[danShumway]

> I'm trying hard to correlate "We were arrested and discriminated against in the past"

Current bathroom bills, bans on transgender medical care, and efforts to equate LGBTQ+ acceptance and care with grooming are not "the past", they're happening right now.

[Banana699]

>Current bathroom bills

Is that government/public bathrooms or private businesses bathrooms? Aren't LGBT++ people extremely fond of saying "It's a private business, it can do whatever it wants", or does that only work when people critical of them are banned off the internet ?

>bans on transgender medical care

I'm highly, highly skeptical that a western country really did ban transgender "medical" care. Most likely it's an obscure law that just made it a private expense not paid for by tax money.

You can prove me wrong though.

>efforts to equate LGBTQ+ acceptance and care with grooming

I have a feeling that people who are reacting to pre-12-years-olds being shown pornographic imagery of 2 boys doing a sexual activity by defending it as "Queer sex education", I have just the slightest feeling, that those people are, indeed, defending what amounts to pedophilic tendencies. When those people are the most visible parts of a community and they're shouting their rather unusual opinions without the slightest pushback or dissent from others in the same community, I have a feeling, again just a very slight feeling, that this community does, in fact, present a very attractive affiliation for pedophiles.

In other words, if some people want to be treated as equal, maybe they should start acting as equals, respecting the things that everybody else respect. Maybe they should stop being the spoilt children of corporate giants who call for banning/firing anyone who looks at them funnily, maybe they should disavow clearly criminal tendencies within their own. Maybe they should stop treating a joke as a genocide.

Maybe then, just maybe, other people would start seeing them as ordinry humans with the same duties, and consequently the same rights and respect, as the rest of us.

[danShumway]

You need to do more research on this, even a passing inquiry into current transgender legislation being debated would have answered these questions.

> Is that government/public bathrooms or private businesses bathrooms?

It is the government dictating how private businesses structure their bathrooms. That's ranged from attempts to flat-out ban businesses from offering multi-person gender neutral bathrooms to requiring businesses to attach signage "warning" people that they have LGBTQ+ friendly bathrooms. It's not only state governments attacking transgender populations, it is also the state interfering in private business.

> bans on transgender medical care

Texas's ban on affirmative transgender care literally just went into effect, how do you not know about this? Notably, Texas doesn't only ban transitioning, and it doesn't even only ban puberty blockers, it bans affirmative care of any kind including therapy for minors. There have been talks of extending those bans past 18 years up to 25 year olds.

> I have a feeling that people who are reacting to pre-12-years-olds being shown pornographic imagery of 2 boys doing a sexual activity by defending it as "Queer sex education", I have just the slightest feeling, that those people are, indeed, defending what amounts to pedophilic tendencies.

You're out of touch with the current discourse about transgender rights if you think that these are the only people being called pedophiles. Florida's "don't say gay" bill bans any discussion of gender/orientation regardless of whether or not it's sexual in nature. When schools are threatening students that they can't use the word "gay" during graduation speeches, then I'm sorry but this is very clearly not about protecting minors or preventing grooming, and lawmakers equating pedophilia with even just basic acknowledgement that queer people exist is dangerous, bigoted rhetoric.

You're arguing that this pushback is related to extreme or clearly inappropriate lessons, but again, even just a passing amount of research into the rhetoric being pushed out by mainstream governors and lawmakers would be enough to show that there is a coordinated effort happening to characterize LGBTQ+ identity as entirely sexual in nature and innately deviant. The intention is to create a perspective that someone openly identifying as gay inherently makes that person dangerous around children.

[gykno]

The root cause of all this is the LGBTQ+ in aggregate. Everything after the first three letters is irrelevant to sexual orientation.

If it had just been left as the LGB, that's something people can get on board with much more easily, from an individual liberties perspective and the principle of equal treatment under the law.

However, the TQ+, with its fundamental reframing of what it means to be a man or a woman, in terms of gender identity rather than sex, is something quite different. It's compelling people to believe something very controversial: that some men are actually women, and some women are actually man, and some people are somehow neither.

No surprise that this is getting pushback. But it's unfortunate, and really quite galling, that the LGB are also being dragged into this mess, particularly given all the gains made in recent years on equality.

[danShumway]

I have some very bad news for you if you think that a lot of transphobic, aphobic, and queerphobic people in aggregate aren't going to eventually come for LGB people too. If you think the LGB movement is going to pacify bigots by throwing transgender people under the bus... it's just a bad plan, they're not going to be pacified. A lot of the politicians banning affirmative care for transgender people would love to roll back gay protections.

But whatever, this is mostly just identity gatekeeping anyway. Transgender people were always active in early LGB rights movements from the beginning, and the idea that gay identity is normal but transgenderism is "controversial" is just laughably ignorant of how controversial gay identity used to be (and how controversial it still is in many circles).

People have some really serious short-term memory loss if they think that the LGB rights movement didn't go through the exact same pushback that the transgender rights movement is facing today, and that pushback included a ton of people who were all too eager to talk about how "respectable" gays deserved rights, but the fringe gays who did stuff like hold hands in public or talk about their partners openly were holding back the rest of the movement.

[gykno]

They may have been active in the movement since the early days, but it's also been a point of contention then, particularly amongst lesbians.

In particular, the modern gender critical movement is a direct continuation of an ideological split amongst lesbian feminists back in the 1970s, one group of whom considered transsexual males to be honorary women and welcome in their spaces as lesbians, and the other who regarded them as straight men who were infiltrating and imposing themselves, and effectively erasing lesbians as a group.

In some parts of the world, LGB acceptance is very high amongst the general population. Over 80% in much of western Europe, Canada and Australia. And over 70% in the US and Argentina.

What we're seeing with this pushback against trans activism in these more accepting places isn't because people have suddenly become more homophobic, but for very specific reasons caused by this activism - effectively the same issue that the feminists of the 1970s were arguing furiously about, but in the public sphere.

Now you are right that some homophobic politicians have jumped onto this issue too, and used it as a lever to push against LGB rights. But they're doing so opportunistically. The more fundamental issue, opposed by many across the political spectrum who have otherwise discordant beliefs, is this elevation of gender identity above sex. For example, in the UK, on a grassroots level it's been mostly left-wing feminist women pushing back against this, not homophobic conservatives.

[danShumway]

> In some parts of the world, LGB acceptance is very high amongst the general population.

Because of activism in the face of people who called gay orientation unnatural or dangerous -- activism that trans-exclusionists now want to see stopped just because they're worried about backlash and because they feel that they personally, individually no longer need that activism in order to be accepted in mainstream society.

If you went back in time you would see the same conversation we're having now play out about both bisexual and asexual people who both have faced the same kind of "are they really gay" gatekeeping that's happening here. If you went back further, you would see another split among feminists about whether lesbians could be considered feminist or whether they were distracting from feminist goals. If you went back even further, you'd see the same splits in feminist circles about intersectionality and whether talking about racism made feminism unattractive to white people. At every step, these exclusions were justified by talking about how the "less proper" activists were holding the broader gay/feminist/whatever movement back from mainstream acceptance.

It's the same story over and over again with each pushback characterizing the people they want to exclude as if they're uniquely controversial or dangerous to the movement. But they're not; it's just gatekeeping. Excusing bigotry that labels transgender people as pedophiles as if that bigotry is just reactionary pushback is really historically ignorant, given that literally the exact same "gays are pedophiles and groomers" rhetoric was used against LGB groups (and was especially used against bisexual people). There are parallels here that are impossible to ignore.

> For example, in the UK, on a grassroots level it's been mostly left-wing feminist women pushing back against this, not homophobic conservatives.

If trans-exclusionists want to talk strategy, then arguing that identity is the same as sexual deviancy, and aligning themselves with homophobic reactionaries is extremely short-sighted, foolish, and dangerous to the overall gay rights movement.

From the beginning, transgender people have done just as much to fight for LGB rights as anyone else in the movement and they deserve acceptance and support. Transgender people helped these so-called feminists put up the ladder, you don't get to pull the ladder up behind you now.