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#woke homophobia
she-is-ovarit · 7 months
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I am so disturbed by how being gay or lesbian is treated as a subculture or aesthetic or homogenous way of being. It's part of why I really don't like the phrase "LGBT community" — gay and lesbian people are a population of people, with several communities. The mainstream, status quo "queer community" and the stereotypes that come with it aren't reflective of us. We aren't characters out of a fanfic, nor are those of us who refuse to dye our hair and assimilate into hipster fashion "het passing". We are just people.
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penthesileas-ghost · 1 year
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TikTok user posts about how she has to pretend her girlfriend is her roommate because her parents are homophobic. Is called out by a commenter for not actually being a lesbian at all: she’s dating a female-identified male. The user proceeds to cry transphobia, to conflate being disabled with being in a homosexual relationship, and to imply that holding up a peace sign or taking film photos with her partner means they’re “obviously” not heterosexual. Her attempts at irony here completely fail because her partner does not pass and to literally any casual observer, they look like a straight couple.
This is modern-day lesbophobia. Stop appropriating homosexual and bisexual experiences to make yourself seem more interesting. Find other ways to deal with your pain.
Lesbian = adult human female exclusively attracted to other adult human females.
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tiredbiird · 11 months
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why arent we talking about me! me! me! me!
homosexuality is still illegal in 68 countries. punishable by death in 11.
homosexual people are dying. they are being killed by their governments and religious officials. you are being made to see a therapist before you can receive a prescription for hormones who cause irreversible changes in your body.
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kanelia · 5 months
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Ignore this pathetic creep with she/her pronouns trying to take a dig at my age and nationality, but pay attention to how after assuming I must be a lesbian she immediately starts to fantasise about me getting r*ped by trans identified males. How the hell have these woman-haters managed to fool everybody? They are disgusting af and their ideology is pure homophobia.
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alien-bear · 1 year
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TRAs loving to pretend that they the reason they hate terfs is the fact that the women’s right rallies are “full of neonazis and are supported by right wing men” but… how come that those TRAs never beat up the Nazis there?
It’s always the lesbians, the elderly people, and the women they threaten.
How come?
Oh right. Because it’s women they hate.
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By: Bridget Phetasy
Published: Jun 22, 2023
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably witnessed the backlash to Pride. There have been mass boycotts of Bud Light after the beer company partnered with trans woman and TikTok influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, sending her a custom can to celebrate her first year of “girlhood.” Target was next to come under fire for its Pride display targeting children and their “tuck-friendly” bathing suits for women. 
This set the stage for the most divisive Pride month in some time. First, the boycotts. Then videos of angry parents at school boards went viral. Conservative radio hosts and commentators vowed to make Pride “toxic” to brands. But it’s not just conservatives who are pushing back; according to a recent Gallup poll, even Democrats have seen a drop in the acceptance of same-sex relations.
Which begs the question: what happened to Pride? After decades of progress for gay rights, growing acceptance of gay marriage and the normalization of same-sex relationships, Pride is unexpectedly political again. Why?
In search of an answer, I spoke to prominent LGBT thinkers and writers, many of them dissenting voices when judged against the views of many LGBT advocacy groups. Their answers surprised me. Across the board they all said some version of “this was inevitable.”
“When it comes to gay issues, conservatives largely lost the culture war,” Katie Herzog observes. “But something about recent trends has reignited that passion — and issues that seemed resolved are up for debate again. I guess the Nineties really are back.”
“The core reason for the backlash is pretty simple: children,” Andrew Sullivan explains. “The attempt to indoctrinate children in gender ideology and to trans them on the verge of puberty has changed the debate. Start indoctrinating and transing children… and you will re-energize one of the oldest homophobic tropes there is: ‘gays are child molesters.’”
Glenn Greenwald largely agrees: “What destroyed the culture war consensus was their cynical and self-interested decision to transform the LGBT cause into one that no longer focused on the autonomy of adult Americans to live freely — which most people support — but instead to demand the right to influence and indoctrinate other people’s children.”
“They are calling them ‘trans kids’ and medicalizing them at an early age. Lying about puberty blockers. Lying about young girls getting irreversible surgery and so on,” says trans man Buck Angel.
In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriages, and with bipartisan support it seemed there was a consensus on this one culture war issue, as well as broad support for the legal rights of trans adults to be free from discrimination. The war was largely won. But rather than shutting up shop or refocusing their efforts on parts of the world where gay and lesbian people faced serious discrimination, activists and NGOs moved onto the transgender issue.
“There are countries in the world where you can be executed for being gay,” says James Kirchick, author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. “That’s what the Human Rights Campaign [America’s foremost LGBT campaign group] should be saving its ire for.”
An average person will likely refer to this shift as “woke” and wonder how “the trans stuff” is suddenly everywhere, all at once. Parents are baffled when three out of four of their twelve-year-old daughter’s friend group “identify” as boys or, even more confusingly, nonbinary. People started putting pronouns in their social media bios, on their work résumés and in their email signatures. Biological men are competing in women’s sports and being placed in women’s prisons. In medical magazines and birthing classes, women are suddenly referred to by dehumanizing terms such as “birthing persons” and “uterus havers.”
“It’s like a new enforced public holiday thing and people smell a rat,” says Douglas Murray. “The wiser people realize that something weird is being smuggled in. This isn’t just like, ‘don’t beat up your gay neighbor.’ It’s like ‘there is no such thing as gender.’ ‘There is no such thing as sex.’”
We’ve arrived here thanks to a confluence of forces. Perpetual victimhood pushed by activist groups that need a reason to exist and continue collecting money. The corporatization of Pride. The hijacking of the movement by gender ideology.
“You can’t dress toddlers up in extreme political propaganda while lecturing the parents on committing child abuse for not transitioning their kids and expect everyone to keep quiet,” trans writer Chad Felix Greene tells me.
To a normal, not especially political person going about their life, it can seem like gay culture is everywhere. Pride was once just a day to have fun, go to a parade, and “for those who have just come out as a way to cement their self-confidence in public” as Sullivan says. Now every June it becomes “the Holy Month of Pride” as Murray dubs it. Corporations change their social media logos to rainbows (unless, of course, it’s their Saudi account). Pride™️ has become so accepted it’s inescapable. 
On the surface this might look like capitalism at work. These companies just want the gay dollar! Though there’s some truth to that, there’s also an undertow dragging these huge corporations down. They aren’t making decisions that are in the best interest of their shareholders; they are acting out of concern for their social credit score.
“These corporations aren’t getting any gay dollars from these fiascos. Gays hate corporations at Pride,” said publicist Mitchell Jackson. “Worst of all, these corporate campaigns just backfire on LGBTQ people. Gay rights are now being threatened again because big-box stores needed to sell tucking underwear.”
Jackson is exasperated that corporations listen to the advocacy groups in an attempt to do the right thing: “Corporations go to these groups for advice, hoping to avoid a woke controversy, and they get led into a hornet’s nest — and then these non-profits can fundraise off of the Bud Light controversy of the week.”
“What changed is that LGBT activist groups could not afford to obtain victory,” Greenwald says. “When activist groups win, their reason for existing, and their large budgets and salaries, dry up. They always have to push debates into whatever places Americans resist. They also have to be losing, have a claim to victimhood, a reason to assert that they are righting the bigotry of Americans.”
“It’s so tragic because we’ve reached this moment when gay people have finally won mainstream acceptance for the first time in, like, 2,000 years of history,” Kirchick said. “It’s OK to be gay pretty much everywhere in America — and there are obviously pockets where it’s still a problem, I’m not gonna deny that — but majorities of Republicans support gay marriage. I’ve seen it in my own life as a thirty-nine-year-old gay man: it’s a lot easier to be gay now than it was six years ago. And just when we’ve reached this moment, these activists have decided, in our name as gay people, to just piss off America and to make them think that we are a threat to their children.”
“I am so upset that my community has been co-opted and has been used for some other agenda,” Angel told me. “The work we have done to get here is profound and should never be forgotten. All we want is to live our lives just like you, but of course that’s not what you see now with the people driving the LGBTQIA+++++ bus.”
The real slippery slope hasn’t been the gay rights movement, as right-wing pundits often say. “When I see some of them going after Pride, they appear to blame gay people for the nonsense peddled in the name of Pride today — when in truth gay people are the victims of it,” comedian Andrew Doyle said. 
At the heart of the problem is the fact that LGBT was never the package deal that most people consider it to be. “LGBT people don’t exist,” says Sullivan. “We’re very different from each other.”
Generally speaking, it’s “the Ts and the Qs” that insist it’s all or nothing. Trans activists demand acquiescence to all their demands no matter how insane and pseudo-scientific, push to allow men in women’s shelters and allow kids to be put on puberty hormones or you’re committing genocide. People are are increasingly saying, “OK — it’s nothing then.”
“I think gays and women in general are bearing the brunt of the gender ideology nonsense,” Murray said. “And it has itself piggybacked like some kind of parasitic entity onto gay rights.”
“Gender identity ideology is essentially anti-gay,” said Doyle. “Gay rights were secured through the recognition that a minority of people are instinctively orientated towards members of their own sex. Gender identity ideology seeks to break down the very notion of biological sex and claim that it is unimportant.”
Underneath the rainbow facade are illiberal forces such as “queer theory” that have been eroding the classically liberal foundation of the original civil rights movement that won gay and trans folks the rights they have now. We’ve gone from “love is love” to trans women insisting if a lesbian doesn’t want to suck their lady dick, they’re a fascist. 
If you’re confused, that’s the point; confusion and contradiction are features, not bugs. In order to understand how this happened, and why, you need specialized knowledge. The average person can’t explain exactly what’s going on, because it’s nonsensical, you can only intuit it; but call it out and you’re dubbed a bigot — and so you retreat, keeping your head down while the gender borg marches on.
The temperature has been raised further by the Biden adminstration’s unambiguous embrace of this ideology. The White House is quick to paint anyone doubting the wisdom of what they euphemistically call “gender-affirming care” for minors as a knuckle-dragger, even though the overwhelming majority of Americans support a ban on such care and many liberal, tolerant European countries have banned it or scaled it back.
No wonder dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who disagree with the idea of biological men in women’s spaces — or are confused about the pseudo-religious idea that you were born in the wrong body, and wonder whether or not pausing puberty is even possible — are terrified to speak out. 
“It was once ‘live-and-let-live’ said Sullivan, “Now it’s ‘embrace the ideology — or else.’”
Herein lies the problem with Pride. You can no longer opt out of the ideology. The trans activism changed everything. It is coercive. It is everywhere. Big Tech acts as an enforcer, in conjunction with the state, policing language, pronouns, exacting punishments for refusing to repeat the mantras “trans women are women” and “gender-affirming care is reproductive freedom.”
“I know many gay activists from yesteryear who are coming out of retirement to address this new anti-gay movement which has usurped Pride,” said Doyle. “It doesn’t help that all criticism of Pride is interpreted as homophobic or transphobic. These are important conversations. Like most culture-war issues, we need to stop thinking of this in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’. These things are irrelevant. There are left-wing gay people and right-wing gay people — and all of them are harmed by Pride in its current form.”
The backlash is veering into a full-blown moral panic. “I’m seeing a lot more people online talking about gay people as though we are all pedophiles who want to groom children into becoming cross-dressing strippers, and a lot of what’s going on feels like good old-fashioned bigotry rearing its ugly head once again,” said Herzog.
Might the public backlash to Pride push moderates and independents to the left the way the overturning of Roe v. Wade did? From an optics perspective, attacking Pride can often look like attacking the whole LGBT community; just from what I’ve witnessed online, an unsettling amount of homophobia is rearing its head, using boycotts as cover for bigotry. Last week a video went viral that showed Muslim children stomping on the rainbow flag while their parents cheered them on.
“I don’t want to name names but there are certain conservative commentators who are using the backlash against LGBTQIA plus to include a backlash against gays,” says Murray. “But I think it’s inevitable because not enough gays try to do the decoupling that I’ve tried to do myself in recent years and say, ‘Sorry, not my party.’”
Yet the decoupling has begun and it seems to be the only way to navigate our way out of this moment without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. #LGBwithouttheTQ and the #LGB have been trending on Twitter almost every day in June. Even if people don’t understand the forces at work, I think most Americans are smart enough to make the distinction between their gay loved ones and friends and some of the more insane gender stuff.
Like most things, this requires nuance. “You have to say, ‘we respect the rights of adults to undergo a gender transition,’” says Kirchick. “And ‘we want full equality and non-discrimination for transgender people in society, but there are real live debates about at what age it’s appropriate to administer these sorts of medical treatment to kids.’”
“Keep biological sex as a central characteristic in the law and culture,” Sullivan says. “Gender can be added, but can’t replace.”
“I think many LGBT people see this mess but are scared to lose friends and community if they speak up,” said Angel. “But it’s our duty as LGBT members to call this out. To show the world that these people are not a representation of us.”
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butch-reidentified · 3 months
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hey
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this is still a violent homophobic hate crime...
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...even if you block me
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...even if you add your potassium or copper or strontium or whatever to your murder weapon.
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after all,
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"they probably deserve it"
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lilliththeghost · 6 months
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I have tried to date trans women. I have tried to date non-binary people AMAB. I was pressured and guilted into these relationships because I wanted to be accepting, and they said they were not technically men so I should be fine dating them. And I thought maybe it would be okay and that they were right because they were smarter than me. My attraction must just be attraction to non-men. They were so sure they knew better than I did, so I let them tell me things about myself that were not true.
I feel like I have given this enough shots to say I do not like dick. But the reality is, I shouldn't have had to prove it. It shouldn't have taken four years of sexless relationships thinking I was the problem.
They should have accepted my answer when I told them. Because I did tell them. They always found a way to explain it away. And when I inevitably pulled away from sex after "giving it my best" I was shamed into thinking there was something wrong with me. So I stayed. I have wasted years of my life on people I was not really attracted to but happened to be there at a vulnerable moment in my life. And I clung to that just because they were nice to me, and I SHOULD be attracted to them, so why wasn't I?
There is nothing wrong with being a homosexual woman. My real flaw is that I let people stomp all over my boundaries because I want to make them happy and be accepted. Because I was socialized to be this way, raised religious, told I needed someone to complete me.
I am done. I am complete. And now, finally, I am not going to let anyone tell me that my attraction is wrong. I will stand up for myself and my needs as a LESBIAN. Because this is who I am, who I always have been, and I will no longer deny it.
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wordwovencackle · 2 months
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I never felt so uncomfortable about the voices of other bisexual people until trans rights activists, the majority of whom are bisexual, have become so comfortably homophobic.
There have always been bad apples. But now, when lesbians aren't even allowed their own spaces to talk about being solely attracted to the same sex, I've frequently felt sick to my stomach. There is no reason why those can't exist alongside a shared space for homosexuals and bisexuals, but here we are! I see many bisexuals who are so deprived of talking about their same-sex attraction, experiences, struggles and joy that they are desperate to connect with openly homosexuals but homosexuals are rightfully wary of risking what little they have left. There are barely any lesbian spaces in real life or online left!
I'm sick of bisexuals dictating what homosexuals should or shouldn't be attracted to and yes, I'm also pointing at trans rights activists for being insanely homophobic and going too far by spewing conversion therapy rhetoric like saying someone's sex doesn't matter during sex, or going stealth until clothes come off and traumatising or triggering the other, or lying to trans people in general that their "masculinity" or "feminity" changes their sex or that they can change their sex through surgery, which trickled down to calling homosexuals transphobic at the drop of a hat.
Since when do homosexuals owe you affirmation? Since when do you feel entitled to their spaces? Why did the majority of bisexuals see this happen and just shrug because they aren't monosexual and thus not the target?
"Genital fetishists," are you all daft? A fetish is a form of sexual desire in which gratification is strongly linked to a particular object or activity or a part of the body other than the sexual organs. The attraction towards genitals is intrinsic to sexuality and sexual attraction. I feel like I'm perpetually talking to first graders.
I'm so disgusted with the online bisexual "community" for blindly nodding their heads like spineless, "no infighting please" puppies. Do you think none of this matters? How safe must your life be to not care about others?
As a bisexual, what occurred that made you think you could comment on the experience of monosexuals? And I'm well aware many call themselves "gay," or "lesbian," while being bisexual. If you have a vagina and you would have sex with someone with a penis, you're not a lesbian. If you have a penis and you would have sex with someone with a vagina, you're not gay. If neither of you have the same genitalia, it's not homosexuality.
"Labels don't matter," was for those who weren't sexually awakened and were figuring themselves out. But this is what it has led to: the utter deterioration of homosexual spaces, and it's vile and there should be a lot more shame about it.
I'm glad that in personal relations and daily life, the connection between bisexuals and homosexuals is a bit better. But the physical gay and lesbian spaces we were once proud of are now paradoxically wary of homosexuals for fear of being called transphobic.
And I'm also blaming bisexuals for not being critical. For prioritising fetishes and kinks before sexuality. For not listening to the experiences of people with a sexuality different from their own varied, but not exhaustive, experiences. I'm blaming bisexuals for not standing up for homosexuals.
I'm not ashamed of being bisexual. I've never been ashamed of it and I never will be. I'll post this post and continue like normal - and isn't that a privilege?
I will always love other bisexuals who aren't homophobic. There are plently, but there should be more. And louder.
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coochiequeens · 7 months
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Natural disasters around the globe and now a war between Isreal and Palestine and instead of posting about how these issues impact women UN Women focuses on men in dresses and then doubles down when called out.
By Shay Woulahan. October 8, 2023
The official account for United Nations Women is under fire after posting in celebration of “trans lesbians” despite having released no formal statement condemning the violence against women in war-torn Israel. The posts, of which two were made on October 8, were intended to celebrate “International Lesbian Day.”
In the first post made to X (formerly Twitter), UN Women stated that there was “no one way to be a lesbian or express womanhood,” leaving many users confused as to the underlying meaning.
“There is only one way to be a lesbian,” one user wrote. “To be a female exclusively attracted to other females. And there is only one way to express womanhood — to be an adult human female,” user @OneSmallVoice wrote.
“Nah, there’s only one way to be either,” another user responded.
After hundreds of negative replies, UN Women made a second post hours later in an apparent effort to double-down on their narrative.
“Remember, trans lesbians are lesbians too,” the post read. “Let’s uplift and honor EVERY expression of love and identity!” The post was accompanied by an image reiterating “trans lesbians are lesbians.”
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Immediately, UN Women was hit with a storm of backlash from users who called the post “homophobic” and “rapey.”
Giggle Founder Sall Grover said the notice was “anti-lesbian,” stating: “Men aren’t lesbians. Deal with it.”
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Another top reply on the post, written by UK-based safeguarding group Safe Schools Alliance, accused UN Women of propagating rape culture.
“You are a disgrace. Delete this tweet, then delete your account. How DARE you contribute to the #RapeCulture women & girls suffer, from childhood, worldwide. Stand down & let people who know #SexMatters advocate for women & girls including our lesbian sisters.”
Other advocates that fight for women’s sex-based rights similarly called out UN Women, with many noting that the organization has yet to release an official statement condemning the brutality committed against women in Israel.
On October 7, Hamas militants launched a surprise offensive on Israel, targeting civilian areas with violence. Almost immediately, horrific videos began to circulate on social media showing the Islamic soldiers kidnapping and brutalizing women. In one of the most shocking pieces of footage, Hamas militants were seen parading around the corpse of a woman now identified as a German-Israeli civilian who had been in the region to attend a pro-peace festival.
As of the writing of this article, over 700 people in Israel have been confirmed dead and over 2000 are injured. In Gaza, the Palestinian Health Ministry has reported 370 dead, with over 2200 injured. Over 100 people have been taken as hostages by Hamas, a great number of them are women and children.
Jewish journalist Eve Barlow pointed out that despite making time to advocate for “trans lesbians,” UN Women hasn’t discussed the violence committed in Israel against females.
“@UN_Women has not issued a single tweet from their account about the crimes committed against Israel’s women. One [repost] on the subject, one tweet about Afghanistan and two about #LesbianDay. Jewish women deserve your advocacy,” stated journalist and activist Eve Barlow.
This is not the first time UN Women and the United Nations has promoted gender ideology at the expense of women. UN Women has a well-established history of calling for all nations to allow men to be able to self-declare their legal sex as female.
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“Trans women have the right to recognition of their self-identified gender – but in most countries, this is not available or subject to abusive restrictions,” UN Women posted in June.
This was blasted by British Member of Parliament Rosie Duffield who responded to the organization’s statement.
“No, this is not a universally accepted ‘right’ at all. And as a Member of Parliament in England, I will continue to work with other legislators to stop self-id from destroying women’s rights – rights to sport, single sex spaces, same-sex medical care.”
On International Women’s Day in 2020, UN Women endorsed a statement made by a trans-identified male in which he referred to women as “formless.” The man being celebrated by UN Women, model Aaron Philip, bragged about being platformed by the United Nations and referred to women who protested as “TERFs.”
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teawithvanya · 3 months
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Notice how the threads of the gay pride flag are being unwovened & threaded into the trans tissue box (or whatever it is)... a good analogy about how TQ+ people are slowly erasing & silencing same-sex attracted people.
(found on Twitter/X)
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she-is-ovarit · 11 months
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It's all connected. Corporations began marketing gay pride themed merchandise. An increase in "I-identify-as" populations began to flood gay bars and events, where outward appearance (marketed as "gender expression") became heavily emphasized.
Commercial visibility and marketability does not equal human rights progress.
Ability to consume does not equal citizenship to an oppressed group.
Biology, (referring to sexual orientation and sex) is not a brand you can buy into or boycott out of.
Corporations selling rainbows do not reflect our values.
The churning out of new "all inclusive" pride flags to pledge allegiance to is not indicative of liberation.
A historical homosexual slur being sold by the multi-billion dollar media obfuscates predominantly lesbian relationships ("queer women", "queer relationship") and retraumatizes many gay and lesbian people.
Gay pride only extending to people able to purchase detracts from the meaning of gay pride and distracts from the struggles of the most vulnerable. It positions the most privileged within marginalized and oppressed groups as those who represent the whole.
And associating body modification, aestheticism, and "expression" with self identity turns the lived experiences and material realities of entire subgroups of people into niche market categories that people who aren't even a part of these groups can identify into and out of based on social trends.
Biology becomes devalued, overshadowed by the social and manufactured "genders". Infinite genders means infinite target audiences. Lived, material realities of certain groups of people become materialism.
Human rights movements are becoming human rights industries, with the wealthy more directly capitalizing off of the exploitation of the poor, of the homosexual, of the female, of the immigrant, of the dark skinned, of the mentally ill, of the disabled, of the sick, of the marginalized and oppressed.
Don't buy into it.
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kthulhu42 · 29 days
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Fucking christ. So sick of homophobia from the group that claims to be part of the rainbow community. Imagine saying this with a straight face. Penis in Vagina sex is as straight as it gets and to even hint that it could be lesbian sex is to shit on every single lesbian who has ever lived. People with dicks (men) cannot be lesbians.
How many times do they have to reveal they are homophobic for people to get the memo that it's just a straight pride movement at this point.
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michellezagenda · 7 months
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at least homophobia was straight up back then nowadays queers wanna be your friend before they start giving you guides on how to transition ……
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/most-transgender-kids-turn-out-to-be-gay-gender-affirming-care-conversion-therapy-58111b2e
Most ‘Transgender’ Kids Turn Out to Be Gay
Subjecting them to medical interventions is the modern-day version of ‘conversion therapy.’
By: Roy Eappen
Published: Dec 14, 2023
As a medical professional who happens to be gay, I’ll be celebrating Dec. 15, the 50th anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. The longstanding designation was based on prejudice, not medical research, and the revision marked the beginning of the end for so-called conversion therapy, which sought to “cure” gays and lesbians of a nonexistent malady.
Half a century later, the medical establishment is pushing a new kind of conversion therapy under the guise of transgender identity. No one is suffering more than gay kids. In Canada, where I practice, and in the U.S., physicians provide what’s euphemistically known as “gender-affirming care” to patients as young as 8, and the leading transgender health association has opened the door to interventions at even earlier ages. Under this framework, those who feel uncomfortable with their bodies may receive a medical regimen including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries. These interventions typically stunt, remove or irreversibly modify a patient’s sexual development, genitals and secondary sex characteristics. Any endocrinologist or other physician who rejects this approach is alleged to be endangering the health and even the life of his patients.
But are these patients really “transgender”? Research shows that some 80% of children with “gender dysphoria” eventually come to terms with their sex without surgical or pharmaceutical intervention. Multiple studies have found that most kids who are confused or distressed about their sex end up realizing they’re gay—nearly two-thirds in a 2021 study of boys. This makes sense: Gay kids often don’t conform to traditional sex roles. But gender ideology holds that feminine boys and masculine girls may be “born in the wrong body.”
In this light, “gender-affirming care” looks a lot like conversion therapy. In the past, it took the form of electroshock therapy, chemical castration and even lobotomy. Now it takes the form of rendering teenagers sterile and sexually dysfunctional for life. Clinicians from the main U.K. transgender service referred to prescribing puberty blockers as “transing the gay away”—a play on the description of old-fashioned conversion-therapy as “praying the gay away.” A clinician who resigned from the U.K. service accused it of “institutional homophobia.” Clinicians at the service had a “dark joke” that “there would be no gay people left at the rate Gids”—the Gender Identity Service—“was going.”
Consistent with conversion therapy, physicians are telling young gays and lesbians that something is wrong with them, based on a regressive view of what it is to be male or female. Also consistent with previous efforts to cure homosexuality: The resulting interventions often create lifelong medical problems, both physical and mental. Contrary to advocates’ claims, there’s no evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries reduce the risk of suicide.
Children who take this road face a lifetime of pain, infertility and anguish. They deserve real mental-health care to address common underlying comorbidities, not mind- and body-altering medical interventions that try to make them into something they aren’t.
Fifty years ago, the medical assault on homosexuals began to end. Now society has been told that accepting transgender identity is the same as accepting gays and lesbians. But it isn’t. Even well-intentioned acceptance of transgender identity disproportionately harms them. One day perhaps professional organizations like the Endocrine Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics will follow the evidence, as the APA did in 1973. Until then, gay kids will continue to suffer from an injustice that was supposed to end 50 years ago.
Dr. Eappen is a practicing endocrinologist in Montreal and a senior fellow at Do No Harm.
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Reminder:
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There's no such thing as "trans kid."
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