Anyone else worried Trump’s advocacy of gender-critical views taints and discredits them?

[PotteringPondering]

I’m gender-critical, and was pleased when Trump issued his early Executive Orders on Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, and Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.

But now… everything else. The sickening bullying of Zelensky and support for Putin, the threats to invade allies, the insults, lies, laziness, lawbreaking, cruelty and incompetence.

I’m concerned the fact Trump is an advocate of gender-critical views taints and discredits them in the eyes of thinking people. The verdict of history may be harsh because of the Trump connection.

I’m a resident of Terf Island, and still passionately hold GC views. But the support of Trump and Vance is starting to feel less like a blessing, more like a kiss of death.

I'm sorry but I don't get your argument at all.

Enlighten me.

Why exactly are the Political Right responsible for political Left including the Democratic Party, responsible for the left's policy setting on gender rights which is completely batshit and at odds with reality?

Why aren't the Democratic Party responsible for their own failure to have a sensible conversation about why women's rights, gay rights, concerns about children, concerns about over medicalisation without proper unbiased scientific research, concern about autistic people and concerns about vulnerable people with a history of trauma were thrown out the window and declared bigoted?

Why isn't it the fault of the Democratic Party being out of step with the public, given that a political party in a democratic society is supposed to reflect and represent the people?

How is it Trump's fault and the Republican Party's fault that the Democratic Party made political decisions all by themselves which have turned into a total disaster area?

This is what is known as an unforced error of judgement by the left. They did it all from their own free will.

All Trump and Co have done is capitalise on massive political and medical scandal that has harmed a hell of a lot of people, particularly women.

That's what political parties and the public are supposed to do - hold parties responsible when they made stupid mistakes and abuse their position of power.

Genuinely why it is never the fault of the Democrats on this subject? Why is it all the Big Bad Evil Villains fault. Seriously it's like it's become a real life parody of super hero films.

Are you overthinking?

I don't think it's a question of intelligence though.

Nobody, regardless of their level of intelligence, believes that men can become women.

But because the idea that we should pretend we believe this has come from liberal/academic circles, intelligent people are somewhat paradoxically more likely to take part in the pretence. They attach a high value to their intelligence and want to align themselves with other intellectuals. They fear being called stupid and ignorant above all else.

Whereas people who aren't particularly booksmart don't particularly care about impressing those sorts of people (and probably couldn't impress those sort of people whatever they did). If you know you're going to be written off as stupid and ignorant whatever you do, you have no incentive to pretend to believe something that isn't true for fear of being called stupid and ignorant.

The British sex realists are overwhelmingly on the left.

Anyone who fails to see this, is just as dumb as people who go along with pretending that people can magically change sex because they say so.

No.

It's dumb to go along with something you know to be untrue. It's even more dumb to be too cowardly to question it. Stupidity is not the preserve of the uneducated. Educated people work hard at being dumb sometimes.

from the disappearing websites about US Veterans who aren't white men, i think we can safely assume the Diversity he is against here is possibly inclusion of non-white minorities. There is a fixed idea among the MAGA-pickup-truck-with-gunrack-driving voters that DEI means giving any job to the first non-white man that applies, and not what it really involves.

That DEI these days seems to apply only to TQ+ and not, say, disabilities or age is just a side-issue in Trump's eyes, i think.

I agree. And it makes people seem untrustworthy. If they can lie so blatantly about self evident reality they are lying about everything. And that’s the reason I believe it was an issue for the Democrats’ electability and still is. So yes it is their fault and the ball is in their court. Gender identity ideology is not convincing to the electorate.

I’m concerned the fact Trump is an advocate of gender-critical views taints and discredits them in the eyes of thinking people.

No. But he does taint and discredit such views in the eyes of unthinking people.

The short-of-thinking people run simple algorithms in their head:
"Trump is bad. Trump is GC, ergo GC is bad."

That is if they think at all, and don't just go along with the crowd in parroting slogans unquestioningly.

Read my post again.

I said “a start might be to stop blaming the Left/leftists/Democrats for everything the Right does”. This means if things go wrong within the Trump admin, why blame the Left? Of course the Democrats are to blame for whatever has gone wrong within their own party.

I think intelligence does come into it very much. As previously mentioned, education ≠ intelligence so people educated far beyond their level of intelligence will grab on to any ridiculous nonsense if they feel it shores up their precarious status.

I think fundamentally it is a credibility issue.

I always end up quoting Sall Grover on this. She said something like, "If you say that a woman can have a penis, I am not going to believe anything you say. Because if you will lie about something so basic, I assume you will lie about everything."

This issue has made me question everything I previously thought about politics. Like, I used to have a long held belief that the Liberal Democrats were sensible centrists and I usually voted for them. Now this issue has opened my eyes to the fact that they're absolute lunatics and that the only reason this isn't more widely understood is because they get so little media exposure.

I am absolutely certain that people who support self ID and "gender affirming care" are absolutely, completely, catastrophically wrong. And if you're someone who I usually agree with about most things, it's going to make me start to question all those other things as well. Before, if I thought you were an intelligent person and an all round good egg whose views were generally sensible and aligned with my own, and you expressed an opinion about something I didn't know much about (the conflict in the middle east, for example), I would probably assume that yours was a sensible take and it would influence my own opinion going forward.

Now, if you say TWAW, I am going to assume that you might be equally wrong about other things too.

How does this link to your point about abortion? Well, my own views on abortion haven't changed, but when for example Miriam Cates was talking about whether the 24 week limit in the UK is really appropriate, where once upon a time I would have dismissed her as a right wing politician with strong religious beliefs who wanted to restrict women's reproductive rights, now I would actually listen to what she has to say and form a view on that. Because I know that she has been spot on about other women's rights issues, so I can no longer write her off as someone with nothing useful to say.

The problem is that many is the US may have voted for Trump on their feelings on this one issue and it's opened up a whole world of shit. Life is more nuanced than just focusing on one issue. Quite frankly I think he's just a misogynist arsehole rather than an advocate for feminism.

But plenty of people all over the world vote on single issues. That's how the Green party (ecology party way back then) started. In fact i remember one of Thatcher's brilliant moves was to say before the 79 election that of course the aims of the ecology party are also aims of the tories. Some not-quite-single-issue voters may have switched their vote because of things like that.

But a lot of genuinely very intelligent people claim to believe this. So where does that leave them?

I think the Democrats are to blame for not winning the election. If they were less shit, Trump wouldn't be in power.

I disagree that "Nobody, regardless of their level of intelligence, believes that men can become women". The medical industry, media, various education bodies especially universities, charities, businesses have been deliberately feeding this narrative to vulnerable autistic kids for years and they got some of them believing enough to permanently sterilise and mutilate themselves.
It is a matter of personal integrity to not parrot lies, especially when they are actually very harmful. Intelligence doesn't come into it, it's a character defect.

Who cares who is “blamed”? Sort it the fuck out. I do blame the left, particularly in this country, as I don’t live in the U.S. The right are doing what everyone expected, aren’t they. I did not expect the left worldwide to betray women and girls and promote absurd, toxic nonsense in the way it has. I will not support it.

In a nutshell.

😂
No need to use ‘normal’ to describe women, we just ‘are’
But transwomen are MEN that crave acceptance as women but as we all know, that’s an impossible dream.

No, I don't worry about @PotteringPondering. Trump is not gender Critical.

Yes, the U.S.A is a very different country. It's culture is rooted in what led to its creation and the principles that arose from that ( religion, the frontier spirit, the rugged individual, but also its roots in slavery and the plantation system etc).

And it is still a relatively young culture; certainly compared to those in Europe. But because it is such a vast country, with a huge population, and with such large mineral reserves it can throw its weight around.

European cultures have been through so many more challenges, more reformations, have experienced many wars on their soil; have suffered invasions, shifting boundaries, rise and fall of empires.........and so have evolved quite differently. People like JD Vance just come across as culturally ignorant - in applying american models and standards to Europe - when they don't really fit.

I would say it’s akin to a religious belief. Rationality doesn’t come into it.

Not an American teenager so no.

Saying Trump is GC is nonsense. He’s a populist doing populist things, not aiming to dismantle gender stereotypes and sexism.

Sometimes a populist action coincides with the aims of another group. That doesn’t make them the same. It doesn’t make them allies nor motivated by the same issues.

Many Hindu people are vegetarian. Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sacred texts use the swastika. This doesn’t make Hitler Hindu, does it?

It’s predictable rhetoric.