Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjamesaustin | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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? What if that joke was light-hearted, or the comedian was just making fun of people who tell those jokes?

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

>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.

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.

>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'

> 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.

> 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.

>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.

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).

Appeal to emotion

Reply on news.ycombinator.com