Originally a comment by Artymorty on Not as familiar.

There’s a bleak irony here that I’ve tried to point out more than once: the loudest champions of gender ideology are often the ones most afraid to actually look at it. “Transphobia” is real and common — it just doesn’t manifest the way we’re told. More often, it takes the form of incuriosity masquerading as virtue. It’s the Ardals of the world — people who don’t know the first thing about the subject — who are phobic in the literal sense: afraid of what they might discover if they examined it too closely.

They haven’t merely absorbed a set of beliefs; they’ve been handed a full epistemic template — a prefab way of slotting “trans” into the social landscape. Activists brute-forced the phenomenon into the moral mould of gay rights and civil rights more broadly, and once that move succeeded, dissent ceased to be merely rude or wrong. It became incomprehensible. They were never taught how to take the story apart. It never occurred to them that it might need taking apart.

Preassembled beliefs. Outsourced judgment. Critical thinking, for Ardal and so many like him, means following the Ikea instructions.

Graham built his own moral framework, guided by principles he actually thought through. It’s not a mystery why they can’t see it — the glass is a one-way mirror. The Dunning–Kruger effect explains the rest.