That Gay Thread

[Rev. Rye]

I used to make fun of those arguments just like Ellen did, but in hindsight I have to admit some bad things did follow the legalization of gay marriage, and I did not see it coming. Of course marriage equality is great and needed to happen. Since then though, we have the mainstream pushing the idea that masculinity is bad and needs to be cured (for example the Gillette commercial, which got twice as many dislikes as likes, and there are countless other examples). You can't blame conservatives for looking at things like this and thinking that they're trying to weaken/feminize men. President Biden just made it so biological women are forced to compete at a disadvantage in their own sports, and so they can't escape the presence of a penis even in a change room or an abused women's shelter. People are being censored for having their own opinion on what is or is not a man or a woman. Censorship is soaring. You can't force people to like transgender people by forcing them to speak a certain way. That's not how things work.

The pedophile thing was only a couple of articles in some left leaning news outlets, which I didn't mind. They were written by non-offending people and were ok. I think the right overreacted to that.

1) Here's the thing about the discourse around toxic masculinity: they're  not condemning masculinity itself. They're condemning certain behaviours that A) have become associated with masculinity in our culture, and B) are extremely destructive, not just to women and anyone outside the gender binary, but to men themselves. It's the idea that men should be dominant, aggressive, and hostile to those who think differently, shit that might have been advantageous when we lived in caves, but are, to say the least, extremely maladaptive now. The mere fact that it's phrased as an adjective modifying a noun should have clued you in on that (because it's a modifier that implies it isn't an inherent part of the noun in question). That's kind of what the Gilette ad was going for, even if it is just a corporate attempt at wokeness that doesn't really mean anything in the context of the organization's actual policies.

2) Trans women in sports are not something Joe Biden forced on sports organizations. This has been an issue for years and, indeed, many sports have ruled that they can actually participate (at least provided they're on their hormones and have been so for a while) because it turns out that it actually doesn't have much of a material advantage. I know, right? As recently as a few months ago, I would have just seen the video of Fallon Fox going all Butch Coolidge on Tamikka Brents and assumed that maybe this might be one of the few areas where trans women are actually at an advantage over cis women, but it turns out that's not actually the case. It turns out that the hormones balance out the advantages that a masculine build would seem to give.

3) I can count the verified examples I've seen of men invading women's spaces to assault them and claiming a gender identity as a defense on one hand. It's worth noting that in both of the legitimate cases I could verify, the attackers had a history of child molestation, so perhaps that's a bigger red flag. And before you show me some news stories to counter this claim, I should advise you to only give me examples where the attacker actually used gender identity as a defense for why they were there in the first place, because it turns out that's shockingly absent in many of the articles used to fearmonger. Merely cross-dressing in a hare-brained scheme to go to women's spaces and assault women is not enough to implicate the trans community. Cross Dressing=/=Transgender, and indeed, in at least one case, a transphobe tried to pass off covering themselves in toilet paper as some sort of trans thing. Here's the case, and here's the time it was framed as an attack by a transwoman. Admittedly, said transphobe is such an idiot that you start to suspect that his parents were... a bit more closely related than a white person and a Korean. On the whole, the more I look at this narrative, the more it sounds like it's some meticulously planned Ocean's 11-style heist that includes plastic surgery for whatever reason when all they needed to do was just waltz into the vault and get it, because nobody's guarding or even locking the vault and the cops aren't likely to get you. Becoming trans just to invade women's spaces and assault them is a needlessly high risk added to the equation when people can just go in, assault them, leave, and not get caught because rape is a depressingly hard crime to prosecute successfully.

4) If people are being censored for their views on gender identity, well, I'm not entirely pro-censorship, but given that A) these ideas are wrong-headed, and B) literally every study on the subject shows that normalisation of these views actively makes things worse for them, it only makes sense that this would happen. And even when they are censored, they can probably still find a reasonably large platform, provided they're okay with sharing a space with people arguing about skull shapes and shit like that.

5) The erroneous connection made with homosexuality and pedophilia is depressingly long. Just to take one example:



This may even have its roots in Ancient Greece, when it was normal for, for instance, the old Socrates to have sex with a young Alcibiades, but if Alexander the Great was in a relationship with Hephaestion (and both were about the same age), it was highly unusual. Or, indeed, it might just be a reflection of pre-existing tendencies towards age gaps in relationships that are considered normal in straight couples, but deviant in gay couples for whatever reason.