like the whole thing about us transes is that there aren't very many of us and we don't really matter in material terms. but people are losing their goddamn minds about us anyways! there is no possible ""materialist"" explanation of this!
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Oligarchs with materialist interests use transes mostly as a prop to lure & distract voters from seeing corruption.
The small size of the trans population makes it easier to fib about them and also to withhold empathy.
Right. IMO this is actually WHY trans "issues" have risen to the forefront of political conflict: there's absolutely nothing there except the basic question of "should people be free to live their own lives as they see fit?" in remarkably distilled form
Not to put too rosy a spin on the history, things were certainly never great, but going back a fairly long time there was a lot of mainstream attitudes ranging from mild curiosity to indifference. The raging obsessive hate as a major political issue was largely whipped up just in the past few years.
My yanked-out-of-my-ass hypothesis: As the population grows more diverse, the only way to maintain a dominant "white" plurality is to include more and more previously "out" groups -- Catholics, Jews (sometimes), Central and Eastern Europeans, etc. 1/2
2/2
As such, they need to keep finding new enemies from an increasingly shrinking pool, which requires amplifying the "threat" to utterly insane levels. I suspect a viewer of Fox News thinks there's a half dozen "boys playing girl's sports" in every HS in the country.
When they lost gay marriage, they realized they needed a fight that wasn't entirely legally settled. And although they faced pushback at first (e.g., the bathroom bill in NC), they were able to make substantive inroads that fed their base, especially after Trump's loss.
It was a rare niche deep in the weeds thing, but there were even some social conservatives who talked themselves into claiming they were strongly anti-gay but at least relatively more indifferent to trans because the latter was actually closer to conforming to gender roles in their warped logic.
Deidre McCloskey's memoir was in 1999 and got a decent amount of respectful mainstream notice without much controversy in a way that'd be the subject of complete dumpster fire discourse flamewars if it was published today.
she also had to fight in court to not be locked up and forcibly given antipsychotics after estranged family tried to have her committed about three years earlier than that
For sure, very much not good times overall, just that her book got a mostly positive reception without the kind of massive hater controversy you'd expect today.
I was just at a dinner with her the other night and she made that same observation, that's why it came to mind.
the right wing is using you as a scapegoat in order to gut public programs, also part of a larger ideological project to control women/the bounds of womanhood and by extension the reproduction (literal and social) of the working class, basically to lower wages/increase prison pops
If the hard far right can convince otherwise decent people to sacrifice the smallest and most disfavored group so as to stay 'in' and save the larger disfavored groups - the battle is lost.
is the thesis supposed to be that this is a recent change?
i thought the panic about the transes is often motivated by "protect the children! protect the women" but of course those have been used to justify oppression forever. surely the materialists have had something to say about that past?
Yes, though also isn't a crucial element enforcement of patriarchal gender norms on cis people, attacking trans-ness to attack all gender liberation? Which brings us back into the Fraser/Butler territory of whether gender & sexuality are "material" (clearly yes, though the ML influencers insist not)
Remembering that /r/ultraleft tried to paint the rise in transphobia as an operation to cut medical costs and social welfare costs. Just lmao. The juice isn’t worth the propaganda squeeze.
Defining "materialism" is a bit of a slippery slope though - do the countless little ancillary benefits you receive as a member of the in-group in a strongly hierarchical society count as a material interest or not?
I think there is a corollary to this view many leftists have, which is that people by default are motivated by base impulses like bigotry and sadism when they're not focused on their standard of living, so any time they get distracted from that laser focus, reactionaries win.
People are a jumble of impulses and motivations and they do not have two default settings that are "bigotry" or "pocketbook." Perhaps you allow yourself to have higher moral beliefs and concerns than this, and that's true of others as well.
Well, no. I would say the default settings are "solidarity" and "aggression"; solidarity is usually reserved from close friends and family, but aggression is the natural response to everyone else UNLESS people are convinced that wider solidarity is in their material interests
Do you think this is true of yourself? That you're fundamentally selfish and would either be acting out in aggression against others for the fun or adopting politics that requires cooperation and teamwork because it's in your personal financial interest to do so?
Yeah. I struggle against it all the time. "There are two wolves" is the corny way of putting it. Perhaps you're a better person who's naturally kind and doesn't have those kinds of impulses, in which case, I'll vote for you.
There is a certain kind of person who really is mostly motivated by antisocial traits, up to an including a possible personality disorder, who sincerely believes that everyone is like them and is just faking it. Some of those people express that through leftwing politics. But that's not most.
This ultimately a very bleak view of humanity that fortunately is not even remotely correct, but it implicitly shows up in rhetoric time and again. What's keeps the brutish hordes from wanting to tear each other apart is class solidarity and as one rises the other falls.
the two professional labor forces with the most trans representation and solidarity-- tech and media -- got absolutely destroyed by automation, decentralization, and interest rate increases. not to mention college educated people broadly. there's definitely material explanation.
no, but it explains why the hatred wasn't quelled and disowned like it was in the mid 10s. it's just that the "materialists" look at the exact wrong side of the equation for the impact of material reality.
okay so like. number one, none of this is plausible. number two, even if it were true, this would still leave the part where they hate us without a material explanation
I think this is the “original sin” of the American new left lol. The old left and center-left were the biggest proponents of the postwar grand compromise between workers and producers that crushed consumers, of which the new left was happy to help dismantle on their behalf.
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The small size of the trans population makes it easier to fib about them and also to withhold empathy.
As such, they need to keep finding new enemies from an increasingly shrinking pool, which requires amplifying the "threat" to utterly insane levels. I suspect a viewer of Fox News thinks there's a half dozen "boys playing girl's sports" in every HS in the country.
I was just at a dinner with her the other night and she made that same observation, that's why it came to mind.
Georgina Beyer MP, _Change For The Better_
If the hard far right can convince otherwise decent people to sacrifice the smallest and most disfavored group so as to stay 'in' and save the larger disfavored groups - the battle is lost.
You sacrifice one, you will sacrifice another.
One reason this is the hill to die on.
i thought the panic about the transes is often motivated by "protect the children! protect the women" but of course those have been used to justify oppression forever. surely the materialists have had something to say about that past?
The only way out is to show in practice that material gains *require* solidarity, because bigotry and sadism are FUN