Why does it seem most people, mainly conservatives, against Trans people? Unless I am wrong I never heard of one shooting up a school church or whatever. The ones I have met have been pretty cool.

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Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Don_Dickle@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

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ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Because stirring up hate against vulnerable minorities, by positioning them as a threat is a well tested and effective technique for power hungry politicians to gain and retain power. And it’s effective, because it works by pulling people in and making all of the conversation about whether or not it’s right to hate on the group they’re targeting.

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- Don_Dickle@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The more I read these comments it sound like the USA is entering its Hitler phase.
  
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  - ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They very much are…
    
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  - Keeponstalin@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    We certainly are
    
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  - scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Hell we used to genocide and enslave the people we looked down on. Talking ill of them on Fox News is a step up, my friend.
    
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  - resin85@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    faena.com/…/umberto-eco-a-practical-list-for-iden…
    
    In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, Umberto Eco distilled the 14 typical elements of “Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism,” while warning that, “These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
    
    The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
    
    The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense, Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
    
    The cult of action for action’s sale. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.” Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture, the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
    
    Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.” Appeal to social frustration. “[…] one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.
    
    The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
    
    The enemy is both weak and strong. “[…] the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
    
    Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
    
    Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
    
    Everybody is educated to become a hero. “in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
    
    Machismo and Weaponry. “This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”
    
    Selective Populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
    
    Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
    
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- Xanis@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It is also exceedingly important to note that plenty on the Right don’t explicitly hate Trans people. That’s a rhetoric. They may be worried about some of the news “reports” and “”“stories”“”, had to triple quote that one, and yes the radical Right and MAGA do buy in hard and hate due to racial and superiority bullshit. What so many on the Right who are on the fence about these things are truly scared of…
  
  Is having an opinion that deviates from the people around them who they’ve known probably all their lives. Unlike us on the Left who hiss and spit at one another every time one of us has a family gathering, many on the Right fear alienating their social circles.
  
  If you ever want to change the mind of someone on the Right you really just need to soothe their rabid, horrid, twisted by those around them, frothing soul of an angry jackass and make them feel as if they can actually believe something else could be the truth.
  
  But by GOD can it be tiring.
  
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- Pacmanlives@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Spot on. The fucking bathroom issue I keep hearing kills me. They are in there to take a shit Karen not to pass you brownies though the stalls and play a game of peak a boo above the stalls
  
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  - HawlSera@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I still don’t understand their claims that bathroom segregation makes anyone “safer”
    
    Do they think there’s some kind of law on the books that says “Anyone who matches the gender on the sign can diddle anyone inside they want!” cause that’s how they act…
    
    Personally I find it silly that bathrooms are segregated at all when stalls exist.
    
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slumlordthanatos@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
As someone who grew up in a conservative household in a deep red state, I think that part of it is that a lot of people are letting Lizard Brain dictate their response to transgender people.

Let me give you a personal example. A while back, I went to a social dance, and there was a trans woman there. Before the dance starts proper, the couple that runs it will teach a dance lesson, and we rotate partners while that’s going on. Eventually, I was rotated into being her partner. For some background, she was obviously early on in her transition; she still looked like a dude in a dress, she didn’t quite have the appearance down yet. But she gets huge props for not only having the bravery to go out as herself, but doing it in fucking Arkansas.

So I rotate over to her, and it dawns on me that she’s trans. In my head, Lizard Brain immediately starts screaming. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?! THIS PERSON IS OBVIOUSLY A DUDE IN A DRESS, HE MUST BE UP TO SOMETHING IF HE’S DRESSING AS SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAN WHAT HE IS! RABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLE”

Keep in mind, where I grew up, you just didn’t see trans people, and even now, it still tickles that primal part of my brain that was trained to be uncomfortable around people who aren’t white and straight.

The difference between me and many of the people I grew up around is that I recognize that it’s happening and try to tone Lizard Brain out when it starts screaming. A lot of other people listen to it and don’t care that the person that it’s screaming about is exactly that: a person.

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- fool@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A brave, vulnerably nuanced answer. Suspicious… what are you planning?
  
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- untorquer@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This is so real. It takes a LOT of effort and time to train this out. If someone isn’t willing to go through that then it makes sense that it would fester.
  
  I had lots of times when i was younger learning about queer culture when i got mad it things. Especially after an overly polite and patient person took the time and effort to explain something to me. Unlearning hate is painful. Learning to liberate yourself is painful.
  
  I think a lot of people feel that pain and decide to run from it and double down on the hate because that way they don’t need to learn and change or pry open their mind to an alternative.
  
  Then there’s the whole fear of conflicting with your own community as a factor.
  
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  - Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Would you mind sharing what that person explained to you?
    
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- BradleyUffner@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Excellently said!
  
  The only thing I have an issue with, and it’s a small issue at that, is:
  
  Keep in mind, where I grew up, you just didn’t see trans people,
  
  You most assuredly did see them. You just didn’t realize it because they were forced to hide who they really were.
  
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- Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  What happened next? How was the dance? Don’t leave us hanging!
  
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- JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I remember reading that when people have racist reactions like what you’re describing it’s like a different part of their brain triggers and then their frontal lobe (for higher logic) sort of suppresses it. I really wish I could remember more about this but I definitely remember learning about this in psychology. Something like when a baby sees someone of a skin color they haven’t seen before they get nervous, but when they’re older different parts shut it down. The memory is very fuzzy.
  
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klemptor@startrek.website ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
For a simple example: my mother is Catholic and until Trump came along, a lifelong single-issue Republican voter who always said she would be a Democrat if it weren’t for abortion. She attends church in an extremely progressive, famously LGBTQ-friendly town.

There’s a transwoman who attends her church (let’s call her Rita). This lady is probably in her mid-50s to mid-60s and has been a fixture at the church for at least 5 years. My mom has been in choir and bible study groups with her for years now. She still just can’t see Rita as a woman. Treats her politely but behind her back refuses to call her “she” and says she’s a “man in a dress”.

She’s really offended that Rita uses the ladies’ room. I’ve asked her why and she can’t articulate it, she just feels like it’s an invasion of her privacy, because men don’t belong in the ladies’ room. And when I point out that Rita isn’t a man, she just rolls her eyes. I’ve asked her if she’s worried that Rita is in there for predatory purposes and she admits that she doesn’t think Rita intends any harm. I’ve asked her how she’d feel if she were forced to use the men’s room and she says “but that’s different!”

My mom prides herself in being a moral person, and still can’t manage to get past her bigotry to see Rita as a woman. There are just too many mental blockades against it. But since she thinks she’s so highly moral, she thinks she must be correct in this situation. It excuses her from finding empathy and bettering her attitude toward trans folks.

My longwinded point is that when people who consider themselves highly moral are bigoted, there’s almost zero chance of getting through to them. And I think a lot of the people who are bigoted against trans folks feel that morality is on their side and being trans is morally deviant, so they think they’re justified in their prejudice.

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- jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s been my similar experience with the Zionist Jews in my family.
  
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Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s strange to them.

When people encounter something that’s different from what they are used to, they don’t know how to process it. It makes them uncomfortable. Some people, instead of learning how to deal with that feeling like a mature adult, blame the individual for making them feel uncomfortable and resent them for “making them feel that way”. Just staying away is not enough, they must be punished for existing.

All because someone felt a little icky when they thought about a girl with a weiner.

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- puppycat@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  well yeah they don’t like the thought of a girl with a weiner, you can’t degrade and classify women into being just a hole+reproductive organs if they might not have that. (but also pre-op trans dudes can’t use women’s bathrooms cus they aren’t women but still will never be men???) bigots are bigots.
  
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- Akasazh@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This is really it. They feel strange about it and cannot grok it. It’s bizzarre that it can break even people that I hold in high regard.
  
  For instance Graham Linehan, the brilliant writer of Father Ted, Dark Books and The IT Crowd went completely of the rails like his own father Jack when it came to transgender people. There’s people who just cant cope. Even including LGBT+ people. Theres plenty of gay people that hate transgenders with a passion and fail to see that the very same hate was directed at themselves a generation before. It boggles the mind
  
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- scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Even as someone who fully accepts trans people and has trans friends and family, it’s still an adjustment to some really old, deeply-seated habits and mental structures. I’m over 50 so I was set in my ways when I learned about “they” pronouns and it still takes work for me to get it right. If I didn’t care about the people involved, it would be very easy to see it as a burden or annoyance.
  
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OwenEverbinde@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Materialist answer (inspired by a video called Why The Political Compass is Wrong: Establishing An Accurate Model of Political Ideology, by breadtuber Halim Alrah.

Business owner makes money by paying workers to produce widgets at $6 / unit. Owner sells these widgets at $10 / unit, making a $4 profit each sale.

Before long, the workers catch on to the reality of the situation: the owner could be making a lot less and still be able to provide “leadership” (or whatever it is he provides). They decide not to work for less than… $8 per unit. With this price, the owner will still be wealthy. But now, so will the workers.

Workers save up money and use it to go on strike.

However: business owner comes up with a better solution to the problem: he divides the workers into brown-eyed workers and blue-eyed workers. He then gets the government to discriminate heavily against the brown-eyed workers. His cronies in government make it legal to deny brown-eyed workers jobs and housing. His cronies in the media write hysterical anecdotal stories about various brown-eyed rapists, thieves, and murderers.

Terrified mobs – stoked into a frenzy by the business owner’s well-funded propaganda – tear down brown-eyed people’s homes and food supplies, forcing them destitute before the strike is done.

The brown-eyed workers now must choose between returning to work for the business owner at $5 / unit… or starving to death.

The blue-eyed workers, meanwhile, have just been tricked into betraying their own team. Some were not tricked, but simply unprepared. These blue-eyed workers stood by in either shock, uncertainty, or laziness. Unable to comprehend how their fellow blue-eyed workers could have become so foolish and so cruel.

But now the business owner can put up the illusion of no longer needing the blue-eyed workers. He can run his factory on a skeleton crew of desperate, brown-eyed workers, and say to the blue, “uh oh! Looks like the brown-eyed workers just stole your jobs!”

Much like the brown-eyed workers, the blue-eyed workers have a restricted set of choices: A) admit they were suckers, fooled into attacking their own team, and try to rebuild their union, or B) double down and blame brown-eyed people for undercutting them… but reluctantly return to work, because the strike has been broken. Or, C) just like the brown-eyed workers, they can choose to starve to death.

The business owner wins, and now society has an eye-color-discrimination problem. It was an arbitrary characteristic. Now it decides where someone lives, who they spend time with, and what kind of opportunities they have access to.

The business owner can rinse and repeat for: skin tone, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. As the saying goes,

“divide and conquer”

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- elucubra@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I find this disingenuous, infantilizing. Racial discrimination and warring has been happening since the beginning of (recorded) time. It stems, among many, many other things (this thing is incredibly complex), from the fear of the other’s “unknowns”, a somewhat justified fear of others, given humanity’s penchant for conquering the neighbors. Another factor is the use of each own’s feeling of superiority over the other’s, to cover for one’s underlying fear of inferiority in some way. Take the example (one of many, not singling out here) of the Jews assertion that they are god’s chosen people, thus everyone else being inferior.
  
  While divide and conquer has been used since the dawn of time, and adapted by the capitalists, the sad and simple fact is that people fear that which doesn’t conform to their comfortable life scheme, that people want certainty, and having a “different” is unsettling for many, and demonization is an easy way to prop one’s belief structure. People who exchange critical thinking for a “safe” belief structure, find it threatening to have others challenge that, so they fight back, to try to have that attack defeated. This can be exploited by others, to rally against that perceived common enemy. Wave a flag, and all who have a common belief of that flag representing their values will rally.
  
  People don’t want to think, and/or challenge their beliefs. It’s a comfort thing.
  
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  - Bacano@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I like your answer too. While I strongly believe the trans talking point is being amplified almost exclusively to fuel culture wars between the working class, your point on out-group mentality is a DNA encoded reality, from what I remember reading.
    
    I think the two compromise the bulk of the answer along with the culture war fuel dumped by foreign entities interested in destabilizing the US.
    
    The only remedy is education. Something that is sadly on the decline.
    
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- KaTaRaNaGa@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Really well articulated.
  
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  - OwenEverbinde@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thanks!
    
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- habitualcynic@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Incredible answer! I saved this with my running list of great quotes and passages.
  
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  - OwenEverbinde@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thank you!
    
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GhiLA@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m a southerner. Take what I’m about to tell you as close to the grain of the problem as possible, because it is.

Here’s the thing. 9 times out of 10, a Southern man is going to meet a lone trans or gay person, have a pleasant experience talking to them and go about their day, they even make friends with the person, spend years talking to them, send gifts, become family members, etc.

But you know what?

Behind closed doors, it’s “fuck those trannies”, “not in my schools”, etc. My mom does it, her sister does it, my dad did it. It’s hypocrisy at an extreme level while also ignoring it at an extreme level.

“Well I have gay friends… I’m not homowhatzit”

THEY’RE TEACHING WHAT!?

“Double Standard” might as well be the tagline for the entire South. They’ll protect their religion and the expectations put on them by their parents and social norms on a general level across the board, while still shaking hands and eating cake with their lgbtq+ buddies.

Just remember any southerner is one thought from God away from stabbing you in the back at all times, because no matter how close you get to them, even as a family member, that book and the expectations behind it means more, was beat into them more, every day since they were born until you met them.

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- y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Southerner here and I’ll say you were right, up until your last paragraph.
  
  Just remember any southerner is one thought >from God away from stabbing you in the back at all >times
  
  This part however, is bullshit.
  
  We’re not all the same and that you would suggest so actually pisses me off. Replace the word “southerner” in that sentence with any other group of people and see if you still find it acceptable.
  
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  - nomous@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Fucking lol at hateful idiots stereotyping an entire geographic area. I’m sure in their minds it’s completely different than stereotyping people because of their race/creed/gender/whatever.
    
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  - GhiLA@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’ll be goddamn. I’ve seen family members ousted from a dinner table, in my own fucking family.
    
    Maybe in your pampered version of the South.
    
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- militaryintelligence@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Incorrect. The book itself means very little, just their interpretation.
  
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- brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  100%
  
  My mom went to an integrated school in the South, made friends… but sometimes overheard racist slurs and threats behind closed doors. Same story with family I have now, all pleasent in public, friends with some gay family members. But vehemently anti-vaccine and such behind closed doors… I don’t even dare ask about trans people :(
  
  The duality is unreal.
  
  A question is where that behind-doors comes from… a lot is from church. Church like you’ve never seen if you haven’t been to the South.
  
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SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think most commenters here are missing the point.

There is a more extreme reaction to transgender people as opposed to gay or lesbian people, because of issues like sports and bathrooms. And that hits at people’s sense of injustice. For example if you have a young daughter, a lot of people will hate the idea of a person with a penis going into the women’s room and being around there little girl. Or if that daughter grows up and joins a sports team, the idea of somebody who is hormonally male and thus naturally more muscular competing against your daughter is unpleasant.

Put differently, I think a lot of people we now classify as ‘transphobic’ Don’t actually have much problem with trans people themselves. Rather, with how the efforts to ensure trans people receive the full treatment of their chosen gender can affect the rest of society.

For me personally, I don’t know what the answer is. I generally don’t care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. I have no problem with anyone presenting themselves to the world as whatever they wish, if it makes you happier than by all means. At the same time though, I don’t think it’s transphobic to point out that somebody who is largely or entirely biologically male will have a natural competitive advantage in the field of sports.
So while I certainly don’t want to exclude anybody, I think there is at least a little justification for restricting some women’s sports to those who are genetically female.

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- CitricBase@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think that one thing you and other centrists are missing is that any kind of regulation isn’t just a regulation on trans women, it’s a regulation on ALL women. It won’t be just trans women that will be put in a position of constantly having their genitals checked.
  
  Be it for bathrooms, sports, whatever, you’re opening us up to a world where anyone that fancies themselves an authority will feel empowered to sexually assault any women they want. That’s what’s at stake here. This is a women’s issue, not just a trans issue. Hell, even men will end up getting harassed in bathrooms.
  
  Meanwhile, actual trans people are going to by and large steer clear of segregated contact sports like they’ve always done, feeling the pain of exclusion and marginalization while deserving none of it.
  
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- LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t think anyone really cares about sports or bathrooms when it comes down to it It’s all about the patriarchy. Not a single person I’ve met has mentioned a woman who became a man going into a men’s restroom as a problem. Or them entering mens sports outside of the dimly vieled “oh well they could get hurt and a man needs to protect them from making their own decisions”
  
  It all comes back to people thinking men have to take care of women because they can’t take care of themselves without assistance.
  
  It is a reflection of how weak the people who think such are. And projecting and trying to control others lives because they don’t believe they can take care of themselves.
  
  If you believe in people having freedom, stop trying to fucking chain them to your ideals.
  
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  - GrammarPolice@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    There is no patriarchy involved though? Even women actively campaign against trans male participation in women sports.
    
    Just take a look at this video: youtu.be/i39VHDmawtw
    
    There are no men involved. Just women, so your argument doesn’t track
    
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- 31337@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think I’ve heard there are a lot of genetically male, but born female people in sports. I wonder if the same people are against those people playing in sports.
  
  Idk how many transphobic people just care about specific issues. There’s a lot of “groomer” rhetoric, hate, and general disgust. It’s easy to get people to hate what they don’t understand; and a lot of media is trying their hardest to cultivate hate against trans people to create an out-group, so they can control the in-group.
  
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  - SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    create an out-group so they can control the in-group
    
    That’s not just the media. It’s basically everyone in power. Media, politics, government, corporations… Everyone.
    
    It applies to the Democrats too. Especially in the 2016 election, they managed to successfully make Republicans the out-group. But I believe that was hugely damaging to the country, it created a lot more division when what is really needed is unity to focus on the issues that most people can agree on.
    
    Because here’s the cold truth- there is a body of policies that probably 80% of Americans would agree on. Things like efficient government, ending government corruption, reducing corporate control over government and elections, reducing income inequality, etc.
    To quote Dylan Ratigan’s famous rant, the United States is being extracted. And I think most people would like to stop that extraction.
    But no major candidate stands for that. Bernie did, but the DNC iced him out because their wealthy corporate donors didn’t want Bernie.
    
    And that in my opinion is why Trump won. Harris certainly didn’t push any major message of radical reform, just a bunch of the usual ‘help the middle class’ talk. Trump may be terrifying, but he does push a message of radical reform and changing the system.
    To write that off and say half the country is racist or misogynist is to avoid learning from this situation.
    
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- Fedizen@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think the part people don’t realize is that like a lot of top athletes just have oddities - higher muscle building hormones, circulatory systems that work better under stress etc. And at the same time sex hormones aren’t the only chemicals that affect these things so there’s also a plethora of performance enhancing drugs cascading out of labs at the same time which is genuinely pumping out hulked up muscle freaks.
  
  At some point it would just make more sense to just classify sports by weight and build and remove the genital inspection element.
  
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  - Smoogs@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes, they do this already within gendered sports (different weights to compete) so just remove the gender side of it.
    
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- BigMacHole@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  LoL at thinking Republicans don’t want people with Penises in their Daughter’s Restroom! Conservatives are LITERALLY making it ILLEGAL for people with Penises and Beards to use anything BUT their Daughter’s Restroom!
  
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Donebrach@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Because fascists need a ~scary other~ to scapegoat to erode everyone’s rights.

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southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s artificial boosting of the same bigotry that’s been ongoing for generations. The new part switching the target.

See, there’s been a very concerted effort to radicalize the right wing of the American populace by media oligarchs. It’s part of an overall strategy going back to at least the post-nixon era.

Want to crush black people? Find a way to villainize them indirectly. “Inner city” crime. Step up arrests for things that are disproportionately a part of black people’s lives. Spread drugs into the chaos brought about by destabilizing black communities to engender greater violence between gangs. And it worked. Look at how many black people are in jail compared to pretty much any other group.

Go back to Stonewall, when the biggest movements for gay rights got going hard, and remember that trans people were involved from the beginning, but didn’t have a convenient label, they didn’t have a way to be a distinct group. Gay rights efforts worked to some degree. Enough that the far right plans to use gay people as the enemy had to find another target the same way that they had to change targets from black people to Hispanic people in the form of “illegal aliens”.

When your plan rests on fomenting anger, hate, and fear to stir up the lowest common denominator of a populace you have to have a target, ideally more than one since there’s always going to be gaps where your desired audience will fall prey to the manipulation for one hate focus, but not another, like when you run into conservatives that aren’t actually racist, but hate anyone in the LGBTQ+ umbrella because of religion, or sheer stupidity.

So, when gays weren’t a useful target for hate any more because enough people knew gay people, and there were enough gay people of prominence to make it harder, why not switch to the next best thing? Trans people!

See, we had a major shift in awareness of trans issues back in the late nineties and early naughties. That’s was followed by a large shift in trans people now having a serious chance at transitioning as medicine advanced, funding shifted, and there was just enough support that more people could transition and not be alone.

This meant that the assholes pushing their agenda to gain and maintain both wealth and power had a gift given to them. A new label to attack, using the exact same rhetoric they’d been using against gay people. “It’s unnatural”, “but what about the children?”, along with the ability to use lingering misogyny via to attack trans women in specific since they are now women, but used to be men (in the rhetoric), so they must be groomers sneaking into bathrooms.

It’s the exact same bullshit over again.

People have forgotten that the same methodology has been in place every time people in power needed to scare the populace enough to achieve a goal. Remember reefer madness? Before my time, but the entire thing was built in order to continue the oppression of black people, to keep them firmly under the boot.

Go back further, and it was the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, whatever group was “other” at the time.

But the modern version is so directly a rehash of the anti gay rhetoric that’s not even fifty years in the past that I’m amazed it isn’t glaringly obvious even to the people that have jumped on the bandwagon of both.

I’ve said it before, but people are stupid. They’re easy to manipulate, easy to fool, and that’s the majority. Even the ones that aren’t easy to manipulate can still fall prey to it if they aren’t paying attention. People are also lazy, and have little long term thinking ability, or attention spans. That’s why we got zero lasting changes after George Floyd was murdered. Anyone that’s made it this far, think for a second. How long did it take you to remember that name and what it means? Now, ask yourself how many people didn’t remember at all.

That’s why trans hate is working. People suck. The vast majority are easy to control, and will believe anything fed to them with the right language behind it. It just so happens that while all of the distractions being used to build up the hate also created a smoke screen to hide gerrymandering, which ends up with more and more control over what language is being used everywhere.

So, here we are with a manufactured, strawman enemy being propped up as the target and then painted with the word “trans”. None of the bullshit used to build up the hate is true, it isn’t accurate, and most of the people behind the hate actually know it’s bullshit, but they aren’t allowed to hate the blacks and the gays out loud any more. They can’t just scream the n word or call people faggots at whim the way they used to.

So, now they’ve got trans people to hate. And they want that hate because it means they don’t have to look at themselves, their own lives and choices. They don’t have to stop and think that maybe everything they’ve built their identity around is empty, so they scream about “wokeness” and “transgenderism” as code words.

There’s no serious, legitimate arguments against trans people being allowed to have the full protection of the law, to have full medical access, to have whatever gender they want on their driver’s license. There’s just the bullshit excuses to have someone to hate. There’s not even a good argument about bathrooms, they’re all built on bullshit too, and that’s the one that’s the low hanging fruit because it seems reasonable to people that aren’t buying all the bullshit immediately, but aren’t quite bright enough to think it through all the way on their own. Which, again, that’s the majority, stupid people too drowned in lies and manipulation to bother thinking.

So, Don, if you’ve gotten this far, I know I went wide of what you asked, but it really is all related. It all comes down to the same thing in different faces over time.

For anyone else, I know this got a little ranty in parts. I know it is long enough to look a little crazed. IDGAF. This shit is patently obvious, it’s not even a secret. The people that have been running the right wing of things for my entire lifetime and before have outright and publicly talked about it. One part of it, the “southern strategy” they brag about. It’s infuriating, so I get ranty.

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- Carnelian@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Please continue with your rants then, that was the most clear and concise breakdown of events I’ve ever seen. Thank you for writing it up
  
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- fadingembers@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This is the correct answer. If anyone is interested in more, here are a couple of relevant articles.
  npr.org/…/transgender-bathroom-bill-republican-st…
  motherjones.com/…/anti-trans-transgender-health-c…
  
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- mke_geek@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  things that are a part of a black person’s life
  
  Crime is just a part of a black person’s life? That’s a highly racist thing to say. Black people aren’t inherently criminals.
  
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  - southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Are you fucking joking?
    
    If that’s really where you thought I was going with that, you’re the racist.
    
    If you’re trying to troll, good job because now I think you’re either a troll, a racist, or an idiot. I prefer to think you’re a troll.
    
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Kalysta@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Conservatives come in two types. The rich ones who want more and more money. And the poor ones who also want more money but are unable to obtain it because the rich hoard money.

The rich conservatives need to stop the poor conservatives from realizing the rich are why the poor can’t get money. So they make up vulnerable groups to blame for the poor’s problem, and the poor are generally too poorly educated to catch on to this game.

Different groups have been the scapegoat. Women, blacks, the italians, the irish, asians, gays, and now it’s transgender people.

The good news is transgender people WILL get full rights in about 20-30 years if you look at historical cycles. The bad news is it will be a fight and many will die before they get treated as human beings by these asshole conservatives.

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- unconsciousvoidling@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think earth’s current environment is going to collapse in 20-30 years.
  
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  - TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    True egalitarianism
    
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daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You all are overthinking it way too much.

Most people hate anything that’s different or uncommon to themselves and their “world”.

Simple as that.

It’s heterophobia in the semantic sense of the word “fear of anything that’s different”.

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- __Lost__@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Xenophobia
  
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  - daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I always thought that xenos was more refering to people from outside, like physically from a different place.
    
    But I really know nothing about words, greek, latin or whatever. So it will probably be a better choice of words.
    
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technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Fascists are cowards who attack the most vulnerable people as a standard tactic.

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- jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And after they exterminate one group, they move onto another
  
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  - cynar@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They came for the trans ~~and I did nothing, because I am not trans ~~ and I fought back where I could. Because fuck that shit, we know there this dance will end otherwise!
    
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  - VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It is a self-cannibalizing ideology that destroys any society that fails to pull up the roots of those fascistic weeds
    
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antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Religious people control their kids through the village support system of their church. Some kids are learning things at public school which are not in line with those beliefs. This is scary for parents. Parents don’t want to lose their children, and can’t imagine loving them as somebody else. Case in point Elon And his trans daughter Vivian.

I’m quite liberal and atheist, but the prospect of a transitioning child is troubling to me. While I’d have no problem supporting a gay child, I feel very strongly about body acceptance, and I reject body dysmorphia. Transitioning to another gender is to me, not too different from a woman who wants augmentation surgeries or a man who is taking steroids. That said I could care less what anybody else does. I think cosmetic surgery and steroids should be legal. I don’t think the government needs to be involved. It’s a decision to discuss with a child, doctor, and parent.

I guess what I’m saying is, I can empathize with the transphobia of conservatives. Where we differ is in how we deal with that fear. They want the government to make society conform to their beliefs. I think it’s up to the individual parent to grow the love in their heart to accept and love whatever their child decides to be.

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- maevyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I just want to say as a trans person, first off, your views are very valid. I think it’s actually great that despite your misgivings you respect the principle of bodily autonomy, which I very much agree with myself. Totally think this is a good take.
  
  I also wanted to give my 2 cents on the experience itself. You liken transition to body modification, and there definitely are parallels. But in my experience, the two are distinct. Like, I have both dysmorphia at times, and dysphoria at others. I’m not 100% happy with my body after transition, but now it’s like, less because I look like a guy and more because I look like a girl but, maybe not with the ideal body I wanted. When that first hit me, my wife told me “welcome to womanhood” and I laughed a little (and cried a little) because it was true, I’d never known a woman who didn’t struggle with her body image.
  
  I also just, can’t really explain how much my mental health has improved. I had terrible anxiety when I entered puberty, and it wasn’t about gender or anything (that I was aware of at the time, anyways). It was almost just like my brain started malfunctioning. I got quieter, I overthought everything, I self medicated with weed and alcohol, became kind of aimless. Then I turned it around, got my career going, got married, worked on myself. I still drank to take the edge off and be able to socialize, but put on a face at parties and figured out how to push through the anxiety. I tried therapy, medication, meditation, you name it, but it never really got too much better, I just got better at working around it.
  
  I had kinda given up on there being an “answer”. I just figured, you know, this is life for me. Not bad, just hard. And then this thing happened, where a lot of stuff I had been pushing down all came up at once. And I transitioned.
  
  I really, really didn’t think it would “solve” things. Like, I thought it felt right, that it would make things better. But I was trying not to get my hopes up. And at first it didn’t, like hormones didn’t really immediately fix everything. It was more subtle. It was like… like slowly waking up from a long and tiring nightmare. The kind you don’t remember much of, you just keep that vague sense of unease for a while.
  
  It’s been a year and a half. I can go to parties and not drink now, and just, relax. Have fun. Socialize. I can make friends and talk to strangers. I still have anxiety, I still have problems, but like, my brain just works better. I don’t know how else to describe it. I make connections I never did before, understand people and empathize with them more.
  
  I feel happy. Not in a like, “this is new and exciting” kind of way, but a sort of deep contentedness. Peace.
  
  I don’t think this is a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all your problems, and it sure as hell won’t solve anything for a cis person. It just helps to take a constant burden out of the way. And for me, even if there had been 0 physical changes, I would 100% take estrogen just for the mental effects it has had alone. It’s been the best mental healthcare I have ever received.
  
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  - antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I appreciate your story and I’m really happy for you. I think if I was child free I would just say hell yes I support everybody to be themselves. But being a parent makes me more protective and cautious annd concerned and if I’m being honest I kind of hate that change in myself. It’s so easy for me to say I support autonomy but I already know that it won’t be when my child is asserting their own autonomy. I know you parents don’t have control, only influence, but it’s hard for me to walk that fine line.
    
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- dragonfucker@lemmy.nz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  I feel very strongly about body acceptance, and I reject body dysmorphia.
  
  Drag wants to take a crack at explaining this.
  
  The mind is a machine. We have free will, but that free will has limits. If you try to hold your breath until you pass out, you’ll probably fail. Your subconscious will demand air and you’ll give in. The human jaw is capable of producing enough force to bite off a finger. But you can’t chew off your own finger unless you’re on drugs. Your brain won’t let you. We can do a lot of things with our brains, but some are hard, and under normal circumstances some are impossible.
  
  Accepting your body when you’re five pounds heavier than you’d like is something our brains can do without that much trouble. Accepting your body when you’re a hundred pounds heavier than you’d like is hard. Some people never manage to summon enough willpower to do it. Accepting your body when you’re the wrong sex is, for most people, impossible. It doesn’t work. The brain has limits, and those limits kick in.
  
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Lauchs@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m going to get all sorts of fun responses for trying to empathize with those with whom I disagree (instead of just writing “dumb bigots”) but here goes:

First, remember that even gay marriage is fairly new to America, it’s been around for less time than the MCU.

There are a lot of folks who almost have mental whiplash, gay marriage went from illegal to “you could get fired for being vocally uncomfortable about it” in fairly quick order.

Now, to make things even more wild for those folks, mainstream culture is pretty insistent that gender isn’t even a thing anymore. Add in some pretty wild news stories/videos*, worries for their kids and the notion that the Left refuses to say there might be any issues whatsoever and you can kinda see where a backlash could crop up.

eg: trans women being reassigned to women’s prisons and then assaulting the women etc, a 6"2, 220lb woman practically murdering her handball oppoisition, some fairly sketchy research practices by some of the authorities (WPATH) on the subject etc.
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Snapz@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
How to say it delicately… Many conservative/religious men really, truly want to just impale their throats on lady dick, but they are indoctrinated from birth to believe that a zombie from space who watches then here 21st will be mad at them if they do what makes them happy. So to distract themselves from that always burning urge to ravenously aspirate dong nog, they performatively hate things as a hobby to pass the time until they die - profoundly alone and completely unhappy (see Lindsey Graham)

And then the conservative women are taught that they are stupid, useless furniture pieces there to look pretty and parrot - not capable of an opinion outside of that is their one husband or father.

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Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Far simpler than whateveryone else is saying. The best way to rally humans to your side is to give them a common enemy. So conservative politicians picked enemies that are small in number and told everyone how they are to blame for all that is wrong in the world.

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Montagge@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

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inv3r510n@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Because queerness (trans, gender non conforming, gender fluid, agender, bigender and related) threatens hierarchy.

In western society regardless of how ‘progressive’ some parts of it have gotten, for the majority there’s still a strict hierarchy. Man most important, then woman, then children first boys then girls. Trans people completely disrupt this hierarchy by being able to change what they are and those who cling to hierarchy freak the fuck out over it.

Then there’s the sexual panic, a straight man who’s insecure is gonna freak out if the woman they think is cute actually has a penis.

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paddirn@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They’re an easy minority to scapegoat. In the US they make up between 0.5% and 1.6% of the population. A sizable portion of straight people associate being transgender as something sick and weird and a sexual deviancy, so it’s easy to target them and to try to associate them with actual objectively bad things (ie pedophilia). They’re just people trying to find their place in the world and live their lives, same as most of us.

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RBWells@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They are just propagandized. In general, it’s so much like racists - they may know trans people and just think they are the exceptions, like them as individuals and still think they hate them as a group. They are intentionally riled up by being forced fed edge cases and disinformation.

Trans people are just people. They aren’t angels who are never criminals and they aren’t degenerates who are always criminal, they are a diverse group like all of us are. But you can bet your ass that whenever a trans person does something criminal it will be blown up so big in conservative media and used to paint them all as criminals. It’s just the right wing media machine.

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PagingDoctorLove@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Their systems of power rely on having an “in” group and an “out” group. Overt racism is less acceptable these days because now there are brown Republicans, but transphobia? Very in.

They’re just choosing a new group to “other” so that we don’t realize they’re coming for everyone who doesn’t fit into their narrow worldview.

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lepinkainen@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Hating gays isn’t cool anymore and will get backlash even from conservatives.

Trans people are the new gays in this sense

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finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
People fear new unknown things (as perceived by the individual), especially when it comes to bodies and human form, instinctively.

It doesn’t conform to their strict societal standards as crafted by thousands of years of culture and history. The authorities have always persecuted and cracked down on anything that threatens the patriarchal standard.

Minorities make the easiest targets. Trans people are an extreme minority.

Some people think it has more to do with sexuality and sexual urges, so their perception is that it is perversion.
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Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Unless I am wrong I never heard of one shooting up a school church or whatever.

en.wikipedia.org/…/2023_Nashville_school_shooting

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ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s a failure of empathy. People hate and/or fear what they don’t understand.

They can’t empathize with someone not feeling right in their own skin like that, so all their rationalizations for things like “why would they want to use that bathroom” end up stemming from what they have left, which is unsavory intent, making them threatening.

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ultranaut@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
After it became less acceptable to explicitly hate the gays in public they needed a new target. There’s a lot of people who like being riled up with hatred, who are fearful and need a bogeyman, etc. It’s either human nature or something deeply embedded in our culture. Eventually they will move on and find a new target to focus their hate on.

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andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Uneducated people in rural areas struggle very much with understanding their experiences of others, and have very strange ideas about how the world works. I told my grandmother I wanted to move to Chicago - she’s convinced I’m going to get gang murdered. (She would be horrified if I told her about wandering around LA on foot)

The idea that there are options other than cisgender heterosexual people is threatening to their understanding of their world. Many have not thought about their gender or sexuality; it’s assumed that you’ll get married to the opposite sex, get gender appropriate jobs, have kids, and go to church on Sunday. That’s what life is in Anadarko or Siloam Springs. Many also struggle with unaddressed trauma from the opioid/fent crisis, or military service - so they think the appropriate response to anguish about your body should just be to just cope with it.

Many of these men are secretly bisexual. Many, many, many heterosexually married men seek out sexual encounters with gay men on the side. They would never want to be in a relationship with a man or someone they perceived as a strange, mentally defective man - for many of them that would also assault their understandings of a relationship as more of a property thing. They feel guilty about porn usage, especially the Christian ones, but externalize it as hatred.

The woman are miserable and are committed to making everyone else miserable as well. You gain power in those communities by policing others, especially young women. They are threatened by the idea that they weren’t locked into compulsive heterosexuality and performative femininity. There was a possibility that they could have graduated college, or not had children.

They get the program though. They’re proper Puritans. If life is suffering then the only joy to be had is in watching other people. And what better target than those who are defying our most basic sociological roles? These are the same people who host gender reveal parties - it matters to them. So it must matter to everyone else.

That’s my guess as a trans man at least, obviously I’m biased.

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PlainSimpleGarak@lemmings.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Why would you ask this question on Lemmy. You will get few, if any, legitimate answers. This platform is an echo chamber.

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auzy@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
We have a lot of LGBTI people in our climbing group

I have never had an issue with any of them

But the people trying to be hyper masculine? Yep…

I feel like it’s because they never left high school. A lot of them are simply trying the same thing that worked when they are a kid. Everyone else grows up

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tiefling@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Because conservatives are smooth brained and small minded

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