but... but the bathrooms! and the children's sports! /s
it's still baffling to me how incredibly irrelevant niche cases dominate the entire discourse.
it's still baffling to me how incredibly irrelevant niche cases dominate the entire discourse.
HN does this constantly with the surveillance, bring up one case of police abusing it, it’s exactly the same thing.
Because in this case, we're talking about maybe a few dozen (if that) relevant cases in trans youth [1]. With police/secret services abusing surveillance... it's huge enough that LOVEINT [2] is a term, and at least 50 cases were serious enough to be brought under official investigation [3].
[1] https://glaad.org/fact-sheet-for-reporters-transgender-parti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol...
Well... one is a niche problem barely impacting anyone. The news reports surrounding the topic of trans youth in sports are all focusing on less than a handful of students. The other is a problem that can be found across the planet with an insane amount of cases never making it to light because no one ever does audits - or if there are audits done, they get circumvented by shared accounts like in this infamous case in Germany [1].
[1] https://www.zeit.de/news/2022-05/12/nsu-2-0-beamter-berichte...
Because there's about 1% of people who are trans in the US [1] and most other populations, on top of that come a further about 1.7% people who are somewhere on the intersex spectrum [2].
Democrats aren't willing to throw literally millions of people under the bus. Republicans aren't just willing to cast them aside - they are knowingly driving trans people to extinction.
[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...
[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/sexual-orientation-and-gender-ident...
A majority of people support wage hikes [1], anti-trust laws [2], higher taxes for the rich [3], at least a general responsibility of the government for healthcare insurance [4] and even a full or barely restricted right to abortions of pregnancies [5].
But neither of this gets done despite bipartisan support, because Republican megadonors and their networks heavily keep the GOP in line. And for trans people, it's the same. The anti-trans rhetoric in the GOP gets pushed primarily by Evangelical influence groups, the rest of the GOP does not care, and neither do the voters.
[1] https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice...
[2] https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/47798-most-americans-oppos...
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/19/most-amer...
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/10/most-amer...
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49712333
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/08/11/most-amer...
[3] https://prri.org/press-release/new-survey-finds-strong-major...
Trying to abstract history into major shifts that are attributable to inanimate objects is just very ludic fallacy.
I say this all to say it surprises me how many republicans I know are pro freedom until it hits certain topics... Pro 2A and anti-(an adult can choose a different hormonal profile for their own body) is an odd pairing in my mind. Pro free-speach like Alex Jones / Citizens united but anti-(choosing to wear clothes or other adornments/appearance of the other gender) is an odd pairing in my mind.
The real stat is much higher than 90%, in case you were curious.
There are now more bills attempting to "solve" the problem of trans girl's in sports (and it is girls, to be clear, trans boys are never an issue) than there are trans girls in sports. It's fucking pathetic.
My muscles are gone y'all. Like I've had to buy more breaker bars and larger tools so I can keep working on my cars, otherwise I simply could not break bolts anymore.
It's gradual, it's not all at once and I am still slightly taller and heavier-set than the average American woman, so I do have an advantage through having more mass, but anyone that's larger than the average American woman will also have that so it's not really an advantage, just a fact of having a larger body.
Something like waiting until male puberty is already pretty far along and doing extensive strength training and then transitioning and competing immediately in a sport that puts a heavy premium on strength. I think most sports already have rules that would prevent this.
For someone following a more normal transitioning trajectory, there would be zero advantage; probably a significant disadvantage.
A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition). Individual sports can have rules to prevent the (primarily hypothetical) abusive cases without preventing children from participating in normal social activities. No one is saying that someone who's 200 lb of solid muscle and started HRT a month ago should be able to compete against girls in football or powerlifting, but pickleball, sure go for it.
That I think is the core issue. Way too many people try to live way too hard through their children. Wherever you look, either in the US or (where I'm from) Germany... you'll find absolutely absurd behavior from completely unhinged parents. Just yesterday, that was a topic discussed here [1].
I would agree that the number of people we are talking about is very small. It was to begin with a very niche issue.
As someone who's been into weightlifting and only casual observer-like in regards to testosterone therapy, this doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. After taking TRT/Steroids a person retains a good deal of the muscle/strength they gained even after cessation ... It surprises me to hear that this wouldnt carry over to sports where muscle/strength/power matter.
Additionally, you have to realize that a major concern on the right is that academia itself has become ideological to the point where only politically acceptable studies can be 1) studied and more importantly 2) published. There's a lot of people out there afraid to speak what appears to them (and their work) to be truth for fear of the backlash and career consequences.
Quite the contrary. If you want to publish something going against "the narrative" (if something like that exists in the first place) has never been easier than now. Proper keywords and the far-right and their pseudomedia are going to give even the worst quackery a time in the spotlight - just look at RFK Jr.
Oh complete and utter twaddle.
Academia trends toward progressive views because the more educated you get, assuming you have principles and employ critical thinking consistently, the more ridiculous the positions of the right tend to look. You cannot look at the totality of climate change data and go "well clearly it's not man made" unless you either don't understand it, or cherry pick it to oblivion. You can't look at the history of Austerity politics, deployed both here and in the UK by our respective free market goblins (Reagan and Thatcher) and hold that it's good for anyone at all apart from those who are already wealthy.
This boogeyman of BIG SCIENCE holding down all the conservatives is complete and utter dreck. Show me literally one example of it. Show me one individual who's life was ruined and their career decimated to uphold ideological ends.
https://www.campusreform.org/article/professor-punished-oppo...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/elite-academia-...
Sports regulatory bodies still test for hormonal PED, but their concerns have long swayed away from them because of the fact that they are so easy to detect and have the built in disadvantage of potentially altering your life negatively outside of sport. The current concerns have shifted to peptides and other forms of PEDs, because they are much harder to detect because they are 1) often naturally occurring but in smaller quantities, 2) don't actually directly act on the musculoskeletal system, but rather trigger natural processes that act on the system, and 3) often have half-lives dramatically shorter than most drug tests can even account for, and therefore require near continuous monitoring.
The extrapolation I'm making, and admitting it's an extrapolation, is that a sexed at birth male competing in womens sports will have had a developmental period of hormonal advantage over females which follows them regardless of gender identity.
That doesn't mean people who know what they're talking about are "ideological," it means you're talking out your backside.
Basically, the activists I'm talking about overreached by:
- Pushing for speech control around preferred pronouns
- Being overrepresented among Reddit mods, thus becoming to some extent the "face of censorship" for many highly online people
- Equating the mere act of disbelieving trans people's chosen gender identities with out-and-out bigotry of the KKK kind
- Talking about a mythical "trans genocide" and getting angry when people questioned its existence
- Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that
Etc.
So what we have now in the highly online discourse is essentially a battle between niche militant trans activists who seem to illogically believe that they are on the brink of being put into extermination camps, on the one hand, and niche militant anti-trans fanatics who exaggerate the relatively rare cases of trans people doing bad things for the sake of pushing an overall anti-left agenda.
The militant trans activists I speak of seemingly just can't stop themselves from continuously providing people who actually hate trans people and people who just hate the left with more and more ammunition by having a prominent online presence while saying a mix of untrue and highly questionable things.
Before anyone jumps in with an angry reaction... yes, if it's not already clear from what I wrote, I also think that the right has a problem with insane deluded militant people.
I am not going to say much more here because I’m fairly certain none of this will get through to you given the tone of your comment. Trans people are far more likely to be victims in washrooms than to be perpetrators.
As for trans genocide, I mean sure, you can make an argument that there is a trans genocide by really really stretching the meaning of the word "genocide" or by using certain parts of highly technical definitions of "genocide". But when trans activists speak of "trans genocide", they are trying to appeal to the emotional resonance of more popularly central examples of genocides, ones with mass killings. If we use the common meaning of the word "genocide", the one that is intended the vast majority of the time the word is used, there is no trans genocide.
As for washrooms, note that I never said that I'm against trans people using their chosen genders' washrooms. What I said is that many trans activists pushed to do this long before the American public had become ready for something of that nature, which contributed to a backlash against the trans movement in general.
because enough people don't have any basic politeness left any more, to the contrary, they're actively pissing someone off.
> However, consider the situation if a white coworker started insisting that people refer to him as black, and you could get fired for not referring to him as black.
That one has been a thing for far longer than the entire trans issue, with it peaking in the rise of rap/hiphop music (and leading to the term "whigger" [1]). It eventually sort-of sorted itself once it was no longer edgy to troll people with such moves.
> If we use the common meaning of the word "genocide", the one that is intended the vast majority of the time the word is used, there is no trans genocide.
The common meaning is "a group of people, almost always the national majority, tries to get another group of people extinct". Given that trans youth already have among the highest suicide ratios, it is likely that policies restricting trans youth lead to more trans youth attempting suicide - and guess what, there's proof of exactly this happening [2].
> Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that
Part of that is the ridiculousness in how many bathrooms are built. On festivals (portapotties), airplanes, trains and most if not all toilets for the disabled, there is no such thing as gender segregation at all - you wait in line, enter the next free booth, do your thing and that's it. Pretty much everyone has used a gender-neutral bathroom at least once in their life, chances are high you used one of them in the last 12 months.
There is no reason at all why toilets cannot be converted to "equal designations". I'd even go as far as to say that "equal" bathrooms are safer for everyone, simply because the facility will be higher frequented.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigger
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/09/25/nx...