Ohio has become the latest state to sign an anti-trans bathroom bill into law, this one limited to K-12 schools and some higher education facilities.
I don’t have much commentary here, I’m just depressed. This is the latest blow after gender-affirming care for minors was banned. Fortunately my kid was grandfathered in but this state is getting increasingly hostile to us.
On a thread-related note, the NYT noted yesterday that pro-trans activists are noting that America is becoming more hostile, not less, to transgenderism as time has gone on and are considering adjusting tactics. The Ohio bill may be an example of transgenderism being pushed back against.
Thai Rivera on youtube has a Lot of videos about this issue. His latest one says, yes, they have gotten too confrontational about it. Its less Let me have rights like everyone else and Do what we demand.
You may have seen my Prediction Of Doom posted in oher threads. Some disagree that we will see the end of American democracy andbecome a fascist dicatorship. Nobody disagrees that LGBTQ rights, especially the T, will be rolled back to pre Stonewall levels. Expect national Don’t Say Gay and anti trans laws. “Conversion therapy” will not only be legal again, it will be mandatory for anybody who expresses a desire to transition. Some say state laws (many already passed) will protect people. I very much doubt it.
Didn’t Trump just pick a nominee (a) for the top job at Treasury (b) who happens to be gay? Sure, maybe that fits into some kind of sinister anti-gay agenda — but maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t, uh, give a crap.
I said it on another thread, but …
How many times more likely are you to be shot while shopping than you are to be harmed by an LGBTQ person in the lavatory?
Hint: it’s a big number.
From the NYT article:
They cite tactics, especially on social media, that became routine for devoted backers of the movement: Attempts to police language, such as excising the words “male” and “female” from discussions of pregnancy and abortion; decrying the misidentification of a transgender person as violence; insisting that everyone declare whether they prefer to be referred to as he, she or other pronouns.
I agree with all of this–trans-activists are winning no friends with campaigns like this. They are discovering that the majority does not want language forcibly de-gendered and that they are speaking from a relatively small echo chamber. The majority are just going to roll their eyes at insisting that people discuss “protstate health for people who have prostates”, for example. And another example in the past few weeks (that I can’t find again) one of the major scientific journals ran a disclaimer before the beginning of a study apologizing that the study called humans who have recently given birth “mothers”.
Where “what we demand” is, well, “let me have rights like everyone else”.
I mean, seriously, what are LGBTQ activists “demanding”?
Maybe Trump does not personally care. However, he did endorse ads about how Kamala Harris wanted the government to pay for “sex change operations” for inmates. “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you!”
Certainly, enough of his base of rabid bigots care. Either he can disregard them or he can throw LGBTQ folks under the bus again. Which seems more likely?
While I understand the point, I remember mentioning to my wife that it would take me a bit to get used to “pregnant people.”
It took about two weeks. I no longer give it a second thought, hearing it or uttering it.
As I’ve posted in other such threads…
When it comes to these “social issues …” I think there’s a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from this study:
A study by scientists at New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles, found differences in how self-described liberal and conservative research participants responded to changes in patterns. Participants were asked to tap a keyboard when the letter “M” appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a “W.” The letter “M” appeared four times more frequently than “W,” conditioning participants to press the keyboard on almost every trial. Liberal participants made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw the rare “W,” indicating to the researchers that these participants were better able to accept changes or conflicts in established patterns.
The participants were also wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in their anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency and a more appropriate response. Liberals were significantly more likely than conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts during the experiment, and this correlated with their greater accuracy in the test.
Social conservatives are generally uncomfortable with this kind of change – the kind of societal change that’s been going on since fire and the wheel hit the scene. They cling to the constancy and stability of the Bible, for example, and decry every single thing that – in their view – differs from it, because … anything other than what THEY view as the Bible’s position … causes them significant upset.
But the same people always talk of “personal responsibility.” Well … I’m sorry that society marching on causes such cognitive stress for you, but … that is NOT society’s responsibility to manage. It’s yours.
Brains of liberals, conservatives may work differently, study finds
And one more … because it fits so damned well here, too:
One of the innumerable consequences of the obstinacy of social conservatives is their seeming inability to grasp a sense of history.
As each group that they’ve aggressively tried to marginalize began to get equal rights, the sky simply didn’t fall. The social conservatives – as is pretty much always the case – were utterly and completely wrong.
But rather than do a bit of introspection and reflection, they set their sights on whatever their next vulnerable bogeyman of choice must be. As “God” needs the “devil,” these social conservatives constantly need some shadowy figure to rail against.
It seems likely to me that — with regard to LGBTQ folks — he’ll say whatever he thinks will get him elected while he’s running for president; and, once that’s no longer a concern, he’ll of course shrug and select a gay nominee from among all others anyway, because, well, why wouldn’t he?
And then he’ll tell his base that Kamala nominated that gay guy during her presidency, and they’ll believe him.
Hitler rose to power with the aid of many gay Nazis. Once he had power, he had them all killed in the NIght Of Long Knives.
But what about demands that society marches on where the majority of society says “no thanks”? Sometimes the ant doesn’t move the rubber tree plant no matter how high its hopes.
The dustbin of history answers that question exceedingly well.
That describes the majority of attempts to make the world a better place. If a position being unpopular meant it could never win then we’d still be living in a theocratic slave state.
One other thing that makes the transgender movement different than other movements is that it is perceived as more of an “intrusion” or imposition on other people than other causes.
Abortion = don’t like abortion? Then don’t get one. A pro-lifer isn’t affected if a pro-choicer gets one.
Gay marriage = the gays get married, it doesn’t affect the straights at all.
But with transgenderism, there is a lot more accommodation demanded. The cisgender women need to compete against MTF athletes. The general public is forced to say “ma’am” when someone with a visibly male appearance and audibly male voice demands so. This breeds a lot more resentment than the abortion or gay-marriage issue.
Is that really substantively different from having to stop brazenly using bigoted, hateful, homophobic, xenophobic, and racist epithets to address … people?
Or discriminating against them in the public marketplace or in employment or in any other realm? Or actually attacking them, not for anything they’ve done, but simply for who they are?
These are really the main accommodations being sought as we try to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice (and they fight desperately to bend it back).
Once again …
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
–John Kenneth Galbraith
Trump – like other RW demagogues – has tremendous appeal to the mouth-breathers, because he tells them that they shouldn’t have to care about less fortunate people, the planet, the environment, or minorities.
He doesn’t ask them to be ‘better people’ in any way, shape or form, the way that most past Presidents have. He encourages them to be proud of their baser instincts and worst qualities.
In short, he applauds them for their “religiosity” while simultaneously absolving them from any need to actually be decent human beings.
Sure, but is calling the person who gives birth to someone else their mother actually any of those things, regardless of their self-identified gender?
That’s the sort of change that’s demanded that people generally think is absurd, and that’s because it requires people reverse thousands of years of common usage because some minuscule number of people have their own personal issue with it.