In an incredible display of just kind of saying stuff, 52-year-old liberal Isaac Shawn has announced that focusing on “trans issues” alienates the working class from the Democratic party, though he does not personally know a trans person, a working-class person, or anyone at the intersection of thes
In less than ten years, I saw three of my cousins transition. This seemed to correspond neatly with trans-rights being mainstreamed as a social issue. Almost as though there are a lot of trans-people, many of whom were simply in the closet until the moment it became socially acceptable to be themselves.
There absolutely are a lot of them; it’s great that they finally feel comfortable to be themselves.
We saw the same thing with gay people. I’m an 80’s kid. When I was young, gay was something you saw on TV and in the movies. There ‘were no gay kids’ at the schools I attended. Because that was simply not something that you could admit to being.
Earlier this year I met a teen girl at work who casually mentioned her girlfriend. I was delighted that kids these days are comfortable enough in their own skin to just say that to someone they just met. That was not a thing when I was her age. It’s nice to see how far we’ve come.
Something cool I've been seeing lately too is my cis/het friends also finding value in engaging with the queer community. Despite not having any revelations about their own identities, they still get to free themselves from all sorts of vague social rules and gain a lot of vocabulary to describe their own experiences.
My gruff male vocalist friend gets to be as campy as he likes on stage and has a wider range of presentation he can choose from, without his gender being called into question. My old boss with the rare kind of offensive humor that actually works in the workplace gets to include trans people in the banter, in a way that he very clearly gets from and admires in his nonbinary kid. A good cis friend of mine used the word "dysphoria" to describe something he was feeling and we were able to have a really deep and supportive conversation about it once I realized how similarly it affected us, despite him being very comfortably cis.
Queer liberation is good for everyone and I'm so happy to see more and more people who get this.
I am working class. I have packed thousands of cases of avocados, boxed thousands of clothes in a factory, and only recently moved to teaching. Trans issues 100% do alienate everyone I work with. They are brought up by many different people to prove that white people are weak and perverted. This is coming from Sri Lankan garment workers, Vietnamese seamstresses and Mexican avocado packers.
They are brought up by many different people to prove that white people are weak and perverted
L-o-L.
You mean they are brought up by transphobic people to prove they are transphobic? Who in their fucking right mind use trans people as an excuse for working class issues?
White people have enslaved races of people and nearly eradicated others and now half of them are trying to be accepting of others and you won't have it?
Sad but unsurprising to see a bona fide member of the working class downvoted for pointing out that some of the popular rhetoric is pointlessly divisive and does nothing to help the working class.
Many of todays activists seem to be doing anything but actually helping the various communities they are oh so eager to bully people on behalf of.
The folks I work with would never associate with the chronically online hexbear types you see here, the ones constantly blaming "crackers" for transphobia.
Are they really ok with a candidate who's going to try to deport them (at best) or kill them (at worst) for not being white enough, just because they can't get over their transphobia? If so, then we really are lost
Which is conservative propaganda. That's not intrinsic to the working class, it's intrinsic to watching fox news and listening to Russian state media call our military soft.
Yeah, people here don't want to hear it, but unfortunately it's the truth. You or I may care, the great majority of people have probably never even met a trans person, if they have they haven't realized, they don't see it as an important matter, not when we have the ecosystem on a destruction course and growing economic inequality (and they don't care much about those if not that they are facing growing difficulties in their daily lives).
That might sound like a big claim to make, but it was Communist ideology and political strategy that provided the theoretical and practical architecture of the earliest effort to win gay equality in the United States—the Mattachine Society, a group whose ideas underpinned all the struggles and victories in the country that have been won over the past half century. Without them, there would no doubt have been a movement for queer equality in one form or another, as there were already stirrings elsewhere prior to Mattachine, especially in Europe. But without Mattachine, the movement that emerged would likely have looked a lot different than it does now.
I suspect the American left focused on LGBTQ+ issues because it was a "safe" mission.
Increasing official tolerance there was no threat to their donors or the wealthy in general. Nobody had to pay more in taxes or submit to meaningful government regulstion to enforce "don't explicitly fire/assault/refuse to marry someone for being gay/trans". Arguably those policies could have ecen come out of broader expectations for "stay out of people's personal lives" rather than making special cutouts and declaring a marginal group.
Looks impressive, accomplishes very little. Pretty much sums up the Democratic party for the last 50 years.
I don't know what "very little" means to you, but I have friends that are married with children, unlikely to face violence motivated by bigotry (location dependant, YMMV), and have legal protections from discrimination in housing and employment.
When I was a kid they could get fired or evicted with no recource, and if they had the temerity to poke their head out of the closet someone could kick their ass with impunity unless they were seriously injured or killed, and sometimes even then.
The ones I've met have all been centrists, eager to throw vulnerable minorities under the bus in their endless and fruitless quest to appease fascists.
I mean I understand the point. The left does a great job of creating noise about issues that affect low numbers of people that end up galvanizing more opposition than it generates in votes. If the thing you advocate for ends up getting more votes against it rather than for it due to your advocacy, you just hurt your own cause.
It shouldn't, but it does. We do not live in a perfect world.
When doctors at the emergency room have to make decisions about who to treat first, they follow guidelines like this one. Those help save lives, by making sure that those patients who need the most urgent care get it first.
In the same way, elevating LGBT issues above more pressing needs of the general population doesn't help anyone, not even LGBT people.
How does gender-affirming care help someone who is homeless and jobless with no healthcare? Is proper pronoun awareness really more important than environmental protection, or combating political corruption?
Just to be clear, I 100% agree that trans rights are human rights. It is an important issue, and deserves attention. But what about black lives matter? Isn't that important anymore? Are we still on that bandwagon, or did it get old? (I realize I'm getting snarky here, my apologies)
Addressing the unnecessary suffering of minority groups of all kinds is important. But putting them above issues that are critical to the survival of our society as a whole hurts everyone, even the people that these policies are designed to help.
Building a large working class movement is difficult when you have a bunch of socially conservative landmines that can divide people. The War on Queerness has always and forever been a war on the working class - often the youngest and most vulnerable, at that. The socio-economic benefits of this hostility only ever accrues to the entrenched establishment.
Fear of alienating the mainstream by withholding support for minority groups only empowers authoritarians who profit from a divided public.
Jews are a very small part of the population. If Republicans were passing laws specifically to persecute Jews, would you be making the same excuses for ignoring it? None of us are free until all of us are.
My understanding of the history of the fediverse, such as it is, is that it was initially used by marginalized groups. Specifically LGBTQ people who felt (and in fact were) persecuted on other platforms.
Trans rights are a core issue to many people here. This is likely why your take is being met with outright rejection by so many.
I understand. But all the down votes and hurt feelings in the world don't change the validity of my point. It is entirely possible to hurt a cause by generating more opposition than support.
Political strategists are there to make party winthemselves money even if it hurts the feelings of a minority, more news at 6
So many of these consultants just exist to restate the bigotries and biases of the candidate, in hopes that they'll be hired on as Yes-Men in a doomed campaign. The GOP has been overplaying its hand on trans-politics since the Obama era. Candidates that run on this shit routinely get washed in all but the safest elections, because they sound like freaks when they run around town posting weird AI art with "IS THIS A WOMAN?!?! VOTE FOR ME!!!" next to it.
But because its become such a baked-in GOP strategy, we're now forced to treat "When can a mall cop grope your daughter's crotch to check if she's secretly a man?" as a serious campaign question.
Strategists don't care. They know their campaign is paid for by a bunch of bible-thumping neanderthals. So this kind of campaigning just won't stop. Because, paradoxically, the losing only makes people madder and more conspiracy-minded and more willing to throw good money after bad.
With friends like those, who needs enemas?
(I know, Onion headline. Still, I'm sure there are plenty of people just like him all over the world. Try again ki- Moo hoo ha ha ha!)
Most working-class voters I know are alienated by phrasing, but rarely by pro-LGBT positions alone. Trans rights are very viable for working-class support, you just have to find the right phrasing for it.