i just want to clarify a point.

it's easy to look at what i've written here and say "she's calling for solidarity with trans activism, but she won't, herself, stand in solidarity with muslims or gamers. hypocrite!".

and, as always, what that means is that you're a conservative, and i'm not. allow me to explain.

what you're doing is creating a false equivalency by throwing all of these different minorities into a box and standing up for "minority rights". so, to you, these are all the same thing, and i'm clearly contradicting myself. but, that is a textbook classical conservative position that is usually attributed to de tocqueville. it's a right-wing approach to the scenario.

i reject this - i don't want to put everybody into this big box, and i don't think that standing up for "minority rights" is the fundamental issue, at all. rather, i'm going to pick and choose which minorities i'm going to stand with, based on whether they reflect the values i have or not. and, while trans activists reflect my values, muslims and gamers (with caveats in both scenarios) most certainly do not.

rather, if i were to stand up for muslims just because they're minorities, then i'd be being a hypocrite, as well as dishonest and inconsistent, because i have absolutely no common cause with them whatsoever.

it essentially goes back to the basic difference between the left and the right, once again. the right believes in a world of harmony, where everybody gets along in shared diversity because they know their place and they keep to themselves. the left, on the other hand, believes in a world that is defined by perpetual conflict between interests and classes, where people need to align against each other in order to advance their own causes.

the simple answer is that i'm on the side of people arguing for equal access to services, and i'm not on the side of people using religion as an excuse to deny it. and, this is actually a good example of the growing contradiction evolving in front of us between real leftist equality and this kind of phony neo-liberalism that thinks "diversity" is a worthwhile excuse to deny it.