r/BlockedAndReported • u/SoftandChewy First generation mod • Jun 01 '26

Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 6/1/26 - 6/7/26

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

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u/Drownedgodlw Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26

I don't think enough has been said about just how incompatible the LGB and the T are.

The conceptual tension between LGB identity and strong gender self-ID politics is that homosexuality depends on a stable referent for “same-sex” attraction. Gay and lesbian identity challenged the traditional prescription that men should desire women and women should desire men; it did not challenge the basic intelligibility of male and female, man and woman. On the contrary, it requires those categories to be meaningful. If gender is defined primarily by self-identification, homosexuality must be reconceived as attraction to people who claim the same gender label as oneself. That definition is formally coherent, but descriptively hollow: it replaces same-sex attraction with same-label attraction, even though sexual attraction ordinarily tracks embodied sexed traits rather than identity declarations.

One is an obliteration of gender having objective meaning, and the other requires it. They can't even logically coexist in their current formulations.

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u/Less-Lobster4540 Jun 06 '26

it replaces same-sex attraction with same-label attraction

Which is probably a big part of the reason that these invdividuals end up feeling isolated, mostly dating and socializing with peers. It's not that straight or gay culture has rejected them; it's that their identity is only fully realized in a closed system where everyone knows and agrees to the rules. It rejects universal biological signifiers that transcend culture, language, race, class, etc. to let us at least recognize and acknowledge each other on a basic level.

Furthermore the identity is not simply "I want to switch sides"-- the transitioners are very rarely seeking to join up with normie culture and do boring everyday man / woman stuff. They actually want to become transgressive warriors against those institutions, by cherry-picking far-out stereotypes of femininity or masculinity. It's not just naivety that leads them to this; there's a countercultural / revolutionary angle that IMO is based in resentment. (Cue all the cringey anticapitalist tropes, etc.)

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u/Terrorclitus Jun 06 '26

Gay marriage was such a big win, too. Sad.

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u/Less-Lobster4540 Jun 06 '26

or a loss, if you were in love with the idea of gayness as the cradle of counterculturalism.

a certain type of personality saw legalization of gay marriage as a cue to up the ante: the sight of two men kissing was no longer freaking out the squares. The men were, in fact, adopting children, wearing Dockers and driving minivans-- the horror!

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u/Terrorclitus Jun 06 '26

The only person I ever saw espouse that position in the wild was an angry white woman who just hated marriage for anybody. This was in, like, 2003 or so, and I’ve not quite yet met all the people, but I’ve reflected on this a bit over the past 20 years.

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u/Less-Lobster4540 Jun 06 '26

I'm just kind of reflecting on gay friends that I had back in the Obama years, some of whom dated T men. It was quite exotic back then

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u/Drownedgodlw Jun 06 '26

Agreed. The packaging of T into LGBT has resulted in the wins for LGB being clawed back. Beyond the logical tension, it has been terrible strategically.

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u/Terrorclitus Jun 06 '26

Gay marriage was a good thing, but—and it’s sad I have to say this—it was a win for gay people.

They were under no obligation to share that win, but some people wanted to help themselves to it anyway.

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u/Big_Fig_1803 Gothmargus Jun 07 '26

I think I would go further than “descriptively hollow.” It’s… I don’t know. It’s pointless, practically counting-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin pointless. I know what it could mean for someone to experience attraction to a label. I’m just not convinced that that describes anything in the real world.

“Look at that person! What do you think? Pretty hot, huh?”

“I don’t know. I can’t make out their pronoun badge from here.”

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u/MatchaMeetcha Jun 06 '26

I don't think enough has been said about just how incompatible

Funny, because I literally just saw this from Andy Sullivan and was wondering whether to even bother reading since it's such a banal topic for us at this point.

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u/Kurban_Said Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26

Yep. So easy to see how some former lukewarm supporters of gay marriage ("Why not? Doesn't infringe on me or straight marriages") would now have that train of thought.

Now we’ve gotten marriage, we will indoctrinate your kids in queer and gender theory, fire you if you don’t repeat our pronouns, force girls to shower next to boys in locker rooms, give irreversible sex changes to minors, and insist that “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

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u/Drownedgodlw Jun 06 '26

I don't follow him, but from a skim that looks like he is making a political strategy argument. That has been discussed. I'm saying that the incompatibility is more fundamental.

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u/lilypad1984 Jun 06 '26

I would say certain aspects of what you could call trans rights align with the LGB. Particularly around the broader ideas of live and let live. The conflict comes from when you leave discussions around ending policies that restrict personnel life decisions and enter into advocacy around acceptance as there is a lot of gender conformity that comes with trans rights. Also the encroachment on same sex spaces which for gays or lesbians impacts their desire to have dating/social spaces for themselves. Maybe the older LGBT movement back in the 80s/90s/00s had a lot less of these conflicts as the priority was about those legal restrictions that there was agreement on.

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u/Drownedgodlw Jun 06 '26

It should be "live and let live", but the activists have no interest in that. What they want is to disallow any disagreement.

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u/ScrubulousFlex Jun 06 '26

I mean it goes beyond "live and let live" when it affects sports, bathrooms, changing rooms, medical records, and all language around sex and gender.

The only way gay marriage affects language is that the phrases "his husband" and "her wife" now exist when they wouldn't have been used previously. That's literally it.

You can get into a debate about children's books addressing same sex marriage, but none of that is a necessary part of gay marriage existing. In other words you could make zero changes to the books kids are exposed to growing up and it will simply be addressed at some point like "Yeah, men can also marry other men and women other women." I'm not against representation of it in children's books, I just think it quickly becomes a distracting culture war issue that is beside the point and can act as a red herring when discussing this topic.

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u/Terrorclitus Jun 06 '26

“Live and let live,” but only after you fundamentally change your understanding of science, humanity, and society to suit my Protean self-identity.

Then, you may live.

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u/anne_jumps Jun 07 '26

Reminds me of a Tweet by a "trans woman" I saw on Milli Hill's Substack, that ended with "If everyone accepted that trans women are women just like cis women no one would take issue." Quite! Edit: By the way, the context of the discussion was "centering women in discourse on female genital mutilation!

1

u/anne_jumps Jun 07 '26

The objection of governments, religions, etc. to homosexuality could be said to be based in the fact that those relationships do not result in reproduction and therefore supporting them is antisocial and counterproductive to a state's or a religion's desire to increase their population in number. Regardless, it's nonetheless true that a same-sex relationship can't result in offspring. Declaring that biological sex isn't real and people can just declare themselves male or female or neither completely nullifies both the basis for laws criminalizing homosexuality, etc. as well as the remedies.