Continental Europe enters the gender wars

[If my soul was made of stone]

In Germany one of the bills, put forward by the Green Party, proposed that children be allowed to have gender-reassignment surgery from the age of 14, even if parents oppose it. It would also have introduced a fine of €2,500 ($3,045) for referring to a trans person based on their natal sex.

Admittedly, this is pretty excessive. Almost no one, myself included, thinks that reassignment surgery ought to be performed on minors, and I don't see the purpose of the fine besides fueling Jordan Peterson-style arguments about trans people being agents of censorship or whatever. I'd support the Spanish proposal, though.

The proposals are “an authoritarian move dressed up as a liberal one”, says Melli Beinhorn of LGB Alliance Deutschland, a gay-rights group.

No one who identifies with "LGB" should be taken seriously, and it angers me that they're given credibility here. Excluding trans people from any queer rights activism is rooted in seeing them as inferior or fraudulent, in a way that you wouldn't expect from other queer people but is all too common.

I still don't understand OP's derangement around trans issues. Does it not get tedious? Even as a trans person myself with an obligation to be tuned in to this sort of thing I can only take so much Discourse™ at one time before my brains start oozing out of my ears.

[If my soul was made of stone]

In Germany one of the bills, put forward by the Green Party, proposed that children be allowed to have gender-reassignment surgery from the age of 14, even if parents oppose it. It would also have introduced a fine of €2,500 ($3,045) for referring to a trans person based on their natal sex.

Admittedly, this is pretty excessive. Almost no one, myself included, thinks that reassignment surgery ought to be performed on minors, and I don't see the purpose of the fine besides fueling Jordan Peterson-style arguments about trans people being agents of censorship or whatever. I'd support the Spanish proposal, though.

The proposals are “an authoritarian move dressed up as a liberal one”, says Melli Beinhorn of LGB Alliance Deutschland, a gay-rights group.

No one who identifies with "LGB" should be taken seriously, and it angers me that they're given credibility here. Excluding trans people from any queer rights activism is rooted in seeing them as inferior or fraudulent, in a way that you wouldn't expect from other queer people but is all too common.

I still don't understand OP's derangement around trans issues. Does it not get tedious? Even as a trans person myself with an obligation to be tuned in to this sort of thing I can only take so much Discourse™ at one time before my brains start oozing out of my ears.

I don’t see why they shouldn’t be taken serious just because they exclude trans people, whether they should be taken serious or not should depend on how many people they represent nothing else.

I'm not inclined to take you seriously on LGBT issues after you said:

TERF is simply a slur against women.

[If my soul was made of stone]

TERF of course was first used as a term by radical feminists, to describe others of their ilk who they nonetheless disagreed with on trans issues. Clearly it has now become an all-purpose label for any who are not fully behind the trans rights agenda, but that is not how it originally emerged.

It started that way, but the Voldemort word also just started as the Latin word for black and any reasonable person would see that word as a slur today.

Words becomes slurs, if they’re used as slurs.

I agree that the term is often misapplied, but to those who don't fit the "radical feminist" part rather than those who don't fit the "trans-exclusionary" part (e.g. the creator of Voldemort). Cis women who say that they feel "silenced" by trans people expressing their experience are generally very privileged and anti-intersectional. Calling it a "slur" trivializes those that are far more charged with hatred against the disadvantaged and gives in to the derangement of a contingent that does not by any means need a louder voice.