A lot of conservatives want to simplify life because they have a simple mind.
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.
If that were true, then it would be trans men getting the most attention because they’re the ones cheating their way up this hierarchy. In my experience, 99% of the hate is directed at trans women.
If the transphobes thought trans men were men then your comment would be accurate. But they just see them as confused women and easy to just ignore them like they ignore cis women.
(You are right about trans women bearing the brunt of the hate, and I think so much of that is sexual panic from cishet men about finding a penis owner attractive)
Yes! Screw the patriarchy
Meh, I don’t know if it’s strictly a hierarchy thing. I think it’s probably more “just” a heteronormative thing. Closed-minded people who don’t like things or people that are different. Fear of difference. I’m just speculating, here.
I can also see the sexual panic aspect.
That’s cuz it isn’t hierarchy, it’s tradition. People have a hard time warming up to things that are very different from the norm.
Materialist answer (inspired by a video called Why The Political Compass is Wrong: Establishing An Accurate Model of Political Ideology, by breadtuber Halim Alrah… and also Jane Elliott’s famous experiment)
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 (the business makes hundreds of widgets, after all). But now, so will the workers.
So the 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 uses his money to discriminate 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, leaving 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 unprepared workers stood by in either shock, uncertainty, or laziness, unable to comprehend how their fellow blue-eyed workers could have become so foolishly self-defeating and 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 apologize and rebuild their union, B) double down and blame brown-eyed people for undercutting them… but reluctantly return to work, because the strike is broken, or C) just like the brown-eyed workers, they can choose to starve to death.
(A) will be the most difficult. As Mark Twain said: “it’s easier to fool people than convince them they have been fooled.”
The business owner wins, and now society has an eye-color-discrimination problem. Eye color was an arbitrary characteristic. Yet now it decides where someone lives, who they spend time with, and what kinds 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.”
You asked why trans people are currently the subject of fear and hysteria? No reason. Not any new reason at least. Trans people are different. Any and every difference between workers is an opportunity for those fatcats rich enough to own “The Daily Mail” and the “The New York Post” to separate us into camps and drain us dry, one camp at a time.
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.
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.
Really well articulated.
Thanks!
Incredible answer! I saved this with my running list of great quotes and passages.
Thank you!
Conservatives are afraid of change, because they control current status quo. They can’t let people escape from that control, so every nail that is a little outside it’s hole gets hammered.
In short, they rather prefer trans (and broadly queers) to hide or die, unless they can control them. Everyone different from what they can control is a big danger. Imagine if everyone could be like they feel like? Conservatives see this as chaos, they are the guardians of peace and good values, so anything not already controlled by them is the opposite, chaos, destruction, fire.
That’s why they rarely present anything new, their policies and general opinion tend to fight the natural evolution of civilization. USA, as obviously all of the American Continent, was built by immigrants (and slaves). Now they fight immigrants, undocumented ones mostly, because they can’t control them. And we know what happened when ‘the libs’ back then tried to end slavery, you know, other people that they CONTROLLED.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
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.
That’s been my similar experience with the Zionist Jews in my family.
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.
This
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
Because stirring up hate against vulnerable minorities, by positioning them as a threat is a well tested and effective technique for the power hungry 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.
The more I read these comments it sound like the USA is entering its Hitler phase.
They very much are…
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.
https://www.faena.com/aleph/umberto-eco-a-practical-list-for-identifying-fascists
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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
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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.”
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Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
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Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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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A combination of ‘scapegoat’ and ‘them vs us’, basically.
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
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.
Personally I find it silly that bathrooms are segregated at all when stalls exist.
You mean the 3-foot particle board separator with a 2-foot gap at the bottom and a solid inch of space around the entire door, the gap large enough to make eye contact with someone at the sink while you’re sitting with your pants down?
Because that’s what passes for a “stall” in 99% of America. Privacy never even came into the conversation when they designed those damn things. They are designed to give the bare minimum illusion of privacy while still being easily stared through to make sure no one is doing drugs in your bathroom. At any point in time any employee of any company has a right to come into the bathroom, peer through the crack in the door and make sure you’re in there dropping a dook properly and not say, shooting up heroin. And you can’t stop them even if you wanted to, the stalls are designed to make that possible.
So, with that knowledge, I sort of almost understand the people that get all up in arms about this. Because there is almost NO expectation of privacy in ANY American public bathroom. If we had European style stalls this would never have been a problem in the first place. But because anybody can just walk up and literally make eye contact from outside the stall while you’ve got your pants down, some folks can be understandably concerned about that.
That doesn’t excuse any of this mess and it doesn’t make them correct, but non-americans don’t realize how shoddy our typical public restroom is. The anger at trans folks should instead be directed at the cheap-ass building contractors that mandate bathrooms that don’t give you privacy.
Edit: These are what I’m used to seeing.
If you’re tall, your eye level is over the top of that door. If you’re a young kid, the bottom of the door doesn’t even start until your chest or shoulders. If you’re medium height the gap around the door is your peephole, whether you want it to be or not.
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.
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.
I think earth’s current environment is going to collapse in 20-30 years.
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.
A brave, vulnerably nuanced answer. Suspicious… what are you planning?
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 at 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.
Would you mind sharing what that person explained to you?
Many conversations with many different people. I can’t recall as this was mostly a decade ago, before it all clicked for me that humans are diverse and nuanced and it’s fine. My guess would be pronouns and wide net incel stuff. Not that i was particularly bad but deprogramming a Catholic suburban upbringing in american masculinity culture and propaganda is a monumental feat.
I think the fact that i was willing to listen, think critically, and engage in self doubt is what invited the conversations. Still, they were being very charitable with their energy and time.
I’m really grateful for that, especially after recognizing in not as cishet as i thought i was.
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.
What happened next? How was the dance? Don’t leave us hanging!
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.
Because conservatives are mostly dumb, and dumb people don’t understand things and won’t make an effort to understand things, and people fear what they don’t understand. Very simple A-to-C.
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.
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 they agree watches them shower and have sex) 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 the one provided by their husband or father.
I really hope this is sarcasm
We all see you. Isn’t enough praying in the world to make that fire in you burn out…
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People fear new unknown things (as perceived by the individual), especially when it comes to bodies and human form, instinctively.
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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.
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Minorities make the easiest targets. Trans people are an extreme minority.
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Some people think it has more to do with sexuality and sexual urges, so their perception is that it is perversion.
Projection is also a common way for people to deflect blame for societal ills. Religious zealots will ignore and even shield sexual abusers present in their own institutions and divert that animosity to outside groups that make convenient targets. They are ok with the abusers within their walls because they are seeking absolution through religious systems. They are not ok with queer people because they need to scapegoat a group to explain why things don’t seem to be getting better.
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Fascists are cowards who attack the most vulnerable people as a standard tactic.
And after they exterminate one group, they move onto another
It is a self-cannibalizing ideology that destroys any society that fails to pull up the roots of those fascistic weeds
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!
Right! They literally came for trans and disabled people before they came for the socialists and only then the trade unionists.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/
