"Appeal to Triviality"

Lately on Twitter I have seen people post an image about the "Appeal to Triviality" fallacy, 'where the person who commits it argues that the argument "doesn't matter" in an attempt to make their opponents give up so they can push their agenda without opposition'.

I wanted to ask if this is a correct fallacy.

I have not heard of this before, but it sounds like a judgment rather than a reasoning error. If someone is spending their valuable time arguing if a taco is sandwich or not, I can say it "doesn't matter," but what that really means is that it doesn't matter to me . If the goal is to make the other person give up the argument so the one claiming it doesn't matter can push an agenda, then this is a form of manipulation. If it just happens that the person really doesn't care if a taco is a sandwich or not, then there is no manipulation.

Now, if the person making the argument reasons that "person X says this doesn't matter, therefore, the argument is not worth making" (to anyone) then there is a certainly an error in reasoning on the part of the person making the argument. So if one wants to call this "Appeal to Triviality," I see no problem, as long as we agree the reasoning error would be on the part of the one abandoning the argument - but I don't think that is what these Twitter meme's are suggesting.

To me, this sounds like a type of red herring . The arguer seems to be using the perceived relevance of a point to distract from the truth of it.

Trying to think of examples I've seen of this in the wild, I've seen a couple people argue that people shouldn't be concerned about trans rights, since trans people make up such a small portion of the population.

I would say the simple answer is no. Even worse, I would call this a form of Tu Quoque itself, actually.

Looking into the context in which it is used, we can find that it's actually commentary on the opponent's perceived hypocrisy: Accusing the opponent of dismissing something as not important, when they are shown to believe it to be very important.

As stated above, it's certainly dishonest and manipulative, but those are descriptions of behavior, not of rhetorical structure. This is further underlined in the 'push their agenda' line of the definition - it is a judgment of the opponent's integrity, an implicit claim that they are lying, which in itself isn't a fallacy.