Libertarian DEBUNKS Steven Crowder Psuedo-Science Transphobia | Skeptic TaraElla 2020.8
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Today, I am going to respond to a recent Steven Crowder video, where he showcased a few examples of trans people behaving violently, and sought to make a general point about trans people and hormone therapy.
Let's start with this. The fact is, while Crowder could find a few examples of trans people behaving badly, and I'm sure you can find even more examples out there, they clearly don't represent the vast majority of trans people. As even Crowder knows, there are at least more than 1 million trans people in America alone, so even if you can find a few dozen cases of trans people behaving badly, that's like less than 0.01% of all trans people. As for his claim that trans people are more likely to behave badly than others, he pulls a few statistics to justify his claim, but those weren't presented objectively. For example, the higher incarceration rate of trans people includes those who have been forced by economic circumstances into sex work to pay for their treatments, which is illegal in most places. Comparing these people to violent criminals is clearly unfair.
The other thing is, what Crowder was essentially doing was taking a few bad apples of the trans community, and using them to paint all trans people with a broad brush. He even made a highly unscientific hypothesis, that trans hormone therapy is responsible for making those people act violently. At this point, I should say that this claim is simply based on speculation justified by pseudo-science, coming from somebody who has no medical training and doesn't fully understand how HRT works. Needless to say, it is also not backed up by any clinical studies, which means it's essentially no better than that anti-vax stuff. Shameful indeed.
But let's get back to the point. Crowder's approach of trying to generalize the bad behavior of a few individuals to trans people as a whole is not only statistically and scientifically invalid, it is also against the fundamental values of classical liberalism. As classical liberals and libertarians, we are individualists. We believe in individual responsibility, and we believe each individual should be judged on their own character alone. That's why, for example, when some radical feminists say that men as a group are responsible for toxic masculinity, we rightly say something like 'not all men' in return. There's no reason why your average decent family man should be responsible for Harvey Weinstein's crimes, for example. Similarly, there's no reason why your average decent trans person should be responsible in any way for the bad eggs of the trans population, or be judged because of their behavior. That would simply not be in line with the personal responsibility we all champion. It would indeed be much closer to judging people as a class, just like those radicals who blame 'straight white men' for everything. As libertarians, we should condemn this kind of behavior every single time.
