MFer you explained to your children that an obese elderly man invaded your house to give them a PS5 and flew away on a magical sleigh.
Or that an independently wealthy fairy sneaks into their room while they sleep because she has a thing for teeth.
Children’s teeth. I got an $800 bill for pulling one of my adult teeth. But it was way cheaper than the $3k for a root canal.
Maybe that’s where she gets her money.
The fae don’t charge and you should not trust them on that basis
I have to wonder about the people who are fully 100% convinced that it’s just knowing about gay/trans/queer people that “turns” their children LGBTQ.
It’s like when I asked my youth leader in Bible study when he chose to be straight and he looked me dead in the eyes and answered, “when I was 12”. I wonder if he ever figured it out.
“Being gay isn’t your choice. It’s mine. You are gay now.”
might be biased due to being bi myself but imo the simpler/more likely explanation is that the “homosexuality is a choice, reject it” homophobes are mostly bi people who’ve been conditioned by their environment from an early age to reject the same sex attraction, so it literally is true for them. In private they might also prefer gay porn because they find the taboo aspect arousing (a common pattern that extends to fetishes).
On demographic surveys bi people are much more common than gay people as well, but bi erasure is a thing in both the straight and LGBT community
Oh yeah you might be right about most of the “homosexuality is a choice” guys. I wrote that article right after Nick Fuentes got caught looking at gay porn, so I was thinking about that cliche.
I really like that, and will posit the transphobic chaser (chaser is the term the trans community uses to describe people who fetishize us) as further evidence. There are plenty of cis people who are attracted to us normally, they’re a huge chunk of who I date, and they’re usually somewhere between neutral and good with our issues. Sometimes you even get someone transphobic who found themselves attracted to a person who happens to be trans.
But then there’s the chasers. Some are attracted to our bodies as novelty, but a large chunk are virulently bigoted towards us, and they follow the same pattern. They’re ashamed to be seen with us (even if we pass for cis), overly focus on our genitals, and generally treat us like we exist for their fetishization of us. And this winds up with a nasty cycle of them trying to define our existence as a fetish, them attempting to push us out of “normal” society and into a life where we hide or are relegated to sex work, and in a society where they succeed we’re deemed disgusting immoral sex objects that only sick freaks are into which creates more of the bigotry by which fetishization spreads.
I think some of that is right, and maybe all of it for a portion of people, but I also believe there are gay or bi people who hate that about themselves and that causes them to be homophobic. I don’t think that’s a large percentage of homophobic people, but I do think it’s not zero.
I don’t blame the gay community or gay people for their own oppression. I blame these bigots, as well as all of the other bigots they join. It doesn’t matter to me what you truly believe underneath or whether your actions are motivated by self hatred.
Oh yeah statistically it’s gotta be that some homophobes are queer. Queer people are 10% of the population, and homophobes are even higher. Two groups that large, there’s got to be crossover. Historically, it would have been even moreso the case.
I’m just unconvinced that queer people are the majority of homophobes because that makes no sense, and I’m unconvinced that the study randomly found mostly bi homophobes. The sheer prevalence of the gay homophobe trope is out of proportion with the conditions that would have been capable of creating homophobia in society in the first place and sustaining it.
For one thing, the study asked the men to rate themselves on the Kinsey scale. Those men fully believed they had never felt attraction to another man. And only 20% of the homophobes showed no penile reaction. Meanwhile, 66% of the gay-accepting men had no reaction.
Yeah, I think often the nuance in the criticism that’s easy to miss is that often when people automatically assume a homophobe is gay it can be used to absolve straight society of the homophobia it perpetuates by pretending homophobia is mostly an issue of self hate rather than one in which members of an oppressed class are taught to hate themselves by less focused bigots of the privileged group, and then are used to do the dirty work of homophobic violence. This is notable in conversion therapy where the people running it are “ex gay” but the people sending their loved ones or telling people to are straight.
Anecdotal time: I have a friend who is a staunch Republican and christian. He is also extremely gay. He denies it and tells me its wrong when I tell him to just accept himself and stop worrying about it so much. I also have another acquaintance who tells him its wrong every time he thinks gay thoughts.
Dont feel too bad for anyone in this story. I forced them all to read Mandate for Leadership and they all still said they’d vote for Trump.
Well maybe it’s because women look good and men don’t and these men don’t wanna have to compete against women.
Homie, what?
I can’t compete with women. How am I supposed to look so good? Fortunately I don’t care to. I will never have kids so my kids won’t have to live in this fucked up world.
I was living in military housing, which were duplexes, and one guy was concerned about the lesbian couple that moved in next to them, asking how he would explain to his young children if they heard sex noises through the wall. I asked him how he would explain straight sex noises to them. He stopped voicing his concerns to me.
It was easier for deaf gay couple next door. They tend to make very unusual noises.
“What is the sound of two clams slapping?”
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It’s never been about the “children”.
Being able to explain things in life to your child is basic parenting.
even if you can’t you can say it, like:
- I don’t know
- don’t worry about it
- I’ll explain when you’re a little older
but in reality “how will i explain to my kids” has never been a genuine question. you can say “some people do that” and that is all the explanation needed. no, this is just code for “i don’t want to see this myself, and I’m using my children as an excuse”.
I’ve found with my kids “I don’t really know, how about we look it up together” is very effective.
it is, and I’ve even learned some things because of it. I’m just saying if you’re really trying to avoid the issue you can just do it, it’s not like you’re giving a testimony.
It’s also code for “I really hate myself for who I am on the inside, and seeing other people be their authentic selves makes me sad, angry, and confused. If my kids learned that it was OK to be themselves, I would lose my shit. They must suffer as I have suffered.”
Usually the issue is LGBTphobic parents convinced themselves anything remotely LGBTQIA is sexual in nature, and they must protect their kids, that if they actually believe it, and not just either “noble lying” (seen some christian fundamentalists admitting “it’s not actually harmful, but what if it’ll be too late for heaven?”), or just doing it for cruelty reasons (bigots, just like bullies, like to paint their targets as people deserving of the bad treatment).
And this also has a hidden assumption that talking to your kids about anything sexual isn’t good. That mindset can lead to teenage pregnancy because, like it or not, our bodies are wired to make sexuality easily discoverable, even if society wasn’t full of it (and it would still be full of it even if lgbt-ness could be dialed to 0).
On another note, wanting to suppress sexuality so that women have fewer options and might be more likely to choose those suppressing it is such a pathetic mindset.
You don’t have to explain it if you haven’t taught them to hate from an early age.
Jesus Christ… do kids really do regular active shooter drills at school now? This country is beyond fucked.
In America they’ve been doing it since I was in middle school. And for good reason, too.
I almost made it out of high school without needing to utilize what we were taught in those drills, but then towards the end of my senior year some jackass kid decided to bring a gun to class and started shooting teachers and students. America is wild.
It’s absolutely insane that mass murders at schools have just become a fact of life in the US now, where it happens on an almost monthly basis, perhaps even more frequently than that.
In the UK we’re struggling with a knife crime epidemic too. So much senseless violence taking too many lives on both sides of the Atlantic.
Craziest thing is that neither Canada nor most of western Europe is dealing with this. i.e. it’s not just senseless violence, but entirely preventable senseless violence.
Even places like Switzerland, which have a high gun ownership rate, don’t.
When my dad was young, he and his brother found one of great-grandad’s old revolvers in a storage trunk, and brought it to school. Once lunch rolled around, they took it out and showed it to the teacher, who thought it was a very cool antique, and they and the teacher spent the lunch period oohing and aaahing over it. A school shooting wasn’t even something people thought about. It just didn’t happen.
Schools here also used to have firearms clubs and drill teams; my high school actually had an all-women shooting team if I remember correctly. And it was an inner-city school.
Somewhere, something changed here in the US. I don’t know when or why. But a good deal of gun owners and 2A supporters grew up in those days and remember them well, and I think they don’t want to believe that change happened?
Maybe it was when people started fetishizing guns? I don’t know, but I wish it would stop. No other countries deal with this kind of nonsense.
where it happens on an almost monthly basis
It’s more than one a week.
The chart isn’t up to date for 2024: https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index.html
All incidents of gun violence are included if they occurred on school property, from kindergartens through colleges/universities, and at least one person was shot, not including the shooter. School property includes but is not limited to, buildings, fields, parking lots, stadiums and buses. Accidental discharges of firearms are included, as long as at least one person is shot, but not if the sole shooter is law enforcement or school security.
That’s kind of important since that definition doesn’t line up with what most people are thinking about when they hear “school shooting”. To provide an example, let’s say a drug deal goes bad in the parking lot of a football field after hours and someone gets shot - that’s a school shooting. Not as bad as some definitions though, since a street shooting where a stray bullet happens to strike a garage building used to maintenance school buses probably doesn’t count under this definition.
Also, I find it interesting that the rates spiked way the hell up for the Biden admin, like 2021 to present is way higher than before.
Also my state has a really low rate despite having extremely lax gun laws (literally allowing open carry to everyone 18+ who can otherwise legally have a gun and concealed carry to everyone 21+ who can otherwise legally have a gun).
We do fire drills once or twice a year where I live (not the US). I’ve been around for forty years and I’ve met only two people with a firearm licence (both for shooting sport-related reasons). The European mind can understand the historical reasons beyond the 2nd Amendment, but not the fetishization of firearms.
The 2nd itself isn’t even the problem, it’s that it isn’t in any actuality followed. It explicitly says “well regulated militia”. I’m an armed leftist but nothing about US firearms is well regulated
In this context “well regulated” means like a smoothly-running clock, with the implication being that militia members will need weapons for training and practice.
As a lefty, part of me wishes we learned into the well regulated militia part and viewed firearms as a part of community defense. But, also as a lefty, there’s much more important things we could do to improve community resiliency before we finally get to firearms training.
In the context and time it was written, this means something closer to “armed citizenry trained to handle their weapons and how to respond to a threat” and not “restricting weapons to the national guard” or “restricting weapons based on the number of total rounds they can hold” or something like that.
I suspect most of the pro-gun folks wouldn’t be that angry at the idea of requiring range time and local emergency drills as opposed to the usual attempts to restrict 2A.
In the context of when it was written, the authors didn’t believe having a standing army was a good idea, machine guns either didn’t exist or would melt after any sustained use, and artillery was meant to either break walls or make infantry nervous that they might end up being one of the few hit.
The ship has sailed on all of those and many other assumptions people had in those days, which makes me think that maybe it’s time for a new constitution. And maybe codify some of the gentlemen’s agreement stuff and harden the system against those who just want to ruin it from within because it’s more profitable for some if governments don’t help people meet their needs.
I am a 66 year old American. I have no guns. The only time I have seen or operated one was when I was in the Navy in the early 1980s. I have seen the damage that guns can do several times in the 30 years I have been working as a child protective service caseworker/supervisor.
Yes, yes they do.
I’m nearly 30 and did them in elementary school
I’m in my 30s and we had them all throughout grade school.
I’m 43, and we didn’t have them at all by the time I graduated in '96
Columbine was in '99, so that checks out. I think schools started doing them sometime after that tragedy.
Which was kinda weird to me. Bowling Green happened a couple years earlier, and there had been school shootings in this country ever since the mid to late 1800s. Seemed like an overreaction to me.
What are you referring to with Bowling Green?
Apparently it was Paducah, not Bowling Green, I conflated two different stories
https://www.ksba.org/protected/ArticleView.aspx?iid=6GAU2A2&dasi=3G32
I graduated in 2002. Based on the other responses, it seems like they started doing them shortly after that.
This is America
I’m pretty sure active shooter drills have been ongoing for over a decade at some schools at this point. There was a whole thing a few years ago about schools “putting litter boxes in classrooms for kids that identify as cats” that conservatives were freaking out about where it turned out that the schools had cat litter in classroom survival kits. They sell Kevlar backpacks for kids.
This country has been screwed for decades now.
yup
I’m teaching Highschool in Germany. We do fire drills once a year and involuntarily every time something goes wrong in chemistry class. We also do what we call amok drills every other year.
Likely monthly or every two-three months, if my memory serves and they haven’t increased the rates any. I think really after Sandy Hook they doubled in intensity, I remember doing active shooter drills with regularity after that moment.
It should be broadly easier to explain that than to explain how every summer is hotter than the last which is why their chances of dying of old age is quite slim.
Do cartoons not regularly have characters in drag like they did when I was growing up? 🤔
Bugs Bunny would make himself up like a woman to confuse Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd all the time.
Women were literally banned from performing on Elizabethan stage. All of Shakespeare’s parts were played by men. Even Juliet. By law.
Drag wasn’t just normal for Shakespeare, it was the only option. And yet he wrote something considered one of the all-time greatest romances.
Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii’m your little señ-or-i-ta.
Which is kinda funny because morally, I see more of an issue with doing it specifically to deceive someone as opposed to doing it because you want to.
Though that is also where at least some of the discomfort about drag (and trans) comes from. The perception of deception, specifically when combined with a moment of potential interest, followed by the repulsion once they realize they are checking out someone of a gender they aren’t interested in (where the gender they are interested in might include cis). It sucks that some turn to anger and hate in that moment when it’s really a nothing burger moment.
Did you ever find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put on a dress and played a girl bunny?
All this hate is just people like Garth, now old and red-voting, having been stewing on the question for the last 32 years.
I have the greatest friend whom I ADORE who is a gay guy whose family is religious. I asked him how he got along with his mom, and he said he loves her very much and they have great laughs together, but she also tells him that gay people are going to hell on a routine basis. He and I agreed that I would be his adopted mom going forward and that he didn’t need to ever feel like she was right for one moment.
Imagine saying something like this to your own kid. Imagine letting your religion be more important than your relationship with your kid. Whatever you might feel about your faith, you should have the brains God gave you that tell you you can’t change anybody and that you should love them as is, and keep your damn delusions to yourself at very least. Why would you ruin your relationship with your beloved child over them loving someone?
I grew up with a gay sibling in totally the opposite environment yet in the end just as toxic; we were raised to be extremely progressive, accept LGBT people as is and love them (and I am 50 so the fact we even discussed trans people back then is nothing short of miraculous because it was so taboo), and despite being Catholic we were also super pro choice. Yet my mother literally became psychotic because of my brother being gay, despite family members kindly and gently telling her all along to accept it, when it came to HER child it was unacceptable because she thought it reflected badly on her, and she was so obsessed with us being perfect that she did everything she could to force him to conceal it, including making him bring a beard to my wedding. Finally he grew a bit of a spine and got into a relationship with a guy, and despite her histrionics has continued. Now she’s obsessed with trying to make them get married, because she wants her friends to give them gifts to pay her back for all the wedding gifts she has given.
Not to trauma dump, but just wanted to point out that it can be difficult even for supposedly accepting families to really honestly support their LGBT children.
Anyway, do your part for LGBT folks. I myself just joined Stand In Pride, which is an organization where allies befriend LGBT people whose family has rejected them, and are available to be chosen family for weddings or whatever. Go to Pride, give out free mom hugs, step in as chosen family for them, whatever you can do. This world is really terrible to gay people no matter what progress we’ve made.
If, according to their own rules, that god created everything, it created LGTB+ people too. Are they saying their perfect imaginary being made a mistake? And if “it’s the devil’s work”, is it so weak that it can’t prevent it?
It’s so stupid. A local church which was kind of a hip young church recently announced they were not LGBT affirming and were really nasty about it, and like two thirds of their congregation left as a result. Even modern Christians don’t approve of this anymore.
Ehhh, that greatly depends on the church. There are still a lot of churches out there that are totally on board with hating anyone who isn’t perfectly straight. You know, that kind of hate that Jesus preached about all the time! People wouldn’t have as many issues with Christians if they actually followed Jesus’s teachings, but here we are.
Well some of them definitely aren’t. My friend I mentioned and I go to a very affirming church and he is beloved as well as our other gay and trans congregation. Nobody would dream of being anything else.
Are they saying their perfect imaginary being made a mistake? And if “it’s the devil’s work”, is it so weak that it can’t prevent it?
The usual answer to this is that God gave man free will, and he can use that free will to act against God (or else the garden of Eden myth would be impossible) and if you choose to be gay, that’s on you. That being LGBTQ+ is a choice is pretty fundamental to it, and also why they tend to believe in things like conversion therapy - if it’s a choice, you can be taught to choose differently.
things like conversion therapy - if it’s a choice, you can be taught to choose differently.
Oh, fuck!
I mixed that term up with “gender-affirming care”.That explains the negativity around “conversion therapy” xD
“When did you choose to be heterosexual? And can you be gay for a week?” 🤷♂️
Also, according to their rules, “love one another” is the single most important one. “Don’t be gay” is in an ancient book that also includes “woman in their period must sleep in a separate tent”, but we don’t see them applying that one, do we?
So going by what’s actually in the bible, hating gays is a bigger sin than being gay. Who’s going to hell now?
Your mom sounds like something the experts refer to as a “Cunt”
i wonder how much of the pro-LGBT stuff was just badges she could pin on her chest for clout, instead of actual belief.
She has BPD so yes. And no I think she genuinely believes it, I really do, just not for her child. She’s not one to fake that to her small credit
I noticed something similar with my in-laws, as far as ruining your family relationship by not accepting people. The grandma goes on rants to her daughter about anti-trans and the pronoun (they/them). She has so much energy for this hate she preaches to her daughters (she has 2) all the time they talk. Always grabbing those talking points.
One daughter has 4 kids and they are all under 18. Some of them experimented with gender fluid stuff. I’m not well versed enough to explain. I know one goes by they/them and the grandmother won’t make an effort, or when she messes up the gender she makes a big scene of “I’m old, it wasn’t like this. Blah blah.”
The really weird thing is after all this hate and after the grandma started putting up walls to her grandchildren (because of the hate she preaches about their siblings). Now she complains that no one wants to talk to her or hang out with her when she visits. Does she not know she was talking about her family during those rants?
She got hooked on some alt right news bs. Started saying she was a tradwife, making butter, and looking for raw milk. Idk what happened, especially since I saw her when she was “strong woman” and gay friendly when she was raising her kids.
That’s so sad. Facebook and the like are the devil for creating those echo chambers.
Imagine hurting someone for living their life. How do they lives with themselves?
It’s weird watching people drop down those rabbit holes in real time.
Like they have to be all in on the crazy in order to be accepted by a new group that doesn’t even care if they exist.
“Oh, this site said something I agreed with about Covid, maybe white people really are genetically superior…”
Before you know it, they’re posting Facebook articles from sites only one step removed from Stormfront.
I don’t know the Lemmy equivalent, but /r/raisedbynarcissists…
BPD actually. They’re just as difficult.
How to explain drag to a child: “Some men like to dress up like pretty ladies and perform songs.”
Gosh, that was so hard.
But but but I need them to understand why it makes me feel strange things and that’s why they’re going to HELL
My thoughts exactly. They just don’t know how to explain it without getting a raging erection and then going through the masturbation/shame cycle 5 times a day for the next two weeks.
That’s how it was explained to me as a kid. But it was also made clear how it plays a pivotal role in aviation. Unfortunately it did have lifelong damage done to my sister, she grew up to be an aerospace engineer
I dream of a drag free* future for aviation! My rocket planes are very good at doing up and almost always come back down. I’m pretty much done, the problem area is just such a short moment in time between getting down all the way and coming to a safe stop. And the ones that don’t come back down.
- The drag is still there a lot of the time, but the aviation no longer depends on it.
If you don’t teach your children that there are only two genders and that only heterosexuality is ok then you don’t have to explain it to them at all. Our children were exposed to our lesbian friends including a lesbian couple and our gay friends including a gay couple from the days they were born. They met one of my trans friends when they were very young. If you don’t teach children to hate then they won’t hate. If you struggle with how to speak to your children about these things then you’ve already failed them and the future.
There have always been gays and trans people. There will always be gays and trans people. Get the fuck over youselves.
Interestingly how my dad taught me was by not talking about it. He didn’t talk about race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, nothing. I watched him interact with all walks of life and watched him treat everyone with the same basic level of respect. Now that I’m older I treat it just like my dad taught it, everyone is a person and unless shown otherwise deserves basic respect.
Exactly. We did the same thing with our kids. They saw us interacting with a wide range of people. When our son came home from a friend’s house and said, “Mommy, what she’s the word n----r mean? What does the word f----t mean?” we had a conversation about loaded words and how we don’t use them. I’ve been working to eliminate gendered insults like b**ch and p—y from my speech. My son called a friend a b–ch while gaming today and I told him not to use gendered insults and explained why. We teach our kids how to deal with people. If you teach them right they will be good human beings.
“Call him a fucking Asshat if you must.”
Sorry, I know you didn’t mean it like that, but I had to chuckle because the “No gendered insults” kinda sounds like everything else is fair play.
That’s basically what I said.
Even better!
to be fair, some people deserve to be called assholes
“It’s like Halloween for grownups.”
“Probably involves more sugar too when you look at the drinks on offer at a lot of places…”
I was first introduced to drag in my childhood through cpl Klinger on MASH. I never really had a conversation about it with my family, but Klinger was always one of my favorite characters on the show and imo had the strongest character arc of all of the cast that lasted the entire run.
Just say its the force of air hitting the object as it moves, and since it hits in the opposite direction, it slows down the object. What RU talking abt in the second paragraph it has norelation to drag
