Not that there’s anything good about this, but hearing that both Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins “resigned” from whatever honorary positions they had with the FFRF rather made my heart sink.
I was a linguistics student for a time, and Pinker’s books always had a sociolinguistic aspect to them, but I never saw transphobia. It was admittedly a while back, so it really wasn’t yet settling into the national consciousness.
I also admired Dawkins’ writing style; again, I saw nothing transphobic.
So for both of these guys to be like “nope, you should have totally kept a piece up that says transwomen should have fewer rights and options” is, maybe, the final insult of 2024.
Perhaps you should understand that people over the age of 60 have different fundamentals and different language than what you are trying to expect from everybody. You are losing potential friends by alienating them only because they cannot learn new things anymore. Not only is it ableist, it’s also bad strategy.
If you must have hate, focus it on people who actually hate you. Don’t try to imagine hatred in others, in the worst case you and they both might start believing your delusion.
Bullshit they can’t learn anything “new”, they just don’t want to, and they think because they’re older they are allowed to have power over the rest of us.
That’s the ableism.