You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

That... depends? I mean, consider that "male" and "female" (as buckets people are assigned to at birth) do a pretty bad job of describing actual biology in many cases, often with harmful results. And that's before we even get to the topic of gender identity! You can be a trans woman while you still have a penis, because being trans isn't just about having surgery. (Consider that the term "transsexual" has fallen out of favor, in part because "transgender" covers the idea that your birth-assigned sex or biological features don't always accurately describe your identity.)

Anyway, consider what the parent originally said:

> > I was banned from r/asktransgender for telling a girl in a relationship with a pre-transition MtF person that it doesn’t make sense to call herself a lesbian (since sexual orientation is based on sex and not gender)

That's.. just not correct at all. Who was the parent to decide that "lesbian" = "biological female in relationship with biological female"? If someone identifies as female and is in a relationship with someone who identifies as female, they are perfectly justified in calling themselves lesbians, regardless of what reproductive parts or hormonal levels they have. Disagreeing with that is just meaningless, because this is how the word "lesbian" is used in the real world, and fighting against reality is generally not a winning move.

> Is insisting (perhaps somewhat pedantically) on using those terms in a consistent fashion really an offense?

If you're someone who's tired of outsiders telling you how you're supposed to describe yourself, yes, it probably is an offense. It's even worse when said outsider doesn't know what they're talking about and is insisting upon something that's incorrect.

> Now, they are free to exclude people for whatever reason they want.

I don't know why the parent got banned, of course. It could have been because they offended people, or it could have simply been because they were being an annoying pedantic (incorrect!) language lawyer who was sucking the life out of discussions. Either, in my mind, is a valid reason for a ban.

> But the statement does not strike me as obviously offensive to trans people (I've even seen them make the same distinction)

"Trans people" is not a monolithic block of people all with the same attitudes and tolerances. One trans person may not be bothered by it (though I would hope they'd be bothered by the parent's statement, since it's incorrect), but another may be. That's just life. And regardless, it doesn't matter if it strikes you or me as offensive to trans people, unless we're trans people. (I'm not, and I assume based on how you've framed this discussion that you aren't either.) It only matters if actual trans people are offended, and perhaps some number of them were. And if you are a trans person, I would hope that you'd agree that you probably don't speak for all trans people.

I feel like that works better for factual, technical claims than political ones though. As another website says, "No technology is discussed."

> Who the fuck decides? Everyone decides norms in the small bubble around them. When people organize their influence grows too. Some people have too much power. Some people should never have power, like nazis.

A lot of the arguments in this thread you will notice are about whether deplatforming makes nazis less nazis. Well, that's not the point. The point is to make sure they aren't accepted, that they can't use the public square to recruit and gain power.

Some would argue that this is ineffective, but they are now stuck in the bind of thinking that access to places of public discourse is both an important right and also practically unimportant.

Maybe they're too young to remember the holocaust deniers on use usenet or how ineffectual stormfront was before 4chan and before mass social media. People who are hungry for power will try to gain it in the easiest ways possible.

If you think them having power would suck, then you want to make it harder for them.

I simultaneously think facebook and twitter and CBS and fox news etc. have too much control over public discourse and also don't want white supremacists to be able to freely use that power to bring back hell on earth. That includes the new york times giving the likes of Richard Spencer space on their page, Tucker Carlson crying about how much white people are under attack and facebook letting white supremacists run recruiting groups thousands in size.

For example, I posit (without proof) that, because we have effectively banned hateful racist speech in most standard professional workplaces, the people who work in those environments and used to suffer harm (through being forced to work in an openly hostile environment to them, through being denied advancement or equitable compensation, through the mental stress of being the target of hate speech, etc.), that those people suffer less harm today then they used to.

- Is it perfect now? No.

- Can people still be secretly denied promotions because of racism? Absolutely.

- Does it happen less frequently in the aggregate than it used to 40-50 years ago? Almost certainly, though I base this claim on common sense for now (don't have scientific sources handy but I'm sure I can find some).