All the transgender/nonbinary/genderqueer/LGBTQIA+ stuff of today, is just the 2010s equivalent of..

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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…hippie counterculture in the 1960s

I’m aware that this post is probably historically ignorant. i’m young and naive. I probably have some incorrect generalizations about the hippie movement, and fallacious comparisons with today’s trends. I’m not certain in my beliefs, this is just an idea and you can correct me if it’s talking out of my ass. The point of talking about ideas is so other ppl can tell you if they’re right or wrong. It doesn’t hurt for me to post it, this post is not causing anyone any actual harm even if it is incorrect.

older ppl shouldn’t be looking down at current youth as being unusually dumb with their gender ideas, because all generations have done analogous dumb things

in both cases, it’s a form of rebellion against oppressive parents and societal norms. Changes in hair length to make statements. Denouncing authoritarian gender roles. Kids are dressing up and behaving in ways that frighten their parents. Parents are freaking out about their kid’s hair colors, dressing style, liberal posting of selfies and nudes on the internet, and crazy ideas about gender. Just as crazy as the hippie’s free love and ideas of expanding your consciousness with acid and dreadlocks and tie dye.

well, now that I think of it, every generation had its own form of rebellion, not just hippies. This gender stuff is just what generation Z and young millennials came up with. other generations had stuff like punk, gangsta. If you suggest to these ppl that their gender stuff is just another generation rebellion, they get angry and say “but this is REAL, shitlord! We actually ARE a different gender on the inside!” but every other rebellion said the same thing about themselves. “this is WHO WE ARE!”

hippies were rising in the 1960s and scared everyone, then became mainstream in the 1970s. A lot of these rebellious movements do become mainstream as the members become young adults. the 2010s were the decade when fringe transgender stuff got more popular and scared everyone. Does that mean this gender stuff will become more mainstream in the 2020s? Maybe it already is on the way, because androgynous appearances are fashionable and it’s becoming more socially unacceptable to be “Transphobic”

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Man, where is a “smiley eating popcorn” animated gif when you need one?

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Let the geriatric scolds at em!

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Preach it, brother.

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You have absolutely no fucking idea how wrong you are.

I can’t even muster the energy to tell you how wrong you are. Kids couldn’t ever talk about this stuff for fear of ridicule and ostracizing. They committed fucking suicide before they would tell their parents. Suddenly, we got smarter as a society and realized that gender dysphoria is a real thing and acceptance is what is required.

Educate yourself.

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Are you aware of how LGBT people have been treated historically, that in much of the world they still risk severe persecution, including imprisonment and physical violence up to and including state-sanctioned murder? Yet your thesis is that all these people are really cis-het, and just pretending? Just acting out to be cool & rebellious, to annoy their parents? Does that really seem remotely plausible?

If you’re a teenager in the Bible Belt or some such benighted place, and you have been surrounded your whole life by ignorant bigots teaching you that “homosexuality is a choice”, well - maybe you get a pass on posting this drivel one time. But you need better critical thinking skills than you show here.

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More like the civil rights movement. I was there; you weren’t.

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Gender preference is not a choice. How you deal with it is; I’ll grant (generic) you that.

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Wow.

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#1

Today, 11:15 PM

uqekizig

Guest

You all may laugh at me for my post claiming that transgenders/nonbinary/etc are just the 2010s equivalent of hippies. Then you scoff at my misunderstanding of history when I use the phrase “hippie counterculture of the 1960s”. without even taking time to point out the historical ignorance, so that you can remain smug and intellectually superior while you laugh at me. You would rather let ignorance persist so you can sit back and laugh at it, rather than fight the ignorance, which is very boring compared to laughing at it. Well, jokes on you, I have no ego to be harmed. Nothing matters.

I wrote that post because my parents dislike LGBT and I dont want them to scoff at me the same way they scoff at nonbinary kids

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In other words, you wrote the OP because you are mad at your parents? Were you planning to show it to them to prove your loyalty?

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For two years I was a trans girl. Then forced to detransition because of family pressure. I feel nonbinary but I also feel that’s kind of dumb and cringy, I can picture my parents scoffing and cringing at it. I’m just trying to make arguments to convince myself the gender thing is a wacky cult I got drawn into, and that my parents are right. They were born in 1956 so they could be right

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I know i sound like a troll when I claim I was a trans girl for two years. But I have proof when I get back to home computer on monday.

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nm

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What does their age have to do with it?

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I was there and this is exactly right.

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Your parents are just wrong.

Being a hippie was a choice to participate in a cultural phenomenon. LGBT identity is not a choice. That doesn’t mean that everyone is completely certain of their identity from early childhood, but the emergence of your identity is a process of self-discovery, not a process of choice.

Your parents may think that it seems like there many more LGBT people than when they were growing up. But that’s not because the number of LGBT people has increased, it’s not because it’s “trendy”. It’s because gay and especially trans people now no longer all feel that they must hide in the shadows and deny who they are. It’s because we have made some progress in tolerance and awareness in recent years, so (in some places, at least) LGBT people are less afraid of ostracism or worse.

If your family won’t accept who you are, you need help and support from outside your family. Do you have that?

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It has nothing to do with hippie counterculture, which did not become mainstream. It mostly evaporated except for a few pockets.

What it is something like was the sexual revolution of the late '60s. That was when people stopped pretending that no one had sex, and that if you did it had to be hidden. I was right at the cusp of this. The first time I visited my now wife at her college I had to sleep elsewhere. The second time I didn’t have to sneak around.

The way it is different was that we straight people were not oppressed in any manner. It is a lot better now, in some places at least, but it was a lot worse back then.

I’m sorry that you have awful parents. Where are you from? I was born in 1951, and I fully support all your rights.

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Are some kids jumping on the bandwagon, because it’s accepted and their friends are doing it? Yes, probably. Does that mean the entire movement is nonsense that will just blow over? No.

It’s inevitable that some people, especially young people who are still exploring their identities, will be exposed to a new concept and be attracted simply because it’s new and interesting. Most of them will drop the idea pretty quickly as they realise that it doesn’t really work for them.

About 18 years ago when I was at school, the idea of same-sex relationships was just starting to gain limited acceptance, and a whole bunch of my female classmates started identifying as bisexual. It quickly became obvious that some of them were just saying that to, slightly ironically, get guys. It’s also pretty obvious that the ones who wound up married to, or in long-term relationships with, other women were not trying to make themselves look more interesting to boys. They were taking advantage of the new acceptability to come out about their sexual preferences, yes, but they weren’t just playing or curious, even if others were.

Incidentally, some of those who jeered at the ‘freaks’ back then also wound up coming out as gay later.

None of this is new, not the L,G or B, not the T, not the Q, most definitely not the I and not even the +. What is changing is the level of information and acceptance. As I said, when I was at school, it was just starting to be OK for girls to identify as bi (though even those who now identify as lesbian had to say bi to be safe), but it was only the first hint of acceptance. I still had a friend at another school who was ostracised and attacked (by teachers, other students and when out on the street) for ‘being a queer’, and it was actually illegal for teachers to say anything positive about ‘alternative lifestyles’. Someone who came out as L,G, T or bi if they were male, back then, had thought long and hard about it. They knew they were taking a big risk, and might lose jobs, friends and family. In some places now, a kid can come into school on Tuesday morning and say to their friend ‘I think I’m gay/a boy/non-binary’ and expect the response ‘OK, cool.’ Of course people in that situation are going to come out at an earlier stage of their inner journey than before. And yes, that means some are going to change their mind later, once they’ve spent time seeing if this new identity works better for them and decided that actually, no it doesn’t. Some might even change their mind again later, and re-identify as LGBT+ as an adult, especially if their reception wasn’t quite as easy as they’d hoped and they’re now in a better place mentally.

Teens are still figuring stuff out, part of that includes trying out new ideas, some of which won’t fit. That doesn’t negate the existence of those who truly identify with concepts the others are just investigating.

Exploring the idea of being LGBT+ may well be ‘just a phase’, being LGBT+ isn’t. Either way, considering the possibility isn’t dumb.

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Assuming the OP is serious and not a troll (because a lot of kids don’t know history)…

As pointed out upthread, the non-binary gender “stuff” is more like the Civil Rights movement than the “hippies counterculture”

(I think you have mistaken notions about the hippies, too, but I want to keep this post short enough to be readable in a morning)

First of all, there was PLENTY of LGBTQIA+ stuff going on in the 1960’s - check out the Stonewall riots to start. Subsequent history/popular culture has ignored these things. There is a LONG history of trans sexual people in the world, it’s not a new thing at all, but it is an ignored and suppressed things.

Black people refusing to sit in the back of the bus any longer was not a “teenage rebellion”, women in the 1960’s demanding the same reproductive and professional freedoms and rights that men had long enjoyed was not “teenage rebellion”, LGBTQIA+ people demanding the right to be who they are and love who they love is not “teenage rebellion”.