Aaron Ross Powell ☸️One of the (dumb) arguments against acceptance of transgender people takes disagreement about the definition of “man” and “woman” as dangerous to a functioning society. Setting aside that this argument depends first upon confusion about the difference between gender and biological sex, the idea that we need to agree one this particular ontological fact is very odd when the people making the argument don’t say the same about other ontological (and metaphysical) disagreements.
It is not clear, for example, why a disagreement about the specific details of the definition of “man” or “woman” is the kind of unsettled claim that would “destroy society,” as anti-trans people frame it, while a disagreement about, for instance, the various characteristics of a divine being, the nature of the afterlife, etc., wouldn’t.
Yes I know that religious people have and do see these other disagreements as important, and many American Christians point to the lack of widely held belief in the truthfulness of their versions of them as signs of civilizational decline. But they don’t center them in the culture war the way they do, in this case, the rather less consequential definition of man and woman. They manage to get along fine with religious diversity, as long as the religiously diverse join them in hating trans people.
➡ @arossp This is a very edgelord take, but I think they are ok with religious diversity because we went too easy on them. If there were stricter laws around child abuse and brainwashing, the kind of laws that intruded into people's private lives the way anti-trans legislation does, the fundie Christians would not be ok with that at all. It sounds anti-diversity but it could instead be framed as 'religious justice', 'freedom of thought', or 'faith by choice'. You can have diversity that tries to address coerced belief, but the current version of 'diversity' we practice involves looking the other way when Christians abuse people, so of course they find that palatable.
fakegreekgrill