I’ve been seeing a worrying number of these people on Lemmy lately, sharing enlightened takes including but not limited to “voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism” and “the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic” and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.
More often than not they reply with a concern I addressed in the comment they’re replying to, without any explanation of why my argument was invalid. Some of them cannot even state their own position, instead simply repeatedly calling mine oppressive in some way.
It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian I got into an argument with on Matrix a while ago, in which I met him 95% of the way, conceded that God might well be real and that being trans was sinful and tried to convince him not to tell that to every trans person he passed, and failed. I am 100% convinced he was trolling – in retrospect I’m pretty sure I could’ve built a municipal transport system by letting people ride on top of his goalposts (that’s what I get for picking a fight with a Christian at 2AM) – and the only reason I’m not convinced these leftists on Lemmy are trolls is the sheer fucking number of them.
I made this post and what felt like half the responses fell into this category. Am I going insane?
You take different approaches to different people. Trying to convince a Christian that being trans isn’t the worst thing a person can possibly be is an exercise in futility. Their mind is made up. If someone genuinely did not understand, or merely thought that trans people were delusional, I of course would try my best to explain the neuroscience etc. behind it to try to convince them, but if you’re talking to someone who thinks being trans is sinful, there’s nothing that can change their mind. The concept of sin is not a rational one. No religious concept can be. And you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic their way into. The only thing you’d be doing at that point is feeding the trolls. The only thing you can do to ensure they won’t harm trans people is try to convince them to keep their transphobia to themselves. And that’s what I did.
I am sincerely begging you to understand the concept of harm reduction.
Setting aside your post history instilling me with doubt you’re doing anything “sincerely”, you don’t reduce harm by increasing net harm.
First of all, what did I say about ad hominem attacks, second of all, I cannot find anything in my post history that would even remotely imply I was arguing in bad faith, third of all, how does telling someone to keep their transphobia to themselves increase harm in literally any way?
I don’t know what did you say?
What does that even have to do with my post in which I did not insult you?
How is a third party confirming to a hate monger “you’re right about transness being a sin” bad for trans people?
Why even ask me? You clearly know what’s best for trans people, you unparalleled ally, you.
You seem awfully hung up on that. Almost like you don’t have anything else on which to stake a claim.
Sounds a bit like lack of faith to me.
I’ve explained three times that, since what is and is not sinful is a matter of personal opinion, convincing a Christian who believes that being trans is sinful that it is not is, definitionally, impossible. Are you going to actually engage with that, or are you going to continue to hurl only-technically-not-insults in my general direction like a troll?
You are so good at knowing what’s good for marginalized groups, why do I even bother putting anything forward?
You quoted me saying you had nothing to argue against other than that one line five comments ago and then your rebuttal was continuing to get hung up on that same line. This is literally beyond parody.
It’s blindingly obvious you’re a troll by this point, so I’m going to do something I should’ve done about 20 replies ago and block you.
It’s kind of sad, really. Literally all you had to do to avoid this was to say “I do think it’s possible to change someone’s mind” and we could’ve had a civil discussion. You might even have changed mine. Guess we’ll never know.
I’m not a troll.
You just haven’t proven worth the effort of explaining things you’ve proven you’ll ignore.
I hope you heal someday. I hope you learn to recognize when people are willing to learn. I hope you learn to give people the benefit of the doubt instead of defaulting to treating everyone you meet as an enemy. I’m sure your past can’t have been easy, and I’m sorry that I can’t give more comfort, but I hope someday you can learn to trust again.
Until then, try not to get in internet fights if you treat anyone with a different opinion than you like an enemy you have to defeat.
I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I think you might be right about the not assigning genders at birth thing. I’m still not sure I’d call it a system of oppression, but letting people decide things for themselves is important. I’d very much like to talk about it more. But I cannot discuss it if you’re going to continue acting this way.
I was lying earlier when I said I was going to block you. I wanted to see if you’d respond, and I’m glad you did, because it gave me an opportunity to see why you’ve been acting this way and extend an olive branch. I’d like to give you one more chance to sit down and talk about this rationally. You can tell me why you think what you think, and I can tell you why I think what I think, and together we can decide what the right path forward is. You do make some good points. My mind is ready to be changed, and if you’d just put the emotion away for a second I genuinely do think we can be friends.