Guppy 🌹

I don't think it should be the job of the state to enforce that kind of thing. Besides which, "transphobes" are often just old or ignorant. I once saw a trans woman threaten to get a train conductor sacked because he misgendered her "Can I see your ticket, Sir?"

The train conductor was like 60 years old and wasn't even aware of what he'd done. The rest of the staff sat on the carriage and tried to knock their heads together to figure out what had happened. None of them knew. If they were educated, they'd have exercised politeness

Legislation only breeds resentment and does more damage in the long run that education would. It's using a band-aid to fix a leaky pipe rather than having it repaired.

If you're willing to let the government dictate the limits of speech, your less-than-ideal situation is going to come back and hurt you, especially if (God forbid) public opinion on trans people radically shifts to the negative following a few court cases for hate-speech

not sure if how much of an argument u wanna built on that, the formal possibilities a law provides matter regardless of the likelihood that someone takes advantage of them. tbs, the free speech case is bullshit cuz as I said, workers don't have free speech while working

well I'm in favour of regulation that enables people to sue their employer for discrimination, but that's a whole different story than prosecuting ppl who misgender random folks in the street, which isn't happening

I don't know if this is directed at me, but it has nothing to do with people potentially abusing the legislation; it's about the legal precedent it sets for regulating speech in the future

which would be totally impossible otherwise, right? when the government (or, given a few years, google/amazon’s private police force) wants to get down to brass tacks and throw folks in jail for saying the word “unionize,” no one is like “hmm i wish we’d done that pronouns thing”

Not impossible, but less likely for the public to swallow. There's a great sense of resignation around this debate. "We've already damaged Western democracy a good deal so we might as well keep damaging it in a direction beneficial to us rather than try to conserve anything"

1) i still need an external reason to care about the fact that it might make trads slightly traddier 2) “destroying democracy is good as long as it collapses in the right direction” is a take id retweet with a straight face any day of the week

Collapse cult bollocks. Fashionable hot air