OTTAWA - Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly says Canada has been considering a “game plan” for how it would respond if the United States takes a far-right, authoritarian shift after next year’s presidential elections.
The anti-trans agenda is the most brilliantly executed wedge issue I’ve seen in a long time. Most “yokels” don’t have any personal experience with trans people. They have no reason to hate them. Even if they’re creeped out by what they don’t understand, the numbers are so few that you couldn’t under any stretch of the imagination convince them that they’re a threat.
But the “foaming at the mouth big city liberals who hates anyone from outside the city” archetype? THAT looks like a threat. There are tons of city folk. They run the government. Do they really hate me?
You want to keep the working class infighting? Drop a trans issue into the mix. The country man says “Boy, now I tell you h’what, I’m not sure about that” and some genius will come out of the woodwork and say “FACIST!” and then boom, they have presented as the rabid threat. Sides are entrenched. Dialogue immediately erodes to ad hominem, both sides paint their strawmen, and they’re convinced that it isn’t a dispute over ideas but rather of the other side being intrinsically defective as people.
And in the squabble, education funding is cut. Class sizes grow. More money funneled to defence. Raytheon gets a contract to vaporize brown kids. CEO gets a 200 million bonus. The system works as intended.
It’s way more likely someone knows a gay person than a trans person at this point so there’s that unknown factor to exploit. It’s also just more of a reality that your gender identity doesn’t matter as much materially to the sort of path in life you’re expected to take, and there’s a lot of economic reasons for that. One being the cost of living and housing has already required two working adults in many places, another is industry specialization and professionalization. We also have a lot more identity technologies available to us, ways we can construct and inhabit identities and validate other people’s identities. The funny thing is in many cases these virile straight male types are actually using the same gender ideology as the trans person, they’re just as much discovering and finding out how to express their male-ness as the trans person is discovering how to best display the gender or non they prefer to be seen as. Even the adage “you aren’t born a man, you become one” is basically the same notion Judith Butler presents under feminist theory. And of course the male identity stuff is commodified to shit just like anything else can be.
All the queer meme pages were making fun of Raytheon’s DEI program this year so I think there’s more awareness about this stuff in general now. I’m at a place where they’ve been putting in a top-down program like this and it’s also the non-conforming people in the company asking the hard questions in the sessions to the diversity industry consultants which is great to see. I’ve also experienced the liberal “ally” condemnation in public once which was very uncomfortable, all because they heard a friend (who had transitioned) and I call each other “dude,” which they were quick to point out very loudly to the entire party, “UH SHE’S A WOMAN!” Thankfully my friend loudly responded back “women can be dudes too” which shut her down, but I was just like girl get out of our business, and why are you listening to my friend and I greet each other, you don’t know anything about our relationship. The worst thing is she was sober doing this lol.
Exactly! And again, it’s absolutely manufactured.
The anti-trans agenda is the most brilliantly executed wedge issue I’ve seen in a long time. Most “yokels” don’t have any personal experience with trans people. They have no reason to hate them. Even if they’re creeped out by what they don’t understand, the numbers are so few that you couldn’t under any stretch of the imagination convince them that they’re a threat.
But the “foaming at the mouth big city liberals who hates anyone from outside the city” archetype? THAT looks like a threat. There are tons of city folk. They run the government. Do they really hate me?
You want to keep the working class infighting? Drop a trans issue into the mix. The country man says “Boy, now I tell you h’what, I’m not sure about that” and some genius will come out of the woodwork and say “FACIST!” and then boom, they have presented as the rabid threat. Sides are entrenched. Dialogue immediately erodes to ad hominem, both sides paint their strawmen, and they’re convinced that it isn’t a dispute over ideas but rather of the other side being intrinsically defective as people.
And in the squabble, education funding is cut. Class sizes grow. More money funneled to defence. Raytheon gets a contract to vaporize brown kids. CEO gets a 200 million bonus. The system works as intended.
It’s way more likely someone knows a gay person than a trans person at this point so there’s that unknown factor to exploit. It’s also just more of a reality that your gender identity doesn’t matter as much materially to the sort of path in life you’re expected to take, and there’s a lot of economic reasons for that. One being the cost of living and housing has already required two working adults in many places, another is industry specialization and professionalization. We also have a lot more identity technologies available to us, ways we can construct and inhabit identities and validate other people’s identities. The funny thing is in many cases these virile straight male types are actually using the same gender ideology as the trans person, they’re just as much discovering and finding out how to express their male-ness as the trans person is discovering how to best display the gender or non they prefer to be seen as. Even the adage “you aren’t born a man, you become one” is basically the same notion Judith Butler presents under feminist theory. And of course the male identity stuff is commodified to shit just like anything else can be.
All the queer meme pages were making fun of Raytheon’s DEI program this year so I think there’s more awareness about this stuff in general now. I’m at a place where they’ve been putting in a top-down program like this and it’s also the non-conforming people in the company asking the hard questions in the sessions to the diversity industry consultants which is great to see. I’ve also experienced the liberal “ally” condemnation in public once which was very uncomfortable, all because they heard a friend (who had transitioned) and I call each other “dude,” which they were quick to point out very loudly to the entire party, “UH SHE’S A WOMAN!” Thankfully my friend loudly responded back “women can be dudes too” which shut her down, but I was just like girl get out of our business, and why are you listening to my friend and I greet each other, you don’t know anything about our relationship. The worst thing is she was sober doing this lol.