No Stupid Questions

As others have said, one did shoot up a school (and the MSM hid the manifesto & details forever). As your comment proves, they found out the shooter was trans & they tried to memory-hole that real hard. But that's besides the point; evil & depraved people will be evil & depraved people. Doesn't matter, trans or not.

Main conservative talking points against trans people: They do not produce children, trans people are categorized as having a mental illness that should be treated instead of chopping off body parts, they really don't like when health insurance money and/or tax dollars pay for elective surgery & treatments, fully transitioned people have their genitals mutilated & they'll never experience an orgasm, once they're chopped up a not insignificant number of trans people experience regret (permanent consequences for acting on temporary feelings), and trans people are more likely than the general population to have depression & commit suicide.

With well-intentioned conservatives, it's actually coming from place of care & compassion. They don't want people to hurt themselves, deprive them of families & fullness of sexuality, or see them despair post-op & kill themselves.

I can only recall one instance of a trans person going postal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting

Because fascists need a ~scary other~ to scapegoat to erode everyone’s rights.

Hating gays isn’t cool anymore and will get backlash even from conservatives.

Trans people are the new gays in this sense

It's strange to them.

When people encounter something that's different from what they are used to, they don't know how to process it. It makes them uncomfortable. Some people, instead of learning how to deal with that feeling like a mature adult, blame the individual for making them feel uncomfortable and resent them for "making them feel that way". Just staying away is not enough, they must be punished for existing.

All because someone felt a little icky when they thought about a girl with a weiner.

Because conservatives are mostly dumb, and dumb people don't understand things and won't make an effort to understand things, and people fear what they don't understand. Very simple A-to-C.

because they're gay and weird or christian and dumb

the existence of GNC people undermines the thin facade of identity that people construct based on their assigned gender roles. they lash out against internal discomfort

I don't think it's most people. I (choose to) believe that's a loud minority.

Conservatives use fear to manipulate their constituents as their primary means to rally support. A minority scapegoat many of their supporters don't know in person, like trans people, are easily demonized by politicians and clergy to pretend trans folks are pedophiles and sex assaulters projecting their own party and priest crimes, it's the same thing they try to do with fear mongering homosexuals as a previous scapegoat to distract and deflect from their awful policy privileging the wealth class and harming poor and middle class people, they need someone to blame for their own awful behavior and choices.

It's artificial boosting of the same bigotry that's been ongoing for generations. The new part switching the target.

See, there's been a very concerted effort to radicalize the right wing of the American populace by media oligarchs. It's part of an overall strategy going back to at least the post-nixon era.

Want to crush black people? Find a way to villainize them indirectly. "Inner city" crime. Step up arrests for things that are disproportionately a part of black people's lives. Spread drugs into the chaos brought about by destabilizing black communities to engender greater violence between gangs. And it worked. Look at how many black people are in jail compared to pretty much any other group.

Go back to Stonewall, when the biggest movements for gay rights got going hard, and remember that trans people were involved from the beginning, but didn't have a convenient label, they didn't have a way to be a distinct group. Gay rights efforts worked to some degree. Enough that the far right plans to use gay people as the enemy had to find another target the same way that they had to change targets from black people to Hispanic people in the form of "illegal aliens".

When your plan rests on fomenting anger, hate, and fear to stir up the lowest common denominator of a populace you have to have a target, ideally more than one since there's always going to be gaps where your desired audience will fall prey to the manipulation for one hate focus, but not another, like when you run into conservatives that aren't actually racist, but hate anyone in the LGBTQ+ umbrella because of religion, or sheer stupidity.

So, when gays weren't a useful target for hate any more because enough people knew gay people, and there were enough gay people of prominence to make it harder, why not switch to the next best thing? Trans people!

See, we had a major shift in awareness of trans issues back in the late nineties and early naughties. That's was followed by a large shift in trans people now having a serious chance at transitioning as medicine advanced, funding shifted, and there was just enough support that more people could transition and not be alone.

This meant that the assholes pushing their agenda to gain and maintain both wealth and power had a gift given to them. A new label to attack, using the exact same rhetoric they'd been using against gay people. "It's unnatural", "but what about the children?", along with the ability to use lingering misogyny via to attack trans women in specific since they are now women, but used to be men (in the rhetoric), so they must be groomers sneaking into bathrooms.

It's the exact same bullshit over again.

People have forgotten that the same methodology has been in place every time people in power needed to scare the populace enough to achieve a goal. Remember reefer madness? Before my time, but the entire thing was built in order to continue the oppression of black people, to keep them firmly under the boot.

Go back further, and it was the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, whatever group was "other" at the time.

But the modern version is so directly a rehash of the anti gay rhetoric that's not even fifty years in the past that I'm amazed it isn't glaringly obvious even to the people that have jumped on the bandwagon of both.

I've said it before, but people are stupid. They're easy to manipulate, easy to fool, and that's the majority. Even the ones that aren't easy to manipulate can still fall prey to it if they aren't paying attention. People are also lazy, and have little long term thinking ability, or attention spans. That's why we got zero lasting changes after George Floyd was murdered. Anyone that's made it this far, think for a second. How long did it take you to remember that name and what it means? Now, ask yourself how many people didn't remember at all.

That's why trans hate is working. People suck. The vast majority are easy to control, and will believe anything fed to them with the right language behind it. It just so happens that while all of the distractions being used to build up the hate also created a smoke screen to hide gerrymandering, which ends up with more and more control over what language is being used everywhere.

So, here we are with a manufactured, strawman enemy being propped up as the target and then painted with the word "trans". None of the bullshit used to build up the hate is true, it isn't accurate, and most of the people behind the hate actually know it's bullshit, but they aren't allowed to hate the blacks and the gays out loud any more. They can't just scream the n word or call people faggots at whim the way they used to.

So, now they've got trans people to hate. And they want that hate because it means they don't have to look at themselves, their own lives and choices. They don't have to stop and think that maybe everything they've built their identity around is empty, so they scream about "wokeness" and "transgenderism" as code words.

There's no serious, legitimate arguments against trans people being allowed to have the full protection of the law, to have full medical access, to have whatever gender they want on their driver's license. There's just the bullshit excuses to have someone to hate. There's not even a good argument about bathrooms, they're all built on bullshit too, and that's the one that's the low hanging fruit because it seems reasonable to people that aren't buying all the bullshit immediately, but aren't quite bright enough to think it through all the way on their own. Which, again, that's the majority, stupid people too drowned in lies and manipulation to bother thinking.

So, Don, if you've gotten this far, I know I went wide of what you asked, but it really is all related. It all comes down to the same thing in different faces over time.

For anyone else, I know this got a little ranty in parts. I know it is long enough to look a little crazed. IDGAF. This shit is patently obvious, it's not even a secret. The people that have been running the right wing of things for my entire lifetime and before have outright and publicly talked about it. One part of it, the "southern strategy" they brag about. It's infuriating, so I get ranty.

They're conservative. The whole name is based on the principle that they want to maintain the old way rather than progress. I think it stems from fear of a changing world. The old world with the old rules provided safety, it was understandable, the rules were clear, and the rules didn't hurt them. Now some people are "attacking" their world, their rules, everything that offers them safety and understanding. So they feel attacked.

It's the same thing, but with another subject every time. Whether it is women getting rights, which threatens their safe world with clear gender roles. Or gay people, who threaten the simple rules like "boys love girls", "in order to be successful, get a job, marry, and get kids". Or non-white people getting rights. What if they vote for things that "we" don't want? What if "they" ruin the world that "we" got so used to.

Trans and especially non-binary people are just the next group in line that threatens their simple world. When men are people born as men and women are people born as women, it's way easier to force people into the traditional roles. The old rules still work, "boy marries girl, gets kids". And when they speak out about their "concerns* they are (rightfully) called out for it. So they become defensive and start doing whatever they're doing now.

Because of tropes like https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreepyCrossdresser from movies like Silence of the Lambs, Dressed to Kill, and Psycho. It puts the idea of men dressing like women as a means of tricking women to attack them into the collective unconscious.

Because Trump spent $19 million on transphobic ads during football games in battleground states. Because they need a Boogeyman to rile up their base.

It doesn't have to make sense. You might as well be asking how can the KKK hate people of color or how can Nazis hate Jewish people.

Uneducated people in rural areas struggle very much with understanding their experiences of others, and have very strange ideas about how the world works. I told my grandmother I wanted to move to Chicago - she’s convinced I’m going to get gang murdered. (She would be horrified if I told her about wandering around LA on foot)

The idea that there are options other than cisgender heterosexual people is threatening to their understanding of their world. Many have not thought about their gender or sexuality; it’s assumed that you’ll get married to the opposite sex, get gender appropriate jobs, have kids, and go to church on Sunday. That’s what life is in Anadarko or Siloam Springs. Many also struggle with unaddressed trauma from the opioid/fent crisis, or military service - so they think the appropriate response to anguish about your body should just be to just cope with it.

Many of these men are secretly bisexual. Many, many, many heterosexually married men seek out sexual encounters with gay men on the side. They would never want to be in a relationship with a man or someone they perceived as a strange, mentally defective man - for many of them that would also assault their understandings of a relationship as more of a property thing. They feel guilty about porn usage, especially the Christian ones, but externalize it as hatred.

The woman are miserable and are committed to making everyone else miserable as well. You gain power in those communities by policing others, especially young women. They are threatened by the idea that they weren’t locked into compulsive heterosexuality and performative femininity. There was a possibility that they could have graduated college, or not had children.

They get the program though. They’re proper Puritans. If life is suffering then the only joy to be had is in watching other people. And what better target than those who are defying our most basic sociological roles? These are the same people who host gender reveal parties - it matters to them. So it must matter to everyone else.

That’s my guess as a trans man at least, obviously I’m biased.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Religious people control their kids through the village support system of their church. Some kids are learning things at public school which are not in line with those beliefs. This is scary for parents. Parents don’t want to lose their children, and can’t imagine loving them as somebody else. Case in point Elon And his trans daughter Vivian.

I’m quite liberal and atheist, but the prospect of a transitioning child is troubling to me. While I’d have no problem supporting a gay child, I feel very strongly about body acceptance, and I reject body dysmorphia. Transitioning to another gender is to me, not too different from a woman who wants augmentation surgeries or a man who is taking steroids. That said I could care less what anybody else does. I think cosmetic surgery and steroids should be legal. I don’t think the government needs to be involved. It’s a decision to discuss with a child, doctor, and parent.

I guess what I’m saying is, I can empathize with the transphobia of conservatives. Where we differ is in how we deal with that fear. They want the government to make society conform to their beliefs. I think it’s up to the individual parent to grow the love in their heart to accept and love whatever their child decides to be.

Nazis do this dumb thing where they go "hey that small and therefore relatively defenseless group (badassness of individuals aside) is the cause of all our problems, let's kill them to solve everything!"

Surprisingly, it never works.

So they do it again with somebody else, and somebody else, and somebody else, until everybody on earth is killed by nazis or somebody stops them.

As for why anybody is dumb enough to fall for it in the first place...it's anybody's guess.

Among the many factors, I think that we shouldn't lose sights on the fact that statistically there is a percentage of any population who has no "normal" sexual orientation. This means that there a percentage of conservative/religious fundamentalists who are non-heterosexual CIS in the closet, who fight against sexual diversity to defend their chosen belief structure. There cannot be queers, thus they are an abomination that must be stamped out.

It seems like it's always projection with these fascists.

They are the ones whose "party" is full of violent sexual predators. They will never bring up the monsters (including their "president") on their own "team".

I'm going to get all sorts of fun responses for trying to empathize with those with whom I disagree (instead of just writing "dumb bigots") but here goes:

First, remember that even gay marriage is fairly new to America, it's been around for less time than the MCU.

There are a lot of folks who almost have mental whiplash, gay marriage went from illegal to "you could get fired for being vocally uncomfortable about it" in fairly quick order.

Now, to make things even more wild for those folks, mainstream culture is pretty insistent that gender isn't even a thing anymore. Add in some pretty wild news stories/videos*, worries for their kids and the notion that the Left refuses to say there might be any issues whatsoever and you can kinda see where a backlash could crop up.

• eg: trans women being reassigned to women's prisons and then assaulting the women etc, a 6"2, 220lb woman practically murdering her handball oppoisition, some fairly sketchy research practices by some of the authorities (WPATH) on the subject etc.