> Speak your mind

Since you asked.

Sometimes I stay quiet because every infight in "The Left" is wasted airtime that allows my political opponents to look calm and normal.

Sometimes it's a matter of priority.

If I talk about gun control a lot, I'm going to turn off lots of people.

I wish the whole Democratic party would stop talking about gun control. I don't think it makes the biggest difference. If they talk about it, they will probably lose voters who would otherwise support issues I care about more.

So how does this relate to the book? I don't know. I haven't read the book. I heard it's bad.

Let's do an "if by whiskey".

If the book is bad... If it's complete misinformation, cherry-picked facts twisted to match bad-faith conclusions, and it's only going to hurt trans people... Then yes, I'm going to stand up brave and say "The publisher should refuse to carry this book, because it is full of harmful lies." Because it is damned expensive to get people to read the truth once they've bought the lies. As a capitalist, I don't want to sell the book about why Nazis are good if it means I have to waste a bunch of money writing a book that refutes it, which many of the readers will not read.

Of course, now we've invoked the Streisand Effect. It's far too late for effective good-faith censorship. Censorship at this point means that I, an adult trans woman with no children, am part of the same `#trans` hashtag as the performative-woke cancel-mob that just wants to mutilate children. I wish I could leave that hashtag. But nobody can take hashtags off once someone puts them on you.

If the book is bad, then it's too late to censor it. But I wish it had been censored sooner, within the publisher, because I think it's a very bad look for a publisher to (following your analogy) publish Nazi propaganda that they could choose to just not publish. If a book comes out to rebut this one, will it make the same headlines? Will it hit the front page of HN? Is this the replication crisis, but for the Twitter age? And before that book gets published, how much damage is done by people accepting un-rebutted misinformation?

If the book is good... If it's mostly true, if it's good-faith concern, and not whataboutism and concern _trolling_, then it still really sucks that people are going to read this headline, maybe even read the book, and come off thinking that I, an adult trans woman with no children, am now part of the same hashtag as the performative-woke cancel-mob that just wants to mutilate children. I wish I could leave that hashtag. But nobody can take hashtags off once someone puts them on you.

What's my unpopular opinion? People lack nuance. Especially online.

In my opinion the book is dangerous because the median person will spend at most 1 minute per day thinking about trans people. If that whole minute is, "Wow, trans people want children to mutilate themselves and separate them from their parents," then I have lost something.

Because now I am vaguely associated with something that we can all agree is terrible. Even if we don't agree whether it's related to me, or how often it happens. I am sure it has happened at least once, I'll grant you that.

My unpopular opinion is that I _shouldn't_ care about this book. I _shouldn't_ feel threatened by free speech. The fact that I come here and write long wordy whiney liberal diatribes about this, I think says that something is wrong about how little rationality is really floating around, even in a space like Hacker News. I should be relaxing in my backyard while I take my estradiol pill, not typing away and wondering if someone's going to accuse me of hurting children one day.

Free speech works great if everyone is a rational actor who doesn't commit to big ideas without big evidence. Are most people rational most of the time? Consider that the lottery still exists.

What about the book? I think people should read it. Don't believe the headline. That's kinda the problem, is that if you have 1 minute per day to think about trans people, please don't spend it on 1 headline that _heavily suggests_ we're _associated_ with monsters. I don't think the author deserves any sales, so please pirate the book, read the whole thing, _and fact check it_.

And once the truth has gotten its shoes on, what do I want you to think? I want you to think, "Wow, it _is_ terrible what happened to those children. Those individual doctors _are_ bad. Those individual trans people in the book _are_ bad. But the fact that ReactiveJelly is trans has _nothing_ to do with _any_ of this. What's she gonna do, kick them out? Become Blaire White and constantly emphasize the bad people in a desperate bid to keep her own head above water? Become Contrapoints and write nuanced 2-hour liberal diatribes that no moderate will ever watch? Sit in her backyard and take her pill while quietly accepting that every minority is going to keep catching flack for the crimes of the worst people who happen to share their hashtag?"

I hope I don't sound agitated. That would, of course, mean that I'm wrong. /s