…I could have told you that 🤷
Not my usual kind of source (Xitter), but I want any centrists out there who ask trans people to “just get along” with actual hate groups that want them eradicated to know that it doesn’t work.
There is no such thing as a reasonable bigot, by definition.
This is why advocating for “finding middle ground”, or centrism, or this repackaged warmed over Abundance crap is so toxic.
You can’t match these people half way. you have to beat them
Most arguments have a middle ground, but its a case by case basis. In this case the sides are:
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let a marginalized group experience a little joy and feel comfortable in their bodies
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refuse to accept that a middle school understanding of gender and biology might not be totally correct.
Meeting in the middle here is how you get second class citizens.
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Beat them with rods is the only method.
(Not sarcasm)
Political centrism works well in a staunch democracy with a certain Overton window. As soon as these Alt-Righters have influence in a country, it doesn’t work anymore.
Some people need to learn about the alt-right’s cultivated ignorance via hard experience.
The rest of us work just fine via observation.
“Meet me halfway”, says the unreasonable man.
You take one step forward, and they take one step backwards.
“Why can’t you meet me halfway?”, complains the unreasonable man.
And thus, conservatism in a nutshell.
I just replied to another comment with this but I’ll put it as a top level comment here because I think it’s important.
I want MORE right wing idiots to realize they’re wrong and join our camp. The more the better. Remember, these people are still our neighbors, they still exist and we will have to interact with them outside our homes. I want more reasonable people, so when we do have converts, please receive them with open arms.
Okay, you were a huge idiot, but welcome to sanity part 1. Of they’re big enough to realize they were wrong (and they’ve had a LOT of brainwashing, it takes a lot for them to snap out of the crazy) we should be big enough to say bygones.
I understand the want for revenge because they were “the enemy”. I understand, they were a huge asshole and now we have to play nice with them? That doesn’t sound fair! But I think we have to, we want to welcome more idiots into sanity and reason. The less idiots out there, the better. And for what it’s worth, there are people that listen to her, if they can now be on the side of reason, they can pull a lot more people with them.
If we don’t we’ll make it harder for people to move out of the right wing camp, and I want much much less people in the right wing camp
Maybe in general, but in this case Wu is a far right genocidal fascist, and not just on trans issues. And it certainly doesn’t seem like she’s changing that except on the one issue that affects her personally. A trans woman fascist is still a fascist, you shouldn’t get points for carving out an exception to your fascism to protect yourself personally.
Part of the problem is, this is not the first time this assault on minorities has happened; and many of the people who voted for Trump were previously thought of as allies who were reformed.
We can even scare our own allies by “making nice” with villains. I remember hearing out a very betrayed voter whose core issue of dismay was hearing Gavin Newsom get cowed by Joe Rogan into saying supporting Trans people was a mistake.
People like Joe Rogan have HURT them. I want you to picture having someone that ruined your life, and picture what it’s like to have them sleeping in your home, based on nothing more than “Hey, bud. We’re good now, right?”
We can even scare our own allies by “making nice” with villains.
There’s a difference between “making nice” in the sense of compromising values as you mention and between giving them a chance to prove they can grow out of their hateful mindset. They’ll have to work for that trust, but we should be willing to forgive and accept them back if they show genuine change.
It wouldn’t be directly moving into your home, but more like the general neighbourhood. If they turn it good neighbours, then their past hostilities can serve as a lesson and an object study, but shouldn’t eternally shackle them.
We should also understand that some people can’t forgive some wounds. Just because it’s the ideal doesn’t mean it will, can or even has to be fully attained.
A good compromise is never just halfway between two policies. It requires understanding both perspectives and addressing their actual problems. So the compromise here would be trans rights for trans people, and free mental health care for anti-trans people.
The Trans Athlete debate also never seems to address the fact that it’s all unfair from the get go. Being born to a poor family? Being born with a birth defect? Being born into an unsupportive family/community? Being born at the wrong time of year?
It also shouldn’t matter how well someone does in sports. No athlete is using their skills in the work place and students shouldn’t need athletics scholarships to pay for school. It should just be for fun with nothing on the line.
In the real world, it doesn’t even cause a real fairness issue. The Olympics started allowing trans competitors in the 90s, but there’s never been a trans medal winner. If there was a real advantage, then you’d expect the best person at some sports in some counties to be trans, so there to be trans athletes competing, and their advantage to put them on the podium. You’d also potentially expect some countries to pad their team with trans people to get more medals. This hasn’t happened.
I think you’re kind of confusing trans people and people with DSDs. The Olympics stopped doing sex testing themselves in the 90’s. There have been a few biological males with DSDs that won women’s medals in the Olympics though. All 3 medals for the women’s 800m at the 2016 Rio Olympics were awarded to biological males, Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba, and Margaret Wambui. Likewise, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are also biologically male (not trans as some people incorrectly claimed) and notably won gold in 2024. They were all wrongly assigned female at birth but have the physical advantages of male puberty.
Ana Caldas is a more specific example of why trans people that are biologically male have an insurmountable advantage in the women’s category.
Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are also biologically male
This is a lie. Wikipedia links to no fewer than 3 sources that confirm this is a lie. I will be blocking you.
“Those cheering fans have embraced Khelif throughout her run in Paris even as she faced an extraordinary amount of scrutiny from world leaders, major celebrities and others who have questioned her eligibility or falsely claimed she was a man.” – https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/algerian-boxer-imane-khelif-fights-for-olympic-gold-after-enduring-abuse-fueled-by-misinformation
'The participation of Algeria’s Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin has proved controversial given they were disqualified from the 2023 World Championships.
“Let’s be very clear, we are talking about women’s boxing,” said Bach at Saturday’s daily IOC briefing.
"We have two boxers who are born as a woman, who have been raised as a woman, who have a passport as a woman and who have competed for many years as a woman.
“This is the clear definition of a woman. There was never any doubt about them being a woman.”’ – https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/articles/c28e88jdprno
'Khelif and a second boxer, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, fell foul of IBA eligibility rules […].
[…] a March 2023 IBA board meeting stated that “the athletes do not meet one of the eligibility criteria”, without stating which one.’ – https://www.reuters.com/sports/olympics/who-is-algerian-boxer-imane-khelif-2024-08-03/
We have two boxers who are born as a woman […]
Right, they were incorrectly assigned female at birth and raised as women but are biologically male, because
the athletes do not meet one of the eligibility criteria
I’m confused as to why you think those quotes support your point. The sex testing was done by an accredited lab, and is the eligibility criteria they do not meet.
The sources people cite for Imane Khelif being biologically male are:
- an opponent with a history of forfeiting after a single punch and claiming after the fact that her opponent was cheating and that was why she was forced to forfeit did it again. When she did that in the past with other opponents, there wasn’t any assumption that the baseless cheating allegations were on gender/sex grounds.
- The IBA, an infamously corrupt organisation with the infamously corrupt Gazprom as its majority owner disqualified her from a tournament without saying why. There are enough historic allegations of them disqualifying people for refusing to throw matches that it’s plausible that the only reason she was disqualified was that she refused to throw a match they wanted to rig.
- JK Rowling said she looked like a man. She does this a lot with a lot of cisgender women due to internalising unrealistic femenine beauty standards.
People have claimed sex testing was done by an accreddited independent lab, but chasing that citation just leads to the IBA saying she was disqualified without elaborating why, which doesn’t support the claim.
There’s no actual evidence to support the speculation. That doesn’t mean it’s untrue, but does mean it’s unreasonable to present it as fact - there’s just as much evidence for alternative speculation, e.g. that she bribed the opponent to forfeit and was disqualified by the IBA because they found she’d bribed people to forfeit in the past, and it would be just as unreasonable to spread that rumour I just invented around as if it were fact.
JK Rowling/IBA/etc don’t matter, they’re just noise. The sex test is what matters. Chasing that citation shows this
https://www.3wiresports.com/articles/2025/6/1/xxyetyl1aewfij823hnfdrsbi1sqjm
And note this correction (from the IOC!), which straightforwardly implies that it’s a DSD case
The weight of evidence strongly points towards Imane Khelif being biologically male. It doesn’t mean the IBA isn’t corrupt, JK Rowling isn’t terrible etc, but none of that matters.
The trans athlete debate was a solved problem before the right wing learned about it. Let the professional authority body of whatever sport, in collaboration with relevant medical professionals, determine what hormone levels or transition progress is qualifying or unqualifying in each individual sport in a case by case basis. Because we tried this before, with genetic testing of Olympic female athletes and enough turned out intersex or androgyn disordered that they stopped doing it.
once again ignoring entirely that trans masc people exist and we are impacted by the bullshit she spouts as well. what impacts one of us affects all of us, and I am not your fucking sister.
Transmascs aren’t part of her personal experience. That makes sense to me. Also they are not the primary enemy of the Anti-Trans people.
Also they are not the primary enemy of the Anti-Trans people.
In the same way that lesbians weren’t the “primary enemy” of Anti-Gay people. They ate shit all the same.
Yes.
It’s sad she’s so close but still on ‘I want a middle ground on these issues’ really? Like…. She is okay with a little disrespect? A little discrimination?
Just a little second class citizen, as a treat.
Taking the middle ground with Nazis is saying you want the holocaust to happen but only three million jews should die.
She is desperate for a place that she can be considered “one of the good ones” with the implicit idea of “there are bad ones and they deserve to be treated worse than the good ones”. She doesn’t understand that the world builds rules on foundational ideas that are just straw men dressed in stereotypes - no one bothers with distinction.
What’s more, if she would just embrace who she is, reject the bigots, and joins the lgbt community…. She will find people who will treat her well. And maybe together maybe we can build a better world……
just like Jenner wants, a little here and there. still not palatable to magats though.
Here is what you should do, Brianna:
Delete your twitter and never post about trans issues again. When you have been so consistently wrong about about something for such a long time, it is the best thing for everyone to simply accept that you shouldn’t be part of the conversation anymore rather than trying to claw your way back into it.
(I know she isn’t actually reading.)
First off, Brianna Wu is not my sister or comrade, so she can write that down.
Goldwater was absolute dogwater but he was right about republicans in 1981…
“On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs."
“Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”
“The problem is, they are getting crazier and crazier.”
They’re not, they just don’t feel the need to hide those parts of their goals any more, and you should have listened to us when we warned you about those goals.
And you should be listening to us now about their future goals.
They kinda are. Not at the fringes, there used to be targeted outing campaigns in the hopes of getting trans people fired or killed back in the day, but what was once extreme personal bigotry has become a pipeline and is increasingly legitimized by mainstream right wing politics. If you ask the average bush era republican if the medical establishment should be forced to institutionalize trans people, they’d reply with a slur for sure but they’d not support overriding medical institutions.
“I thought if I let the leopards eat a little of my face they wouldn’t take it all.”
“You know, I’m starting to think these ethnicity-critical Nazis can’t be reasoned with.”
“I am starting to feel like these face-eating leopards I allied with are eyeing my face with increasing hunger.”
What The hell are extreme Position on “trans people” that come from trans people themselves? Such extreme stuff like “just let everyone life the way they want and dont be fucking dick?”
I seriously have no fucking clue what she could mean that might be somewhat controversial. The only thing I could think of is stuff like “chop everyone’s dick off” but that’s more like extreme feminism and not just “extreme trans”.
I think that people like to imagine this opposite dangerous “extreme” to validate that they can have the right to hold their problematic values. But that other extreme is basically a boogeyman. I hear from frienda and family on every subject “oh but we should be careful to not go too far in the other extreme”. As if it was a real threat. Not only because we are so closer to right wing extremism at the moment but also because how can caring about other people can be “too extreme”.
Even after all of that, she still doesn’t get it:
I think many of our most extreme ideas are bad. But theirs are worse.
The problem is that “our” (using quotes as I’m only progressive, not LGBTQ+) most extreme ideas are only held by a minority of progressive people, and meanwhile the things she thinks are their “most extreme ideas” are the ones that she saw personally, while interacting with people who don’t mind interacting with a trans-woman. Those aren’t their “most extreme ideas.” They’re their mainstream ideas.
She’s comparing our most extreme ideas against their mainstream ideas.
I would love to know what those extreme left ideas that are bad are. Like 99% of progressive ideas boil down to “stop treating other people like shit.”
I’m not sure who she’s referring to when she says our there but whoever it is would be insane to invite her in with that take
Also, she doesn’t say what our most extreme ideas are. The most extreme idea she mentions is allowing trans-women to compete in women’s sports. But I think that’s probably a mainstream belief, and also the one that is best supported by science.
(Meanwhile, the most extreme idea of theirs that she mentions is that trans-women should face non-stop violent rape if they go to prison.)
Also, she doesn’t say what our most extreme ideas are.
If I were to try to define the most extreme positions held by any in our community (in regards to trans issues), they might be:
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Bathroom access based on identity only. Very few people are actually like this. But some folks would say that all that is needed to switch bathrooms is identifying as a different gender. So it’s perfectly acceptable for a person dressed in male clothing, with a beard, using a deep voice, etc. to use the women’s restroom as long as they identify as female. Very few trans folks would be caught dead doing that. Most recognize that there is a certain give and take, a negotiation of social spaces. I imagine most would say you shouldn’t have to pass in order to use the bathroom, but most would recognize that it’s going to cause a ton of unnecessary friction and hate if someone fully masculine-presenting uses the women’s restroom. I don’t think people who can’t pass should be banished from the bathroom that matches their identity. But I myself would be very uncomfortable sharing the women’s restroom with an entirely masculine-presenting person, trans or not.
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Unrealistic/impractical pronoun expectations. Some folks confuse “gender is a social construct” with “nothing is real and nothing matters.” Pronouns are a social construct. That doesn’t mean they mean nothing; it means they have socially constructed definitions. If I invent a new pronoun tomorrow and start demanding others call me it, that isn’t a social construction. That’s just something I invented and am now imposing on others without their participation or consent. In order to socially construct something, there must be a meeting of the minds, a shared milieu of understanding. A pronoun, if you expect people to actually use it, can’t be something you just invented. It has to be something negotiated among a large number of people. This is why the pronouns people tend to actually use are he, she, and they. Most others get little use beyond extremely online teenagers. Pronouns are meant to be shorthand for characteristics of your identity. If your pronoun is so unique that no one has any idea what the hell it means, you’re not using a pronoun, you’re just using a nickname.
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Sports based purely on identity with no qualifiers. I support trans women playing on women’s teams and trans men playing on men’s teams. But that’s not just because of identity, but because I recognize that the science says that trans women don’t have any advantages after a few years on HRT. I wouldn’t however support trans women who still have male testosterone levels competing on women’s teams. That’s just about basic fairness. But, some would say that it’s just sports, and that respect for identity matters more than athletic fairness, and that no one should have to seek out medical treatment they may not otherwise want. Fair enough, but I would disagree.
Still, these are extremes. The vast, vast majority of trans people wouldn’t switch bathrooms before at least changing their presentation, use pronouns they can actually expect other people to use, and wouldn’t expect to switch sports teams without altering their own hormones. If TERFs really were interested in compromise, these are the issues we could compromise on. So maybe we restrict bathrooms based on legal identity, but in turn we make it really easy to change your legal identity, say up to once per year. And we have clear social expectations about the rules of bathrooms. So it’s OK if you don’t fully pass, but you shouldn’t be rocking a beard in the women’s restroom. Or, we come to a compromise on pronouns. You can have your close friends call you whatever you want, but the only pronouns you should expect others to recognize are the broad and generic he, she, and they. We compromise by, for example, making it workplace harassment to not respect someone’s pronouns. But in turn we trans people also don’t demand that people learn hundreds of new pronouns or start referring to human beings as inanimate objects. Or, we regulate sports, but we don’t try to ban trans people from sports all together. We follow the science that says trans women have no advantage after a few years on E. You can’t change your teams based purely on self-ID, but we do give trans men and women a clear and open path to participate fully and equally in athletics.
If TERFs and other conservatives really were just looking for a reasonable compromise, these are the types of issues we could compromise on. But, as the post notes, you give these bastards an inch and they’ll take a mile.
My proposition to solve the bathroom issue is making gendered bathrooms illegal and mandating proper cubicle walls that guarantee privacy. The harassment that gender neutral bathrooms are claimed to cause is vastly exagerrated by the right wing. It does not outweigh the harassment towards gender minorities that gendered bathrooms cause.
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Genuinely surprised this was not in Leopards Ate My Face
Feel free to share it there lol. I did consider posting it there, as you might have guessed from my leopard emoji.
