What's sad is how effective this is. Religious groups figured out a few years ago that anti-porn groups accomplish nothing, but if you start an anti-trafficking group you can restrict porn access.
As the Heritage Foundation admitted:
> Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids. No child should be conditioned to think that permanently damaging their healthy bodies to try to become something they can never be is even remotely a good idea.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/kids-online-safe...
Look, it's cool to be trans, no problem. These women I know are good people and net contributors to society. But they are off the ideological deep-end, and would happily spend 3 hours at the family BBQ lecturing an impressionable 13 year old about how those weird body feelings are very likely gender dismorphia. They're just as drunk on their flavor of delusional social media as any other religious nut is crazy about God.
If you think you could be convinced by anyone that you're not living out your true gender identity, I have news for you... Most people, children too, are not having those thoughts unless there's actually a journey waiting for them.
This isn’t an actual risk to anybody, and I can’t believe I have to say that.
I do wonder how many would detransition if it wasn’t too embarrassing for them or because they’re effectively stuck that way if they did bottom surgery. Certainly I’m sure there are many more that quietly do it and not be a part of a community around it - I know of one person who did.
I’m sure there are many reasons people transition. For instance, there used to be a subreddit that collected (many) trans people commenting on how much them transitioning or being the other gender turned them on (Reddit being Reddit, it was banned). Some might do it because it feels like a way to get a new start. Some might do it because it’ll get them attention. Some, I’m sure, do it because they genuinely feel like they have the wrong body.
All of those could (of course) be affected by social interactions, with only the last one being positive. Unfortunately it would be really hard for us to ever know the true statistics, as that sort of thing is hard for even the person experiencing it to suss out.
Orders of magnitude more people are maimed, disfigured, or outright killed by:
1. Guns.
2. Vehicles.
3. Alcohol.
Weirdly, suspiciously weirdly, the people that are vehemently for age-verification to protect potential trans-indoctrination victims from any risk of bodily harm are the very same people that are very much in favour of those three things. Or at least, show zero apparent interest in using age verification to block 2nd amendment nuts spreading their propaganda -- and I use the word very literally -- because the NRA is funded by Russia[1], or blocking young impressionable kids watching Nascar and being influenced to engage in dangerous speeding, or blocking alcohol advertising from ever being seen by a minor.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/764879242/nra-was-foreign-ass...
Well I wonder how many would transition in the first place if the culture (and law) allowed for gender fluidity without judgement or violence.
Also: not speaking for all queer people here, but if a person wants to detransition because they changed their mind/feel differently as they age/whatever the fuck reason, that’s fine!
Go read some threads on the detrans subreddit.
And FYI, I've seen it happen with one of my own family members - someone who so far as I can tell isn't 'a man in a woman's body', but rather just someone who never fit in and was always a bit of a social outcast.
Their struggle was never their bloody gender, it was their struggle to find a way to fit into the world.
And that's what a lot of transitioning actually is. Because human psychology works such that when we're not fitting in, when we feel insecure and out of place, a subconscious pressure emerges to reinvent ourselves due to the current formula not working for us.
It's offensive to me that you'd make such claims whilst clearly so naive about it.
While you may think they are being affected by certain kinds of messaging, you also have to interrogate that you yourself are being affected by other kinds of messaging, shaping your view on how gender functions.
This is the exact same reasoning behind anti-gay laws around the world: That telling people it's OK to be gay will cause them to somehow "choose" to be gay, which to anyone who is actually either straight or gay is completely absurd - they couldn't change that aspect of themselves even if they wanted to.
But identity as a whole is a very murky thing - if you ask me it's largely an adaptive abstraction that our minds invent.
The purpose of said adaption is to adopt a role which functions within the tribe/society for purposes of survival.
I think we way over-simplify the whole thing by making it about gender and gender roles.
And it's that over-simplification that I would label as the ideology. Because that's what ideologies do: they take the complex ambiguities of the world and try to cram them into a simplistic box.
Can you explain what you mean with trans ideology? because AFAIK 'ideology' means a collection of beliefs or philosophies, and I don't really understand how that applies to a physiological condition, like it does in the case of religion.
>> Keeping trans content away [...]
Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"? I mean, from a pure logical point of view the statement is correct, because "trans content" is a subset of "LGBT+ content", and therefore "suppressing LGBT+ content" is technically correct, but it's at least misleading. The left's version of this would be something like "twitter is suppressing anti-immigration content!", and the actual example is some alt-right commenter saying that immigrants should be lynched. Immigrants being lynched is certainly an subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading.
Just one of the many, many, many reasons that trans rights are human rights.
It quite literally is the slippery slope argument. You just don't want to call it that because the term is almost always used in the context of a fallacy, and you think you're right. It's like "freedom fighters" vs "terrorists". Nobody calls themselves terrorists, even terrorists.
Moreover the "It's effective because it sounds "reasonable" on its face, but it's a ploy" argument works equally well for any side, eg. it's not hard to imagine someone on the right saying "today it's Jan 6th protesters and that might seem reasonable, but tomorrow it's anyone at unite the right protests, and when president AOC's in power it's anyone who's protesting against trans surgery for minors".
I have personally witnessed this tactic being used by anti-LGBTQ bigots for decades.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-ag...
Not really. Do you think the people attempting to ban trans content are otherwise fine with kids being gay/lesbian/etc? Do you think they view gay/lesbian identities as legitimate, rather than unnatural perversion? It’s the same rhetoric in my experience, we’re all just deviants making choices. It seems like casual uninvested people just got used to gays being in the public eye and anti-gay people lost the ability to get anyone to care about that position. Turns out they’re just normal people trying to live their lives.
> Immigrants being lynched is certainly a subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading
I don’t think your analogy works unless you believe that transgender people are uniquely extreme compared to other identities. If true, I think that more shows your prejudice than anything. Maybe if enough trans people end up in the public eye, casual uninvested people will stop thinking negatively about trans people generally too. Maybe one day they’re realize we’re just people trying to live our lives.