A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

[Horus]

A positive development, debate was getting far too stifled. What does it even mean to "feel" like a man or a woman? I have never "felt" like a man. I simply am a man. The only answer I ever get is that it varies from person to person. We are what we are and we like what we like.

[Horus]

1% or less of the population is transgender and so it's never going to be understood by most people, whose brains match their bodies the second they are born.  Be grateful you do not have to go through all of the crap that comes with being trans.  It's not something any one would ever choose.

I for one am glad that rigid gender roles are being challenged by the youth of today.  If a girl is cheered for being a tomboy and playing football, a boy should never be bullied for wearing pink nail polish.

We never had "gender ideology" when I was in college.  Lately everything colleges teach are being criticized by right-wing conservatives.  Yet many of them are wealthy enough to send their kids to these overpriced schools.

There is always been backlash to LGBTQ people and 2021 seems to be a year of anti-trans attitudes.

I don't see how any of this challenges gender roles. If anything it solidifies them. "Oh, you like wearing dresses, you must be a girl in a boy's body." Or vice versa for the girl that likes to play football.

[Horus]

This thread has been an absolute mess, and intellectual arguments are being reduced to inane drivel, a lot of which is totally irrelevant.

The thing is, what is gender? If you can’t answer that question, then this debate becomes totally unintellectual in nature, and is more based in personal feelings. In the latter case, then the feelings of a trans person who calls themselves a gender different than there biological sex are no more important than the feelings of someone who thinks that “a man with a uterus” is an oxymoron. Simple as that. They can still respect one another, but you can’t force either one of them to respect the other persons view.

The difference is that for one person, this is just an opinion about a set of issues that barely affects their life in any way, while for the other (trans) person, the way society feels about this issue determines their ability to be safe and successful in every aspect of their lives.

Even if this does come down to a debate about feelings, why would you deliberately hurt someone’s feelings when it costs you nothing to just treat them the way they are asking to be treated?

Like I said, it’s not too much to expect them to respect one another (for example, use requested pronouns). But if the person says, “I still think you’re 100% a man” when the person claims to be a woman, you can’t get mad at them for stating that when you can’t prove them wrong.

How is telling someone “I still think you’re 100% a man” respecting them?  Why would you say that when it is obviously very hurtful to the person you are saying it to, and doesn’t make any difference to the way you live your own life?

It’s just them stating their opinion on how gender works.

If you walk up to a random person and say "your face is ugly", that might be your sincere opinion, and it might not be disprovable, but it certainly wouldn't be respectful.  It wouldn't even by respectful if you said that to your friend.  

There are lots of contexts where it is not respectful to share one's opinion, and a non-trans person's opinion of the "true gender" of a trans person is going to be one of those times virtually always.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Gender probably isn't.

Fwiw misgendering people is a bad thing to do, and I will always call a person by their preferred pronouns, so long as they don't extend beyond he/she/they, but this is not the same as calling someone ugly.

It seems to me like extremists are trying to prevent reasonable people from being public advocates for LGBT issues, and this is a potential explanation for the far left's attempts to harass Contrapoints into oblivion and it also in a slightly different situation explains the insane anti-gay attacks they used against Pete Buttigieg as well.

At the risk of wading into the sort of hardened radical queer theorist territory for which I have a bit of notoriety here, the attacks on Pete from queer voices on the left weren't about his sexuality in isolation, but the perception that he had sold out his queerness to neoliberal/neoconservative pandering and ensconced himself in the values and expectations of a social order built on upholding cisgender heterosexuality (academic types will call this "homonormativity"). The idea that the "queer community" is unified and needs to know better for its own interests is patronizing and paternalistic, and ignores the perspective of many queer voices that have come to reject broader social norms rather than try to seek their approval. I would certainly much prefer a world where I wouldn't risk getting murdered for being transgender, but debates like this where cishet perspectives with no firsthand knowledge of our experience act like they know what's best for a very heterodox collection of people makes me wonder if it's ever worth the effort to get the world on my (or our) side, and while I'd prefer a world with less hot-button discourse eating my people alive it's the inevitable result of advances in queer rights and the Information Age atomization of sociopolitical spheres.

I recognize that this is exchange was somewhat tangential to the broader discussion happening in this thread, but this response here stood out to me as actually bolstering Dalecooper's point. You reject the idea that the queer community is supposed to be unified for its own interests when its imposed upon by outsiders, but this apparently is in fact the operating logic of a certain segment of the queer community the moment one of their own strays from activist expectations. Why else would leftist queer people have cared as to whether Buttiegieg "sold out" his queerness and "ensconced himself" in the world of cishet values? If queer folk don't need to be unified, it shouldn't have mattered. "You should have known better" seems like exactly the kind of sentiment being lobbed at Buttiegieg here by other queer people, despite your protestations to such a notion being valid.

Should be noted that many non straight people do not define as queer. I personally find the word demeaning. The gay men I know who identify as queer pretty much always wear makeup and often have varied pronouns. The queer community is a more radical subset of the LGBT community.