[bosmos]

> that people's gender identities, biochemical makeup, and surgical history are obviously completely irrelevant to complete strangers

At least in the UK, this became a matter of renewed public interest for two reasons: firstly, a proposed reform of the law to remove all gatekeeping from the process of changing one's 'legal sex', and secondly, an appalling case of several imprisoned women being sexually assaulted by a man (Karen White) who had been incarcerated alongside them due to having a 'legal sex' of female.

It was left-wing feminist groups, who organised largely offline to begin with, that reignited this debate. This wasn't some artefact of social media raging, it was a grassroots effort to halt and reverse a change in the law due to its clearly negative effects on women.

This is also a debate that has been ongoing for decades, long before social media websites even existed. Janice Raymond wrote what turned out to be a quite prophetic book on this topic in the 1970s, for instance. Renée Richards was stirring controversy in women's tennis at around the same time. Much of what you'll hear on this topic these days has already been covered by radical feminists for many years prior.

[kuramitropolis]

You make valid points - but I don't think the author of the post that I was replying to would be able to appreciate the nuance.

By bringing up the Karen White example, aren't you basically saying it would somehow be less appaling if it wasn't a trans person perpetrating the assault? Because I thought this sort of thing was abhorrent regardless of the salient details of a particular case?

Social media only makes it easier to focus on "which cage should we use for transgender people", and so much harder to ask ourselves "why are we putting people in cages". Or, as per the other example, "did Hunter Biden really lose his incriminating laptop?" vs "why are we letting ourselves be governed by people with familial ties to criminals?"

Social media and the polarizing meaningless debates that it enables serve the purpose of precluding people from focusing on the latter kind of question. (Which is already hard enough as it is, because it involves actual thinking.) If the public conversation is retreading ground that was already covered in the 1970s like you say, doesn't that mean that our society is regressing? Shouldn't be worrying first and foremost about that, since that's where we'd find the root cause of all the more specific issues?

How many people feel good for having the correct in-group opinions, while their contribution to e.g. the trans rights debate only goes as far as canceling JK Rowling, or, conversely, going to a Jordan Peterson talk? How many people have even heard of the actual examples you mention, as compared to the number of people who only know "uhh, so there's a debate on the Internet about some abstract hot button issue, and I'm required to pick a side in order to participate in society"?

A couple years from now the topics may be completely different, they'll just find another scapegoat or another thorny bioethical edge case, but the medium of debate will still be largely the same ol' Internet, and the AIs will only have become more effective at sowing discord.