• dandelion
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    5 hours ago

    it’s just a lazy copypasta of the anti-gay agenda from decades past 🫠

    they use all the same rhetoric: accusing gay trans people of grooming children, of being sexual predators, of flaunting their perversion in public, etc.

    and even before the anti-gay movement of the 1970s (see for example Anita Bryant, I recommend the ContraPoints video on this topic), the Nazis used pretty much the same rhetoric:

    And like today’s digital fires, those flames were not lit without years of prior hate. Four years before the book burnings, one of the earliest editions of Der Stürmer—the Nazi propaganda publication that fueled fascism’s rise—accused Hirschfeld of “grooming” youth, echoing today’s attacks on LGBTQ+ people. Hitler notoriously called Hirschfeld “the world’s most dangerous Jew.” Trans and queer people were the canaries in the coalmine of atrocity. Similarly, just a few years ago, the “groomer” slur ignited online, feeding a growing trans panic that has only escalated since.

    It does at times seem like transphobes and homophobes violently project their discomfort with finding trans and gay people sexually appealing onto trans and gay victims, but there are actual data to support this rough correlation:

    https://lawsuit.org/general-law/republicans-have-an-obsession-with-transgender-pornography/

    While I think this could partially explain some of the hatred, I don’t think a simple narrative is adequate explanation. Similar to the idea that homophobes are just closeted gays, while that might explain the psychology of some homophobes, I don’t think we can apply it broadly without more evidence. The reality is that transphobia and homophobia survive and thrive due to a diversity of psychological reasons, a single explanation is likely to fail.