So - where can I go exactly?
Sarcasm activated!
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Jesus Christ, is it that hard to be accepting and loving towards others?
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I’d settle for not trying to murder us - baby steps apparently.
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I know… this is sickening. And it’s not like it’s just some third world problem either. It’s not like trans people aren’t subjected to all sorts of discrimination right here in Amurica…
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I know it does no good for anyone now, but every time I here about these intolerant bigots, I’m frustrated that they can’t see that they’re the narrow-minded villains history will at best pity. A bully who can’t see the fear and insecurity diving them is…infuriating and tragic all at once.
ETA: And that.
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Stories like this terrify me. The line separating us from savagery seems an awful lot like a polite fiction, one which whole countries are experimenting with crossing.
I live in Massachusetts- we were the first state to legalize gay marriage and we lead the nation in protection of transgender rights. Overall this is a progressive place, but not so progressive that my daughter, who is queer and out and in high school, isn’t harassed on a daily basis just for being who she is.
When I see the animus displayed by Trump and the GOP toward LGBTQIA people and when I register the low-key hostility of my ostensibly liberal neighbors, I fear for my daughter’s future. We are poised atop a steep slope with jagged rocks at the bottom.
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Holy fucksocks; humanity is such a shitty species, sometimes.
SMGDH
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my bar is set even lower…I don’t need you to accept or love others. Is it too much to ask to just leave them the fuck alone and let them exist?
So if you have such an issue with transgender people, fine…no one said you HAVE to have trans friends, or date a trans person, or have them over for dinner…could you just …ya know…NOT MAKE DEATH THREATS? Is that truly too much to ask?
Seriously…I don’t like NY Jets fans. While I choose not to sit and drink beer and watch a football game with them; I am also not openly calling for them to be murdered in the streets! This really is not that hard to simply live and let live.
(and ofc your point is totally valid)
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“Burn her!” is not the fucking response I expected to her speech.
Actually, scratch that, it is not what I wanted, but totally what I expected. Just not from so many voices.
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I’m tempted to offer the fascists a complementary cigarette and blindfold, but that would be treated as being worse than the violent transphobia that is a daily reality for transgender people. Some people are more equal than others.
I’m talking to a friend who is right now pointing out that the original definition of genocide also applies to transphobia. Maybe we should stop holding back and just call out their crimes against humanity for what they are.
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And to make sure they have the same rights and resources as everyone else?
No, it shouldn’t be.
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I don’t know, man… here’s my thing on that. Rights are connected to the nation-state and with the capitalist system, yeah? We TALK about inalienable rights, etc, and even have international structures that talk of such things, too (which are quickly breaking down in the current global environment, with the international structures seemingly unable to defend those rights in any sovereign country). This has been developing over the long term of the modern era (from the enlightenment and age of revolutions). So our rights are something that are contingent, even if we don’t see them that way… We know this, because we are in the process of hard fought wins over the past century and a half or so for a number of different groups being whittled away at by right wing regimes, often in the form of threats of violence or outright violence of various kinds.
So what do we have if the legal structures that protect the people who are deemed “other” (by whatever metric of the particular context) break down? That’s the thing that I don’t know how to get past other than say love and acceptance for all might be the way forward. But what happens when someone hates someone else for whatever reason? The same problem we have with a rights regime… and ALL of this can be weaponized against minority groups in order to keep some small group of people in power…
It reminds me of that line from Laurie Anderson’s O Superman… “Cause when love is gone/there’s always justice/and when justice is gone/there’s always force/and when force is gone/there’s always mom…”
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A civil war.
Despite appearances, I swear this isn’t a facetious response. I will cop to it being a bit glib, though.
Seriously, though: universal love and acceptance would solve most of our problems overnight, but I do not know that they can be compelled out of people. I’m not even sure they can be effectively taught by any sort of industrialized schooling. You can however compel people to respect a certain agreed-upon set of universal rights and on a rather grimy level this is done through threat of force: you can’t burn trans* people because if you do, some other people will come and arrest you and if you resist they will shoot you.
We’ve been very bad at doing this, of course, but on the whole better over time.
However, if the strictures providing this fail spectacularly then it behooves the people in favor of justice to provide the backing violence that’s always been lurking unpleasantly in the back of all high-minded declarations of universal rights.
Hence: civil war.
sure… I’m aware… but…
That is current breaking down, all over the place. It’s broken down before, and is doing so now, so it’s not a magic bullet either.
As a historian, I don’t believe in the teleological narrative of progress. Any progress we make is due to hard work on our part, not on happen-stance.
This is not an option.
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The last American civil war had a bloody, detrimental impact on countless lives. If it comes to ever having a second one, it will be far worse this time, and the country as we know it will likely not survive.
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Oh, absolutely. I meant only to describe, not predict. So far it’s been tending up, all things considered. We can assume we’ve been doing something right. But that’s no guarantee. Indeed, as you say:
As for civil war not being an option… I mean, it’s always an option. They do happen and America is not under some special divine grace protecting it. It’s not a particularly desirable option, but if and when blackshirts come for your neighbors, you don’t really have any desirable options left.
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Moreover, although the American Civil War was necessary to begin the long process of freeing approximately three million Americans from slavery, the fact that six generations and two World Wars later we’re still incrementally working on the two steps forward one step back on that process proves that while war is sometimes unavoidable, it isn’t really a solution to the problems that made it so. And it’s a poor last resort for instituting or restoring the rule of law (as opposed to the rule of the gun masquerading as the the rule of law), not least of all because the “good guys” aren’t guaranteed to prevail in a violent conflict.
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Fuckin’ A.
An option that won’t work is no real “option” at all.
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