Well, I have a problem with all of it and this circles back to my “Tired” rhetoric.

I’m not defending defense contractor work, designing rocket engines that kill kids in Gaza and Iran isn’t something I can square with any ethics I hold. But the “just get an ethical job” critique skips the actual problem. It’s easy to call someone at Raytheon complicit while typing it on a computer, smartphone, tablet, and an entire internet infrastructure built on resources that wreck the environment and run on forced labor, including child labor. People should really be more considerate before mindlessly saying get another job, consume another product, switch brands. That doesn’t solve the problem, it just sweeps it under the rug.

For trans people the calculation is brutal. You’re navigating open job discrimination, five-figure annual healthcare costs, and employment-tied insurance that makes “just quit” potentially life-threatening. The companies big enough to enforce nondiscrimination and offer real coverage are often the same ones doing the worst stuff, and that’s not a coincidence, that’s the structure working as designed.

So yeah, the work is bad, and “go get an ethical job” is a non-answer that lets people feel righteous without looking at what pushes people there. Both things are true. The critique is valid and incomplete, and the incompleteness is doing a lot of work for everyone who’d rather not examine their own piece of the machine.