Oh, and I’m also less on this board because transphobia hit different now. It’s just not worth it getting mad at the garbage people here who continue to be here. Yeah, it sucks, but with my mental health, I can’t really be asked to fight and not have a life. I’m better off just sticking with my boyfriend and other LGBT friends.
I’m also not in this board as much as i was. The political situation is too stressful to be in a place where there’s a lot of chatter about it.
I’m mostly confused about @Babale’s involvement in this. I’m glad to see you’ve moderated some of your worst positions from some years back, and befuddled by your insistence on returning to a place that makes you feel suicidal sometimes, and saddened that you don’t see a connection between how terrible you feel when a few people say mean things about you, and how trans folk feel when there’s a dominant social movement dedicated to saying horrific shit about them.
But since you’ve promised not to read any of this, I’m mostly confused about @Babale’s involvement in this.
Last time I was here, Babale had been listening to Briana Wu. I tried to tell him she wasn’t the best to listen to on trans issues.
Yeah, but not much. You can get six months of the Hooterville Daily Retort for only 1 cent, if you act NOW.
I’ve been arguing with DemonTree about a bunch of issues, including trans issues, for a while, in threads and in PMs. I earlier in this thread expressed the idea that while I disagree with DemonTree’s trend to misgender people and find her transphobic in a few different ways, I think breathless exaggerations about her seething hatred for trans people, desire to see them killed, or the idea that she is “dehumanizing” anyone are all pretty dumb.
DemonTree PMed me about that post complaining that I didn’t bring up the positive positions on trans people that she mentions in this thread. I’m not sure why her awareness of the thread is “thanks to me” either, but that’s probably what she’s referring to.
And for the record, once more - I disagree with DemonTree on almost everything, but most of the attacks against her here have very little to do with any position she has actually expressed. You’re all arguing with a caricature (incidentally, so is DemonTree, who rarely argues against anything I say as opposed to arguing against a caricature of a trans rights activist).
How old are you? I’m not asking to be belittling, but I’m wondering what you remember of the mid-nineties and the homophobia of that day.
It is very rare for folks to express their hatred of minority groups in explicitly murderous language. It is much more common for folks to express that hatred in language couched in terms of love and tolerance, downplaying the documented deaths that their approaches cause.
The transphobia of today echoes strongly with the homophobia of the mid-nineties, both in policy and in rhetoric.
I’m relatively young, but I don’t remember gay people being gEnOcIdEd in the mid 90s.
You’re right, modern transphobia is reminiscent of that time. It sucks, especially relative to progress we thought we already made.
It’s a far cry from the murderous, eliminationist hatred you seem to imply.
That’s because it happened in the '80s.
Absolutely–but it continued in the nineties. That’s when I was involved with Act Up!, so that’s the time period I think about. The nineties homophobes were fighting a rearguard action, but the fighting was deadly. Pat Buchanan railed against “homosexual rights” at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Gays and lesbians could still be imprisoned for their acts (I remember a high school friend, a lesbian, being told approvingly about these laws by her history teacher). Matthew Shepherd was murdered for being gay, along with many others.
Your flip “gEnOcIdEd” maybe could use a rethink.
All of that is super fucked up. The term for it isn’t “genocide”, though.
Your flippant use of such a serious term desperately needs a rethink.
For fuck’s sake. I didn’t. You’re way out of pocket here.
The government deliberately ignored a burgeoning health crisis because it would kill off a group of people they didn’t like.
How is that not genocide?
The only concession to @Babale I’ll make is that, as you said, the actual genocide part was 1980s, and much less in the 1990s (where it was more of a rearguard action, I think). I’m conflating a lot of stuff, drawing a through line between the actual genocide of the 1980s and the awfulness of the 1990s to which I compared the awfulness of the 2020s.
I don’t think I ever called what’s happening now “genocide,” although I 100% understand the fears that a genocide of transfolk is around the corner: the way the rhetoric, exclusion, and dehumanization of trans folk is proceeding is horribly familiar from history. We’re not at genocide right now IMO, but we’re sure at a place where genocide’s groundwork is being laid.
I don’t think I ever accused @Demontree of advocating genocide. But she could damn sure stand a lot further away from the groundwork layers than she’s currently standing.
Folks it’s simple, if Michael Knowles had said this at CPAC,
“For the good of society … Judaism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
instead of
“For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
then he would have been advocating for genocide and not “gEnOcIdE”.
Please explain the difference for me.
Ask Babale.
The main solution to genocide these days appears to be trying to nitpick the definition into it “technically” not being genocide and pretend that makes it perfectly acceptable.
Wow, are you all actually going to hijack another thread to Israel & Gaza?
WTF?
Your hijack sensor is way overcalibrated.