The second part of this two part series is about rebutting various ideas I've encountered. So... yeah. You know what you're getting into, so don't blame me.
Validity
For many trans people, acceptance from others is difficult. But something less often talked about is acceptance of oneself. There can be shame that they're a freak, that this is a fetish, or embarrassment because they think they look ridiculous. People don't want to be who they are because they are worried. I can see why I got the backlash I got on r/AskTransgender when I said I thought trans women are men sexually but women socially, and the latter is all that matters. A sense of validity goes to the core of one's being. If being trans is not valid, the truth is all of the suffering and effort transitioning were the efforts of a crazy person. The stakes are high when so much rests on one question: Am I valid?
This is why cavalier comparisons between transgenderism and transracialism are very offensive. Such charged and old topics need to be treated with reverence. Don't be a child that blurts out whatever their latest train of thought takes them.
We should respect people's boundaries and not assume that a trans person who refuses to debate is purely insecure. People have their own shit to deal with. The world's not going to run out of trans people for you to debate. Find another one.
'Gay people forgot they were gay.'
Somebody said gay people 'forgot their sexual orientations' in volleyball because in their experience, gay people can get vicious in volleyball. It could depend on the situation, but I can see most people playing volleyball seriously be vicious in volleyball. People are not one dimensional creatures, where a 'nice girl' is always nice and passive for example. We've all heard about tribalism and how it affects groups of people, and we know how some people can be when it comes to sports teams, for example.
Stereotyping large groups of people with little hesitation is a problem because it makes it acceptable to assume things about somebody without actually knowing them. Prejudice has led to terrible things in history. Beliefs about how gay people should act don't often lead to genocide but it can lead to problems with the norms of a society. People are not one-dimensional, but perhaps even more importantly, individuals vary more than the groups they belong in. This is why we judge people as individuals and not as groups. Failing that, our beliefs about how people are shapes how we treat others subconsciously, which itself can lead to a negative interaction between societal norms and individual behavior.
Our norms govern many things and I see how it has negatively impacted trans people for example. A lot of it can be remedied if we just think that people are people, and that is that. No point expecting a particular behavior from people you don't know.
'Transgenderism is bad for our species if everyone becomes trans.'
If everyone were women, we'd have an even bigger problem. That ends our species. If everyone were artists, we'd all starve. It doesn't mean artists are bad, it just means that not everybody can or should be artists.
WTF even is this argument?
'*Insert incoherent noises here*'
The most common misconception about trans people is that trans people share a similar story: They found out they were trans early on in life, and suffer serious depression... And they often get genital surgery. Somebody disputed me on this, saying that people who think this way are dumb and they're not that common. Wording matters; here I was talking about the most common misconception. That might or might not mean a majority of people. If 99% of people understand a concept and 1% have errors in understanding, the most common misconception is actually very rare.
A lot of people believe in stereotypes. Even if only 1% of the US population believes something, that's 3 million people. Often people don't have the mental capacity left from their day-to-day activities to learn about the nuances of some minority group and that's understandable. What's less understandable is discussing and debating the topic as if one is informed when they are not.
Stereotypes are also why I often hear people respond to people coming out as trans with 'but you never showed any signs'. Part of it is said out of surprise, but part of it is the expectation and stereotype that trans people exhibit different behavior from a relatively early age. This makes sense because my experience with the media about trans stories is they are all about people who knew they were trans from an early age. A significant portion of trans people realize much later for a plethora of reasons, and quite a good percentage had a lot of doubts about their gender. This is why r/AskTransgender contains countless threads of people asking if they are trans, 'trans enough', or if it's all just a fetish.
You don't need crushing dysphoria to be trans. To simplify, being trans means you think you should be the other sex. Dysphoria means you're upset that it's not working out perfectly. Some people don't get surgery or even hormone therapy, but those are complicated decisions each person needs to make based on their own financial, health, environmental, and mental health reasons.
The trans issue is not intuitively obvious to people. With homosexuality is pretty easy: For example, imagine how a girl is attracted to a man, and put that mindset into a man and voila, you have a homosexual. It's not a hard concept. But how many cisgender people experience gender dysphoria? I've seen various attempts by trans people to explain gender dysphoria but they are all clumsy. Imagine if you had to use your left hand from now on instead of your right. Imagine if everybody treated you like a boy when you were a girl, and calls you a he. None of these thought experiments work and language mostly fails.
The point is, people often have a poor understanding of trans people, and media narrative about the trans experience is accepted as the default. This leads to stereotypes.
I actually know somebody who thought I might've become trans because the daughter of some movie director came out as trans... As if I jumped onto the trans bandwagon. Somebody else I know once thought that trans people were gay but didn't want to admit it. Yeah.
'y golddigers keep chasing me tho'
Maybe you've met one of those rich boy frat kids who didn't earn a dime, gets drunk all day, and flashes their wealth. There's something insidious about flashing money and pretending like you're not because that amount was no big deal. Maybe if people wanted a relationship based on love and all things nice, don't make your net worth be a big factor in how you woo people.
Or maybe some kids live in such a bubble, they're sense of what's normal is totally twisted, even by first world standards. That's Mitt Romney levels of out-of-touch. These people who worry so much about how they're perceived by their peers think money talks everywhere. It doesn't. A rich asshole is still an asshole.
There's something uniquely abrasive about a thankless rich kid who sees interactions in terms of money all of the time.
'2008 recession wasn't that bad.'
It's called the Great Recession for a reason. Some people put so much stock in personal experience and anecdote, they make very inappropriate judgement when faced with good data. The median household income, personal savings rate, or employment rate are all statistics that track how people are doing financially. I don't know what else to say here. It's just so many levels of dumb to not realize this.
Yes, while some people lost their life savings, some other people elsewhere had none. But it's not like the recession only hit rich countries. If the implication is that because people who had savings were lucky, then there's a questionable lack of empathy with human suffering. If I lost my life savings and somebody shrugs it off, saying others have it worse, I would be incensed.
'I don't want to visit America because of gun violence.'
The most common cause of gun death is suicide. Do you intend to commit suicide on your vacation? Do you intend to visit downtown Detroit in the middle of the night? Do you intend to join a gang? It turns out crime rates differ from city to state to country. If we're going to be objective about it, you should fear a Big Mac more than a Glock 19.
Do you know what the leading causes of death in America are? In the year 2015, 633,842 people died to heart disease. 595,930 to cancer, 155,041 to chronic respiratory disease. 146,571 died to accidents, 140,323 to stroke, 110,561 to Alzheimer's, 79,535 to diabetes, 57,062 to influenza and pneumonia, 49,959 to kidney diseases, and 44,193 to suicide. Deaths to gun homicides? Less than 18,000. To maximize your chances of dying to gun deaths you have to live in America for the rest of your life, not just visit.
Modulate your behavior according to statistical probabilities. I know somebody who was apprehensive about visit America due to guns. Then I told her, you do realize that the homicide per 100,000 people is x3 higher in your country than where I live, right? If the homicide rate of your destination is lower than whence you came, then it's an upgrade, not a downgrade. The fact that people die by knives or bullets doesn't change that calculation. We make choices all the time that increases our chances of death, but we feel the benefits outweigh the harms.
'I have little capital so I'm going to go risky on my investments.'
Penny stocks are super volatile and the company may not exist in a year or two. Some people think having little capital means it makes sense to be super risky with it. I don't understand that logic. Either a way to do is the best use of money or it isn't, that doesn't change because you don't have billions to play with. If anything, having more capital gives you more room to be go risky some of the time, because you can actually survive if it comes crashing down.
If you can't scrape together $300 to buy a share of something decent, you probably shouldn't be investing in the first place.
'Why are trans people so damn sensitive about being outed?'
For one, it's just not cool to share secrets without consent. It takes a certain lack of empathy or integrity to violate that trust. In some places it is physically unsafe to be outed, and emotional trauma can be very real as well. It's still possible for some trans people to lose financial support from family, or for interpersonal relationships to deteriorate. Coming out is a very personal thing - somebody has trusted you, so please respect that.
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