Increasingly see discussion among trans ppl around "are transphobes stupid or evil" and I think the answer is instead that they are bores.
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It's neither a weakness of intellect nor essential moral flaw that drives them to repeat bollocks they've heard and be immune to evidence to the contrary. It's a condition of their boring alienation and need to fill the void with being bastards and finding unity in trans hate.
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My feelings around my attempts to talk to transphobes and help resolve the gaps in knowledge through communication were I think largely foiled by the fact that transphobic people look up to other transphobic people, build families and networks of transphobe friends.
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They are, essentially not *just* an independent floating consciousness free to make up their own views on things that can be resolved by a conversation of any length, but like the rest of us, interdependent on the people they're already enmeshed with the beliefs of.
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I now feel like I have an extremely deep understanding of why the "try to talk transphobes out of it" approach was wrong and I think it's because many of the mechanisms that people attribute to a TERF cult are also widespread social phenomenon.
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E.g one example would be looking to others you trust, your parents, elders, movement leaders or just the friends around you to see how to react when you see something new happen.
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It's not cult behaviour, it's just a natural heuristic for survival and responding to danger that can when it misfires or is misdirected by charismatic figures result in catastrophic harms.
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Some people I talked to despite being superficially willing to listen expressed disbelief that I or other trans people were even real, telling the truth about our experiences we shared trying to explain our lives.
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People are already primed by Anglo American culture (and particularly decades of psychiatry falling into pop culture rendering us as lying degenerates who will do anything to get our transitions) to disbelieve trans people in the just place so this is utterly unsurprising.
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Anyway, a big part of this post was about formulating a response to Hanlon's razor: Don't try to attribute to malice nor stupidity that which can be explained by conformity to local norms.
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End of conversation
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People focus too much on transphobic ideology and not on what people get from believing in it, which is often that they get to belong to a group that somehow meets their needs, give them a purpose, etc.
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