[user104658]

Originally Posted by Niamh.

Well this is the thing, he has had evidence through the Cass report showing that actually people who were saying this stuff about medicalising children and fast tracking them/not looking at other possible reasons why they think they're trans - is not actually just made up stuff because we all hate trans people and don't really care about children (I mean which is more likely for the vast majority of people??) Why wouldn't we (especially people who are parents) care about the welfare of children??

He is correct though that most people in a general sense couldn't care less what others do with their lives or how they dress etc, they only start caring when it starts impacting other people which this does, it very clearly does, just look at Sport for, I guess the most visual and glaring examples

Basically he's being very disingenuous here because I don't think he's stupid

My thoughts exactly and it actually irks me more when people demonstrate that they are in fact capable of having an intelligent, nuanced discussion about the issues and yet still resort to spewing idioms and soundbites in public discourse. He's more than capabe of understanding that this is a complex issue. If you caught him in a private one-on-one he'd probably willingly discuss the issues. But in public? "There is no issue everyone is just mean".

It's 100% Stonewall - literally - it's baked into the ideology. "Give them nothing, openly concede nothing" - because the idea is, if you do openly concede that it's a complex and nuanced issue (every sociological issue is!) then other disingenuous people on the other side will use it as an "ah-ha!" moment to exploit.

I mean, to an extent, I even get it. I understand where that came from.

The problem is that in the modern oh-so-interconnected era... you have lots of people constantly listening. And lots of them not capable or not old enough yet for proper critical thought about these issues. So if all they here is the drum-thumping of total denial that there's an issue then they're going to parrot that with no understanding at all of the topic at hand.