I'm very confused by this description?
What exactly is "trans ideology"? And how do you "buy into it"?
I consider myself a centrist on most things. And I don't really understand that statement.
Either you think that people who want to dress, act, and be treated differently than their birth sex should be allowed to do so. Or you think that people should be forced to act and be treated as based on societal gender expectations.
I don't see what "ideology" there is here?
It goes much further than 'societal gender expectations' and accepting or denying that people should be able to dress and act how they want.
> At the extreme, there is the belief that 'identifying' as a women makes you a women, and that you don't even need surgery or hormones to qualify.
This is about how you talk to people mostly. Nobody on the left believes that a man who wants to be a women is automatically biologically a women — that would be absurd, which is why the right likes to show it that way. What they believe in is that when a man decides to take the hard, life-changing decision to become a women the bare minimum decent thing is to respect that and call them "she" or "her".
I said two things:
1. If a man does hormone therapy they are biologically transitioning towards a woman, this is e.g. why they can give breast milk. In biology a sex isn't always as clear cut as many believe and there exists ample scientific research on the topic, so this isn't the topic of our discussion.
2. With the biology out of the way, what remains is the question of the gender — the social, societal and mental role of what it means to "be" a woman. And obviously like with any role people can have different ideas of what it includes and what it excludes. What the left does is simply to say: "Fuck those social constructs, they don't help us, if someone wants to be a woman they are a woman", while the more conservative type might have very specific (bit in the face of history: arbitrary) ideas on what a "true" woman looks like, behaves like, is like.
The conservative definition of the gender roles we have a net-negative effect in our society. And that goes for men as well. So many "real" men, that immitate what they think "makes a man" — because of fear that they are not they fail their loved ones and they fail themselves. They confuse acting strong with being strong, while the strong (=harder to do) thing would be to confront your own weaknesses.
So if trans-ideology simply means not taking those roles seriously I am on board. If it means something else I am all ears.
I do find it strange to call it an "ideology", but I guess if you want to say that.
It still seems to me it's just debating the idea that people who want to dress, act, and be treated differently than their birth sex should be allowed to do so or not.
I guess you can say that's an ideology, because it's an ideal societal reality that is being advocated for, to allow for this behavior and socially accept it.
But I don't see what you find goes beyond this?
Problem: Someone would prefer to be treated like society treats woman, including being referred too as one.
Debate: Should we allow this or not
Pro-trans stance: We should allow it.
Anti-trans stance: We should not allow it.
Do you mean that you do not believe that anyone has a brain chemistry that makes them feel like either they have the wrong gendered body or like they're not totally quite woman or man?
Or do you just mean that you don't trust everyone who pretends as such, and think there are some that are just opportunist about it?
Second, a grammatical gotcha is far from a proof. Our language is not a perfect representation of reality.
That's the point. Your conceptualization of gender doesn't actually make sense to the true reality of gender expression.
You have this idea that gender "should" be some way. You were told this, and raised to believe that. But if you're observant of the real world, you see that there exists many people for whom this doesn't make sense.
You can see there are people that have the traits of one and the sex of another. You can see that there exist many more relevant characteristics than just genitals. The structure, size and connections of the brain, the hormonal balance, the organs, the bone structure, the chromosomes, etc. All these things exists in so many more combinations than two distinct clearly delineated sets.
And so, like we did in the past with believing the earth was the center of the universe, or not knowing what caused diseases before we learned about germs, or why thunder would strike. We're forced to re-evaluate our understanding of reality, and update our mental models with one that can fit all we observe and better predict reality.
In the past, ideology has actually worked to repress and hide this reality. Forcing people that don't comform to pretend otherwise.
And yet here we are, thousands of years into human history, and still there exists many people that don't fit the model. They existed throughout history, there's accounts of it in writing from many prior civilizations.
Which takes me back to what I said previously. You can continue to want to repress them. Or you can just accept a model where there is a spectrum of gender, with most people fitting nicely one side or the other, but also many that are somewhere in between.
And that means, if they want to act or be treated one way or another, you can be okay with that. Or you can think that we should force them otherwise.
Says who? You can be left wing without accepting trans ideology, and you can be right wing without becoming a nutjob. And nobody is forcing you to align with either the left or the right anyway.
What party? It's very strange that the democratic party exists in two states within America - the boogeyman democratic party on Fox News, and the actual democratic party that votes in congress. What trans "agenda" is the democratic party actually pushing?
This boogeyman democratic party seems to only exist so that conservatives can hide behind the label of "centrist". In this alternative universe, AOC is the president instead of a Representative (she's not even a Senator!).
That being said, people "become" trans just like one "becomes" left handed: You discover it one day and go: "Oh shit, I am trans/left handed". There is nothing you can do about it. Sure you can hide it from society to avoid scaring them, but that is very unhealthy for you.
There was a long time when kids had to hide their left handedness because it was seen as "abnormal" by the right handed majority. And then when it became medically irrefutable that it is natural and that forcing right handedness on left handed people can have serious medical and paychological sideffects left handedness became normalized. Suddenly there was a "rise" in left handed people (in fact however the left handed people existed all the time, they were just hiding it). The number of left handed people then stagneted around it's natural occurance rate of roughly 12%.
The whole trans discourse is a discussion about a very similar phenomenom. People are gay, trans, asexual, left handed and there is nothing they can do about it, as they have been born with that trait. Now the flipside of that is that you can't get gay/trans/asexual/left handed by being "exposed" to it. Either you are already trans and hide it from yourself so well that it probably alreasy takes a psychological toll or (much more likely) you are not.
That being said, what is the "trans ideology of the left"? I can't speak for the US, but a few thoughts:
1. to speak of "the left" is... interesting. Last time I checked they all had different views on the same topic. So whom do you mean, or are we speaking about the left as the right paints it?
2. At least the left people I know don't do anything more than say: "If you are born trans, that is okay, we accept you." I guess if you agree with the scientific consesus that being trans is not something you learn, but something you are, then this should be a acceptable view to you too.
3. Because most trans people are not treated well by the society around them, the left often demonstratively gives trans people special exclusive spaces or helps them in ways they pobably wouldn't help a straight white guy from an upper-middle class background. As any political solution this can either solve real problems or be pie in the sky, but hey they are trying to help.
Do we actually know that yet though? Handedness seems to be genetic, but for the rest we really don't know the causes.
> "If you are born trans, that is okay, we accept you." ... this should be a acceptable view to you too.
Why? It shouldn't matter if it's innate, a development 'disorder', a choice, or a result of trauma or social contagion. We can just accept people anyway.
Yeah we know that (for various definitions of "know", but the evidence suggests biological factors have the most impact). There could be more research on that topic (and there would have been if the Nazis didn't burn down the first research institute that researched that field). This is a good starting point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruenc...
> Why? It shouldn't matter if it's innate, a development 'disorder', a choice, or a result of trauma or social contagion. We can just accept people anyway.
Then we agree. And I am not sure "The" left wouldn't agree with the both of us as well. Most leftists I know are also pretty accepting of similar conditions (e.g. mental health acceptance, etc).