A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

Or to put it more quantitatively: how many words uttered by real transgender people have been published on British media, and how many words of these brutally silenced "gender-criticals"?

The trans experience is one that is in many ways beautiful and joyous but is sadly also fraught with trauma. Trans people experience a lot of pain that stays with them. Much of that pain has to do with people who refuse to accept who they truly are. Or people will “just want to have a discussion” where they try to see invalidate the persons identity.

When a cis person enters a discussion like this, to the cis person it’s just an intellectual discussion. But to the trans person it can be threatening and it can trigger memories of past trauma they’ve gone through.

So yes, trans people get upset when you bring things like this up because you’re bringing up a topic that may have been used as a “gotcha” to invalidate their identity, and it can be unclear if that’s what you’ll try to do. This makes the whole conversation upsetting to them.

Imagine if a man who didn’t believe in women’s rights wanted to discuss it with a woman who has been discriminated against. That would be a difficult conversation and it wouldn’t be surprising if she got upset and didn’t want to have a “rational debate” about her rights.

What you’re doing when you bring up difficult topics to a marginalized person is you’re forcing them to re live traumatic memories in order to educate you. I learned this from learning about the experiences of people of color. (If you’re white) DO NOT go ask a random black person to explain to you the everyday racism they feel, because inevitably it won’t make sense to you and when you challenge something they say it will become a lot of emotional labor for them to try to make it make sense. Sure some people are fine explaining this stuff but not everyone.

Instead what people of color say about this is: go do the learning on your own. Go find out what people in this marginalized group say about your issue without making one of them explain it. Their identity is not up for you to debate. But you can read articles written by people within the community or listen to YouTube interviews. You can find the answers without making a marginalized person re live their trauma to educate you.

This is all surrounding the topic of “emotional labor”. Debating someone’s trauma requires huge amounts of emotional labor for them to stay civil and most people don’t have the energy for that, so you should not ask that of them. There are other better ways to educate yourself.

EDIT: Folks, I’m trying to honestly tell you the experience I’ve had. I had to learn this stuff too. I know that this community hates being told they have to change their behavior, but I’m kindly and honestly explaining what I know and you’re downvoting me. Please stop.

Citation required.

You put "debate" in quotes like it's somehow a dirty word, which is shocking and depressing to me. I DO care about what real transgender people have to say, and to be honest, especially on college campuses in the US, it is very easy to see they have a voice and are able to speak there opinion.

I have no idea whether this academic's opinion is one I agree with. Primarily because she wasn't allowed to speak.

You're certainly right that this is an inflammatory topic with strong political and ideological overlap, and as the guidelines explain, we don't want flamewar here, and we don't want ideological or political battle. The site exists for intellectual curiosity, and those things aren't compatible. There's a great deal of established moderation practice around this, if anyone wants to read past explanations:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

That doesn't automatically make a story like this off topic for HN. It depends on whether there's enough new information in a story to support a substantive discussion. In this case, the topic is not just "gender ideology", it's ongoing developments at universities and in the discourse at large. All of these are significant and interesting phenomena. For that reason I turned the flags off on this submission. That's also established moderation practice (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It requires a judgment call, of course, and we don't always make the right calls—but not making any would be an even worse call.

Of course it's commenters' responsibility to stick to the side guidelines if posting in such a thread. That means curious, thoughtful conversation and respect toward other commenters (and other people generally). Flamewar, flamebait, snark, name-calling, personal attacks and so on are not ok. People sometimes think that just because a topic is inflammatory it means they get carte blanche to spew what they will (e.g. "if you don't want me to post like this then you shouldn't allow this thread in the first place"). I call that argument "the topic made me do it", and not only is it false, the opposite is true: commenters here are under a greater obligation in cases like this, as the site guidelines make clear: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."