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Steve QJ's avatar

"But it all seems faintly reminiscent of an adult arguing with a 5 year old when they are upset"

Hi Dan! Thanks for this. Haha, the above quote is kind of true. But I've taken a deeper understanding of all kinds of issues away from many conversations where the person I was talking to was immature or nasty. These conversations aren't just a collision of different facts and statistics, they're a collision of different life experiences, different world views. It's one in a million that one somebody's worldview will flip 180 degrees because of a well-phrased argument on the internet. Especially from a stranger.

I have these conversations because they help me understand where people are coming from better, because other people read them on Medium, and because I get to share them here and have further conversions about them. The people reading can figure that out for themselves, but can also see why certain arguments, maybe arguments they'd also believed, don't quite work. That's all much more important to me than whether a single person admits they might have missed something.

By this point, I'm quite confident that I have a deeper understanding of trans issues in general than most of the individual trans people I speak to. Because, unlike almost all of them, I've spent years reading things that are pro-trans *and* things that highlight the negatives of gender ideology. But even with (or perhaps because of) all the research I've done, there's huge amounts of complexity to how to resolve these issues that requires understanding where everybody is coming from. From the most reasonable to the Stephanies of the world.

It's quite easy to capture the rational arguments in articles. I can be clear and dispassionate and evidence-based. But the more emotional points of view only appear in the comments. And to really figure this mess out, we need to understand those perspectives too. Because, sadly, people spend more time being emotional than rational.

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