Quote:
Originally Posted by pokerjo21
It seems like a very manufactured controversy to me. Most trans people I know are not struggling to find a good waxing salon. We're struggling to be allowed to use public bathrooms, access health services, serve in the military, adopt children etc. In fact, this whole controversy feeds into one of our biggest complaints, which is the frequent cis obsession with our genitals.
Instead of manufactured I might be tempted to say that it's unrepresentative, or blown out of proportion, but I think the idea is the same.
It's something we noticed a lot of in the research project I participated in which looked at discourse in the online MRA reddit, but I suspect it's pretty common in politics in general. I've heard the basic idea referred to as the fallacy of the dramatic instance, which is a name I like. That is, it's the idea that people pick out some unrepresentative but dramatic example of bad behavior within some group (a social movement, political party, whatever) and use it as a proxy with which to criticize the larger movement. And it works best when the example is not, in fact, manufactured (just unrepresentative).
So I think the person facing the suit in the article may have a very legitimate complaint. And, depending on the way the legal system decides, it would seem legitimate to me to criticize some applications of public accommodations laws. But it doesn't make sense to try to turn it into some broad-brush criticism of trans activism as a whole.