I don’t want to participate in this conversation, but I want to leave a note for any people who may be casually scrolling this thread, reading the exchange, and wondering how you feel about it.

You are witnessing, in real time, a technique that has been popularized by alt-right influencers like Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder as a means to be racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/etc online and then play the victim when people get mad about it.

The first step is to post something that at first glance seems rational, logical, and supported by facts, which portrays a particular minority group in a bad way. There are lots of these kinds of “arguments” available all over the web, and I’m willing to bet the “well thought out” comment that got the above user banned was mostly copy/pasted. It’s similar to the “despite making up X% of the population, black people cause Y% of crime” thing you see posted from time to time, as @[email protected] mentioned. They often use real facts and data, but typically skewed or taken out of context to push a particular agenda.

The next step is ideally to have someone from that minority group get mad and call them a bad word. Then they can sit back, sip their tea, and say, “See? I told you that gays/jews/trans/blacks/whatever are the REAL bigots! I’m just trying to have a conversation and they start calling me names and banning me.”

In cases like this, where @[email protected] is attempting to call them out in a civil tone, they play the “you’re just mad because you don’t agree” card. Or the “you didn’t provide a master’s thesis counterargument” card. Or the “I never actually said a slur so how is it hate speech” card. No matter what you say to them, no matter how you try to approach the “argument”, they will twist it around so that you are wrong. They’ll keep doing it until you finally lose your cool, which goes back to the first step.

In the worst case, no one takes the bait and they get ignored. But even this is still a win, because it means they get to spread their hateful propaganda freely. And a lot of times there will be casual onlookers, with no strong feelings about the matter, who see the exchange and think, “Hmm, that person is being civil and reasonable and all these pro-trans people are getting angry and calling them names. Maybe they’re right, and trans people ARE all mentally unstable. I’m going to save their ‘well thought out’ comment for later.” And so it spreads.

Call it gaslighting, call it trolling, it doesn’t matter. Think of it like this. Imagine two young brothers riding in the back seat on the way to Disneyland. The older brother is tormenting the younger brother by poking him constantly. “Mom! He’s poking me!” says the younger. “Stop poking your brother” says the mom. So what does the older brother do? He puts his finger right in front of the younger brother’s face. Not quite touching him, but close enough to be extremely annoying. “Mom, he’s still bothering me!” says the younger. “No, I’m not actually touching him” says the older, laughing. Finally, the mom has had enough. She turns the car around and says the trip to Disney is cancelled. The older brother, now furious, points at the younger brother: “LOOK WHAT YOU DID!”

The exchange you’re looking at is basically the grown-up version of the big brother in the backseat. They don’t want to have a discussion. They don’t even want to argue. They just want to piss of whichever minority group they hate, without technically breaking any rules (“I’m not actually touching you!”). And then, if they do get banned, they move on to the next space and say “Those out-of-control gays/jews/trans/blacks/whatever banned me from the last forum, but I’m sure THIS forum actually supports free speech and honest discussion. Did you know that despite making up X% of the population…”

Unfortunately, the best thing you can do is ignore them and hope the moderaters clean them out. It becomes a problem on big sites like reddit where mods are already swamped with thousands of other issues. But hopefully in the federated world, communities will mostly stay small enough to be manageable.