Why does it seem the world is all of a sudden concerned about sexual orientation? Especially America. Did I miss how far we came as a society to see it take a 40 year step backwards?
these things come up whenever the right wing needs a distraction. they have to keep finding new groups to blame society's ills on, so that conservatives don't realize it's their politics that lead to those.
whenever a group inevitably becomes too accepted (or at least not feared enough) to be a distraction, they move on to the next group. sometimes they bring an oldie back because that's fashion for you.
It's not "all of a sudden". And it's not "the world". And it's not even "America". Rather, you're now consuming media that's exposing you to thoughts that have always been around, often on the fringes.
Remember, bigots have always existed, and polite bigots toe the line as much as they're forced to. They aren't going to disappear, ever. (That being said, we can make them less relevant and powerful.)
exactly. and bigotry isn't limited to sex or race stuff.
people pretty much hate anyone who is different than them. even so called progressive inclusive hippie types... will express crazy bigotry towards groups they don't like based on crude stereotypes that are largely not true.
our brains love to generalize. They don't like treating people who are different than us as worth our acknowledgement and esteem.
Why are people so interested in defining themselves along sexual identity and orientation in relatively recent western culture?
Why now? Why is it so different from most of human existence?
Because we are no longer facing famine. The Green Revolution has made our relationship with food so secure we no longer define ourselves in relation to it.
Throughout most of history people are farmers or ranchers or shepherds or bakers or butchers or millers.
So, we climb the Biological hierarchy of needs looking for our next characteristic that needs fulfillment.
not even. 1950s we had this idealized version that everyone was heterosexual, owned a home and had strict gender roles.
That shit is now all blown apart. And for most folks the complexities of it all are beyond understanding.
And it cuts both ways. I don't care about other people's genders and identities, but boy they care about mine. Gotten plenty of sexist slurs from queer/trans people based on my gender and lots of shitty assumptions. I'm bi, but I 'present' as a heterosexual dudebro, and it makes non-gender conforming people angry at me for some reason, also many insecure straight men and women. Only people who don't seem to care are people who are bi, or secure in their sexuality. Way too many people feel the need to do that though.
According to the GSS, only 10% of Americans reaponded "Agree" or "Strongly Agree" to the statement "Homosexuals should have the right to marry" people should have the right to marry in 1988 (first year the question was asked).
In 2004, it was 30%.
In 2022 it was 67%.
Also according to the GSS, 40 years ago a third of Americans thought homosexuals shouldn't have the right to speak.
We've made remarkable progress in a very short period.
Yeah, trans people are just new targets. DOMA wasn't that long ago, but regressives lost the battle against gay people, so trans people are just the next rung on the hate ladder for them.
Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people's understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.
It's all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.
Like "There are trans rapists in women's prisons"... Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery is enough for a trans woman to meet the requirements.
Or
"Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men"... When hysterectomy isn't even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.
But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won't.
it's mostly that it is social wedge issue that drives up ratings, outrage, and politicians can grandstand about it. And make up crazy bullshit about kids being forced to transition by evil doctors or something.
and therefore we can ignore real issues in the country while the media/pols rant on about total nonsense that affects hardly anyone and mostly isn't real or relevant to trans people or any people at all.
You've gotten enough good answers that I think it okay to address a tangent.
Things are definitely at the point where christofascists, and other hate driven ideologies are getting louder.
But, and this is vitally important as to why the pushback is making it a matter of public discourse at the level you're asking about, there's more allies now than ever.
Be ready for old man talking here, and ignore if not interested. Disclaimer: I have arthritis, and it's easier to type gay than LGBTQ, so I'll be using the shorter word for that reason, not as an exclusion.
Back in the seventies and eighties, gay rights was a thing for mostly gay people. Before that it had been gaining minor support, and the eighties were when social restrictions started changing enough that gay people were allowed to have some degree of public awareness in both news and fiction.
I keep bringing it up in various places, but Billy Crystal played the first recurring openly gay character on television. That was in 1977, and ran until 1981. I don't think it can be said enough how huge that was in bringing awareness of gay people as just people was. That role brought gay into our homes and lives in a way nothing had before.
When something makes a group real to the majority, makes things stop being a dirty secret and just another part of life, you get kids growing up that are more open and accepting. As acceptance grew, so did the amount of people coming out.
As people came out, the straights realized that not only had they always known gay people, but they liked them, and even loved them for years, sometimes a lifetime. When that starts spreading, you have more people that are willing to support gay people and their rights as fellow humans.
Instead of being pariahs, gay people became part of life, part of our hearts. Eventually, more and more people that didn't have direct relationships with someone gay became allies, supporters.
However, the more gay people became a part of life, the more noise bigots made, in their own homes and in public. So, instead of it being a dirty little secret nobody talked about, that way of thinking got nastier and louder. Before, it wasn't something everyone would even know about until much later in life, but as the gay rights movement in the seventies started building up steam, you had more hatred being spewed as well. There had been before, but it was more likely to be handled with dismissive or contemptuous remarks rather than outright venom and bile in the open.
Now, us folks that were kids during the late 70s and early 80s didn't just accept gay folks. We would often defy elders that opposed gay rights or bad talked them. As time passed and we grew up, the segment of that generation that became allies tended to be more and more vocal in our support. By the nineties, my generation was moving into adulthood and willing to vote our conscience. We were willing to put our time and money into the cause. Sometimes, we'd put our bodies on the line when things got ugly.
Move forward to now, and you've got two or three generations actively and loudly opposing the bigots, and not just the gay people. The bigots are smaller in number, but have been pandered to by political groups around the world, so have more weight than their numbers should give them.
Mind you, the bigots also include people of every generation too. Don't imagine that there aren't kids even that spew the same kind of nastiness that's been used since before the 70s. But there's more in direct opposition to them, and plenty of passive dismissal of the bigotry. Bigotry is not a relic of the past, nor is it limited to older generations; some of the loudest and most obnoxious hatred gets spewed by younger adherents. But the seeming percentage of hate is lower in younger generations, and the seeming percentage of outright support is higher.
That puts us in the situation we're in, where hate has a bigger voice than it should, and love/acceptance has to shout louder to oppose it.
Things are definitely at the point where christofascists, and other hate driven ideologies are getting louder.
Good time to bring up how their numbers are drastically thinning. This is a big win and part of why we need to fight them hard as their fear of marginalization causes them to switch from dirty tactics to outright fascism to cling to power.
they are popular because they provide simple answers to complex issues.
People like that. Esp younger folks.
Just like the alt right is so popular with them, because it gives them simple answers.
Left doesn't have simple answers. Wants you to listen to a college course type of lecture on every issue... people don't care about that. They want a simple soundbyte they can emotionally respond to. Left is very poor at that... there are some examples, but they dont' really get much traction outside of leftist/socialist circles.
it really feels like it's at a boiling point though right now. World governments have all shifted more to the right on average than they have in the last 80 years.
Because the right offers people stability, authority, etc. People like that.
They don't like left because it's too vague and complicated to understand their points of view.
Trans people = bad is a lot easier for the average person to understand, than explaining to them what a transsexual person is and isn't, and the various types of trans/queer identities. That shit requires a dictionary and hours of time to understand.
They both genuinely hate trans people though. Hell, Musk disowned his own trans daughter. Like if he was just in it to divide the population he wouldn't be treating his trans child so horribly.
Exactly. Its no coincidence we went from Occupy Wall Street and national level discourse about actual healthcare and UBI, to such debates as 'is genocide okay?' and 'are nazis bad?' Purposeful misdirection that in it's staunch opposition to anything left of capitalism, created fascism.
You know, it's perfectly OK to group voters by identity, so long as that identity cannot exclude "Normal" people. Soccer Mom, Six pack Dad, Middle class, working poor, labor, Small Business owner, Rural, Urban, and Suburban are all perfectly fine to promise these groups political power. But you do the exact same thing for queer people or black people and that's identity politics all of a sudden.
Well in america it seems to seems that people are theologically do things against LGBTQ and enacting them. The news we get and i preface this while knowing America is on the brink of it. That other countries or instutions are savages. Not my opinion but what we see daily.
My guy, there are entire countries controlled by Islamic Extremists where you're lucky if all they do is kill you when they find out you're LGBT, and it's entirely for "theological reasons."
I put this in quotes, because I'm not nor have I ever been a Muslim. But Islamic Extremists will kill gay people for supposed "theological reasons."
It's most definitely not just America doing it because "mah holy book says it's wrong."
Also, look up the genesis of the conservative media apparatus - specifically, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and how that whole thing came to be in the post-Nixon era. There’s a lot of context, and none of it was done in good faith. The intent was always to game social norms and leverage populist appeals to emotion into tribal ideologies (I.e. us-vs-them/ingroup-vs-outgroup). That’s ultimately the fundamental basis for conservatism.
These days, foreign influence operations (often based in authoritarian countries) aimed at increasing the polarization of a target population also play a major role.
You had me in the first half. All this foreign influence talk is hugely overblown. Not non-existent, but so small that it may as well be. It’s a convenient excuse for Clinton’s embarrassing election failure, and it’s convenient for manufacturing consent for heightened belligerence toward Russia.
Right, fuck, my bad. Welp, yeah, I’m sorry to say but I think it has more to do with your progression into understanding more about the world and perspectives outside of your own experience. In no way am I trying to be mean or discouraging. You asked a really valid and important question, and i guess i impulsively reacted and forgot there are people less jaded than me. For what it’s worth i admire you and hope that learning some people are STILL stuck being shitty doesn’t make you think everyone sucks. And I’m proud to learn that another person younger than me just ‘gets it’ that people are people deserving of love and respect regardless of bullshit like who they themselves love.
It's so dumb, like of all the challenges facing us as a species now, THAT'S the shit that people are getting worked up about? Life on Earth for humanity is in the process of going through a set of major environmental changes that we're probably not ready for and is going to have catastrophic results for some... and there's people out there getting bent out of shape about pronouns and sexual orientation. We need to be doing alot more preparing for what's coming over the next few years and a lot less bitching about things that don't personally affect us. It seemed like we had made some big strides for awhile there, and that seemingly got erased within the past 8 years.
But those other things is stuff which askes a sacrifice of you personally, while someone else's sexual orientation only needs you pointing at them. In the Netherlands where I live it's a lot less about sexual orientation (but still some), and a lot more about foreigners, be it asylum seekers or people of Moroccan descent who's grandparents were brought over in 1960's because of labour shortages.
All the comments saying it's a distraction from how the working class is being oppressed by the owner class are right, but also...
There have always been bigots, small town small minded people who don't "know any gay people" but there was that one skinny boy in their class that didn't like sports so he was bullied until he left town at 18. And now, that generation of bigots is finally dying out. Not only due to age but due to an increased connection with the greater world. A small town bigot might not know any LGBT people personally but they are aware of their existence, due to television and the Internet. So quietly ignoring people who are different than you doesn't work anymore. And a dying animal fights harder than ever.
These death throes are useful to the owner class. But they are still dying out. And if we can exterminate capitalism and figure out a way to survive in a post-warmed globe, we might just see the end of (this particular type) of bigotry.
Dude, plenty of Democrats in their 30s who say they are progressive are raging bigots and support racist policies.
They are just quiet about it. They aren't saying crazy racist nonsense on tiktok, but if you talk to them about issues like housing or schools... they make it very obvious what they think. Using polite language, of course. Black people are great, as long as they don't live near them, or go to the same school as their kid goes to! These are the same people who are NIMBY because they don't want 'people who haven't worked as hard as I have' from living near them.
Family sizes are down, birth rates are now 1 per family, maybe 2 children.
This is due to many reasons but mostly
Hormonal birth control
Women entering the mainstream labor pool
Basically, there are better things for women to do then just have kids. This has a been a huge force multiplier for the economy
However, this means that family lines, genetic lineage, family names, dynasties... All rests on the shoulders of a single child. That's a lot of pressure.
When you had 10 children, and one or two were "special", it may have caused some drama but the lineage was still being secured by the other 8.
When there is only one child who then chooses a alternative life style that does not reproduce that means the END of a genetic line, the end of a name, the end of a dynasty, the end of a family. These things are hugely important to people.
I think people are more angry about sexual choices now, because they're more important, because people have less children.
Well romans were fine with it. And the US people like to compare themselves to Romans at the height of the empire. But now it seems totally unforgiveable .
That's... disingenuous. Lot of stuff happened between those points, including the murder of homosexuals for the crime of existing.
The LGBT community keeps the fight up because complacency gets our rights taken away. Justice Thomas has explicitly stated that gay marriage is on his list of wrongs* to right. To say nothing of Project 2025.
A lot of it seems to be people who care are very loud because it's become a political point of divide. In real life most people seem to be at least tolerant of different sexual orientations these days even if the people on fox news won't stop shouting negative things about it.
Because the bigots seemed to have found ways to get in positions of influence to spread their toxic ideologies and get laws passed that targets their 'enemies'. Even when the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that same-sex marriage is legal, I knew in the back of my mind that things are far from over. Because after that? Like one month later, Kim Davis denied legalizing a same-sex marriage.
And things seemed to have worsened thanks to the existence of people like DeSantis, Trump and any GOP still somehow breathing that wants to antagonize everyone over sexual orientation. Because in their psychotic structure, they want America to be purely Christian, purely White and probably Blonde, Blue-eyed and fair skinned.
Even in 2004, George W Bush back then on February was quoted to have said: "Our Nation must defend the sanctity of marriage". What he means is, to protect the sanctity of STRAIGHT marriage because he seems to have it in his head that marriage is the property of the church and all that shit.
Doesn't that sound exactly like the kind of people a certain country named Germany aspired to be like back in WWII? Ironic.
Yea but wasn't that moron Kim Davis denied a same sex mariage on religious belief even thought the constituions says a seperation of church and state? And the SCOTUS ruled in the gay couples favor? And now is trying to fight against paying attorney fees for the gay couple that she denied? That kim davis?
Are the Dharmic faiths particularly inclusive of queer folks? Or just by comparison? I don't know about Buddhism but China is somewhat antigay, and it's not like the Kama Sutra had any gay stuff in it, and with all the erotic Hindu temple art I've never seen any gay stuff going on. Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong in my amateur assessment here
You know my friend, I am just starting this journey, and I haven't got there yet, so I have no answers for you. TBH I don't think I want to learn about anymore than the handful that I do. So far they all have positives to add to a life well lived but taken as a whole they don't make sense. Or they are just plain ol straight fucked up.
It's finally reaching such widespread acceptance that 1. Actual bigots are getting concerned they can't be bad people anymore and 2. Assorted people are getting tired of the discourse.
I don't think the site admins would be appreciative of my suggestion :^)
In reality, forcing higher standards across the board raises the floor and can prevent enough bad behavior to be useful. Education and experience also encourage good behaviors. Basically, make it illegal to be a bigot, and let people learn why they don't want to.
It's just part of the show, the illusion of choice for the lower classes while the elite remain the same.
Just a big distractor.
Edit: at the same time the pushing of LGBTQIA+ and femminism ideologies it's intended specially to make people have less kids, the more the traditional family get vanished the more easier it's to depopulate the world.
Wut. No one has an interest in depopulation but a few Malthusian kooks. The capitalist class certainly certainly doesn’t: who would then perform the labor from which they leach their wealth?
It's all about distraction. All of us seek entertainment because our lives are usually quite dull. So the media feeds us things to have opinions about. Politicians, big tech psychos, gender issues...
It's all pointless and keeps us from actually making any real difference. People here on Lemmy fight over which words to use, gender issues, or god forbid, someone admits they are not vaccinated...! Wow. Nuclear bomb right away.
None of this matters at all, it's just entertainment.. Nobody changes their minds from getting downvoted either. Sometimes it feels like keyboard warriors here think they are fighting some kind of fight. But nobody changes their mind guys, even if you downvote them.
So it's actually pure entertainment and distraction from what matters... :) We don't have to be so serious.
Aside from what everyone else has said, one of the big leaders to this scenario is that the world has gotten so much safer and so much less violent and so much more accepting that people have to literally scrape the barrels to find something to be outraged about.
We all of us know that the Republican playbook of taking rights away from people is a thing that is intended to target people and punish them for not adhering to the moral code of the people doing the targeting.
But the fact that we can spend so much of our national resources on arguing over morality is a side effect of the world being so good that we don't have to argue over worse things.
I'm not attempting to apologize or forgive anybody for their stance, but it is true that we are arguing over whether or not it's okay to have an abortion or whether or not it's okay to be gay rather than whether it's not okay to let have the country starve to death or whether or not it's okay to kill everyone all the time always.
I've said this before and I will inevitably say it again, human history is a pus filled boil on our consciences.
The only way to fix it is to lance it and to deal with all of the pus. We are in the pus clean up stage of human history, and in time with enough constant patient care, it will get better.
The capitalist class has class consciousness, and they understand that this is a class war. Until you develop class consciousness, the capitalist class will continue to take advantage of your false consciousness.