[mst]

The complete failure to understand enbies is, indeed, unfortunate.

I stand by my estimate that it gets a lot more right than it gets wrong, however.

My priors are based on conversations with a bunch of trans people; a mere assertion of "shocking ignorance" and "transphobia" largely leaves me thinking that you're so certain of your correctness you don't believe arguments need to even be made, which is not a position I can really rebut.

However, I shared the article, unfortunate parts and all, such that people can draw their own conclusions, and I'd continue to invite people to read and decide for themselves.

[damnyou]

It is not just "unfortunate", it betrays their actual views, which is that we should be ready to sacrifice people's lives on the altar of patriarchal gender norms.

A lot of the more polite bigots will be comfortable making concessions to the trans people who conform to patriarchal roles (and hey, good on Pluckrose for being slightly less bad than charlatans like Stock) but will have knives out for anyone whose existence challenges them. This is a problem.

The only way to true gender liberation is through abolishing the patriarchy.

[mst]

> It is not just "unfortunate", it betrays their actual views, which is that we should be ready to sacrifice people's lives on the altar of patriarchal gender norms.

Helen is hardly gender role essentialist and in fact quite substantially non-conforming to many female gender norms and visibly proud to be her.

To assume that her failure (as of the time of writing, at least) to comprehend non-binary identities "betrays" anything except a lack of comprehension is ... unfounded, at best.

[damnyou]

The entire idea of "transtrenders" is a made up one designed to perpetuate oppressive gender roles and work against solidarity within the trans community. The fact that she takes it seriously is pretty goddamn founded, as far as evidence goes.

[mst]

Not precisely true. IIRC it first came about during one of the iterations of the tumblr trans wars to describe people who identified as things like "AFAB demigirl" and kept claiming that people who wanted to medically transition "just wanted to be able to pretend they were cis" and therefore "weren't really trans", which understandably went down about as well as a shart in a spacesuit with the people with severe physical dysphoria.

There was a stupendous amount of circular firing squad style stupidity to go around back in those days.

[damnyou]

One of my closest friends is an AFAB demigirl.

Despite the bad ideas of a subset of trans people (morphological liberation is very important to me), the idea of "transtrenders" is bogus and oppressive.

[mst]

My point is that it's entirely possible to encounter the term in a context where the people being described by the term were being bogus and oppressive, so it's impossible to know a priori whether somebody using that term is an enemy or merely an imperfect ally.

Successful activism generally requires forming as large a coalition as possible, and insta dismissing somebody as a bigot for not getting everything right first time is not an effective way to do that.