[RD] Trans Genocide

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I remember things very differently but i grew up in America, not sure how different that was. I knew what being gay was when I was a kid in the 80s. I don’t remember how I first heard about it. I remember seeing some gay characters on TV and in the 90s I saw Priscilla Queen of the Desert (Australian movie) and Madonna’s Truth or Dare and there were often gay and trans people on Rickie Lake and Geraldo.

I’m not saying this was good representation all across but it was something.

I even remember when I was a kid hearing something about how some people got what was called a sex change operation then. Maybe one of the early mentions of this was in Myra Breckinridge in the 70s.
 
Yeah, Lake and Rivera and Springer and Maury (and later Dr. Phil) brought them on for cis people to gawp and gawk it. It's little better than the tv shows having their characters vomit or dry-heave at the mere thought of interacting with a trans woman, and only a small step above the trans woman as a psychopathic predatory murderer that's been a favorite of crime dramas for decades.

That sort of pervasive transphobic representation was a pretty significant part of why I denied and suppressed my identity for so long.
 
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Yeah, Lake and Rivera and Springer and Maury brought them on for cis people to gawp and gawk it. It's little better than the tv shows having their characters vomit or dry-heave at the mere thought of interacting with a trans woman, and only a small step above the trans woman as a psychopathic predatory murderer that's been a favorite of crime dramas for decades.

That sort of pervasive transphobic representation was a pretty significant part of why I denied and suppressed my identity for so long.

I was thinking about that, I think the first time I encountered a transgender character was in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which has a trans woman villain, has two extended scenes of cis men throwing up and a scene where Ace Ventura strips the trans woman in front of everyone.
 
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I was thinking about that, I think the first time I encountered a transgender character was in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which has a trans woman villain, has two extended scenes of cis men throwing up and a scene where Ace Ventura strips the trans woman in front of everyone.

Ayup, same. Good representation for me growing up was stuff that was more metaphorical and less directly intentional in its portrayal of trans people or transness:

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And then there's the og good rep:
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I was absolutely obsessed with this and the previous book when I was a kid (gee wonder why that might have been)
 
I think the appearances on talk shows might have been a necessary step toward the subject at least being talked about, except not Jerry Springer, which I don’t remember talking about issues exactly. I don’t remember Maury being anything but paternity tests, but I almost never watched it.

I just looked at Ricki Lake on YouTube which I used to watch after school a lot in the 90s and I remember being sometimes sympathetic to gay people. One of the things that came up was “too fat to be a drag queen” which I’ll have to watch later.

It seems pretty mixed on trans issues, sometimes sympathetic and sometimes stuff that would seem pretty bad now.
 
When site staff posts an official notice decreeing that what trans people are undergoing isn't genocide... yes? Clearly some people aren't convinced. It's important. Minimizing the reality of the risk and what's happening is to trans people's disadvantage, and they are already fighting against a machine that is hellbent on their removal from society. Centrist fence-sitting and "it's really not so bad" has no place in a productive conversation.
people even posted the definition of genocide and then failed to demonstrate how not covering something through state funded insurance fits that definition, even if you squint.
If you woke up in a female body tomorrow, would you want to kill yourself?
estimate is probably not, though i wouldn't be happy about it. there was a point in my life where i considered the latter for other reasons, quite a few years before i even joined cfc. it's not a good place to be in.
In all of our heads, sanctions are a different thing from removing supports, despite the victim not really being able to tell the difference.
is that really true though? there are clear differences in agency, individual freedom, and motive. in one case, the state is punishing people because x. in the other, the state is not compelling other people to pay for something. these are fundamentally different. enough that i don't by that such is beyond the ability for anybody, even those affected, to grasp.

"you are screwed and state doesn't give a crap" is a relatively common occurrence, happening daily to vastly different types of people at vastly different severity. everything from "you got courtesy towed into an illegal spot then towed again for real, pay to get your car back" to "if you don't comply we will squeeze private business with monetary threats until they fire you" to "we are literally going to throw you in jail without bond and hold you for months, then maybe drop charges".

those are different degrees of awful, but they are all expressly targeting someone beyond merely not shelling out money to help.
We all have trouble separating 'lifestyle choices' from 'personal necessity'
true, and this line will blur even if one tries to look at it objectively. short term decisions inform long-term outcomes. smoke enough tobacco, and you're going to need things to continue living that you would not have needed but for said smoking. was that a lifestyle choice, or necessity? and how bad does something have to be, before compelling others to pay for it is necessity? i legit don't think society has a coherent answer to that, so we get some pretty bad screw jobs for some people while others get arbitrarily strong support.

i don't think likening any of that to genocide is constructive, though.
 
It might not be a constructive term, but nothing about this situation is constructive or moral.
 
Thanks to everyone who shared their experiences and tried to explain them.
I'll definitely need to reread couple more times to process this.
Thank you for taking the time!
 
people even posted the definition of genocide and then failed to demonstrate how not covering something through state funded insurance fits that definition, even if you squint.
Yes, you're correct. What's going on isn't genocide, because trans people aren't on the list. It's merely eugenics. I feel so much better now 😌

I know the term genocide seems like a lot, but we transition because we are dying. And if you take that away from us, you're leaving us to die. And the absolute worst thing is this has happened before.

No one gave a damn when AIDS was ravaging the gay community. Hundreds of thousands of gay men died because of social stigma. This picture was taken in 1993, the men in white, facing the camera are the surviving members of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. Those in black, facing away, represent those who had died from AIDS.

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The Chorus had been founded in 1978. It had been 15 years. This wasn't just some tragedy that happened. Reagan did nothing because not enough people cared, and a lot of people thought what was happening was a good thing. It wasn't until it was clear that HIV was also spreading (more slowly) in heterosexual populations that Reagan did anything. The gay men who survived this did not let me forget that.

These laws... you won't see the deaths, because we will be killing ourselves. You'll never hear about it. And many of us will kill ourselves without ever telling anyone who we were, so even if you know we died you won't know why. As I opened this thread with, I am alive today because of the possibilities that I was lucky enough to have access to, despite being disabled. If Florida's laws had been Ontario's laws in 2014, I'd be dead now. That is not hyperbole, I would be dead.

So yes, it's not technically genocide. But morally, leaving people to die because of who they are is genocide.
 
It might not be a constructive term, but nothing about this situation is constructive or moral.

situations themselves are not inherently constructive or otherwise generally. the question is more what makes good policy, when it comes to doing taxation and centralizing these kinds of resources to government.

as for moral...it's hard to make a case either way. assuming one accepts the premise of a government doing taxes and implementing policies at all, the phrases:
  • "the government does not pay for some things i believe it should"
  • "the government also pays for things i believe it should not"
probably hold for every person in this thread. maybe for every person who thinks about it at all. which things will vary person to person, and so will the reasons they believe the government should or shouldn't pay. and to what extent payment should cover. it's not so simple as to say "well obviously the state should pay for everything". that's not how it works, we're not post scarcity. constituents choose what they want their government to pay for, and what they do not. at least in principle. the system is pretty badly run, so frequently this does not happen.

the problem with centralizing health care (and many other aspects of individual life) into government is that people are then dependent on the whims of a single entity, with no capability to defect to competition. the government chooses what is best for you, even if its choice is not yours. usa fortunately does have the layer of states with different policies, so it is still possible to defect between state governments at least, even if it sucks. if i had it my way, there would be a lot less state-controlled/subsidized x/y/z thing with private interest groups dictating which things more than voters. but alas, us government isn't my burger king either.

this is all in stark contrast to genocide, where the victims of that don't have the option to defect/leave in any capacity.

No one gave a damn when AIDS was ravaging the gay community. Hundreds of thousands of gay men died because of social stigma.
quoted is an awful analogy. people don't randomly get aids. they get it by sleeping with other people who have hiv. that is voluntary, in a way that i understand being trans is very much not voluntary.

i would rather use an analogy of whether or not the government covers some unusual medication that the person who needs it couldn't control that they needed.

suicide is a very broad problem, increasingly so. a particular group having a higher suicide rate does not *necessarily* mean it's good policy, or even the most moral allocation of funds, to address it in the context of that group. just as an example, the us government in various states implemented policy that predictably led to a significant increase in suicides generally, at scale, in the name of the greater good. not only did it not pay for care to alleviate a medical condition, it actively hindered the lives of people in a way that was statistically guaranteed to result in increased suicides.

many of the same people in this thread willing to inaccurately call this policy genocide backed said policy. and like you said, there's no direct tracing. no "but for this policy, x would be alive today". we don't know. but i do know that the same people who told me the government can and should pay to actively implement such a policy, are now telling me that the government not paying to cover something is somehow genocide. unsurprisingly, i'm not convinced.
 
quoted is an awful analogy. people don't randomly get aids. they get it by sleeping with other people who have hiv. that is voluntary, in a way that i understand being trans is very much not voluntary.
Suicide is voluntary. The analogy is about how people don't care when LGBT people die, as you are helpfully illustrating. Being gay wasn't voluntary then and being trans ain't voluntary now.
 
The US government allowing people with diabetes the  choice whether to eat regular meals, have a social life or  die, depending on what medical insurance they have, is also utterly immoral and a damning indictment of the self-styled "greatest nation on Earth". That is, however, at least targeted at all poor diabetic people, rather than the state of Florida selectively targeting trans people.
 
Suicide is voluntary. The analogy is about how people don't care when LGBT people die, as you are helpfully illustrating. Being gay wasn't voluntary then and being trans ain't voluntary now.
everyone dies, unfortunately. the fact of the matter is that you, me, and most other people in the thread act in a way consistent with barely caring about it in the overwhelming majority of cases.

and i hold that comparing a causal sequence --> sex --> disease --> dying due to that disease has a lot more agency than gender dysphoria. to the extent that it makes your side of the argument poorly and alternative examples are more comparable (people who can't get coverage/die as a result). that simply isn't genocide, despite that it isn't good.
The US government allowing people with diabetes the  choice whether to eat regular meals, have a social life or  die, depending on what medical insurance they have, is also utterly immoral and a damning indictment of the self-styled "greatest nation on Earth"
it's one thing to say this, and another to back it with internally consistent reasoning. again, people make choices on all kinds of matters all the time. some of them have negative consequences. some people also have negative situations they couldn't reasonably control (or even possibly control). the government has to run a set of policies that function. i'm not sure why avoiding subsidizing bad choices is necessarily "immoral". to me, that policy is more justifiable than the trans one...though neither are genocide.
 
Ok with AIDS, people in the 80s became infected with HIV long before anyone knew it existed and people are asymptomatic for years and years while still spreading it to others so I see it as only a choice as much as getting in a car accident is a choice.

I guess I could see this working as a choice to some degree with some people who just have crazy amounts of unprotected sex and gay men who were still going to bath houses after it was already known to be a deadly disease and how it was spread. But I don’t think that’s most gay men who got AIDS.
 
people even posted the definition of genocide and then failed to demonstrate how not covering something through state funded insurance fits that definition, even if you squint.
It was demonstrated, for the record. You may not have found it convincing, but that's a different argument entirely.

The same goes for you nitpicking emzie's point about AIDs and how it was ignored because you've decided to make it about personal responsibility when the actual context was government policy.

Yes, we get it. You're against federal government involving themselves pretty much anywhere. Your general position on this has been made repeatedly known, at length. However, that's an individual position. It has no bearing on establishing the culpability (or lack thereof) of the state in caring for its citizens.
 
This is ridiculous though. This isn’t a matter of the government just randomly making a decision about spending priorities.

The governor and Republican politicians spend months saying: “we do not like these people. They are a contagion and an affront to our moral society. We would prefer if they stopped existing.”

And then they say, “this thing which we previously provided, we are going to stop providing for those people, specifically, because we do not think these treatments are moral and we would prefer if they ceased to exist.” And all the while these same politicians are also saying, “we would furthermore like to adopt educational policies that single out these people for harassment with the intention of making them cease to be.” And these same politicians also say, “we would like to change the law so that any person who facilitates the existence of these people be prosecuted as criminals for that facilitation.”

For someone to read the context of what’s happening by and conclude it’s just innocent budgetary priorities is laughable in the extreme.
 
My "internally consistent reasoning" is that if a government has the ability to easily stop its citizens from dying, they have a moral obligation to prevent that. We already do this with fire alarms, seatbelts, work safety legislation etc., so if a government deliberately sets out to let a portion of their people die through easily prevented ways for purely political reasons, then that is just as vile and immoral as "the G word", even if we don't use that term.
 
it's one thing to say this, and another to back it with internally consistent reasoning
You have no clue how the real world actually works do you? The real world is not you standing on stage in a HS debate tournament with judges adding and subtracting points for style and logic.
 
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