Donald Trump had recently finished a familiar riff about banning gender transition surgery for children when the former president, speaking to an audience of Evangelical voters, moved on to something new: a policy that would affect transgender adults.
“I will ban all taxpayer funding for sex or gender transitions at any age,” said Trump, receiving thunderous applause at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington last month. The Republican leader, who moments earlier had also pledged to reinstate a ban on transgender men and women serving in the military, paused for several seconds to soak in the crowd’s adulation.
It’s the kind of moment — and the type of policy — increasingly common on the GOP presidential campaign trail this year.
i wish the left could just pass a law banning harmful religion
i personally don’t care what you believe nor should freedom of religion go away, but this is exhausting
it’d be nice if we could just split into different countries; tired of dealing with these people. let them have their own fascist christian everyone-that’s-not-a-cishet-white-man-phobic country with zero taxes and fucked up roads and people realizing they have no choice but to hang themselves by their bootstraps when shit hits the fan. the rest of us will have a country where we take care of each other and don’t engage in harmful, childish drama.
Gay and trans people would still be born there.
they can move to our progressive country with zero barriers.
So assuming the fascist nation doesn’t restrict the movement of or exterminate lgbtq people, will your theoretical progressive nation provide relocation expenses and therapy for the ~20 years of abuse that is growing up lgbtq in a house of hate? Because there’s no way the fascist faction is just sending their kids to the enemy. They have to make it to adulthood in a dangerous environment, figure out their circumstances without education or information on the subject, and make the decision to leave behind everything they know for at best total mystery/at worst every lie they’ve been told about the enemy. Considering the extreme disparity of lgbtq acceptance and safety already extant, this idea changes very little. It lumps all the safe and unsafe places together, making it more difficult to get to a safe place.
what are you currently doing for all the children in all the other countries where it isn’t safe to be lgbt? is your plan to take over those countries? what is your plan here now? if we don’t secede, what are we doing? the fascists are winning here. we can leave or we can let them win; we are doing nothing which is letting them win. you can’t save everyone.
Not that this is really relevant to your fantasy of a Glorious Civil War of Separation, but I am a trans woman with a history of winning over conservatives and helping them grow to understanding in the rural Midwest. When I worked at a trucking motel, I led a series of truckers to the conclusion that trans people are just normal people, except this particular one who is the best damn front desk agent they can get for under $200 (for the record, our CDL rate was under $100). Now I work at the single busiest dispensary in the city where I do the same thing because even fascists love weed. Even without any group affiliation, I put myself in danger to do important and successful grassroots work in my day to day life that I could not do if separated from the people who need to see and hear me. I am pushing for change every day in one of the battleground locations for trans rights and have never lived somewhere that was safe for and accepting of me. Separating into a fascist and free state abandons people like me, people who fight where it counts because we were born where minorities don’t get rights.
This was essentially our approach for slavery, but it’s fundamentally flawed. Allowing exploitation and bigotry in some other location isn’t a fix.
like in an abusive relationship, the abused are not responsible for the shitty actions of the abuser. you don’t tell the abused to stay and wait for the abuser to have a change of heart, you get them the hell out of there.
so we allow them to continue to pass bigoted laws? because that’s what’s happening. i’m disabled, unable to work, and lgbt. i’ve got maybe $10 to last me for a month, not enough food stamps to cover food. this shit is scaring me. if i want to move to a progressive country i need to work there; they aren’t accepting people who will drain their resources. they’re killing us. let them kill themselves.
And for the people like you who happen to live in the new Fascist America, fuck them? Fascism is not a joke you can just quarantine, it’s hyper militaristic and imperialistic. If the country split, and one half was fascist, we’d be at war within a decade.
yes! what about the people currently all over the world who are lgbt and live in countries where being lgbt is fucking illegal? what are you doing for them?
yeah, it’s not a fucking joke, it’s spreading and we’re just sitting here complaining about it while it fucking gets worse. abortion rights out the window, lgbt rights out the window. it is already happening here. what’s your alternative?
My alternative to a fascist America is a non-fascist one. Fascists are reactionaries, they see the writing on the wall and they come out of hiding.
As boomers die off, the percentage of bigots in relation to the total population will continue to drop. Instead of giving them safe refuge in another country, we actively combat these fascist ideologies, and also allow their main proponents to die off naturally.
There’s certain things a parent wants to hear, or doesn’t, that makes them happy and proud.
When my daughter said she isn’t religious, mostly because her fundamentalist cousins turned her off to it, I was a proud and happy dad