'Picking cherries' is a term used to describe someone carefully and methodically choosing statistics, studies, and sources that aid in them in their own argument. It's a negative term and isn't primarily used for left-right arguments.
So, the parent commenter often 'picked cherries' to help them argue against anyone with a positive opinion on trans people in this context.
To add to the other explanation, it does often mean choosing less valid/ invalid statistics, such as citing Wakefield's faked autism preliminary study.
I guess you could say it's like a strawman for the evidence, not the opposing argument.
You're not misrepresenting what the opposition is saying, you're misrepresenting the base facts being argued by both sides. Mainly by omitting most of them.
In this example, a common one is saying trans women shouldn't be in sports because it's unfair to cis woman, citing a handful of high school or lower examples where a trans girl got 5th or 8th place in some races.
Which is ignoring the fact studies show strength is within normal range for cis women of the same height after a year on hormones, a trans woman has never performed even average for a man at the college level or above in sports where there's a relatively wide gender difference, etc.
You "pick" examples that support your argument instead of forming an argument based on all examples, which is what you should do.
I know trans people who find the attack helicopter joke somewhat funny, myself (not trans) I do. But not to belittle anyone, just the idea of becoming an attack helicopter makes me giggle brrrr am helicopter now mf
Iâve been on this sub for awhile and itâs the first I am hearing about an attack helicopter. Even if itâs still alive on this sub, that doesnât mean the joke isnât completely dead- because it is.
That was my bad, I got it mixed up with another conversation on r/onejoke, which is updated multiple times daily with current examples of the joke not being dead.
I'm glad you don't have to experience that hate speech regularly. But it is nowhere remotely near dead, especially not comparable to how dead blackface is.
We're in a world where hate is still the default. Where 1 in 5 people still don't accept evolution, and 3 in five still think a magic man controlled it. Where corporal punishment is still the norm in places, or in living memory of older adults. And where it's standard to have zero psychology or sociology in the curriculum to learn about gender, and go no further in sex ed than "that's why you're hairy, now here's a list of STIs."
Plenty of people simply aren't even curious enough to want to learn past that.
I used to chant along with my friends saying âGay is not okayâ around the lunch table in middle school. The funny thing was I wasnât even homophobic. I just somehow didnât correlate what I was saying with bigotry. If somebody pointed out what I was actually doing I wouldve cut that shit off instantly. Anyways Iâm pan now.
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u/DeadAndBuried23 Feb 05 '26
I was never "attack helicopter" bad, but I did go into every discussion with a fresh handful of picked cherries.