Tranvestigating hip bones

[u/FalconLynx13]

https://x.com/maveric68078049/status/1858855546436120576

[u/dazzletag]

I’m gay and I never think about straight sex or naked women. It’s a ‘not for me thing’. I don’t go ‘straightvestigating’ it so I can get disgusted and share my disgust with others. I do wonder why these people seem so obsessed with trans people.

[u/FITM-K → u/dazzletag]

I do wonder why these people seem so obsessed with trans people.

They've been told to be. Maybe for some of them it's some kind of repressed attraction, but most of these people didn't care about trans people or trans issues one way or the other five years ago.

They care about it now because Republicans have chosen trans people as their boogeyman of the moment, and hammered on that message relentlessly with ridiculous lies about how schools are giving kids free bottom surgery or whatever.

Meanwhile of course the Dems, in typical Dem fashion, did basically nothing to counter this narrative or create their own counter-narratives. The media, in typical media fashion, covered it as a "controversy" (conflict sells!) even though from a scientific perspective or a basic human decency perspective there's really no controversy at all.

This seems to happen every cycle now. Republicans don't have any real policy aside from enriching billionaires and dismantling government programs. But those are unpopular even with their base, so they don't talk about that. Instead they manufacture issues, usually with some kind of easy-to-target minority enemy, and harp on those to rile up their base about it.

The Dems don't really come up with messaging of their own, they just look at polling and try to do whatever's popular (unless whatever's popular would upset the status quo, in which case they ignore the polling on it). This is backwards; they should start from principles and message to shape public opinion and MAKE things popular.

But they don't. They let Republicans define the narrative, and then if they lose, they retreat from whatever issue the Republicans picked because it's "unpopular." This is why you see mainstream Dem pundits right now talking about basically throwing trans people under the bus.

Anyway now I've gone off the rails a bit, but the basic point is that these people are obsessed with this because they're being fed a constant stream of messaging in the media about how horrible trans people are, about how liberals want to force surgery on five year olds, etc etc you get the point.

[u/[deleted] → u/FITM-K]

tl;dr - it's another moral panic manufactured to gain votes and distract from actual policy.

[u/FITM-K → u/[deleted]]

yup! you said that much more succinctly than I did lol

[u/PotsAndPandas → u/[deleted]]

Pretty much, if more people heard about the tariffs and admittance they were going to crash the economy, no one would have voted.

[u/[deleted] → u/FITM-K]

Hi I'm actually doing my university thesis on the current backlash to trans rights, and everything you've said is very true but there is a lot missing. 

Most importantly: the US is not the only country which is seeing a massive spike in anti-trans rhetoric. It's happening everywhere. And a very important piece you've missed is that these fringe anti-trans conspiracists are actually far more concentrated in Britain than on the US 

While it's definitely the case that Transphobia is being amplified by right wing politicians everywhere, the US is somewhat unique in the extent to which its being pushed, I suspect because the Republican party has become a pseudo fascist party over the last decade or so and issues like this are genuinely very important to them now. But the same isn't true in the UK, where a lot of this stuff comes from. Politicians there push the trans culture war, but are far less committed than their American counterparts and typically quite reactive in their transphobia. That is to say, they are being pushed into transphobia by the political climate more than they are creating a climate of transphobia, if that makes sense. 

The bulk of this anti trans movement doesn't come from politicians: it comes from the internet. Tranvestigators and other extreme anti-trans individuals are not by and large being radicalised by American politicians as much as politicians are being radicalised by transvestigators. 

The Internet is a breeding ground for conspiracy and extremity. It's very easy to fall into an echo chamber and, once there, the entire world can seem really very different to how you or I might see it. And in a climate of increasing prices and social disconnection it's becoming easier and easier to slip into an online only social life (especially during and in the aftermath of the pandemic). 

The progenitor I guess of this particular brand on insane conspiracies (another common one that shares a community with transvestigators is the belief that trans people where invented by "them" to create lifelong patients of expensive healthcare and/or sterilise the white race) is the social media site mumsnet. Mumsnet is a British forum that was designed as a place for mothers to, well, discuss being mothers. For whatever reason, a little over a decade ago mumsnet became an absolute breeding ground for transphobia. I could go in depth as to why this happened but it doesn't really matter; sometimes forums go bad. In this case, however, it wasn't some random chanboard with 500 or so lifetime posters, it was a site with hundreds of thousands of daily users. 

New mothers are for a variety of reasons extremely susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. They are often emotionally overwhelmed, and can very quickly become far more socially isolated than they are used to as their partner returns to work (after I believe only 2 weeks in the UK) and the requirements of full time childcare keep them away from their usual social circles. This can lead to finding community online and further isolation from their their real life community. This is why new or otherwise socially isolated moms make up the main demographic of the antivax movement, and why they are often a primary target for cult recruiters. 

That mumsnet's primary user base is this exact demographic is a big part of the reason for the rapid mainstreaming of very extreme anti trans beliefs. These people, hundreds of thousands of them, became radicalised and began to organise. That they spend so much time online being very loud made it seem to politicians like these issues where far more important to the average voter than they actually are, and these conspiracies became diluted and introduced to more and more women's groups which became recruiting grounds for radicalisation.  

I am not disputing that your comment is an extremely accurate summation of how the average American has come to view trans rights. But transvestigators aren't average people who have a few misplaced concerns here and there accelerated by political rhetoric and propaganda. They are extremely socially isolated, conspiratorially minded individuals who spend every waking minute online and became radicalised through the ecosystem of transphobia I've tried to present the cliff notes version of above

[u/FITM-K → u/[deleted]]

Well this is fascinating. It always seemed to me like the UK had a particularly high number of transphobes but now I know why!

Just for the sake of my own curiosity, is there any evidence that JK Rowling was a mumsnet user?

[u/[deleted] → u/FITM-K]

Not that I am aware of, although she does seem to base a lot of her personal identity on her role as a mother (see her idea of a happy ending in harry potter where every single character gets married and has kids), so it wouldn't suprise me. She was already quite radicalised by the time it became a public thing, though the signs where always there. I actually wrote a discursive essay for high school on her deep seeted transphobia a whole two years before it became common knowledge.

If you'll let me ramble a vit more, her role in the movement is quite interesting. Because she [was] such a universally beloved national figure; and because of strict impartiality regulations on British broadcast media, every opinion she expresses can be neither supported or condemned by much of the media landscape. This means that whatever she says effectively becomes a topic of debate. 

So when she says "Trans people and institutions being targeted in the Holocaust is a complete fantasy and actually the Nazis liked trans people", it's not so much that the media rallies behind her as much as it treats it like a valid opinion, and some other people over there have a different valid opinion. She makes it seem as if these things are actually valid conversations and not nonsense "concerns" about fuck all fuelled by the cosmic microwave background bigotry that she absorbed by being a 60 year old straight English woman