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Hate Speech Hypocrisy
Some hate speech is hateless.
My students used to be appalled to learn that the First Amendment protects language they would understand as “hate speech,” which I take to be a verbal expression of hatred towards other people based on their apparent membership in certain categories we have agreed to protect. Legal protection most often flows from some status that the objects of hatred cannot control, such as gender or one of many proxies for the empty category of “race”: color as a proxy for race to hate African-Americans, nationality as a proxy for race to hate Mexicans, religion as a proxy for race to hate Jews, etc.
When you unpack these things, they reduce to status of birth as opposed to status assumed later in life, because status of birth is more likely to muster the power to achieve “legal” protection. Legislators, and people generally, identify more easily with persons persecuted for their status at birth.
Persons who step outside their gender as predicted by their birth sex are more likely to be tagged as fair game because the status they have adopted is seen to be a choice. I suppose they want, in the immortal words of The Rolling Stones, to get their “fair share of abuse.”
“Legal” is in scare quotes because I am convinced that laws purporting to criminalize hate speech are unconstitutional and so are…
