Moral quandries suck.
There’s a 20-something lesbian TERF in the UK who is terminally ill. I have never contacted her before, and I shall not name her here.
Do I write and offer commiserations, or do I say nothing? Do I put arguments aside and show basic kindness, or risk a TERF backlash?
Now is not the time for confrontation and debunking ideology.
In the world there are millions of 20-something people who are terminally ill right now. Most will die without the internet paying any attention whatsoever, because they are not online celebrities. Some will even die alone, because they don’t even have family/close friends who could support them.
I just fail to see a moral quandary here. Why should I care about one specific stranger merely because I have heard about her due to her having done something nasty and harmful? After all, I don’t pay attention to the individual tragedies of literally billions of other people about whom I have never heard, most of them nice people who never promoted bigotry towards me and didn’t try to make the world a worse place.
I know that the Internet wouldn’t pay any attention if I were terminally ill. Strangers aren’t paying any attention to the fact that right now my country denies me access to healthcare just because I’m queer and my country doesn’t want me to live as a man. There’s exactly one person in the entire world who is currently trying to actually help me with my medical problems (my boyfriend). Even my mother wouldn’t support me (she’s extremely transphobic, so I never came out to her, she doesn’t even know what’s going on with me). And I’m not complaining here—that’s just how life goes on for the average person who isn’t a celebrity, because the world at large doesn’t care about somebody’s medical problems. If some TERF doesn’t care about my medical problems (caused by transphobia that she herself is promoting), then why should I care about her medical problems? Of course, it’s not like I want somebody to die and I’m certainly not happy about another person being terminally ill. It’s just that I don’t feel anything—I neither care about her nor feel sympathy.
Where’s the “moral quandary”? If you happen to be in the habit of automatically offering commiseration to anyone who’s suffering a terminal illness, then maybe. The fact that you “have never contacted her before” suggests that you aren’t particularly close to this person, so… again, where’s the “moral quandary”?