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I find it bizarre that of all things, society has decided to legislate that you can’t hurt the feelings of trans people. We are being fed the line that there is no harder struggle on earth than to be trans, and that to offend a trans person is akin to actual physical violence.1/8
In some places, misgendering a trans person is considered a hate crime, either legally or in terms of social opprobrium. Presumably this is bc trans adults are so fragile that the thought of anyone seeing them in any other way than how they want to be seen will cause them to 2/8
commit suicide. But why are we stopping there? Why isn’t also a hate crime to comment on, say, the height of people with dwarfism? Are the struggles of little people less daunting? Are they less harmed by insensitivity? Or do their feelings & mental health just matter less? 3/8
Or what about laws to prevent discrimination against and insensitivity to obese people? If calling Alex Drummond, complete with beard and intact male genitalia, “he” instead of “she” is an act so egregious that someone should be banned from Twitter, fired from her job, 4/8
and shunned from her social networks, should we not also vilify anyone who calls an obese person “fat” instead of “thin?” Does society imagine that obese people do not suffer from dysphoria, or that the shape of their bodies doesn’t make their lives harder? 5/8
That no obese person was ever driven to suicide by bullying and unkind commentary about their body? Still, I see no one writing op-eds demanding that the public be compelled to call overweight people skinny, or being forced off university faculties for discussing obesity. 6/8
I believe that everyone should make an effort to be kind, or at the very least polite, to others. Most of the time it’s not hard to be nice. But to think that the government should legislate to prevent hurt feelings is both patently absurd and scarily Orwellian. 7/8
That we have singled out just one small group whose feelings must not be hurt, while everyone else’s feelings are fair game, makes it all the more sinister. We’ve decided that some animals are more equal than others and that should trouble us all. 8/8
