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  • MAGA can hold multiple conflicting viewpoints at once. There is no logic to them, they will just go with whatever is useful for causing harm. MAGA is made up of the losers who bullied everyone in middle school and never grew up.

  • They would consider you whichever one allows them to hurt you in the moment. It's not an honest belief, they just want to be cruel to people.

    • I recall having a conversation with a transphobe and it coming down to me going, 'I just don't understand why you want to be cruel to trans people.' He tried to brush it off but it was obvious that he was simply trying to dress up his bigotry with pseudointellectual bs.

      That, and the tried and true, "I'm just concerned about women in women's spaces. Post transition women commit the same number of crimes as men."

      Where did you read this? Can you show me what crimes they commit? Who did the study?

      "Oh I can't remember this now, can't we have a debate about this."

      That's when I realised that this was pointless. Because, for him, this was just a game. That the rights of trans people were something we could "intellectually" parse out. All while actual, real world people are being harassed, discriminated against and killed.

      Fuck that shit. And fuck that guy.

      • This was one of the more baffling experiences in coming out - seeing some of the most scientifically minded, media literate people I know suddenly shut off all of those instincts when they encountered "the trans debate." Like someone with a healthy amount of skepticism around statistics linking me bullshit "average number of sexual partners" figures from a conversion therapy lobbying group. Or someone with an active dislike of sports suddenly deciding that the sanctity of women's sports is more important than their relationship with their daughter.

        The best explanation I've been able to come up with is that gender is regimented by complex trauma, often when we are children, and these are the types of cognitive distortions that occur when we're in fight-flight-freeze-fawn responses. Flashbacks are often thought of as vivid sensory experiences i.e. re-experiencing the traumatic event, but it's a spectrum of responses. Many are more subtle and feel extremely normal in the moment, while our ability to reason is actually overtaken by our need to feel safe in the face of a perceived threat.

        I think this kind of statistics vomit can sometimes be a "flight" response to a perceived threat of someone being trans in proximity to them. Flight responses are characterized as attempting to avoid a threat by throwing oneself into action not to overcome, but escape the threat. Perhaps a wall of text with nuanced-and-reasoned set dressing and lots of links and numbers feels like a wall between them and "the problem."

      • "Debate" is used as a foot in the door

        Edit: also happy cake day

    • Eww, thanks for telling me. That’s truly something…

  • Everyone is going on about how maga is inherently anti trans but the situation is more nuanced

    If you’re terminally online then yes, maga is 100% anti trans all the time but irl that is not always the case

    I provide gender affirming care and work with families where someone is trans and their families are MAGA people, respect pronouns and names, give rides home from surgery, call partners boyfriend/girlfriend as appropriate, and will even at times get mad at others for not respecting their child’s identity

    This is not a super common thing, to be clear, but it’s also not shockingly rare. Maybe 20-25% of my clients? It also gets into the whole “humanizing” factor. These people are so insulated from minority groups thanks to continued segregation that they can easily demonize them but lgbt minorities can pop up in their families much easier. That’s why they fucking hate acceptance movements; you can’t white flight from your queer kid but you can bully them into a loveless marriage that ends in divorce or suicide. But when they finally do integrate they generally recognize that while there are aspects of a culture they still despise the people within it are still just people, especially if those people are the people they’ve known and loved their whole life

    It’s cognitive dissonance at its finest though and creates tons of friction. Client is obviously very upset that family is voting to end their rights and family usually does mental gymnastics to not see it that way. Also majority of instances, overwhelmingly so, are trans men. This is all based on my anecdote so take it with a grain of salt but imo trans women are most often used for propaganda and portrayed as monsters so trans men sometimes fly under the radar via erasure. though to be absolutely clear key word is sometimes, trans men absolutely get a ton of shit flung at them too. This probably plays into the fact that trans women outnumber trans men by a significant margin and more importantly/likely systems of misogyny, people hate women.

    That said I would generally assume the worst, especially if you encounter a group of Trump people, or if you are in a place where you are doing discourse online

  • It's hard to say, I live in deep red Texas and I'm openly gay and have been for decades. The only times that I have experienced homophobia in this state has come from liberals when they learned that socialist and communist do not support their party. I've never had a Republican have any issue with me, my husband or our relationship.

37 comments