mauvais you are arguing very persuasively.
I’m pretty convinced about your point that community is more important than thrashing this out. I am particularly aware of one or two other Mums who have trans kids for whom this is a tender subject.
So let’s talk about it. How would it look like if there was a self imposed moratorium on discussing trans issues here? Would it be workable, enforceable, desirable?
Short answer: I don't know, it's difficult, and I'm glad I don't run this place.
Longer answer... I'm acutely aware of the deep irony of me, a cis man, chiming in on any of this, let alone putting forth the answer. But lots of other voices are now gone.
I'll try and articulate something. At work (which in its day to day business is not related to any of this) we have diversity/inclusivity spaces where staff can chat, share news articles and every so often - usually prompted by external events involving BLM, Pride etc - someone organises listening sessions. In this we hear all kinds of marginalised or minority voices, be it on societal racism or women's experiences in the workplace, and I've learnt a lot from it. Now I just can't imagine asserting strong opinions in these places, not least as I mentioned a while back, largely because it is not theoretical, it concerns real colleagues. If we were discussing this stuff in a void where they were absent then maybe I would be mansplaining it to death, because I am an idiot, but that's not how it is. It is for me to listen and often adjust my thinking. It's also not an arrangement that primarily exists
for me to be educated; I can derive that from it if I'm lucky but it is mostly to provide a space for other people to organise and feel more supported in. As someone said to me, paraphrasing, it is not for society's victims to educate the non-victims - e.g. for women and non-binary people to educate us/me on gender discrimation.
In a work context it is easier to form this culture because of basic professionalism, but it's not just that, it's a people-centric construct where we are not just willy waving for the sake of an argument, it's made real by real people. In our case we already lost a lot of those people and even if they could be coaxed back we have not really reformed how we behave so it would invite more hurt.
I think I would ask the question: we are ourselves a fairly strong community that generally values and often knows each other, so how do we get to something like the culture I describe? Moratoriums on subjects etc are a strategy or implementation detail that may or may not support a bigger idea of creating an inclusive space and being good to each other. Behaviours I think we have here, like thinking of ourselves as something like Twitter - which is not a community - are the opposite of that.
Possibly it is too late, both in terms of the arc of this place and forums like it as a whole, and in terms of the representation we already lost. But trying to be more considerate in what we rattle on about would be a start, even if that does mean going a bit far and shutting down some discourse too soon because of its potential for toxicity. There are probably many other components to the answer too.
