likely in response to my comments on the beehaw post, which i linked to (hopefully im doing this right?). apparently, calling people you dont know for the first time "they/them" before being told their pronouns is "misgendering". absurd. this kind of attitude threatens the larger LGBTQ community and is partially why cishets hate us after we won so much progress back in the 00s and 10s.
im a queer person. im neurodivergent. this shit is so goddamn fucking annoying, especially as an older queer who got physically assaulted on a near daily basis for being queer in the 90s. the kids today get their panties in a twist over being supposedly "misgendered" by someone calling them gender neutral pronouns before being corrected. narcissistic victimhood bullshit.
anyways, now banned from one of my favorite instances. meanwhile in the US theyre planning on hunting us. but yeah, lets ban fellow queers over their view that people who get mad about being "misgendered" when they arent (cis people are also referred to as "they/them" before further context in a conversation with a stranger) are just attention seeking brats that threaten the larger movement. its so obvious to me that the brats who find reason to be offended over innocent pronoun use never faced real adversity, like getting repeatedly physically beaten.
edit - the best part of all of this is i faced no moderation from beehaw and all of my comments are +1 or higher. power tripping oversensitive neurodivergent hating bastard of a mod over at blahaj IMO.
edit 2 - did this wrong. heres a link to the post i think got me banned from blahaj and a screenshot about it https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37659465
Edit 3 - apparently I did nothing wrong until I made my thoughts known about how the pronoun police fucked over the larger LGBTQ community as our rights are backsliding in America. Yall are gonna whine about being misgendered to the concentration camp guards at the rate we’re going. God forbid I be angry that while queers were busy fighting over pronouns our adversaries stuffed the courts, stuffed the school boards, couped the government, and are installing a fascist dictatorship. When I say that these fucking toddlers are going to learn what real oppression tastes like, that’s what I mean. It’s not that I want us to be hurt or oppressed (as the dog piling idiots have interpreted), it’s that the younger generation is weak as hell and lost the fucking plot in the fight for our rights. I grew up getting beaten in the streets for being queer only for these kids to claim their pronouns not being mind-read is oppression!
I'm a cishet guy, so my perspective is limited to that outside view, and the secondhand perspectives my handful of LGBT friends offer. But everything that I've seen and heard myself has pointed towards a greater acceptance of LGBT folk over the course of my 30 years of life, including the past decade. Like antisemitism and other bigotries, the worst and most violent expressions are often not rooted in backsliding of popular sentiment, but that popular sentiment has become widely positive enough to be threatening to conservative cultural forces, but not so strong or universal as to be an automatic death sentence for public bigotry. France was less antisemitic in 1940 than in 1900, yet it is the France of 1940 which cooperated with the Nazis on Jewish genocide.
I get that's not a big fucking comfort when the result is still potentially genocide, but I don't know that pronoun fights have had the effect you think they have, nor that popular opinion has reversed course rather than the still-recordbreaking level of LGBT support simply being insufficient against an outburst of the hatred that was never completely put out, and which still rules a sizable and energetic minority in this country.
I think the bad faith pronoun policing has been actively harmful to the queer community.
I think we are actively backsliding to the time of my childhood where physical violence against queers was not only acceptable but encouraged. We had a solid decade of acceptance from roughly 2006-2016 that seemed pretty legit (obviously hate will never be fully eradicated) but then when the generation that followed me came of age they - who grew up in a time of acceptance - found brand new ways to get offended by seemingly innocuous bullshit. And around the time of the neopronouns and other frivolous nonsense was the time that our social standing started to fall. I remember it first appearing on tumblr, baby queers policing everyone for not “respecting” their pronouns. Oh, and not being sexually interested in trans people being “transphobic”. In fact, anything besides fawning adoration was considered “transphobic”. The younger queers are irritating as hell IMO and are putting all of us at risk.
No offense, but I think you're getting old in a time of crisis. You rightfully see that things are fucked now, and getting worse, and want an explanation for it. But oftentimes the easy, A-Leads-To-B explanations that are intuitive are not correct. Tumblr, and Livejournal before that (Christ, remember Livejournal?), were always cesspools of hypervigilance, groupthink, and aggressive identity politics, but their activity was largely that of a vocal, and often very young and confused, minority misunderstanding academic and popular concepts, not a major cultural current.
I don't think their quarreling and internet slapfights were meaningful contributors, and while I might be wrong, I doubt that such minor quarreling is core to modern LGBT culture; what is more likely, I think, is simply that neopronouns and pronoun importance has increased with the acceptance of trans folk in society as more than a joke or an aside thought. I mean, fuck, I remember what the mid-late 2000s were like regarding trans folk. Not fucking pretty.
The kids will always be irritating. Hell, they were irritating when I was a kid, and I was one of the little shits. But they're also considerably less racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic than the kids were back in my day; and so is society at large, I think.
It's just that, like issue approval, popular minority acceptance unfortunately does not guaranteed the execution of a majority or plurality-opinion in policy. Improvements in popular minority acceptance reduce the chance of horrific policy execution, but until it is overwhelming, these reversals remain a possibility.
If it sounds like I'm downplaying it with clinical phrasing, I don't mean to. Fuck, I might be in line for the camps myself, albeit for different reasons. I just don't know that you're looking at the right cause for why LGBT folk are at risk now.
Omg live journal! Throwback! I miss those days. 😭 life was so much simpler back then. Hold up let me put on a passive aggressive away message wRitTeN lIkE tHiS on my AIM! 😝
I think the bad faith faux outrage pronoun policing is an offshoot of that and influenced larger culture especially larger queer culture. I was not welcome in those spaces back then despite being queer myself because I always saw aggressive identity politics for what it really is: a distraction against class based struggle. Queers dying in the street from poverty isn’t magically eradicated by a rainbow painted in the road which is all our leaders have to offer us. Performative bullshit. I think the appetite for performative bullshit stems from tumblr activism in the 2010s. Remember when all the corporations made their logos rainbow for pride month for a few years? So brave! they know what side their bread is buttered so they’re done with that now that the fascists are running the show. (And donating to them!)
Also I’m not offended. I am getting old in a time of crisis. The other day a friend texted me about how we should go to a protest together. Dude. I’m so fucking tired. the protests don’t matter and don’t do shit, and with AI and facial recognition, all that’s doing is getting you put on a list with your identifying info to be further dealt with in the upcoming years. I’ve been screaming at the top of my lungs about the descent into fascism the US has been speed running since fucking 2000 when bush stole the election. What we need is a general strike, a real one, we need to hit the capitalists (who side with fascists, a tale as old as time) where it hurts. Or ya know, deny, defend, depose.
Sorry, off on a tangent there.
Probably part of it. That being said, now when people feel like being assholes they focus on pronouns and identifying as an attack helicopter or whatever.
I don’t know about that anymore. Trumps support amongst the 18-29 year old crowd surged between the 2020 and 2024 elections, from roughly 1/3 to 1/2. And he won young men this election by 49-48%.
I think the “Zellenials” were the most accepting of any generation (just based on observation and IRL interaction) but their younger gen z counterparts are swinging back hard. Older millennials were assholes but as they aged they became better. All but one of my tormentors growing up apologized for the abuse they did to me, unprompted and unexpected, which im grateful for. (I moved away a decade ago and was back home a few years ago visiting when I ran into people who were cruel to me when I was younger, it was a trip)