Hostility may be driving the transphobic to the polls and driving away the indifferent. You’re never going to convince the transphobic to vote for politicians who support trans rights. But you can convince people who regularly don’t vote to help you at the polls. But a lot of the people who don’t regularly vote that I know in real life, don’t vote because they hate the hostility and perceived pointlessness of politics. If you’re hostile then you’re not going to get their support. Convincing them that they can really help all the good people who are trans will bring them to the polls. getting them onboard would help a lot in elections.
Hostility may be driving the transphobic to the polls
So 1 to 3% of the US population somehow has been hostile to a full quarter (25%) of the population?
Please explain to me how this is physically possible for the people in the extreme minority to have produced enough hostility to a much larger (like nearly 10 times as large) population? Because fully a quarter of the US voting population seems to be getting out to vote about trans issues, but I’m pretty sure they’re driven by fucking religious fascism not trans people being hostile.
I just don’t see how its conceivably even possible. Unless every single trans person sits downtown with a bullhorn ranting angrily while also ranting angrily in every forum they exist on.
No, it’s usually fucking shitheels coming to trans spaces to shit all over them. But the hostility from the trans people is the problem!
Give me a break.
If you are driven to the polls because you dislike someone for existing a way that upsets or confuses you, even though they do not hurt you or anyone else, you’re the one who is fucking valueless and needs to be stripped from fucking society. If someone being hostile is all it takes to turn you into an extremely shitty person, then the reality is you were already a shitty person looking for an excuse for it to begin with.
First post on lemmy, just wanted to say this was a great comment. It was eye opening to think about how it’s probably not even physically possible, in addition to being a bad faith argument. I’d never heard it put that way, good point.
I get that you’re angry and certainly have a right to be angry. You have let your anger blind you to reason though. You comment reads like you didn’t actually read mine at all. Or if you did, then your anger wouldn’t allow you to at least understand what the main point was.
But tldr: the bigots are lost. The people who aren’t strongly aligned can be convinced to vote, but hostility towards people who aren’t being hostile towards trans rights is driving them away even if it isn’t directed at them. It’s not your job to win them over, but it would be effective at the polls.
1- Voting against trans rights isn’t the only type of transphobic behavior and getting people to vote in favor of trans rights won’t fully get rid of transphobia.
We need laws to protect people who are trans from trans phobic behaviors and laws. Voting is how you accomplish that.
2- It seems like you’re the one that’s not understanding, if you focused less on tone policing and more on reading you’d see that their response makes perfect sense to yours, the tone doesn’t change or erase that.
I’m not policing. I’m suggesting a strategy to actually accomplish goals. Being aggressive towards people isn’t going to help even if the aggression is justified.
3- Nobody who wasn’t transphobic to begin with needs to be convinced to not be it, queer people don’t need to perform niceness in order for them to deserve rights and presentability politics is the devil’s advocate of bigotry.
This is how I know you didn’t actually read what I wrote, because. I explicitly said that the bigots can’t be turned and that people have every right to be angry over transphobia.
Just to step in with a personal anecdote in regards to point 3, and specifically “nobody who wasn’t transphobic to begin with needs to be convinced to not be it”:
About a year ago my wife’s cousin (17M) was visiting us for a party. I was showing him and his dad my gun collection, and the cousin noticed several stickers on my safe which reference support for the LGBT+ community.
When we happened to be alone out on the balcony later, he asked me about them, and what I thought about LGBT+ people and issues, and it was a great opportunity to educate someone not in that community. It is also something that he wasn’t going to get from his parents or friends, because his parents don’t know anything about LGBT+ issues, and his friends are all 16/17 year old males, and that means they all watch manosphere-light assholes like JonTron.
I’ve written about this issue elsewhere at more length, but the Left has largely ceded the young-unaligned-male demo to the Right when it comes to outreach and education, and I do think a lot of the problem is this attitude that “anyone who’s not bad is already an ally”, or put in the inverse, “if you’re not already an ally, you’re bad”. But in the case of young people specifically, we do need some willingness to have these discussions, because a Google search gives you facts about the LGBT+ community, sure, but it doesn’t give you humanization.
The rest of point 3 I agree with, but I do think it’s unfortunately common- even if understandable- to see people lash out at what are very possibly good-faith questions about LGBT+ issues because of how used we all are to questions just being the lead-in to some bigot asshole’s screed.
I agree racism is bad, but why can’t black people be civil and polite when asking for equality?
The thing is that these people aren’t being honest when they say things like that. They’re lying, but they’re often lying to themselves as much as to others. They always have some objection or another to opposing bigotry. Because the reason they’re giving is just a post hoc justification for opposing progress.
Think back to the George Floyd protests. People said the exact same thing, that they oppose racism, but they can’t abide riots (even though the overwhelming majority of the protests were not violent). Then later, an NFL player kneeled during the anthems, literally the tamest, most inoffensive protest I can imagine. And people lost their minds.
It doesn’t matter how disruptive or civil the protest is, it will never be inoffensive enough, they will always oppose it. And if you somehow do find a form of “protest” so inoffensive that they accept it? Then they’ll ignore you.
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Hostility may be driving the transphobic to the polls and driving away the indifferent. You’re never going to convince the transphobic to vote for politicians who support trans rights. But you can convince people who regularly don’t vote to help you at the polls. But a lot of the people who don’t regularly vote that I know in real life, don’t vote because they hate the hostility and perceived pointlessness of politics. If you’re hostile then you’re not going to get their support. Convincing them that they can really help all the good people who are trans will bring them to the polls. getting them onboard would help a lot in elections.
So 1 to 3% of the US population somehow has been hostile to a full quarter (25%) of the population?
Please explain to me how this is physically possible for the people in the extreme minority to have produced enough hostility to a much larger (like nearly 10 times as large) population? Because fully a quarter of the US voting population seems to be getting out to vote about trans issues, but I’m pretty sure they’re driven by fucking religious fascism not trans people being hostile.
I just don’t see how its conceivably even possible. Unless every single trans person sits downtown with a bullhorn ranting angrily while also ranting angrily in every forum they exist on.
No, it’s usually fucking shitheels coming to trans spaces to shit all over them. But the hostility from the trans people is the problem!
Give me a break.
If you are driven to the polls because you dislike someone for existing a way that upsets or confuses you, even though they do not hurt you or anyone else, you’re the one who is fucking valueless and needs to be stripped from fucking society. If someone being hostile is all it takes to turn you into an extremely shitty person, then the reality is you were already a shitty person looking for an excuse for it to begin with.
First post on lemmy, just wanted to say this was a great comment. It was eye opening to think about how it’s probably not even physically possible, in addition to being a bad faith argument. I’d never heard it put that way, good point.
I get that you’re angry and certainly have a right to be angry. You have let your anger blind you to reason though. You comment reads like you didn’t actually read mine at all. Or if you did, then your anger wouldn’t allow you to at least understand what the main point was.
But tldr: the bigots are lost. The people who aren’t strongly aligned can be convinced to vote, but hostility towards people who aren’t being hostile towards trans rights is driving them away even if it isn’t directed at them. It’s not your job to win them over, but it would be effective at the polls.
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We need laws to protect people who are trans from trans phobic behaviors and laws. Voting is how you accomplish that.
I’m not policing. I’m suggesting a strategy to actually accomplish goals. Being aggressive towards people isn’t going to help even if the aggression is justified.
This is how I know you didn’t actually read what I wrote, because. I explicitly said that the bigots can’t be turned and that people have every right to be angry over transphobia.
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Just to step in with a personal anecdote in regards to point 3, and specifically “nobody who wasn’t transphobic to begin with needs to be convinced to not be it”:
About a year ago my wife’s cousin (17M) was visiting us for a party. I was showing him and his dad my gun collection, and the cousin noticed several stickers on my safe which reference support for the LGBT+ community. When we happened to be alone out on the balcony later, he asked me about them, and what I thought about LGBT+ people and issues, and it was a great opportunity to educate someone not in that community. It is also something that he wasn’t going to get from his parents or friends, because his parents don’t know anything about LGBT+ issues, and his friends are all 16/17 year old males, and that means they all watch manosphere-light assholes like JonTron.
I’ve written about this issue elsewhere at more length, but the Left has largely ceded the young-unaligned-male demo to the Right when it comes to outreach and education, and I do think a lot of the problem is this attitude that “anyone who’s not bad is already an ally”, or put in the inverse, “if you’re not already an ally, you’re bad”. But in the case of young people specifically, we do need some willingness to have these discussions, because a Google search gives you facts about the LGBT+ community, sure, but it doesn’t give you humanization.
The rest of point 3 I agree with, but I do think it’s unfortunately common- even if understandable- to see people lash out at what are very possibly good-faith questions about LGBT+ issues because of how used we all are to questions just being the lead-in to some bigot asshole’s screed.
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Are you saying the Martin Luther King and his strategy was bad for the civil rights movement???
Seriously though. These kinds of trap questions are pointless and counterproductive.
The thing is that these people aren’t being honest when they say things like that. They’re lying, but they’re often lying to themselves as much as to others. They always have some objection or another to opposing bigotry. Because the reason they’re giving is just a post hoc justification for opposing progress.
Think back to the George Floyd protests. People said the exact same thing, that they oppose racism, but they can’t abide riots (even though the overwhelming majority of the protests were not violent). Then later, an NFL player kneeled during the anthems, literally the tamest, most inoffensive protest I can imagine. And people lost their minds.
It doesn’t matter how disruptive or civil the protest is, it will never be inoffensive enough, they will always oppose it. And if you somehow do find a form of “protest” so inoffensive that they accept it? Then they’ll ignore you.