When someone "grieves the loss" of "girls" who are actually trans men, they are saying that those men's bodies never belonged to themselves but to others. Especially when they talk about things like top-surgery or sterilization.

Bodies perceived as "feminine" are not to be altered because somehow it is important to others that we have breasts and functioning wombs.

Cis women, this should concern you. Deeply.

Transphobia and especially transmisogyny probably are currently the greatest threat to women's rights.

Transphobes wish to create a world where women have to constantly prove that they are "really" women and show sufficient femininity before being allowed to participate in public life.

They want to make it impossible to participate in women's sports without invasive and humiliating investigation. They want women to be uncertain whether someone will accost them for entering a woman's restroom while appearing insufficiently feminine.

They want the ability to critique and control women's participation in the public sphere. It's fucking horribly regressive, and it *will* get out of hand quickly. It already is.

Trans women are an easily vilified group of women, whose "otherness" can be used an excuse to police all women.

Trans rights are human rights, and trans women's rights are women's rights.

Women have a right not to be scrutinized for how we choose to participate (or not) in femininity. We have a right to live our lives without proving anything to anyone. We should not need to ask for permission to exist in public.

Meanwhile to these people, trans men don't exist.

Persons perceived as feminine are not granted the right of self-determination, are not granted their own identities. When persons designated "feminine" by society cease to perform femininity as demanded, it is tantamount to ceasing to exist.

For these people, to be a trans woman is to be a pariah. To be a trans man is to be a ghost. There is only one way for female-designated persons to exist.

That is not freedom. That is a denial of humanity.

Trans men are men. Trans women are women. Non-binary people are...well, whatever they say they are... that's a mixed bag of individual identities, to say the least.

People who want to restrict trans rights want to restrict human rights. They want to set the boundaries of what it means to be human and force everyone to obey.

Transphobia is a form of proto-fascism.

As a genderqueer cis-ish woman (it's complicated), anything that hurts trans women hurts me. Any right people want to deny to trans women is a right that now can be refused to me also.

If there is a standard for who is and isn't a woman in the "right" way that determines how you are allowed to interact with the world, then women don't have rights. We have obligations. We have to earn our participation in the world. We have to prove we are deserving of it by the degree of our femininity.

I wish more cis women would understand that the way society treats trans people is inextricably related to our rights as women to individuality and self-determination and to our ability to freely exist in society.

The idea that trans men are "lost" women should tell you that they believe that your feminine body and your existence as a feminine person is something you *owe* to the world. If you cease to perform femininity, you have taken something away from others that was rightfully owed them.

It's tough because there's a certain amount of control you *have* to have over kids you're responsible for. You have to keep them safe, and feed them, and maintain your own sanity.

But still...

Training people from infancy to submit without question to "authority" is a wild choice.

Almost every human starts out incredibly curious. As soon as kids learn language, they start asking question after question after question. It's so constant it's exhausting. That makes me think that incuriosity is learned.

One of the constant hallmarks of the people driving the global rise of fascism is a total lack of curiosity. They have no desire to understand the world or other creatures better. They don't want to learn anything they don't already "know". They don't want to correct or refine their beliefs. They simply don't care about anything that happens that doesn't concern them.

But when you remember that people can and do literally beat the curiosity out of their children...no wonder we have so many small-minded adults.

If we ever want anything better for humanity, we are going to have to do better for kids, specifically.

We need to encourage curiosity in children more.

Incurious people are killing the world.

The first thing people want to teach kids is how to "obey", how to walk in lockstep, but that's not the kind of human we should be trying to grow.

When I was a Christian, I developed an unhealthy habit of always putting others before myself because I was under the impression that's what a good person does.

These days I think more in terms of radical equality: I don't treat myself as if I have less value than others—I try instead to act as if everyone has the same value as I do.

More than it simply being unhealthy, I think Those Who Would Be Masters benefit unduly from the type of humility that says you should consider yourself less than others. It's conditioning to accept oppression. It makes accepting oppression a virtue.

So I'm not into that anymore. I think if you value other people, you will fight for them and their rights...rights which should be exactly the same as yours.

I really appreciate the responses people have been giving on this.

I'm glad we have more constructive possible approaches to this than condemning people for simply being "lazy".

Social issues require social solutions. Lecturing & scolding individuals might feel good for a minute, but it doesn't solve anything.

Personally, I'm baffled by a lot of human behavior, but that's no reason to act like a dick about things. People are gonna people.

In one sense, ChatGPT & similar are exactly the right type of AI for the world we live in.

We live in a world where we're expected to generate bullshit & do busywork, whether that's in school or at our jobs.

A bullshit machine can do that so much quicker & more easily. Of course that's appealing.

We need to get out of the bullshit system if we want to rid ourselves of this scourge.

Fascism is an attempt to remake reality by sheer force of will, to deny reality, to simply make it what they *say* it is.

That's it. It's an ideology of force.

It's mind-boggling to me, but it's helpful to know, because I want to argue with their pathetic, flimsy arguments. But they aren't really arguments...they are ideological statements. You cannot persuade a fascist with evidence. You cannot persuade them with careful reasoning.

They start from what they want to believe and try to bend the world to their will.

The pathetic thing is that they think that they *can* make reality suit them by force. That's ridiculous, but... that's fascism for you.

I read or watched something recently about the way fascists think/argue that finally made a few things click for me.

They start from what they insist is Truth, statements like "there are only two genders." Other people might respond with information about intersex people & the complications of defining something like "biological sex". These are facts, related to observation of reality, but to a fascist, anything that doesn't align with the Truth in their heads can be rejected outright.