Context: Am LGBTQ person who also has traditional religious views.
Big disagree. You carry a pride flag in the wrong parts of town where I am, you'll get beat up.
Walk around preaching hellfire and damnation and at most you'll get a lot of annoyed looks and at best you'll get people cheering you on.
> In schools these days it's trendy to be anything but straight.
In high schools in my town people get beat up for coming out. A friend who went to college out of state was mocked because people thought he was gay, despite him being straight.
Also, you appear to have a misconception of what the LGBTQ acronym includes.
LGBA - these are related to attraction.
TI - These are for Trans/Intersex individuals and have nothing to do with attraction.
Q - Questioning/Queer. Can be used by those who don't feel as though they are properly described by the above descriptions, or who are opposed to them for some reason.
There are other letters, but for the most part they are subsets/synonyms of the above labels, at least as far as the use case here is concerned.
Yeah it seems you can have wildly different experiences depending on where you live in the US. Probably why we are so politically divided, at this point we're living in different societies.
Anywhere in California you would not experience any of that. In fact it really is as OP describes. Look at polls of kids in elementary schools where 50%+ of young kids are identifying as non-binary because it is trendy.
the people beating up anyone are the cultural underclass/proles, be it rural whites or ghetto blacks -- by definition these are not cultural elites.
Physical violence (and any indicator of physical needs- shelter, food, safety) basically signals 'cheap animal unit', and animals are useful tools to be managed by the machinery (of capital, patriarchy, globalism, blah blah etc whatever left or right wing flavor of 'power structure' you mentally choose to sketch it out, it's there churning, by whatever name you like)
you seem to confuse elite signaling and countersignaling with personal sufferings when in reality, both are exactly how it's supposed to go
The cultural machinery works thru contradiction and desperate elite mimicry, people trying to aspirationally sound like the class right above them, leading to tragedy of the commons, for example:
Rich women support bail reform/ islamic immigration/ transgender craze/ porn-culture that gets poorer women raped/ scared/ fired / cheapened, and that's the new feminism
Pragmatic feminists/terfs/lesbians/mom groups/anti-vaccers are the new witches to be burned as the purity test for desperate psuedo-middle-class aspirational women, supplying the cultural fodder content mill, while Republican women/Christian evangelicals make popcorn...
Abortion rights are a cheap voting lever, the more passionate you are the more the machine knows how to use you, people are putting their carrots and sticks in their bios, announcing the best ways to control them with a smile lol
Women in Iran and Afghanistan not allowed to go to school, that is defacto no longer a feminist issue but something something 'why not both' meme-mumbles by nonbinary mental illness connoisseurs.
Gays getting beat up by rural whites so they move to metropolis and work for the rainbow utopia of corporate America is exactly how the machine eats :)
Let's try to disentagle this gish gallop shall we :) ?
> the people beating up anyone are the underclass/proles, be it rural whites or ghetto blacks -- by definition these are not cultural elites.
But they do make up the culture of the parts of society people actually live in.
> Physical violence (and physical needs, shelter, food, safety) basically signals 'cheap animal unit', and animals are useful tools to be managed by the machinery (of capital, patriarchy, globalism, blah blah etc whatever left or right wing flavor of 'power structure' you mentally choose to sketch it out, it's there churning, by whatever name you like)
"People who have needs are manipulated by people who have money". Shocking.
> Rich women support bail reform/ islamic immigration/ transgender craze/ porn-culture that gets poorer women raped/ scared/ fired / cheapened, and that's the new feminism
> (Pragmatic feminists/terfs/lesbians/mom groups/anti-vaccers are the new witches to be burned as the purity test for desperate psuedo-middle-class aspirational women, supplying the cultural fodder content mill, while Republican women/Christian evangelicals make popcorn...)
You uh... might want to back of the OAN/Fox
> Abortion rights are a cheap voting lever, the more passionate you are the more the machine knows how to use you, people are putting their carrots and sticks in their bios, announcing the best ways to control them with a smile lol
No machine cares enough about an individual to look through their bio.
> Women in Iran and Afghanistan not allowed to go to school, that is defacto no longer a feminist issue but something something 'why not both' meme-mumbles by nonbinary mental illness connoisseurs.
"People put the most focus on issues directly impacting themselves". What a shocking discovery you've made.
In my church, there's a frequent saying "you can't help others until you've helped yourself". You have to have yourself on a stable base before you can lift others. In addition, there's a conversation to be had about interventionism in there, it's bit off topic but clearly didn't go so well last time.
> Gays getting beat up by rural whites so they move to metropolis and work for the rainbow utopia of corporate America is exactly how the machine eats :)
I'll admit this part confuses me. You go drop all the right wing talking points up above, and then go "All the right wing people are being manipulated to make educated lgbt people go to cities and work"... and instead of the solution being to help educate more people, it's to make things worse for LGBT people everywhere?
sorry but discussions of culture trends can't be easily parsed by people who can only think so ...literally
why not just get stuck on 'what IS culture even', 'what is a trend Really??', and other forms of useless filler-think that magically only crop up when a middle class smart-and-friendly-smile type person is made uncomfortable by working class people actually 'noticing things' with their eyes and ears...
Policy-wonks aren't gonna be in the family rooms where people say things that matter to them, where populism and/or prejudice brews.
Get to know some immigrant communities, they don't understand english to watch fox or cnn. Black folks didn't make vaccine decisions based on what channel you think they should watch. Wealthy white people buying property or voting with their feet/dollars aren't going to tell all the friends they went to college with exactly why, revealed preferences and all that.
I'm a radical feminist, if american conservatives/rep have common cause then all the better
Imagine understanding capitalism, the state, warfare, or the history of any nation at all.... and still having party loyalties??? sad :)
Indeed, I now hear acquaintances on the right referring to them derisively as the 'alphabet mafia.' I wonder if maybe it's gotten meaningless when there are so many letters. Sometimes I see "+" used instead, after the first few letters. In that case, do the members of the groups that come after feel marginalized compared to the big ones that make up the first few letters?
And what about the people who self-identify as one of the groups but don't want to advertise it as their defining characteristic? What do they do? That's a hard one, I think there are quite a lot of people that are in that situation.
I suppose the holy grail will be if/when we just decide that such labels don't matter.
For me, it's nice to see the full acronym in places where it makes sense or are already LGBTQ focused.
Outside of those spaces, I generally prefer LGBTQ or LGBTQ+ for that reason.
That holy grail would be nice to reach some day.
For those looking on and saying "well, you're doing it to yourselves":
The answer is that currently we _have_ to do it because any many parts of the USA/world people who fall under that umbrella aren't able to live in a way that brings them joy.
As such, they need a banner to organize under and belong with. Once that need passes eventually so will the labels.
> Indeed, I now hear acquaintances on the right referring to them derisively as the 'alphabet mafia.' I wonder if maybe it's gotten meaningless when there are so many letters.
Despite the number of letters increasing, it's still a minority. Additionally, the rate of popularity is slowing.
I am still on the fence whether or not this is a left-handedness situation. (The number of people who are left-handed sharply increased within 1-2 generations once we stopped beating children for primarily using their left hands. But this was generally not considered a social contagion or some grooming behavior from left-handed teachers or something.) If it is, then we should see identification level out within a generation or two.
The actual traits described are not a choice, but identifying as part of the LGBTQ culture absolutely is. Not everyone is comfortable advertising their sexuality to strangers.
Do you think only the 'traditional dominant culture' has a desire for personal privacy? I tend to view privacy as more fundamental, and in my experience most people want a good amount of it. I do not feel unique when I say that regardless of who I am attracted to and/or having sexual relations with (or nobody at all), this is only my business (and my partner, if they exist).
I can name a number of people in my family who are openly gay but not politically active. If you asked them if they identified as LGBTQ+ they would probably say "sure" but they don't wave flags, have stickers, clothes, or anything else proclaiming their sexuality. They're not trying to hide it (as if that were possible, they're all married to partners of the same sex), but it isn't a fundamental part of how they interact with the world.
And I know people in my family who are quietly bisexual or gay, too. Plenty of folks would accuse them of being in the closet, as if that were bad (because they should want to advertise it, right?). It must be fear of bigotry that keeps them in the closet, right? In my experience, no, they aren't actively hiding anything, not using subterfuge to make people think they are straight, they just keep their sexuality to themselves.
I've heard a good part of younger generations think differently. I get the impression the pride thing represents more than sexuality to kids who don't share the same context as older generations. They almost treat it like a brand.
I agree 100%. I have two middle school-age kids, only one of whom has entered puberty but both have extensive thoughts on what LGBT(+) means. I do a lot of smiling and nodding, and just listening, because they really see it quite differently than any adult I have met. It's very much become an entire culture that is only loosely related to actual sexuality.
I am very interested to see how it plays out with my kids as they mature, and as their cohort matures into adulthood. It's fascinating, a little overwhelming perhaps, but not particularly threatening. They aren't at all militant, and I don't know if that's an age thing, or if the culture is evolving away from it.
Sexuality seems to not be a choice, but gender expression (which people sort of mentally lump in) can be a choice (obviously gender dysphoria is not a choice, but not all gender expression decisions are made due to the presence of absence of dysphoria).
Nope. The number of letters keeps increasing as more people are brought in. In schools these days it's trendy to be anything but straight.