We’ve been through this before in the German Reich. It didn’t matter to antisemites that blood libel was a myth or the stab-in-the-back myth was contrived fiction to explain how sacred Germany lost the Great War. These people want to believe Other people are vermin and their precarity will be solved by deporting them to elsewhere.
So it is with the recent propaganda pushes against trans folk (also LGBT+) The groomer myth is so old we have PSA movies warning boys about The Homosexual in from the 1960s, when our society still gave zero fucks about children’s welfare.
The fear of the trans woman in the women’s rest room is the same as the fear of the black family in a white neighborhood. They are eager to believe violence is justified. And no piles of statistics about incidents and crime rates is going to change their minds. They want a valid cause to purge Americans, and will settle for a vicious rumor perpetuated by FOX News and OAN.
Yeah. That’s why no amount of appeal-to-morals arguments is going to convince them. Nor will facts.
The reason why we should argue against their world view is to convince those still on the fence, those who are at the beginning of the pipeline and can yet be saved.
If someone is on the fence between “trans women are rapists pretending to be women to gain access to women” and “please don’t be mean to us”, then the latter is going to look like a weak argument and the former is going to look “reasonable”. Hence the “facts versus feelings” narrative.
We constantly need to reiterate the central point: that gender is entirely fluid and a social construct not set in stone. Because that’s a genuine argument that could convince people.
We’ve been through this before in the German Reich. It didn’t matter to antisemites that blood libel was a myth or the stab-in-the-back myth was contrived fiction to explain how sacred Germany lost the Great War. These people want to believe Other people are vermin and their precarity will be solved by deporting them to elsewhere.
So it is with the recent propaganda pushes against trans folk (also LGBT+) The groomer myth is so old we have PSA movies warning boys about The Homosexual in from the 1960s, when our society still gave zero fucks about children’s welfare.
The fear of the trans woman in the women’s rest room is the same as the fear of the black family in a white neighborhood. They are eager to believe violence is justified. And no piles of statistics about incidents and crime rates is going to change their minds. They want a valid cause to purge Americans, and will settle for a vicious rumor perpetuated by FOX News and OAN.
Yeah. That’s why no amount of appeal-to-morals arguments is going to convince them. Nor will facts. The reason why we should argue against their world view is to convince those still on the fence, those who are at the beginning of the pipeline and can yet be saved.
If someone is on the fence between “trans women are rapists pretending to be women to gain access to women” and “please don’t be mean to us”, then the latter is going to look like a weak argument and the former is going to look “reasonable”. Hence the “facts versus feelings” narrative.
We constantly need to reiterate the central point: that gender is entirely fluid and a social construct not set in stone. Because that’s a genuine argument that could convince people.