The Republicans have been playing by the nazi playbook for a long time now.
Nazis didn't start with the Jews. They knew they couldn't get away with rounding up an entire ethnic group. They started with the LGBTQ community. They dehumanized lgbtq people in the eyes of the public and made it seem like they were doing it for the good of a pure and powerful Germany. When that worked they realized how easy it was to dehumanize an entire population in the eyes of the public and used the same tactics against Jews, Roma etc.
When you think about it the lgbtq community is the first line of defence protecting democracy because they are the most vulnerable and easiest to demonize. Once it's ok to eradicate one group of people it becomes so much easier to do the same to larger groups.
It won't stop at lgbtq people, they will keep eradicating every minority until they're actually stopped by force. So far they've gone after trans people, gay marriage, women's reproductive rights and have even talked about overturning Loving vs Virginia. Their goal is a straight, white, "Christian" male utopia.
Might be obvious, but just to underscore it - if a conservative ever starts spouting nonsense about how "there wasn't no transgenders when we was kids" - yes there were, they just didn't know, and things like this are why
Also, just to put this research in some historical perspective - when this institute first opened its doors, we hadn't figured out insulin yet and the best treatment doctors had for diabetics was restrictive diets that ended up starving patients to death as often as not. Like, if those research institutes has gotten firebombed repeatedly over the years, a lot more of society would probably find the notion of people who can't eat sugar strange.
Might be obvious, but just to underscore it - if a conservative ever starts spouting nonsense about how "there wasn't no transgenders when we was kids" - yes there were, they just didn't know, and things like this are why
Many early 20th-century British and North American educators and physicians, albeit with a “scientific” rationale, insisted children should be made to write using their right hands. The methods used to obtain this result were often tortuous, including tying a resistant child's left hand to immobilise it. Typical of the reasoning to justify such practices is a 1924 letter to the British Medical Journal endorsing “retraining” of left-handers to write with their right hands, because otherwise the left-handed child would risk “[old word we don't use anymore] in mental development; in some cases…actual [old word]”. As late as 1946 the former chief psychiatrist of the New York City Board of Education, Abram Blau, warned that, unless retrained, left-handed children risked severe developmental and learning disabilities and insisted that “children should be encouraged in their early years to adopt dextrality…in order to become better equipped to live in our right-sided world”.
The saddest part is this trick has been working on humans for thousands of years. Is the issue the types who spin things this way, or the rest of us who fall for it? Seems like a human tragic flaw.
I'm starting to believe that human nature just always tends toward fascist tendencies. It's a constant battle against this shit, and it's exhausting. Then every ~100 years or so, the people who fought against it last die out, and everyone forgets what fascism does to a nation and the cycle repeats.
Studies of authoritarian personalities (specifically, authoritarian followers: the kind who show up to Trump's rallies to cheer, not Trump himself) show that there is probably a genetic component to this and dealing with these people is probably always going to be a struggle for humanity.
However: it's probably more that the tendency is genetic. Exposure to novelty and life experience (or generally: lack of those things) are big factors in terms of someone actually adopting these ideas
Unfortunately it's not a field that gets a huge amount of study.
Human lifespans are short and most humans need to learn lessons firsthand. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a cyclical pattern for humanity. Hell, the Roman Republic was founded by a hard working group of people that wanted to escape the tyranny of the Etruscan kings that dominated the region. And Rome was hijacked by a tyranical emperor in the end, leading to a slow decline over the years.
LGBT and communists were attacked at around the same time based on my knowledge of events, but is it really a surprise that the LGBT would be excluded from recognition based on the dominate cultures of the time?
Germany went through a Communist revolution immediately after (and a little bit during) WW1. The Communists won and took over Germany, getting rid of the monarchy. The far right in Germany went fucking wild with rage, a level of anger that really has no parallel in the modern US, and "cleansed" Germany. The Weimar Republic was formed roughly in the wake of that.
But that wasn't the Nazis, though many of the people involved in that did go on to become Nazis.
The Nazis did sorta go after queer, and specifically transgender, people first. (And "degenerate art"!)
The Weimar Republic, for its many, many, many faults (seriously here it's hard to overstate) did grow out of a Communist revolution even if it betrayed that revolution. They were actually issuing permits for people to live their lives as a different gender, similar to our modern conception of getting your paperwork changed in the US. One of the first things the Nazis did when they took over was to strike those permits down. (Or simply prosecute the people who held them. Or simply straight up murder them.)
Pretty sick isn't it? Especially when you consider in their straight white Christian male utopia they will still be the underclass to the 1% of people who control more than half of the world's wealth. So you kill a bunch of innocent people and your still a poor racist scumbag piece of shit. Nice.
Being Christian, white, straight, and/or male is just a means to an end.
If they have to collectively suck the cocks of a bunch of gay guys if it will give them power, they'll do it and then execute them saying they were tricked.