No Stupid Questions

I'm going to be an apologist for conservatives for a sec, just for the sake of giving out my theory of mind of these people.

I think this all happens mostly due to the stress trans people are inadvertently causing their parents. When your kid comes out of the closet, this will happen to a parent regardless of how liberal-minded they are. Even if you have no problem with the concept, your kid being trans brings about new kinds of threat scenarios you never had to think about before. If you're a sensible, smart and handsome person like I truly fucking am, you can process it in a few years and come out as not being a 100% asshole towards the issue.

But if your reference group is republican church goers, there's a high probability that such a person just simply does not have the mental or social toolset to process it in any sensible way. They will construct a toxic viewpoint for this issue, strengthen it from outside sources and then start to spread that toxicity.

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.

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.

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.

FYI

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nashville-christian-school-shooter-appears-former-student-police-chief-rcna76876

They're people, just like the rest of us. Some are great, some are not.

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.

Fear, control, indoctrination, tribalism, double standards, poor mortal character, hypocrisy, and because it 'makes them feel icky' and so they have to be loud and obvious about it so that they're community sides with them and doesn't suspect that they're (allegedly) total closet cases.

They're a convenient political target because it makes insecure men not want to be associated with them. Believe it or not, a similar thing happened last time Republicans won the popular vote in 2004 - back then the issue was gay marriage. Bush went hard on opposing that and it helped him win.

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.

Since when do conservatives care about mass shootings?

In my experience and speaking with transphobes I think it’s caused by our current culture of trying to force people to accept them.

Most people in my experience are happy not knowing or ignoring signs that someone is trans or gay. However when you start bringing it up in casual conversation or being overtly flamboyant for lack of a better term people start giving push back on it. I would compare it to the vegan stereotype. No one cares you’re vegan but when you constantly bring it up or try to make every conversation about you being vegan people get annoyed.

We as a society need to accept that racists and transphobes won’t change. You can’t force them to accept anything.

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.