> "It must be a crime if you don't treat me as a member of the opposite sex".

This is a thing that basically does not exist. This is, again, more right-wing culture war bullshit that was cooked up in a meth lab. It's not real.

Can you get fired if you purposefully antagonize your boss at work? Yes. That's always been the case. Guess what, if I call my boss a jackass I'm probably getting shown the door, and that's not even a pronoun.

Can you get in trouble for discriminating based on gender and sexual orientation? Yes, and that's been the case for a while.

Nobody is getting into legal trouble because they don't personally believe trans women aren't "real" women, whatever "real" might mean to them. Nobody, not a soul. It's just a non-issue.

What's going on is there is a set of people who are basically just doing nothing who are under constant new and innovative threats from the right. And, when they say, "hey, don't do that", we somehow have the gall to point at them and yell "Culture war! Culture war!"

It's not that people's goodwill is being burnt on trans people. It's that the right has been playing to the populist messaging they have in order to continue their crusade.

While the economy is burning down, and the climate is worsening, and we are entering wars, they are trying to convince you the problem is some set of people who are doing nothing. And, that the solution is simple: beat down this set of people.

This includes immigrants, trans people, gay people. Of course, it's just not true. But humans are stupid. We're already pre-wired to be uneasy around people we don't understand who are different from us, especially visibly different. And, humans understand and have high confidence in simple solutions.

I mean, God, look at the border wall. Will that work? Did that work? Of course not. But it's such a simple, almost child-like understanding of the problem that people had very high confidence in it.

> What's going on is there is a set of people who are basically just doing nothing who are under constant new and innovative threats from the right

Trans people haven't done nothing, there are many reforms that have moved the trans issue a lot that were pushed by trans people, that is not nothing. The right isn't innovating anything by rolling back those, they are just being conservative which is in their name.

You could argue those reforms are good, but you can't argue it is the right that is changing things here, the right just undo change they don't do the changing on these issues.

And you can't fault the right for trying to win the election. You have to try to win the election as well, throwing it away by sticking to unpopular policies such as trans in sports is just ignorant. It isn't just the right that doesn't want trans in sports, it is a large majority of the entire population that doesn't want that.