So the GOP used to vocally oppose rights for the G, the L, and the B. They don't do this anymore because it's become unpopular. Too many people, at least on some level, accept gay people.
This is the reason they started going after trans people (the T) more vocally. They need the votes of other bigots, and so far if there's not much return, fine. The people who care aren't voting GOP anyway.
This is cause for hope and tired resignation. If the efficacy of GOP rhetoric against trans people is waning, then they are becoming more widely accepted. On the other hand, the GOP will find another target for their bigot baiting. No one tell them what non-binary is.
...and later the very same day...Collin Allred acquiesces to GOP hate advertising with what looks like it will be a rather massive fumble. I'm pretty sure you'll be writing at us on that, if you haven't already. I can almost feel you writing. Not sure how this ties in, or what, if anything, about the above is changed by that. Honest question, being that I'm a cissie myself.
One thing the extremist Right understands better than anyone is how their various radicalization pipelines work. They are, after all, the PRODUCT of those pipelines.
They are going after Trans people because they are easy targets. They're visible, they make a lot of folks uneasy, and they don't have many defenders. And if the Right can whip up seething hatred for Trans folks, it makes it a whole lot easier to whip up hatred for others. Transphobia and misogyny are what gets future extremists into the pipeline: they will progress over time into violently hating everything and everyone, just like a good Nazi.
With all due respect, Crip, it ain't any more complicated than that.
Also too, when talking about Mark Robinson, projection and self-hatred probably doing some heavy lifting here--hatred of "others" often being comprised of significant portions of self one wishes to jettison.
Same applies to far more of these haters than we have public evidence about. It's always easier to transplant your own demons into another person who visibly contains them. And worst of all, does not treat them as demons. Because all they really are is differences.
Anti-trans activists have been going nuts in Europe for the past week. A couple ridiculous and hateful conferences, one in Portugal, one in London. The TV ads targeting trans folks have been slamming Americans in state after state and the Supreme Court of the United States is on the verge of outlawing trans health care.
Yeah, it feels like shit, but we can fight back.
Proof? Some kid/s -- probably associated with Trans Kids Deserve Better, the fantastic activists who have been kicking ass in England for the past 8 months but the exact person/s isn't identified so we can't be sure -- 💜released💜thousands💜of💜live💜crickets💜 at the anti-trans London meeting just as medical record thief, privacy pirate and anti-trans melon fucker Jamie Reed was about to speak.
We are truly blessed with an excellent up-and-coming generation. Crickets! Everyone sing Despacito!
Amazing analysis as usual, CD. It's striking to me that anti-trans ads will hit three major groups: those who know trans people and know they're not a threat, those who know trans people and have gone down the rabbit hole from hell, and the biggest group: those who don't know any trans people personally, that they know of, and for whom it's at most a hypothetical. People need healthcare, we all have opinions on education and taxes, virtually every adult has met an immigrant at sone stage. But knowing trans people makes it more immediate as well as tends to tilt people's views heavily toward empathy. But I agree completely: these are identity statements for the wannabe "party of Lincoln". (Now I want to spit to get that nonsense out my mouth!) We deserve better.
A lot of it simply that the GOP needs an other to vilify so their voters are distracted away from the fact that they’ve been voting against their own economic self-interest for decades.
But a huge part of it is that republicans men are deeply insecure. They are so desperate to be seen as the party of alpha males even as their icons of masculinity are pencil necks like Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and Stephen “Walling Dead” Miller. Tim Walz could eat all three of these cucks (to use their word) for lunch.
The truth is, they are the party of betas who all cower at the feet of the orange makeup wearing man-baby who does the double jerk off dance to “YMCA.” Jordan Klepper did a whole montage this week highlighting just how unmanly the PAB is.
But their insecurity feeds their hatred of anyone they see as gender-nonconforming even as they are blind to their emperor’s effeminate behavior. It’s weird and sad and we would pity them except for the fact that they truly are horrible people who want to make their fellow Americans suffer because it’s the only way they can elevate themselves.
Slightly OT: A minor character in a couple of relatively obscure Star Wars novels has been introduced to the wider fandom: transwoman Clone Trooper Sister (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sister). Incel fanboi heads are exploding all over teh Galaxy, and it is GLORIOUS!!
Dems are caving to this stuff. Colin Allred cut an ad saying he doesn't want boys in girls' sport, running scared from Ted Cruz's ads. We really are fucked. No matter who wins the election, trans people will be being force-detransitioned within 10 years. https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1844736865338822698
I get the despair, but I've also seen too much change on queer issues to feel doomed. The demonization of gay men in the 80s was fierce and pervasive, but in the 90s there were more out men, not fewer. and by the 00s things were obviously, ridiculously better than they were in the 80s. Then in the 10s was Obergefell.
I'm not saying this is easy or change comes naturally, without a fight. I am saying that we had to win a lot of fights just to get where we are today, and the democrats weren't stepping in to help trans people in the 90s when I was getting constant death threats or in the 00s when their support for gay men and lesbian was conditional on leaving trans people out of non-discrimination efforts.
We're coming out of the closet faster than we're dying, and I don't think that they can force us to stop. They can do a lot of very, very bad things, and I will fight them when they do, but I don't think they'll succeed in getting our people to stop outing ourselves.
Surely at the point where Janice Raymond's "moral mandate" becomes a real thing - where trans identity is considered as socially pestilential as child molestation - you *can* get people to stop outing themselves? Or at least return to a 1950s "twilight" world of Mafia-run bars and sex work?
Normies overwhelmingly do *not* accept trans identity claims. In Tim Walz's phrase, they generally "mind their own business" (or, to use an older phrase, Don't Ask Don't Tell). If pushed - like they are on the sports issue - they revert to a "sex not gender" position. And as Joyce knows, once you've accepted that, game over everywhere. Trans healthcare becomes considered something as barbaric as a lobotomy and simply gets banned, like it is in England.
I honestly feel that trans identity, which has only existed for a few decades, may well cease to exist very soon. Not trans people, not trans feelings, but it will simply not be possible to "change gender" even on a social level.
Thing is, even if they do their worst, it's not a new thing - that's how things used to be. But when people have seen freedom, it's really hard to get them to forget what it's like. Back in, say, the 50s, trans people had no straight allies. Now they have many.
>> Surely at the point where Janice Raymond's "moral mandate" becomes a real thing - where trans identity is considered as socially pestilential as child molestation - you *can* get people to stop outing themselves? Or at least return to a 1950s "twilight" world of Mafia-run bars and sex work? <<
I don't disagree, but that's THEIR gameplan, THEIR vision. Surely at the point where Indiana Fever sink all their baskets they win the WNBA title.
But the Raymondites and the Pat Robertson acolytes are not unopposed. As with the WNBA, there are people playing defense.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that 10 years from now the scenario you depict will be our reality. Not because the cissexists will give up, but because we won't either.
this is how you shift the overton window, by continuously repeating and spreading your most extreme idea, until it reaches a level of saturation that it is no longer fringe, or at least in no way novel
the only way to apply traction in the other direction is to do it right back, to go on the offensive and very publicly support and affirm whatever they’re demonizing— pro union pro labor pro workplace safety pro stable economy pro trans and gay rights pro reproductive rights pro bodily autonomy pro clean air and water— not by ignoring it and certainly not shutting up about it or taking a republican-lite stance on it
people don’t want lite republicans, they either want the full calorie fascism or they want a definite, if not diametrical, alternative
This is correct. But Dems will not do that. Why? Because "normie" libs are *not* fully trans-accepting. The media opinion is "Don't Ask Don't Tell". They are simply not going to defend trans people when it comes down to it - and trans folk are too much of a minority to defend themselves. Trans identity will simply be eliminated within a decade. Of course trans folk will still exist but it'll be back to the 60s, actual laws on what clothing each gender is allowed to wear etc.
But if all this analysis is correct, there is literally no hope. All they have to do is to spew hate often enough, and it becomes the law of the land, and there's nothing we can do to stop them. Is that correct?
nope! we gotta actively rally against it instead of ducking down and focusing on anything else out of the misplaced fear that their radical fringe hatefroth is a big winner for them: the way this fight gets lost is in not pushing back loudly, vigorously, and most importantly in legislation
if the left had been willing to fight harder for labor and union protections, Reagan literally could not have legally done what he did; it’s the pre-emptive defeat of running from an issue or worse, adopting the moderate version of the R position on the issue no R cares about and lefties care about but the other way, that yields the issue
There's a reason that I wrote about labour and reproductive rights as areas where we lost and about LGB rights as an area we won. Even when the Democratic Party wouldn't do shit, we ourselves kept up the pressure, kept up the messaging.
Fighting against their anti-trans messaging can be done successfully. There's danger there, of course. Trans people aren't as large a group and aren't as wealthy a group as gay/bi/pan/queer men were in the 80s and 90s, so our numbers and resources suffer in comparison. We'll need allies.
But on the plus side, the people who fuck trans people aren't always trans, they're not counted as trans. With queer men, every man that fucked a queer man was ALSO a queer man, by definition. But as trans people, whenever someone falls in love with us, they learn about us and become invested in our liberation. That will add to our numbers. On top of that, the fact that the GOP constantly tries to tell people that seeking abortion is the same thing as advocating transition is causing trans people and reproductive rights activists (sometimes but not always those can be found in one person) to ally with each other. That swells our numbers.
It won't be easy and our victory isn't guaranteed, but I think we can do this.
IMO Harris’s Trans support is part of the Mind Your Own Business section of the campaign and protecting people’s rights to body autonomy and that’s where she addresses this.
Some Democratic strategists have never gotten past their oh-so-edgy insight that if an issue isn't exclusively about white hetero men, it's a distraction. It's well past time to say good-bye to the Carville generation.
So the GOP used to vocally oppose rights for the G, the L, and the B. They don't do this anymore because it's become unpopular. Too many people, at least on some level, accept gay people.
This is the reason they started going after trans people (the T) more vocally. They need the votes of other bigots, and so far if there's not much return, fine. The people who care aren't voting GOP anyway.
This is cause for hope and tired resignation. If the efficacy of GOP rhetoric against trans people is waning, then they are becoming more widely accepted. On the other hand, the GOP will find another target for their bigot baiting. No one tell them what non-binary is.
𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑝𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑎 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑘𝑒𝑒𝑝 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑤𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝒆𝒍𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚 𝒔𝒑𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈, 𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑖-𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝑎𝑑𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑡𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑛𝑜 𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟 ℎ𝑜𝑤 𝑙𝑢𝑟𝑖𝑑 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑙𝑖𝑝𝑠 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑂𝑃, 𝑖𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝑓𝑒𝑎𝑟. 𝐻𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑠𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑦 𝑖𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑔𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝑤𝑖𝑛 𝑙𝑒𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑛𝑒𝑤 𝑣𝑜𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑂𝑃.
...and later the very same day...Collin Allred acquiesces to GOP hate advertising with what looks like it will be a rather massive fumble. I'm pretty sure you'll be writing at us on that, if you haven't already. I can almost feel you writing. Not sure how this ties in, or what, if anything, about the above is changed by that. Honest question, being that I'm a cissie myself.
One thing the extremist Right understands better than anyone is how their various radicalization pipelines work. They are, after all, the PRODUCT of those pipelines.
They are going after Trans people because they are easy targets. They're visible, they make a lot of folks uneasy, and they don't have many defenders. And if the Right can whip up seething hatred for Trans folks, it makes it a whole lot easier to whip up hatred for others. Transphobia and misogyny are what gets future extremists into the pipeline: they will progress over time into violently hating everything and everyone, just like a good Nazi.
With all due respect, Crip, it ain't any more complicated than that.
Also too, when talking about Mark Robinson, projection and self-hatred probably doing some heavy lifting here--hatred of "others" often being comprised of significant portions of self one wishes to jettison.
Same applies to far more of these haters than we have public evidence about. It's always easier to transplant your own demons into another person who visibly contains them. And worst of all, does not treat them as demons. Because all they really are is differences.
Anti-trans activists have been going nuts in Europe for the past week. A couple ridiculous and hateful conferences, one in Portugal, one in London. The TV ads targeting trans folks have been slamming Americans in state after state and the Supreme Court of the United States is on the verge of outlawing trans health care.
Yeah, it feels like shit, but we can fight back.
Proof? Some kid/s -- probably associated with Trans Kids Deserve Better, the fantastic activists who have been kicking ass in England for the past 8 months but the exact person/s isn't identified so we can't be sure -- 💜released💜thousands💜of💜live💜crickets💜 at the anti-trans London meeting just as medical record thief, privacy pirate and anti-trans melon fucker Jamie Reed was about to speak.
We are truly blessed with an excellent up-and-coming generation. Crickets! Everyone sing Despacito!
https://www.them.us/story/youth-activists-live-crickets-disrupt-anti-trans-conference-london-j-k-rowling-lgb-alliance-trans-kids-deserve-better
Amazing analysis as usual, CD. It's striking to me that anti-trans ads will hit three major groups: those who know trans people and know they're not a threat, those who know trans people and have gone down the rabbit hole from hell, and the biggest group: those who don't know any trans people personally, that they know of, and for whom it's at most a hypothetical. People need healthcare, we all have opinions on education and taxes, virtually every adult has met an immigrant at sone stage. But knowing trans people makes it more immediate as well as tends to tilt people's views heavily toward empathy. But I agree completely: these are identity statements for the wannabe "party of Lincoln". (Now I want to spit to get that nonsense out my mouth!) We deserve better.
A lot of it simply that the GOP needs an other to vilify so their voters are distracted away from the fact that they’ve been voting against their own economic self-interest for decades.
But a huge part of it is that republicans men are deeply insecure. They are so desperate to be seen as the party of alpha males even as their icons of masculinity are pencil necks like Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and Stephen “Walling Dead” Miller. Tim Walz could eat all three of these cucks (to use their word) for lunch.
The truth is, they are the party of betas who all cower at the feet of the orange makeup wearing man-baby who does the double jerk off dance to “YMCA.” Jordan Klepper did a whole montage this week highlighting just how unmanly the PAB is.
But their insecurity feeds their hatred of anyone they see as gender-nonconforming even as they are blind to their emperor’s effeminate behavior. It’s weird and sad and we would pity them except for the fact that they truly are horrible people who want to make their fellow Americans suffer because it’s the only way they can elevate themselves.
Slightly OT: A minor character in a couple of relatively obscure Star Wars novels has been introduced to the wider fandom: transwoman Clone Trooper Sister (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sister). Incel fanboi heads are exploding all over teh Galaxy, and it is GLORIOUS!!
I actually noticed that. I'm considering whether to write about it.
Doo iiit!
If I had a halfway appropriate body type, I'd be pricing clone trooper armour right now
The fact that the Evil Empire is more trans-positive than the GOP says a lot.
Dems are caving to this stuff. Colin Allred cut an ad saying he doesn't want boys in girls' sport, running scared from Ted Cruz's ads. We really are fucked. No matter who wins the election, trans people will be being force-detransitioned within 10 years. https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1844736865338822698
I saw that about Allred.
I get the despair, but I've also seen too much change on queer issues to feel doomed. The demonization of gay men in the 80s was fierce and pervasive, but in the 90s there were more out men, not fewer. and by the 00s things were obviously, ridiculously better than they were in the 80s. Then in the 10s was Obergefell.
I'm not saying this is easy or change comes naturally, without a fight. I am saying that we had to win a lot of fights just to get where we are today, and the democrats weren't stepping in to help trans people in the 90s when I was getting constant death threats or in the 00s when their support for gay men and lesbian was conditional on leaving trans people out of non-discrimination efforts.
We're coming out of the closet faster than we're dying, and I don't think that they can force us to stop. They can do a lot of very, very bad things, and I will fight them when they do, but I don't think they'll succeed in getting our people to stop outing ourselves.
Surely at the point where Janice Raymond's "moral mandate" becomes a real thing - where trans identity is considered as socially pestilential as child molestation - you *can* get people to stop outing themselves? Or at least return to a 1950s "twilight" world of Mafia-run bars and sex work?
Helen Joyce laid out the game plan just this month: you *start* by excluding trans kids from school sport, and if you accept the argument for doing that, there's no way you can oppose adult bathroom bills. https://transsafety.network/posts/joyce-speech-plans-to-abolish-trans-rights/
Normies overwhelmingly do *not* accept trans identity claims. In Tim Walz's phrase, they generally "mind their own business" (or, to use an older phrase, Don't Ask Don't Tell). If pushed - like they are on the sports issue - they revert to a "sex not gender" position. And as Joyce knows, once you've accepted that, game over everywhere. Trans healthcare becomes considered something as barbaric as a lobotomy and simply gets banned, like it is in England.
I honestly feel that trans identity, which has only existed for a few decades, may well cease to exist very soon. Not trans people, not trans feelings, but it will simply not be possible to "change gender" even on a social level.
Thing is, even if they do their worst, it's not a new thing - that's how things used to be. But when people have seen freedom, it's really hard to get them to forget what it's like. Back in, say, the 50s, trans people had no straight allies. Now they have many.
>> Surely at the point where Janice Raymond's "moral mandate" becomes a real thing - where trans identity is considered as socially pestilential as child molestation - you *can* get people to stop outing themselves? Or at least return to a 1950s "twilight" world of Mafia-run bars and sex work? <<
I don't disagree, but that's THEIR gameplan, THEIR vision. Surely at the point where Indiana Fever sink all their baskets they win the WNBA title.
But the Raymondites and the Pat Robertson acolytes are not unopposed. As with the WNBA, there are people playing defense.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that 10 years from now the scenario you depict will be our reality. Not because the cissexists will give up, but because we won't either.
this is how you shift the overton window, by continuously repeating and spreading your most extreme idea, until it reaches a level of saturation that it is no longer fringe, or at least in no way novel
the only way to apply traction in the other direction is to do it right back, to go on the offensive and very publicly support and affirm whatever they’re demonizing— pro union pro labor pro workplace safety pro stable economy pro trans and gay rights pro reproductive rights pro bodily autonomy pro clean air and water— not by ignoring it and certainly not shutting up about it or taking a republican-lite stance on it
people don’t want lite republicans, they either want the full calorie fascism or they want a definite, if not diametrical, alternative
This is correct. But Dems will not do that. Why? Because "normie" libs are *not* fully trans-accepting. The media opinion is "Don't Ask Don't Tell". They are simply not going to defend trans people when it comes down to it - and trans folk are too much of a minority to defend themselves. Trans identity will simply be eliminated within a decade. Of course trans folk will still exist but it'll be back to the 60s, actual laws on what clothing each gender is allowed to wear etc.
By saying that outcome is inevitable, you are helping it to happen.
I don't think that Jews getting out of Germany while the getting was good in 1939 helped the Holocaust to happen
But if all this analysis is correct, there is literally no hope. All they have to do is to spew hate often enough, and it becomes the law of the land, and there's nothing we can do to stop them. Is that correct?
This article is about the bad things that are happening and the long term republican strategy, but there are others about hope. Read this one:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/fights-for-abortion-and-trans-rights
nope! we gotta actively rally against it instead of ducking down and focusing on anything else out of the misplaced fear that their radical fringe hatefroth is a big winner for them: the way this fight gets lost is in not pushing back loudly, vigorously, and most importantly in legislation
if the left had been willing to fight harder for labor and union protections, Reagan literally could not have legally done what he did; it’s the pre-emptive defeat of running from an issue or worse, adopting the moderate version of the R position on the issue no R cares about and lefties care about but the other way, that yields the issue
There's a reason that I wrote about labour and reproductive rights as areas where we lost and about LGB rights as an area we won. Even when the Democratic Party wouldn't do shit, we ourselves kept up the pressure, kept up the messaging.
Fighting against their anti-trans messaging can be done successfully. There's danger there, of course. Trans people aren't as large a group and aren't as wealthy a group as gay/bi/pan/queer men were in the 80s and 90s, so our numbers and resources suffer in comparison. We'll need allies.
But on the plus side, the people who fuck trans people aren't always trans, they're not counted as trans. With queer men, every man that fucked a queer man was ALSO a queer man, by definition. But as trans people, whenever someone falls in love with us, they learn about us and become invested in our liberation. That will add to our numbers. On top of that, the fact that the GOP constantly tries to tell people that seeking abortion is the same thing as advocating transition is causing trans people and reproductive rights activists (sometimes but not always those can be found in one person) to ally with each other. That swells our numbers.
It won't be easy and our victory isn't guaranteed, but I think we can do this.
These people are just plain hateful .
IMO Harris’s Trans support is part of the Mind Your Own Business section of the campaign and protecting people’s rights to body autonomy and that’s where she addresses this.
Some Democratic strategists have never gotten past their oh-so-edgy insight that if an issue isn't exclusively about white hetero men, it's a distraction. It's well past time to say good-bye to the Carville generation.
I'll say it again: trans=Jew.
I have both identities, so that's literally true for me.
There is also if you are hanging with dogs that are eager to attack anything, isn't better to keep their attention on anything besides yourself?