Transphobia: The Disturbing New Trend Sweeping Our Nations

[nosimpleway]

The Joke:
If you type !Friday into the channel on IRC, Lyrai has a bot set up that will post, in bold red text, ROMO! HOTTEST [GROUP] GIRL! TEN SECONDS GO
because Friday would do that kind of thing a lot

[Friday]

So Santana expressed his solidarity with Chappelle in telling trans people to shut the fuck up and go back in the closet and accept that they are biologically male/female.

This stung me a bit because I really liked his music, and never much cared for Chappelle's comedy style*. Completely irrational, I know, I shouldn't be basing how much I personally care on whether or not I like the artist, but I am human after all under all the carapace. And to be clear Chappelle's bullshit enraged me, it just didn't sting.

Anyway, it just reinforces my personal belief that old people should continue to speak and go back to the united states senate and accept that they are the lawmakers and have all the power.



*with the exception of the Wayne Brady skit, which remains the best trolling of white people I have ever seen

[Grath]

Alice Cooper also just joined Dee Snyder in talking shit about gender-affirming care, which is disappointing. (I'm not disappointed or surprised about Paul Stanley starting that crap.)

[Mongrel]

Wow. Alice Cooper? Cooper's actually someone I would not have actually expected to go that way.

Disappointing is the word, yeah.

[Thad]

Anyway, it just reinforces my personal belief that old people should continue to speak and go back to the united states senate and accept that they are the lawmakers and have all the power.

On the one hand, I do expect less tolerance for LGBT people in general and trans people in particular from older folks.

On the other, when people start saying old people are the problem with the Senate, I like to remind them that the four youngest senators include Sinema, Cotton, and Hawley. (And Warnock, who doesn't deserve to be lumped in with those three.)

Yeah, there are elderly people like Feinstein and McConnell in the Senate, but there are also elderly people like Sanders, Warren, Wyden, and Hirono. I don't really think the best solution for discrimination against trans people is to discriminate against old people.

[Friday]

The senate thing was a joke. Google says the average age of the US Senate at current is 64, but I don't actually believe the problem with the Senate is that it's too old. As much as I bitch about the boomers, I've met enough of my own generation to know that I hate the eternally hand-wringing white moderate millennial far, far more than I do the raving fox news brainrot white supremacist boomer. Each and every time a 37 year old says "I agree with BLM but not their methods, I don't condone violence" I slip further and further into a black depression from which I will never escape.

[Brantly B.]

I noticed the other day that you don't hear people say "and allies" much any more.

[Mongrel]

I find the labeling so exhausting. I don't want to be an "ally" I don't need or want a badge or certificate of authenticity or some fucking Nintendo Gold Seal Of Anti-Racism. It's not a fucking status. I just want to not be a fucking asshole and try to have some consideration for others. So many label arguments really just come down to "Hey, I'm just trying to ask you to have some fucking basic courtesy. Can you do that or not?"

Sure, yes, moving away from an entrenched binary system of race & gender & sex & sexual proclivities to a vast spectrum with more than one axis is complicated. I get that the labels were originally intended to be a helpful shorthand for a wide variety of complex problems and marginalized groups, but in the era of the internet, it almost seems like people are using them like self-administered tribal tattoos. Like some weird gateway to an exclusive club which is often more centred around misery or hatred than solidarity.

Probably the worst and most extreme example of this is what happened to 'incel', but so many labels and acronyms have been adopted and used like this by even decent well-meaning people, and it really feels like we ended up stumbling our way into adding a whole extra layer to modern language whose entire purpose has unintentionally become to divide people.

Anyway... I am prepared to listen to how shortsighted and dumb I'm being for saying this.

EDIT: I'm not even saying I have a preferred alternative because I don't. Obviously it's just as absurd pretend like everyone is the same either. It's more just like this is such a shitshow and I have absolutely no idea what if anything could or should be done about it which would actually be helpful.

[Büge]

I find the labeling so exhausting. I don't want to be an "ally" I don't need or want a badge or certificate of authenticity or some fucking Nintendo Gold Seal Of Anti-Racism. It's not a fucking status.

The problem lies, of course, with people whose allyship is conditional. Like, they'll support the LGBTQ+ community, but not the parts of the community that make them uncomfortable or confused. And then, as so often happens, people will call them out on it, and rather than examine their own biases and do the work to dismantle their privilege, some of those "allies" dig in their heels and turn on the community, sometimes straight into the arms of TERFs and Nazis.

Why yes, I am talking about JK Rowling, how did you guess

[Mongrel]

JK "But I have gay friends" Rowling

[Niku]

Don't be silly, billionaires and TERFs don't have friends, they have alliances of convenience at best.

[sei]

they'll support the LGBTQ+ community, but not the parts of the community that make them uncomfortable or confused. And then, as so often happens, people will call them out on it, and rather than examine their own biases and do the work to dismantle their privilege, some of those "allies" dig in their heels and turn on the community, sometimes straight into the arms of TERFs and Nazis

I know I'm not reading the room and that you're referring to JKR, but something about the way this is framed bothers me.

the trouble with the phrase “LGBT community.” The term implies a coherent group identity, based solely on a shared sexual orientation or gender identity. It suggests a homogeneity that does not exist.

This is especially apparent in regions of the world in which there are sharp economic and power disparities, including in the Middle East and North Africa. Ask, say, a transgender woman in Egypt, who has struggled her entire life to find a job because of her gender expression, if she “identifies” with a rich gay Egyptian man who has the resources to live a comfortable life. Their lives rarely intersect.
[...]
The term “LGBT community” [...] creates a false dichotomy between “‘in” and “out” groups.

I'm not here to stan for JKR or her views; she's the most prominent TERF I can think of. If you think of her as supporting DV victims* who mirror her past experience foremost, you can at least make sense of her positions even if you find them repugnant and their underlying premises false. She's just doing that usual shit you see people do where they try to save their past selves by proxy.

What I'm saying is I don't think she saw herself as signing up to support LGBT as an overarching group to begin with. It's not conditional support for sub-elements of that group; that grouping is simply invalid within her operating context.




* Through a traumatized lens of masc-reading aggressors and femme-reading victims.

[Mongrel]

I appreciate that the article is speaking to the fact that well-meaning people are struggling to find a foothold to understand a group so large and complex, even often as nominal members of that group. There's no one word that suffices; the best we've been able to do is assemble an acronym, yet even that changes at times and is lengthened and shortened by different groups. Same with the combined pride flags, etc.

At least in the latter case I can wonder if we all might be better served if it were replaced by something like this:



Probably a dumb idea, but I like the inclusivity of it, while still being enough of a rainbow to piss off any phobic assholes.

But regardless, that's the sort of concept we as humans are trying to communicate with words, and neither umbrella terms or tribe-trees is adequate for the purpose.

[Romosome]

Oh yeah, I heard about the Santana thing. Chappelle stung me, but taught me the pattern behind it. It's not just being an old, out of touch white dude, after all. Chappelle isn't that old or white.

No, it's just *millionaires*. Multi-million dollar celebrities who will never have to work another day in their fucking life, and who have been living like reality is a game to them for years already. There's no actual ideology here. Just fuck you, do what we say, don't criticize me or my millionaire criminal friends. Epstein shit.

Anyway I hope he fucking slips in the shower while jacking off and breaks his neck. Then has to be cared for in the ICU by an entire team of turbo-gay ultrahomo 20 year old RNs with dyed hair.

Die mad bro.

[Thad]

SF Chronicle: Inside the New York Times’ trans coverage: ‘I wonder if people at the top fully believe in trans people’s humanity’

“There’s a culture at the New York Times of not saying exactly what you’re thinking, and sometimes I wonder if people at the top fully believe in the humanity of trans people,” said a current Times employee who I’m not naming in accordance with the Chronicle’s anonymous sources policy over fear that they would be fired. “I think (reporters) are working in good faith. But there is a problem in the newsroom of being too excited to question whether or not it’s OK to be trans.”

This is what Christian nationalist groups banked on happening, said Imara Jones, an independent political journalist whose podcast, The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, recently dug into the question of how the Times’ coverage got so slanted. Jones’ show documents how right-wing groups figured out how to launder culture war topics like gender-affirming care into the kind of both-sides intellectual debate that newspapers love — and use to insulate themselves from allegations that they are, in Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s words, “a liberal rag.”

“The (Christian nationalists) did a lot of massaging of messages,” Jones told me, and their data showed “concern” about youth transitioning was the clear winner when it came to taking advantage of what she calls the public’s “soft transphobia.”

“They created an entire disinformation network of pseudoscientific organizations that the Times now cites.”

(links not included in copy-paste)

[Romosome]

it's great timing for the latest Bleach villain to, apparently, be a female-presenting hypersexual psycho who is called a man by all the heroes and basically hated by everyone





One Piece is like a million times better at this guys cmon

[Büge]

I'm more surprised that Bleach is still going

[Mongrel]

Stuff like Bleach or One Piece are basically in the same basket as General Hospital or Coronation Street now.

[Niku]

One Piece is like a million times better at this guys cmon

tell me you never read the two year timeskip without telling me you never read the two year timeskip

(okay that's literally the bottom of the barrel when it comes to the newkama and the wano arc was actually a fantastic course correction, but it remains a black mark on the series)

[Yoji]

This gave me a chuckle more than anything: Authors of the "WPATH Files" upset over "suspiciously" happy trans people.