Hacker News Reader

Comment by twodave | Hacker News Reader

Uncharacteristically off-topic comment from me, I guess, but when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator? How are our relationships supposed to improve if we dub anything that makes us uncomfortable as "taboo" and steer clear of it? I get that on the Internet there is a lot of anonymity (though less than there used to be) that folks tend to abuse, but at the same time, this is the most public and far-reaching platform that has existed in all of human history. How can we take social issues that are already difficult within the same family unit and have a well-adjusted conversation about them at least in the public arena? Even if we disagree? And if the platform we have can't be used to bring people with different views closer together then what good is it?

All that to say, I feel like there's an element of human empathy, respect, civility? Whatever you want to call it, it's just missing today. Maybe it's always been missing. I saw a commercial on TV yesterday, literally suggesting that telling someone they left their Starbucks on the roof of their car as they drive off is a heart-felt touching moment. That's just common decency, but we're so self-centered that even just being "civil" is this monumental effort.

View on HN

It's weird to talk about missing an element of human empathy regarding the topic of trans individuals, whose very existence is unacceptable to a broad swath of the population.

40% of transgender people have attempted suicide. The public dialogue around trans lives is one of very little empathy, respect, or civility. People are on this thread casually debating whether this joke "went to far" or not, while the people who this joke was about continue to face constant ridicule, teasing, bullying, discrimination, and assault.

Would it have been OK to make a joke about 9/11 victims while they were still digging people out of the wreckage? What if that joke was light-hearted, or the comedian was just making fun of people who tell those jokes?

Joking about people currently experiencing trauma isn't funny.

Most of humanity's best art, literature, music, and comedy is about people experiencing trauma. Being able to joke amidst suffering is the very thing that makes us human. It's also a critical part of empathy itself.

These are jokes at the expense of people widely discriminated against (and in many parts of the world, outright killed). It's not funny if you're punching down on minorities. It's just fucking sad.

Doesn't it depend on who's in the audience? You make a joke at someone's face, you're the baddie. You make a joke in a show I specifically went to go see you for, or I clicked on your recording to watch you, it's on me.

Generically and universally decrying punching down is extreme and would require spying/policing everyone to implement.

"If the person on the gallows makes a grim joke, that's gallows humor. If someone in the crowd makes a joke, that's part of the execution."

Humor being about trauma is kind of a vague categorization. It's probably more insightful to drill down more specifically.

Dave Chappelle is a master of this. He tells jokes while also making commentary on taboo subjects. Through his jokes, he allows us to open a dialogue about something important that too-often is left untouched.

In this case; this AI is not really trying to convey anything meaningful. It's just regurgitating distasteful jokes that hurt people that are currently going through a tough time.

I completely agree, but the key distinction here is who is writing the jokes.

People experiencing trauma writing jokes about it and being able to joke about it despite the trauma can result in great material. The humor provides a shared way to process the traumatic events.

However, it is very different when a third party is doing the joking - and poorly at that. It often ends up just making fun of people who are suffering - which isn't exactly good taste. It is no longer joking amidst suffering, but joking about suffering.

> people who this joke was about

This joke was about transphobes. Yes it would be ok to make a joke about 9/11 jokes not being funny while they were still digging people out of the wreckage. Transphobes aren't experiencing trauma.

Comedian here. Yes it is and yes it can be. But live in fear all your life and help push more policy that takes away rights.

My favorite comedy has been about stereotypes in society, especially negative stereotypes. The joke isn't about the stereotype itself, or the people targeted by the stereotype, but rather the joke is on any dumb-ass who believes in that stereotype (older generations, people with closed minds, etc.) At least that's they way I've always looked at it.

It's been difficult the last few years because no one wants to even acknowledge that these stereotypes exist, like any joke or mention of them is hurtful.

https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereoty...

> Would it have been OK to make a joke about 9/11 victims while they were still digging people out of the wreckage?

This is a good question! Who should be asking it? Comedians, or the morality police?

Okay, I'm calling the drama police on you.

Have 40% transgender people attempted suicide primarily because they are being bullied by society or because they have a mental disorder where their body doesn't match their brain and they become depressed because it is physically impossible to reconcile those differences, so they spiral into despair?

Genuine question, I just don't know how to tiptoe around this in a 2023 acceptable way without asking it bluntly.

Sounds like we need better medical treatment if half of people with the condition want to commit suicide, and telling people on the internet to stop bullying and putting colorful flags in your twitter profile won't suffice. Not advocating for hate, just saying that it seems the medical community delegated this whole thing to society with a note of 'please be nice and everything will sort itself out'.

People were making the "they're committing suicide because their brain is wrong so we need to fix their brain" argument about homosexuality back in the 90s.

Research has pretty firmly come down on the "nah, it's society." side of things.

If I understood temp_account_32's point correctly, the comment about the mental health was not "they're trans, therefore their brains _must_ be wired wrong", so much as it was "before they transition, they're often so distraught over their identity and who they see in the mirror, that it often causes despair and depression".

I agree with you that research has pretty firmly come down on the side of "nah, it's society" for the former. I think the latter is a fair point. To pin it all on society I find to be disingenuous. Transitioning can be a healthy thing in that case. Disclaimer: am not trans, so I openly admit I may be totally ignorant and off base.

It's not all society's fault, but research has shown that the distress and depression of being outside societal defaults is greatly lessened when support is available and acceptance wide spread.

Yes. Completely agree. To suggest that it's all society's fault is disingenuous. To suggest that society is fault-free is reckless and cruel, and society's part is not a small piece of the pie either. Society needs to step up to address the societal aspect of the issue as part of a multi-pronged approach.

It’s also impossible to decouple mental health from your surroundings, i.e. society etc.

Transgender is no longer classified as a mental disorder. Any attempt to have a discussion on this, I've found, has to overcome this semantics. If there is no disorder in the individual, obviously society is fully to blame.

https://nicic.gov/being-transgender-no-longer-mental-disorde...

The medical community didn't delegate it to society.

Transitioning is an effective and proven treatment, which has a far higher rate of success than basically any other psychiatry-related treatment. The medical part is pretty much solved, and those physical differences can be reconciled quite well.

But as it turns out, the hate from society still remains, and it still has an effect. Turns out being happy is a bit tricky when it is literally a coin flip whether the person you are talking to believes you should be murdered merely for existing.

The treatments I'm familiar with, especially those that are assisted by prescription drugs, are quite new and unsupported. it's hard to find any studies of this stuff at all. the amount we know about efficacy here is shockingly low.

if you have references, I'd welcome them.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24344788/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-009-9551-1 https://mayoclinic.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/hormona... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-014-0453-5 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23553588_Long-term_... http://europepmc.org/article/med/25690443 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2265.... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29463477/

If by "quite new and unsupported" you mean "pioneered in the 1920s, well-established for many decades, backed by dozends of studies, and successfully applied to hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide", then yes - it is indeed quite new and unsupported.

If you want to read just one study, why not start with the last one? The Amsterdam Cohort consists of 6,793 people since 1972. That should be plenty to start with.

If you want even more, I recommend reading the "Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People". Currently in its eighth edition, it describes the entire process, with hundreds of additional studies cited.

> The treatments I'm familiar with, especially those that are assisted by prescription drugs, are quite new and unsupported

The treatments you are familiar with have been around since the thirties. Research on them started with the Institut fur Sexualwillenschaft, which has been since burned down, and hundreds of papers have been published on the topic since, dealing with thousands of patients all over the world, with their findings all being remarkably consistent.

How hard have you actually looked into it?

Here's a paper which suggests that the medical part might not be solved

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

"Conclusions

Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group."

How do those rates compare to people who were not allowed the reassignment?

"Trans people have a higher rate of suicide than the general populace even after reassignment" isn't disproving either the 'innate' or the 'societally-driven' risk model here.

That paper doesn't state what you think it does.

If you read the Discussion, you'd see that this study actually contrasts other similar studies, which saw no such outcome. It even explicitly states that the overall mortality rate was only significantly increased for the group operated before 1989, and mentions that

> However, the latter might also be explained by improved health care for transsexual persons during 1990s, along with altered societal attitudes towards persons with different gender expressions.

This study is often used in an attempt to discredit transgender healthcare. In fact, it is used so often that there is even an interview[0] with the author about its misrepresentation. The interview links half a dozen other studies done since then which confirm that transgender healthcare does indeed work, and is in fact quite effective.

[0]: https://www.transadvocate.com/fact-check-study-shows-transit...

No. Here's a paper which is frequently misquoted by people failing to read its open-access text in its entirety, and relying on third-parties often creative interpretations of it. It has been discussed by its author - Cecilia Dhejne - multiple times over the last decade, notably during her Reddit AMA https://thewinnower.com/papers/7252-science-ama-series-i-m-c...

> Thank you for your question and I am happy I was invited to AMA.

> I am aware of some of the misinterpretation of the study in Plos One. Some are as you say difficult to keep track since they are not published in scientific journals. I am grateful to friends all over the world who notify me of publications outside the scientific world. I do answer some of them but I can’t answer all.

> I have no good recommendation what to do. I have said many times that the study is not design to evaluate the outcome of medical transition. It DOES NOT say that medical transition causes people to commit suicide. However it does say that people who have transition are more vulnerable and that we need to improve care. I am happy about that it has also been seen that way and in those cases help to secure more resources to transgender health care.

> On a personal level I can get both angry and sad of the misinterpretations and also sometimes astonished that some researcher don’t seem to understand some basics about research methology.

It would be false equivalence for me to suggest this is a suitable analogue, but it is interesting to note certain amputees are able to perform more or less completely normally from a social perspective in daily life (and possible even excel in sports etc) yet they can still suffer from phantom limb syndrome and have increased risk of suicide, anxiety etc.

There is clearly a significant social aspect here but I'm not willing to toss out that the body may just really not enjoy not being naturally in the expected configuration. Going to the gender you want seems to be partially solved but, like the person with the lost limb, it's doubtful we have anything close to a full substitute. I really worry the medical community has been doing a dis-service to the development of treatment by underplaying the suicidal aspects that may be less socially related.

One thing to keep in mind is that the opposite is happening here.

With transgender people, the "original" state is unnatural. Medical treatment fixes this mismatch by making the body match the brain. It is a voluntary treatment with an extremely high success rate and negligible regret rates.

As far as I can tell, there is zero evidence that any remaining issues are caused by the treatment itself. All evidence points that the remaining issues are primarily socially related.

What did transgender people do before the treatments and therapies? How did they live in their original state all their lives without our medical interventions? Do we know that the treatments help in the sense that treated people commit suicide less than untreated people before the treatments were available?

> What did transgender people do before the treatments and therapies? How did they live in their original state all their lives without our medical interventions?

What did diabetics do before treatment and therapies? People with asthma, myopia, or really any other health issue? What does it matter?

> Do we know that the treatments help in the sense that treated people commit suicide less than untreated people before the treatments were available?

Why do we need to know that? What's the point of it? We don't evaluate effectiveness of any treatment by comparing current data with likely non-existent, pre-treatment (read: more than a century old, in this case) data.

My statement above is asking how to test whether the treatments are contributing to a social contagion effect. If they are, we can't test treatment vs. no treatment at a snapshot in time because the very existence of the treatment adds to the contagion effect which in turn produces suicides in treated individuals! To make sure social contagion is not the bigger factor we want to look at how these disorders manifested prior to the existence of the treatment and compare that to the effect of the treatment now.

The horror stories from detransitioners prove that the medical part is not ‘pretty much solved’. Unclear why such disinformation spreads so much.

Research on youth suicide rates shows an extremely high correlation with the family and social environment, in that family support and at least some welcoming spaces dramatically lower suicide rates among trans youth.

The Trevor Project collects research on these lines: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/article/facts-abo...

Looked at the page.

Says:

  LGBTQ youth are not inherently prone to suicide risk because of their sexual orientation or gender identity but rather placed at higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society.

This is a remarkable claim that demands proof. This seems to be a well thought out, researched, website therefore it can't be some oversight that they just spout this without evidence.

There's a lot of proof linked from that page. I presume you've read it all and have some specific disagreement?

I'm looking for the citation for this:

  LGBTQ youth are not inherently prone to suicide risk because of their sexual orientation or gender identity but rather placed at higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society.

The citations show these individuals are placed at higher risk in association with mistreatment. I couldn't find the citations for the rest of the statement, including the 'rather' bit.

I think it should be a given that psychological safety is linked to suicide risk: do your own research if this seems like a stretch

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=psychological+safety+an...

I think it’s effectively impossible to remove societal influence from the equation - in other words, we can compare between different local environments and personal histories, but there’s no trans youth in the western world that hasn’t grown up in an at least moderately hostile and othering society.

I think you may be able to do some comparative analysis based on different rates of depression & suicidal ideation among homosexual youths both over time and across different states/local environments to get a sense of the magnitude of the social effect, but it’s basically impossible to fully disentangle social effects when evaluating the mental health of trans youth when you’ve got senators and governors proposing bills decrying them as ‘less-than’.

But, let’s try an experiment: let’s keep working on society until that’s _not_ the case, and if there’s still a substantially higher incidence of trans suicide in a world in which they’re supported and have care options available to them, I’ll owe you a coke.

> let’s keep working on society until ...

You can't posit that for every issue that pops up, it's not scalable at all. We have limited time on this Earth and limited resources, this is not a computer program where you can apply hypotheses in isolation and get quick results.

> how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society.

You want someone to academically prove this concept to you? It is basic, as in fundamental, to human psychological safety and thus physical survival. Not everything true exists in a report.

>everything true exists in a report.

Whoops, looks like I cut off part of the beginning of your sentence. That didn't change our interpretation of it now did it?

Edit: never mind this comment, but can’t delete anymore. Don’t remember where I heard this.

If your brain does not get exposed to the ‘right’ set of hormones at the right time while you’re in the womb, your brain can develop a different gender identity than the rest of your body. This can be the explanation for some trans people, but I don’t know how many.

This is just a hypothesis, there's no evidence for this.

What does it mean to suggest the brain has a "different gender identity?" Surely we are not reverting back to mind/body dualism?

> because it is physically impossible to reconcile those differences

Impossible to reconcile when they’re blocked from effective treatment. In a decent society trans people would be given treatment when asked for.

>Have 40% transgender people attempted suicide primarily because they are being bullied by society or because they have a mental disorder where their body doesn't match their brain and they become depressed because it is physically impossible to reconcile those differences, so they spiral into despair?

What's the difference when so many US states are now prohibiting treatement for this?

Proper medical care has been shown to improve the mental health of trans people, but the social isolation is still a major factor. Trans people can undergo medical transition to better align their bodies to their sense of self, but they often end up losing friends and family in the process, and face discrimination when it comes to finding work or housing, or simply just existing in the world. Not to mention many places currently have laws, or are pushing new laws, to limit trans individuals' access to things like medical care and other necessities.

>Sounds like we need better medical treatment if half of people with the condition want to commit suicide

We KNOW exactly what to do and how to help trans people be happy and successful and not want to kill themselves: Preferred gender supporting care, treating them like the human beings they are, hormones for those who are confident enough to not regret it.

Here's what half the country currently votes for instead: Banning trans people from bathrooms, banning books that acknowledge the existence and acceptableness of trans people, calling trans people pedophiles and groomers on large public news channels, generally just making """jokes""" that amount to "if you are trans then you are stupid and broken and don't deserve to live"

> Have 40% transgender people attempted suicide

They haven't. This is an invented statistic that just gets repeated and repeated until people accept it as if it's truth.

Yeah "Blocked and Reported" Episode 149 (Jan 28, 2023) debunks this stat over a good 10 or 15 minutes for anyone that cares.

The flaw was in how the survey was conducted. I won't try to repeat it here- it's a long explanation to do justice.

It’s mental disorder issue, but mental health is so stigmatized that it’s phobic to suggest someone needs mental health help. It’s analogous to helping someone walk off a bridge and feeling like a hero for helping someone.

But does controlling what everyone says on the Internet help or ultimately hurt? This seems to be the crux of so many problems.

>It's weird to talk about missing an element of human empathy regarding the topic of trans individuals, whose very existence is unacceptable to a broad swath of the population.

I certainly won't deny that trans people go through a lot, but stuff like this is honestly getting hard to take seriously. It's commonly repeated but going on about their "existence" itself being denied just sounds over dramatic. I don't think trans people are any worse off than other marginalized groups but for some reason, I'm finding they receive the fiercest protections.

In fact, within my own friend group, I'm pretty sure a trans joke would have far more immediate social implications now than even a joke about the holocaust. It's so over the top at this point my empathy is diminishing.

> Would it have been OK to make a joke about 9/11 victims while they were still digging people out of the wreckage? What if that joke was light-hearted, or the comedian was just making fun of people who tell those jokes?

It would have been poor taste but I don't think you would have received any bans from social medial for making one, that's a pretty new phenomenon.

What even is this argument?

“Your life admittedly sucks but I think you blow it out of proportion so I can’t feel empathy for you”

No, it's just that whenever they seem to be brought up in discussion aggressive "supporters" come out of the woodwork, over dramatically act like the world is ending over the smallest things and misrepresent my arguments with the most bad faith interpretation on purpose. Like you are doing now.

It's hard for me to empathize with a group that increasingly looks less like a marginalized group, and more like some fanatical religion that somehow has gained an almost ridiculous amount of influence over every major institution and social media platform. And I say this as someone who was originally 100% on board.

A trans person could insult my identity, race and sexuality without any consequences whatsoever, but the reverse has the potential of permanently ending my social life and livelihood. Of course as the magnitude of this disparity keeps increasing, my empathy, and sympathy would decrease along with it.

If anything, I'm actually starting to become afraid of trans people, not because of their transition, but due to their incredible authority.

To provide some examples: Eddie Izard has been on mainstream on British TV for decades, often (though not always) presenting as a woman. The first British TV programme about transsexuals – as it was called back then – dates from 1979 (A Change of Sex) and was, as I understand it, received overwhelmingly positively. In 2001 Big Brother had a transsexual candidate in the Netherlands, etc.

No doubt there is discrimination, and there was in the past as well, and I don't want to minimize this, but the idea that the general public (i.e. most people) fundamentally objects to the very idea of trans people existing (and wants to "genocide" them, as is sometimes also claimed) does not seem to bear out.

Maybe you should look up Trump's speech from a couple of days ago. He argued that transitioning at any age should be banned, and that gender-affirming healthcare should be banned by all federal agencies.

Or maybe look at the law Arkansas tried to pass, where any public performance whatsoever by a transgender person would be considered an "adult performance", because they would be wearing clothes which are not traditionally associated with their assigned gender at birth.

That kind of thought is becoming increasingly common among right-wing American politicians, and I do not know of any other way to describe it than trying to deny the existence of trans people. I really wish this was all just an exaggeration, but unfortunately it really is this bad.

Those sound like better political targets then than artists (comedians).

> Would it have been OK to make a joke about 9/11 victims while they were still digging people out of the wreckage?

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."

Do you think its possible that someone doing that digging told a terrible joke when they were doing that digging?

Would it be funny if a trans person was the one telling the joke?

And you don't think its possible plenty of people found such a joke distasteful? You act like if you walked the streets of NY after 9/11, making jokes about it, people would be cheering you on... I have a feeling the situation would be quite different.

Is walking through the streets of NY immediately after 9/11 and making 9/11 jokes equivalent to a bot on twitch saying rude things?

Like how does what you're talking about relate to the topic at hand in anyway whatsoever?

It's not, but it wasn't my hypothetical that I offered as a reason of demonstrating my reasonability.

>Like how does what you're talking about relate to the topic at hand in anyway whatsoever?

I'm not exactly surprised you aren't getting the point. Context doesn't really seem to be a thing to you. For what it's worth, I was pointing out that context matters, so your hypothetical wasn't really meaningful. Arguably, less meaningful than what you accuse my own post of being, considering that my post contained this lesson.

And in the context of this story, if I am a comedy club owner who has a rule saying comedians cannot joke about 9/11, is it ok for me to kick out a comedian who breaks those rules?

OK by who?

If you were a club owner that did that, you’d have some people feel supported by your choice and many people offended by it.

You could expect to get blackballed by comedians and patrons who’d never bother with those jokes but see you as being an arrogant bourgeoisie, abusing your commercial power over artist’s own expertise in their craft.

You’d create your safe space, but lose more than just what you ruled out.

There’s no objective “ok” or not, just consequences.

Appeal to emotion

> People are on this thread casually debating whether this joke "went to far" or not, while the people who this joke was about continue to face constant ridicule, teasing, bullying, discrimination, and assault.

I don't see how banning joking about them will help them, all this will achieve is to radicalize moderates.

Sure, why not, nobody force you to listen/watch it. If it has audience then it's OK. Society nowadays wanna ban everything because of crybabies who can't handle jokes. But yeah, to play it safe let's not even acknowledge existence of these people, so they can't complain and they can be happy.

> radicalize moderates

Hmm, maybe think about that again.

I don't feel like I lose anything by not making a trans jokes. Were I a person in the public eye, I'd choose not to make a trans joke not because I'm afraid of backlash, I'd choose not to make it because I'm living through the time when these people are fighting for a seat at an already uneven and shaky table and it just seems unnecessary. I work with some trans people and they have excellent humor about themselves when the humor isn't intended to imply they're an impossibility or a grotesque.

In the case of my in-laws, none of them had trans people on the brain until Tucker Carlson told them they couldn't make trans jokes or some invisible mafia would get them, and now they seem to feel their life just isn't complete if they can't tease trans people.

Gilbert Godfrey famously made a 9/11 joke that “bombed” on September 29, 2001.

If you eliminate all comedy that offends someone, there won’t be much left to laugh about.

Except that's a part of comedy. Pete Davidson makes jokes about his dad dying in 9/11 all the time and they are hilarious. Just pointing at a shitty thing isn't comedy, you have to actually write a joke.

I guess you didn't realize that Pete Davidson is making these jokes 20 years after 9/11, not 20 days?

I think it is possible Godfrey did that on purpose just to set up the audience for his Aristocrats.

>Would it have been OK to make a joke about 9/11 victims while they were still digging people out of the wreckage?

At what point do you feel like trans individuals will be "fair game" for humor? Or in your example, `no longer being pulled out of the wreckage`?

Comedians made 9/11 jokes within a year or 2 of the event.

>The public dialogue around trans lives is one of very little empathy, respect, or civility.

And I wonder why exactly this is the case...

Something something "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"

With all of the insanity stemming from trans people and loudmouths in the LGBT community both online and in real life, I don't blame people for losing their empathy and respect for them. If you're legitimately clueless as to what I'm referring to, look into child drag shows, censorship, the invasions of women-only (XX chromosome) spaces, legitimate cases of grooming occurring on platforms like Discord, and their generally insufferable attitudes towards people that don't perfectly align with their beliefs.

>Would it have been OK

twitch is a platform where you can stream yourself preforming grotesque acts of murder in the most violent videogames. i could foreseeably mod transgender prostitutes into gta or use the names of notable trans activists in rogue survivor and then go target them in a killing spree. trying to draw arbitrary demarcations around permissible culture & expression rarely if ever has the desired effect. calls for empathy, just like those for a return to faith/patriotism/civility/etc can never be sincere if they are enforced by top-down dogma, more than anything else, they breed resentment towards the sacred cow. there are a lot of pressing issues for improving the lives of trans people, primarily issues of law and healthcare policy; banning 41% and ywnbaw jokes is nothing but a distraction. on a personal level i find the mentality of 'be nice to trannies or they'll rope' far more insulting than any memepost.

>Joking about people currently experiencing trauma isn't funny.

humor is how we overcome trauma, once you can laugh about something it doesn't hurt anymore. if you ban laughter to try and protect someone all you're really telling them is 'nope you're fucked up forever'

I think this is the exact kind of thing we should be talking about. There are some truths that I think we can brush aside if we let ourselves, such as:

1. All people experience trauma. Whether you think one person's trauma is more important, acceptable or comfortable to discuss doesn't change any of that.

2. Some trauma is objectively more severe than others, but not necessarily subjectively more or less. A light-hearted example--we have 4 kids. It's not fair for us to make fun of our friends/extended family who have 1 kid and complain about certain things. It's also not okay for a drug addict to make fun of a porn addict, or for a fat person to call their bulimic friend "shallow".

3. As evidenced above, people cope with trauma in different ways. What causes one person to question their sexuality might drive another person to overeat or another person to self-harm or escape into fantasy literature or video games or whatever other means of avoidance is calling out to them. Nobody deserves to be shamed for this (in fact in a lot of cases that's part of what keeps them in the cycle).

We should be able to talk about this openly, though, and even make light of it at times, having enough social grace to know that people with different (or even wrong) opinions or who are telling a joke aren't attacking anyone or spreading hate or whatever. I think at least one real issue here is a lack of trust. If I don't believe the person on the other end of the keyboard has my best interest at heart then I'll probably take whatever opportunity I can to be offended by what they say.

Trying to reason with a side that is unable to take a joke or understand satire is futile. It is their way or the highway, no in-between. And unfortunately they've become the gatekeepers of all things in tech and media, so their messages is over-amplified in comparison to their numbers, they think they are in the right and won't take consideration for anyone that disagrees.

We all enabled this behaviour, we are at fault.

Agreed, as a society we need to increase our resilience to opinions we may find uncomfortable.

We've totally abandoned the concept of "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

I'm fairly certain that's untrue. There is, however, a fairly pernicious aspect of the social discourse that really would like to conflate "entertaining it, rejecting it soundly, and not repeatedly entertaining it for the same pretty-tired arguments" with never entertaining the thought at all.

The sea-lion cartoon has stuck around for a reason.

Sea-lioning is one example of argument in bad faith. I wasn't talking about that. I'm talking about educated people's willingness and ability to play gracefully with ideas--as Oscar Wilde put it. I think as a culture, we're losing this ability. Bans and cancellation based on clumsy, blunt-force word matching are accelerating this loss. This gracefulness is already pretty much totally gone from the Internet, if it ever existed here.

> repeatedly entertaining

It can appear this way, on the internet, but it could be that the individuals asking the question are entertaining it for the first time.

I know this is what happened to me, with unrelated topics. You can’t reason with the mob. They aren’t interested.

If you aren't willing to go take the time to educate yourself on the topic (there are ample resources to do so) then it is not our responsibility to educate you about trans people. Trans people are a rarity, so they tend to have to field the same like 20 questions a million times over. They just want to live their fucking lives, not answer truly ignorant questions about their genitalia from people who didn't put in even an ounce of effort to understand.

Attitudes like this are why people will listen to the TERFs instead, as they're always willing to talk about trans-identifying males are eradicating female-only spaces, and so on.

Well ofcourse. One just wants to live their life while other is activist promothing their case.

That’s an awful lot of nuance to convey in a Twitter post or a twitch chat or most forum replies. The mediums of our discourse have made complex thoughts hard to communicate

Of course, because plenty of thoughts, when critically examined, are correct but socially unacceptable.

When someone reaches the conclusion that a socially unacceptable thought is correct, the vast majority will try to stop thinking about any at all.

A mark of educated mind is also in abilty to see the consequence of their words.

Eg. suggesting oppressed group struggling with validating their own existence and massive suicide rates coming from that struggle to entertain a though that validy is not there may not be what an educated mind would do.

While I agree with this in the abstract, this particular case is that of a private company refusing hosting to content that it (or, perhaps, its advertisers) does not want their name attached to. It'd be nice if we didn't have this situation, e.g. income not being tied directly to advertisers -> indirectly to LCD of opinion.

I don't know if you were implying that Twitch ought not remove this content, but I just feel like sometimes the conversation gets taken to an abstract space, the conclusions of which then get applied to concrete space e.g. Twitch. It's important to recognise the rights we give private companies to decide what they provide airtime to.

>this particular case is that of a private company refusing hosting to content

I believe this argument holds water on some level, when it regards a small private company, but it is much less compelling when that "private company" is Amazon (who owns Twitch), Google, Twitter, Facebook or another behemoth with hundreds of millions of users. At that point, it becomes a very chilling attack on free speech, which is why I think that many big tech platforms should be designated at common carriers.

Correct.

What if the private company is Visa or Mastercard? What if it is your only ISP?

It's slightly different in that those are basically utility companies at this point, but there's definitely an argument to be made that certain levels of social media ubiquity ought to qualify them as a utility, since you lose so much through not being able to interact with them.

Yeah I'm definitely sympathetic to this, and I think the next decade will determine how we proceed with these cases. It does feel like, while they're all private companies, if a random individual was to be banned from all social media platforms, their life really cannot function at some level in a lot of modern societies, so we ought to treat these companies differently.

When the companies are generating revenue through selling advertisements, and the advertisers decide "yeah we actually don't want to buy a pre-roll on the stream where the guy is making racist comments", it's another level of difficulty to navigate. Should these companies be required to host someone's content at a loss, given that they have some way for advertisers to "block" certain content types from being associated with their brands?

>When the companies are generating revenue through selling advertisements, and the advertisers decide "yeah we actually don't want to buy a pre-roll on the stream where the guy is making racist comments", it's another level of difficulty to navigate. Should these companies be required to host someone's content at a loss, given that they have some way for advertisers to "block" certain content types from being associated with their brands?

It is simple enough to add flags to streams that enough people report as "offensive" and let advertisers choose which streams their advertisements appear on. Advertisers (and others) who insist that everyone that find offensive is completely banned off the platform should be given the bird and told to take a walk. I think one of the problems is that advertising has (like big tech) become an oligopoly, dominated by "the big four" ad agencies. It is one thing for a company that represents .001% of the ad market to pull their ads from a website or a platform because they find something offensive, and a massive conglomerate to pull 25% of all ads from a platform (let alone act in concert with the other 3 ad agencies who control the entire ad market). The reality is that far too many of our "markets" are controlled by far too many corporations, many of which act in concert and otherwise coordinate in ways that are legally questionable, at best. Unfortunately due to our largely corrupt government that is heavily influenced by corporate interests and regulatory agencies that are mostly staffed by a revolving door of industry cronies things are very unlikely to change.

As a society we shouldn't tolerate the intolerant, those who seek every excuse to vilify and target minorities.

FYI, certain prominent political leaders said they’d outlaw certain minorities and make the lives of people living hell.

Personally i am not fond of seeing friends and family suffer at the hand of fascists.

@Dang, since when is paraphrasing Popper and restating the statements of people without a sliver of modification or strawmans worth flagging?

Don't you think there is a problem with abuse here?

The problem I'm seeing is that with some regularity, people are being designated as "intolerant" for simply asking questions, deviating slightly from the most up-to-date acceptable opinion, or just not keeping up with what is the correct opinion to have now. Applying nuance and assuming that others _might_ have good intentions isn't really in vogue.

JAQing off and asking questions to learn and understand are two truly different things.

Misrepresenting positions and arguments to a rabid “fanbase” is not asking questions.

It’s time the charades stop and the fascists drop the pretences, oh wait their supreme leader has PUBLICLY said he will ensure that trans people will be outlawed.

No amount of science and evidence is ever enough for these people either.

Transsexualism is not a new thing and to claim it is is either wilfully ignorant when you act as a host and don’t do due diligence, or maliciously intentional.

I am not asking people to have correct opinions, i am asking that they listen to those who did the science and the research, i am asking that they talk to actual trans people about their experiences.

Perhaps asking for some empathy (not sympathy) as a fellow human is already too much.

The problem is, there’s no way for you to know which type of person it is until you’ve talked with them for a bit. From what I’ve seen, people immediately condemn anyone not in lockstep, and never find out, leaving a very confused, interested person, who only experiences irrational, negative, interactions.

I see your anecdotal data and I raise you my predictor variables:

- Wears a maga hat

- Supports forced pregnancies

- Is evangelical christian

- Is proudly unvaccinated

- Considers him or her self a "pureblood"

- Is proudly uneducated and complains about "overeducated" women.

- Complains about drag shows - which nobody forced them to go to - while not batting an eye for beauty pageants for children.

- Complains about HBO Max's The Last of Us showcasing a gay couple (but they obviously loooooove watching heterosexual "couples" on shows)

Which, online (the context here), would require communication with them, to know. That communication would have to be a somewhat spooky probing, completely tangent to the question.

Anecdotes aren’t required for this.

you might not be aware of this but for many people, myself included, seeing casual use of the word "fascists" in discussions such as these elicits an immediate, uncontrollable eye-roll. presently the word "fascists" appears three times on this page (outside of this post), and like, I know what you're getting at, because I'm familiar with the general ideology you appear to subscribe to (based on your use of that term in this context), but, many if not most people are kind of done with people who call everyone and everything they don't like "fascists" or "fascist", just casually using it as a sort of slur.

I know that it makes perfect sense in your ideology and that use of this term is common there, but for the rest of us, it's a bit of a hard sell to connect the word "fascists" with a low-poly poorly-animated Jerry Seinfeld facsimile who emits strings generated by a language model, about thirty seconds of which happens to be politically incorrect, yet, all told, quite mild.

it's kind of on par with talking about "satanism" in the context of Dungeons & Dragons play—I can definitely see how that connection could be made, but doing so would require me to subscribe to an ideology that I simply don't subscribe to, so instead, repeated use of this term has caused it to become, in my mind, and likely the minds of many others, a sort of humorous non-sequitur.

The word "fascist" was used to refer to a person who supports authoritarian regimes that attack minorities, education, reproductive rights, freedom of speech whenever they do not like said speech. I used it to refer to people in support of creating lists of "unwanted" people [1], I used it to refer to people in support of banning books that stand against their ideology.

In your overly condescending and infantilising response, you missed context from parent comment:

> there are actual Nazis out there who want to put people in ovens, so it's taboo to make jokes about how they may have a point.

> similar thing with trans people, you mention them and trolls come out of the woodwork saying they should kill themselves.

Now, you may be okay with a small segment of the population dying at the hands of definitely-not-fascists who have attempted to murder certain officials at their homes, but I do not subscribe to your morally deprived and bankrupt view of the world.

Anyway, what's the difference between Putin's regime, Iran, and GOP besides the religion? It's quite eerie to see how many parallels one may draw from GOP, Iran and Russia.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/texas-transgender-database-dr...

I'm not sure why you took the time to write this specific reply, when I clearly stated that I'm very familiar with the general ideology of the person who enthusiastically and repeatedly uses the word "fascist". I spent most of last decade in the greater Seattle area, in the game development scene—trust me, I've heard it all before, repeatedly, ad nauseam. there is no new information for me in your post.

I was merely attempting to convey that use of the word "fascist" in a context such as this can and will be taken by many as extreme hyperbole bordering on abject nonsense, because I suspect that many people who still casually use this term don't realize that it has lost any weight or gravitas that it once had through sheer overuse, and as a result, use of the term elicits immediate dismissal for many.

also, to everyone else: isn't it curious how some issues such as this one cause people to go off about myriad completely unrelated political topics, wholly unprompted?

> Anyway, what's the difference between Putin's regime, Iran, and GOP besides the religion? It's quite eerie to see how many parallels one may draw from GOP, Iran and Russia.

what could any of this possibly have to do with language-model Seinfeld making a transgender joke?

> you may be okay with a small segment of the population dying at the hands of definitely-not-fascists

I'll just uh.. reiterate my comment from above in hopes that there's some level of introspection possible here:

> The problem I'm seeing is that with some regularity, people are being designated as "intolerant" for simply asking questions, deviating slightly from the most up-to-date acceptable opinion, or just not keeping up with what is the correct opinion to have now. Applying nuance and assuming that others _might_ have good intentions isn't really in vogue

As the other comment said, there's difference between JAQing off and genuinely asking questions.

If you wish to ask questions, there are places where you can very much do so, like r/honesttransgender. You can read papers on the topic, you can read experiences, and you can pose questions in a manner that isn't antagonizing people.

If you wish to blame somebody for the "intolerance" towards the "just asking questions" rhetoric, there are plenty of "news" anchors that cause mass hysteria and purposefully misrepresent information to push their ideology.

Matt Walsh "just asked questions", while supporting, and condoning violence against trans people. Shapiro "Just asked questions", and so does Carson or whatever that guy's name is.

So now trans people have to justify their own existence as people and live in fear because of said people who "just ask questions".

You see, if you wish to learn, there is a time and place for it, antagonising people who genuinely fear for their life by using the same rhetoric the above people used to fuel a rabid and bloodthirsty base you are showing that you don't actually care about people, or at least that's the impression that you are giving.

> Applying nuance and assuming that others _might_ have good intentions isn't really in vogue.

Because the internet's been around for more than a minute and everyone knows you can't give people the benefit of the doubt on these platforms. If you genuinely wish to learn, there are plenty of socially acceptable ways to do so. It's like urinating - everybody does it, but everybody also knows there are places it's socially unacceptable to do it.

Such as Twitch's opinion that this joke was a violation of their TOS, and thus deserving of a temp ban? That opinion seems to be making a lot of people here pretty uncomfortable.

A common defining attribute of harmful people like bigots is an inability to self reflect. It's akin to a thief being mad a court ordered them to turn money over to the victim. "When I take money it's wrong, but when they take it from me it's ok. People need to be comfortable with money transfers [opinions] they don't like."

Which no, we don't. We will continue to take efforts to prevent and mitigate a harmful person's ability to cause harm. This is obvious to any reasonable person but unfortunately not to the chronic thief. You cannot win over him with argument, only with unilateral action such as garnishing his bank accounts for restitution and making theft culturally unacceptable.

>We will continue to take efforts to prevent and mitigate a harmful person's ability to cause harm.

the channel in question is literally a bot that strings together semi-coherent sentences from chat gpt with little to no object permanence. there is no person or harmful intent to mitigate here, it is just a bunch of words in a blender.

I'm not talking about the bot, I'm talking about all the people reacting negatively to its temporary ban.

As the number of people on the planet grows, regression to the mean at global scale becomes more and more necessary to do anything at global scale.

Humans get to not appeal to the lowest common denominator when they aren't in groups numbering in the billions.

(... this is a fancy way of saying "There's a reason the jokes you'll tell your friends in the privacy of your own home you might not tell a stranger on the street").

I think this is a perfect summation of the issue. Not allowing public discourse will always result in entrenche, extreme, and polarizing views.

As an affected individual: Public discourse on this issue is plentiful and, unfortunately, usually full of wrong information, misconceptions and "my favorite scientist said otherwise" (probably on the JRE, against a dozen or so professional medical associations) gotchas from exterminationist groups that get invited on to have a "balanced" conversation.

Transgender people do not have large political or economic impact either. We kind of rely on the few media outlets that do their due dilligence to not platform the already entrenched, extreme and polarized, who then go on to claim the discourse is being supressed.

The tone in the US is even worse. We went from the edge of the overton window being "I have empathy for their delusion but they can't pick their bathroom" conservatives to "The trannys are all secret pedophiles that want to corrupt our children, we need to return the death penalty for such degeneracy" conservatives in barely 10 years.

I think the difference is context. If you want to get together at a psychology conference and talk about how we ought to classify gender dysphoria based on our current understanding of the people who experience it then that's cool and nobody would bat an eye at a speaker making a case that it's a mental illness.

But outside of a medical context if you make a joke that (in this case somewhat ambiguously) that relies on saying that trans people have a mental illness then the actual meaning changes because that phrase is used as a pejorative and as a dog whistle for people who support conversion therapy.

>nobody would bat an eye at a speaker making a case that it's a mental illness.

That's not true. There would be a huge outcry, specifically from the psychology camp you are disagreeing with, who would get very huffy and maybe insinuate you don't have the best intentions and the psychologists who think you are right would back you up and also get huffy and write angry letters about letting feelings get in the way of physical reality and that we shouldn't let current stigmas about "mental illness" stop us from improving our understanding and cataloguing of mental disorders.

You know what doesn't happen? Making it a felony if a book that contains a trans person exists on your bookshelf in your classroom. Telling the general public that if you allow trans people to use the bathroom they feel comfortable in, they will molest and rape your kids (this is a real take right now). Entire forums set up with the express intent of bullying people into killing themselves.

To me at least, your first paragraph about everyone getting huffy and writing letters is the expected outcome and exactly the kind of impassioned Socratic debate that's good for the field. The term used to describe those with intellectual disabilities has changed a bunch of times in response to the term being picked up as a pejorative; I can't imagine people would be too up in arms about that happening to "mental illness." The debate with more meat is what categories exist, their defining characteristics, and where different experiences fall, not that the category that used to be called mental illness is now called "harshed brain vibes."

I think the difficult issue is that gender dysphoria occupies a similar space to neurodivergence where the line between "this is a problem that needs corrected" and "this is a kind of person that needs accommodation" is heavily influenced by cultural attitudes, and while the difference isn't arbitrary we have more examples than we can shake a stick at from history where psychology has persisted the wrong view (usually the former when it's the latter) for many many years.

That ship has sailed, in America at least.

There are two sides: one who believes in freedom of speech, and the other that would jail or worse others for their speech.

Being honest and open about nearly any topic could get you fired, so it’s much simpler to be highly guarded with who you interact with.

As always, if you think this is a ship that sailed “recently”, I have bad news for you.

Among other examples, McCarthyism.

More like it's always a fight to keep freedoms, because there's always multiple causes purporting to do good in the name of limiting freedoms out of necessity. The road to hell, bad actors, and ideologies on every political side of the aisle.

Eh. I think that a lot of people who you see draping themselves in the flag of free speech just want their own viewpoints to be the privileged ones while they suppress the speech of others. E.g. in the US most of the "free speech" rhetoric we see at the moment is from the political Right, and seamlessly transitions into banning books, rigorously legislating the behavior of teachers, imposing dress codes, etc.

This doesn't apply to everyone, of course. There's genuinely principled supporters out there. But it's common enough that I'm cynical about it.

>There are two sides: one who believes in freedom of speech, and the other that would jail or worse others for their speech.

Lol you can't actually be serious?

> when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator?

When brand safety is no longer the arbiter of what messages are communicated in the wide-reaching channels.

sometimes you can't have nice things because there are people who will abuse them.

there are actual Nazis out there who want to put people in ovens, so it's taboo to make jokes about how they may have a point.

similar thing with trans people, you mention them and trolls come out of the woodwork saying they should kill themselves.

there are a lot of horrible people and trollish behaviors online, and sometimes the only way to deal is to avoid the topic that brings it out, which kind of aligns with the objectives the trolls wanted in the first place. social media isn't making these calls as some kind of woke social engineering, they're making them to avoid a death spiral into a cesspool that destroys their business and civil society itself. Yeah, it's silly to read "AI comic canceled for transphobia", but maybe it's not just the community standards that are the issue.

"Evolution of democracy is not possible if we are not prepared to hear the other side."

"Democracy is a great institution and, therefore, it is liable to be greatly abused."

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/kiwi-farms-die-...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34ane/neo-nazi-homeschool-o...

Let us not forget certain fascists who claimed they’d outlaw all trans people and force them to detransition.

Let us not forget how many trans people have died at the hands of bigots.

Not only claimed, they've passed laws to that effect

Please make discussion possible by giving specifics rather than using unnecessary secretive terms like “certain people” and “they”.

Forcing people to guess should be avoided, especially since not everyone is where you’re from. Links to examples are also helpful.

They are referring to Trump running on the platform of punishing doctors for offering gender affirming healthcare, and banning transitioning.

Apparently stating facts is worthy of downvotes. Keep it classy HN.

> Apparently stating facts is worthy of downvotes. Keep it classy HN.

I don't think this is the case, since there were no facts presented. Your guess seems to differ from the other person [1], which proves that some clarity would have helped the discussion.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34680938

They presented the comments made by Trump.

Whether you are unaware of it or not doesn’t make them not true.

As the commenter said, google is your friend.

https://www.axios.com/2023/01/31/trump-transgender-rights-lg...

Utah just banned transitioning youth. Google is your friend, no need to guess.

The fact that two people responded with two different answers shows that guessing is required. Indirectness is popular with these types of topics, and I don't understand why. It's almost like it's used to preemptively set up a fight, with responses similar to yours, like "Well, you're not paying attention" or "How could you not know?". It's not useful, to anyone.

It shows the opposite, that there is so much of this going on....

> It's not useful, to anyone

What's not useful to everyone is acting like you don't read the news, can't read the news, or in the event that someone points out something in the news that you didn't, that you somehow cannot be availed of that knowledge in a way that doesn't render the argument moot. It's really stupid when you think about it that way.

Plus, aren't we supposed to be making the effort of understanding each other here. Sitting in ignorance to insist you can't think of a single example isn't really making that effort.

I covered your response, here, which appears to be accurate:

> It's almost like it's used to preemptively set up a fight, with responses similar to yours, like "Well, you're not paying attention" or "How could you not know?".

A stage was set where people can easily be placed into a box, created by an intentional lack of clarity. They can then be easily attack for not seeing things "as clearly" as they should. It's not possible for anything positive to come out of an exchange built in that context. By that, it's not useful, unless your goal is actually to create a negative exchange.

That's a much bigger assumption than assuming someone talking about contemporary news follows it.

I'd say it's a repeated observation of something incredibly consistent, whenever these discussions (and others) come up, more than a blind assumption. My prediction of your response, and you precisely following that prediction, being evidence that both of us have done this before. Maybe that pattern is intentional, or maybe it's emergent.

I'll also claim to know the next part of the pattern, but I don't think you can complete the pattern, somewhere like this, and it definitely involves misplaced assumptions.

Often here people mistake plausibility for reasonability, I'm not surprised to see it occur here as well. You aren't being reasonable. None of your post is reasonable. You are relying upon plausible deniability to make your point, but it's entirely counter to the purpose of conversing here where we are supposed to try to make an effort to understand each other. I will repeat my point that when discussing a particular element of the news, it is reasonable to assume that someone partaking in the conversation is reasonably informed about that exact topic they are discussing. That assumption is eminently more reasonable than your assumption that it is a trap. It's actually laughable and speaks to your individual paranoia and unwillingness to discuss the topic in earnest.

Notice the extreme and complete change in your tone, and even phrasing! It's like your a completely different person.

> we are supposed to try to make an effort to understand each other.

My first comment was asking for clarification, so discussion could be had. You made no efforts, and resisted, until now.

> I will repeat my point that when discussing a particular element of the news

As my first comment stated, the problem is that no particular element was discussed. I suggest re-reading this thread.

The rest of your post is a textbook example of gaslighting, so I'm choosing to remove myself from this thread now. But, I sincerely wish the best for you.

>Notice the extreme and complete change in your tone, and even phrasing! It's like your a completely different person.

No change in my tone nor my point.

>My first comment was asking for clarification, so discussion could be had. You made no efforts, and resisted, until now.

I literally offered an example that fit.

>As my first comment stated, the problem is that no particular element was discussed. I suggest re-reading this thread.

Yawn.

>The rest of your post is a textbook example of gaslighting, so I'm choosing to remove myself from this thread now. But, I sincerely wish the best for you.

Be gaslight, then. It's all projection from you anyway.

I have found that directly calling such people out results in a knee-jerk reaction of flagging and downvotes.

It seems that any criticism of the republican leadership results in a horde of bigots mass flagging and downvotes which then prevents me from responding to attacks and responses.

Dealing with the bullshit and falsehoods always takes a lot more time than it takes to discredit facts, and HN’s approach with flagging does not help.

As a matter of fact, I had a comment where i paraphrased Popper almost word for word regarding the paradox of tolerance, and then quoted Trump saying he wants to outlaw trans people, and i got flagged.

It took for @dang to come and unflag me.

The claims were "outlaw all trans people and force them to detransition" and "trans people have died at the hands of bigots".

The Utah law "prohibits health care providers from providing hormonal transgender treatments to minors and those not diagnosed with gender dysphoria".[1]

That's not the same thing at all.

[1]: https://healthnews.com/news/utah-limits-access-to-gender-aff...

They meant inferring I referred to the GOP.

That’s simply a single edge jump from “Utah GOP” to GOP.

There is a certain irony to decrying attacks on trans ideology dogma as "fascism" while defending censorship.

It is not through silence and imposition that healthy social order changes. Demands are made while little public discourse has even taken place and the more friction that creates the more those demanding feel vindicated, the more rejection fosters.

It seems like rather than changing hearts, the trans movement decided it was in the right and set itself to impart justice, whether the public understands it or not. Not quite fascistic, definitely totalitarian, that makes it way closer to actual fascism than anything that is often pointed as such though. Shame.

Totalitarian refers to a single party controlling the government.

I didnt support censorship either. You created a strawman that i couldnt respond due to the sheer volume of downvotes.

I support people expressing their thoughts freely so that I know who is dangerous, and who is not. Who has a disdain for my mere existence, and who is willing to stand in support of minorities.

The reality is that bigots will only get emboldened, as they have, and it’s not due to censorship, it’s due to strawmans and falsehoods pushed by prominent bigots.

I merely pointed to bigots killing people, and to prominent politicians who embolden the bigots, and rally them under a false flag, under a supposedly “holy” cause, under the so-called protection of conservative values.

Shame on you, for jumping to conclusions and creating strawmans.

Honestly it kind of feels like this is an argument for getting rid of social media altogether rather than filtering social media through a narrow ideological lens (which has no problem with trolling other groups, by the way).

This comment is only slightly tongue-in-cheek.

The historic small society solution was to shun people who were problematic.

Plenty of people are civil. Reminding someone that they left their coffee on their car should not make you feel anything special.

Our minds frame the world in terms of our major conflicts. Trans people are fighting for recognition and rights. Social conservatives are fighting to reduce rights and increase misunderstanding and fear. In terms of that fight, it is more than just feelings that are being hurt.

It's easy to have empathy for our own tribe, it's hard to have it for another tribe, especially if there is an active fight.

Is this....a weird way to say that you want folks to have the ability to (checks notes) make transphobic comments and prevent other people from reacting?

> but when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator?

How is making transphobic remarks appealing to the opposite of the LCD of society. It appears that you are claiming some sort of social or moral superiority....to a person that makes hateful comments about someone's sexuality.

> How can we take social issues that are already difficult within the same family unit and have a well-adjusted conversation about them at least in the public arena?

Nothing about this story has anything at all to remotely do with a "conversation".

> Maybe it's always been missing. I saw a commercial on TV yesterday, literally suggesting that telling someone they left their Starbucks on the roof of their car as they drive off is a heart-felt touching moment.

Look, a corporation making an advertisement to emotionally effect you isn't evidence of "look at what I think is wrong with society today." I hope that this isn't lost as some sort of personal attack. Just take a step back and ask yourself why you thought it was a "heart-felt touching moment" vs. just "common decency." (Maybe it's because Starbucks wants to keep that ad in your head for longer! They are indeed hyper-effective at getting people's money all around the world!)

If you want to have a conversation about transphobia, maybe ask yourself what is your personal goal. It is problematic if you envision yourself to be the center of something that, honestly judging by your writing, most likely does not affect you in the slightest. If you're not trans, it's probably best to stay out of it and don't try to stop the cultural and social changes that trans folks are advocating for.

This is actually a great example of not giving the person communicating the most gracious interpretation. Look, all I'm saying is we'd all be a lot better off if we gave each other the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the intent of our words. I'm not trying to comment on the facts of the story, but more the way the story made me feel. I'm definitely not defending the kind of speech that targets and ridicules a group, whether generated or otherwise. I wish I could do a better job of sharing my heart here.

As for the comment about the commercial, it was a bit of a tangent on an already-off-topic rant, but I think it describes some of our self-centeredness as a culture. "Oh, if you buy our product you'll feel like spreading the love by..." just not being a jerk? The fact that they ran that commercial means they think it'll resonate with the audience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com