive evidence in favor of the gender identity hypothesis, but observing the opposite would, I’d say, argue against it.
[1] Some of this is that I just don’t think the activist fringes of the Left have power over the Democratic Party and Democratic governance that matches the activist Right’s power over the GOP and its governance.Report
The Israel-Hamas War seems to be really wrecking havoc in the Democratic coalition. Vox had an article about it. In the Bay Area, the Oakland City Council had a big fight on a symbolic resolution calling for an Israel-Hamas ceasefire war that placed all the blame on Israel and didn’t mention Hamas at all. Members of the Oakland City Council that attempted to make the resolution more balanced by bringing in the initial Hamas Simchat Torah massacre got bashed.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/east-bay/oakland-city-council-meeting-comments-viral/3384954/
Dean Paterson of the SF Board of Supervisors is working to bring a similar resolutions to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors this or next Tuesday. The Pro-Palestinian elements in American seem much more militant this time and are not relenting on one issue.Report
“Thank goodness we’re no longer talking about the homeless or shoplifting! Uh-oh… someone mentioned tax revenues… HEY! WE ARE LAUNCHING AN INQUIRY INTO WHETHER OCTOBER 7TH ACTUALLY HAPPENED!!!”Report
I get it that this is an issue that people feel passionate about but I don’t get why so many political bodies that have no power over US Foreign Policy are engaging with this issue except as a form of wedge politics.Report
What’s the wedge?
It’s not like you’re going to start voting for Trump. This will barely get you to consider voting for whomever opposes Dean Preston in the primary.Report
1. There’s a strong possibility that the people pushing this resolution are straightforwardly imbeciles
2. If they aren’t, it’s one of the ways to do entryism. They won’t get close to the levers of power now, or in five years, but 20 or 30? This Preston guy could wind up as the Democratic Jeremy Corbyn some dayReport
Dean Preston is a member of the DSA. He is also 54 years old. He is never going to associate with the Democratic Party and is bit too old to become the American Jeremy Corbyn.Report
A fair number of DSA folks vote Democratic because there is little other choice.Report
At least here, where there’s a fairly large and active DSA organization, pretty much all of them vote Democrat, even if they’re critical of the party (especially, but not exclusively, at the national and state levels). They also endorse Democrats, have had a couple local party chairs, campaign (officially and unofficially) for Democrats, and have tried (with no success here in Austin, I’m afraid) to run Democrats from within the org.
They’re also almost all in favor of Palestinian liberation, and while the vast majority, as far as I can tell, are not pro-Hamas, they also recognize that Israel created and maintains the situation that breeds violent resistance, through various means, but importantly, by effectively making all resistance illegal and punishing even non-violent resistance with extreme violence.
[To be clear, I’m not a current member and don’t vote Democrat.]Report
I can confirm that Dean Peterson is an absolute idiot and NIMBY trustfunder radical and it pains me to agree with Elmo that he is the worst member of the Board of Supervisors.
There does seem to be the potential for a real wedge in the Democratic coalition related to Israel/Palestine and the split is based largely on age (with the cut off being somewhere between 40-45) and to a lesser extent on ethnic background/status. Certainly many people under 35 only seem to think of Israel as a bully. The under 35 set also seems to think of Jews as only looking like their Orthodontist whose grandparents emigrated from Poland a long time ago. They don’t know must Israeli Jewish citizens are not of German/East European ancestry and/or they don’t care. Jews are just a weird subvariant of white people to them.
However, I am not sure that the chronically online speak for Gen Z as a whole and it is very hard/impossible to determine whether the passions of the chronically online translate to the broader Democratic coalition.
What perplexes me is what the people loudly demanding a ceasefire think can happen in the real world. Israel is not the 51st state and all the people getting in trouble for not making public statements on a ceasefire really have no power to make one happen. Biden makes a primetime speech from the Oval Office calling for a ceasefire. One doesn’t happen. Do the people who demand/want a ceasefire support sending a whole lot of US troops to occupy the region and act as peacekeepers? I doubt it but that is what it will take.
It seems like another variant of Underpants Gnomes politics.Report
A lot of them assume that Israel is basically entirely dependent on the United States for subsidies when it is the wealthiest country in the MENA area and it isn’t even close. Israel’s GDP is greater than the GDP of every other country in the Middle East combined. My basic theory is that they really believe that Israel is so dependent on the United States or the West that, the world can demand Israel do something and Israel must do it.
A variety of this is when they keep saying that Israel was created by international law. This isn’t true, Israel created itself by declaring independence and surviving a war of elimination against it, but they seem to really believe that Israel can be undone just by simple majority UN vote if the US would just allow it or that Israel is under special obligation to obey the world’s commands more than any other country.Report
Per Wikipedia, so a first approximation… Israel’s nominal GDP is about 60% of Saudi Arabia’s. Granted the Saudis are pretty much a one-trick pony. Israel receives more US foreign aid than any other MENA country, but it’s pretty insignificant compared to their GDP.Report
They will still vote for Biden over Trump. Because they know what the fight is about at home.Report
I am not doubting that.Report
True enough, but I can’t say I’m entirely comfortable with making the “Hamas is Good, Actually!” contingent of the Left a load-bearing element of the Democratic coalition.Report
I doubt the “Hamas is good” contingent is big enough to be load bearing.Report
They aren’t now.
I want to ensure that they aren’t in the future.
A lot of really unpleasant fringe elements have become very powerful parts of Team Red. I think there are structural reasons that make Team Blue more (but not entirely) resistant to entryism, but I don’t want to sleep on this stuff.Report
Team Red embraced those elements – even caused them to grow – because they lost voters due to a myriad of changes in society, and to the fact the GOP policies don’t actually help most Americans. Team Blue has no such problem.Report
That gets you to “more resistant”.
I don’t think it gets you to immune.
I don’t think it’s inevitable or even at all likely that these idiots are gonna take over the party or anything. But having Dem leadership point at them and say, “Can you believe these fishheads?!” is healthy.Report
The only way to get to immune is to get rid of humans.
I actually think “hey the fringe has a sort of a point. How do we address it without being jerks?” is a better response.Report
I’m wondering who the “Hamas is good actually” people are? I see some in the Middle East, and a handful from actual tankies (not the people reactionaries would call tankies), and then qualified support among the actual experts on the conflict (e.g., Fink), but I don’t see it among pretty much anyone else. Most if not all of these people either can’t or would not be caught dead voting for Democrats of any sort.
Unless we’re suggesting supporting Palestinian liberation, the right of return, etc, are pro-Hamas positions.Report
Any significant anti-anti-Hamas positions out there? (Not *PRO* Hamas, mind. That’s a risible assertion.)Report
Yeah, that’s mostly Fink’s position. I think he recognizes that Hamas is the only group capable of leading a resistance right now, and he further recognizes that non-violent resistance, (which he actually promoted with people he knows in Hamas until Hamas promoted the non-violent protests that resulted in hundreds of dead Palestinians and thousands more wounded by Israeli snipers) is simply pointless, because the world ignores it and Israel just shoots the protestors anyway.
Put differently, he’s not pro-Hamas , he’s pro-armed resistance, and Hamas is the only game in town, which is a sort of anti-anti-Hamas position.Report
For what it’s worth, I think that it’s exceptionally *POSSIBLE* to hold a pro-Palestine Victory position and even a pro-Hamas position and it be morally coherent. It’s just, you know, kinda necessarily anti-Semitic.
I don’t think that this problem gets resolved without one of the definitions of “Genocide” and it’s pretty much honest (if unpleasant) to say “yeah, if I gotta pick one, I pick *THIS* one.”Report
I think many of the more intelligent Pro-Palestinian activists realize that the Jews in the Middle East, whether they were Ashkenazim fleeing persecution in Europe or from Mizrahi communities that were thousands of years old, know that without Israel the Middle East would be Jew free. They just believe that the Jews would eventually be absorbed into the West and basically be fine after awhile but also that this sounds really bad.
Like the hundreds of thousands of Jews who migrated in Mandate Palestine between 1918 and 1939 would have been killed in the Holocaust if they stayed in Europe. Somebody saying that they believe that a world where we had an even bigger Holocaust would be preferable to one without the migration of Jews to Mandate Palestine because less settler-colonialism will just sound awful to most normies who aren’t anti-Semitic.
Likewise, saying that “you can’t make anti-colonial omelette without breaking some colonial eggs and if these colonial eggs are some of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, so what?” also sounds really anti-Semitic. Both of the above points are morally coherent though. Anti-colonialism is so important that they would willingly sacrifice Jews to achieve it.
Most people realize that if they say these things, they are going to lose the court of public opinion in the West at least because it sounds really callous and reprehensible. So they just go straight to “(((The Israelis))) are brutal colonial occupiers that don’t belong there even if their families lived there for decades or centuries”Report
Antisemitism was worse in the past than it is now. Now? It’s anticolonialism.
Remember a few years back when the UN held a vote on whether “Zionism is Racism”?
Well, today the US held a vote on whether Antizionism is Racism.
Maybe we could kick the can down the road a ways… if we had another ceasefire…Report
There is also a realist anti-Zionism that isn’t necessarily sympathetic towards the Palestinian but favors them in the conflict because the worlds Muslims side with the Palestinians* and there are billions more Muslims than Jews. Getting rid of Israel could theoretically get rid of a big thing making Muslims made at the West in this logic.
*This is something I don’t understand. There seems to be an assumption that Pan-Islamic feeling is a lot more natural and organic than Pan-Jewish feeling so of course Muslims will always rally to Palestinian defense and can hardly be expected to do other. Jews who rally to the defense of other Jews are seen with simple and bad tribalism.Report
Jews who rally to the defense of other Jews are seen with simple and bad tribalism.
Compare to whites who supported South Africa.
Becoming white was a bad idea. The Jews should have avoided it, if they could have.Report
Compare to whites who supported South Africa.
YikesReport
Ethnostates have been “not a good look” for a while. Some even call them “cringe”. If they have a group of 2nd class citizens? Man. It will *NOT* age well.Report
I don’t think it’s necessarily anti-semitic at all. don’t get me wrong, I think it can be, and I’ve seen people who are clearly antisemitic be pro-Hamas, but Fink here is another good example (as would be, say, Chomsky, who has condemned Hamas’ violence against civilians, but recognizes that violent resistance is justified): he’s the Jewish son of two Holocaust survivors, and considers it part of their legacy to support armed resistance in Palestine.Report
Eh, anti-colonialism in practice is going to look a lot like colonialism in practice.
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, of course.
But you had best hope that your target doesn’t believe in the whole “self-defense” thing. They might forget about concepts of “justice” and “fairness” without taking important concepts like “history” into account.Report
I’m not sure what about Chomsky or Fink’s support of Palestinian resistance looks colonialist.Report
The word “colonialism” means different things to different people.
Some understand it to mean Israel’s control over Gaza and the West Bank.
A popular Palestinian view is it means Israel’s control over the entire area.
“Undoing colonialism” can mean “kicking all of the Jews out of the region”.Report
It’s the whole “killing people, sexual violence, hostages” part of resisting-in-practice.
Of course I oppose rape. BUTReport
RE: non-violent protests
The expressed purpose of those non-violent protests was to enact a RoR. They were just going to march into Israel and take their land. Non-violently of course.
What was supposed to happen to the Jews who have owned that land since 1949 was unclear.
If you are trying to destroy a state, then you’re going to trip over laws and into violence at some point.
Of course knocking down fences/walls also lets Hamas do whatever.Report
Its difficult, like really really difficult to find any activist or spokesman who makes a clear and unambiguous distinction between the Palestinian people and Hamas.
And while I understand that Likud would very much like this to be so, the activists themselves don’t bother to make any distinction. So far as I can tell, they themselves see no distinction.
Specifically, they chant the same eliminationist slogans and use the same eliminationist maps.Report
Yep. There was also a gleeful tweet from October 7th that stated something like “What do you think decolonization looks like?” And the DSA rallies which caused AOC and Bowman to state “Hey guys, not cool.”Report
I think my very first comment on this topic after 10/7 was along the lines of how we need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
To be able to criticize the Likud administration, and wholeheartedly support Israel’s right to exist. To offer support for the self-determination of the Palestinian people and demand they adhere to norms of peaceful coexistence.Report
The Further Left in the West has a complicated relationship with Israel and Zionism from before the time Israel existed. A lot of the current ambivalence towards Israel among at least the Very Online types and other members of the Further Left is a reflection of this.Report
Which a lot of people seem to have a hard time doing. Right after October 7, there were huge and bitter fights on LGM about the extent of the attack and Hamas’ atrocities with a lot of people adopting a view that Israel was straight up lying and others cautioning on the fog of war because they did not want to believe in the extent of the atrocities.
These bitter fights may get relitigated because of the sexual assault statements currently going on now.
Even today, it seems like I see people who just try to downplay the extent of the October 7th attack by silence and omission. It is no longer Israel be lying but more like sweeping October 7 under the rug.
And as Lee notes, a lot of people pretend Palestine would be a secular left democracy and not a right-wing theocracy.
There is a real generational and somewhat race based split here that gets filtered through a dumb American lens where Israelis are white and Palestinians are not-white. This is done by both the supporters of Israel and Palestine.Report
To be fair, I don’t think that every Palestinian wants Palestine to be an Islamic theocracy. Obviously, the Christian Palestinians do not want this. Islamic theocracy is a popular idea in Palestine as it is in other Muslim majority countries.
This puts a lot of Western activists that feel sympathetic for the Palestinians in a bind. They obviously hate our local theocrats but they feel bad arguing for imposed secularism in the Muslim world. Many get around this agenda by assuming that the people they feel sympathetic for are automatic multicultural secularists despite any evidence to the contrary.Report
A lot of people in the West seem to be completely unable to tell the Palestinians or really Muslims in general that they must adhere to the norms of peaceful coexistence. It’s a combination of a lot of factors like not wanting to be racist by lecturing “non-whites”, a feeling that the world’s Muslims would never tell the Palestinians to behave so the rest has no ability to do so, and whatever else. People do think that Jews out to behave though.Report
The Pro-Palestinian Activists in the West were cheering on the Simchat Torah Massacre after it occurred. They have quieted down about this but are now basically pretending that the Simchat Torah massacre and Israel just decided to get up and take military action in Gaza for the lulz. They are also really quiet on the fact that hundreds of people were or are being held captive and Hamas systematically committed sexual assault against Israeli women in captivity.
These were Israelis from the Green Line. They are treated like Settler-Colonialists as the Israelis in the West Bank. So not only do the Pro-Palestinian activists fail to make a distinction between Hamas and the rest of the Palestinians or at best forget that Hamas exists but they treat every Israeli citizen as deserving it even if they are literal babies from Green Line Israel.Report
The question I always have is what do the ceasefire now people want? They seem to have completely unrealistic views on what western politicians and NGO leaders can do to get a ceasefire.Report
How many of the ceasefire people were calling for a ceasefire in the middle of October 7th?
Those people probably want a ceasefire and world peace or something.
The people who weren’t calling for a ceasefire at that point in time are more likely calling for a do-over at a later date.Report
The most realistic of them sincerely want a ceasefire because they see what Israel is doing as useless and as having too much collateral damage. They want a return to the October 6th status quo and nothing else. The more unrealistic of them want America and the West to abandon Israel totally and force Israel to give the Palestinians whatever they want.Report
It is in no way difficult to find such people. They compromise the vast majority of Westerners who support ending the Occupation and Palestinian liberation more generally.Report
Then why aren’t these Westerners speaking up but are letting the most obnoxious and noxious pro-Palestinians activists in the West take the lead and be the public face of the movement? Diaspora Jews fight about Israel in public all the time.Report
I don’t know what you’re talking about. They are taking the lead, and they dominate pro-Palestinian activism in this country and most of Europe.Report
No, they freaking aren’t. I haven’t heard one freaking Pro-Palestinian protestor in the West say anything to condemn Hamas or the Simchat Torah massacre in anyway from October 7th onward or do anything to control the even more outrageous Pro-Palestinian and openly anti-Semitic ones.
There have been numerous real examples of the craziness in Pro-Palestinian activists provided on this site. That you can’t even name one name but make vague comments about how these alleged people who are allegedly condemning Hamas are in the freaking lead doesn’t convince me at all. It has been all “Israel fished and fished around” or “this is what decolonization looks like” or conveniently forgetting that Hamas exists and is in power, calling the shots in Gaza.Report
I’ve heard them condemn Hamas, but most of them are not worried about Hamas right now, they’re worried about the actual ethnic cleansing, carried out with open genocidal intent, that’s taking place right now. If you want them to condemn Hamas, wait until Israel stops killing thousands of children.Report
Naming a few of these would be a good start to convincing me.
Specifically, are there any essays or op-eds wholeheartedly condemning Hamas and supporting Israel’s right to exist?
And is there any evidence of these people having any influence whatsoever on the people of Gaza?
I read every single day about the horrors and misery the Gazans are suffering, but also how tenacious Hamas is defending their turf, down to house to house gun battles.
It appears to me that Hamas and its eliminationist fantasies have widespread and deep support among the Palestinian people, and the Western supporters just don’t care enough to separate the two.Report
The Palestinians could benefit from allies that would tell them plainly that the Jews aren’t going to up and disappear or the world isn’t going to come swooping down like a burden of prey and take all the Jews away. Instead, Pro-Palestinian activists in the West have spent decades indulging the Palestinians in their most extreme demands and saying the deserve everything they want and don’t have to negotiate on a single issue.Report
I really think that anti-Israeli forces in the West see Israel as an entirely illegitimate settler-colonial state, that even if Zionism saved the life of hundreds of thousands or millions of Jews this is no excuse for settler-colonialism, and that the complete destruction of Israel and the expulsion of all Jews from the Middle East would not only be justice for the Palestinians but for all noble victims of settler-colonialism.Report
There have been credible reports that Hamas forced the children they captured to watch videos of the Simchat Torah massacre and threatend them at gun point if they cried. Israeli women held captive were systematically raped but no freaking Pro-Palestinian activist can seem to bring themselves to make a simple and unequivocal denunciation of Hamas. Instead we get “October 7th was a false flag operation and the IDF killed Israeli citizens.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-forced-hostage-kids-to-watch-videos-of-oct-7-atrocities-family-member-says/
Just fish it. The Pro-Palestinian movement is anti-Semitic to the core. They do not care about Jews or Jewish life at all. They do not see us as a real people with real communal needs. They are living embodiments of “in the warmest of all hearts, there is too often a cold spot for the Jews.” I will respect Palestinian self-determination when they respect Jewish self-determination.Report
Okay, here is my story.
I knew a guy in my 20s and we kept up on social media. His politics were always a bit leftier than thou. I had some photos of him on social media too from the time when we knew each other. One Monday morning I woke up and saw a not one but two angry messages demanding that I take the photographs down because he did not want to be associated with a “genocide apologist.”
I wrote somethings in defense of Israel but I don’t think anything I wrote came close to genocide apologia and I have also been critical of Bibi often but in his mind, anything mildly supportive of Israel was genocide apologia.
I don’t know if he thinks Hamas is actually good but there were some actions around October 7 that were not a good luck and did present the attack as an uprising of the oppressed and I have no doubt that people still see it that way.Report
As someone who’s also unfollowed, unfriended, and blocked people for defending ethnic cleansing with stated genocidal intent, I get it.Report
Yeah, the groups that you like get self-determination and the groups that you don’t like don’t get self-determination.Report
I mean, if self-determination means actual, currently occurring ethnic cleansing with genocidal intent, then yeah, I am not going to support their self-determination.Report
Something like three quarters of Gaza is displaced but they’re displaced internally.
Egypt or somewhere would need to open their boarders for it to be ethnic cleansing.
Gaza is a nasty, brutal war with Israel pretty much ignoring human shields.
It might be genocide although imho that’s dumbing down that word a lot. If we use it for every nasty war then it doesn’t leave us with anywhere to go.
We might get there. Preventing food/water from getting in would do it and Israel has flirted with that.Report
I would qualify all three of these remarks–admittedly from anonymous randos speaking at the Oakland City Counci meeting–as boiling down to Hamas is Good, Actually:
“I support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, including through Hamas, the armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance,” said a community member.
“Calling Hamas a terrorist group is racist and plays into the genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media and we should be doing everything possible to combat,” said a person at Monday’s meeting.
“The notion that this was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative,” said another person at Monday’s meeting, who pushed on after being told their time was up. “Many of those killed on Oct. 7, including children, were killed by the IDF.”
I also think deranged false flag conspiracy theories like the last are clearly anti-semitic above and beyond the implicit anti-semitism involved in Hamas apologism.
They also go beyond supporting Palestinian liberation, the right of return, etc.Report
I actually agree with the middle one, and think the first is pretty common outside of the US and not unheard of, but less common (and with variants that often condemn Hamas’ targeting of civilians) among good activists, but the third is, as you note, ridiculous and antisemitic.
I’d recommend attending a rally. There will be a whole lot of normies there.Report
How is killing somewhere between 1,200 to 1,400 Jews, taking over two hundred captive and torturing them plus statements that they will do it again, not a terrorist act? Plus every action Hamas did the past? They explicitly call for the death of every Jew in the Middle East in their charter. This shouldn’t be hard. Hamas is a terrorist group. They are explicitly racist and anti-Semitic.
There is a real big tendency to basically define anti-Semitism in the strictest and most limited terms compared to all other hatreds. Hamas’ charter even in the revised version calls for the death of Jews. We produce ample amounts of evidence of all the anti-Semitism in Muslim majority countries from the tip of Morocco to the tip of Indonesia and people who would be quick to jump and say racism in any other instance get all mealy mouthed about it. This has some real serious Jews Don’t Count energy.
The sickos at the Oakland City Council are the Pro-Palestinian movement in the West whether you like it or not. They want a Jew free Middle East.Report
The killing of ~900 civilians, and the taking of hostages was wrong, and terroristic, but if we’re going to use those proof that a group that is effectively the government of Hamas, a government that the Israeli government has worked with and even bolstered, extensively for over a decade, then we’re going to have to apply those criteria consistently to other governments.Report
I don’t see how you get to Hamas not being a terrorist group, like, at all. While I dissent from Lee’s comment that every Hamas action prior to October 7 is terrorist, that comprised a huge fraction of their “armed resistance”. It’s just that it wasn’t nearly as successful.
And saying that it’s racist to call a group using terrorism as its primary tactic a “terrorist group” is racist seems… pretty freaking bizarre.
As for the normies, sure–unlike Lee, I’m concerned much more with fringe entryism than general pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel sentiment.Report
There are people out there who simply want it both ways.
If Hamas is the legitimate or quasi-legitimate government of Gaza, the October 7th attack was an act of war. Israel has a right to respond to acts of war.
The terrorist organization thing is harder because one person’s terrorist organization is another person’s resistance organization.
But it is clear that Chris is actively indifferent or just downright hostile to the state of Israel like a good number of further left types. These people never seem to realize that most Israeli are not of Eastern European origin and they have no good response to Jewish displacement after WWII. They also like to ignore that Hamas is a reactionary right theocratic organization because recognizing that fact is awkward.
In the dumb American reductive way, a lot of people (both supporters and detractors of Israel and Palestine) see Israelis as white and Palestinians as not white and this influences their views on the conflict.
“In the warmest of hearts, there is a cold spot for the Jews.”-Ben Hecht.Report
Oct 7th was an act of war no mater what Hamas is.
States can declare war on non-state actors.
The Barbary Pirates.
Al-Qaida.
I would also claim Hamas is the government of Gaza considering they run the place including charities, military, and medical servicesReport
I am slightly occurred with fringe entryism but believe that these antics will be a big turn off to the average and not very online Democratic voter. The Trotskyites made a similar attempt at entryism, obviously not over Israel, in early 1980s Britain and were not able to take over the labor party.Report
FWIW, someone I used to know accused me of being a genocide apologist on social media. I doubt he voted in 2016 and if he voted in 2020, it was through gritted teeth.Report