There was a recent wrecker post that did this a lot. It comes across as reactionary to me but sometimes I see leftists doing it too. Nerd culture being associated with being childish/nostalgic and easily exploited by sanitised consumption, etc.
As an autistic person who sometimes gets hyperfixations that could be seen as childish, it feels gross to have people paint these hobbies as some kind of uniquely hyperconsumerist thing, because 90% of the time it’s just because the hobby is seen as childish and/or neurodivergent coded.
For example: I was hyperfixated on gardening for a while. It was expensive, really hard to do ethically and the industry itself is massively corporate and responsible for some of the biggest environmental problems today. It’s a nice little escapist hobby where you can turn your mind off while you pretend you aren’t fucking up your local biome because Monsanto decided it would sell more soil wetter, plant disease cures and fertilizer ifs product kills the soils ability to self regulate. I tried to do it the organic permaculture way, ended up being too expensive and half of the products were not in fact as ethical as they pretended to be. Also I have a degree in Ecology, most gardners don’t have that luxury and are not trained how to garden ethically. Never once have I ever seen anyone call gardening a vapid corporate hobby or expressed concern that I was using my fake little biome to escape from the real world. Never once have I been lumped in with the same people who invented DDT. Because it’s a socially acceptable hobby for a well adjusted adult to have.
I can’t say the same for when I had a Pokemon hyperfixation. It was a relatively cheap hobby, I mostly just played the games and the rom hacks were fun. But I stopped because who wants to be associated with grown ass adults waiting in line for cards and playing a childrens game! They must be mentally ill in some way, right? Now adults who still like a hobby they grew up with get put into the same camp as Harry Potter fans, who we have apparently now have decided are bad because Harry Potter is childish and whimsical, not because the writer is a racist transphobe.
Just something that mulls over in my head sometimes, because social dynamics that make no sense to me are another thing I like to fixate on and dissect for fun. I tend to see how the flow of popular narratives can manipulate people into adopting reactionary talking points. All you have to do is trojan something onto a socially acceptable target without outright saying the target and you have even leftists redirected to attack a target that the right want dead. People are funny.
Thanks for reading my weird rant. I could just be coming across as insecure and making myself an easy target for wreckers to get a rant from, but eh who cares if I get a reputation as someone easily baited by this subject. Someones gotta deconstruct this kind of thing so it might as well be me.
The original meaning of the R-slur was literally that the person supposedly had a “delayed” development, so there absolutely is a connection between how we treat disabled people and how we treat children. There’s a wider discussion to be had about how the autonomy of children is contantly denied in most societies, and the USA is a particulaly bad offender in this regard outside all imperial core nations. I’ve always found it shocking and revolting how normalized it is in Amerika to be openly abusive to your kid, how unremarkable it is there to treat your child as your property. But hexbear never had that conversation because too many users immediately fell for the thought-terminating, sectarian and reactionary “there’s anarchists that want to abolish bedtime” jokes, and it shows in how we talk about the treatment of kids here. I think it’s part of the “bullying works” mindset, too, that always came off as “well i was beaten as a kid and it didn’t harm me” bs. Newsflash, having been bullied as kids absolutely has harmed you, it has harmed me, we constantly keep circling back to that harm and we will not be able to break that cycle and heal as long as we do not recognize that you can’t treat people like objects just because they’re 12 or “act like they’re 12”.
We need to relearn respect for human dignity and we need to start with recognizing this right in the people we most routinely deny it to, in children.
It was pointed out to me recently that the “debate” over under-18s being allowed HRT is as much a subfunction of this as it is transphobia, which I was like “woah” to but also isn’t really surprising, sadly.
It’s common for transphobia to reflect the worst fears of reactionaries. Our transitions require that we assert our autonomy in ways that radically deny what they imagine the natural order of things to be. Our name changes do not only fly into the face of their insistence to call their daughter Bobson Klansman jr., the dozens of document changes that follow it highlight at every step the encroaching panoptic nightmare that is datamining technocapitalism. Our HRT regimens demonstrate to all senses that gender is not a bioessential and immutable thing, but something you can hack and play with and influence down to the epigenetic level, and the earlier we start that the more their flimsy “you can always tell” excuses break down. Our very bodies remind them that their performative immitation of phallocentric heterosexuality as a form of male domination is a fraudulent hoax, and the fact that all of them secretly crank it to t-slur porn completely breaks them when they are confronted with us outside of pornhub, obliterating their mental faculties in a way that is as terrifying to them as coming face to face with Nyarlathotep on the high plateau of Leng.
To be trans is to be antifascist down to the molecular level. This is why as long as the fascists draw breath, they will do everything they can get away with to end our existence, as we are the living proof that all they believe in is a steaming garbage pile of lies.
“To be trans is to be antifascist down to the molecular level”, pretty good writeup ngl. Kinda makes me wish more trans people would take up a revolutionary stance. I wish I saw less nato queers…
I’ve seen a total of 2 trans people in the military over the course of the last 5 years, and that number goes up to 5 if we’re including “works for a non-military branch of an MIC corporation” or “owns stocks of such a corporation” or “has done contract work for the army once”. 5 out of a literal tripple digit number of trans people i’ve interacted with irl. And that’s not nothing, but it’s a tiny fraction of all trans women i’ve met and i barely interact with cis people nowadays and have met about as many of these who are in similar positions. And unlike with cis people who just dgaf about anybody owning Rheinmetall stock, i know trans comrades who have literally broken up with partners over that, so i’d say that’s really not enough to warrant making up the entire genre of trans drone pilot that so many leftists get super hung up about even on this site.
So many leftists still refuse to notice how overrepresented trans people in general and TMA people in particular are in their spaces, especially in outspokenly anti-imperialist ones, especially in ones that are solidaric with Palestine in this ultrazionist hellhole of a country i am living in. Do you think we would have 50% queer people on a sex-hating incel site like hexbear if it wasn’t for trans people being more into communism than anybody else out there? Yes, i get it, the majority of trans people are social democrats and progressive liberals well gues what the majority of cis people in my country are literally Super Hitler. The trans community skews left harder than any other demographic, it’s not our fault that in countries infested with anti-communist brainworms, that still means a majority of us are kinda lib. That’s just the norm for literally everybody, but we are expected to always have correct takes because otherwise we make trans people look bad, and as soon as somebody does that, everybody is like “well that’s just most trans people” even on here. That’s a textbook case of double standard. You can show MLs and MLMs literally one trans girl working for Thyssen-Krupp and they lose their shit and talk about how being trans is a bourgeois Western concept that you can’t expect working class people from the global South to be normal about when working class people from the global South are literally more than half of my neighbors and none of them have a problem with me.
Sorry, but i’m just fed up with hearing this shit. When a trans woman is not a comrade, it’s without fail made out to be something that directly links back to her transness. We never get the grace of that being seen as a personal failure that cis people get granted by default, it’s always because that woman is a “NATO queer”. When a cissie is not a comrade, nobody ever says “well, cis privilege literally makes it more likely that you are a lib or worse” even though that is demonstrably true. Cis people are, on average, less politically trustworthy than trans people. Why don’t we hold them accountable for being “NATO straights”? Because people would think that’s ridiculous. And they only think it’s ridiculous because being straight is the default that you do not have to justify to anybody, where being queer and especially being trans immediately means anything you do gets examined under a magnifying glass. I’m so fucking tired of people on here trotting this out.
Your whole comment reminded me of this XKCD:
Yeah, that’s basically it.
Yes, I don’t mean ‘literally in the military’. I do agree that the “trans drone pilot” thing is slightly wild as an idea. And we do have a ton of trans people here, it sure as fuck beats the shark instance. I didn’t refuse to notice, I’m one.
Germany
what a classic.
More than the political leaning broadly, or working for shitass elevator companies or military support or anything though, I was thinking about how startlingly fuckin’ racist white trans people can be. Pretty harrowing thread if you ask me. And I know, twitter, bsky, but these are people that exist in real life.
Funny enough the MLs asserting that you can’t expect working class people from the global south to be normal is a pretty bad take in and of itself. I hate to see the “queerness is bourgeois” take but when I think about Brand Israel, that kind of makes me feel ill. Not that it makes the take correct obviously.
Can’t say I disagree that we never get any benefit of the doubt, yeah. All kinds of spaces are always chomping at the bit to have a turn bullying trans women.
I like saying this because it’s true, as it’s true of all identities that the imperial core privileges. Cis people, cishet people specifically, neurotypicals, white people. I do think that more than being the “assumed default”, a “NATO straight” is just the default in NATO broadly. As in, yeah, it’s a cishetero patriarchal white supremacist project. So I guess it’s more notable when “minorities” support it. Not that I don’t think cis leftists over-expose trans people in empire, but y’know.
I think in short, I just don’t have the same inherent faith in the revolutionary character of trans people as you do. We’re just people, it’s a bit like any other identity in that you don’t get “more revolutionary” just for being trans.
I do not. I think revolutionaries are the exception in every demographic, i just think that trans people are more likely than anybody else to be that exception. It’s the same as with being left handed, that correlates massively with queerness and particularly with transness. But that does not mean left handed people are a majority in trans spaces, or that trans people are a majority of left handed people.
Well alright, I wish I felt the same. Maybe trans people do lean left more often, but in my experience I’ve seen a lot of unexamined biases, is all.
Lots online unfortunately, sad to see, queers of all kinds. Lack of intersectionality is a real problem.
i thought name change stuff mostly originated in debt enforcement
Honestly we SHOULD abolish bedtime, like different people have different natural circadian rhythms that change with age, but we’re forced to live by more or less one standard time for sleeping, which is based on the standard working hours, which are themselves based on the most efficient way to extract value from the working class. The abolition of wage labor should mean the freedom to fall asleep and wake up when it is most convenient for you to do so.
But yes, up the dignity of children, down the bullying works mindset. Very good comment!
in particular the school start times are the wrong way around here. highschool starting at 7:30 am is abusive. there’s a lot of logistics and scheduling changes that should be made to western schooling for that matter, but we’re beholden to sports culture and early 20th century farming so it will never change.