GioCities

blogs by Gio

The Génocidaires: People

Eugenicists need broad centrist support🔗

Now, a lot of people pushing the anti-trans agenda aren’t actually murderers or overt political fascists. The extremists are still the extremists. Moderates sustain these genocidal movements, but they don’t drive them. Unlike the center, the people who rise to the top are always the ones drawn to the movement because of its viciousness. It still matters, though, whether the people towards the middle are willing to help them or not.

It’s still true that legislators and anti-trans activists are not pursuing moderate treatment (psychotherapy, etc); they’re distinctly aiming for obliteration. But that message only works for people who agree with those people openly willing to back genocide outright, or people who can agree with the lampshade.

Even most of the republicans don’t actually know the people they’re voting for are full-on cuckoo-bananas. But the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” types end up pushing this agenda, even if they’re unaware. People see a ballot where one choice describes a more convenient world for them, and they tick it. They’re not supposed to think about the violence it takes to make that happen.

People like framing the idea of pride like they frame the abolition of slavery or civil rights: as a celebration of a positive political change that happened in history, rather than an ongoing conflict. As soon as pride feels like a conflict, it feels like a conflict they’re on a side of, because they are.

r/pansexual: You're not welcomed

Buying the euphemism🔗

A lot of the people helping propel the cause of genocide don’t actually believe in the case for genocide; the genocidalists depend heavily on people buying the euphemism. That’s another topic I want to do a longer piece on someday, but here’s a brief summary on how rhetoric works on marks.

The mark says they don’t want children to be abused. Now, the people pushing the anti-abuse laws don’t care about children being abused, and their laws don’t prevent abuse, but anti-abuse is the euphemism they’re using to disguise their intents, and the mark agrees with that euphemism, so they think they must agree with the policy. In effect, the fascist hijacks the legitimate cause, just like they hijack institutions.

Even though the marks would, in isolation, be opposed to the real agenda of genocide, they believe enough in the cover story that they show up to support the genocidal cause.

The Shirley Exception🔗

Another key factor in why people support policies they disagree with is the so-called Shirley Exception. Transphobic culture and legislation are both perceived as uncomfortable and inconvenient for a few people — adding some hoops they have to jump through — but they’re usually not seen as being explicitly genocidal.

The Shirley Exception is a way people rationalize supporting policies that are much harsher than they believe are appropriate. People are generally concerned about people taking advantage of policies. The example Alexandra Erin uses is service animals: people think others are taking advantage of service animal policies to bring their pets to public spaces, and so they want to crack down on that legislation. The policy change, though, is to crack down completely: “facilities aren’t required to respect service animals” was the example used in 2018, although “abortions are illegal even in cases of rape, incest, and impregnated children” might ring more familiar today.

The Shirley Exception is when people say “well, surely there will be exceptions”. People who (wrongly) trust policing institutions have a strong instinct that the administrators in power will make the appropriate exceptions, to the extent that they’re willing to support the angry, punitive policies that explicitly criminalize the very legitimate cases they want exceptions made in. Even when the policy is explicit that it will not allow for exceptions, and even punishes facilities that make any.

“No, this is just to cut down on abuse”, advocates of cruel policy say. The perception that there’s this ongoing abuse of the current system is crucial, and highly effective at getting people angry enough to pass terrible laws. They say “no one’s talking about legitimate cases”, even though the policies themselves very explicitly do include those cases.

And then, of course, exceptions are not made. That thread was written in 2018. Now, in July 2022, we have the case study of the century right in front of us: post-roe abortion treatment.

State laws written to be as extreme and punitive as possible have kicked in, to monstrous results. The medical procedures to end pregnancies that are known to be fatal to the mother are banned, and women are dying. A 10-year-old rape victim had to escape Chicago to get an abortion and escape certain death, and the doctor is being attacked under the law for doing so. Activists are pretending this is some misrepresentation of the law, but it isn’t: the laws are as broad and vague as possible, and are written specifically to facilitate this sort of legal attack on minor rape victims and their medical care.

‘Oh, God, no’: Republicans fear voter backlash after Indiana child rape case - POLITICO

Lizelle Herrera’s arrest in Texas is not unique — and could get much more common – Grid News

This was all known. People told them this, this was the case made against the laws in the first place, but extremist lawmakers pushed them through anyway. Because “abortions” are things only sluts get to escape the consequences of their sin, and the law’s job is to come down hard and swift and without room for escape. (Again, angry law.) And, if you ask the extremists, the core people who pushed the wording of the bills and stoked the fears that “people are taking advantage in the first place, you won’t see the shock and concern you see on the decent people tricked into supporting the policies. No, you’ll see people insist the ten-year-old should have just had the baby, even though, for a child that age, carrying a pregnancy to term would have been fatal. Irrational, dogmatic, and cruel.

It’s such a horrific story that the media kept lying about it, over and over again. First, the story was that it didn’t happen, and it’s just a bunch of democrat lies. Then the story was Ohio law permitted it, and there was no need to flee the state, trust us. (Then the Ohio AG came in to confirm that, no, that would have been a crime under Ohio law.) Then Then the prosecuting AG got on Fox News and lied about the doctor being “an abortion activist acting as a doctor” who didn’t file proper reports when it was obvious that they had. (They also took that opportunity to dox the doctor to an audience with a history of violent terrorism toward abortion providers, as a fun bonus.) Now the best they have is these cases are rare and hard to find, which is of course still a lie.

Anyone with half a brain can tell the Shirley Exception is nonsense. Laws are policy. When the text of the law is angry, violent, and vicious, it’s because the people writing it are creating policy that is angry, violent, and vicious in order to further an agenda that is angry, violent, and vicious. There can be no tolerance given to policymakers by the people, because there is no tolerance given to the people by the policy.

Conditions, Mental health, and the suicide epidemic🔗

One insidious part of the genocide is that it doesn’t rely on extermination camps or state violence. Just creating the right set of societal conditions can be enough to drive people to suicide or destitution.

You might be tempted to file this under Social Murder, but it’s really an intentionally genocidal tactic. I’ll quote from Monroe, K. R. (2008). Cracking the Code of Genocide: The Moral Psychology of Rescuers, Bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust:

That was the key: dehumanization. You first call your victim names and take away his dignity. You restrict his nourishment and he loses his physical beauty and sometimes some of his moral values. You take away soap and water, then say the Jew stinks. Then you take their human dignity further away by putting them in situations where they even will do such things which are criminal. Then you take food away. When they lose their beauty and health and so on, they are not human anymore. When he’s reduced to a skin-colored skeleton, you have taken away his humanity. It is much easier to kill non-humans than humans.

Trans people are forced into situations that put them at high risk. See Fatal Violence Against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2021 - Human Rights Campaign: while many cases of violence are clearly anti-transgender hate crimes, there’s a significant amount of violence caused by risk factors exacerbated by trans stigma, like unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and even sex survival work. Many trans homeless people report being denied access to homeless shelters, or reported avoiding shelters altogether because of fears of mistreatment.

Increased risk factors from Dismantling a Culture of Violence

HRC finds the same phenomenon in how we’re treating trans people as Monroe saw in his study of the holocaust: “The dehumanization of transgender people begins with stigma — hostile political climate, lack of acceptance, cultural marginalization — which simultaneously leads to direct violence in the form of anti-trans hate crimes, but also increases other risks for violence; unequal policing, exclusion from healthcare, employment discrimination, etc lead to poverty, and environments that allow more violence.”

The data is incredibly sobering. Some highlights (lowlights?):

From UCLA Williams Institute - Suicide thoughts And attempts Among transgender adults - Findings from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, which primarily used the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS), the largest survey of transgender people in the U.S. at the time:

  • 81.7% reported ever seriously thinking about suicide in their lifetimes, while 48.3% had done so in the past year. 40.4% reported attempting suicide at some point in their lifetimes, and 7.3% reported attempting suicide in the past year.
  • Experiencing discrimination or mistreatment in education, employment, housing, health care, in places of public accommodations, or from law enforcement is associated with a higher prevalence of suicide thoughts and attempts: The prevalence of past-year suicide attempts by those who reported that they had been denied equal treatment in the past year because they are transgender was more than double that of those who had not experienced such treatment: 13.4%.
  • Those rejected by their religious communities or had undergone conversion therapy were more likely to report suicide thoughts and attempts.
  • The cumulative effect of minority stress is associated with a higher prevalence of suicidality. For instance, 97.7% of those who had experienced four discriminatory or violence experiences in the past year (being fired or forced to resign from a job, eviction, experiencing homelessness, and physical attack) reported seriously thinking about suicide in the past year (!!!) and 51.2% made a suicide attempt in the past year.
  • Minority stress experiences, such as family rejection, discrimination experiences, and lack of access to gender-affirming health care, create added risks for transgender people. The cumulative effect of experiencing multiple minority stressors is associated with dramatically higher prevalence of suicidality.
  • Future research that supports the design and evaluation of suicide intervention and prevention strategies for the transgender population is urgently needed.

Williams institute: Suicide Attempts among Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Adults

Overall, the most striking finding of our analysis was the exceptionally high prevalence of lifetime suicide attempts reported by NTDS respondents across all demographics and experiences.

Of those surveyed, 50-54% were harassed at school and 50-59% were discriminated against or harassed at work. 60% were refused care by a doctor’s office, and 63-78% suffered physical or sexual violence at schools alone. (At work, that number dips slightly to 64-65%.) 57-61% were harassed by law enforcement, and 60-70% suffered physical or sexual violence at the hands of law enforcement.

The UCLA Suicide Risk and Prevention for Transgender People: Summary of Research Findings - September 2021 found that studies indicate approximately 40% of transgender adults have attempted suicide in their lifetimes, and that 30% of transgender youth have attempted suicide in the past year. This report reiterates previous findings, such that family and social support dramatically reduce suicide thoughts and attempts. Parental support is, again, crucial: Transgender youth with families that used their chosen name reported less suicide ideation compared to those whose families would not use their chosen name at home.

As another case of psychological violence, there’s also an extrordinarily high level of targetted bullying of trans students in the US. Out in the open: education sector responses to violence based on sexual orientation or gender identity/expression: summary report found that 85% of LGBTQ students in the US were verbally harassed within the year, compared to 55% in Canada and just 16% in Nepal.

The Survivors’ Network case🔗

Trans people are denied access to crisis centers. I’ve already mentioned homeless shelters, but it doesn’t end there. In the UK, there’s a rape recovery center being sued by one of its patients for also offering services to someone suspected of being trans. A person — “Sarah” — attended a group session with this suspected trans person, and took that as an attack. I say “suspected” because Sarah obviously didn’t know the other person’s birth status, she just assumed. This wasn’t snuck on her: the charity was clearly labelled as being trans inclusive. (Of course, men can be rape victims too, but this was indeed a trans-inclusive women’s only facility.)

Of her group therapy session, Sarah says “I felt manipulated and coerced into talking … When I left the session I had a panic attack, I was absolutely distraught.” Of course, you are asked to talk in group therapy, that’s expected, but not demanded. The problem here is she decided one of her fellow victims was an outsider, an invader, and was more interested in striking back at her than anyone having any sort of recovery that day. What Sarah is asking here is to deny a rape victim a place to heal so she can be more comfortable.

Propaganda🔗

For every openly genocidal activist, there needs to be a small crowd of people who really are just “concerned” about all the supposed harm the victim group is doing. That’s why there are so many opinion columns and raving blog posts trying to paint the “trans agenda” as anything other than “exist”. The fear and paranoia is the only way it works, and that’s why manufacturing it is so key to the movement.

To quote Edwin Moriarty,

From Transphobic Language and the Horus Heresy Into this boiling pot of stress and fear is poured bile and viciousness by a small percentage of the population who believe that trans people deserve this treatment, or worse. They are not the majority of people but they have loud voices, and they are relentless. There’s a joke in the UK that there’s only a few hundred dedicated transphobes in the UK, but they all have newspaper columns. It’s not really much of a joke.

The language of hate these people use poisons the discussion of trans issues. They use a trick that has been used by bigots from time immemorial to reframe discussion in the public eye by using terms and phrases that seem innocuous and unremarkable from the perspective of an uninformed observer, but slowly build together to create a twisted version of the real world that doesn’t reflect reality but instead their own hate.

Keeping people anti-trans relies on lies, and those lies only exist when fuelled by sensationalized repetition.

For example: The social contagion narrative pushes the idea that people are being tricked into a “lifestyle” and somehow fast-tracked through gender-affirming care. In reality, trans healthcare is the opposite of rushed, and there certainly isn’t any fast track. If you’ve ever been friends with a trans person in your life, you know that trans healthcare is notoriously slow and difficult to get, as — in addition to the immense societal pressure to eradicate trans people, including criminalizing care and attacking doctors — few physicians have the appropriate medical training to administer or recommend the appropriate care. This is a common misconception because — between centrist reporting and outright genocidal propaganda — the media misrepresents these facts.

As, yet again, there’s so much of it, I’m going to try to divide it into categories and go through it.

Mainstream media transphobia🔗

The media — especially in Britian and the UK, but also now in the US — have turned sensationalized transphobic opinion columns into mainstream news in a pattern that, for some reason, reminds me of Lotka-Volterra equations. This behavior normalizes genocidal talking points and helps radicalise moderates against trans people.

And in case it wasn’t obvious, that’s a mainstream news community that trans journalists are more and more excluded from. Organizations like the Trans Journalists Association have tried to support trans-friendly news coverage and educate writers on how to respectfully cover trans issues, but with the popularity of anti-trans sensationalism in the news, this has gained little traction.

Women Don’t Count🔗

So to dive into “The Mainstream”, here’s Pamela Paul’s “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count”, an opinion piece published by the New York Times (about… two days ago, as I write this bit). The basic premise is that both the far right and the far left are mistreating and disenfranchising women: a feminist perspective that seems to try to say “back up, both sides are wronging women in their own way.” Except that once you get past the first paragraph, the entire 1,200-word article is dedicated to attacking trans acceptance on the left and trans people in general.

So, the headline and opening intentionally misrepresent the article, right off the bat. The contents of the article are the standard uninteresting TERF arguments: trans support is misogynist and spearheaded by a cabal of “activists” (it’s bad to be active in politics, you see) working to attack the real women. The thought-police left won’t let you say “woman” anymore (more on that later), while the “sisterhood” has been accommodating and kind while “males” invade their spaces. In trying to make a parallel to the right, she alleges trans people somehow reduce women to gender stereotypes, but doesn’t really support that with anything.

Nowhere in the entire piece does Pamela treat a trans person as human. Nowhere does a trans person — even hypothetically — do anything other than loom as a spectre and threat. Nowhere in the article does she cite a single action a trans person has done, and she certainly doesn’t talk to one for her article. This kind of “journalism” is typical. Anti-trans writing struggles to show how their views are grounded in reality (rather than the authors’ imaginings) for the simple reason that they are not.

You can’t say women🔗

Now, “you can’t say the word women anymore”. That’s a fun one, let’s dive into that. First: demonstrably false. In no way, in any context, is it “verboten” to accurately describe women as such. Pamela’s example of this is another opinion from Michael Powell that implies groups like the ACLU aren’t using the word, when they clearly are. But this disconnect is caused by intentional misuse of the word.

When people discuss how abortion care effects “menstruating people”, it’s because that’s the accurate descriptor for the population she’s describing. Not all people with female reproductive parts identify as women, but also, of course, not all cis women menstruate, and it would be incorrect to include them. Even if trans people didn’t exist, using “women” here would be intentionally inaccurate. Same with “pregnant people”: not all women are pregnant, not all women can get pregnant, some children can get pregnant but aren’t yet women, and not all people who are pregnant identify as women. TERFs aren’t upset because anyone actually prevents them from saying “woman”, they’re upset because they don’t want other people to say the word “people”.

The actual ideas of “man” and “woman” that anti-trans activists are trying to conserve aren’t any kind of biological fact. They’re social ideas: how people dress, what kind of jobs they have, what their temperament is. There’s nothing about wearing a tie written as part of our DNA, or even mandated by God. The Two Genders, in all their holy wisdom, are inarguably social constructs themselves. It’s actually a disagreement over taxonomy, terminology, and methods of categorization. It’s a fight over conflicting definitions of categories, and ultimately it’s a conflict of the belief system of biological determinism against self determination.

Lowbridge on the BBC🔗

Let’s go even more mainstream. Let’s go to the BBC.

Here’s Caroline Lowbridge’s “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women”, published under news, not opinions. It’s about lesbians who are pressured into sex by predatory trans women. That’s borderline sexual assault, that’s really bad. Well, no, it’s actually about arguments within the cis lesbian community, like a lesbian who had an argument with their partner about having a threesome. That argument was between the two lesbians, and didn’t involve any trans people. Well, no. It’s actually about pushing extremist anti-trans rhetoric, like fringe group Get The L Out’s unhinged “research” study “Lesbians at Ground Zero - How transgenderism is conquering the lesbian body”, which Lowbridge spends six paragraphs lauding.

Is a lesbian transphobic if she does not want to have sex with trans women? Some lesbians say they are increasingly being pressured and coerced into accepting trans women as partners - then shunned and even threatened for speaking out. Several have spoken to the BBC, along with trans women who are concerned about the issue too.

“Lesbians at Ground Zero - How transgenderism is conquering the lesbian body” is extremely thinly veiled radical trans-exclusionary propaganda, and rants about how “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact, appropriating this body for themselves”, “[the LGBT movement] is a constant invasion: invasion of lesbian spaces and invasion of the lesbian body as the ultimate women-only space”, and “The female pronoun [is] an honorific, a term … due to women as members of a sex caste that have survived subordination and deserve to be addressed with honour. [Trans women] cannot occupy such a position”.

If the paper has anything useful to say, it’s something like “the awareness of trans women creates a crisis in people who relied on a particular notion of ‘lesbian’ as self-identity”, which would almost be interesting to think about (hey, isn’t subversion of a worldview revolving around gender supremacy the thing that makes misogynists so angry at feminists, etc) if this paper didn’t spend its time demanding that said identity crisis is trans people’s fault.

All this to say, the intent of the article is to launder anti-trans propaganda and attack trans women by painting them as sexual threats and predators. It’s not concerned journalism, and it’s not concerned with the wellbeing of people.

To confirm this, let’s check to see how concerned Lowbridge and the BBC are about sexual predators. Remember, that scary thing from the headline, that turned out not be what the article was about at all. The article prominently features lesbian porn star actor Lily Cade as a trusted source to describe supposed trans violence against lesbians. Problem: Lily Cade was accused of and then admitted to a series of sexual assaults. This was known before the article was published, but intentionally omitted. You might call this an editorial slip-up, but the BBC specifically said they put this specific article through “[its] rigorous editorial process”, Lily Cade and all. I don’t want to go too in-depth on the gory details here (including how the article lies about its other sources) because Shaun has an excellent response here already. But we know, for sure, that the people involved in writing and publishing this article don’t care one iota about sexual assault. All it’s for and all it does is attack the trans population as a group of sexual predators.

How’s our friend Lily Cade doing? Oh, she’s leveraging the fact that the BBC platformed her to advocate for mass ‘execution’ and ‘lynching’ of trans women. Here are some fun excerpts from her philosophy:

If you left it up to me, I’d execute every last one of them personally

Cancel the ever-living f**k out of this. Cancel this so hard that no man dare walk the path of the trans woman in public ever again! Enough is enough.

[In the same post, she said trans people should be “killed… as is the duty of the man to protect the women and the children from pedophile pervert monsters”, and claims that same-sex marriage “was the fall of Rome”.]

Lynch Kaitlyn! Lynch the ‘Sisters’ Wachowski! Lynch Laurel Hubbard! Lynch Fallon Fox!

They can’t take down Lily Cade. She’s already dead. I’m the bullet, bitch. I’m a f**king soldier. You ready? I’m ready.

So that’s… well, a lot of death threats, including listing out names of specific trans women she personally wants lynched. There are also rape threats in there against the families of trans people, made in the name of… protecting sexuality.

Here’s the point: the people pushing these ideas are like that.

And the children. Oh, won’t somebody please think of the children? The New York Post’s “Anguished parents of trans kids” fighting back against the “‘gender cult’ trying to silence them”, about those parents who found out medical science went against their intuition and got very upset about it instead of parenting. Although, as usual, that article and the parents it’s about don’t seem concerned about children at all, so maybe it’s just “think of the parents”.

There’s so much sensationalizing around the idea of potential child abuse, but how do these outlets report on real child abuse?

nypost fabulous heiress Again, the headline in this very story is about how she raped a child

That’s a headline from the New York Post. Glamour shots. Like it’s nothing but a social faux pas to be excused. The very same outlet who published about the dangerous “gender cult”. Why the disconnect? Because the mainstream media sees trans people as targets for sensationalism. It’s more socially acceptable to attack a trans child because they were rejected by their family than it is to attack a rich woman for raping a minor. That’s not some conclusion I’m extrapolating, that’s just a straight read of the situation. And it’s hideous.

Conservatives stirring up controversy🔗

Of course, some institutions push that sensationalism as a means to an end, with the intent of feeding their base and fomenting new hostility.

Take Friendswood, Texas. The city brought in hometown hero Haley Carter, ex-marine and retired professional soccer player. Just the kind of person to lead a parade. Then conservative talk radio personality Jesse Kelly tweeted screenshots he dragged up of “communist” behaviour, and told his 500,000 followers to call Friendswood and complain, even posting the number. It was a hit job, and a successful one. Carter stepped down, citing “threats of harm to herself and her family”. Kelly celebrates, his work accomplished. Haley supported gun reform and took her son to a pride event, so she had to be removed from public life by any means necessary.

It’s a culture war that keeps people angry at their “enemy” and keeps them fed with “victories” like this one.

Truth doesn’t matter here. Take Scott Smith, who gave an interview to The Daily Wire (Ben Shapiro’s media site) testifying that his ninth-grade daughter was sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a man in a skirt. He positioned this as an objection to allowing trans kids to use the bathrooms, because they’re “using it as an advantage to get into the bathrooms.” The boy in question, meanwhile, was arrested and charged with rape. While his hearing was pending, he enrolled in another school and sexually assaulted another girl. The story was a hit, and the interviewer went on Tucker Carlson’s show to talk about how “the Loudoun County public schools covered up the rape of a 14-year-old girl at the hands of a boy wearing a skirt in order to pass a school policy that Democrats were adamant about passing.” The outrage sparked fed Glenn Youngkin’s political race, fuelling the narrative of schools pushing leftist policy instead of caring for students.

The problem is the assault had nothing to do with trans people or bathroom policy. The daughter’s testimony in the court hearing revealed that it was something horrific but less sensational: domestic violence. She had a pre-existing sexual relationship with her attacker, and they’d had consensual sex twice already in school bathrooms. On the day of the attack they agreed on the bathroom as a meeting place in advance, but it went bad. In addition, the attacker wasn’t allowed in the bathroom by any sort of bathroom policy; the only inclusive bathroom policies were set months later.

This was not a case of someone identifying as trans as a guise to enter a bathroom, as conservatives wanted it to be. But the damage was done. It was talked up enough in conservative circles that it feels like real evidence; a case study in exactly the kind of violence aggressive policing is needed to prevent. Making people associate right-wing state violence with public safety like this is a classic conservative tactic for securing power, and unfortunately a highly effective one. The facts were fake, but the feelings are real.

And it’s in this crucible of conservative conspiracy that we get “stories” like “Tax-Funded Researcher Studying Trans Children Is Married To Trans Woman; Both Profit From Child Mutilation” from The Federalist, next to headlines like Fake News Board (Commonly Known As Pulitzer Prize) Defends Award To 2018 Russia Hoaxers [NYT], that cites 4thWaveNow, Transgender Trend, Lisa Littman, ROGD… debunked bunk, all of it. Or “MSNBC analyst claims ‘Jesus Christ would be called a groomer’ if ‘alive today’” and “Biden pushes radical trans activism in schools” on Fox News. Please excuse me for not dissecting those, but it’s just all the same.

Weimar🔗

Oh, Fox. Never one to disappoint, here’s Fox News, with Tucker Carlson opening a segment (supporting the right-wing counterprotestors harassing a family pride event) with the choice phrase “Just another week in Weimar.”

What looks like offhand language here is actually a head nod to a very specific far-right cryptofascist talking point.

The Weimar Republic was the German government immediately preceding Nazi Germany. It was perceived as destabilized and weak, with the new Nazi party blaming Jews, liberals, and socialists in government for the German loss of WWI. That perception of weakness was a key factor in allowing fascism to take over Germany.

The fascist “America is like Weimar” talking point says “America has become weak (cultural degeneracy, pride, etc) and it’s time for us fascists to take control again.”

Policy serves to keep people agitated, too. Like the Leon High School policy to broadcast warnings about queer people in PE or overnight trips to parents, which just serves to further anti-trans tropes and keep people concerned and angry by enforcing this narrative that all queer people (even kids) are comparable to sex offenders. Or a Tennessee law requiring businesses allowing people to use the bathrooms of their choice to display a sign in order to discourage businesses from having those policies and stigmatize the ones that did. (Obviously a violation of the first amendment in the form of compelled speech.) The law was struck down by injunction, but note the clear intent seen here to stigmatize the target population.

And high-profile conservatives online have the same effect. Here’s Jordan Peterson calling an adult consenting to top surgery equivalent to Nazi medical war crimes:

The Trans Question🔗

You also see liberal institutions serve much the same function as the hyper-conservative outlets by “legitimizing the debate”. In this case, you’ll remember that “the debate” is between exterminating all the trans people, or not doing that. But boy, do we ever like debates, and you can’t have a Debate if you acknowledge that one side is an atrocity.

And so we get things like Joan Smith, “The Tories are right to be debating the trans question”.

Originally, “The X Question” was used to describe how countries established a national identity by tying the nation to an ethic identity. This was the very early notion of a Nation-State: a State, a government, that corresponded to a Nation, a people. “National questions” were the discussion of those nation/state mappings; the Roman Question was the question of whether the Roman catholic church should be an independent state or not, with “yes” corresponding to independence, statehood, and “nationalism”.

It wasn’t until Nazi Germany that the idea of “The X Question” was tainted the way it is today. The Germans raised “The Jewish Question” rhetorically with the intent to answer it with a resounding “no.” Because of thousands of years of Jewish stigmatization in Europe though, “no” here didn’t mean “no Israel for you”, it meant an escalating series of attacks: forced societal integration, deportation, and finally “The Final Solution”. The final solution, the holocaust, was the final “answer” to “The Jewish Question”, and arguably the reason the Nazis brought it into public consciousness the way they did in the first place.

Since that atrocity, and the incomprehensible evils conducted in the name of the answer, no one has brought a national question into the public discourse since. The idea of asking a National Question means you want to answer it “no”, in the most horrible way imaginable. To ask a national question is to incite genocide. Which is why it’s back in force. It’s not a coincidence. The rhetoric is constructed to invoke the idea of outside invaders in society, to prompt discourse to come to the conclusion that it’s unacceptable for them to exist, and to generate a mandate to do whatever it takes to eliminate them.

And so we have Joan Smith, “The Tories are right to be debating the trans question”, and the political climate it puts into words. We have Derek Hunter, “The Transgender Question”, and all the equivalent columns and thought pieces and blog articles. And we know exactly what they’re for.

Children as the wedge🔗

That’s what cries about children are for, too. Concern about children is used as a wedge to seize policing power. Conversely, the goal of the genocidalists isn’t to protect children, the children are a means to an end. I cannot emphasize this enough: the goal isn’t protecting children, and the campaign doesn’t end at children.

The effort that’s driving this doesn’t limit itself to minors. I’ve evidenced this throughout, but look also at pieces like “The health establishment is failing young adults who question their gender” in which Erica Anderson specifically attacks the informed consent model of health care, which is the principle that allows trans adults to consent to treatment. Anderson argues instead that people cannot be trusted to make decisions for themselves, and their gender must be controlled instead by the state. Despotic.

Echo outrage🔗

The propaganda works, and people echo these stupid ideas and fuel the paranoia.

Oh, here’s a good one. A clothing designer sells pants and underwear designed to reduce the visible profile of male genitals, targeted towards MtF trans people. They’re not sex toys or clips, they’re just underwear that reduce your profile rather than accentuate it. If you’re anti-trans, this annoys you, because you wish there weren’t trans people. But then you go read a book or something.

But if you’re anti-trans and absolute human garbage, you get this instead: Transgender designer is accused of ‘child abuse’ for selling pants that seek to ‘flatten’ the genitals of boys as young as four - as doctors warn the underwear could cause infertility. Contort the fact that the clothing comes in small sizes as child abuse. Get Tory peer Baroness Nicholson (who looks like a knock-off Jessica Walter character who just saw an immigrant) up in arms about. Find a doctor to quote about testicular health, even though the doctor quoted isn’t speaking about the clothing issue at all, and doesn’t seem to know anything about the story his words are being used for. Get our friends at Transgender Trend, why not, to describe underwear as “barbaric interference with a child’s genitals” and other rhetoric that would seem to insist children not be permitted access to clothes at all. Associate anything in the neighbourhood of “trans” with child abuse, by any means necessary, even when all you’re talking about is selling comfortable pants.

Of course it’s not really about the clothing; they think trans people existing in the world at all is child abuse. That’s why the clothing argument doesn’t make sense, it isn’t trying to.

Bombard people like Jeremy David Hanson with terrorizing misinformation until they go on a rampage to get vengeance on such enemies of the people as Mr. Potato Head and Merriam-Webster for perceived “radical homosexual agenda.” He posted threats online that he wanted to “go on a shooting spree”. He sent a rabbi the threat “That identifies you as some kind of tranny abomination and a radical Marxist… You and your entire family should be gassed and your synagogue shot up and bombed” for putting their pronouns in their social media profile. He messaged DC comics directly “I am going to fucking kill you… I am going to rape your wife and decapitate her then blow up DC Comics headquarters” and that he would “EXTERMINATE you cultural Marxists destroying America” after a new superman identified as bisexual in a comic book. That “IGN is obviously a far-left extremist, cultural Marxist propaganda site” and “I will have to keep posting my comment, and if IGN keeps deleting it, I will shoot up their offices. The radical left needs to pay for silencing and oppressing conservatives.”

To many people, it doesn’t matter how obviously false the claims are (or how completely the people talking misunderstand their own points), this radicalising rhetoric works. Moral salience kicks in; the act of identifying the outgroup prompts action. They believe the people telling them every day on every channel that the existence of trans people is an existential threat and the worst offence that could be committed by humanity, and they internalize it, believe it, and act on it. That’s what the propaganda does, and that’s what the propaganda is for.

Human hate can adapt to anything.

Legitimacy of Belief🔗

When we see people rise up and attack each other like this, see them deteriorate into fodder for a war, it prompts the question: Do they really believe these things?

Final word: Save the nuance🔗

There are open questions about best practices in trans medical care and psychology. Those questions are, for the most part, the business of qualified experts and the trans folks in question. There are questions of science, and questions of personal choice, and that is all. There is no space here for a public debate about whether or not trans people should be allowed to exist, or vigilante mobs raising arms to enforce what they’ve been told “righteousness” looks like. There is never room for an exterminationist debate.

Right now, people are fighting for their right to exist. The right to not be tortured and lynched. Fighting for their lives. There is no way to responsibly criticise the same population that is the victim of a genocide while that genocide is occurring, because such criticism actively aids the genocide. Keep people free. Keep them safe from threats of government and social violence. That is priority one. Only in conditions of reasonable safety can nuanced discourse responsibly exist. Without that, any “critical” discussion is just fuel for the genocidal fire.

Related Reading🔗

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