…I could have told you that 🤷
Source: https://x.com/BriannaWu/status/1984574165643403370
Not my usual kind of source (Xitter), but I want any centrists out there who ask trans people to “just get along” / compromise with actual hate groups that want them eradicated to know that it doesn’t work.
There is no such thing as a reasonable bigot, by definition.
This is why advocating for “finding middle ground”, or centrism, or this repackaged warmed over Abundance crap is so toxic.
You can’t match these people half way. you have to beat them
Political centrism works well in a staunch democracy with a certain Overton window. As soon as these Alt-Righters have influence in a country, it doesn’t work anymore.
Beat them with rods is the only method.
(Not sarcasm)
Most arguments have a middle ground, but its a case by case basis. In this case the sides are:
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let a marginalized group experience a little joy and feel comfortable in their bodies
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refuse to accept that a middle school understanding of gender and biology might not be totally correct.
Meeting in the middle here is how you get second class citizens.
I see a lot of (often well deserved) shit talk about centrists/middle ground. Honestly, it IS silly to talk about middle ground between reason and raw hate. I do, however, doubt myself if I look around and find myself spouting the most extreme ideas on a given topic. How isnt that scary to people? I dont want to be the fanatic. I was raised with talk about the middle path and the golden mean. Virtue in courage is found between recklessness and cowardice. I still subscribe to that notion, but absolutely recognize how one can lull themselves into false means based on the prevailing culture (Overton window). Still, I dont see how it is that hard to have some bedrock principals, and use those to anchor a true middle ground.
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What a pathetic person :c
A good compromise is never just halfway between two policies. It requires understanding both perspectives and addressing their actual problems. So the compromise here would be trans rights for trans people, and free mental health care for anti-trans people.
The Trans Athlete debate also never seems to address the fact that it’s all unfair from the get go. Being born to a poor family? Being born with a birth defect? Being born into an unsupportive family/community? Being born at the wrong time of year?
It also shouldn’t matter how well someone does in sports. No athlete is using their skills in the work place and students shouldn’t need athletics scholarships to pay for school. It should just be for fun with nothing on the line.
In the real world, it doesn’t even cause a real fairness issue. The Olympics started allowing trans competitors in the 90s, but there’s never been a trans medal winner. If there was a real advantage, then you’d expect the best person at some sports in some counties to be trans, so there to be trans athletes competing, and their advantage to put them on the podium. You’d also potentially expect some countries to pad their team with trans people to get more medals. This hasn’t happened.
I think you’re kind of confusing trans people and people with DSDs. The Olympics stopped doing sex testing themselves in the 90’s. There have been a few biological males with DSDs that won women’s medals in the Olympics though. All 3 medals for the women’s 800m at the 2016 Rio Olympics were awarded to biological males, Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba, and Margaret Wambui. Likewise, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are also biologically male (not trans as some people incorrectly claimed) and notably won gold in 2024. They were all wrongly assigned female at birth but have the physical advantages of male puberty.
Ana Caldas is a more specific example of why trans people that are biologically male have an insurmountable advantage in the women’s category.
Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are also biologically male
This is a lie. Wikipedia links to no fewer than 3 sources that confirm this is a lie. I will be blocking you.
“Those cheering fans have embraced Khelif throughout her run in Paris even as she faced an extraordinary amount of scrutiny from world leaders, major celebrities and others who have questioned her eligibility or falsely claimed she was a man.” – https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/algerian-boxer-imane-khelif-fights-for-olympic-gold-after-enduring-abuse-fueled-by-misinformation
'The participation of Algeria’s Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin has proved controversial given they were disqualified from the 2023 World Championships.
“Let’s be very clear, we are talking about women’s boxing,” said Bach at Saturday’s daily IOC briefing.
"We have two boxers who are born as a woman, who have been raised as a woman, who have a passport as a woman and who have competed for many years as a woman.
“This is the clear definition of a woman. There was never any doubt about them being a woman.”’ – https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/articles/c28e88jdprno
'Khelif and a second boxer, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, fell foul of IBA eligibility rules […].
[…] a March 2023 IBA board meeting stated that “the athletes do not meet one of the eligibility criteria”, without stating which one.’ – https://www.reuters.com/sports/olympics/who-is-algerian-boxer-imane-khelif-2024-08-03/
We have two boxers who are born as a woman […]
Right, they were incorrectly assigned female at birth and raised as women but are biologically male, because
the athletes do not meet one of the eligibility criteria
I’m confused as to why you think those quotes support your point. The sex testing was done by an accredited lab, and is the eligibility criteria they do not meet.
The sources people cite for Imane Khelif being biologically male are:
- an opponent with a history of forfeiting after a single punch and claiming after the fact that her opponent was cheating and that was why she was forced to forfeit did it again. When she did that in the past with other opponents, there wasn’t any assumption that the baseless cheating allegations were on gender/sex grounds.
- The IBA, an infamously corrupt organisation with the infamously corrupt Gazprom as its majority owner disqualified her from a tournament without saying why. There are enough historic allegations of them disqualifying people for refusing to throw matches that it’s plausible that the only reason she was disqualified was that she refused to throw a match they wanted to rig.
- JK Rowling said she looked like a man. She does this a lot with a lot of cisgender women due to internalising unrealistic femenine beauty standards.
People have claimed sex testing was done by an accreddited independent lab, but chasing that citation just leads to the IBA saying she was disqualified without elaborating why, which doesn’t support the claim.
There’s no actual evidence to support the speculation. That doesn’t mean it’s untrue, but does mean it’s unreasonable to present it as fact - there’s just as much evidence for alternative speculation, e.g. that she bribed the opponent to forfeit and was disqualified by the IBA because they found she’d bribed people to forfeit in the past, and it would be just as unreasonable to spread that rumour I just invented around as if it were fact.
JK Rowling/IBA/etc don’t matter, they’re just noise. The sex test is what matters. Chasing that citation shows this
https://www.3wiresports.com/articles/2025/6/1/xxyetyl1aewfij823hnfdrsbi1sqjm
And note this correction (from the IOC!), which straightforwardly implies that it’s a DSD case
The weight of evidence strongly points towards Imane Khelif being biologically male. It doesn’t mean the IBA isn’t corrupt, JK Rowling isn’t terrible etc, but none of that matters.
The trans athlete debate was a solved problem before the right wing learned about it. Let the professional authority body of whatever sport, in collaboration with relevant medical professionals, determine what hormone levels or transition progress is qualifying or unqualifying in each individual sport in a case by case basis. Because we tried this before, with genetic testing of Olympic female athletes and enough turned out intersex or androgyn disordered that they stopped doing it.
“The problem is, they are getting crazier and crazier.”
They’re not, they just don’t feel the need to hide those parts of their goals any more, and you should have listened to us when we warned you about those goals.
And you should be listening to us now about their future goals.
They kinda are. Not at the fringes, there used to be targeted outing campaigns in the hopes of getting trans people fired or killed back in the day, but what was once extreme personal bigotry has become a pipeline and is increasingly legitimized by mainstream right wing politics. If you ask the average bush era republican if the medical establishment should be forced to institutionalize trans people, they’d reply with a slur for sure but they’d not support overriding medical institutions.
It’s easy to dunk on how wrong she used to be, Brianna absolutely and clearly was. But now that even she agrees, it’s not super helpful to mock her about it.
There are a oodles of different social pressures to conform for trans women, I truly understand her motivation. Girl let her internalized transphobia take the wheel and went look for nonexistent middle ground. Especially early in transition it’s alluring to be *one of the good ones" and get a very specific type of applause for it.
We need to recognize that Bri didn’t have to admit her faults, glad she did, but even on far more trivial issues most folk struggle. I’m glad she got here, and I look forward to her being better advocate for our rights. But her past should only be as an example for others, not a crudgel to mock her previous bargaining.
Welcome Hon, glad to see ya. ♥️
I agree in large part, I think she needs to step away from the internet and discourse for a while and actually connect with trans people in real life. Hit up a support group and listen, go to day of remembrance and hang around for a while after just talking about life with people, stuff like that.
I haven’t forgiven her yet, but she’s still my sister, she just needs to get her shit together and stop hurting the family. And that includes learning that her middle ground is still gonna make us second class citizens (and it’s easy to accept it for yourself, but when it’s others you care about it’s harder, it’s why you need community).
I will however say, she’s not fresh out, she was out when she was a major target of gamergate like a decade ago. Like idk how she didn’t learn by watching Blaire White get used in the same way.
Sounds great IF she does agree. She’s dropped this ball before. I agree with you, except very tentatively.
Can we still mock her for being a blood thirsty genocidal psycho?
Brianna should go home and read, forever.
She was wrong. She remains wrong. The most help she can be to anyone is to butt the fuck out.
The trans movement in no wise needed a quisling to suck up to TERFs, and we aren’t going to coddle her for getting what she was told she would.
This is not a matter of innocent ignorance. This was a matter of willfully ignoring all of the people telling you what would happen, complete with historical record.
Absolutely agree that Brianna needs to log the fuck off, de-center herself as any sort of repetitive of the community and sort out her own internalized transphobia. She isn’t even close off the hook.
This is not a matter of innocent ignorance. This was a matter of willfully ignoring all of the people telling you what would happen, complete with historical record.
100%. I agree completely. She ignored the broader trans community and perpetuated harm, all for selfish self-congratulatory reasons. But what I’m saying is that she recognized the futility and is starting to listen. This no “forgive and forget”, but we can’t condemn her for admitting she was wrong.
I just don’t want others with misguided bigoted talking points thinking that they are trapped in that echo chamber.
She isn’t starting to listen, though.
She just decided that because she half admitted a mistake that lots of people loudly told her she was making, she can just act like none of the nastiness she perpetuated on people who carefully explained why this was going to blow up in her face. She just declared that she was reaccepted, trying to wishcast instead of engaging in personal growth.
She still says she believes in “middle ground” with violent, homicidal, totalitarian fascists. Despite everything, she still hasn’t realized that “middle ground” is a fallacy that rightists use as a trap to take everything from others.
“Meet me in the middle” says the unjust man. You take a step forward, they take a step back. “Meet me in the middle” says the unjust man.
She’s close, I think, but only when you admit that compromising with the unjust is ALWAYS perpetuating injustice can you be forgiven.
Some people need to learn about the alt-right’s cultivated ignorance via hard experience.
The rest of us work just fine via observation.
“Meet me halfway”, says the unreasonable man.
You take one step forward, and they take one step backwards.
“Why can’t you meet me halfway?”, complains the unreasonable man.
And thus, conservatism in a nutshell.
What The hell are extreme Position on “trans people” that come from trans people themselves? Such extreme stuff like “just let everyone life the way they want and dont be fucking dick?”
I seriously have no fucking clue what she could mean that might be somewhat controversial. The only thing I could think of is stuff like “chop everyone’s dick off” but that’s more like extreme feminism and not just “extreme trans”.
I think that people like to imagine this opposite dangerous “extreme” to validate that they can have the right to hold their problematic values. But that other extreme is basically a boogeyman. I hear from frienda and family on every subject “oh but we should be careful to not go too far in the other extreme”. As if it was a real threat. Not only because we are so closer to right wing extremism at the moment but also because how can caring about other people can be “too extreme”.
The problem with compromising for a “middle ground” is that, when the right decide to re-litigate the issue (if they ever stop litigating to begin with), your starting position is now that middle ground. Compromising for a middle ground simply moves the Overton window to the right.
First off, Brianna Wu is not my sister or comrade, so she can write that down.
Better late than never but bitch we ALL warned you
Ah, Brianna Wu. Theres a name Ive not heard in a while. Always looking to grift off something or other for her own gain. I wonder what she needs money for this time…
Exactly. My dislike of her has zero to do with her being a trans woman.
I have no sympathy whatsoever.
Fuck off and have the day you voted for.
Oh… I know… I’ll walk through the chainsaw robot cave… they are triggered by motion… they tear anything that moves to shreds… yeah, that’s where I’m going to walk…
I remember a long time ago someone told me “you can’t reason with crazy.” These people are living in a completely unrealistic universe and do not have their wits about them. You can call them evil or whatever, but even so, they should be getting help from a medical professional because whatever is going on with these people is completely toxic, unhealthy, and destructive, even for themselves. I’ve pretty much written off anyone who still supports this administration a couple of years ago, as any reasonable person has already abandoned Trump and anyone else he associates with.
once again ignoring entirely that trans masc people exist and we are impacted by the bullshit she spouts as well. what impacts one of us affects all of us, and I am not your fucking sister.
Transmascs aren’t part of her personal experience. That makes sense to me. Also they are not the primary enemy of the Anti-Trans people.
Also they are not the primary enemy of the Anti-Trans people.
In the same way that lesbians weren’t the “primary enemy” of Anti-Gay people. They ate shit all the same.
Yes.
