• buh [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    we all know the right has Only One Joke, but has anyone investigated why that one joke is about gender? 🤔

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      because transphobia is still a borderline acceptable bigotry to hold in day to day American society. The etiquette around how to talk about gender still hasn’t found its way into broader, cis normative culture. Believe me, this is a weird thing to say and it’s weird to acknowledge, but about half of cis, straight people in the US have absolutely no idea what a transgender person is, and most of them have never even encountered a trans person. I doubt most Americans could define what a trans woman is without conflating trans women with drag queens.

      I remember a statistic from like 5 years ago that more Americans claim to regularly talk to angels than Americans who talk to trans people. But because it’s a borderline acceptable bigotry, it’s going to take precedence. Believe me they would probably rather make jokes about Latinos, disabled people, black people, whatever. They definitely want to make jokes about gay people, but homophobia is slightly on the unacceptable bigotry side of normal culture at the moment, but it’s swinging back to the acceptable side.

      That’s also another reason why a fictional blue haired transgender person is the target of ridicule for right wingers, because trans people aren’t real people to them. Trans people are a statistic to them, or something a politician mentions, or the subject of a meme. Trans people aren’t actual live humans for them to interact with. Most of their experience mocking trans people probably won’t get pushback and when it does, it’ll probably be another cis person because that’s their social circle. trans people are just a kneejerk reaction of “that person looks weird and weird is bad.” The blue hair is thrown in to conflate any sort of young person within a subculture as trans. That must be part of it too, like an angle of “Look at these dumb smug young people, they’re so dumb they don’t even know what gender they are”

      in any case, death to transphobes. They’re not even worth wasting bullets on. Throw them in a volcano or kill them with a shovel.

    • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Probably because they were raised to uncritically believe that MAN IS WHEN PENIS AND WOMAN IS WHEN VAGINA is some sort of One Universal Truth™ so they are terminally stuck in their 1950’s understanding of the world, and anything that challenges that One Universal Truth™ must be derided as some kind of “mental illness” because clearly our understandings of biology or sociology or any other anthropological field are incapable of being updated over time, because that would mean they would have to actually learn something new, and god forbid they try to learn anything new beyond grade school.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        they were raised

        Worth remembering that the overwhelming fanatical obsession with trans people is only a few years old. Before that it was gay people, before that it was “Urban youth”, and so on and so forth. They can be re-trained to switch to a new target in less than a year.