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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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It's terrifying to witness active dehumanization in a nation that supposedly wants you to live your best life. They'll try to convince the whole nation that trans folk aren't people, aren't human, we can't let them. Once they're not human, they can get away with anything they do to them. If you see these efforts to dehumanize any group, no matter where you are, try to be brave because you never know when you're next.
I'll never forget this poem, it really shaped my perspective on speaking up sooner rather than later. There was another poem that echoed similar sentiments, but I can only remember the line "I will not be an agent of death."
As a trans woman it's really fun getting to be the minority that it's totally okay to just openly hate and dehumanize, the right's newest whipping girl ;-;
Stay strong girl! You have every right to exist in your most comfortable form, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Identity is an innate human right, you deserve the freedom of expressing that identity like everyone else!
<3
Especially when so many pedojacket us which in turn causes trans folks to infight.
I remember in my university's then-Gay and Lesbian Association (getting the "B" added was a whole thing) we got leafletted by the North American Man/Boy """Love""" Association (spit). Had to make a motion to reject them entirely, which is gross it even needed to happen. Happily it was unanimous.
It's freaking amazing, and terrifying, how quickly the right wing wackos have been able to demonize a group that almost nobody has even thought about in forever. It's like a case study in finding some marginalized group to vent rage on/about.
Definitely terrifying and can be surprising, but I think it's easier to demonize unfamiliar groups than to demonize a well-known one. I think demonizing and dehumanizing relies on some degree of the unknown to make all the hysteria and fear plausible. If the group is well known by the general public, it's easier to say "now wait a minute, I happen to know many trans people and they're very kind." It creates a strong base of informed allies to speak up on the group's behalf. It's not impossible to demonize a well-known group, I just believe it's easier when your target has no personal interactions to check against the fear mongering.
This is also why "colleges indoctrinate students" is wrong even though college students do tend to get more liberal. When college students leave their home towns and go to college, they run into people of differing backgrounds. Stereotypes get challenged and broken to pieces. The college kids return to their home towns unwilling to engage in the demonization because suddenly it's not some faceless Other they are railing against, but an actual person that they have interacted with.
You described my college experience to a T, it was hard going home and realizing my family, not just my community, is plagued by hatred of people they never met.
Even worse than the demonizing is how they dehumanize trans people. Don't get me wrong, demonizing a group is bad, but dehumanizing is so much worse.
I learned this lesson during a trip to the Holocaust Museum in DC. I walked through one of the train cars and tried to picture fitting as many people in there as the plaque said were crammed in. I couldn't. Then, I realized that I was trying to fit people in the car. Even though these were imaginary people existing solely in my head, I was still treating them like people. I switched to trying to cram that many human shaped objects in the car and realized it was easy to do.
The right is pushing dehumanization of people they don't like. Once you've accepted a group of people as "not human," all sorts of horrible options open up to deal with them.