We should have T-shirts made up …
Remember, Trump is the one who stranded thousands of his own supporters five miles from their cars in the desert. That’s the guy running the country starting Jan. 20.
He’s just a big believer in survival of the fittest. The 5-mile desert hike is just a warm-up exercise.
I wouldn’t have cared about the terminology if @Measure_for_Measure hadn’t gone out of his way to say it’s not genocide. He’s the one who decided that word was more important. He had to lecture me about using it. All without even once explaining why he didn’t think it applied. Instead, he lectures me as if I think it means “bad thing happening.”
I don’t care that much about outdated dictionaries. In the real world, anything that applies to ethnic, religious, national or racial groups also applies to LGBT groups. The same cultural structures exist. Trans people are as much of a block of people as Black people are.
And I don’t hate MfM or think he’s a bad person. There’s a reason I confined my anger to “how dare you?” rather than actually attacking him. Like I said, this was about letting off steam.
MfM pissed me off, but he’s not MAGA. Nor is he outright dismissing what is going on. He’s not one of the liberals saying that Democrats should drop the trans stuff–when that’s exactly what they already did. Nor is he one of the leftists that are weirdly going after trans people now, likely because they suggested that maybe what they did didn’t help Gaza at all but did condemn so many.
I can be mad at someone without hating them or thinking they are a horrible person.
I’m not quite that pessimistic, actually. That is absolutely the level to prepare for. That is definitely the intent of many.
But I also see some hope. We have the progressive stuff that passed despite Trump winning. We have a trans representative in Congress. And we have states who passed state laws to establish LGBT rights at the local level.
The advice I actually gave the kid was based on that last part. They live pretty close to Minnesota, where Walz did a lot to protect LGBT people and trans people specifically, enshrining rights into law. And Illinois which has done similarly. I linked a map showing the safest states for trans folk.
Preparing for the worst is good, but catastrophizing is not. This is likely going to be a state vs federal fight.
Now if only Walz hadn’t been muzzled, maybe this wouldn’t be necessary. But that’s another discussion.
I’m glad you have a cooler head today.
Just keep helping your friends stay safe and alive. That’s good work. And worthwhile.
Truly, I was concerned for you.
I don’t really care about the exact definition of a word, either.
I thought you did.
Be safe, my friend.
TBF (to be fair), a lot of that is because I purposely did not go back and read any replies in that thread, and happily saw that people in this thread understood where I was coming from.
I do appreciate your concern.
And I recommend not engaging with those who respond do you disingenuously. There’s a reason I cannot see the posts from the person you replied to—they don’t contribute much other than annoyance. Block 'em and be done.
This is the key part. The policy has to be eliminationist in intent, against an entire group or a large part of it, usually but not always with the implication that it would involve killing. I accept the definition of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
The acts that constitute genocide fall into five categories:
- Killing members of the group
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Anti-trans genocide is a real possibility, but I don’t think you should just throw the word around if someone advocates or practices discriminatory behavior, even very bad discriminatory behavior. Because eliminationist policy deserves a special word and overuse trivializes …the mass murder in the killing fields during the 1970s in Cambodia. Or the mass killings targeted at Tutsis in Rwanda during the 1990s. To quote Timothy Snyder from On Tyranny,
- Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don’t use the Internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by Czesław Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.
That criterion is met by first-hand information I have from those in direct personal contact with some of those affected Americans, who (a) were under threat of physical violence at the polling stations by Trumpists who are now about to be emboldened by official authority, much as many German citizens were before erupting in Kristallnacht in 1938, and (b) are suffering mental anguish because they’re literally in fear for their rights, their well-being, and their very lives.
I can imagine worse, and I can imagine a worse scenario over the next 8 years. Pulling the alarm too early isn’t especially helpful in my view.
This isn’t genocide either, though it’s one of many precursors:
Agreed and kudos. I’m trying to thread that needle as well.
Let me put this another way. An anti-trans legal environment is the rule rather than the exception throughout the world. Acts of genocide imply an obligation to protect. I really can’t see going to war metaphorically at least with the world over civil rights offenses, though civil rights offenses can be very bad, life ruiningly bad.
Man, we’re going to have a lot on our plate moving forward.
I think the primary function is society is to protect its members. Are you saying you don’t think we have an obligation to protect other Americans?
More likely just as the last time, the guy not running the country.
He’ll run it into the ground, at least.
Believe it or not, transgender and nonbinary are not synonyms. In some respects, they can be more like contraries.
Not really.
It’s about 50/50 by country, much more by population if you consider “requires surgery” as still somewhat on the pro-trans side of things. That doesn’t speak to the cultural environment, of course.
The concept of a Responsibility to Protect was enshrined by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005. It states that some crimes are sufficiently heinous to overcome concerns about sovereignty. It’s a cross-border concept. I don’t think Scandinavians have a responsibility to intervene to protect transgender people in Mexico, Bermuda, the Caymen Islands, Fiji, or the Falkland Islands. That was the term I had in mind (though I misleadingly used the word, “Obligation”).
But to answer your question, those residing in the United States have human rights worth fighting for by Americans such as myself. I do acknowledge electoral considerations though.
MrDibble: good point. There’s a decent wiki article on legal status of transgender people. At the bottom they have a chart deliniating 4 categories: these are Legal, Permitted with complex legalities or practice, Prohibited, and Unknown. South Africa is legal. The countries in my list above were all in the Prohibited category, except for Mexico which was, “Varies by subdivision”, a status we also have in the USA. Among the states where it is legal are India, Pakistan, Brazil, Japan, Germany, and some states in the US. I retract my claim, though I don’t know what the best summary characterization would be.
Well thank you for the info.
I admit to not knowing much about the terminology.
Indeed. Two of my best friends in the world (I think of them as family to be honest) are a couple, and one is a trans woman and her partner is nonbinary. I knew them when they identified as male and female respectively, in fact I’ve known my nonbinary friend since they were still in school (their father one of my best friends, he was one of my groomsmen at my wedding in fact).
That’s why a lot of this is personal to me. It directly affects people I care a lot about.
We’re not. The steps detailed by Celest Irwin are not merely discrimination. They would, if enacted, result in the near* (not including those in hiding) complete removal of trans people from the free US. That’s genocide.
No, it won’t look like those more direct methods devised in the 1940s. To pull it off in a country that has to pretend to still have the rule of law, they can’t be that direct. They have to manufacture consent, which requires plausible deniability. That’s the entire point of Irwin’s post.
Everything you are citing is rather old. I think it is entirely reasonable to think that we know more about systemic attempts to remove a population group in the past 70+ years.
As I pointed out before, trans genocide is an existing term, already used in trans activism. You don’t really know enough about trans issues to challenge that. I don’t even, and I’m exploring my gender at the moment (see my updated pronouns in my bio).
I do also think merely removing trans healthcare and the massive deaths that would cause (if not for underground work) qualifies already. Even if only in some states, that forces removal, and forced removal of a population is still genocide.
But even if you disagree on that line, I find the idea that it must be this direct action to be ridiculous. Indirect actions that achieve the same goal are still genocide.
It need not be “the worst thing ever,” since there have always been different types of genocide.
As for going to war: that’s the point of doing it indirectly. It is much harder to fight against indirect actions. It would be hard to go to war as long as there is plausible deniability.
That makes their agenda more achievable. Genocidaire have gotten more clever in their tactics. It doesn’t make their goal any different.
So are the next four years just going to be full of this unhinged drivel? And we’re all gonna pretend like these are the posts of a normal, well adjusted, adult human being?