I feel like people might think this is figurative, or like maybe it's a simplistic story, but it's very real. In the 70s, it was never "LGBT" it was gay organizations, lesbian organizations, transsexual or transvestite organizations, gay and lesbian organizations, but not all together. It was only the threat posed by the AIDS crisis that spurred the creation of organizations like Queer Nation it was in this climate that the coalition building happened, and where things like equal marriage became a rallying cry (as many people watched their loved ones die and have their affairs revert to--often homophobic--next of kin rather than their lifelong partners)
Divide and conquer is an age old strategy.
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Getting Steven Universe vibes from this.
Imagine your people actually having political value instead of being thrown away in the badlands and forgotten.
The biggest problem with the Trans specific community is that there's a lot of hesitation from within and surrounding allies to call out the crazy stuff that's being pushed. Most people are okay, for example, with queer books being in schools. Most people are not okay with pornography in certain books. Can't we push queer books that talk about age-appropriate sexuality without pictures of people giving blow jobs to strap-ons? My mom would have had a fit if she found anything like that between straight couples in my school library.
So, it comes out that some books contain this explicit material, and instead of the queer activists/supporters saying: "Alright, yeah, this material shouldn't be here. How about replacing them with these queer books that don't contain explicit material?" They said: "fuck you, there's nothing wrong with this, you're just a bigoted transphobe."
That's where we're losing a lot of support. Because most people draw a line at explicit material for those underage. If they physically see that it's there, and advocates are shouting that it's not there (and if it is there, that it's a good thing anyway 🙄) then rational supporters are going to take a big step back and say "whoa, that's going too far." And you're going to get some who say: "yeah, let's take it all out, at least until we can be sure the explicit stuff is gone." The tactic of denying that the explicit stuff exists in the face of reality does not work. It causes people to pull away instead of supporting the overall goal.
The real fantasy here is that the lgbtqia+ community is something other than fractions of a percentage of the population with extremely niche interests. Voltron all you like, but you're still an extremely small percentage of the whole with an extremely overexposed media footprint. I'm glad yall are being celebrated again as my people once celebrated and venerated twinsouls, but we also need to refocus our outrage on the shit that affects all of us, like net neutrality and basic right to live shit. Gender affirming care is wonderful for the people who have ready access to food, water, and shelter. I am more worried about the people who don't have even those basic things. And the number of those people in this country grows every day.
I mean, let's not pretend that everyone in that group thinks the same way about this issue.
Plus, we'd do better to stop equating people finding gender ideology to be incoherent with "intolerance."
