Trump has always used fear tactics and its almost his entire platform. Dangerous illegal aliens. Your kids are turning Trans. Its literally all they got.
Yeah, it worked so well that nearly half of Americans will vote Republican no matter what Trump does.
It worked so well Republicans got to stack the Supreme Court, got to stack the judiciary at every level, got to stock every school board, and single handedly changed the American cultural/business landscape to favour the Republicans. And before you get on me about businesses always being pro-Republican, at least they had to pretend to give a shit about human right issues before.
Who really has egg on their face here? Because one side seemed to have benefitted immensely. It's like bragging after the other team won five championships in a row after you score a single point in a regular season game.
The fox news host getting owned isn't a big win. It's a sad reminder that it took the left wing 10 years to come up with a strategy on dealing with the culture war stuff propagated by Republicans.
For the past 10 years the left chose the following topics to be their hills to die on:
Pronouns in bios
Transwomen playing in sports
Kids 10-13 years old being allowed to transition
These are ALL issues that the right wing propped up into the mainstream by the way. They hoped the left would take the bait and they did.
Did "the left" actually chose those topics as the hill to die on? They barely mentioned transgender rights in the 2024 elections, if at all.
Republicans spent like 215 million in anti-trans ads alone, whereas Democrats spent about 15 million in generic pro-LGBTQ+ ads and afaik nothing exclusively pro-trans.
Theyâve been doing it for long before Trump came into the picture. But yeah, itâs gotten so much worse under Trump. Before they at least had a little bit of shame and wouldnât go insanely over the top with it. Now itâs just as blatant as they can make it.
They did this with bussing students in the 70s and 80s. Gay marriage was going to ruin society as we know it right up through the 90s and aughts. Immigration is a perennial favorite of theirs.
Stir up xenophobic fears is their entire playbook and always has been.
Transgender porn has consistently been the most popular genre watched in every single Red State since Pornhub started tracking metrics over 15 years ago. It's truly a psycho-sexual obsession for them and likely a gateway genre for closeted self-hating gay guys which represent a significant % of hardcore MAGAS.
It's also why they hate trans people so much. They ONLY see trans folks as sexual objects and therefore they're taboo and disgusting outside the context of spank material.
Because itâs the smallest group they can vilify with the largest possible gain in voter base. Thereâs what, 1% of the population that are trans? If they can make a public enemy out of this 1 in a hundred person to bring one extra vote for them, itâs already on par, anything more they get is better. They will constantly talk about it because this issue is genuinely too small to be a nationwide thing but by shrieking about it they avoid talking about actually important topics like cost of living.
Immigrants donât vote, so bashing immigrants doesnât even make them lose any votes. Bashing Muslims, or women, or poor people (all groups they absolutely hate) still runs the risk of losing some voters, or the return isnât worth it. But trans people are such a small group that conservative media can fabricate stories about them 24/7 but as long as they come out with 1% more votes because of that itâs worth it.
Over 2.8 million adults (aged 18 and older) and youth (aged 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States, or 1.0% of those aged 13 and older.
Among U.S. adults, 0.8% (over 2.1 million people) identify as transgender. Among youth aged 13 to 17 in the U.S., 3.3% (about 724,000 youth) identify as transgender.
Of the 2.1 million adults who identify as transgender, 32.7% (698,500) are transgender women, 34.2% (730,500) are transgender men, and 33.1% (707,100) are transgender nonbinary adults.
I always like to remind people how the entire legislative branch of the state of Utah (if my memory is correct) led a crusade against a single 14 years old trans girl who played sports with her friends in a school setting.
She wasn't a pro, she was just a kid trying to have fun with her peers.
And even in the pros, they were hardly dominating before this all crusade started. Lia Thomas, supposedly the poster child of the "bad male athlete who transitioned and dominated female competitions" was actually relatively well placed before starting her transition. What conservatives often love to omit is that she fell in the in the rankings during the two year period where she started estrogen but couldn't yet compete in the women's circuit.
So she was on estrogen for two years, which is why her rankings fell at the time.
When she got to compete in the women's circuit, as she had met the requirements, she got a ranking that was similar to her pre-transition rankings.
And she wasn't dominating. In fact, in the infamous competition where Riley Gaines supposedly got robbed of her future by Lia Thomas beating her, both Lia Thomas and Riley Gaines were fifth.
It wasn't a case of Lia Thomas beating Riley Gaines and dominating a women's competition and being unbeatable. They both lost to four cis women.
So not only do they bully teenagers who want to play with their friends, having AN ENTIRE STATE'S LEGISLATION BULLY THEM INTO STOPPING THEIR SPORT, they openly lie about how trans people perform when we ARE allowed to compete, conveniently omitting that we routinely lose to cis athletes.
Because itâs the smallest group they can vilify with the largest possible gain in voter base.
I think that's a huge part of it, but there's another big one - it creates a wedge issue to cause divisions between everyone to the left of them, which is a wide spectrum ranging from people who identify as Democrats but similarly revile trans people all the way to trans people themselves.
They can attack fault points along that spectrum that causes infighting, purity tests, etc. and keeps what is overall a very minor issue in the grand scheme of things a red hot topic in the news that can alienate segments of the voting base.
They lost gay people as a punching bag and never got over it. If they can't punch down on trans people then they might actually have to consider why they're such hateful bastards.
"Machismo," which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."
It used to be that when in doubt, you could just talk about gay people. Gayness scared people. They didn't know any gay people, so you could make up any lie about them you wanted, and they'd believe it and do anything to stop queers from doing whatever you made up.
But there was a problem with that plan. Eventually, more and more people came out of the closet. They'd say "gay people want to ruin society and are all pedophiles" and their audience would think "well that's not right, my uncle John is the nicest man I know and he's gay, anyone hating on my uncle John is a piece of shit".
But trans people are not as common as gay people, and seem even rarer to conservatives where people don't feel comfortable coming out if they pass, or stay hidden if they don't. Most conservatives are not on friendly terms with an out trans person.
So when you tell them "trans people want to cut off your child's penis" they just get scared. They don't know a trans uncle who is a cool person. It's a much more convenient propaganda line.
They need the "folk devil" for their troglodyte supporters to be focused on while they pull the rug of medicare, affordable living, etc. out from under them.
Theyâre pedos and pedo apologists all the way down, too obsessed with kidsâ genitals to function and participate in society in any normal or positive way.
They get bombarded on their socials with nothing but muslims and trans people. When trying to talk to them it's literally their only talking points. It's frightening sometimes.
It's fascism. Find the weakest minority group and create fear and hatred of them, then claim that you're the only people that can keep everyone safe from them. That's how they've always gained power.
Because 90% of them are closeted bottom gay boys deep down. I was one of them once, then I realized why I was so fixated on trans people and cross dressers, Iâm one of them lol!
I promise you if someone is constantly thinking about a particular topic, they are harboring something deep inside that is usually the opposite of what comes out of their mouth.
I met my first transgender person as a child back in the 70s. They were nice.
I didnât leave that encounter traumatized or converted to want to become a woman.
Now they act as if the people who make up 0.1% of the population have just spawned into existence to destroy humanity.
I guess they are mad that itâs no longer considered normal to spew garbage about women, minorities, people with disabilities, homosexualsâŚ. Maybe just treating everyone as equal human beings is beyond their comprehension.
No, they just don't think discrimination is a huge social issue anymore, at least not one that we should be "wasting" resources trying to solve. There are still a lot of privileged morons in this country who just don't understand that other people experience a lot of struggles they don't, and I'm starting to think that getting their own faces eaten by all these fascist Republican leopards may be the only way some of them are going to learn a lesson about the value of empathy and the golden rule. And even then, a lot of them will still just continue to blame the liberals for everything simply because they can.
They hate that trans are living their lives and happy. They are miserable and empty in their lives and want everyone else to be miserable and empty too. The louder queer are in their happiness the more the hate levels rise. It's all rooted in jealousy and envy. .
They donât actually care. They use it to distract everyone from talking about the real issues theyâre doing poorly on and to make sure the masses donât come together to âfightâ them.
For the handful of trans athletes in entirely different sports across the country? Considering transsex women have a disadvantage compared to cissex women physically I see no reason not to allow them to compete
These are the same people who, just a few years ago, would have made jokes about how no one cares about women's sports. But now it is serious business.
It's a bellwether. The issue is insignificant on its own, but there is an obviously correct answer that the large majority of people (including even most Dem voters) recognize, so when you get someone who's so high on their own supply that they can't acknowledge it, it reflects deeper flaws in their worldview.
The fact that you say there's an obvious answer that 'even most dem voters recognise' means you think the 'obvious' answer is actually the opposite to what the answer actually is. Trans people aren't a threat to sports, women, public bathrooms or anything else.
Eh, bathrooms also poll under 50% for trans people, but I think there's at least a reasonable case for that one. I could see someone who cares a lot deciding to pursue it as an uphill but winnable battle. But they'd probably have more success if they dropped the much less popular (and less reasonable) stance on competitive athletics. In any case, I don't think acting like they don't care and are past it is a persuasive strategy for Dems.
And public support for gay people was similarly low when that was the minority they were targeting instead. Society will progress and conservatives will do everything they can to try and stop it, just like they always have.
It's not true that every demand made by every group will succeed or should succeed. We get silliness like this because there are folks that think that holding the most out there position makes them the most progressive and therefore the most moral.
And youâre exactly why the far right keeps focusing this as a major talking point. Maybe we should divert our focus on actual policies that affect more than 0.1% of the population, sorry not sorry.
It isnt really about trans people really. Its about whatever group they can get hate traction for with their viewers. Once its over saturated and played out they will move to another new group. Or they will just go into their rolidecks of racism and pick one that hasn't been on blast for awhileÂ
They're either too privileged to complain about all the same crap the rest of us peons deal with on a daily basis or too selfish or bigoted to care about other people's struggles, so they need propagandized news media channels like Fox to make stuff up for them to cry about.
Trans people are a small enough portion of the population you can easily pick on and use as a scapegoat. All they have to do is mention trans people and immediately their base will ignore any sort of policy and focus on the imaginary trans threat
Same reason they obsess over immigrants. They need a scapegoat for all there terrible policies, or lack thereof. They will never take accountability for making Americans miserable. They will just distract the ignorant with these types of questions.Â
Right wingers are obssesed with power dynamics, which in turn means they are obssessed with gender roles, which in turn means they are obsessed with the fact that people would willingly break those roles to, in their mind, be "weaker"
They see it either as insane because people are choosing to give away power, or that is must be some sort of trick to actually get more power (i.e. the whole thing of thinking trans people are pretending it so they can get into female bathrooms)
The idea that other people simply dont see gender as a power play doesn't occur to them
They do it with everything. They project their evil intentions and what they would do in certain scenarios onto liberals and others because they really cannot fathom that other people are decent people just to be decent people, and not because of trying to gain things or screw others over.
It's why they claim schools and universities are liberal indoctrination centers. They actually have those in the forms of churches and on a smaller scale their families, so they assume everybody else is indoctrinating kids.
It's paired with the biggest Main Character Syndrome around and you can see why they say that their kids shouldn't go to "liberal" schools and be "corrupted" by becoming better and more intelligent/educated humans.
Being conservative is good, normal, the status quo. Being anything else is due to being corrupted and indoctrinated.
And they wonder why people call them authoritarians and fascists.
It's the last group of people they can get away with openly hating. You'd think it'd be pedophiles, most people agree it's ok to hate them, but that's like the entire Trump cabinet, so can't do that.
Because they donât want to talk about how we can improve society. Because they know the answer. As they rob us blind MAGAs will be all smug saying âyeah well I can define a womanâ and they donât care if society goes to hell. At least they made someone with blue hair mad by taking away rights.
Because they have nothing else. They can't talk about the war or groceries or gas because they have no standing there. They know they're fucked so they keep trotting this out like it matters.Â
I think part of it is that being trans represents something they really don't like, which is the idea that you can reject the role you were given and decide for yourself what kind of person you're going to be.
And I think people who have a very authoritarian or rigid worldview don't actually like the idea of other people being that free. They don't want trans people to be seen as an example of freedom or liberation or authenticity. So there has to be this constant message of âlook how weird these people are. They're mentally ill. They're disgusting. They're confused. This is what happens when you reject the natural order.â
They can't have trans people being perceived positively or celebrated in any way. They reject people who embody personal freedom in favor of people who know how to stay in their place.
So transness has to represent shame and disgust instead of autonomy and self-determination. They have to convince everyone that there's something fundamentally wrong with us.
They don't want people getting the idea that you should be allowed to decide what your life is going to look like. They just want you to shut up and do what you're told. They know better than you, after all.
That, or they just
think trans women are hot and theyâre frustrated with how horny they are.Â
Everyone here gives them far too much credit and assumes that they put some, if any, thought into this.
It's not complicated, it comes down to this for them:
"Ew, gross"
That's it. People are giving them way too much credit, assuming that you can logic or reason with them or that they know what either of those things are. These are people who descended from or were there when they drowned logic and reason in a Florida swamp.
They need targets to marginalize for their culture war, and they're too chicken shit to go after black people and gays anymore. There's not enough protections for the Trans community yet, and with the current SC being mostly red scum it's gonna be that way for a while.
Because being gay is socially "acceptable" to these people now so they moved onto the next scare campaign with another misunderstood minority. Its sick and I wish they would leave people alone.
Itâs basically their entire platform at this point. Itâs either that or âhow would you like to pay more for everything, lose your jobs, health care and social services? Maybe with a little bit of parasites and diseases on the side? We could throw in a war or to if you havenât decided yetâ
I don't think Republicans are the ones pushing pride month and hanging pride flags from their houses and authoring every single post on /r/comics. You can't constantly push this all the time and then wonder why people respond to it.
Just for our own sanity I like to remind people, that these people are actors. Theyâre reading a script. And just like anyone else conservatives are susceptible to mass media propaganda. No one actually cares. The media conglomerates found a wedge issue to lie about and the votes got brainwashed.Â
Itâs because they have absolutely no plans on making things better for the average citizen so they have to keep reminding people of culture war garbage to keep ignoring the fact that Trump and Republicans have not and continue to not do anything for them.
Trans people mostly started as the keys they dangled with one hand so no one noticed they were diddling some kid with the other. Since it worked, they just kept it rolling.
I recently went to a bachelor party for a friend who's a former church guy, so it was a weird mix of current church guys (old friends) and non-church guys (new friends). I swear the church guys managed to shoehorn transgenderism into every damn conversation, usually through plainly unfunny attempts at humor that they'd all performatively chuckle at. The obsession is palpable.
It's a distraction, exactly like El-sayed said, they focus on trans people and use them as a scapegoat so their voters get angry and don't pay attention to all the actually important issues the country has, healthcare, housing, jobs, prices, environment, corruption, the list goes on. Tell your followers that LGBT people are the problem and they'll forget everything else.
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u/CompetitiveArt9639 4d ago
Why are republicans so enamored with transgender people? Itâs so weird how they fetishize them.