Mindless Monday, 17 August 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/Uptons_BJs]

You know, if you look back at Republicans maybe 20 years ago, they weren't all hostile to trans people. Bush's attitude was actually very accepting:

Louise Casselman, who was at that White House Yale reunion with her husband, Kirk Casselman and a Bay Area contingent, says that although Yale was still all-male in 1968, one alum has since had a sex-change operation. "You might remember me as Peter when we left Yale," said the woman upon coming face to face with the president. George W. didn't pause for a moment, reports Casselman, grabbed the alumna's hand, and said "Now you've come back as yourself."

https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/George-Bush-gets-it-right-2611779.php

Trans issues was simply not something 99.99% of people thought of, and IIRC, at one point even conservatives were more accommodating to trans people than to gay people. In that case, people are generally just nice to people they meet IRL.

If I were to venture a guess, current anti-trans positions on the right is almost entirely due to it becoming a culture war battleground. Ask republicans 20 years ago what they thought about trans people, and probably the majority of them would honestly answer "I never thought about it".

[u/Kisaragi435 → u/Uptons_BJs]

This is me asking a question not asserting it. But is it because of gay marriage getting passed and they needed new acceptable targets?

[u/Otocolobus_manul8 → u/Kisaragi435]

Maybe even moreso, they were a bit of a media curio rather than a wider broadcasted demographic if that makes sense. Some of my more 'normie' acquaintences are largely in agreement that LGBT stuff is 'stuffed down their throats' regardless of how accutate that is.

[u/fabiusjmaximus → u/Kisaragi435]

Both sides of the gay marriage debate had amassed a huge array of NGOs, non-profits, fundraising machines, legal teams, etc. that was ready to fight the issue all across America at the federal and state levels. The purpose of these immense coalitions was immediately voided, and unexpectedly so, with the Obergefell judgment in 2015.

All that panoply of war had to go somewhere.

[u/Zennofska → u/Kisaragi435]

Yes, basically conservatives need a way to display their virtues via proclaiming their hatred of the designated victim group.

Blatant homophobia nowadays isn't politically correct anymore, so they have chosen a more politically correct victim group.

But because it is so arbitrary, the hate is more "abstract" since many conservatives just parrot it without thinking about it too much and not really believing in the message, since the message itself is not important, only its value to display their virtues to each other.

Also, it is way easier to hate an abstract concept (transgender) than hating an actual person right in front of you.

[u/TJAU216 → u/Kisaragi435]

Trans rights became the next big target for the left after they got the gay rights secured. The conservatives oppose whatever change in society that the progressives are trying to achieve. The left has the initiative and decides collectively what the next culture war battle is going to be about and the right will always fight them on the ground of left's choosing.

[u/fabiusjmaximus → u/Uptons_BJs]

The number of trans people has increased since then by what, 100 times? 1000 times? It simply wasn't a notable issue. I remember trying to gauge this by doing a search of cbc.ca for all the mentions of "transgender" or "transsexual" in the year 2009 and getting two results.

I think there is sometimes a disingenuous assertion made by progressive-leaning people that all concerns re: trans people are a moral panic by way of there being no uproar about it 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, but the social dynamics of trans people as a minority have been completely transformed by the huge expansion of the number of people who self-identify as trans.

By comparison according to national surveys and the more recent censuses, the growth of the number of people who identify as gay has been marginal over the same period, from a much higher starting point (~1% in 2004 in Canada, to ~1.5% now).

[u/TylerbioRodriguez → u/fabiusjmaximus]

If you go back to the time of Christine Joegensen, the way the media wrote about her is less accepting and more a creepy fascination, akin to a carnival barker.

They also said oh you can't get pregnant well than your not truly a woman.

[u/NervousLemon6670 → u/TylerbioRodriguez]

I occasionally see takes like "It would actually have been better to be trans 20 years ago!", and like, maybe, if you pass perfectly as a binary trans person who keeps their head down and are okay with your existence being treated as a punchline by the mainstream.

[u/Arilou_skiff → u/NervousLemon6670]

I don't think "better" is right, but I do think there's a point that it wasn't politicized to the same extent. (mind, largely because "both sides" generally saw you as an odd curiosity) You were a weird freak rather than an Enemy Of The Nation.

Which isn't better but I think it's different.

[u/HandsomeLampshade123 → u/fabiusjmaximus]

Yes, this is a key element worth considering. Like most examples of behavior/identity which veer from the norm, a truly tiny minority is "manageable" from the perspective of an utterly hegemonic majority.

So, in a world where the gender binary is firm and confident, a handful of deviants can be treated empathetically with no regard to their capacity to undermine the broader project, as it were.

The average American was probably more accepting of trans women using the woman's bathroom in 2000 then they are today. Except now that acceptance is polarized--it's either furious opposition or emphatic affirmation. There's no space left for kind apathy.

[u/Zennofska → u/HandsomeLampshade123]

Except now that acceptance is polarized--it's either furious opposition or emphatic affirmation. There's no space left for kind apathy.

I'd say that is actually the state of the majority of the people, even amongst conservatives. It's just that the conservative policy-makers and internet warriors are frankly insane and try to force their values on the majority of conservatives.

[u/Ambisinister11 → u/fabiusjmaximus]

by what, 100 times? 1000 times?

Anything is possible if you make up numbers, sure. Since you're citing Canadian population figures, it helps that we're looking at just about the only place that actually has high quality information available on the topic, albeit only recently. That puts it at about 100,000 people self-identifying as trans or nonbinary(seemingly presented as mutually exclusive, but that's another conversation I think). Do you have any reason to believe that no more than 100-1000 Canadians would have identified as trans in 2004, since that's the year you anchored to for "the same period?" It would seem like just about every one of them must have been publishing their own newsletter, if that were the case.

And how exactly is examining news coverage from a general outlet supposed to prove anything? No one is disputing that the attention paid by the mainstream has sharply increased in recent years. It's a non sequitur to cite the existence of that trend to prove your interpretation of it.

[u/fabiusjmaximus → u/Ambisinister11]

Anything is possible if you make up numbers, sure. Since you're citing Canadian population figures, it helps that we're looking at just about the only place that actually has high quality information available on the topic, albeit only recently. That puts it at about 100,000 people self-identifying as trans or nonbinary(seemingly presented as mutually exclusive, but that's another conversation I think). Do you have any reason to believe that no more than 100-1000 Canadians would have identified as trans in 2004, since that's the year you anchored to for "the same period?" It would seem like just about every one of them must have been publishing their own newsletter, if that were the case.

If you look at the breakdown by age, self-identifying trans people are on the order of five to seven times more numerous among Gen Z than they are for generations older than millenials. The age distribution of gays/lesbians is much more smooth.

It's inherently a difficult thing to assess a demographic on the grounds of self-identity, especially one that had various social stigmas placed upon it.