Will this Richard Hanania article on trans ideology hold up?
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Plus
54
Ṁ8607
2028
26%
chance

https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-gender-ideology-cant-survive

The gist of this article seems to be "Most leftist causes are supported by evidence and can be debated, but trans ideology is only as popular as it is because of aggressive censorship of anyone who disagrees. A relaxation of this censorship on Twitter will lead to vastly more people talking about it and seeing how ridiculous it is."

If Elon Musk does not buy Twitter, or does buy Twitter and the de facto content moderation policies do not become less restrictive towards criticism of the trans movement, this market resolves N/A. Otherwise, this market resolves based on my entirely subjective judgement of whether Richard's claim seemed true.

If at the beginning of 2028 it looks to me like the trans movement has lost significant ground relative to other leftist causes, this resolves YES. Otherwise it resolves NO. I'll consult the community before resolving, in case other people have had different experiences from me.

In order to differentiate between Twitter causing this change vs. a change that was going to happen anyway, see this companion market for the case where Twitter remains unchanged: https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-this-richard-hanania-article-o-0b909fcda930

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It's a compound series of claims, I don't know how this will resolve. I predict his narrative will become commonly accepted, but it will never be true.

Richard Hanania claims it is holding up more strongly than he expected: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-lgbt-dialectic

[...] I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re finally starting to see successful right-wing boycotts at the exact moment Twitter censorship policies changed.

If anything, my prediction may have been a bit too conservative. It was about trans, but in the case of Target, conservatives have bullied the company into decreasing the visibility of all Pride merchandise.

predictedNO

@tailcalled My hope is that by 2028, the article won't be holding up; being trans is exhausting enough already, I'd really like it not to get even worse.

@evergreenemily (Also, it's worth noting he's wrong about the social media censorship thing; even before Musk relaxed the rules on hate speech on Twitter, anti-trans legislation was gaining steam throughout the country. The rate at which trans people have been targeted by legislation has been increasing for years. All of this has been a long time coming; I was starting to realize trans people were the new conservative scapegoat by mid-2021.)

EDIT: Actually, the linked market is supposed to resolve N/A if Twitter changes its de facto moderation policies. So never mind about it being the same as this market.

The way I read it, now that the situation with Twitter has settled, this question is now equivalent to "will the trans movement has lost significant ground relative to other leftist causes before 2028"—that is, it's the same as https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-this-richard-hanania-article-o-0b909fcda930.

The idea that "trans ideology" is only popular because of censorship is laughably false.

The notion of a "trans ideology" or "trans movement" is badly named. Trans people are not monolithic, opinions differ between people and over time. Hanania uses the phrase "gender ideology", which is better. More precisely he's talking about gender self-identity. He could describe it as "gender self-identification ideology", I guess, if he wants to keep that vibe.

This market is really vague and subjective. I think you could make it more concrete by looking at the polling data from Pew Research: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/

So for example you could make a market like "In 2028 will more people agree than disagree that whether someone is a man or woman is determined by sex assigned at birth?". If Hanania is right then that is more likely to resolve YES. Just an example, maybe that isn't exactly what you are getting at.

Hope this helps. I'm afraid I won't be betting on this market.

predictedNO

@MartinRandall I wish they asked people about how things are in their state (or some even smaller unit) instead of US as a whole. I suspect many of those answers are based on the bad things people heard about other color states on the internet rather than any first-hand experience.

@Yev Agreed, for the questions about whether society has "gone too far" or "not far enough" it really depends how far society has gone. And society isn't a monolith, the best answer might be both at once.

@MartinRandall I was betting based political prominence, not on rates of acceptance, which I agree will probably continue to rise. Selling my YES due to ambiguous definition.

Moderately confident that the prominence of trans issues relative to other left-wing causes will drop off in the next 5 years purely because semi-niche culture war issues struggle to remain in the 'primary' limelight that long, so betting YES, but the idea that the current overall popularity of this (or any) issue is caused by twitter censorship is pretty silly, imo.

I agree with this take (compare to hot button issues of the past like same-sex marriage, Black Lives Matter, etc), but I'm not sure if it would cause the market to resolve NO (since the decline in arguments about transgender people might happen significantly after Elon changes how Twitter is moderated.

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