Smoofer

3y

Where did I cite any statistic or talk about murders? I didn’t say trans people are getting mowed down, I’m saying trans people that I’ve met irl are scared of being attacked for their transness. Maybe it’s from them getting caught up in sensationalism but it’s also true that none of these statistics can truly describe the trans experience. Someone throwing rocks at your car (anecdotal but literally happened to a friend of mine getting in her car in Hollywood) doesn’t get recorded by the FBI or whatever

krishna bound

3y

i mean you said "They’re just trying to live life and not get hate crimed" but like statistically they aren't anymore likely to get hate crime'd than any other group unless they're put in impoverished circumstances at which the rate is equivalent to other groups in said circumstances but more likely to be reported as a hate crime vs regular crime. The idea there's an omnipresent threat of hatecrimes just isn't true. There's maybe an omnipresent threat of people snickering or making mean comments, but you could say that about almost anyone depending on the area.

Yuzzy

3y

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

Smoofer

3y

Ok maybe hate crime was too literal, how about “live life and not get physically harmed for their identity”. Like I said statistics don’t tell the full story there. You think trans people gonna go to the LAPD and report getting chased down the street or a drink thrown at them at a party? I promise the cops do not give af and that incident is not getting reported

Besides the fact that “hate crime” is a really specific thing that is incredibly hard to prove and subject to political climate as well

Smoofer

3y

Oh definitely there’s pockets of acceptance but just the fact there’s areas of town where there’s a legitimate risk of being attacked for being trans is pretty validating of their concerns

krishna bound

3y

i will write long posts on cultural topics so long as there are people to read them

hoopsplayer21

3y

your wordsmithing is so great man!

as someone who typically will read something you post, just felt the need to air my sentiments! you make everyone who reads them more informed without necessarily overtly pushing a stance.

krishna bound

3y

i mean probably not, i agree with you, but online there are def people who equate any form of public hostility in public to genocide or something. you're right that statistics don't tell the full story, but i mean, they tell a lot of it; where there's smoke there's fire and so on. I don't doubt they face public hostility, but at the same time I doubt this is intrinsically due to trans identity. The same places where this is happening, i guarantee you you'd get a similar reaction if you walked there wearing unisex designer clothing or alt styled clothing something.

RASIE

3y

Oh trans people def have reasons to feel in danger now. My post was just talking about gays.

Knx

3y

yo f*** hate.

he is true in saying animosity has increased.
I remember when same s***marriage was passed.

and now, it just feels dangerous.

Smoofer

3y

Do they really tell a lot tho? Like you automatically went to the admittedly low known hate crime murders. Sure that’d be telling if there was a legitimate like KKK esque movement that was actively hunting trans people. I just really don’t think that says much about the climate of violence, especially considering how rare it is for murders in general to be investigated to the point where they will say it’s a hate crime. Even the clothes example you gave speaks to a climate of violence against queer people (not explicitly trans but Id call being attacked for being a cross dresser / having non gender conforming style pretty closely related)

krishna bound

3y

well the statistics are "violent deaths involving trans people" so it includes hate crimes and non-hate crimes. you can combine this with statistics about violent attacks on trans people for a slightly better picture. I agree statistics don't tell the whole story, but they do tell part of it - in addition to what you say about how there isn't "KKK esque movement(s)" that exist like this. The rhetoric online is often hyperbolic and paints a picture of things being more dangerous and grave than they really are.
I would never deny that there are people out there who exist in the sphere of willing to attack those distinguished from accepted middle-american "normality", but I do think the issue with relegating this to only trans people is that it bolsters a rhetoric that the specific issue is in fact related to reactions to trans identity. It's a misnomer and it leads people to make the wrong conclusions on how to solve the issue. The correlation has less to do with that and more to do with A. circumstance as I mentioned earlier and B. any form of non-derivative aesthetic identity within these areas, as you mention.

Get Jiggy

3y

All that Hogwarts Legacy stuff certainly didn’t help for a lot of people that’s all I’ll say.

BG

3y

i wanna see real gays real f**s out there on the streets
america needs a new gaystar.
someone the people can relate to
in the small towns in the medium cities
i wanna see big cocks and big hearts
lets go america
rock hard with the cock hard
starbucks pride my ass
bring it back to the mom and pops diners coffee shops

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.

2words

3y

I stand with the trans people

But as a country I really don’t believe this should be one of our top issues I’m sorry

And that goes for both sides. Righties need to stop acting like trans people are an existential threat and lefties need to stop pushing identity politics as their only thing

A living wage and homes for all is more important in the big picture. End the culture war

blonded

3y

https://ktt2.com/homophobic-boaters-boat-blows-up-saved-by-dude-they-were-harassing-126921/2
still gets me