𝓝𝓪𝓽𝓪𝓵𝓲𝓮 𝓦𝔂𝓷𝓷  💎

Many have expressed concern that I am "walking into a trap," i.e. a ploy to humiliate me on stage, to publicly pwn a SJW for the delight of the audience. I will owe you all an apology if I'm wrong here, but I don't think this is the case.

The event will be moderated by @TheTherynMeyer, one of the lead organizers of the event. Theryn is someone who, though conservative, I have found very open to reconsidering her opinions, and whom I trust to be a good moderator.

Many of my critics have objected to the event on the grounds that it is a ticketed event. Tickets will fund travel/hotels/honoraria for the speakers. It *is* possible funds raised will be used to host an objectionable speaker in the future.

If you are not comfortable with this, do not attend the event. I have conflicted feelings about it myself but have decided to take the risk in order to promote a leftist perspective that I believe at least some of the audience is receptive to.

I don't know what my speaker's fee will be (if anything), but I have not been promised anything extravagant. I am not doing the event for profit or self-promotion but because I believe it is the right thing to do.

I understand that trans people who have been out longer than me have experiences that I do not, and I do try to listen to those perspectives. However, I wish that, in turn, I were not treated like an inexperienced little child.

I'm almost 30 years old, significantly older than many of my critics. I have taught classes of undergrads like the ones to whom I'll be speaking. I have seen students radically shift views on subjects like abortion, affirm action, etc. over the course of a philosophy class.

"But bigots are different, they can't be reasoned with." Often that's true, yes. But sometimes what appears as an inveterate bigot is simply someone who hasn't thought much about a subject, hasn't really considered an alternate point of view.

When we're talking about 20-year-old undergrads, I'm especially reluctant to concede that "these are just hopeless bigots, they can never change." Are they? Have they even *really* encountered an articulate formulation of the anti-bigoted views yet?

One of the tenets of leftist thought is supposed to be that many popular attitudes are the result not of individual moral defects, but of a collective default way of seeing: "bourgeois ideology," "rape culture," "male gaze" "cis/hetero normativity"

Basically everyone raised in our society is transphobic/racist/misogynistic by default. In order to escape those viewpoints, someone or something has to intervene. Default thinking says that PoC are inclined to criminality, that children transitioning is child abuse.

Try to remember what you thought and felt growing up, before any exposure to leftist thought, or to personal experiences that changed your preconceptions. I personally aim to be that informant, that intervenor as often as possible.

I'm not claiming to be a special sorceress who's magically better at this than anyone else. Others are more experienced, more educated, more articulate than me. My success rate even breaching the surface is probably no better than 1 in 10.

But I'm willing to try, willing to improve. Also, *this is my job.*

I've received hundreds of messages from people telling me that my videos have helped pull them away from the brink of the Alt-Right. Or that I've persuaded them as to the validity of non-binary gender IDs.

And this is not because I'm some sort of magic savior. I'm not. It's just that this is what I do all the time. For an audience of hundreds of thousands. And a few hundred of those have been affected in some way.

So when people say "trust my experience: you can't persuade a bigot," I want to respond: "well, what about my experience? Am I supposed to just discard that?"

Now I know many of you may generally agree with what I'm saying here but still think that this particular event is a really bad idea. And that's fine. That's allowed. I thank those of you with constructive criticism, and I will take it into consideration next time.

Unfortunately, much of the criticism I've gotten has not been constructive. It has been intensely hostile and often outright libelous.

Once the outrage is up and running, the empirical facts of the case are lost to the overwhelming sentiment that I am a traitor. And once that feeling takes hold, evidence must be constructed to justify it.

Hence these unhinged inferences: year-old holocaust denial comment -> anti-Semitic group -> fascists (+ ticketed event) = ContraPoints is hosting a Nazi fundraiser.

The purpose is to insist that I am as sinister and evil as possible. And twisted psychological motivations are stipulated to explain my behavior: I'm selling my soul for profit, am desperate for the approval of transphobes, etc.

It's the same pattern of wild hyperbole, amplified half-truths, interpreting things in the least charitable possible way that leads to "Chris Ray Gun is a Nazi" and other overblown, outrage-driven articles of Twitterverse common knowledge.

The point is not that CRG hasn't said shitty things. It's not that there aren't valid criticisms of my going to the Vancouver event. It's that an environment of wildly vitriolic & exaggerated accusations makes it difficult for the accused to hear anything but irrational rage.