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Controversial topics are hard to talk about.  What makes the process even more difficult is when one side, for whatever reason, decides that disagreeing with their position is equivalent to you *hating* their position.

The disagreement=hate confab is almost an exclusive feature of attempting to dialogue with someone on the Left of the political spectrum.  I hesitate to use the Left/Right distinction though because the terms are not describing the political reality we now inhabit.  Perhaps authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian might be a better way to describe positions these days.

Authoritarians whether on the Left or the Right seem to have a built in predisposition to thinking that their choice is the moral choice and that somehow by questioning their assertions you are questioning their morality or ethics.

It really isn’t that, at least not a first.  One must grapple with the argument the person makes not the morality or ethics the person in question happens to hold.

An easy example is a person stating the fact that women, exclusively, are adult human females.  The simple action of stating a fact can lead to accusations of hatred, discrimination, and even bigotry.

How does that even work?  My hypothesis is that when you encounter the disagreement=hate trope the person that you are dealing with isn’t willing to put the thought or effort in to make a reasonable counter-argument.  It is much easier to simply dismiss statements and thoughts that do not comport with what you hold to be true than do the work to properly refute them (also the statement in question may be closest to the truth and thus more accurate than your worldview).

Another issue is that your interlocutor may rate highly on the authoritarian scale.  Woke ideologies like transgender ideology are totalizing, for them to reach their final stage *everyone* has to believe in the ideology.  The utopian magic can’t happen until everyone is ideologically congruent thus wrong-thinkers must be converted or removed from the equation.  If you are speaking against gender ideology -for the converted it simply must be “hate” – because the ideologue is convinced that their position is not only factually correct, but morally and ethically correct as well.  Thus, the problem lies in you, not them as they have deep insight into the question, that gives them access to the “truth” and speaking against this “truth” must be hateful in nature.

It isn’t.

Being able to interrogate and critique ideas is part of the bedrock of a free society.  We need to be able to objectively look at what people say and determine for ourselves the value of their arguments.  Doing this now in society can be challenging precisely because questioning the orthodoxy is often misconstrued as “hatred”, thus speech and debate must be kept in check to stop the “hate” if one is to follow the reasoning from those who seek to limit speech in our society.

Limiting speech is such a completely terrible idea and we should really pause and consider the nature of so called progressive movements that advocate for the censure of speech in society.