No Stupid Questions

Rural IL here. Full of conservatives.

Nobody here cares if you are trans. Couldn't care less.

Never met a school church shooter either.

I think most commenters here are missing the point.

There is a more extreme reaction to transgender people as opposed to gay or lesbian people, because of issues like sports and bathrooms. And that hits at people's sense of injustice. For example if you have a young daughter, a lot of people will hate the idea of a person with a penis going into the women's room and being around there little girl. Or if that daughter grows up and joins a sports team, the idea of somebody who is hormonally male and thus naturally more muscular competing against your daughter is unpleasant.

Put differently, I think a lot of people we now classify as 'transphobic' don't actually have much problem with trans people themselves. Rather, with how the efforts to ensure trans people receive the full treatment of their chosen gender can affect the rest of society.

For me personally, I don't know what the answer is. I generally don't care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. I have no problem with anyone presenting themselves to the world as whatever they wish, if it makes you happier than by all means. At the same time though, I don't think it's transphobic to point out that somebody who is largely or entirely biologically male will have a natural competitive advantage in the field of sports.
So while I certainly don't want to exclude anybody, I think there is at least a little justification for restricting some women's sports to those who are genetically female.

Most conservatives I know think it's dangerous to entertain trans ideas in children. They say kids don't know what gender really means because they haven't experienced puberty yet but the most effective time to use hormone blockers is before puberty. So they feel like it's the parents who are encouraging use of hormone therapy for their kids because the parents are brainwashed by left media, and essentially committing child abuse.

Because queerness (trans, gender non conforming, gender fluid, agender, bigender and related) threatens hierarchy.

In western society regardless of how ‘progressive’ some parts of it have gotten, for the majority there’s still a strict hierarchy. Man most important, then woman, then children first boys then girls. Trans people completely disrupt this hierarchy by being able to change what they are and those who cling to hierarchy freak the fuck out over it.

Then there’s the sexual panic, a straight man who’s insecure is gonna freak out if the woman they think is cute actually has a penis.

They’re an easy minority to scapegoat. In the US they make up between 0.5% and 1.6% of the population. A sizable portion of straight people associate being transgender as something sick and weird and a sexual deviancy, so it’s easy to target them and to try to associate them with actual objectively bad things (ie pedophilia). They’re just people trying to find their place in the world and live their lives, same as most of us.

Because conservatives are mostly dumb, and dumb people don't understand things and won't make an effort to understand things, and people fear what they don't understand. Very simple A-to-C.

As others have said, one did shoot up a school (and the MSM hid the manifesto & details forever). As your comment proves, they found out the shooter was trans & they tried to memory-hole that real hard. But that's besides the point; evil & depraved people will be evil & depraved people. Doesn't matter, trans or not.

Main conservative talking points against trans people: They do not produce children, trans people are categorized as having a mental illness that should be treated instead of chopping off body parts, they really don't like when health insurance money and/or tax dollars pay for elective surgery & treatments, fully transitioned people have their genitals mutilated & they'll never experience an orgasm, once they're chopped up a not insignificant number of trans people experience regret (permanent consequences for acting on temporary feelings), and trans people are more likely than the general population to have depression & commit suicide.

With well-intentioned conservatives, it's actually coming from place of care & compassion. They don't want people to hurt themselves, deprive them of families & fullness of sexuality, or see them despair post-op & kill themselves.

because they're gay and weird or christian and dumb

the existence of GNC people undermines the thin facade of identity that people construct based on their assigned gender roles. they lash out against internal discomfort

Materialist answer (inspired by a video called Why The Political Compass is Wrong: Establishing An Accurate Model of Political Ideology, by breadtuber Halim Alrah... and also Jane Elliott's famous experiment)

Business owner makes money by paying workers to produce widgets at $6 / unit. Owner sells these widgets at $10 / unit, making a $4 profit each sale.

Before long, the workers catch on to the reality of the situation: the owner could be making a lot less and still be able to provide "leadership" (or whatever it is he provides). They decide not to work for less than... $8 per unit. With this price, the owner will still be wealthy (the business makes hundreds of widgets, after all). But now, so will the workers.

So the workers save up money and use it to go on strike.

However: business owner comes up with a better solution to the problem: he divides the workers into brown-eyed workers and blue-eyed workers. He then uses his money to discriminate against the brown-eyed workers. His cronies in government make it legal to deny brown-eyed workers jobs and housing. His cronies in the media write hysterical anecdotal stories about various brown-eyed rapists, thieves, and murderers.

Terrified mobs -- stoked into a frenzy by the business owner's well-funded propaganda -- tear down brown-eyed people's homes and food supplies, leaving them destitute before the strike is done.

The brown-eyed workers now must choose between returning to work for the business owner at $5 / unit... or starving to death.

The blue-eyed workers, meanwhile, have just been tricked into betraying their own team. Some were not tricked, but simply unprepared. These unprepared workers stood by in either shock, uncertainty, or laziness, unable to comprehend how their fellow blue-eyed workers could have become so foolishly self-defeating and cruel.

But now the business owner can put up the illusion of no longer needing the blue-eyed workers. He can run his factory on a skeleton crew of desperate, brown-eyed workers, and say to the blue, "uh oh! Looks like the brown-eyed workers just stole your jobs!"

Much like the brown-eyed workers, the blue-eyed workers have a restricted set of choices: A) admit they were suckers --fooled into attacking their own team -- and try to apologize and rebuild their union, B) double down and blame brown-eyed people for undercutting them... but reluctantly return to work, because the strike is broken, or C) just like the brown-eyed workers, they can choose to starve to death.

(A) will be the most difficult. As Mark Twain said: "it's easier to fool people than convince them they have been fooled."

The business owner wins, and now society has an eye-color-discrimination problem. Eye color was an arbitrary characteristic. Yet now it decides where someone lives, who they spend time with, and what kinds of opportunities they have access to.

The business owner can rinse and repeat for: skin tone, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. As the saying goes,

"Divide and conquer."

You asked why trans people are currently the subject of fear and hysteria? No reason. Not any new reason at least. Trans people are different. Any and every difference between workers is an opportunity for those fatcats rich enough to own "The Daily Mail" and the "The New York Post" to separate us into camps and drain us dry, one camp at a time.

We have a lot of LGBTI people in our climbing group

I have never had an issue with any of them

But the people trying to be hyper masculine? Yep..

I feel like it's because they never left high school. A lot of them are simply trying the same thing that worked when they are a kid. Everyone else grows up

Among the many factors, I think that we shouldn't lose sights on the fact that statistically there is a percentage of any population who has no "normal" sexual orientation. This means that there a percentage of conservative/religious fundamentalists who are non-heterosexual CIS in the closet, who fight against sexual diversity to defend their chosen belief structure. There cannot be queers, thus they are an abomination that must be stamped out.

I support trans people to do whatever they want to themselves but unfortunately one did shoot up a school https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting

Their systems of power rely on having an "in" group and an "out" group. Overt racism is less acceptable these days because now there are brown Republicans, but transphobia? Very in.

They're just choosing a new group to "other" so that we don't realize they're coming for everyone who doesn't fit into their narrow worldview.

There are a lot of factors at play that make transness an easy target to be the scary other bigots rally around.

The simple truth is that unless you yourself are trans you cannot understand the trans experience. There is no way to explain the scope or impact it has on someone's life. It's automatically alien and provides essentially a permanent out group. Anyone who is uncomfortable with people who are different or that have different experiences than themselves are almost certainly transphobic to some degree. Right now to the best of my knowledge transphobia is the only thing all hate groups share.

Trans people are the current scapegoats because prior to the pandemic we had an explosion of trans people feeling safe enough to come out online (I blame Obama making us all feel safe). They are particularly effective because both white nationalists and evangelicals use queerness as a scapegoat all the time anyway so it was easy for them to rally around. Which is why conservative politicians fearmonger around trans people.

It's not that simple, but it's close enough for a lemmy comment.

1. People fear new unknown things (as perceived by the individual), especially when it comes to bodies and human form, instinctively.

2. It doesn't conform to their strict societal standards as crafted by thousands of years of culture and history. The authorities have always persecuted and cracked down on anything that threatens the patriarchal standard.

3. Minorities make the easiest targets. Trans people are an extreme minority.

4. Some people think it has more to do with sexuality and sexual urges, so their perception is that it is perversion.

Conservatives come in two types. The rich ones who want more and more money. And the poor ones who also want more money but are unable to obtain it because the rich hoard money.

The rich conservatives need to stop the poor conservatives from realizing the rich are why the poor can’t get money. So they make up vulnerable groups to blame for the poor’s problem, and the poor are generally too poorly educated to catch on to this game.

Different groups have been the scapegoat. Women, blacks, the italians, the irish, asians, gays, and now it’s transgender people.

The good news is transgender people WILL get full rights in about 20-30 years if you look at historical cycles. The bad news is it will be a fight and many will die before they get treated as human beings by these asshole conservatives.

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 never heard of one shooting up a school church or whatever.

First off, one must be very careful of generalizing to an entire group from the actions of a small sample [1]. Using the metric of whether there have been trans people who have engaged in mass shootings is quite reductionist, and is a faulty generalization — if I am to interpret what you said to mean that "conservatives" are "against" all trans people because they think that they are all responsible for "shooting up" schools and churches. Second, to address your belief, to my knowledge, there has been at least one instance of a school shooter being trans [2].

How to say it delicately.. Many conservative/religious men really, truly want to just impale their throats on lady dick, but they are indoctrinated from birth to believe that a zombie from space (who they agree watches them shower and have sex) will be mad at them if they do what makes them happy. So to distract themselves from that always burning urge to ravenously aspirate dong nog, they performatively hate things as a hobby to pass the time until they die - profoundly alone and completely unhappy (see Lindsey Graham)

And then the conservative women are taught that they are stupid, useless furniture pieces there to look pretty and parrot - not capable of an opinion outside of the one provided by their husband or father.

In a less direct way one standing theory is that it’s tied to cultural issues with gender relations and due to the lack of a cultural role for us (at least in cultures where that applies or where those roles were damaged during colonialism, which was very common). Then there’s also the oversexualization of trans people.

For the first one Julia Serrano does a good job going into a lot of detail for a big chunk of it, but the quick summary is that there’s two axes of sexism: traditional (one sex and that which is associated is better than the other, traditionally prioritizing the masculine over the feminine) and oppositional (that that which is associated is deeply connected and immutable). All sorts of people run up against oppositional sexism, from cis gay people to dudes who like to sew. But it’s likely necessary to reinforce traditional sexism.

Then there’s the lack of cultural space. It’s being built, but it isn’t done yet and until it’s been uncontroversial for some time it’ll be at risk. It’s the issues of “I don’t know how to treat them” and “it’s against god”. It’s people angry that their understanding of one of the most vital parts of their culture is being called to make space for something that’s new to them

Then there’s the oversexualization. Trans people all throughout the world have a long history of resorting to sex work to survive. That means that to many people our existence is seen as inherently sexual. I grew up where trans people only appeared on tv as tragic sex workers, jokes of erotic disgust, or Springer style freak shows, and the next closest depictions were as murderous erotic crossdressers (which many saw as the same thing). And so now here I am, one of them, demanding you treat me as an educated professional and a peer and a decent chunk of bigots will see my face as inherently pornographic and therefore unfit to display around children. They hear about teenagers wanting to transition and think of it as sexualizing them. And for a certain portion of people they’re mad that a porn category and type of exotic hooker is demanding rights

There’s more, and I didn’t say it all the best I could (typed it out off and on over a while between doing things as well as it being something I mostly break down in discussions with other trans people). But yeah, we’re different and we challenge basic understandings of some of the foundations of society and culture, but our liberation helps break down the issues you’re already facing and a lot of the time the requests we’re making make life easier for cis people once y’all get used to us being around.

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.

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.

Fascists are cowards who attack the most vulnerable people as a standard tactic.

You all are overthinking it way too much.

Most people hate anything that's different or uncommon to themselves and their "world".

Simple as that.

It's heterophobia in the semantic sense of the word "fear of anything that's different".

Far simpler than whateveryone else is saying. The best way to rally humans to your side is to give them a common enemy. So conservative politicians picked enemies that are small in number and told everyone how they are to blame for all that is wrong in the world.