>What would you make of a heterosexual, cisgendered man saying that he doesn't really think people with non-standard gender identities are discriminated against?

So now that I'm a member of an "unprivileged" viewpoint, I'm granted the privilege of determining what constitutes ignorance and privilege in other people--you granted it directly by asking me. In this way you are propagating the inequality of privilege.

It is enough for me that a viewpoint is wrong; I do not need to associate it with a group. (Or at least, I do my best.)

We are in a war over privilege and who has it: the honest attempt is to balance out the economic and societal privilege with privilege in discourse, privilege in judgment, who has a 'right' to feel a certain way. The dishonest attempt is where selfish action leads those who have power to hold onto it.

In a theater of discourse as muddled as the internet, as cacophonous as our cities and streets, the combat is about shutting down viewpoints, which is _not about who is right_.

Privilege is not a coherent, sane, or consistent concept. I work as a programmer, and am privileged financially as a result. Should I give up this privilege when the simple fact is _society needs programmers?_ By having privilege do I forfeit the right to be proud of my career? Is there a net privilege quantity that I possess? The only determinative answer I have to these questions is the last one, and it is a solid 'No,' because _each privilege I supposedly possess/lack acts along a different axes_, and sometimes a privilege or lack thereof provides benefits and consequences simultaneously.

Discrimination, likewise, is not a coherent, sane, or consistent concept. "Knowing real discrimination"--you reference an absolute concept that is actually based on your personal evaluation of what constitutes real discrimination. There is no real discrimination or fake discrimination: all discrimination is discrimination. Some of it is valid: no one is complaining that Stanford doesn't let in people without graduating middle school. Some of it is invalid: the Westboro nuts are morons. Some of it cannot be helped: despite all the progress of feminism, some women just want to get married and submit to their husband, and we are left with no course but to respect that choice. (I respect it: do you?) And some of it we _recognize_ as technically 'unfair' but are hoping to mitigate larger effects: affirmative action.

The OP is making a comment about the wider sea. You didn't really provide any evidence to counter his large-scale commentary except for (implicitly) denying his group any privilege to _even contemplate_ the wider sea.

That's the problem with these sorts of discussion: someone can say "We're moving towards equality pretty well, overall" and be attacked with "There is still discrimination X." Both statements evaluate as true, so a fight starts anyway, plus it gets tied up into people's identity (that is something you did _explicitly_, in fact) so people get pissed off.

For what it's worth, here's my take: the demographic shift for males in the US is broadly towards lower education and employment. Additionally the heterosexual relationship has an altered power balance: forces in the legal system that were discriminatory against women have been targeted for elimination for the past however many years, while _not_ being targeted for men. How much discriminatory cruft remains from our hetero-normative past?

It is almost a given that social forces move too far, take too much, and then have to balance out. There are very few conservative revolutions, very few careful idealists. So how _unlikely_ is it that we have not moved past a point, or will very soon, where the equal status of men and women is ambiguous? Arguably the point of equality is _at _ the point in time where equality is ambiguous, because otherwise there wouldn't be much to argue about! (At the very least we can use this to provide lower and upper bounds, eh?)

Your knee-jerk reaction, "No," may very soon be out of date.