It is bizarre that society's mind was turned so quickly, on a chronological dime, over "trans." If you haven't thought about it from this angle, please do.
I’m over 45 years old. I recall knowing the difference between Transvestite (RuPaul, popular Vouge-ing culture) and the rare adult Trans-sexual (Renee Richards). I also remember (not yet out) Billie Jean King competing as a woman against Bobby Riggs and winning their tennis match. I recall the push for gay marriage in the AIDS era having a lot to do with partners not being able to support or have accessibility to assets the way spouses would after death.
I don’t recall a real debate over what gay marriage would mean for churches / synagogues/ mosques in terms of their biblical interpretations. I don’t recall discussions over the issues of CHILDREN of gay parents.
I remember all of what you are saying. You make some great points.
Anybody can be for or against anything they want to. What is despicable is when some small group of people insist that everyone must accept them, even as they spew hatred of others.
I'm not LGB but I have a family member who is and I know a few. I am against the WORD "marriage" for the union of 2 same sex people. I wish it would have remained Civil Union....but legally wed. There will always be people who have an objection to homosexuality for whatever reason. As soon as the word "marriage" was used, it gave the activists something to bitch about and cry discrimination......I certainly wouldn't want a baker who is against homosexuality to be baking my wedding cake for all my wedding guests (spit in the food?). Maybe I'm wrong, though?
I have a visceral hatred when I see the trans flag displayed. They’re signaling that they’re accepting & loving but all I see are lies to very vulnerable people.
Same. I sometimes wonder if the people flying them, or putting the "In This House" or "Be Kind" signs on their lawn, are engaging in a sort of performative protection ritual, akin to the Israelites in Egypt who were instructed to paint their door frames and lintels in lamb's blood so that the angel of Jehovah would "pass over" their houses and spare them the killing of their firstborn. These things are sending a virtue signal, showing they're "one of the good ones," possessing the right beliefs, and please oh please spare me and my family.
When I was in my young gay days in the gay meccas of Chelsea, the Pines, South Beach the "ts" were like the little brother that tagged along but never really welcomed. We wanted men. Men with muscles, hard bodies, lack of body hair in all the wrong places. Not curves and tits. Not a vagina.
But the social justice warriors needed a new war in 2015. Gay marriage was here and they had nothing else to harp on about. And BTW who are the social justice warriors? Angry lesbians, young mal adjusted straight women (and some of their punching bag, weak boyfriends/husbands), and unattractive gay men. Yes that last one sounds brutal but true.
But trans has never had the raw numbers. Enter the children. Take mentally unbalanced children and teenagers so desperate for belonging and give it to them in the form of social media acceptance. They'd be quickly convinced they're a cat. In fact, some already do, the "furry" phenomenon.
As a gay man, I’ve always thought gay marriage was spiteful. We had domestic partnership, which was fine. We aren’t the majority, and we aren’t burdened with the regeneration of the population. Cultural homosexuality cannot go from marginalized and sketchy to central and normalized in a decade without major distortions to the broader culture. I am happy Pride has scaled back.
I was born in 1948. Believe it or not, there were gay people back then, too.
While it's possible to find any sort of people being discriminated against in any era. gay people really weren't persecuted. It was, in fact, a little like "don't ask, don't tell." We knew who was gay, they knew that we knew, and we just left it at that.
Personally, I don't work too hard at being accepted. If I have to censor myself or falsely conform to norms, the hell with it. Funny thing is, in doing that, I get a lot of respect from people who are on the other side of fence.
If you hate on people, they will hate on you. If you are tolerant of others, they will be tolerant of you.
On a similar note, we all have to work at being "accepted" -- or not. There are women who take an instant catty dislike to other women, and there's nothing the object of their catty scorn can do to dispel it. There are certain cultural behaviors that make me bristle. I don't accept those behaviors -- and I shouldn't have to.
Perhaps the worst feature of being "progressive" is ordaining themselves the arbiters of not just "acceptance" but proclaiming bigotry if the object of their benevolent "acceptance" isn't not just accepted, but CELEBRATED.
At the university in NYC where I teach, we were ORDERED not just to 'accept' trans students, but to vaunt them as the next best thing. When I said NO, I was labeled "hostile."
Every student in my classroom has been "included." What does any teacher stand to gain by making someone feel 'excluded.' Who needs Progressives to tell them whom to "accept" and whom to "reject."
Recently, I commented that transgender people, regardless of the medical and cosmetic interventions, NEVER PASS.
Some activist screen shotted my comment with the threat to "call (me) out" -- what a grossly narcissistic ploy -- so he's going to call me out for seeing what's obvious to everyone -- that the man in a dress is a man in a dress? What's his argument going to do? Force me to see what I don't see?
It's a sad situation. Respect is not respect, when you force someone to respect you. Any progressive who insists on being respected is a desperately insecure person.
Plus it's cult behavior, forcing "non believers" to parrot the mantras, even if they are obvious lies. Brainwashing, control, subservience. I was relieved when a former "friend" cancelled me this year after Trump's inauguration because I would never have to dance around the stupid pronouns of her best friend, a lesbian, who goes by he/him. Every time she brought her up, I felt like Picard on that ST:TNG episode where the Cardassians were telling him to say there were five lights when there were only four and he was trying to resist by telling the truth.
Yes, I don't know how they do it! Play along with the lies. I find it so hard to take.
Speaking of which, a friend of mine responded to a comment I made on some distant FB page with videos of the "No Kings" protest, in which I ask What is this protest about? My friend writes: We're protesting Trump's immigration policy.
I can't wrap my brain around the dissolution of the boundary between legal and illegal immigration.
I wound up responding that if they self deport, they have the opportunity to return legally, however I don't understand the assertion that people have the "right" to live in a country illegally. Or the rights of criminals such as Tren de Agua and MS13 to stay in the U.S. Why would they protest against deporting criminals?
I can't help wondering whether she even knows that the deported were illegals -- and criminals.
It's so bizarre!!!! We all used to agree borders were a good thing a few years ago! But now because of TDS, it's become "racist". But you may be correct that she and many others don't realize it's just the criminals being deported at this point. Although...why are they defending ANY immigrant who came in illegally???
I wonder if they realize how much of our tax dollars have been spent on these illegals and how much of our social security and Medicaid has been drained??? It's despicable, the absolute corruption of the government, and they act like it's not the Democrats, it's Trump who is acting like a king. 1984.
"Trojan Horse" is the exact right term of reference, for every single lib/leftist/progressive movement the radicals have left outside the walls of every group they've infiltrated and captured.
You can go down the list of "protected" groups that've slowly been gathered under the left's umbrella of "protection" and identify when they were turned on their heads and destroyed, for "the greater good".
Each of these groups have been chewed up and spit out, as they were supplanted and replaced by a more profitable "special" group - Blacks fell to immigrants; legal immigrants fell to illegals; women and the gay community fell to drag and trans; the white middle class fell to the minority welfare class; the legacy dem party fell to the globalist/marxist/communists and the list goes on.
What they all have in common is they failed to recognize the perils the radicals brought into their midst, veiled in promises of power, influence and dominance over their enemies. No one ever asked about the price of this "dominant equality" - which was and is the life and existence of the targeted group.
Staying with your theme - you are correct - when the gay community allowed itself to be talked into (by radical infiltrators) demanding same sex marriage be codified in legislation and religion they stepped onto the path of ruin. They were no longer allowed to accept the "live and let live" stance of the non-gay community, they'd worked so hard to gain. Instead, they were told to demand the populous in toto accept and acknowledge this or be labeled as bigot, phobe, and nazi.
This meant that those who previously may not have agreed with the gay lifestyle choices but placed them secondary, to seeing gay people as co-workers, neighbors and friends - were now labeled enemy.
Those of us on the outside, saw what those inside the radicalized movement didn't, radical infiltrators were moving them toward a perverted and pedophilic cliff they'd be shoved off of, by those radicals and converts in their midst.
Now, those who either woke up to the damage or always saw it and never joined in, are left to figure out how to pick up the pieces and repair the damage but have to fight the same radicals, while doing so.
"Phoebe" was a new one, to me. I googled it as slang and only came up with a reference to the "Friends" character. I finally realized it was meant to be "phobe". Nobody ever accused me of being quick.
Identity as a social construct has been incubating for decades. Sexual identity has always been included in this development. Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Habermas, etc.
The proponents of gay equality in the West could not have avoided the trans movement. It was always coming at them.
I hope you are wrong about this one! I hope everyone has their eyes wide open about MAPs and are ready to expel pedophilia out of the "tent". I know NAMBLA's been underground for quite some time now, but even under different names (MAPs Prostasia) it is still the lowest of the low.
I hope I'm wrong, too. But nobody twenty years ago could have imagined, let alone predicted, the trans lunacy we see today. Anything is possible (unfortunately).
orwellian fugue states are the thing in the post-Grunge, post-Punk, post-modern world.
people think they've *suddenly* woken up. "how did I not see this before"
they've fallen asleep, they've accepted there is no past that is real, and this new present is what was always there for millennia, it was just hiding in plain sight.
Rejection, even denial, of thousands of years of human thought and culture, as if everyone today is morally and intellectually superior to everyone prior to the year 2000, has been devastating.
Josh, I don't know if you've ever discussed this, but I'd like to see what you think. But only if you feel like talking about it:
We talk of some people feeling they're trapped in the wrong body. And so they dress as if they are the opposite gender. How is this different from being gay? Should the one be generally accepted, but not the other?
Sex change operations go a long way back, but only recently have been foisted upon children, which is disgusting by any measure. But is there some benefit to an adult? My understanding is that the physical transformation does little to change their own self image.
I think the bigger issue than gender and sexuality is narcissism. Who you are and how you behave is your own business. When you want to make sure everybody else knows about it, that is narcissism. I'll never find that acceptable.
I agree with you. But I think there's an obvious difference between these two:
Gay assertion-"I'm attracted to my own sex."
Trans assertion-"I'm actually the sex that I'm not, and you are required to say you believe I'm the sex I'm not, and you are required to treat me in every way like I'm actually a woman, and you're required to help children become like me because some children are like me."
I think it's easy to see the difference. I think it's easy to answer the question of which is easier to tolerate.
Oh, I personally am very concerned with the gender/sexuality issues, now that they've foisted it upon everybody like Thought Police, and have come after children and youths. Nobody gives two shits about whether you want to wear a wig, make up, and prance around in a dress. Not really. People DO mind being forced to say it's normal and engage in the cosplay. This is so far beyond gender/sexuality.
Exactly. Pretend to be the opposite sex, if that's what does it for you, but leave me out of it. Don't try to coerce me into saying the words and pretending with you.
This seems to be a trait of progressives. They don't just come up with self-destructive ideas, the insist that we all accept them. And if we try to keep our children away from them, we are called bigots.
The teachers unions, the legal associations, and 90% of Washington DC are controlled by democrats. And progressives control the democrats. There is no middle ground to be reached. All of these organizations need to be pummeled into the ground.
The issue wasn't just the ideological implications but the mechanisms of achieving it.
When a lot of the social elite thought that it was an unalloyed good, they felt no limits in pressuring the rest of society to think the way they did. They were willing to use legal cases, harassment, blatant lies, and deny information to their opponents in ballot measures (voters in MN were not told that not voting on the measure to ban Gay Marriage was a NO vote and even PoliSci grad students didn't know that). They knew it was unpopular and were willing to override the will of the majority.
In many respects, the tactics that Trans activists use today were pioneered or popularized back in the Gay Marriage fight. For example, the argument that "not all sex has to be reproductive" was used to justify same-sex relationships. Whatever the merits of that claim, Trans activists adopted "people who want reproductive sex should be allowed to have it but it should otherwise be irrelevant for sex" which has very different implications. The reliance on legal cases, making scene, and moral berating was expanded. Conflating disagreement with hate was common and people were called "homophobes" for disagreeing about Gay Marriage (even Gay people).
Some of that is expected in any social reform movement but the utopian promises that were made about Gay Marriage attracted a certain kind of unhinged activist.
While there were actual gay people who had been murdered simply for same sex attraction, the Trans activists took that martyrology and applied it with even less limits.
When advocates for gay marriage chose to use non-electoral tactics for achieving that, they put themselves in a mindset to view the majority of the public as enemies. Trans activism borrowed that so it is little surprise that many LGBT organizations went along with it. They were used to that kind of thinking or dependent on institutional power that switched their ideological mascots and would lose a lot by open disagreement.
I am not convinced Gay Marriage is a stable policy but the evidence will have to come in (and it is too early to tell). What I am convinced about is that the tactics to achieve Gay Marriage made even less popular causes think they could win using the same tactics but more brutal.
At a certain point, the narrative will flip . It will be decided that “trans gentrification” dissolves rights , on the grounds that Trans isn't a codified identity because it's so subjective. OR, perhaps this is proto transhumanist cultural programming & propaganda. Either way , it isn't about sex or gender . I think it's mostly the latter . Early stage transhumanism. Biodigital convergence . Identity can only be verified digitally . Humanity is taken out of the equation. Rhetorical hypobole .
Just recently, I was telling my husband how much it pains me to see Smith College (I'm an '87 graduate) open the lovely Grecourt Gates to the trannie Trojan horse. Their commencement speaker last month was Rachel Levine, who also received an honorary degree. It goes without saying I wouldn't give a wooden nickel to the college.
Same thing with me and Sarah Lawrence. I wrote them a letter telling them I was ashamed of being an alum, they'd get nothing from me, and I wish failure on them.
It's true. They came in the back door.
I see what you did there:)
100% this
I’m over 45 years old. I recall knowing the difference between Transvestite (RuPaul, popular Vouge-ing culture) and the rare adult Trans-sexual (Renee Richards). I also remember (not yet out) Billie Jean King competing as a woman against Bobby Riggs and winning their tennis match. I recall the push for gay marriage in the AIDS era having a lot to do with partners not being able to support or have accessibility to assets the way spouses would after death.
I don’t recall a real debate over what gay marriage would mean for churches / synagogues/ mosques in terms of their biblical interpretations. I don’t recall discussions over the issues of CHILDREN of gay parents.
I’m too old for this.
I remember all of what you are saying. You make some great points.
Anybody can be for or against anything they want to. What is despicable is when some small group of people insist that everyone must accept them, even as they spew hatred of others.
I'm not LGB but I have a family member who is and I know a few. I am against the WORD "marriage" for the union of 2 same sex people. I wish it would have remained Civil Union....but legally wed. There will always be people who have an objection to homosexuality for whatever reason. As soon as the word "marriage" was used, it gave the activists something to bitch about and cry discrimination......I certainly wouldn't want a baker who is against homosexuality to be baking my wedding cake for all my wedding guests (spit in the food?). Maybe I'm wrong, though?
I have a visceral hatred when I see the trans flag displayed. They’re signaling that they’re accepting & loving but all I see are lies to very vulnerable people.
Same. I sometimes wonder if the people flying them, or putting the "In This House" or "Be Kind" signs on their lawn, are engaging in a sort of performative protection ritual, akin to the Israelites in Egypt who were instructed to paint their door frames and lintels in lamb's blood so that the angel of Jehovah would "pass over" their houses and spare them the killing of their firstborn. These things are sending a virtue signal, showing they're "one of the good ones," possessing the right beliefs, and please oh please spare me and my family.
And some very demanding and narcissistic assholes, sociopaths and sexual predators
When I was in my young gay days in the gay meccas of Chelsea, the Pines, South Beach the "ts" were like the little brother that tagged along but never really welcomed. We wanted men. Men with muscles, hard bodies, lack of body hair in all the wrong places. Not curves and tits. Not a vagina.
But the social justice warriors needed a new war in 2015. Gay marriage was here and they had nothing else to harp on about. And BTW who are the social justice warriors? Angry lesbians, young mal adjusted straight women (and some of their punching bag, weak boyfriends/husbands), and unattractive gay men. Yes that last one sounds brutal but true.
But trans has never had the raw numbers. Enter the children. Take mentally unbalanced children and teenagers so desperate for belonging and give it to them in the form of social media acceptance. They'd be quickly convinced they're a cat. In fact, some already do, the "furry" phenomenon.
The nail's head just got hit.
"But gays just want to get married!"
I always had two internal responses to this:
(1) Gay men don't want marriages. They want weddings.
and, combined with "Gays just want to be able to to serve in the military the same as straights!":
(2) Better you than me, pal. Better you than me.
I have no idea if (1) is true, but it's a hilarious stereotype that made me laugh.
To be brutally fair, it’s probably true of about 60% of heterosexual women too. 😂
Yep.
As a gay man, I’ve always thought gay marriage was spiteful. We had domestic partnership, which was fine. We aren’t the majority, and we aren’t burdened with the regeneration of the population. Cultural homosexuality cannot go from marginalized and sketchy to central and normalized in a decade without major distortions to the broader culture. I am happy Pride has scaled back.
I was born in 1948. Believe it or not, there were gay people back then, too.
While it's possible to find any sort of people being discriminated against in any era. gay people really weren't persecuted. It was, in fact, a little like "don't ask, don't tell." We knew who was gay, they knew that we knew, and we just left it at that.
Personally, I don't work too hard at being accepted. If I have to censor myself or falsely conform to norms, the hell with it. Funny thing is, in doing that, I get a lot of respect from people who are on the other side of fence.
If you hate on people, they will hate on you. If you are tolerant of others, they will be tolerant of you.
On a similar note, we all have to work at being "accepted" -- or not. There are women who take an instant catty dislike to other women, and there's nothing the object of their catty scorn can do to dispel it. There are certain cultural behaviors that make me bristle. I don't accept those behaviors -- and I shouldn't have to.
Perhaps the worst feature of being "progressive" is ordaining themselves the arbiters of not just "acceptance" but proclaiming bigotry if the object of their benevolent "acceptance" isn't not just accepted, but CELEBRATED.
At the university in NYC where I teach, we were ORDERED not just to 'accept' trans students, but to vaunt them as the next best thing. When I said NO, I was labeled "hostile."
Every student in my classroom has been "included." What does any teacher stand to gain by making someone feel 'excluded.' Who needs Progressives to tell them whom to "accept" and whom to "reject."
Recently, I commented that transgender people, regardless of the medical and cosmetic interventions, NEVER PASS.
Some activist screen shotted my comment with the threat to "call (me) out" -- what a grossly narcissistic ploy -- so he's going to call me out for seeing what's obvious to everyone -- that the man in a dress is a man in a dress? What's his argument going to do? Force me to see what I don't see?
It's a sad situation. Respect is not respect, when you force someone to respect you. Any progressive who insists on being respected is a desperately insecure person.
Plus it's cult behavior, forcing "non believers" to parrot the mantras, even if they are obvious lies. Brainwashing, control, subservience. I was relieved when a former "friend" cancelled me this year after Trump's inauguration because I would never have to dance around the stupid pronouns of her best friend, a lesbian, who goes by he/him. Every time she brought her up, I felt like Picard on that ST:TNG episode where the Cardassians were telling him to say there were five lights when there were only four and he was trying to resist by telling the truth.
Yes, I don't know how they do it! Play along with the lies. I find it so hard to take.
Speaking of which, a friend of mine responded to a comment I made on some distant FB page with videos of the "No Kings" protest, in which I ask What is this protest about? My friend writes: We're protesting Trump's immigration policy.
I can't wrap my brain around the dissolution of the boundary between legal and illegal immigration.
I wound up responding that if they self deport, they have the opportunity to return legally, however I don't understand the assertion that people have the "right" to live in a country illegally. Or the rights of criminals such as Tren de Agua and MS13 to stay in the U.S. Why would they protest against deporting criminals?
I can't help wondering whether she even knows that the deported were illegals -- and criminals.
It's so bizarre!!!! We all used to agree borders were a good thing a few years ago! But now because of TDS, it's become "racist". But you may be correct that she and many others don't realize it's just the criminals being deported at this point. Although...why are they defending ANY immigrant who came in illegally???
I wonder if they realize how much of our tax dollars have been spent on these illegals and how much of our social security and Medicaid has been drained??? It's despicable, the absolute corruption of the government, and they act like it's not the Democrats, it's Trump who is acting like a king. 1984.
I know! Another friend emailed me to say she’s protesting against Trump cutting Social Security.
Since when? Doesn’t she know Biden Admin was siphoning SS to support these migrants she’s protecting?
Where do they get this shit from?
Can’t help noticing that the most fervent are older than 60 with fossilized politics that still believe the D’s are the good guys.
"Trojan Horse" is the exact right term of reference, for every single lib/leftist/progressive movement the radicals have left outside the walls of every group they've infiltrated and captured.
You can go down the list of "protected" groups that've slowly been gathered under the left's umbrella of "protection" and identify when they were turned on their heads and destroyed, for "the greater good".
Each of these groups have been chewed up and spit out, as they were supplanted and replaced by a more profitable "special" group - Blacks fell to immigrants; legal immigrants fell to illegals; women and the gay community fell to drag and trans; the white middle class fell to the minority welfare class; the legacy dem party fell to the globalist/marxist/communists and the list goes on.
What they all have in common is they failed to recognize the perils the radicals brought into their midst, veiled in promises of power, influence and dominance over their enemies. No one ever asked about the price of this "dominant equality" - which was and is the life and existence of the targeted group.
Staying with your theme - you are correct - when the gay community allowed itself to be talked into (by radical infiltrators) demanding same sex marriage be codified in legislation and religion they stepped onto the path of ruin. They were no longer allowed to accept the "live and let live" stance of the non-gay community, they'd worked so hard to gain. Instead, they were told to demand the populous in toto accept and acknowledge this or be labeled as bigot, phobe, and nazi.
This meant that those who previously may not have agreed with the gay lifestyle choices but placed them secondary, to seeing gay people as co-workers, neighbors and friends - were now labeled enemy.
Those of us on the outside, saw what those inside the radicalized movement didn't, radical infiltrators were moving them toward a perverted and pedophilic cliff they'd be shoved off of, by those radicals and converts in their midst.
Now, those who either woke up to the damage or always saw it and never joined in, are left to figure out how to pick up the pieces and repair the damage but have to fight the same radicals, while doing so.
Bullseye!
"Phoebe" was a new one, to me. I googled it as slang and only came up with a reference to the "Friends" character. I finally realized it was meant to be "phobe". Nobody ever accused me of being quick.
lol…no one ever accused me of being a good speller.
Thanks for the catch.
I assumed you were the victim of some auto-correct function.
Yes, please, let us go with that. 🙏
Identity as a social construct has been incubating for decades. Sexual identity has always been included in this development. Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Habermas, etc.
The proponents of gay equality in the West could not have avoided the trans movement. It was always coming at them.
"Minor-attracted" is the next rung down the ladder. It's coming.
I hope you are wrong about this one! I hope everyone has their eyes wide open about MAPs and are ready to expel pedophilia out of the "tent". I know NAMBLA's been underground for quite some time now, but even under different names (MAPs Prostasia) it is still the lowest of the low.
I hope I'm wrong, too. But nobody twenty years ago could have imagined, let alone predicted, the trans lunacy we see today. Anything is possible (unfortunately).
orwellian fugue states are the thing in the post-Grunge, post-Punk, post-modern world.
people think they've *suddenly* woken up. "how did I not see this before"
they've fallen asleep, they've accepted there is no past that is real, and this new present is what was always there for millennia, it was just hiding in plain sight.
Rejection, even denial, of thousands of years of human thought and culture, as if everyone today is morally and intellectually superior to everyone prior to the year 2000, has been devastating.
it's so tiresome, and so fucking boring all of it. they are exhausting.
Josh, I don't know if you've ever discussed this, but I'd like to see what you think. But only if you feel like talking about it:
We talk of some people feeling they're trapped in the wrong body. And so they dress as if they are the opposite gender. How is this different from being gay? Should the one be generally accepted, but not the other?
Sex change operations go a long way back, but only recently have been foisted upon children, which is disgusting by any measure. But is there some benefit to an adult? My understanding is that the physical transformation does little to change their own self image.
I think the bigger issue than gender and sexuality is narcissism. Who you are and how you behave is your own business. When you want to make sure everybody else knows about it, that is narcissism. I'll never find that acceptable.
Some might get a kick out of this link. https://alt.history.british.narkive.com/En8QJcon/who-said-that-thing-about-scaring-horses
I agree with you. But I think there's an obvious difference between these two:
Gay assertion-"I'm attracted to my own sex."
Trans assertion-"I'm actually the sex that I'm not, and you are required to say you believe I'm the sex I'm not, and you are required to treat me in every way like I'm actually a woman, and you're required to help children become like me because some children are like me."
I think it's easy to see the difference. I think it's easy to answer the question of which is easier to tolerate.
As I mentioned, I'm far less concerned with the gender/sexuality issues than I am with the doctrinaire attitude.
Oh, I personally am very concerned with the gender/sexuality issues, now that they've foisted it upon everybody like Thought Police, and have come after children and youths. Nobody gives two shits about whether you want to wear a wig, make up, and prance around in a dress. Not really. People DO mind being forced to say it's normal and engage in the cosplay. This is so far beyond gender/sexuality.
Exactly. Pretend to be the opposite sex, if that's what does it for you, but leave me out of it. Don't try to coerce me into saying the words and pretending with you.
This seems to be a trait of progressives. They don't just come up with self-destructive ideas, the insist that we all accept them. And if we try to keep our children away from them, we are called bigots.
The teachers unions, the legal associations, and 90% of Washington DC are controlled by democrats. And progressives control the democrats. There is no middle ground to be reached. All of these organizations need to be pummeled into the ground.
The issue wasn't just the ideological implications but the mechanisms of achieving it.
When a lot of the social elite thought that it was an unalloyed good, they felt no limits in pressuring the rest of society to think the way they did. They were willing to use legal cases, harassment, blatant lies, and deny information to their opponents in ballot measures (voters in MN were not told that not voting on the measure to ban Gay Marriage was a NO vote and even PoliSci grad students didn't know that). They knew it was unpopular and were willing to override the will of the majority.
In many respects, the tactics that Trans activists use today were pioneered or popularized back in the Gay Marriage fight. For example, the argument that "not all sex has to be reproductive" was used to justify same-sex relationships. Whatever the merits of that claim, Trans activists adopted "people who want reproductive sex should be allowed to have it but it should otherwise be irrelevant for sex" which has very different implications. The reliance on legal cases, making scene, and moral berating was expanded. Conflating disagreement with hate was common and people were called "homophobes" for disagreeing about Gay Marriage (even Gay people).
Some of that is expected in any social reform movement but the utopian promises that were made about Gay Marriage attracted a certain kind of unhinged activist.
While there were actual gay people who had been murdered simply for same sex attraction, the Trans activists took that martyrology and applied it with even less limits.
When advocates for gay marriage chose to use non-electoral tactics for achieving that, they put themselves in a mindset to view the majority of the public as enemies. Trans activism borrowed that so it is little surprise that many LGBT organizations went along with it. They were used to that kind of thinking or dependent on institutional power that switched their ideological mascots and would lose a lot by open disagreement.
I am not convinced Gay Marriage is a stable policy but the evidence will have to come in (and it is too early to tell). What I am convinced about is that the tactics to achieve Gay Marriage made even less popular causes think they could win using the same tactics but more brutal.
At a certain point, the narrative will flip . It will be decided that “trans gentrification” dissolves rights , on the grounds that Trans isn't a codified identity because it's so subjective. OR, perhaps this is proto transhumanist cultural programming & propaganda. Either way , it isn't about sex or gender . I think it's mostly the latter . Early stage transhumanism. Biodigital convergence . Identity can only be verified digitally . Humanity is taken out of the equation. Rhetorical hypobole .
I assume you have read the Denton's Document that lays our in black and white their Machiavellian MO.
Just recently, I was telling my husband how much it pains me to see Smith College (I'm an '87 graduate) open the lovely Grecourt Gates to the trannie Trojan horse. Their commencement speaker last month was Rachel Levine, who also received an honorary degree. It goes without saying I wouldn't give a wooden nickel to the college.
Same thing with me and Sarah Lawrence. I wrote them a letter telling them I was ashamed of being an alum, they'd get nothing from me, and I wish failure on them.
I am married to a man but only because there are certain privileges still only attached to the M word. 100% it was a Trojan horse.