Most Americans believe that it’s a “problem” that Republicans are transphobic.
A new YouGov poll asked Americans whether they thought that certain issues were a “problem” for either party. 44% said that transphobia was “a major problem” among Republicans, and another 24% said they thought it was “a minor problem.” Only 32% of respondents said it wasn’t a problem.
Transphobia was the second most likely issue to be labeled a problem by respondents, after “hostility toward immigrants.” “Tolerance of political violence,” “conspiracy thinking,” “white supremacy,” “homophobia,” and “fascism” followed closely behind.
Oddly, 40% of respondents said that “transgender ideology” was “a major problem” for Republicans, and another 20% said it was “a minor problem.” 41% said that they didn’t think it was a problem at all for Republicans.
There just aren’t that many trans people compared to how often conservatives make a big issue of them. And the number of times that a trans person has actually caused a tangible problem for other people in a way that is related to their being trans is even more rare. Not that it doesn’t happen, but it might as well be a unicorn.
That’s an easy way to tell for sure that they are using the issue as a distraction.
It’s not really a distraction, IMO. The enforcement of gender norms is kind of essential for conservative ideology. The idea that someone can transgress or opt-out from the enforcement of their rules is anathema to them.
If people assigned female at birth can become male and vice-versa, then all of the biological essentialism they believe in, that women are one way and men another due to their inherent characteristics, is proven false. It’s an important part of their ideology and without it a lot of other enforced heirarchies they care about inherently fall apart.
Sadly, a lot of the left is really naive to just how fucking evil these kinds of people are.
They worked hard to craft the narrative around trans people as the new sub-human scourge trying to destroy our nation etc. It was deliberate from the start, they picked a group that has low representation and low population, whom average people don’t understand or connect with.
You don’t fix this kind of thing with education, outreach and lecturing. You fix this with regime change. All of the transphobic chuds and all of the terfs have the attention-spans and emotional consistency of toddlers, that’s why they were vulnerable to the narrative to begin with. If we had new leadership who, no matter what ideology they represented, said “trans people ain’t a big deal and we ain’t going after them” you would see vast waves of people lose interest and start looking for the next target to hate and scapegoat.
conservatives are notorious for under reporting prejudice in surveys and also not responding to surveys
even if this article is right, Republicans still use anti-trans rhetoric and anti-trans policy to appeal to ignorant uneducated males of low socioeconomic status, and it works…
if you go far enough down on the totem pole of socioeconomic status and education, you find people who genuinely think that Democrats are trying to give all the money to the elites and don’t understand that proposals for trickle down economics mean they, the lower class people, are going to get fucked. Because so many of these low education and low intelligence people can only vote emotionally, because they actually can’t understand the economic issues, they get tricked by conservatives every time with emotional ploys about trans people and other bullshit…
Because if you’re some tractor driver who went to Bob Jones university and can’t understand things like monetary supply and federal interest rates and crowding out of private investment by government bonds and real prices and the problems of the CPI, you still may understand the myths of the Bible and that trans people “don’t seem quite right” and you may laugh at “trans-insanity” insults and other things enough to connect with super rich people out to fuck you as hard as your ignorant brain will allow. And so if you’re that type, you’re going to vote Republican and then 2 years later complain about how it’s unfair you’re losing the farm and tractor.
It’s not about how people rationally feel, this is about rhetorical mendacious trickery to confuse and dupe the stupid plus rage-bait wedge issues so that enough poor people vote with the rich so that both the lower and middle classes get fucked.
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