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John M's avatar

This is a kind of intellectually dishonest rhetoric that I see a lot. I'm not sure if there's a name for it, but it basically involves using words and definitions to put certain intuitions in people's heads that the basic facts of the situation wouldn't. For instance, you might have a word like "genocide," for which people have some very extreme ideas in their heads. And people have tried to write down some definitions and criteria to capture these mental concepts referred to by "genocide." But then minimal satisfaction of the written criteria, often in a roundabout way, is used by people to argue that something is genocide, even though the actual reality of the situation doesn't match people's intuitions about what genocide means. But because those intuitions exist, people end up thinking the situation is much worse than it really is simply because someone convinced them that something technically meets the written criteria for genocide. You can make a case that certain trans legislation technically meets the criteria for genocide, but that doesn't really tell you anything because the intuitions you'll get from that will be wrong. As you pointed, the right does this for words like invasion. It's really quite a dishonest trick and people should stop doing it.

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Tower of Babble's avatar

I feel like when people talk about denying trans people’s right to exist, they are talking about that persons right to exist *in so far as* they are a trans person. If being trans is an incredibly integral part of someone existence, and a legislative body renders living out that experience illegal, they are denying that person their right to exist (as a trans person). That implicit ‘as a trans person’ is really important though because of how inextricably linked it is to the individuals identity.

As an analogy a government might make it illegal to read or practice philosophy, and people might say they are denying the right to exist of philosophers. Likewise there is an implicit ‘as philosophers’ there, but supposing many philosophers are so connected to philosophy that it is an integral part of their identity, it seems like omitting that appended phrase isn’t actually that crazy.

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