This is certainly an example of such an aside, but it is a topic I find interesting so I’ll reply.
This information is not new to me. I would guess it is not new to a lot of people, especially LGBTQ people. Trans people often say that trans people have a brain that is literally, physiologically, more aligned to their gender identity than to their gender assigned at birth.
Some LGBTQ people may not want to emphasize this due to disliking biological essentialism, the same way some LGBTQ people have drifted away from the common idea that gay people are born gay. But I would guess (without looking for facts, pure guess) that these are the minority… I would guess most gay people and trans people are fine with saying they were born that way and it is due to genetics/physiology.
I find it kind of fascinating that your initial instinct is that trans rights advocates are the ones that “suppressed” this info. From my perspective they are often shouting this from the rooftops (albeit with less technical detail than this video goes into, since this guy is teaching a biology class) and then anti-trans activists say they are wrong. I do not think “TRAs” even have the power socially to suppress this info even if they wanted to, and they absolutely do not want to. You can see lots of trans people in the comments of that video appreciating the lecture.
Also, when I googled this subject, one of the first things I found was an anti-trans website calling this exact topic a myth:
Even these anti-trans people agree with me that this is a widespread claim though. Here’s the initial text on their site (the starting sentence is bold already, but I’ll add bold to one part of one other sentence for emphasis)
“I was born in the wrong body”. We commonly hear this and similar phrases to describe what it feels like to be transgender. These sound-bites roll off the tongue with ease and have been repeated so many times that it is easy to believe they are true; that the brain is indeed gendered and mismatches can occur between the brain and the body. However, there is no credible scientific evidence to support this idea.
So yeah. I think your ignorance of this idea may have more to do with you not being very well informed on the overall subject, rather than being due to anyone suppressing information.
I think this is mostly true for the irrelevant controversial asides. If your discussion partner isn’t interested in an irrelevant aside, and isn’t baited into arguing due to finding it controversial and objectionable, then they can just ignore it.
I am unsure how valuable an aside actually is in such a case. You say the asides are useful for providing context and that seems possible to me, but not necessarily true. Probably depends on the specific irrelevant asides.
I do wonder about the value of asserting the asides as factual even for irrelevant ones. One of the issues I raised isn’t just that these asides are irrelevant and create tangents. It is also that the way you often present them puts the burden on your discussion partners to do the work. You don’t typically pair your irrelevant asides with any of your reasoning or arguments. So then it’s on us to argue against assumed “standard” reasoning, or probe for clarifying details, or similar.
Again if it is an irrelevant aside then we can just choose not to engage and then avoid that burden. But if the aside is the type that is supposed to be part of your argument, where you assert a controversial fact as if it’s just a general fact, then this can be more frustrating. An example of this would be the non-irrelevant aside about the church shooting.
Yes I agree that some leftists are very anti-western. I don’t need examples.
I don’t think I would classify that as too controversial, even. Not on this forum, for sure, but also not generally. I think some of the anti-western leftists would freely agree that they don’t like the west, and if asked they would give their arguments for why the west is bad. Then there may be another subset of lefties that you consider anti-western, but they reject that label and say they are fine with the west as a concept, they just dislike XYC western countries a lot for ABC good reasons.
And then there is another subset who reject the idea that they are anti-western, say they like western civilization, and explain that they have criticisms that they hope will make western civilization or specific western countries even better. My guess is that this last group is the overwhelming majority of left-of-center people in the USA.
Thanks for clarifying, I did interpret you as seeing it more like: sometimes an error when misapplied, sometimes good and useful when applied correctly.
One tangible example of this is a few months ago in the discussion of feminism. When I was criticizing men a lot, you eventually seemed to get frustrated that I wasn’t also criticizing women. That would be an example of the sort of thing I’m talking about. I’m not sure how you would characterize that now, in terms of the distinctions above.
I don’t think I was arguing for something I thought was wrong. But my estimation of things is contextual; I might think something is kinda bad objectively but much better than alternatives, and thus I could “defend” it. The defense would be sincere, and I may not mention the stuff about it that I view as bad.
Anyway, it may be a bit complicated. We don’t need to continue this tangent.
Okay, cool.