Because stirring up hate against vulnerable minorities, by positioning them as a threat is a well tested and effective technique for the power hungry to gain and retain power. And it’s effective, because it works by pulling people in and making all of the conversation about whether or not it’s right to hate on the group they’re targeting.
The more I read these comments it sound like the USA is entering its Hitler phase.
https://www.faena.com/aleph/umberto-eco-a-practical-list-for-identifying-fascists
In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, Umberto Eco distilled the 14 typical elements of “Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism,” while warning that, “These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
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The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
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The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense, Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
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The cult of action for action’s sale. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.” Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture, the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
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Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.” Appeal to social frustration. “[…] one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.
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The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
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The enemy is both weak and strong. “[…] the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
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Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
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Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
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Everybody is educated to become a hero. “in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
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Machismo and Weaponry. “This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”
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Selective Populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
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Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
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They very much are…
Hell we used to genocide and enslave the people we looked down on. Talking ill of them on Fox News is a step up, my friend.
A combination of ‘scapegoat’ and ‘them vs us’, basically.
It is also exceedingly important to note that plenty on the Right don’t explicitly hate Trans people. That’s a rhetoric. They may be worried about some of the news “reports” and “”“stories”“”, had to triple quote that one, and yes the radical Right and MAGA do buy in hard and hate due to racial and superiority bullshit. What so many on the Right who are on the fence about these things are truly scared of…
Is having an opinion that deviates from the people around them who they’ve known probably all their lives. Unlike us on the Left who hiss and spit at one another every time one of us has a family gathering, many on the Right fear alienating their social circles.
If you ever want to change the mind of someone on the Right you really just need to soothe their rabid, horrid, twisted by those around them, frothing soul of an angry jackass and make them feel as if they can actually believe something else could be the truth.
But by GOD can it be tiring.
Spot on. The fucking bathroom issue I keep hearing kills me. They are in there to take a shit Karen not to pass you brownies though the stalls and play a game of peak a boo above the stalls
I still don’t understand their claims that bathroom segregation makes anyone “safer”
Do they think there’s some kind of law on the books that says “Anyone who matches the gender on the sign can diddle anyone inside they want!” cause that’s how they act…
Personally I find it silly that bathrooms are segregated at all when stalls exist.
Personally I find it silly that bathrooms are segregated at all when stalls exist.
You mean the 3-foot particle board separator with a 2-foot gap at the bottom and a solid inch of space around the entire door, the gap large enough to make eye contact with someone at the sink while you’re sitting with your pants down?
Because that’s what passes for a “stall” in 99% of America. Privacy never even came into the conversation when they designed those damn things. They are designed to give the bare minimum illusion of privacy while still being easily stared through to make sure no one is doing drugs in your bathroom. At any point in time any employee of any company has a right to come into the bathroom, peer through the crack in the door and make sure you’re in there dropping a dook properly and not say, shooting up heroin. And you can’t stop them even if you wanted to, the stalls are designed to make that possible.
So, with that knowledge, I sort of almost understand the people that get all up in arms about this. Because there is almost NO expectation of privacy in ANY American public bathroom. If we had European style stalls this would never have been a problem in the first place. But because anybody can just walk up and literally make eye contact from outside the stall while you’ve got your pants down, some folks can be understandably concerned about that.
That doesn’t excuse any of this mess and it doesn’t make them correct, but non-americans don’t realize how shoddy our typical public restroom is. The anger at trans folks should instead be directed at the cheap-ass building contractors that mandate bathrooms that don’t give you privacy.
Edit: These are what I’m used to seeing.
If you’re tall, your eye level is over the top of that door. If you’re a young kid, the bottom of the door doesn’t even start until your chest or shoulders. If you’re medium height the gap around the door is your peephole, whether you want it to be or not.
For a simple example: my mother is Catholic and until Trump came along, a lifelong single-issue Republican voter who always said she would be a Democrat if it weren’t for abortion. She attends church in an extremely progressive, famously LGBTQ-friendly town.
There’s a transwoman who attends her church (let’s call her Rita). This lady is probably in her mid-50s to mid-60s and has been a fixture at the church for at least 5 years. My mom has been in choir and bible study groups with her for years now. She still just can’t see Rita as a woman. Treats her politely but behind her back refuses to call her “she” and says she’s a “man in a dress”.
She’s really offended that Rita uses the ladies’ room. I’ve asked her why and she can’t articulate it, she just feels like it’s an invasion of her privacy, because men don’t belong in the ladies’ room. And when I point out that Rita isn’t a man, she just rolls her eyes. I’ve asked her if she’s worried that Rita is in there for predatory purposes and she admits that she doesn’t think Rita intends any harm. I’ve asked her how she’d feel if she were forced to use the men’s room and she says “but that’s different!”
My mom prides herself in being a moral person, and still can’t manage to get past her bigotry to see Rita as a woman. There are just too many mental blockades against it. But since she thinks she’s so highly moral, she thinks she must be correct in this situation. It excuses her from finding empathy and bettering her attitude toward trans folks.
My longwinded point is that when people who consider themselves highly moral are bigoted, there’s almost zero chance of getting through to them. And I think a lot of the people who are bigoted against trans folks feel that morality is on their side and being trans is morally deviant, so they think they’re justified in their prejudice.
That’s been my similar experience with the Zionist Jews in my family.
A lot of conservatives want to simplify life because they have a simple mind.
Conservatives are afraid of change, because they control current status quo. They can’t let people escape from that control, so every nail that is a little outside it’s hole gets hammered.
In short, they rather prefer trans (and broadly queers) to hide or die, unless they can control them. Everyone different from what they can control is a big danger. Imagine if everyone could be like they feel like? Conservatives see this as chaos, they are the guardians of peace and good values, so anything not already controlled by them is the opposite, chaos, destruction, fire.
That’s why they rarely present anything new, their policies and general opinion tend to fight the natural evolution of civilization. USA, as obviously all of the American Continent, was built by immigrants (and slaves). Now they fight immigrants, undocumented ones mostly, because they can’t control them. And we know what happened when ‘the libs’ back then tried to end slavery, you know, other people that they CONTROLLED.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Trans people give conservatives feelings in their pants and scare and confuse them. They lash out in fear, hatred, and self-loathing.
Why does it seem most people, mainly conservatives, against Trans people?
First, I think it’s important to establish the validity of the claim, and the assumptions being made, since you cited no sources, nor did you provide any definitions, nor did you specify any assumptions; I will presume that by “conservative”, you are referring to American Republicans. Second, it does seem that the majority of Republicans are against trans protections [1].
References
- “Americans’ Complex Views on Gender Identity and Transgender Issues”. Author: Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown. Publisher: Pew Research Center. Published: 2022-06-28. Accessed: 2024-11-23T02:35Z. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/.
- “Americans’ Complex Views on Gender Identity and Transgender Issues”. Author: Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown. Publisher: Pew Research Center. Published: 2022-06-28. Accessed: 2024-11-23T02:35Z. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/.
Because hateful people always need an other. an outsider. Someone be fearful of, yet feel smugly superior too
It used to be black people.
then it was the irish and the itallians.
then it was hispanics.
then it was gays
and now its trans people.
Oh honey it never stopped being black people.
Most on that list are still targets. A world without trans people cannot exist, and noone’s happy to be a canary in the coal mine…better believe anyone on that list is watching their own rights be stripped away when trans people’s rights are. (General Bodily Autonomy not the least among them)
FYI
They’re people, just like the rest of us. Some are great, some are not.
yeah, was going to say - there have been trans mass shooters, lol
Another notable case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Springs_nightclub_shooting
Aldrich’s attorneys have said in court documents that their client identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, preferring to be addressed as Mx. Aldrich. Neighbors allege Aldrich to have made hateful comments towards the LGBT community in the past, including frequent usage of homophobic slurs. Aldrich never mentioned being non-binary prior to the shooting and was referred to with masculine pronouns by family members. Police testified they found rainbow-colored shooting targets in Aldrich’s home. Experts in online extremism have voiced the possibility that Aldrich’s proclaimed self-identification could be disingenuous, while the Center for Countering Digital Hate acknowledges the suspect’s past actions and impact on the LGBT community.
I am personally inclined to agree that the self-identification is likely disingenuous, a stunt for the courtroom (maybe to make it harder to argue he committed hate crimes).
It’s strange to them.
When people encounter something that’s different from what they are used to, they don’t know how to process it. It makes them uncomfortable. Some people, instead of learning how to deal with that feeling like a mature adult, blame the individual for making them feel uncomfortable and resent them for “making them feel that way”. Just staying away is not enough, they must be punished for existing.
All because someone felt a little icky when they thought about a girl with a weiner.
well yeah they don’t like the thought of a girl with a weiner, you can’t degrade and classify women into being just a hole+reproductive organs if they might not have that. (but also pre-op trans dudes can’t use women’s bathrooms cus they aren’t women but still will never be men???) bigots are bigots.
This is really it. They feel strange about it and cannot grok it. It’s bizzarre that it can break even people that I hold in high regard.
For instance Graham Linehan, the brilliant writer of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd went completely of the rails like his own father Jack when it came to transgender people. There’s people who just cant cope. Even including LGBT+ people. Theres plenty of gay people that hate transgenders with a passion and fail to see that the very same hate was directed at themselves a generation before.
It boggles the mind. But really people feel really icky about the fact that people can choose their gender when they are being plagued by being welded to that gender in most of their lives.
Even as someone who fully accepts trans people and has trans friends and family, it’s still an adjustment to some really old, deeply-seated habits and mental structures. I’m over 50 so I was set in my ways when I learned about “they” pronouns and it still takes work for me to get it right. If I didn’t care about the people involved, it would be very easy to see it as a burden or annoyance.
so the only redeeming value of trans people is that they don’t shoot up schools?
/s
conservative ideology is built around hate, and thus attracts hateful people, or indoctrinates people susceptible to to such ideology. There must always be some outside group to blame every problem on, and to feel superior to without having to actually be better. Conservatives have enough hate to go around that they’re not focused exclusively on trans people, but this flavor of hate is the new hotness for them.
I’m going to get all sorts of fun responses for trying to empathize with those with whom I disagree (instead of just writing “dumb bigots”) but here goes:
First, remember that even gay marriage is fairly new to America, it’s been around for less time than the MCU.
There are a lot of folks who almost have mental whiplash, gay marriage went from illegal to “you could get fired for being vocally uncomfortable about it” in fairly quick order.
Now, to make things even more wild for those folks, mainstream culture is pretty insistent that gender isn’t even a thing anymore. Add in some pretty wild news stories/videos*, worries for their kids and the notion that the Left refuses to say there might be any issues whatsoever and you can kinda see where a backlash could crop up.
- eg: trans women being reassigned to women’s prisons and then assaulting the women etc, a 6"2, 220lb woman practically murdering her handball oppoisition, some fairly sketchy research practices by some of the authorities (WPATH) on the subject etc.
Can we compromise? No trans people in sports and trans people have their own unique prison or cell block and young teens can take puberty blockers and estrogen so they don’t need to try to pay 150,000 in facial feminization plastic surgery at 18 or 19, money of which they can only get quickly from sex work and not going to school? Sound like a good compromise?
I don’t know what the answers are!
A lot of this stuff is mostly at the state level which seems almost reasonable.
I imagine the big actual fight on this would come down to when are parents able to over-ride their kids wishes and vice versa. It’s a shitty battle for trans kids; if you don’t let them access medicine early, it puts them on a brutal path as you pointed out. But I also can’t imagine conservatives would be chill letting their kids alter their sex at such a young age. (From the parents’ perspective, what if this is just some teenage drama with lifelong repercussions?)
We don’t let kids get tattoos (and thank Christ for that, otherwise I’d probably have Wolverine fighting the Zerg on my chest or something) this seems bigger.
I dunno, like most real world issues, it’s tricky. And at the fun intersection of children and a rapidly changing perspective of gender, well damn, there are going to be some ugly fights.
I just don’t think it’s as much of a random fad for kids as conservatives worry.
the analogy of “oh i want a cool new weird haircut/strange tattoo” = same as getting hormones and genital altering surgery seems incorrect to me
kids are not that stupid at that age and gender is mostly hardwired. i just don’t think kids of that age would take it trivially
many trans kids exhibit extreme opposite gender behavior from very early ages. I am not talking about boys liking pink or not liking trucks, i am talking about boys crying because they can’t wear dresses and hating the male parts of their body. There is something that happens to some XY or XX brains in utero that causes the default brain wiring that causes certain behavior to be the opposite of what it normally is. This shouldn’t be that unfathomable. There are animals that contain DNA from before certain evolutions (like tailless animals having tail DNA) and it’s just turned off. The idea that epigenetics, prenatal hormone levels, and endocrine disruptors can’t alter sexual identity development isn’t really supported by data, and even though the exact way transgenderism occurs isn’t fully understood, it’s not caused by some evil Satanic vodoo or a liberal Hollywood plot.
The only reason why this isn’t accepted as true is an anti-science mentality caused by religion, and your response is biased by religion or conformity whether you realize it or not.
This aligns with what I have heard from folks I know in that world. Fear motivated by exaggerating one off and isolated incidents. The information silos in the conservative world (especially news) is frightening.
Which I don’t get because they’re all about rape as a jail punishment
You were doing reasonably well, until you diverted to pure transphobia in the last paragraph
The listing of the news/videos they may have seen?
Not the list, but the way you described them, as if these were things that actually happen…
This is part of the thing. If we on the Left can’t have an honest discussion about things that do happen, then it is incredibly hard for anyone not already “on side” to take us seriously.
trans women being reassigned to women’s prisons and then assaulting the women etc https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/09/26/americas-growing-row-over-policies-for-transgender-prisoners “Tremaine Carroll, a transferred inmate serving 25 years to life for violent crimes, was charged with raping two women in ccwf and faces trial soon; Carroll denies the charges. In 2022 an inmate moved to Rikers Island women’s prison in New York received a seven-year sentence for attempted rape.”
This is a tricky issue, trans women in men’s prisons are also at risk. But to straight up deny these things happen and deny the existence of non transphobic concerns, well, that’s hard to take seriously.
a 6"2, 220lb woman practically murdering her handball oppoisition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SJYdXj7Kac&ab_channel=WilsonB9000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Mouncey
Murder was hyperbole, probably inappropriate. But damn, she is just so much bigger than her entire team and everyone on the opposition in all of those clips. (She also dominates in Aussie rules football.)
some fairly sketchy research practices by some of the authorities (WPATH) on the subject https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/06/27/research-into-trans-medicine-has-been-manipulated
The whole article is discomforting and worth reading. But, while WPATH (what is supposed to, and claims to be and independent science based organization) was creating their guidelines: “But an email in October 2020 from WPATH figures, including its incoming president at the time, Walter Bouman, to the working group on guidelines, made clear what sort of science WPATH did (and did not) want published. Research must be “thoroughly scrutinised and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care in the broadest sense,” it stated. Mr Bouman and one other coauthor of that email have been named to a World Health Organisation advisory board tasked with developing best practices for transgender medicine.”
Again, I’m generally on board with trans rights etc but to say there aren’t issues just makes it that much harder to take us at face value.
This is a tricky issue, trans women in men’s prisons are also at risk
“Also at risk”
The fact that you equate cherry picked single instance anecdotes as comparable to entrenched violence and discrimination against trans folk as being somehow comparable is the part that makes it transphobia.
Murder was hyperbole
It was, yeah. Despite her “murdering” the opposition, from the very article you linked, Australia finished 5th.
There are 7 players on a handball team. She scored 23 goals across 6 games, for an average of just under 4 goals per game (3.83 to be specific).
The total goals scored by Australia in those games was 160, which works out to an average of 3.81 per Australian player across those 6 games. Her “murdering” of her opponents consisted of having a 0.02% higher average than her opponents.
The fact that you parrot lines like “murdering” and look at videos designed to make it look open and shut, whilst not bothering to investigate the reality of the situation is what makes it transphobic.
The whole article is discomforting and worth reading. But, while WPATH (what is supposed to, and claims to be and independent science based organization) was creating their guidelines:
An article posted on the economist, who has Helen Joyce, a vocally transphobic journalist as one of their senior staff. Linking to an article that has been mostly circulated on various transphobic websites, calling out WPATH for being biased and getting in the way of evidence based research? Whilst defending the Cass review, which has been widely called out by many international medical bodies for its own bias and inconsistent approach to evidence.
The fact that you’re worried about WPATH as the real issue here is telling…
You are misunderstanding.
Most reasonable, casual folks, who aren’t up on who Helen Joyce is or other trans poli sco lore, these are all fairly reasonable takes. The Economist is generally regarded as one of the most reputable papers around and for good reason.
I’ve also not presented my beliefs, just “here’s some pretty mainstream concerns.” I made that pretty clear in my opening statement (and pointed out that pretty much this exactly would happen.)
You’ve clearly encountered these arguments before (definitely didn’t watch the video which is fucking sympathetic). I’m not making these arguments.
I’m saying that reasonable people, who read one of the most reputable papers in the world can in fact have reservations on some trans issues. I can disagree with them but it’s not just bigotry.
Yes, they’re designed to seem that way.
Which is why I earlier stated that my issue wasn’t with listing them, but specifically, the way you presented them.
I’ve also not presented my beliefs
You used the word “murdering” to describe a transgender woman playing sports with other women, despite her playing at a level comparable to them.
You absolutely presented your beliefs.
U are literally denying objective reality at best it weakens ur arguments at worse it makes u look like a grifter.
Bruh check out the guys post history, read their comment history, they arent exactly a trans ally
I don’t recall posting about trans anything, can you refresh my memory?
Edit: Oh, it’s you! Are you making this assumption because I disagree with you and condemn the advocating of violence on republicans and democrats?!?
mainstream culture
Talk to any random person on the street and they don’t fucking care about identity politics.
Extremists are not the mainstream no matter how much they shout about it.
There’s a reason conservatives campaign against “woke.” And most conservatives I know socially called the election a win against woke, even if they couldn’t exactly name a woke policy that Harris proposed.
Harris explicitly didn’t play identity politics, and I applaud her for it. I think the left is starting to realise even people who agree with them dislike being told what to think … one can dream right.
I like your dream and fully agree on Harris.
Sadly (though I am admittedly a pessimist and would love to be wrong) I think the Left elites/party brass are coming to that realization on identity politics. But I dont think mainstream/cultural Left is and unfortunately, I think Right and centre Right curious voters view the political and cultural Left as the same.
No, most people aren’t going out of their way to hurt trans people, but those loud extremists are creating a negative connotation in some people’s minds. That’s no different from racism.
Extremists on both sides are a problem, so when you say “those loud extremists” a reasonable person would have no idea who you’re talking about. I think you’re correct in either instance, but I doubt that’s what you where going for.
Oh. My bad. I thought a reasonable person would assume I meant the loud extremists that match the topic of this post.
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They are just propagandized. In general, it’s so much like racists - they may know trans people and just think they are the exceptions, like them as individuals and still think they hate them as a group. They are intentionally riled up by being forced fed edge cases and disinformation.
Trans people are just people. They aren’t angels who are never criminals and they aren’t degenerates who are always criminal, they are a diverse group like all of us are. But you can bet your ass that whenever a trans person does something criminal it will be blown up so big in conservative media and used to paint them all as criminals. It’s just the right wing media machine.
I see a lot of mostly correct answers here, but as a trans person myself I can’t help but feel they are all missing the core concept.
People hate trans folk for the same reason “get back in the kitchen” is still said to women in any non-“traditional” role or the “angry black man/woman” is said about anyone advocating for their own rights. There are strict gender and racial roles that are enforced by our society so rigidly, that many have assumed them to be naturally correct laws of the universe. Anyone existing outside of those roles is seen as either mental illness to be corrected or malicious evil-doers wanting to cause trouble.
When in fact the reality is much simpler, that being human is a more diverse expressive and dynamic experience than those holding on to those “natural laws” would like to admit. To exist outside the role you were “assigned” is a threat to society that assigns the roles, ergo a threat to the very way of life for those who see gender, sexual and racial hegemony as innate truths.
Conservatives who hold high tradition are naturally the first to speak out and seek to regulate us back in to “normal society” via legislation but liberals are absolutely not immune. To reduce transphobia to a political wedge issue, while correct, doesn’t quite explain the more innocuous yet quite prevalent transphobia inside left leaning spaces.
