Aside from what everyone else has said, one of the big leaders to this scenario is that the world has gotten so much safer and so much less violent and so much more accepting that people have to literally scrape the barrels to find something to be outraged about.
We all of us know that the Republican playbook of taking rights away from people is a thing that is intended to target people and punish them for not adhering to the moral code of the people doing the targeting.
But the fact that we can spend so much of our national resources on arguing over morality is a side effect of the world being so good that we don’t have to argue over worse things.
I’m not attempting to apologize or forgive anybody for their stance, but it is true that we are arguing over whether or not it’s okay to have an abortion or whether or not it’s okay to be gay rather than whether it’s not okay to let have the country starve to death or whether or not it’s okay to kill everyone all the time always.
I’ve said this before and I will inevitably say it again, human history is a pus filled boil on our consciences.
The only way to fix it is to lance it and to deal with all of the pus. We are in the pus clean up stage of human history, and in time with enough constant patient care, it will get better.
Not that old yet.
Right, fuck, my bad. Welp, yeah, I’m sorry to say but I think it has more to do with your progression into understanding more about the world and perspectives outside of your own experience. In no way am I trying to be mean or discouraging. You asked a really valid and important question, and i guess i impulsively reacted and forgot there are people less jaded than me. For what it’s worth i admire you and hope that learning some people are STILL stuck being shitty doesn’t make you think everyone sucks. And I’m proud to learn that another person younger than me just ‘gets it’ that people are people deserving of love and respect regardless of bullshit like who they themselves love.
You flatter me mate…internet blushing
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I suspect the truth is a lot more jarring/disruptive to your worldview than you might be ready to admit. I’m positive that you’ll shoot the messenger. You’re so close to the answer. It’s staring you right in the face.
The unfortunate truth is: The people (tribe) that you’re (rabidly) in support of are merely using those identity politics dogwhistles so that you’ll continue voraciously gobbling up the increasingly miniscule table scraps from the ruling class while thinking to yourself that you’re the last bastion of resistance against some great encroaching evil. When conservatives accuse the DNC of running the media, they’re not wrong. The DNC and their stable of “diverse” demagogues are masters of stage-managed, focus-grouped mass marketing. If they tell the truth, they are quickly disposed of.
Please read some Chomsky, my friend.
Okay, but even if that’s the case, what do we do about the very real consequences for trans people?
Your commitment to analyzing all of this through a small hole of ideas that are relevant to you is preventing what you’re saying from making complete sense. You’re omitting things and skewing the perspective with a lens.
This is because you’re both correct to some degree. Yes there is a large tribe who is using identity politics to gain support. However that support is less than equal to the other camp who uses scapegoating of said identities when you compare support on said social issues.
For all of time this has worked in politics and as always it is, as you point out basically, used to obscure the actual dealings.
Here’s where you’re completely off the rails. The DNC are masters at very little and especially are not masters at mass media marketing. Their slogans fail, their advertisements are bad, and they have failed to instill ideas that counter those of the right. The line about “conservatives are good for economy” still exists and they have no counter. The DNC are incredibly weak compared to the RNC.
Make no mistake, the DNC is scraping by because they do not represent exactly what the elite class believe as much as the republicans do. The media has mostly turned on them and criticizes their candidates about 10x more. Most of the media, owned by the elite class, does not belong to the DNC. Every major news network, including CNN now, goes against them and works counter to them.
And when we talk about why lgbt issues are present now, it has little to do with the tribalism you’re referencing. Little to do with identity politics. What’s even more rough to hear is that lgbt politics don’t matter to most voters. They matter to an LGBT crowd. Which is far smaller than the fundamentalists that the anti-lgbt are attracting. The DNC are not pro-LGBT in the way that we think of. They are pro-LGBT in the opposite way. The way where the other party has forced them to be.
That was a low effort response to a well written detailed post that took quite a while to write. At least deal with some of the issues raised, don’t just ignore everything they said and dismiss them as willfully ignorant.
It was because I thought the author both understood and even agreed with my point in principle but then did intricate mental gymnastics to disagree with my point and let everyone off the hook including the person that I was disagreeing with.
I don’t want to continue talking in circles with Centrists telling me that the piss pouring on my head is in fact charitable rain drops from the benevolent libs.
That’s a much better response!
Thanks for pulling it out of me.
Kind vibes to you, friendly and intellectually honest fellow fediverse Lemmy user. 🙏
Do you perceive this as a brand new issue in human society?
Well romans were fine with it. And the US people like to compare themselves to Romans at the height of the empire. But now it seems totally unforgiveable .
That’s… disingenuous. Lot of stuff happened between those points, including the murder of homosexuals for the crime of existing.
The LGBT community keeps the fight up because complacency gets our rights taken away. Justice Thomas has explicitly stated that gay marriage is on his list of wrongs* to right. To say nothing of Project 2025.
Western world is still pretty much the only place where homosexuals aren’t. Rest of the world… murdered pretty regularly. Asia, Africa, South America, middle east, are all FAR less ‘progressive’ than Western democratic countries.
Very true. I’m behind the US lens on this one so it’s easier to speak from what I experience. I know it’s… bad… elsewhere.
lol they were fine with it as long as the queers were whores and such. they could not be citizens.
only people who had any power in Rome were male roman citizens, and the wealthy ones at that.
and lots and lots of folks blame the downfall of Rome on it’s ‘decay’ of allowing homosexuality and such
The 1% needs to endlessly divide the working class against itself. It’s an old game with new tricks.
Well to be fair a lot of those politicians aren’t in the 1%, they just want to be. And they’re more than happy to toe the party line and step on everyone they can in order to get to the top. And then there’s the true believers, but let’s be honest anybody who’s a true believer or anything is crazy.
Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people’s understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.
It’s all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.
Like “There are trans rapists in women’s prisons”… Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery is enough for a trans woman to meet the requirements.
Or
“Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men”… When hysterectomy isn’t even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.
But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won’t.
The transition requirements are so high
what are the requirements?
Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery… But whether or not you “fit the requirements” won’t be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There’s documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn’t a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.
It’s also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women’s prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to “expectedly matter of course” .
So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally “at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all”
Part of the problem with arguments like that is if you say ‘trans women are not widely represented in women’s jails’ they can say ‘yeah but the left want to change that with self ID and all the other things they push for’ so really the only point you’ve made in their mind is that its good the people pushing these things aren’t in power.
Surely no one can deny that the lefts messaging has been that a trans person should be able to enter any gendered space without question? You never see trans advocates say ‘yes creepy men pretending to be women to gain access to female spaces is a legitimate problem which we intend to protect against by…’ they say ‘its not a problem, will never be a problem and anyone who says it might be is evil and stupid and bad’
Everyone knows a lot of men are creepy, everyone knows that there are rapists who if able to get put into a woman’s jail would jump at the chance - if one side is going to pretend these aren’t true simply because it makes the rest of their belief on the issue difficult to explain then that’s not on the normies who don’t accept it without question.
Up until the run up to the election the UK labour party for example pledged self ID legislation would be made law and there was huge outcry from trans advocacy groups when they changed their mind - you can’t argue that something you’re trying to make happen isn’t a problem because it doesn’t yet happen.
You see but here’s where how you’re putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is “we aren’t supposed to exist.”
The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their “problems” because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.
So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a “ruining your fun” problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.
It doesn’t matter that prisons don’t change their design to fit us because as long as we’re the ones getting raped the system is fine.
It doesn’t matter that public toilets don’t change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.
It doesn’t matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it’s just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we’re interpreted by the system as an ‘undue medical burden’ we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they’ve saved resources.
It doesn’t matter that we have kids of our own because us “not being safe to be around children” means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them “safely” .
The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren’t actually happening. This effect is called creating a “Moral exclusion” and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.
There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women’s bathrooms. Because it’s bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn’t mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that’s not a problem because you aren’t supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.
Oh man, I’d never even considered the fact that all these supposed “male rapists in female prisons” have had bottom surgery.
Like, what man cares so much about being able to rape women that he gets his dick cut off? That’s so much easier to believe than the idea that trans women actually are what they say they are (i.e. they are trans women, not men with a fetish or whatever other grossness)?
After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.
We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex… But in talking with cis people I actually think it’s something else. I think the vast majority of cis people’s experience of gender only comes from external influences… I have met cis people who recognize what we’re talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it’s actually rare.
So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who’s entire experience of gender is performance based… So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand… But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.
I don’t think it’s that they don’t have an internal gender identity, I think it’s just hard for them to tell. Ask a cis woman how she knows she’s a woman and she’ll probably say something like “because I have a woman’s body”, but I don’t think that means she has no internal sense of her gender, it just means it takes a lot more introspection and nuance than she’s spent to get to that than it takes to go “boobs, check, vulva, check, I’m good”. She doesn’t have a disconnect, so she’s never had to really consider it, doesn’t mean she doesn’t have it.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think research indicates we aren’t special because we have a gender identity, but because of what it is.
I don’t know who (Abigail Thorn? Contrapoints? …Vihart?) but someone was talking about how sometimes that’s the case, that they really don’t have a sense of their own gender. That they’re “really” something like agender, but that it’s just too much of a bother to worry about correcting people. But there are also plenty of cis people deeply invested in their own gender, who really do have toes to it and identify as that gender, but when you ask them how they know, they put it all on external things rather than internal.
That’s not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.
But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we’re talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people’s. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?
Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don’t really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don’t fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people… But otherwise on their own those things don’t make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.
They also don’t seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don’t tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.
I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don’t actually mean anything to them on their own.
Change the question slightly and they think about it differently. Ask them how they’d feel if they lost some of those features. A cis man with hairy arms and chest probably doesn’t say he feels a great joy when he thinks about them, but would probably feel some real discomfort if he couldn’t grow body hair any more. They assign a neutral value to them because they consider it “default”. And of course not everyone feels the same way about these things, cis or trans, but I think most cis people really do value their genders and sexed bodies because those things match, even if they wouldn’t say so.
Either way, I think we’re both speaking anecdotally and I don’t plan to go look for the research on gender identity right now.
That’s the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it’s root in other people’s perceptions. There’s a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project “manliness” as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces…but doesn’t well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.
It’s a difficult knot to dig down to it’s source but I think it’s a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it’s so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.
To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn’t really happening because cis people don’t really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don’t really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can’t just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate… And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.
I don’t know about that. I think the reasons they give would sound external like that, but they can sound that way from a trans person too. And ask about something more significant, like
what if you didn’t have a penis anymore? Say you could still have sex and babies, but didn’t have a penis. How would you feel about that?
A cis man would be pretty affected by that, and he wouldn’t attribute that to societal pressure. I contend that at the very least there is some misattribution when most cis people put the entirety of their gender identity on external factors.
Either way, I fully agree that it’s something that research can answer in a way discussion never will. Whether and to what degree that research has happened, is happening, or ever will happen I can’t say.
it’s mostly that it is social wedge issue that drives up ratings, outrage, and politicians can grandstand about it. And make up crazy bullshit about kids being forced to transition by evil doctors or something.
and therefore we can ignore real issues in the country while the media/pols rant on about total nonsense that affects hardly anyone and mostly isn’t real or relevant to trans people.
You’ve gotten enough good answers that I think it okay to address a tangent.
Things are definitely at the point where christofascists, and other hate driven ideologies are getting louder.
But, and this is vitally important as to why the pushback is making it a matter of public discourse at the level you’re asking about, there’s more allies now than ever.
Be ready for old man talking here, and ignore if not interested. Disclaimer: I have arthritis, and it’s easier to type gay than LGBTQ, so I’ll be using the shorter word for that reason, not as an exclusion.
Back in the seventies and eighties, gay rights was a thing for mostly gay people. Before that it had been gaining minor support, and the eighties were when social restrictions started changing enough that gay people were allowed to have some degree of public awareness in both news and fiction.
I keep bringing it up in various places, but Billy Crystal played the first recurring openly gay character on television. That was in 1977, and ran until 1981. I don’t think it can be said enough how huge that was in bringing awareness of gay people as just people was. That role brought gay into our homes and lives in a way nothing had before.
When something makes a group real to the majority, makes things stop being a dirty secret and just another part of life, you get kids growing up that are more open and accepting. As acceptance grew, so did the amount of people coming out.
As people came out, the straights realized that not only had they always known gay people, but they liked them, and even loved them for years, sometimes a lifetime. When that starts spreading, you have more people that are willing to support gay people and their rights as fellow humans.
Instead of being pariahs, gay people became part of life, part of our hearts. Eventually, more and more people that didn’t have direct relationships with someone gay became allies, supporters.
However, the more gay people became a part of life, the more noise bigots made, in their own homes and in public. So, instead of it being a dirty little secret nobody talked about, that way of thinking got nastier and louder. Before, it wasn’t something everyone would even know about until much later in life, but as the gay rights movement in the seventies started building up steam, you had more hatred being spewed as well. There had been before, but it was more likely to be handled with dismissive or contemptuous remarks rather than outright venom and bile in the open.
Now, us folks that were kids during the late 70s and early 80s didn’t just accept gay folks. We would often defy elders that opposed gay rights or bad talked them. As time passed and we grew up, the segment of that generation that became allies tended to be more and more vocal in our support. By the nineties, my generation was moving into adulthood and willing to vote our conscience. We were willing to put our time and money into the cause. Sometimes, we’d put our bodies on the line when things got ugly.
Move forward to now, and you’ve got two or three generations actively and loudly opposing the bigots, and not just the gay people. The bigots are smaller in number, but have been pandered to by political groups around the world, so have more weight than their numbers should give them.
Mind you, the bigots also include people of every generation too. Don’t imagine that there aren’t kids even that spew the same kind of nastiness that’s been used since before the 70s. But there’s more in direct opposition to them, and plenty of passive dismissal of the bigotry. Bigotry is not a relic of the past, nor is it limited to older generations; some of the loudest and most obnoxious hatred gets spewed by younger adherents. But the seeming percentage of hate is lower in younger generations, and the seeming percentage of outright support is higher.
That puts us in the situation we’re in, where hate has a bigger voice than it should, and love/acceptance has to shout louder to oppose it.
Hey.
I really enjoyed your comment. It’s very well written. Nice job. That’s it; that’s all.
Thanks :)
it really feels like it’s at a boiling point though right now. World governments have all shifted more to the right on average than they have in the last 80 years.
governments have all shifted more to the right on average
it appears to be the case. though afaict none of it appears to be organic.
Because the right offers people stability, authority, etc. People like that.
They don’t like left because it’s too vague and complicated to understand their points of view.
Trans people = bad is a lot easier for the average person to understand, than explaining to them what a transsexual person is and isn’t, and the various types of trans/queer identities. That shit requires a dictionary of trans terminology and hours of time to understand.
There’s been some surprising upsets recently though! We were all bracing for a fashy-wave but lots of progressive leaders have been elected lately, after it looked like their hardline iron-fist nationlist counterparts were gaining ground.
By no means a reason to take it easy and give them a breather, oh no! But we should definitely acknowledge every little bit of dystopia we manage to collectively avert. Even if only a little.
the fashy-waves were manifested by centrists leaders that we learned were very fashy-friendly after those upsets made those leaders intrigue with the far right; as is happening in france with macron; or clinging on to conservative policies; as is happening in the uk with starmer.
the people voted left; but all of the leaders went right anyways.
harris and trump are doing something similar with harris ignoring the will of 68% of americans when with comes to the genocide and trump with project 2025.
A little late-80s perspective: when I was growing up, “gay” was an insult we’d call eachother jokingly. Nobody “was gay” because that’s a (light, funny) slur. Hell, it wasn’t till I was 28 I realized it didn’t “have a dating-girls phase” that I never grew out of, I was just bi.
The homophobia is still pretty deeply ingrained even in people who aren’t that old and are really trying. I can only imagine how bad it is for those who aren’t and don’t.
I still have a hard time digesting “gay” as a slur. We simply didn’t use it that way, ever. F@g could go both ways and my gay friends happily slung it at each other. An attempt to take the word back from the haters I guess. At least that word was sometimes used as a real insult.
We’re of an age, and I too try to bring perspective to younger readers. All true, I was there, I saw it.
Things are definitely at the point where christofascists, and other hate driven ideologies are getting louder.
Good time to bring up how their numbers are drastically thinning. This is a big win and part of why we need to fight them hard as their fear of marginalization causes them to switch from dirty tactics to outright fascism to cling to power.
Survey: White Christianity is declining while the religiously unaffiliated keep growing
they are popular because they provide simple answers to complex issues.
People like that. Esp younger folks.
Just like the alt right is so popular with them, because it gives them simple answers.
Left doesn’t have simple answers. Wants you to listen to a college course type of lecture on every issue… people don’t care about that. They want a simple soundbyte they can emotionally respond to. Left is very poor at that… there are some examples, but they dont’ really get much traction outside of leftist/socialist circles.
Also you can spend thirty seconds as a right winger and have them all tell you that you’re great, important, clever, worthwhile, and all those things – spend twenty years dedicating your adult life to leftwing values and you’ll still get spat on by your political peers because your opinion on some obscure issue is 2% different to theirs.
That bump in 2020 is kind of interesting. The reason seems obvious, but correlation does not equal causation and all that. It does make me wonder if a big chunk of people claiming to be unaffilated are doing so because they think it’s the correct answer to give, not because it’s actually true. (My theory being that the pandemic made them decide they better stop denying Jesus for awhile or whatever)
Religion is an opiate. The best way to reduce its abuse is by addressing the underlying pain. When people conditions get worse they look to things to help numb the pain.
According to the GSS, only 10% of Americans reaponded “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” to the statement “Homosexuals should have the right to marry” in 1988 (first year the question was asked).
In 2004, it was 30%.
In 2022 it was 67%.
Also according to the GSS, 40 years ago a third of Americans thought homosexuals shouldn’t have the right to speak.
We’ve made remarkable progress in a very short period.
Yeah, trans people are just new targets. DOMA wasn’t that long ago, but regressives lost the battle against gay people, so trans people are just the next rung on the hate ladder for them.
Is that why I had to fly to a different state to marry my gf instead of my home state who does not recognize same sex marriages?
So now it’s demonstrated this can’t be true was it a lie and if so why? If not then what extra details make it plausible?
All 50 states are recognize gay marriage since Obgerfel v Hodges in June 2015.
Recognize is not perform.
In this case it is. All 50 states are required to perform gay marriages as of June 26th, 2015. The ruling took immediate effect nationwide. Clerks were having to hand-edit marriage licenses to allow for same-sex certificates because within an hour of the ruling people were showing up at courthouses to get married in states where it had been illegal.
Churches aren’t required to perform same-sex marriages nationwide, however.
Pretty sure churches aren’t required to anywhere in the US
Correct. And I appreciate that. A couple wanting a religous wedding should know that the pastor that’s blessing the union supports them.
20 years ago we were killing people for being gay, 10 years ago that was the worst thing you could be, what are you on?
The prosecutor argued that the murder of Shepard was premeditated and driven by greed
McKinney’s girlfriend told police that he had been motivated by anti-gay sentiment but later recanted her statement, saying that she had lied because she thought it would help him.
Price said she had lied to police about McKinney having been provoked by an unwanted sexual advance from Shepard, telling TV journalist Elizabeth Vargas, “I don’t think it was a hate crime at all.”[9][37] Rerucha said, “It was a murder that was once again driven by drugs.”[9]
Doesn’t seem to be a hatecrime. Just a crime against someone that happened to be gay.
yea yea saw the movie. It just kind of seems today more blatant then ever before. And on my off days I am usually on weed and alcohol. While I search for a new state to be stationed at.
Have you seen the Russian psy ops instructions?
Got a manual?
Because Americans are too ignorant and uneducated to assemble tribally over any actually important issue. Heck most people on Lemmy think if you’re gay and go to UAE they just chop your head off and bury you under a camel. The reality is that the world doesn’t care, just keep your private life private. But when your entire identity becomes a label you have to shout at everyone it’s basically veganism
I don’t think it’s good to just generalise a whole country of people. I’m not American but I realise we only really see the lunatics and crazy opinions. The regular people are as boring and uninterested as the rest of us, it’s just that doesn’t drive engagement.
Edit: Dudes complaining about mods here being as bad as Reddit stating no alternative opinions allowed. Strikes me if you’re having comments removed on multiple sites, that you’re the issue and not the mods. Perhaps conduct yourself better.
It’s not an incorrect generalization when it is stereotypically true. Also good to see the mods here are just as shit at reddit. No alternate opinion allowed.
“Keep your private life private” Okay so I can’t hold my gf’s hand in the street but if I had a bf it would be normal. In some countries I wouldn’t be allowed to marry her. Are those issues of making my private life public? A lot of people do care and hate us. Im getting weird looks everytime I’m with her in the street. So shut up about issues you’re not concerned with.
That’s not true at all. You have a warped view of the reality because of being fed negative propaganda.
The same way the North Koreans believe weird untrue things. You can see that propaganda because it’s transparent to anyone who has lived outside that bubble. The American propaganda is equally stupid
Well in america it seems to seems that people are theologically do things against LGBTQ and enacting them. The news we get and i preface this while knowing America is on the brink of it. That other countries or instutions are savages. Not my opinion but what we see daily.
My guy, there are entire countries controlled by Islamic Extremists where you’re lucky if all they do is kill you when they find out you’re LGBT, and it’s entirely for “theological reasons.”
I put this in quotes, because I’m not nor have I ever been a Muslim. But Islamic Extremists will kill gay people for supposed “theological reasons.”
It’s most definitely not just America doing it because “mah holy book says it’s wrong.”
Like I said I am in America and all we see is how backwards other countries are on the topic. It just feels like America is now in the process of becoming one of them
Because gay rights have more and more support so they decided to pick an easier target.
They moved against the gays when abortion stopped being such a wedge issue, which itself replaced school integration to turn out the bigot vote.
Exactly. Its no coincidence we went from Occupy Wall Street and national level discourse about actual healthcare and UBI, to such debates as ‘is genocide okay?’ and ‘are nazis bad?’ Purposeful misdirection that in it’s staunch opposition to anything left of capitalism, created fascism.
You know, it’s perfectly OK to group voters by identity, so long as that identity cannot exclude “Normal” people. Soccer Mom, Six pack Dad, Middle class, working poor, labor, Small Business owner, Rural, Urban, and Suburban are all perfectly fine to promise these groups political power. But you do the exact same thing for queer people or black people and that’s identity politics all of a sudden.
The only identity politics I want to see is us against the ruling elite. Everything else is sparkling fascism.
Is it?
queer and black people don’t have money. those other groups do.
if all the sudden queer people were billionaires, you can sure as shit bet they’d be promised political power. in exchange for their money. they’d be running corporations, in political office, etc.
it just turns out that it’s mostly white dudes who have all the money, and some white women, and the occasional random other non-white person has it. in USA at least. obviously different in other countries.
Gay people have exactly as much money as everyone else. There are proportionately as many gay billionaires as there are gay homeless people.
can you please explain further what you mean? it could be interpreted a number of different ways.
i’m not sure if this is your point or not? but there is obviously overlap between each of those groups, there’s black sixpack dads, and poor/middle class lgbqti etc etc
anyway imo none of this revived division appears organic. there’s always going to be the odd biggot, but afaict the majority of modern biggots are being indoctrinated and radicalised by an organised media effort (and our leaders are either complicit or ‘inexplicably’ powerless at protecting us from it). for sure these radicalised biggots should do better, but we’re also talking about average people going up against billion dollar propaganda machinery. it’s certainly asymmetrical warfare.
The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.
A huge portion of religious people believe that homosexuality is an especially dangerous sin because it’s a social contagion, they see the increased popularity of gay things and the decreased respect for religion as a clear sign that the devil is winning and faithful, godfearing society is collapsing. To an extent they’re right, modern views on self determination and respect for others is anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years - to the faithful it’s like saying the sky is pink or fish live in trees.
There are of course now grifters using homophobia to draw people into their political ideologies but it’s generally people from homophobic families in homoohobic communities that get drawn into it, it’s easy to forget that when you see a twenty something year old kid making homophobic comments it’s likely at his age his dad was going ‘queer bashing’ for fun with his friends and certainly wouldn’t have hesitated to beat up a gay person in a bar or in the street if encountered.
Even big artists like Eminem had deeply homophobic messages in his music, now that’s backtracked and he’s friends with Elton - this isn’t entirely because he’s grown as a person but because at the start of this century it was unconscionable that rap or hip hop could be anything but homophobic. School kids used the word ‘gay’ to describe uncool or disliked things so commonly it was even part of my own vocab despite being raised in a progressive and accepting family in a liberal area.
Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime but it’s not universal, a lot of religious and conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.
Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.
It’s a hugely complex issue for me, I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is. Forcing things too hard can be painful for those unready which causes resentment and reaction but holding back and allowing non-violent homophobic behavior to exist in our society is hurtful to those struggling to find snd accept themselves. (For example being 17 and trying to reconcile popular music explicitly talking about how your unexplored sexual desires are disgusting, realizing you have to make the choice between humiliation and self denial - and this is probably a big part of other emotional troubles which can lead to rejection of otherwise sensible social norms leading to unhealthy drug use, self endangering behavior and other things that still have lasting damage to my life to this day)
I don’t know what will solve these complex issues in our society, maybe making certain concessions to mildly homophobic sections of society would stop driving them into full on culture war crusaders? Maybe highlighting that it’s not only possible but probable to be gay and boring would help ease the anxiety? I actually kinda think straight pride type events and companies pandering to heterosexuals could be normalized and accepted more - not in a way that pits them against everyone else but more of a everyone gets a party kinda way. Stop heteros feeling attacked or at least make those who want to paint that picture looking silly.
It’s sad to admit but humanity is naturally kinda selfish and shitty, bigotry and group thinking is as natural and easy to us as breathing while compassion and understanding takes effort and the right circumstances to flourish.
excellent writeup
i agree with alot of what you said and will try to hit a few key issues and hope i can add something to the excellent perspective you’ve cast.
The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.
exactly, they know its a very useful mechanism to accumulate power. so imo we should constantly remind ourselves - they’d be doing this anyway. if homosexuality didn’t exist or was non-viable for this, they’d be onto something else. they’d have used any topic to get what they want. (you could ofc have a metadiscussion about why certain topics are more powerful than others. but thats a different discussion).
anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years
another critical point, as you correctly identified, this is how christianity has become, not what christianity was even purportedly about. if you take the actual words attributed to jesus in the bible, afaict never said a god damn thing about being gay trans whatever. according to their own book - after centuries of fucking with the bible - it STILL says the greatest commandment of all is to love your neighbour as yourself and you can’t judge cos you’re all fuckin sinners afterall.
so it’s all hypocrisy built upon hypocrisy , basically typical “there are 5 lights” bs. in other words it has all the fingerprints of a propaganda pathology not an expression of positive spirituality.
Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime
yeah to that end i think the OPs timeline of 40 years was a bit optimistic, or we at least have to recognise that represents a cross-section of OPs experience which wasn’t necessarily universal 40 years ago. that said i feel there has been a backslide in the last say 10-15 years)
conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.
tbh i think thats because its probably both at the same time, its a documented soviet technique to covertly fund two sides of an issue to control the outcome. not picking on the soviets btw, just that they did a great job perfecting these kinds of things, wrote it down and then the power structures keeping them secret began to collapse and the methology leaked to the public.
we see this in a simpler form where corporations invest in pride month and also unironically heavily invest in homophobic organisations, (so i guess it doesn’t always have to be a cold war operation for powerful entities to effect control via seemingly conflicting interests).
and in what is presumably a less consciously aware context, consider how jk rowling veils her attacks on the trans community behind a thin veneer of “caring about gay people”. i’m strongly of the belief if she’d been born 50 years earlier she’d be jumping on the homophobia bandwagon instead of the currently “trendy” transphobia bandwagon.
to say another way, not everyone pretending to be our friend has our interests at heart, infact sometimes they’re just trying to accumulate power by taking the positive stance on this issue - probably for no other reason than the negative position won’t currently yield them as big a return.
and this can lead to eg. conservatives becoming outraged about a stance taken by someone who is vocal and politically motivated, but who has no business speaking on our behalf, then conservatives end up feeling like they’re “under attack from the homosexuals” when it wasn’t even a homosexual who said it!!
next the conservatives says some hateful thing in retaliation, people respond to that and it spirals…everyone loses (except perhaps the actual perpetrator). this is definitely a flaw in human thinking where our tribalism clouds our perception, we feel under attack and in the heat of the moment incorrectly assess which side someone is taking (or even that there’s only 2 sides, when in life there’s probably rarely ever only 2 sides).
Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.
again, its probably both? tbh i don’t think that laziness is the only explanation for the woefully shoehorned characters we’re currently getting. honestly its fucking insulting (to us, not the biggots - though the biggots might feel insulted too?). as you mention its a profitable cash grab, and i’m sure it hasn’t escaped their notice that a certain type of aggressively half-arsed inclusivity will provide alot more value to them from the hysteria it generates vs actually doing it ‘right’ in a sensitive and compassionate way, which might actually lead to healing.
if healing is what they actually wanted i think it’d look very, very different than how it currently looks. and the kindest interpretation is they’ve realised it’s more profitable short-term to produce hysteria instead of healing.
compare in contrast to what i still think (despite modern news) was a great example of inclusivity characters with the lesbian main characters in buffy:
in 1999 no less, it showed a lesbian couple in bed and instead of a cheap sexiness grab, they’re literally sitting up in bed reading & having a mundane conversation. no sexualisation of the lesbian relationship as something existing only for hetero male gratification, or out attacking heteros. just plain, believable real life characters living a boring normal part of their life. so yes i very much agree that the boring normality is a very powerful thing. surely ALOT more positive overall than aggressive hysteria.
In summary my take-aways are:
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their MO is to use a scapegoat, they’d be attacking someone vulnerable, regardless of whom
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not everyone pretending to be our friend actually wants to help us
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hysteria is sadly apparently more profitable (short term) than healing
A positive note?
I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is
i really don’t either, though something think how homosexuality has been hijacked in modern perception (by that 1000 years of fake christianity as you mentioned). in eg. parts of ancient societies, men could love men and women could love women, someone could be a third gender, and it wasn’t even a thing to get upset about it, because it was just normal life. why do we suffer when they didn’t even know they were supposed to be suffering?
Insightful discussion! It’s interesting how certain issues are leveraged for power rather than genuine concern. Just like how we use tools to online remove watermark from image, some political strategies are about altering perception rather than addressing real problems.
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