_ _

3y

who gave this 11 likes? this dont even really make sense and it's obv considering you didn't even try engaging in discussion. it's like transphobes see something they can latch on, even if the argument is s***ty just to play the devil's advocate. these people are killing themselves because transitioning is pretty much illegal in half of the states and you're saying people "couldn't care less" about their gender

Q3D

3y

Idk if it's like written in any law that trans people can't access stuff it's more so tht there is no law supporting so it creates a Grey zone that is easily exploited by transphobic people ajd institutions

Q3D

3y

Something the left side doesn't get at least in America it seems is that queer issues tie in to the issues you mentionned its all connected and should all be treated as the same big thing that it really is (class war)

krishna bound

3y

actual long post now

firstly, i don't think it's really fair to equate LGBT movements intrinsically to leftism. it's true of course that the two intersected many times historically (just as racial civil rights movements did on both ends too) , but there is no intrinsic connection between LGBT and any specific political movements (in the US or abroad), just allyship at times in terms of similar goals. For the purpose of this conversation though it makes more sense to limit the discussion to America as the modern understanding of LGBT movements is basically an Americanism more than anything else. In that sense, we ave to acknowledge there is just as much a history of right wing LGBT movements in the US as there is leftist ones. Much of the reason we now group LGBT groups with leftism is due to a false equivalence made in the post-WW2 era by the US government, where President Eisenhower & Senator McCarthy included gays in their umbrella of McCarthyism investigations. This of course had the result of pushing LGBT people into outer/alien spaces which of course were occupied by those also excluded - at the time i.e. Marxists, etc. ; however this was not still a direct connection as much as it was a means of communication. What is often not talked about at this time are movements such as the Gay Voter's League, which often campaigned for Republican Candidates (including Nixon!), the rise of Log Cabin Republicans (which successfully lobbied against many anti-gay measures in the US), and prior to that, of course, the movements of gay people who supported Fascism - that quote from Maxim Gorky exists for a reason, it was not just fabricated due to hating Nazis. Just as the succession of Dadism led to Fascism, the "rebuild all culture with new values" ideas was appealing to many disenfranchised LGBT at the time, especially abroad since it was not true that Marxism and LGBT rights were seen (internally or externally) as one and the same. While of course this was seen more in Europe, it did also exist in the US.

Of course, all the above is basically just historical window dressing. Of course LGBT people were historically targeted politically within the US and elsewhere in the same manner as political Leftists. The point is though that the threat there was visceral; fighting for what was not just a political ends but a deep cultural victory. For as much as LGBT people may come from different labels or walks of life, there is a reason the letters are (were) grouped together over time and it's because the original cultural battle was about, at its heart, the ability to hold differential cultural values and still co-exist alongside others; this is how it materializes in strains of all subcultural movements from Punk to Jon Waters' shock Cinema. This was a shared value between groups - whether they be transgender, gay, etc. Now, here is the issue; years pass, and this victory was essentially won. Or, well, it was was won insofar as the system accepted the asks of the people fighting it. Because, at the end of the day, what was the battle being fought in epistemological terms? We can talk about "acceptance" and "safety" because these are abstracts without clear political goals - they exist solely within the minds of the individual to be debated upon in a collective; they're the mirror side of conservative "preserve our culture" style goals. So politically, groups must find real battles to fight. These took the form of simply mirroring that of their external contemporaries; say, fighting for civil unions, fighting for gay marriage. So what happened, that with all those battles won, the tide broke? Did conservatives simply push back too hard? Did the government infiltrate the movement? There's a quote, the famous wave speech, from Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas about the 60s counterculture I feel is apt:

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

The truth is that there is no simple answer such as movements being "hijacked". The fact is that time keeps moving and as such political goals lose material ends and became more abstract while also being further intertwined with the system it tried to fight. For all the talk of opposition and danger, the fact is - in some format - institutionally the fight was absorbed separate from the identities of those originally fighting it. No longer was it about fighting for the truth or righteousness of the identities, it was about winning economic & sociopolitical battles within the capitalist system. As thompson notes, the cultural battles we fight are no longer a simple youth vs old guard fight of good & evil anymore. The classical nature of these fights are reduced back to abstracts connected by a thread at best to their material political goals. There is no longer a real tether that holds groups within the connected sphere together anymore either; that momentum has been shifted as systematically collective material goals have been replaced with individual ones.

Someone else in the thread mentioned about how certain times felt "violent" during political turmoil, and I think that's a good term to use - not because this was a physical war in the sense of Stonewall all the way through, but rather because the victories fought by those battling them felt violent. The rulings for gay marriage and anti-discrimination suits, and laws that followed as such on a state and local level, and the very acceptance into the systematic social fabric were violent victories; not in the physical sense, but in their integral intensity. Now, however, you may see a pushback, but is that pushback really against these same victories in a meaningful material manner? Almost 75% of americans support gay marriage. Talk or discussion of anti-gay sentiment is just as individualist as talk of radical acceptance or liberation - it may as well be an argument over someone's favorite color that can turn violent in the same way as a bad discussion in a bar. The fight has shifted milestones and the talking points have changed because it is no longer being fought outside the system. Kurt Vonnegut said it best on Vietnam:

Every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

eye contact

3y

very old social rules

The Greco Roman social model that the west prides itself on was saturated with homoerotic rhetoric

Men literally had s***with each other as a social norm because they devalued women that much

gabapentin

3y

The problem is capital*

(*NOT capitalism; just "capital," it's cleaner)

Choking

3y

what’s the difference other than sounding cleaner

gabapentin

3y

The problem is capital*

(*NOT capitalism; just "capital," it's cleaner)

krishna bound

3y

I didn't say anything about rural towns specifically nor act like this was a countryside issue. However the point stands that you're likely to see an overlap in discriminatory or harassing behavior for being trans in the same places you'd see such behavior for non-derivative identities - again literally hence in part why the term "LGBTQ" was grouped together to begin with, since the discrimination is for those seen as not abiding by cultural norms. Acting like I'm only talking about rural areas is projection.
Secondly, of course someone like Harry Styles is not receiving harassment on the level of a transgender person. That's a bad faith comparison. Styles is seeking attention on the red carpet and is rich. This once again is distinguished alongside bourgeois vs working class lines. Someone like styles is appropriating the controversial nature of others' identities knowing very well he's protected in the public conscious while others are not.
Try to dress like Harry Styles in Inner City Detroit or North Philadelphia if you truly believe harassment is only targeted at transgender self-identifying people specifically and not just those not abiding by derivative gender norms. Statistically, trans violence - in any form, but especially in terms of active violence - is not happening in redneck backwoods areas. It's happening in impoverished inner cities, this is just a literal fact. This doesn't change the fact I'm sure you'd see similar behavior in a trailer park in west virginia, but statistically that's not where this is happening. The fact that right wingers have vile rhetoric does not change the fact that it's disconnected from actual violence, unless you're trying to argue speech is violence (under which I disagree). Of course, I'm not trying to turn this into some argument over cosmopolitanism. That's a distraction from the main point at hand and a tangent at best.
The fact that there's a legal apparatus for which conservatives with platforms are attempting to disenfranchise trans people is a completely different issue - and more complex. The extent to which laws in this regard affect outcomes is a different conservation - but also one which falls along distinct lineages from anything I've said in this conversation. These are cultural battles being fought on both sides without clear end goals.
That said, no one is denying - myself included - that this political apparatus is discriminatory, and I haven't mentioned anything denying this in any post I've made, including the essay I wrote several pages ago.
However, the points you make act like I am - you say "why are trans people ostracized" / "what is the material/psychological cost of being disowned" - in what manner am I denying this is a problem? This goes back to what I said in my longer post - what is the political battle there when you tell me these things exist, and I don't deny them. Is the goal to force a legal structure that forces people to accept their kids? While a noble goal it's unrealistic and at the end of the day that is an individual fight, not a political or material one. This is a similar argument in epistemology who think that laws can solve racism - the point isn't to "solve" racism, the point is to create a framework in which racism is powerless on a socioeconomic basis. There is no answer for "solving" hatred, and fixating on the fact people are hated rather than attempting to fix the results of ostracization is destined to be a losing battle. If you wish to fight epistemology, you are no longer waging a political battle, you're waging a cultural one in the same way evangelicals are.
So with that, we can establish the focus really moves to "how can we actually help trans people who find themselves in that situation" - what the entire basis of the discussion should be . This is where you lose me because there is no intrinsic connection that them being trans has vs others in similar situations. I am not denying there may be an intrinsic connection between them being trans and others hating them - the same could be said of race, gender, religion, etc. ; but social hatred only intersects with political fundamentals, especially in the modern era, it does not fuel it. The issues they face from an economic and political perspective - the ones actually solvable - once in this scenario is representative of the lack of safety nets for those who face these individual struggles/battles. Trying to argue that they face extreme specialized, criminal level hatred is statistically not true and relies solely on anecdotes. Correlation does note equal causation of course, but the fact that the statistics are mirrored by others in the same scenarios, especially in terms of things like s***work and violence, paint a picture for at least understanding material conditions. Now you may say, again, "but they're there because they're trans", and while that may be true in some scenarios of course, how does that actually change the argument for how to fix it? There are lots of reasons that people end up in ostracized or similar scenarios which are specific but also collectivized in terms of trends. Fixating on this rather than broader political victories is not only useless but completely decimates your own argument because of the associated statistics to the argument. Now, beyond that, if you want to make arguments about the distinctions of trans identity vs others (i.e. the need for specialized medical care), sure, I will give you that - but that's a distinct argument - and also neither here nor there as I haven't said anything against specialized medical care. However, that still comes back to the wider point; that is an actual political goal. If you want to fight for specialized care, you have to actually fight for specialized care. You cannot be fighting the war of "stopping discrimination" only to then rebut to "actually this means..." once pushed in an argument on it to find specifics. Political victories require explicit political means and ends; all I'm saying is that fixating on cultural ones is not only fruitless but statistically isn't even agreeable by most of the population unless they base their view on anecdotes.

Smoofer

3y

F*** capitalism but I got my capital up

Choking

3y

what’s the difference other than sounding cleaner

Yuzzy

3y

I feel like the pushabck is mostly only about trans people nowadays

mrcl_hrn

3y

unlike other civil rights, lgbt activists eventually hit a brick wall because the bible is against it and evangelical christians wont budge on that.

Shady Ant

3y

I feel like a big part of it is the increasingly vocal minority group of slacktivists on twitter that make us look bad.
For example, recently a v-tuber was bullied into retirement for just CONSIDERING to play Hogwarts Legacy, and while I saw many tweets from fellow LGBT people denouncing it, I saw a couple supporting it and touting it as a “trans W” as well.
Irregardless of how you feel about that specific issue, you need to be able to understand that people being bullies over culture war silly s*** (the wizard game is just a culture war pawn, not an actual LGBT issue) will make more and more regular people who are uninvolved in the culture war s*** view the community in an increasingly negative light.
LGBT “””activists””” are increasingly being their own worst enemies and making things worse for regular LGBT people because they can’t get over the fact that they don’t get to control how others act and see things, and as a regular LGBT person who doesn’t like engaging in culture war stuff, that irritates me.

sonyatv

3y

someone hating an entire community "because of a******s within it" means they hated that community anyway so i dont think it really matters what trans ppl say online about a s***ty videogame

Shady Ant

3y

I disagree; I’ve met people who say some variation of “you’re one of the good ones” and “maybe you aren’t ALL bad” to me when they learn about my identity, because they have had very limited points of reference in the past.
I doubt that there are that many people who genuinely seek to dislike groups of people from the jump; things are much better and easier when we all get along. However they end up disliking groups because they only see a small percentage of people from that group, and that warps their perception of the rest of the group.
That’s why we can’t let the most vocal parts of the community be twerpish crybullies.
I don’t really want to talk about it though.
I believe that the community would be in a much better position if we could, as a whole, disavow culture warriors, but that won’t happen, so I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Shady Ant

3y

I feel like a big part of it is the increasingly vocal minority group of slacktivists on twitter that make us look bad.
For example, recently a v-tuber was bullied into retirement for just CONSIDERING to play Hogwarts Legacy, and while I saw many tweets from fellow LGBT people denouncing it, I saw a couple supporting it and touting it as a “trans W” as well.
Irregardless of how you feel about that specific issue, you need to be able to understand that people being bullies over culture war silly s*** (the wizard game is just a culture war pawn, not an actual LGBT issue) will make more and more regular people who are uninvolved in the culture war s*** view the community in an increasingly negative light.
LGBT “””activists””” are increasingly being their own worst enemies and making things worse for regular LGBT people because they can’t get over the fact that they don’t get to control how others act and see things, and as a regular LGBT person who doesn’t like engaging in culture war stuff, that irritates me.

Shady Ant

3y

I disagree; I’ve met people who say some variation of “you’re one of the good ones” and “maybe you aren’t ALL bad” to me when they learn about my identity, because they have had very limited points of reference in the past.
I doubt that there are that many people who genuinely seek to dislike groups of people from the jump; things are much better and easier when we all get along. However they end up disliking groups because they only see a small percentage of people from that group, and that warps their perception of the rest of the group.
That’s why we can’t let the most vocal parts of the community be twerpish crybullies.
I don’t really want to talk about it though.
I believe that the community would be in a much better position if we could, as a whole, disavow culture warriors, but that won’t happen, so I guess it doesn’t really matter.