this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Just to step in with a personal anecdote in regards to point 3, and specifically "nobody who wasn't transphobic to begin with needs to be convinced to not be it":
About a year ago my wife's cousin (17M) was visiting us for a party. I was showing him and his dad my gun collection, and the cousin noticed several stickers on my safe which reference support for the LGBT+ community. When we happened to be alone out on the balcony later, he asked me about them, and what I thought about LGBT+ people and issues, and it was a great opportunity to educate someone not in that community. It is also something that he wasn't going to get from his parents or friends, because his parents don't know anything about LGBT+ issues, and his friends are all 16/17 year old males, and that means they all watch manosphere-light assholes like JonTron.
I've written about this issue elsewhere at more length, but the Left has largely ceded the young-unaligned-male demo to the Right when it comes to outreach and education, and I do think a lot of the problem is this attitude that "anyone who's not bad is already an ally", or put in the inverse, "if you're not already an ally, you're bad". But in the case of young people specifically, we do need some willingness to have these discussions, because a Google search gives you facts about the LGBT+ community, sure, but it doesn't give you humanization.
The rest of point 3 I agree with, but I do think it's unfortunately common- even if understandable- to see people lash out at what are very possibly good-faith questions about LGBT+ issues because of how used we all are to questions just being the lead-in to some bigot asshole's screed.
From what I've observed, all too often curiosity about trans people (which comes from a place of ignorance) regularly is misread as transphobia (especially when the curiosity is worded in accidentally transphobic ways - a lot of cis people with little knowledge of trans people genuinely don't have the right vocabulary, and that gets misinterpreted as transphobic rather than just a lack of knowledge). Questions about trans lives regularly get a hostile "it's not my job to educate ignorant people, they should Google it" response. If @[email protected] had responded to their wife's cousin with an angry "it's not my job to educate you!", the result would likely not have been as positive as the conversation they had.
I always approach questions about trans stuff with an initial assumption that it's made in good faith and comes from a place of curiosity. Those acting in bad faith reveal themselves pretty quickly, in which case I shut the conversation down. But more often than not, people are ignorant but curious, rather than malicious and hateful. So I absolutely agree with t3rmit3 on that front. Very little beats the human touch of having a real conversation with someone.
What @frog said is spot on in regards to my wife's cousin; the first thing he did when he saw the pride flag was go, "haha gay" because he's and edgy teen. And when we were talking later, he absolutely sounded like a right wing anti-LGBT+ troll, because he didn't have either the vocabulary or mindset to do otherwise. But he was asking questions earnestly.
There is tons of 'casual transphobia' in young male spaces (and casual bigotry in general), and someone has to be willing to wade into that bog if we want to pull those kids out of it. I'm not saying that has to be you or any other person in particular -not everyone can or should put themselves in that position- but if all transphobia is universally only met with hostility, even when the context of the conversation might otherwise hint that this is not someone who is a lost cause, it will drive those people further into the clutches of the Right.
That is why I brought up the lack of a Left-oriented outreach pipeline for young men; they've been ignored by the Left for long enough that their spaces are very hostile to LGBT+ people in general (looking at my fellow gamers), but we need to start clawing them back, and that has to start with not immediately treating them as lost causes worthy only of derision when they exhibit transphobia.
Many of them are just parroting the language and behavior of the spaces they occupy in order to fit in, not actively choosing or attempting to be transphobic.