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 straight men and women. Only people who don’t seem to care are people who are bi, or very secure in their sexuality. Way too many people feel the need to do that though.
I’d just like to say that I’m not defining myself at any point, I’m describing myself.
A trivial point, maybe, but there’s still plenty of bigots around and the ones around me use phrases like “defining yourself” to minimize and erase lbgtq+ people’s experiences.
Identifying might be the best word to use, given the psychology literature all tends to use that, but thank you for your critique.
Because Americans are too ignorant and uneducated to assemble tribally over any actually important issue. Heck most people on Lemmy think if you’re gay and go to UAE they just chop your head off and bury you under a camel. The reality is that the world doesn’t care, just keep your private life private. But when your entire identity becomes a label you have to shout at everyone it’s basically veganism
I don’t think it’s good to just generalise a whole country of people. I’m not American but I realise we only really see the lunatics and crazy opinions. The regular people are as boring and uninterested as the rest of us, it’s just that doesn’t drive engagement.
“Keep your private life private” Okay so I can’t hold my gf’s hand in the street but if I had a bf it would be allowed. In some countries I wouldn’t be allowed to marry her. Are those issues of making my private life public? A lot of people do care and hate us. Im getting weird looks everytime I’m with her in the street. So shut up about issues you’re not concerned with.
That’s not true at all. You have a warped view of the reality because of being fed negative propaganda.
The same way the North Koreans believe weird untrue things. You can see that propaganda because it’s transparent to anyone who has lived outside that bubble. The American propaganda is equally stupid
I don’t even live in America. You should just shut up.
All of a sudden? Where have you been the last 80-100 years?
Not that old yet.
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.
You flatter me mate…internet blushing
The US isn’t any more concerned about sexual orientation now than any point in the past. Back in colonial times, it wouldn’t have been safe to be anything other than straight with all the hyper religious colonists. They were even forcing their gender conformity and the straight sexual orientation on the Native Americans. Baron Friedrich von Steuben got a pass for being gay, probably because he was the one in charge of training the troops for Washington. 100 years ago, you could be killed on the street for being anything other than straight or denied jobs. The Lavender scare of the mid century brought this more to light. The AIDS crisis that started in the 80s and bled through into the 90s and 2000s as new medicines were being invented, further brought negative light to sexual orientations outside of straight. The cause of all of this attention to sexual orientation has been the religions brought over by colonists.
In recent years, sexual orientations outside of straight are finally being seen in a positive light with Lawrence v TX (2003) legalizing same-sex relationships and Hodges v Obergefell (2015) legalizing same-sex marriages. In Bostock v Clayton County (2020) legal protections against job discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity were finally put into place over 70 years after the start of the Lavender Scare.
The attention to sexual orientation has always been part of North American history. It has just changed from acceptance with the Native American peoples to hate, death, and intolerance under the colonists, to a more accepting present day. With some of the positive news in recent years, it can be easy to forget (if you’re surrounded by progressives in a blue state) that the hate of sexuality injected into North America in the 15th Century still has hold over large portions of the population today.
american school system. decades of wrong education by specialising while not having broader knowledge and making education a side hustle while college football is their slave business.
this has led to a mostly degenrated society. an idiocracy.
In my 36yr life it isn’t any greater or lesser of a concern than it has been before, though I’m quick to think of the euphamism-treadmill as being constantly turning.
—To me It seems like sexuality is easy-pickings for politicians that don’t want to write legislation that benefits the lower-classes. It’s a big part of the “circuses” metaphor in the phrase “bread and circuses.”
The forces of reaction never went away, they just weren’t as narketable for a few years, there. Companies are trying to increase their marketshare among bigots while also not alienating the people that don’t hate gay people. So you get pinkwashed corporate logos and genocide along with cancelled gay shows and an increase in false history nouveau Westerns.
Wedge issues. Equal rights for everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation of ethnicity are something that we, as a society, actually solved decades ago that aren’t even a question. They were brought back into public discourse by corrupt people that seek to keep us distracted while they rob us all blind. The two party system in the US (and any nation that uses a FPTP voting system that limits us to a MAXIMUM of two viable parties) is a HUGE reason why they still exist.
The reason we still argue endlessly about these solved issues is that the two parties have decided to highlight those issues (as if there’s even a debate about them) because the super wealthy people at the top don’t want us talking about things that will cause us to stand up and demand improvements to our material conditions.
I’m calling the DNC technique of wrapping Reaganomics in a friendly identity politics outer shell “woke-washing” because of how similar it is to “green-washing”.
Some More News did a segment on how Regan forced the Democrat Party to go further right in order to achieve power. Same thing happened in the UK after Thatcher. The Labour Party swung right to get votes.
I don’t have the data however I would imagine, that after the the conservative 80s, a lot left wing parties moved to the right to capture votes.
Also Regan elevated Jerry Falwall and the Christian Religious Right.
Coverage naturally gravitated toward Lynchburg, Virginia, preacher Jerry Falwell, who had supported Anita Bryant’s 1977 anti-gay-rights crusade, and Virginia Beach television mogul Pat Robertson, who was involved with the Washington for Jesus rally of April 1980 (scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of the first landing at Jamestown).
Falwell, head of the Moral Majority (another nod to Nixon), was more eager to enter the political arena. He thus became the first anointed spokesperson of what was then commonly called the “Religious New Right.”
During the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan and the evangelical conservatives engaged in a very public courting ritual. Evangelicals had entertained possible GOP alternatives to Carter since at least 1979. Options abounded— ranging from right-wing purist Philip Crane of Illinois to early front-runner John Connally of Texas—but Reagan, long a darling of conservatives in general, was an especially compelling choice. By the time Moral Majority executive director Robert Billings signed on as a Reagan campaign adviser, the deal was pretty much sealed.
Truly Regan was a piece of shit.
That’s actually a bullshit talking point used by the Progressive Policy Institute (which are not even remotely Progressive) and other right wing think-tanks. They pushed right because of the DLC. They used the “capturing votes” thing to excuse the rightward push. They STILL love that talking point despite Bernie having the most bipartisan grassroots support in the last 40 years…
They had to move heaven and earth to cheat him.
IMO, Clintonites and neoliberals were even more nefarious since they successfuly pretended to be leftists while purposely pushing the Democratic Party rightward to what we see today. Coupled with regulatory capture in the form of Citizens United, they now have a virtually-impenetrable corporatist stronghold in the US.
Further reading: https://www.salon.com/2016/04/30/clintonism_screwed_the_democrats_how_bill_hillary_and_the_democratic_leadership_council_gutted_progressivism/
That fucking rock was installed a few years ago to keep homeless people from sleeping. Very inclusive 😡
That rock is inclusive! It doesn’t let any homeless person sleep there. The rock does not care about skin color, race, sexual orientation, gender, etc.
Yup. The DNC should use that in an honest rebranding.
Equal rights for all (except the poor).
great answer…no sarcasm. But what does FPTP stand for?
First past the post. Here’s my go-to graphic to describe how it affects democracies.
How the Swedish parliament would look is how the current British government does look. For exactly this reason.
I was thinking about that just now.
They did Corbin dirty in almost exactly the same way that they did Sanders. It has been worst-case-scenario from there on out.
Have they fully privatized NHS yet?
Thankfully not and the party that wanted to is the blue one that lost massively in July.
If it’s as bad as it is in the US, they ALL want to privatize it.
I’ll never forget Joe Lieberman swooping in and literally letting health insurance companies completely rewrite (destroy) the Affordable Care Act from an incremental step toward Single Payer into a law that codifies their profiteering. It put everyone into three categories:
A.) people who make more than their incredibly low income means testing are required to shop for expensive private health insurance on the free market. Health insurance companies literally raised their rates right after this. Because of Joe, health insurance profits, medical bankruptcy, and death from being under/uninsured (70,000 people per year) are at an all-time high! Any real illness won’t be covered and you’ll be forced to cover it with a GoFundMe!
B.) people who face stiff fines if they don’t have health insurance (neoliberal paternalism much like charging people for plastic bags and sugary drinks)
C.) people who somehow manage to sneak in under the means testing income bar! If you are 300% or more below the actual poverty line, you get the most bare bones medical insurance possible!
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 isn’t enough for trans women.
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.
The transition requirements are so high
what are the requirements?
Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery… But whether or not you “fit the requirements” won’t be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There’s documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn’t a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.
It’s also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women’s prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to “expectedly matter of course” .
So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally “at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all”
Oh man, I’d never even considered the fact that all these supposed “male rapists in female prisons” have had bottom surgery.
Like, what man cares so much about being able to rape women that he gets his dick cut off? That’s so much easier to believe than the idea that trans women actually are what they say they are (i.e. they are trans women, not men with a fetish or whatever other grossness)?
After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.
We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex… But in talking with cis people I actually think it’s something else. I think the vast majority of cis people’s experience of gender only comes from external influences… I have met cis people who recognize what we’re talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it’s actually rare.
So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who’s entire experience of gender is performance based… So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand… But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.
I don’t think it’s that they don’t have an internal gender identity, I think it’s just hard for them to tell. Ask a cis woman how she knows she’s a woman and she’ll probably say something like “because I have a woman’s body”, but I don’t think that means she has no internal sense of her gender, it just means it takes a lot more introspection and nuance than she’s spent to get to that than it takes to go “boobs, check, vulva, check, I’m good”. She doesn’t have a disconnect, so she’s never had to really consider it, doesn’t mean she doesn’t have it.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think research indicates we aren’t special because we have a gender identity, but because of what it is.
That’s not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.
But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we’re talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people’s. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?
Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don’t really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don’t fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people… But otherwise on their own those things don’t make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.
They also don’t seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don’t tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.
I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don’t actually mean anything to them on their own.
Change the question slightly and they think about it differently. Ask them how they’d feel if they lost some of those features. A cis man with hairy arms and chest probably doesn’t say he feels a great joy when he thinks about them, but would probably feel some real discomfort if he couldn’t grow body hair any more. They assign a neutral value to them because they consider it “default”. And of course not everyone feels the same way about these things, cis or trans, but I think most cis people really do value their genders and sexed bodies because those things match, even if they wouldn’t say so.
Either way, I think we’re both speaking anecdotally and I don’t plan to go look for the research on gender identity right now.
That’s the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it’s root in other people’s perceptions. There’s a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project “manliness” as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces…but doesn’t well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.
It’s a difficult knot to dig down to it’s source but I think it’s a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it’s so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.
To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn’t really happening because cis people don’t really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don’t really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can’t just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate… And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.
Part of the problem with arguments like that is if you say ‘trans women are not widely represented in women’s jails’ they can say ‘yeah but the left want to change that with self ID and all the other things they push for’ so really the only point you’ve made in their mind is that its good the people pushing these things aren’t in power.
Surely no one can deny that the lefts messaging has been that a trans person should be able to enter any gendered space without question? You never see trans advocates say ‘yes creepy men pretending to be women to gain access to female spaces is a legitimate problem which we intend to protect against by…’ they say ‘its not a problem, will never be a problem and anyone who says it might be is evil and stupid and bad’
Everyone knows a lot of men are creepy, everyone knows that there are rapists who if able to get put into a woman’s jail would jump at the chance - if one side is going to pretend these aren’t true simply because it makes the rest of their belief on the issue difficult to explain then that’s not on the normies who don’t accept it without question.
Up until the run up to the election the UK labour party for example pledged self ID legislation would be made law and there was huge outcry from trans advocacy groups when they changed their mind - you can’t argue that something you’re trying to make happen isn’t a problem because it doesn’t yet happen.
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.
Conservatives have been furious about that progress this whole time. They will never accept progress. If permitted, they will undo every bit of anti-bigotry progress made in the last 100 years and return us to a slave-based economy.
Conservatism is a deadly social cancer. It always has been.
I suspect the truth is a lot more scary than you might be ready to admit. You’re so close to the answer. It’s staring you right in the face.
The unfortunate truth is: The people (tribe) that you’re (rabidly) in support of are merely using those identity politics dogwhistles so that you’ll continue voraciously gobbling up the increasingly miniscule table scraps from the ruling class while thinking to yourself that you’re the last bastion of resistance against some great encroaching evil.
Please read some Chomsky, my friend.
Your commitment to analyzing all of this through a small hole of ideas that are relevant to you is preventing what you’re saying from making complete sense. You’re omitting things and skewing the perspective with a lens.
This is because you’re both correct to some degree. Yes there is a large tribe who is using identity politics to gain support. However that support is less than equal to the other camp who uses scapegoating of said identities when you compare support on said social issues.
For all of time this has worked in politics and as always it is, as you point out basically, used to obscure the actual dealings.
Here’s where you’re completely off the rails. The DNC are masters at very little and especially are not masters at mass media marketing. Their slogans fail, their advertisements are bad, and they have failed to instill ideas that counter those of the right. The line about “conservatives are good for economy” still exists and they have no counter. The DNC are incredibly weak compared to the RNC.
Make no mistake, the DNC is scraping by because they do not represent exactly what the elite class believe as much as the republicans do. The media has mostly turned on them and criticizes their candidates about 10x more. Most of the media, owned by the elite class, does not belong to the DNC. Every major news network, including CNN now, goes against them and works counter to them.
And when we talk about why lgbt issues are present now, it has little to do with the tribalism you’re referencing. Little to do with identity politics. What’s even more rough to hear is that lgbt politics don’t matter to most voters. They matter to an LGBT crowd. Which is far smaller than the fundamentalists that the anti-lgbt are attracting. The DNC are not pro-LGBT in the way that we think of. They are pro-LGBT in the opposite way. The way where the other party has forced them to be.
That was a low effort response to a well written detailed post that took quite a while to write. At least deal with some of the issues raised, don’t just ignore everything they said and dismiss them as willfully ignorant.
It was because I thought the author both understood and even agreed with my point in principle but then did intricate mental gymnastics to disagree with my point and let everyone off the hook including the person that I was disagreeing with.
I don’t want to continue talking in circles with Centrists telling me that the piss pouring on my head is in fact charitable rain drops from the benevolent libs.
That’s a much better response!
Thanks for pulling it out of me.
Kind vibes to you, friendly and intellectually honest fellow fediverse Lemmy user. 🙏
So you see something that concerned 2% to 15% of the population use to hide in the closet and or we didn’t talk about it or know.
Now people are done hiding. Which impacts tons of people who barely understand their anatomy let alone their wives. When school never taught intersex and gender despite it being a thing that was understood in science in the 60s and 70s. A lot of people are suddenly confronted with a reality they don’t understand. When peoples bubbles are popped first comes rejection of thing then comes fear and anger. Issue is with 8 billion people there is constantly people learning about sexual orientation, gender, and sex.
Let’s not even talk about the internalize confusion of you people either. This is just current existing people learning about this stuff today.
it’s only the lucky and the people with enough support in urban enough environments that are not hiding anymore; everyone else is still stuck in the closet.
Very fair. Still the cuntry side are seeing them in their media and world more and more
literally russian bot farms
🤦🤦🏾♀️🤦🏻🤦🏽♀️🤦🏼♀️🤦🏿🤦🏾♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽🤦🏿♀️🤦🏾♀️🤦🏽🤦🏽🤦🏾🤦🏽
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.
deleted by creator
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 does it seem you have all of a sudden started to look at information about sexual orientation? Did you miss that in the current information overload, everyone gets exposed to different information and no one can tell you why you are getting exposed to whatever you are getting exposed to?
As a lesbian I have had to overcome hatered but still don’t understand why the whole world seems all of a sudden in the past decade to take all their hate out on gays and transgenders
