Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people’s understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.
It’s all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.
Like “There are trans rapists in women’s prisons”… Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery isn’t enough for trans women.
Or
“Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men”… When hysterectomy isn’t even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.
But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won’t.
Oh man, I’d never even considered the fact that all these supposed “male rapists in female prisons” have had bottom surgery.
Like, what man cares so much about being able to rape women that he gets his dick cut off? That’s so much easier to believe than the idea that trans women actually are what they say they are (i.e. they are trans women, not men with a fetish or whatever other grossness)?
After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.
We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex… But in talking with cis people I actually think it’s something else. I think the vast majority of cis people’s experience of gender only comes from external influences… I have met cis people who recognize what we’re talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it’s actually rare.
So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who’s entire experience of gender is performance based… So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand… But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.
I don’t think it’s that they don’t have an internal gender identity, I think it’s just hard for them to tell. Ask a cis woman how she knows she’s a woman and she’ll probably say something like “because I have a woman’s body”, but I don’t think that means she has no internal sense of her gender, it just means it takes a lot more introspection and nuance than she’s spent to get to that than it takes to go “boobs, check, vulva, check, I’m good”. She doesn’t have a disconnect, so she’s never had to really consider it, doesn’t mean she doesn’t have it.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think research indicates we aren’t special because we have a gender identity, but because of what it is.
That’s not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.
But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we’re talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people’s. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?
Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don’t really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don’t fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people… But otherwise on their own those things don’t make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.
They also don’t seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don’t tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.
I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don’t actually mean anything to them on their own.
Change the question slightly and they think about it differently. Ask them how they’d feel if they lost some of those features. A cis man with hairy arms and chest probably doesn’t say he feels a great joy when he thinks about them, but would probably feel some real discomfort if he couldn’t grow body hair any more. They assign a neutral value to them because they consider it “default”. And of course not everyone feels the same way about these things, cis or trans, but I think most cis people really do value their genders and sexed bodies because those things match, even if they wouldn’t say so.
Either way, I think we’re both speaking anecdotally and I don’t plan to go look for the research on gender identity right now.
That’s the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it’s root in other people’s perceptions. There’s a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project “manliness” as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces…but doesn’t well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.
It’s a difficult knot to dig down to it’s source but I think it’s a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it’s so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.
To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn’t really happening because cis people don’t really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don’t really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can’t just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate… And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.
Part of the problem with arguments like that is if you say ‘trans women are not widely represented in women’s jails’ they can say ‘yeah but the left want to change that with self ID and all the other things they push for’ so really the only point you’ve made in their mind is that its good the people pushing these things aren’t in power.
Surely no one can deny that the lefts messaging has been that a trans person should be able to enter any gendered space without question? You never see trans advocates say ‘yes creepy men pretending to be women to gain access to female spaces is a legitimate problem which we intend to protect against by…’ they say ‘its not a problem, will never be a problem and anyone who says it might be is evil and stupid and bad’
Everyone knows a lot of men are creepy, everyone knows that there are rapists who if able to get put into a woman’s jail would jump at the chance - if one side is going to pretend these aren’t true simply because it makes the rest of their belief on the issue difficult to explain then that’s not on the normies who don’t accept it without question.
Up until the run up to the election the UK labour party for example pledged self ID legislation would be made law and there was huge outcry from trans advocacy groups when they changed their mind - you can’t argue that something you’re trying to make happen isn’t a problem because it doesn’t yet happen.
The transition requirements are so high
what are the requirements?
Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery… But whether or not you “fit the requirements” won’t be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There’s documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn’t a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.
It’s also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women’s prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to “expectedly matter of course” .
So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally “at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all”
it’s mostly that it is social wedge issue that drives up ratings, outrage, and politicians can grandstand about it. And make up crazy bullshit about kids being forced to transition by evil doctors or something.
and therefore we can ignore real issues in the country while the media/pols rant on about total nonsense that affects hardly anyone and mostly isn’t real or relevant to trans people or any people at all.
There are 8 billion people in the world. If 10,000 people on Xwitter are upset about something, it’s statistically insignificant.
This is what pisses me off about people that go on about I’m sick of this woke society or sick of these “crazy trans people”, or whatever else.
And I’m like brother I do not care and most people do not care. Let people do what they want it ain’t that deep. I’m off the view if it doesn’t negatively affect me then what business is it of mine how people live their life. The things they get outraged over is just from some minority of loons on Twitter and not everybody.
Because right wingers spent the past ten years repackaged the fear mongering about “The Gay Agenda” and call it woke instead.
Which is a repackaging of the satanic panic.
Which is a repackaging of the red panic.
What about reefer madness?!
Sounds like a good time!
Rich shitbags funding divisive propaganda to make the plebs fight each other and vote against their own interests.
Any war but a class war…
Musk and JK Rowling come to mind, specifically.
JK Rowling is just mad that gender doesn’t fit the sorting hat.
For an ugly fucking lady like Rowling, you’d think she would understand that going down the path of “that woman isn’t feminine looking enough to really be a woman” is anti-feminist at it’s core and could hurt her in the long run when people begin questioning her gender for being an ugly ass.
Or does she really think she’s some hot shit and not some ugly twat?
It’s literally already happened to Kyle Rittenhouse and Andrew Tate. She’s making this worse for herself in the long run.
Perhaps you’ve been projecting the ugliness within you all along and that normal looking non-supermodels can be shitty people for things separate from the way they look.
I cant help but feel like you’re calling all these people ugly and think that’s some how cool.
She may be making it worse but she has made enough money to not give a shit.
? I mean here personality is ugly, but google images make it seem like she is not physically ugly. Not that that really matters.
They both genuinely hate trans people though. Hell, Musk disowned his own trans daughter. Like if he was just in it to divide the population he wouldn’t be treating his trans child so horribly.
I mean, you seem to be assuming that muskboy cares about any of his children.
He just hates that one more because she exposes him for the hateful shitbag he is.
Astroturfing. Also, look up the genesis of the conservative media apparatus - specifically, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and how that whole thing came to be in the post-Nixon era. There’s a lot of context, and none of it was done in good faith. The intent was always to game social norms and leverage populist appeals to emotion into tribal ideologies (I.e. us-vs-them/ingroup-vs-outgroup). That’s ultimately the fundamental basis for conservatism.
You had me in the first half. All this foreign influence talk is hugely overblown. Not non-existent, but so small that it may as well be. It’s a convenient excuse for Clinton’s embarrassing election failure, and it’s convenient for manufacturing consent for heightened belligerence toward Russia.
No need to manufacture that, we have a surplus inventory already
But the right loves Russia they’re super right wing, putin is even offering people free citizenship if they’re fleeing ‘woke western politocs’
Belligerence to Russia comes largely from the fact they invaded a neighboring nation
Hey folks, nothing to see here. Just the .ml account telling us that Russian influence in the US is overblown! (Just as the DOJ shows us the tip of the iceberg of Russia desperately trying to get Trump elected.)
Conditions have gotten worse and the ruling class has chosen a scapegoat to distract people from the ongoing class war.
So I am a class? Feel so blessed and afraid at the same time.
Everyone is in ‘a’ class. It’s a classification of the populous. Do you work for money, or does your money work for you?
If you receive a paycheck or have to budget what so ever, chances are you are not part of the classification of shitbags that push the propaganda.
Ok probably a stupid question how do these rich shitbags get their money to work for them when in the public they, as you called them shitbags and push propaganda? To me pushing an agenda would do more harm than good instead of using it to organically grow itself without any interference
They (the investment/owner class) make their money work for them by investing and by playing the banks. Generally, they want to invest the vast majority of their money, and never cash out of their portfolio. When they need “cash” to buy something, they do it with loans and there’s lots of tricks (that I’m not super familiar with) to make loans as cheap as possible, and potentially even profitable if their investments are doing better than the cost of the loan.
Now, why would they spend money pushing propaganda when instead they could be investing that money? Well, when you are that rich, you don’t actually have to spend that much to push propaganda. People are already clamoring for your opinion, because they see you as successful and think, if I copy you then I too can be successful. And when you do need to buy an article, it’s pocket change compared to your vast wealth. And if instead you need to buy a TV news network, a newspaper, or a website, that itself can be an investment. As long as you don’t run it into the ground, it may make you money at the same time as allowing you to push propaganda.
And why do they want to push propaganda in the first place? Because if the working class (those that live off paychecks instead of investments) has the time, energy, and knowledge to do something about wealth inequality, then the investment class will start to have to pay their fair share and lose a bit of their wealth. The investment class doesn’t want that to happen so they need to rob the working class of those 3 things. Manufacturing a culture war is one way to steal time and energy from the working class, because they now have to spend that time and energy on defending personal rights. Busting unions is another way to rob time and energy, as the fewer rights workers have, and the less they are paid, the more time and energy they have to spend to stay out of poverty.
It’s all a ploy to get people to pay less attention to how the investment class gets their money so that they can keep racking up the score without interference.
That said, some of the investment class actually truly holds hateful views, as does some of the working class, but the working class has nothing to gain by acting on that hatred except a sense of personal fulfillment. The investment class benefits financially, so they may act out the hatred even if they don’t feel it.
You are an instance
It’s so dumb, like of all the challenges facing us as a species now, THAT’S the shit that people are getting worked up about? Life on Earth for humanity is in the process of going through a set of major environmental changes that we’re probably not ready for and is going to have catastrophic results for some… and there’s people out there getting bent out of shape about pronouns and sexual orientation. We need to be doing alot more preparing for what’s coming over the next few years and a lot less bitching about things that don’t personally affect us. It seemed like we had made some big strides for awhile there, and that seemingly got erased within the past 8 years.
But those other things is stuff which askes a sacrifice of you personally, while someone else’s sexual orientation only needs you pointing at them. In the Netherlands where I live it’s a lot less about sexual orientation (but still some), and a lot more about foreigners, be it asylum seekers or people of Moroccan descent who’s grandparents were brought over in 1960’s because of labour shortages.
Cultural progressivism has been used as a shield to implement bad economic policies.
Edit for those who do not understand:
Michael Parenti addresses this well:
Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploitative one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.
Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and power are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impressive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;’ "upper class;’ or “moneyed class.” And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the “ruling class.” The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion’s share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are themselves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.
Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a simple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into “conspiracy theory.” The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the “working class,” a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;’ for then one is talking about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.
The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the soothing adjective “middle.” Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt concern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of society. By including almost everyone, “middle class” serves as a conveniently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actuality of class power.
The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimization: the “underclass.” References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society’s most vulnerable elements.
Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.
american school system. decades of wrong education by specialising while not having broader knowledge and making education a side hustle while college football is their slave business.
this has led to a mostly degenrated society. an idiocracy.
Wedge issues. Equal rights for everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation of ethnicity are something that we, as a society, actually solved decades ago that aren’t even a question. They were brought back into public discourse by corrupt people that seek to keep us distracted while they rob us all blind. The two party system in the US (and any nation that uses a FPTP voting system that limits us to a MAXIMUM of two viable parties) is a HUGE reason why they still exist.
The reason we still argue endlessly about these solved issues is that the two parties have decided to highlight those issues (as if there’s even a debate about them) because the super wealthy people at the top don’t want us talking about things that will cause us to stand up and demand improvements to our material conditions.
great answer…no sarcasm. But what does FPTP stand for?
First past the post. Here’s my go-to graphic to describe how it affects democracies.
How the Swedish parliament would look is how the current British government does look. For exactly this reason.
I was thinking about that just now.
They did Corbin dirty in almost exactly the same way that they did Sanders. It has been worst-case-scenario from there on out.
Have they fully privatized NHS yet?
Thankfully not and the party that wanted to is the blue one that lost massively in July.
If it’s as bad as it is in the US, they ALL want to privatize it.
I’ll never forget Joe Lieberman swooping in and literally letting health insurance companies completely rewrite (destroy) the Affordable Care Act from an incremental step toward Single Payer into a law that codifies their profiteering. It put everyone into three categories:
A.) people who make more than their incredibly low income means testing are required to shop for expensive private health insurance on the free market. Health insurance companies literally raised their rates right after this. Because of Joe, health insurance profits, medical bankruptcy, and death from being under/uninsured (70,000 people per year) are at an all-time high! Any real illness won’t be covered and you’ll be forced to cover it with a GoFundMe!
B.) people who face stiff fines if they don’t have health insurance (neoliberal paternalism much like charging people for plastic bags and sugary drinks)
C.) people who somehow manage to sneak in under the means testing income bar! If you are 300% or more below the actual poverty line, you get the most bare bones medical insurance possible!
That fucking rock was installed a few years ago to keep homeless people from sleeping. Very inclusive 😡
Yup. The DNC should use that in an honest rebranding.
Equal rights for all (except the poor).
That rock is inclusive! It doesn’t let any homeless person sleep there. The rock does not care about skin color, race, sexual orientation, gender, etc.
I’m calling the DNC technique of wrapping Reaganomics in a friendly identity politics outer shell “woke-washing” because of how similar it is to “green-washing”.
Some More News did a segment on how Regan forced the Democrat Party to go further right in order to achieve power. Same thing happened in the UK after Thatcher. The Labour Party swung right to get votes.
I don’t have the data however I would imagine, that after the the conservative 80s, a lot left wing parties moved to the right to capture votes.
Also Regan elevated Jerry Falwall and the Christian Religious Right.
Coverage naturally gravitated toward Lynchburg, Virginia, preacher Jerry Falwell, who had supported Anita Bryant’s 1977 anti-gay-rights crusade, and Virginia Beach television mogul Pat Robertson, who was involved with the Washington for Jesus rally of April 1980 (scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of the first landing at Jamestown).
Falwell, head of the Moral Majority (another nod to Nixon), was more eager to enter the political arena. He thus became the first anointed spokesperson of what was then commonly called the “Religious New Right.”
During the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan and the evangelical conservatives engaged in a very public courting ritual. Evangelicals had entertained possible GOP alternatives to Carter since at least 1979. Options abounded— ranging from right-wing purist Philip Crane of Illinois to early front-runner John Connally of Texas—but Reagan, long a darling of conservatives in general, was an especially compelling choice. By the time Moral Majority executive director Robert Billings signed on as a Reagan campaign adviser, the deal was pretty much sealed.
Truly Regan was a piece of shit.
That’s actually a bullshit talking point used by the Progressive Policy Institute (which are not even remotely Progressive) and other right wing think-tanks. They pushed right because of the DLC. They used the “capturing votes” thing to excuse the rightward push. They STILL love that talking point despite Bernie having the most bipartisan grassroots support in the last 40 years…
They had to move heaven and earth to cheat him.
IMO, Clintonites and neoliberals were even more nefarious since they successfuly pretended to be leftists while purposely pushing the Democratic Party rightward to what we see today. Coupled with regulatory capture in the form of Citizens United, they now have a virtually-impenetrable corporatist stronghold in the US.
Further reading: https://www.salon.com/2016/04/30/clintonism_screwed_the_democrats_how_bill_hillary_and_the_democratic_leadership_council_gutted_progressivism/
In my 36yr life it isn’t any greater or lesser of a concern than it has been before, though I’m quick to think of the euphamism-treadmill as being constantly turning.
—To me It seems like sexuality is easy-pickings for politicians that don’t want to write legislation that benefits the lower-classes. It’s a big part of the “circuses” metaphor in the phrase “bread and circuses.”
The forces of reaction never went away, they just weren’t as narketable for a few years, there. Companies are trying to increase their marketshare among bigots while also not alienating the people that don’t hate gay people. So you get pinkwashed corporate logos and genocide along with cancelled gay shows and an increase in false history nouveau Westerns.
It’s all about distraction. All of us seek entertainment because our lives are usually quite dull. So the media feeds us things to have opinions about. Politicians, big tech psychos, gender issues…
It’s all pointless and keeps us from actually making any real difference. People here on Lemmy fight over which words to use, gender issues, or god forbid, someone admits they are not vaccinated…! Wow. Nuclear bomb right away.
None of this matters at all, it’s just entertainment… Nobody changes their minds from getting downvoted either. Sometimes it feels like keyboard warriors here think they are fighting some kind of fight. But nobody changes their mind guys, even if you downvote them.
So it’s actually pure entertainment and distraction from what matters… :) We don’t have to be so serious.
Removed by mod
Wut. No one has an interest in depopulation but a few Malthusian kooks. The capitalist class certainly certainly doesn’t: who would then perform the labor from which they leach their wealth?
