I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks

Possibly because the comment section will inevitably collapse into a partisan flamewar.

Shouldn't be a partisan issue.

While I agree with you, it is observably true that many people take different positions on the issue and then demonize those who disagree with them, converting it into a partisan issue.

Another commenter (now deleted) made the claim that, saying an issue shouldn't be partisan is “just saying ‘everyone should believe what I do’ but in the lexicon of people who look down their nose at the general public.” They added, “The only nonpartisan issues are the most basic of things that all societies have like ‘don't murder people’ (but even then the minutia become debatable).” Although the comment has been deleted, I think this merits a little further exploration, because it's a widely held viewpoint, and there is some truth to it, though I disagree more than I agree.

There are definitely people who mean, "Shouldn't be a partisan issue," that way, but what I mean when I say it is that from the clash of opposing opinions comes the spark of insight, and partisan struggles in which arguments are soldiers do not permit that process to happen: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...

I have frequently observed variants of the following exchange in mathematics classrooms:

Professor [writing on blackboard]: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.

Student sitting in the third row of the audience: No, it's x³ + a.

Professor: Hmm. [pauses]

Student: Because the x from substituting f doesn't cancel.

Professor: Yes, you're right. So you see that this just reduces down to x³ + a.

Sometimes it goes the other way, and the student is the mistaken one. Neither participant goes into the discussion on the premise that "everyone should believe what they do"; rather, they believe that by discussing the issue they can arrive at an agreement, which may involve changing their own mind. Converting the discussion into partisan struggle prevents that from happening. Imagine what would have happened in my example if the discussion had instead gone as follows:

Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.

Student: No, it's x³ + a.

Professor: I don't remember paying tuition to come and see you lecture.

Or, alternatively:

Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.

Student: You didn't even do a modicum of research. It's x³ + a.

Or, how about this?

Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.

Student: No, it's x³ + a.

Professor: You're being manipulated into thinking that this factor is being canceled incorrectly by the horrible evil professor.

Or, how about this?

Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.

Student: "x²" ? Êtes-vous fou ? Restez avec x³ !

This difference comes out in its purest form in mathematics, but it's also possible for discussion and consultation to reach agreement on empirical and even moral issues. But partisanship is an obstacle in that process.

And here in lies the problem: wedge issues. Taking something, blowing it out of proportion and turning into a partisan issue on purpose. Abortion, LGBTQ rights, immigration. It becomes impossible to have nuanced, rational discussion about those topics, and its on purpose. One side thrives off of making them emotional, hot-button issues. Shunning discussion of it here or elsewhere because it's an emotional, hot-button topic, is just conceding to the side making it like that.

Unfortunately, it also seems to be true that the guidelines aren't enforced on discussions about the Trump administration. We used to have informative, curious discussions about politics here, but it seems like Hacker News is no longer capable of that, so I think these flamewars are best left to one of the many willing political battlegrounds like reddit or X.

This is ironic. I thought there was a big push from the right for less censorship and less moderation in social media. Now we’re flagging posts because the comment section may get heated.

> the comment section may get heated

Have you read this discussion? It was already heated, although the comments posted recently have been better.

Before greggyb asked why it was flagged, the top comments were about "the dumbest bully from their grade school" and "team grade school bullies". Does that not sound like flag-worthy discussion to you?

Name calling like that buries legitimate discussion, like the claim that she was not in fact eligible for a TN visa because she "worked for" a startup she co-founded (Holy! Water).

"NAFTA specifically prohibits self-employment for TN visa holders. This restriction poses challenges for entrepreneurs who wish to start a business in the United States."

https://www.visapro.com/resources/article/tn-visa-to-green-c...

When the people in charge are acting like the dumbest bully from my grade school, then yes, it does sound like valid critism and a legitimate point of discussion.

Abortion, LGBTQ rights, and immigration are inherently deeply emotional issues, but that doesn't in itself make them partisan. It increases the risk that they will become partisan, but often enough and in enough places they have not been. Politicians—not just on one side or even on just two sides—generate support for themselves personally and for the political class as a whole by converting them into partisan issues. Venkatesh Rao has written a very thought-provoking analysis of the current dynamics of the situation in https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/.

This has been HN policy since the beginning, and while HN is usually still quite unpleasant, policies like this one are largely responsible for preventing it from being worse. There are social contexts where discussions of topics like US immigration policy can do good rather than harm, but HN is not one of them.

It's amazing how many people don't know how hypocritical and self-serving each side is when it comes to speech and censorship.

> They added, "The only nonpartisan issues are the most basic of things that all societies have like "don't murder people" (but even then the minutia become debatable)." Although the comment has been deleted, I think this merits a little further exploration, because there is some truth to it, though I disagree more than I agree.

For example, that time when English people in England didn't count: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Englishry

It's a race issue. We only know about this story at all because the woman is a milk-white Canadian. It's not supposed to happen to people like her, which is makes it extra outrageous.

I don't think there is anything to be gained from enumerating the cases when one or another society has condoned killing people, which are so numerous and diverse that they may have accounted for the majority of all of the people who have died. Everyone is aware that such cases exist, I think.

To be blunt, your perspective does not align with reality.

The reality is that transgender Americans have been doing these things, all these things, for many decades. And nobody, and I do mean nobody, cared. Ultimately you are not inspecting penises in the Men's room. You, yourself, do not care.

What do you believe transgender people did in the 70s, or 80s, or 90s? You've never thought about it because you know, deep down, it's not a real issue. But, if you do think about it - or better yet, just ask them - you'd know they've already been doing these things.

Women do not run into burly men with beards when they go to the women's room. Do you know why? Because those transgender men have always gone to the men's room, and have never been questioned. Never been questioned, until conservatives decided to question it.

I have been alive for a long time now. We always knew trans people existed. Nobody batted an eye. Conservatives too, including conservatives that exist still, and including even you. Yes, that's correct - I am speaking for you, because I know you were not protesting these things in the 2010s, or the 2000s, or the 90s, or the 80s, or the 70s.

So no, you don't care, and no, you yourself believe these are not real issues. You might not say that now, because as I've already stated, the conservatives brought it into the zeitgeist to distract you. And now, you are distracted. Before, you were not.

And, to you and other conservatives, you should focus. The economy is in danger. Due process is being violated. Our constitution is in hot water.

The American right has been able to propagandize you, and others, so completely and so severely, that you not only do not pay attention to these issues, but you legitimately think you willingly chose to not pay attention. You didn't choose anything, this was carefully crafted for you. I challenge you to think back to an earlier time you were alive and question what you saw then.

> While I agree with you, it is observably true that many people take different positions on the issue and then demonize those who disagree with them, converting it into a partisan issue.

Sure, but you have to draw a line somewhere. Even on HN, there are opinions that you can't express (repeatedly) without being banned, even though there are clearly people with such opinions. Otherwise it's the Nazi bar problem - everyone who's not a Nazi will eventually leave.

Where exactly to draw the line is left as an exercise to the reader, but I suspect that some people just don't like where the line is currently being drawn.

That seems like a reason to flag the comments, not the article.

I grew up in locker rooms. I started swimming competitively at age 7. The whole, "you were actually surrounded by trans people your whole life and never knew it till 5 years ago!" is absolutely delusional and my guess is you don't actually have much experience in men's rooms at all.

Feminists were protesting this way back in the 1970s. Janice Raymond even wrote a popular book about it.

Here's a review of her book, from 1979, which lays out many of the same points around this issue as are being discussed today: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/archives/male-and-female-...

I have, of course, been in Men's rooms. In my experiences in Men's rooms, I have seen remarkably few penises.

These transgender people did not suddenly pop out of nowhere. For context, I know several trans women who are in their 50s, and transitioned a long time ago.

I see with transgender people what I saw with homosexuals. That they were some type of phenomena, a new social contagion. That they are on the attack. I thought, surely the general population would never be stupid enough to fall for such an obvious falsehood yet again. Of course they've always existed.

> The reality is that transgender Americans have been doing these things, all these things, for many decades.

Do you have any evidence for that?

For example, do you have evidence of any of these happening in the US before, say, 1990?

- any openly transgender athlete participating in sports on the team of their preferred gender rather than their sex assigned at birth?

- large numbers of children receiving "gender-affirming" hormones or puberty blockers?

- transgender prisoners being housed with the sex they identify as, regardless of whether they actually "present as" that sex?

- a transgender woman being accepted to attend a all-women college?

Maybe all of these happened quietly, so common and uncontroversial that they were totally unremarked upon. But surely there's some evidence that they occurred?

For me it simply doesn't pass the laugh test that a trans woman with a penis could walk into a nude spa in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s without anyone batting an eye.

Are you kidding? There are so many VCs here who have the resources to push for fair treatment of immigrants and foreign visitors! HN is the perfect place to discuss this.

This will blow your mind: in Hawaiian culture, transgender people held a place of honor and respect. Hawaii is part of America (illegally overthrown), so there’s a cultural history of transgender people that you can point to here that is respectful, though today a lot of Hawaiians use it as a derogatory term due to hate brought in with Christianity and continental culture.

I don’t get why it’s such a threat, please explain that rather than trying to erase transgender people. Gays also have a very long history, and they’re also in the crosshairs today, why them? Did gays not exist to you in the past as well?

Nice steel manning, of course transgender people without bottom surgery don’t walk into nude spas. If you find a single example, great, find me the hundreds of examples you folks claim there are which threaten you. You’re not arguing honestly, just coming up with wild situations that don’t match reality. You may be uninformed, or misinformed, I suggest you actually read more than surface articles on Fox News.

I am not kidding. The problem is that the discussion collapses into an unpersuasive and uninformative partisan flamewar, so it does not improve the choices that those VCs will make. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43413819 for a more in-depth discussion.

Sometimes things get messy discussing important topics, we should err on the side of sunshine rather than darkness for these discussions. HN has a lot of powerful and wealthy people who have a responsibility to protect the system they relied on to become rich and powerful, but instead these people ignore the discussion because it doesn’t mesh with their ideas that America is the greatest.

See my connect from a few comments ago where I mention how interesting it is we can discuss authoritarian slides everywhere else except when it happens in America. It’s almost a conspiracy, IMO.

Also, I can understand demonizing the current admin, they’re flaunting the most important laws that protect us, and for some here the USA is poised to upend their lives or worse.

In any case, this discussion isn’t interesting, and constant complaints of bad behavior are stifling the actual discussion more than those flagged, dead comments that started shit.

All of the boys in the swim club changed together. All the boys in middle school and high school sports changed together. As an adult, working out at gyms and rec centers, all the men change and shower and talk and joke butt naked. Half the YMCAs I've been to over the years have a group of old guys that will tease you for being shy. The high school swim team I was on was... wild, I guess I'll say. Not buying what you're selling, sorry.

I deeply regret that you are providing such a perfect illustration of my point.

>This has been HN policy since the beginning,

This is not true, at least according to dang if I recall correctly. There was a change in moderation strategy since the pg days. The way I remember dang's own explanation was that pg was more hands off in his moderation of political topics. Sure, you can say that it wasn't the same community back then, less flamewars etc, but the fact of the matter is the creator of this site moderated things slightly differently.

Maybe you won't find it ironic, but the creator of HN is often sharing posts on twitter that would be flagged to oblivion if someone other than him posted it on here. Regardless of all the reasonable explanations (this is a tech site, journalists/politicians are on twitter), it's still an interesting datapoint that the creator of this forum in this day and age thinks it's more important spending his own time talking politics on twitter more than talking tech on this forum. I'm going to go out on limb and bet that he does this not because he enjoys or prefers talking politics but because he feels compelled to do so more due to the unprecendented nature of certain events.

I think people who say "do it on twitter like pg, instead of HN" forget that pg's positive twitter experience is largely due to the fact that he has a million plus followers on twitter and people in other fields know who he is so he is able to get high value engagement that counteracts the trolls. Your average HN user is not going to have pg's twitter experience, and so they'd rather try their luck posting in the best forum that's hospitable to them, HN.

I don't claim that there are hundreds of examples of this.

My claim:

- A: today, the left, broadly construed, insists that there is a right for transgender women to go into women-only spaces, including nude spas. For my point, it doesn't matter how often this "right" is exercised - merely that the left asserts that there is such a right.

- B: this was not true of the left 6 years ago (or 45 years ago).

- Consteval's claim that the left is merely defending "settled," uncontroversial rights that trans people have had for decades is therefore wrong.

Evidence for A:

In 2021, a 52 year old sex offender who had been convicted in multiple instances of indecent exposure went into a nude spa. It caused a huge controversy with dueling protests and counterprotests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi_Spa_controversy

In San Francisco, a Russian nude spa announced a policy that 1 night a month would be "ladies only" for people who were assigned that sex at birth, to provide a "phallus-free environment." For that decision, they were investigated by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. They reversed their policy after this intervention.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250307232755/https://www.sfchr...

https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/archimedes-banya-ladies-ni...

In Washington, a Korean spa which requires nudity for some services restricted people from male genitalia from entering the facility. A transgender woman with male genitalia was denied service at the facility and sued: https://www.courthousenews.com/after-banning-trans-women-was...

So it seems to me that either:

- transgender women without bottom surgery could go into nude spas in 1970 without issue, or

- I'm wrong about A, and the left doesn't actually insist that trans women have a right to women-only spaces, or

- Consteval is mistaken, and people on the left are in fact pushing for more rights for transgender people that were not settled 6 years ago (or 55 years ago).

I'm asking for some evidence I'm wrong, you're just saying it doesn't really matter if I'm wrong - it's unlikely to affect me personally. Maybe! Nevertheless...

There are children who are transgender today and they're not changing in front of other's.

I don't know where this delusional that dudes are just hanging brain around women is coming from. You're right, that doesn't happen. That's a conservative's wet dream. I'm sure you, and others, would be beyond ecstatic if transgender people were doing that. Maybe then, you'd have a smidge of justification for all this.

For the record, nobody actually cares if you're "buying what I'm selling". You're missing the big picture here. These people aren't a threat to anyone, and to suggest otherwise is un-American. You can either face the reality that lays before you, or you can continue to be ridiculed for having obviously false beliefs. The world around you doesn't rely on you "buying" anything.

While these sub-ideologies did exist, they were fringe. This is now a primary issue for conservatives and it has been brought into the zeitgeist and their political platforms. That is different. Most, close to all, conservatives were not considering this in the late 70s. I know you know that.

> For me it simply doesn't pass the laugh test that a trans woman with a penis could walk into a nude spa in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s without anyone batting an eye.

They weren't, and they still aren't. The idea that transwomen want to be around ciswomen and hang brain is a conservative fantasy. You would very much like to believe that is true, because you believe transwomen are inherently perverted sexual deviants. Not unlike how conservatives viewed homosexuals. Of course, this is not so. This is one of the most classical forms of a projection. Meaning, you cannot view transwomen in a light that isn't sexual, so you project your own sexual objectification onto them. Again, exactly how was done with homosexuals in the past. Even today, there are a lot of people I've met who can't see a gay man without thinking "dick in ass dick in ass!". That's not the homosexual's fault.

On the topic of gender affirming care: the primary recipients of gender affirming has always been cisgender people. I take testosterone myself, because unfortunately I lost my testicles to cancer. I identify as a man and I want to present as a man as much as possible, so I take testosterone. And again, with puberty blockers, same thing - mostly cisgender people.

To be clear, gender affirming care for minors typically includes things like a new haircut and new wardrobe. In some cases, particularly for teens, puberty blockers may temporarily be used. The idea that minors are mutilating themselves is, surprise, another conservative fantasy.

But, even then, the Conservative's desire to get in the way of the rights of parents, their children, and their doctors, is very out of character. If you told conservative's 10 years ago that the government is going to want to vet what treatment their children can and cannot receive, they would be aghast. Even today they would be. After all, a lot of them have a big issue with the principle behind vaccine mandates.

You and another poster in this thread keep trying strawman me with "trans people aren't a threat" stuff but I never said anything about any threat. I responded, explicitly, to your post that trans people have actually been passing in their preferred changing rooms forever, and I can tell you from years of personal experience (perhaps if I said, "my lived experience", you'd listen better?) that they have not. As another posted has pointed out, women have been complaining about this for decades. Your paragraph about "hanging brain" and conservative wet dreams is simply unhinged and your attempt at putting words in my mouth is unimpressive.

> They weren't, and they still aren't. The idea that transwomen want to be around ciswomen and hang brain is a conservative fantasy.

I think you're probably right that the vast majority of trans women are completely uninterested in such a thing. And yet:

In San Francisco activists protested a policy that excluded trans women from a nude bathhouse one night per month for a "phallus free" womens night. They were investigated by the city's Human Rights Commission after numerous reports and reversed course - no more "phallus free" nights. In Washington State a trans activist sued a nude female-only Korean spa for not providing her with service because of her male genitalia.

Are these specific people merely fighting back to try to retain a right that was already "settled" back in 1970? Or are they trying to claim a new right?

You're right; the guideline to not submit most stories about politics was not present from the beginning, but rather newly added in May 02008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080527112502/http://ycombinato...

But that greatly predates the changes in moderation strategies or hiring dang and sctb.

Surely the understanding of the site's social dynamics has evolved over time, though, and so the reasons for the same guideline are different now.

> I don't know where this delusional that dudes are just hanging brain around women is coming from. You're right, that doesn't happen. That's a conservative's wet dream. I'm sure you, and others, would be beyond ecstatic if transgender people were doing that. Maybe then, you'd have a smidge of justification for all this.

Me: "I want our society to allow businesses to prohibit people with penises from receiving certain services, for example a nude massage at a women-only spa."

You: "This is not happening, it's a conservative's wet dream, maybe if it were happening you'd have a smidge of justification for all this."

If it's not happening, why not allow businesses to prohibit it? Like, if no trans women want to hang out naked with natal women, is it a problem for Wi Spa or Olympus Spa or Archimedes Banya to say "as a nude facility that serves women, we are uncomfortable having phalluses on the premise"? Why are there protests and lawsuits and investigations when people implement these policies?

Do you personally think that those policies are objectionable? Do you think they should be illegal?

I am not sure what opinion you thought I was trying to express. Evidently some sort of anti-censorship argument? To the contrary, my comment was explaining that the issue of US immigration has become highly polarized, and discussing highly polarized issues on HN is generally destructive, so probably we shouldn't attempt to discuss the issue here. This is closer to being a pro-censorship argument than an anti-censorship argument. (Later I added an illustration of how well a discussion can go without polarization, and how radically that differs from the current comment thread, but you may not have seen that.)

Your comment begins by signaling partial disagreement ("Sure, but") but then makes no argument tending to show that the issue is not highly polarized or that HN is a good place to discuss highly polarized issues. Instead, it discusses other topics relating to social group dynamics, but not in a way that is relevant to the comment you were replying to.

I regret that you think that, but I’m not explaining to you why you’re wrong, it’s as pointless as you trying to convince me that I’m demonizing anyone with that comment.

Not as fringe as you may believe. Raymond's book sold a lot of copies. But more impactfully, radical feminist ideas on this topic and others continued to develop, and became increasingly influential from then to now.

One aspect of this that often isn't considered is how women with shared feminist ideals but differing political backgrounds have been working together across the aisle. As a result, radical feminists on the left have had significant influence on conservative policymakers via these informal collaborations. Look at EO 14168 for example.

>But that greatly predates the changes in moderation strategies or hiring dang

dang explicitly states they do it differently than pg it:

when a thread turns into a political flamewar, we moderate it more than pg used to. There were many past submissions that neither users nor moderators would allow today [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

You're advocating for avoiding polarised discussions because they degenerate quickly. I'm only pointing out that that's not the only option: you could allow these discussions while ruthlessly silencing bad faith actors (for whatever definition of "bad faith" you want to adopt). Those are both "pro-censorship" stances (although I prefer the word "moderation" to "censorship"), but they're going about it in different ways.

That's what I mean by the Nazi bar problem[0]: you can't solve it by just not allowing certain topics to be discussed, because eventually in some completely tangential situation, a nasty flamewar is going to erupt and people who are not Nazis will be appalled that there are Nazis here.

[0]: I'm explicitly not saying that certain opinions expressed on HN are literal Nazi opinions, the Nazi bar problem is just a convenient analogy for the situation when one group of people holds opinions that are utterly appalling to many other people that frequent the same space.

> The question we all need to ask is - how many people are personally victimized by transgender Americans? Gay Americans? Green card holders? Once you start asking those questions, the current conservative zeitgeist becomes untenable, and the platform quickly crumbles.

I agree that that statement is technically correct, but I have observed various forms of it in American media, and here's my issue with it: the Conservative platform seems to not have run on it at all.

Broadly, I don't see the point in straw manning (conflating all immigration with illegal immigration, for example) in a good faith discussion. I've seen it a huge amount in left wing media, but I think honestly have to dismiss that discussion as bad faith and try and desperately search for the remainder.

Specifically, they haven't run on "gay Americans" that I've seen at all (I'm not sure what that would look like, even), and they haven't run on green card holders. They have run on trans ideation and surgery for children, and trans women in female spaces, and illegal immigration, it's true, but that is far more specific, and it's those precise issues that got them elected.

this sort of comment is exactly why i flag this sort of content, to put it kindly, you're sort of missing the point and using a strawman argument

I see. Thank you for clarifying. I indeed had not understood you.

It sounds like you think the problem is the wrong sort of people. But almost everybody retreats into ego defense and partisan struggle under sufficiently threatening circumstances, even though some people are habitually more prone to that kind of thing than others. It's more about minimizing the frequency of the wrong sort of circumstances.

Additionally, though I think everyone is happy that I'm not the one running the site, I have observed elsewhere that your favored "ruthless silencing" approach has some side effects you may not be anticipating.

Thank you!

Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for anything specific because I understand that the problem is hard. But I feel like some people want to have their cake and eat it too. If you don't silence certain types of discourse, you alienate certain participants (and HN understands this to a degree - you can't use racial slurs here, for example). Maybe that's acceptable - but you just have to be honest about it.

Are you interested in hearing from the perspective of a trans person who mostly doesn't agree with the person you've been replying to, but does feel there's gaps in your perspective here?

I ask this way especially because I don't know if you'll actually see this since I see one of the comments is flagged, and given how it's been most of a day already.

I would be very interested, thank you. The flag is probably justified since HN is not really the place for these culture war things :) but I'm genuinely trying to understand the perspective here, because it does seem like a big gap between my understanding (the Democratic party has moved left on these issues) and theirs (the Democratic party is just playing defense on these issues).

I personally wonder if people were arguing and complaining that America was moving left or failing back when racial integration was the big fight. I’m sure there were people arguing that letting non-whites drink from the same water fountains was dangerous for white women. Think about that a bit while you lament transgender people.

You're proving my point here - the original comment claimed that the left was merely defending the pre-existing, settled rights that trans people have "always" had against the right's aggression, I'm saying that the left has been actively pushing for change and new rights. I think the left sees trans rights as a continuation of the civil rights movement. This is an empirical question, entirely separate from the question of whether this is a good thing.

Could you explain the racial analogy in more detail please? It's not obvious how restricting males from using female-only spaces is similar in concept or principle to racial segregation.

No, I'm saying you're derailing the conversation with your "empricism", congratulations. That's what you people do around here. If there are simply a few examples of the "danger" you people claim, then why is it such a problem? Answer is that there is no problem, it's a made up issue that is being used to divide us politically, like abortion or gay rights or weed. It doesn't matter if "the democrats are moving left", you're either for the rights of people to exist as they wish, or you are for limitations on how people can express themselves in this way. I'm finished with this line of conversation, you have wasted enough of my time.

This is simply not true. If you turn on Fox News or even listen to the current administration talk, they are talking about transgender people.

Hell, Ted Cruz ran an ad depicting transgender children as big burly men who want to hurt YOUR daughters on the soccer field. He's a senator. He's got bigger fish to fry than that.

Even if you truly believe conservatives aren't making a boogeyman out of nothing, which is very hard to believe, but even if you do - if you look at the legislation being proposed it doesn't target the narrow cases you think it does. It harms all trans people. A lot of it targets gender-affirming care for adults.

And then immigration. How many people have illegally been detained now? Are we in the few hundreds? Where's their due process? I won't mince words. If you think the Trump administration is only targeting "illegal" immigrants, you are stupid.

Not that we didn't see any of this coming. For months leading up to this administration, the left warned about Project 2025 and it's radical ideals. We reminded you that this has nothing to do with children. With illegal immigrants. This has to do with every American. But you, evidently, continue to fall for obvious lies. After a certain point, we must deduce that you have subscribed to some religion, and it is out of our hands.

> If it's not happening, why not allow businesses to prohibit it?

Well, we aren't.

But, more specifically, the stuff the left does have a problem with is not doing this. You, and other conservatives, are trying to play innocent. This "what, lil ole me?" approach to policy making and the publicity associated with it does not fly.

If you read the bills, any of them, take your pick, proposed by states across the US you would understand they aren't doing innocuous things like this. They are targeting transgender people and crossdressers in a much more extreme fashion. Limiting adults access to medical care, enforcing dress codes in public, and even making their very existence untenable.

You, as, I'm assuming, a proponent of government restraint should be against these. These affect non-trans people as well, and set a dangerous precedent for what the government is allowed to know. It harms privacy, autonomy, healthcare.

When these other vast downsides are brought up, you, predictably, put on the "nooo we're not going to do that!" charade. Surprise, after this administration we can no longer believe that. Practically everything everyone thought was off limits is no longer so. You can continue to play stupid, yes. But you should be careful - after a certain point, people might start believing you are just stupid.

You seem more interested in debating the imaginary version of me in your head than in having an actual discussion here, so have fun, I think you can do that on your own.