I think the "LGBT" framing has become a massive misstep for the LGBs of the world. I'm more liberal, and I'd guess that I have a more positive view of the LGBs than most of this comment section will. Every LGB I've known has been pretty vanilla and normal.
But the T issue is completely difference. There's no LGB surgeries, no mental-illness issues for LGBs, no weird metaphysics about the concept of gender, and no elimination of single sex spaces.
It's as if we had one movement that combined both higher minimum wages and rent controls. Then you have people who hate rent controls supporting the "MWRC" movement because they want higher minimum wages. Just bizarre stuff.
Regarding teachers talking about their spouses in school. As a member of the "previous generation" (grade school in the early 70's), I recall all our teachers were referred to as "Mrs", but we had absolutely no interest in their personal lives and I don't remember any of them telling us about their husbands or children. We didn't care about our teacher's personal lives until high school and then mostly we made fun of them. My point is, kids live in their own kid's world and I'm pretty sure they're not clamoring for information about their teacher's home life. All the complaints about not being able to talk about heterosexual relations is coming from the adults, not the kids.
"You can only rationally do so if you think the cis-hetero individual should be thought of as the default, idealized form of a human being."
This is correct. It doesn't mean we should punish adults for homosexuality or whatever. But heteronormativity is essential for human flourishing. "Oh but we'll have synthetic wombs and blah blah" whatever. It wont be enough to make up for the anti-natalist side effects of this ideology. The classical liberals have their heads in the sand on this issue and conservatives caved the moment elite people started calling them bigots.
We'll see if this recent successful pushback has any teeth or is just a flash in the pan. I have my doubts since nobody of any importance in national politics or corporate governance will do anything about it. In fact they are it's biggest supporters! PGLE isn't going to stop because of a GOP win here and there.
I'm gonna have to go with the Isaiah Berlin Fox vs. Hedgehog analogy, "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing," with liberals being foxes and conservatives being hedgehogs.
Liberals know about things like heteronormativity and "gender expression", that there have always been gay people and other sexual minorities and that these people need to be centered so their self-esteem can be raised to hetero levels, which in their belief system is necessary to attain Justice and Equality.
Conservatives know that the liberal project of "social liberation" has no limiting principle and that if liberals are willing to teach Queer Theory to children and encourage their "gender journeys" behind the backs of parents while lying to them about it, then the liberal project is a dagger aimed directly at their parental rights and authority and at their traditional religious beliefs.
Are public libraries hosting Hooter girl story hours? Are government agencies flying the Hooters flag for a month out of every year? Is every academic institution and corporation forcing people to write an essay about how they will personally advance the righteous cause of Hooterism as a condition of admission or employment?
Conservatives may be simple-minded and intellectually inconsistent/dishonest, but they are smart enough to realize when the entire ruling class of the Western world is pissing on their leg while telling them it’s raining.
Maybe it is a British private school thing but we weren't supposed to know anything about our teachers, even their first names were semi secret.
I am not sure conservatives would be happy with complete symmetry, but it strikes me that teachers who want to talk about fetishes are largely GBTQ (not sure any lesbians want to talk about it) and parents from both sides would be equally upset if a teacher wanted to discuss heterosexual BDSM or similar.
Aren't conservatives anti-Hooters? Isn't it just low salience in the current world.
When it comes to discussing spouses with kids, there's also something of a social contract involved. If teachers can't be trusted to use discretion about sharing details with their students (e.g. telling kids you're married: OK, telling kids how active your sex life is: not OK), then the policy hammer might have to come down and say teachers are not to discuss their personal lives at all.
Shapiro's argument about teachers is indeed retarded, but who is taking kids to Hooters? This sounds like a "your terms are acceptable" moment; the left may be smarter, but precisely because of its cultural hegemony, it's less able to see things from the cultural conservative point of view. Thus it assumes social conservatives believe that no sexual restraint should ever be imposed on men, only women.
As for Richard;'s last point, I don't really buy into the idea that there will be many conservative victories here. Any fleeting rightward drift really just represents the Boomers and Gen X's last hurrah. Once Millennials and Gen Z are fully running the show, that whole game will be over, submission to almighty Pride will be demanded with more vigor than ever.
I agree. I think conservatives made a mistake by trying to apply consistency to heterosexual and homosexual relations.
They should just say it like it is: one is normal and foundational to human existence, the other is a perversion.
What I said is outside the Overton Window and so is considered shocking, but it needs to be said, because its the only way we get out of this hell. Conservatives playing by the rules set by the left, this utterly false idea of 'equality', is what led us to our current nightmare of kids being brainwashed and mutilated.
For the record, I absolutely don't think kids belong at Hooters, either. That said, it needs to be pointed out that kids aren't going to see much at Hooters that they aren't likely to see at many public beaches, either, which cannot be said for a gay man in a costume, dancing around, pretending he's Britney Spears or whatever to satisfy some fetish or compulsion.
I don't know that conservatives are being mealy mouthed or hypocritical here. I think the fundamental difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality in an educational setting is that teaching kids about the mechanics of human reproduction is different from teaching them about things that happen to make certain people aroused. In this sense, teaching kids about homosexuality is grooming in the same way that discussing heterosexual fetishes is grooming -- you're normalizing adults having sexually explicit conversations with kids that don't involve teaching them how babies are made. You don't have to actively "marginalize" (or whatever) homosexuality; this is just a natural understanding people have when LGBT doesn't have a stranglehold on the culture.
I'm reluctant to accept that only conservatives are prone to reacting from the gut. Isn't it just that liberals, typically being more educated, are more skilled at rationalising their gut feelings?
The handy thing about the trans stuff is how it reveals those rationalisation chops. Because, as Richard helpfully pointed out in his Twitter essay (linked in the piece) this revolves around metaphysical principles more than the scientifically verifiable or falsifiable arguments about other types of social justice.
So I'm not confident, really, that we aren't conflating intelligence with word skills when we compare how conservatives and liberals parse the edge cases of sexual identity.
You're missing a BIG part of the equation. And that is that it is not only conservative Republicans who feel strongly about money hungry surgeons mutilating children in the name of gender identity. It is not only Republicans who are concerned about biological males with penises and testicles, who "identify" as women, RAPING biological women in "women's prisons."
You're trying to make it sound like ONLY Repubs are concerned with the troubling issues pertaining to the LGBTQ community and transgenderism, and that's wrong. There are scores of Dems who don't believe a child can consent to a life altering surgery, that involves castration and sterilization. I'm a Democrat and I share many of the same concerns, so you're wrong on that front. It's not only Repubs, it's Dems, too. Welcome to 2023. Also, I strongly encourage you to go to YouTube and listen to the Detransition stories. They are heartbreaking and offer an extremely important perspective that can no longer be denied or pushed under the proverbial rug.
"Conservatives granted that homosexuality isn’t inherently inferior to heterosexuality. "
That is the leftist position and not the conservative position. Conservatives have never granted this premise.
Conservatives know the biological reality is that the equipment is designed for a certain use. They believe using the equipment incorrectly is weird, and quite inferior. But using it wrong isn't hurting those adults too much. So fine. If you must.
To keep things apolitical. People walk on their legs and not their hands. While you "can" walk on your hands, and even might enjoy it, that is not how the equipment was designed to be used. Walking on your hands in the supermarket is awkward for the rest of us is - but we can live with it because we are inherently accommodating and nice people.
But teachers walking on their hands in school all day. And corporations trying to sell handshoes to children gets really worrisome. Because this is just going to cause lots of kids to live difficult lives that don't need to do so. Now the handwalkers are doing harm. The children are now being explicitly told by these teachers and corporations that handwalking will solve their teenage angst. And it WON'T. The problem with LGBTQ is the proselytizing and recruiting.
While we can tolerate handwalking, their is no reason on the planet to encourage it. It is not "normal" in a very real way. And every person is "not normal" in some (or many) ways. I have no desire to punish people who are different (as we all are in some way). But that doesn't mean society needs to encourage unnormal behaviors in malleable children - who are best served to be as normal as they can be (and compensate for the rest).
This is getting long, but you will like "mouse utopia experiment 25". It explains an awful lot.
And your shtick about conservatives being stupid is getting old and typically disrespectfully leftist.
Liberals largely control our moral universe and specifically taboos, which leaves conservatives to fight culture wars with a hand tied behind their backs. So it is with this issue, where questioning whether it is in society's best interest to celebrate rather than stigmatize LBTQ is beyond the pale.
But I don't think flawed argumentation is unique to conservative advocacy. Most advocacy relies on emotion over great argument, including wokeness, which is obviously remarkably successful and dumb.
I think the "LGBT" framing has become a massive misstep for the LGBs of the world. I'm more liberal, and I'd guess that I have a more positive view of the LGBs than most of this comment section will. Every LGB I've known has been pretty vanilla and normal.
But the T issue is completely difference. There's no LGB surgeries, no mental-illness issues for LGBs, no weird metaphysics about the concept of gender, and no elimination of single sex spaces.
It's as if we had one movement that combined both higher minimum wages and rent controls. Then you have people who hate rent controls supporting the "MWRC" movement because they want higher minimum wages. Just bizarre stuff.
Regarding teachers talking about their spouses in school. As a member of the "previous generation" (grade school in the early 70's), I recall all our teachers were referred to as "Mrs", but we had absolutely no interest in their personal lives and I don't remember any of them telling us about their husbands or children. We didn't care about our teacher's personal lives until high school and then mostly we made fun of them. My point is, kids live in their own kid's world and I'm pretty sure they're not clamoring for information about their teacher's home life. All the complaints about not being able to talk about heterosexual relations is coming from the adults, not the kids.
"You can only rationally do so if you think the cis-hetero individual should be thought of as the default, idealized form of a human being."
This is correct. It doesn't mean we should punish adults for homosexuality or whatever. But heteronormativity is essential for human flourishing. "Oh but we'll have synthetic wombs and blah blah" whatever. It wont be enough to make up for the anti-natalist side effects of this ideology. The classical liberals have their heads in the sand on this issue and conservatives caved the moment elite people started calling them bigots.
We'll see if this recent successful pushback has any teeth or is just a flash in the pan. I have my doubts since nobody of any importance in national politics or corporate governance will do anything about it. In fact they are it's biggest supporters! PGLE isn't going to stop because of a GOP win here and there.
I'm gonna have to go with the Isaiah Berlin Fox vs. Hedgehog analogy, "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing," with liberals being foxes and conservatives being hedgehogs.
Liberals know about things like heteronormativity and "gender expression", that there have always been gay people and other sexual minorities and that these people need to be centered so their self-esteem can be raised to hetero levels, which in their belief system is necessary to attain Justice and Equality.
Conservatives know that the liberal project of "social liberation" has no limiting principle and that if liberals are willing to teach Queer Theory to children and encourage their "gender journeys" behind the backs of parents while lying to them about it, then the liberal project is a dagger aimed directly at their parental rights and authority and at their traditional religious beliefs.
I think both can be true.
Are public libraries hosting Hooter girl story hours? Are government agencies flying the Hooters flag for a month out of every year? Is every academic institution and corporation forcing people to write an essay about how they will personally advance the righteous cause of Hooterism as a condition of admission or employment?
Conservatives may be simple-minded and intellectually inconsistent/dishonest, but they are smart enough to realize when the entire ruling class of the Western world is pissing on their leg while telling them it’s raining.
Maybe it is a British private school thing but we weren't supposed to know anything about our teachers, even their first names were semi secret.
I am not sure conservatives would be happy with complete symmetry, but it strikes me that teachers who want to talk about fetishes are largely GBTQ (not sure any lesbians want to talk about it) and parents from both sides would be equally upset if a teacher wanted to discuss heterosexual BDSM or similar.
Aren't conservatives anti-Hooters? Isn't it just low salience in the current world.
When it comes to discussing spouses with kids, there's also something of a social contract involved. If teachers can't be trusted to use discretion about sharing details with their students (e.g. telling kids you're married: OK, telling kids how active your sex life is: not OK), then the policy hammer might have to come down and say teachers are not to discuss their personal lives at all.
Since you're the smart/intellectual conservative, what's your rationale for banning LGBTQ-related discussions in front of kids?
Or is your argument that gays etc. are morally inferior to heterosexuals and it was always okay to persecute them?
Shapiro's argument about teachers is indeed retarded, but who is taking kids to Hooters? This sounds like a "your terms are acceptable" moment; the left may be smarter, but precisely because of its cultural hegemony, it's less able to see things from the cultural conservative point of view. Thus it assumes social conservatives believe that no sexual restraint should ever be imposed on men, only women.
As for Richard;'s last point, I don't really buy into the idea that there will be many conservative victories here. Any fleeting rightward drift really just represents the Boomers and Gen X's last hurrah. Once Millennials and Gen Z are fully running the show, that whole game will be over, submission to almighty Pride will be demanded with more vigor than ever.
I agree. I think conservatives made a mistake by trying to apply consistency to heterosexual and homosexual relations.
They should just say it like it is: one is normal and foundational to human existence, the other is a perversion.
What I said is outside the Overton Window and so is considered shocking, but it needs to be said, because its the only way we get out of this hell. Conservatives playing by the rules set by the left, this utterly false idea of 'equality', is what led us to our current nightmare of kids being brainwashed and mutilated.
For the record, I absolutely don't think kids belong at Hooters, either. That said, it needs to be pointed out that kids aren't going to see much at Hooters that they aren't likely to see at many public beaches, either, which cannot be said for a gay man in a costume, dancing around, pretending he's Britney Spears or whatever to satisfy some fetish or compulsion.
I don't know that conservatives are being mealy mouthed or hypocritical here. I think the fundamental difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality in an educational setting is that teaching kids about the mechanics of human reproduction is different from teaching them about things that happen to make certain people aroused. In this sense, teaching kids about homosexuality is grooming in the same way that discussing heterosexual fetishes is grooming -- you're normalizing adults having sexually explicit conversations with kids that don't involve teaching them how babies are made. You don't have to actively "marginalize" (or whatever) homosexuality; this is just a natural understanding people have when LGBT doesn't have a stranglehold on the culture.
I'm reluctant to accept that only conservatives are prone to reacting from the gut. Isn't it just that liberals, typically being more educated, are more skilled at rationalising their gut feelings?
The handy thing about the trans stuff is how it reveals those rationalisation chops. Because, as Richard helpfully pointed out in his Twitter essay (linked in the piece) this revolves around metaphysical principles more than the scientifically verifiable or falsifiable arguments about other types of social justice.
So I'm not confident, really, that we aren't conflating intelligence with word skills when we compare how conservatives and liberals parse the edge cases of sexual identity.
You're missing a BIG part of the equation. And that is that it is not only conservative Republicans who feel strongly about money hungry surgeons mutilating children in the name of gender identity. It is not only Republicans who are concerned about biological males with penises and testicles, who "identify" as women, RAPING biological women in "women's prisons."
You're trying to make it sound like ONLY Repubs are concerned with the troubling issues pertaining to the LGBTQ community and transgenderism, and that's wrong. There are scores of Dems who don't believe a child can consent to a life altering surgery, that involves castration and sterilization. I'm a Democrat and I share many of the same concerns, so you're wrong on that front. It's not only Repubs, it's Dems, too. Welcome to 2023. Also, I strongly encourage you to go to YouTube and listen to the Detransition stories. They are heartbreaking and offer an extremely important perspective that can no longer be denied or pushed under the proverbial rug.
"Conservatives granted that homosexuality isn’t inherently inferior to heterosexuality. "
That is the leftist position and not the conservative position. Conservatives have never granted this premise.
Conservatives know the biological reality is that the equipment is designed for a certain use. They believe using the equipment incorrectly is weird, and quite inferior. But using it wrong isn't hurting those adults too much. So fine. If you must.
To keep things apolitical. People walk on their legs and not their hands. While you "can" walk on your hands, and even might enjoy it, that is not how the equipment was designed to be used. Walking on your hands in the supermarket is awkward for the rest of us is - but we can live with it because we are inherently accommodating and nice people.
But teachers walking on their hands in school all day. And corporations trying to sell handshoes to children gets really worrisome. Because this is just going to cause lots of kids to live difficult lives that don't need to do so. Now the handwalkers are doing harm. The children are now being explicitly told by these teachers and corporations that handwalking will solve their teenage angst. And it WON'T. The problem with LGBTQ is the proselytizing and recruiting.
While we can tolerate handwalking, their is no reason on the planet to encourage it. It is not "normal" in a very real way. And every person is "not normal" in some (or many) ways. I have no desire to punish people who are different (as we all are in some way). But that doesn't mean society needs to encourage unnormal behaviors in malleable children - who are best served to be as normal as they can be (and compensate for the rest).
This is getting long, but you will like "mouse utopia experiment 25". It explains an awful lot.
And your shtick about conservatives being stupid is getting old and typically disrespectfully leftist.
Liberals largely control our moral universe and specifically taboos, which leaves conservatives to fight culture wars with a hand tied behind their backs. So it is with this issue, where questioning whether it is in society's best interest to celebrate rather than stigmatize LBTQ is beyond the pale.
But I don't think flawed argumentation is unique to conservative advocacy. Most advocacy relies on emotion over great argument, including wokeness, which is obviously remarkably successful and dumb.