Warning: I’m tired of constantly reading conspiracy thinking from otherwise-smart people, and I’m taking it out on you here, because I just hit my breaking point and I don’t subscribe to the Stack you’re quoting. Sorry, but really, sorry-not sorry.

Re: Drescher’s paper and the “long game” importance she ascribes to it and early trans activism: ascribing to master planning what is the result of more mundane day-to-day human self-advocacy is naive.

Any true and experienced student of human nature who pays attention and thinks critically should know that.

If you ever wonder why people tend to fall for conspiracy theories, congratulations, your wonderment was just answered with this silliness.

So the author found a paper where a guy outlined a strategy that in practice ended up being wildly successful. Omigod it was a conspiracy, they planned it all along starting at least in 2009, right?

WRONG.

It’s the first error that conspiracy-theorists make - mistaking a bunch of converging individual agendas that each originated with an individual who had similar characteristics and experience and motivations as a bunch of other individuals, with a master plan.

So a guy wrote a paper. BFD. Did he start the fire? No. Did anyone even read his paper at the time? What kind of impact did it actually have on people’s thinking? Who knows? Was he the author of a Master Plan? No. He was just a dude who was thinking similarly to a bunch of other people, who wrote about his thoughts on the topic, which were the result of very common human motivations that he shared with others.

Which also describes a million other sets of thoughts written in a thousand other papers by thousand other people. But the author retroactively focuses on this one, because it turned out to be accurate to what later happened. Which brings us to the next mistake conspiracy theorists make - forgetting that when a thousand different people set their Genius Theory about How Everyone Should Do Things down on paper, the chances are, one of them will turn out to be more or less accurate.

CONSPIRACY????

No, you flaming idiots, just the inevitable result of human nature, at the individual and group level.

The tactics outlined in Drescher’s paper are what narcissistic abusive mind-fuckers instinctively do. Not because he told them to. Not because anyone planned it, or had a Narcissists’ Strategy Session in 2009 or before. But because they are narcissists.