𝓝𝓪𝓽𝓪𝓵𝓲𝓮 𝓦𝔂𝓷𝓷  💎

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.