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Panfilo posted:Something I'm genuinely curious about is what literature they actually think is appropriate for this subject matter. They'll likely sidestep the issue by insisting they don't care if 18+ people read the book, but if you really corner them on what books people should read to understand the subject better, what would they recommend besides "nothing"? There is no queer literature they consider appropriate. Their explicit view is that teaching minors about gender identity or sexual orientation is "sexualizing our children and grooming them to be sexually exploited." In other words, if you teach a child that gay people exist and that it's okay to be gay, in their view, you are trying to recruit that child to be gay so that gay people can predate on them. This rhetoric is very, very old, and it was endemic when I was a kid in the 90s and into the 2000s. But the Right has given it a new coat of paint by replacing "child predators" with "groomers" and effectively co-opting the MeToo movement to claim that queers are engaging in mass sexual abuse of minors by teaching them that gay penguins exist. The Sartre quote about bad faith arguments applies here. These people want to eradicate queers from the public sphere and relegate them back to a shadowy and shameful existence as second-class citizens. They are weaponizing the leverage the public has over municipal employees (teachers and librarians) and are effectively engaging in a scorched-earth strategy, burning bridges and eroding legitimacy in institutions, to try to remove queer content from the public sphere in the most direct way that a Concerned Mom has the ability to. They're engaging in fascism--it's not about democratically engaging with the system, it's about targeting weaknesses in the system to deface it so they can eradicate impurities in the culture.
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Aug 25, 2023 16:16
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FlamingLiberal posted:I guess the ‘good’ news is that the attempt to turn the culture against LGBTQ people is not really working outside of the GOP base. They really waited too long to try this. I think it may have had more general pull if they had pushed harder after gay marriage was legalized. It's hard to say. The most vulnerable targets right now are trans and nonbinary people. 2023 has been a horror show for trans people, as far as human rights are concerned. While focusing ire on trans people and trans kids is actually pretty unpopular among the general population, it has been a way for conservative policy-makers to rally around a common enemy. One of the more frustrating things it that among Boomer and Gen-X liberals and centrists, there is a pretty significant amount of contempt for trans people. You can see it in places like the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the loving World Chess Federation. This is the contingent that like, views trans people as postmodern decadents and positions themselves somewhere between "just asking questions" and "defending cultural sanity against the woke illiberal millennials." It's insipid rhetoric, but I don't think it should be discounted, because it is being amplified by the ghoulish poo poo the republicans are pulling off.
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Aug 25, 2023 17:06
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Space Fish posted:YA lit moving from queer narratives such as "please don't murder us" and "one day I might work up the nerve to privately hold hands with another homosexual" to descriptions of blowjobs and anal really painted a target, no matter how healthy and informative the intentions of those texts. The culture showdown commenceth! Book challenges have been happening forever, and a lot of books have been challenged for depicting sexual situations. When the sexual situations depicted were hetero, the books were targeted in singular. So you'd have The Giver challenged, for instance, for depicting wet dreams about the main character taking a bath with the girl next door while naked. But now there is a coordinated attack against all queer content. Teachers are getting fired for showing a Disney movie that has a gay character in the background. It's happening at a grassroots level with Moms for Liberty, and it's happening at a top-down level with governors and legislators. It's also reaching this point where it's spiraling away from queer content to any non-puritan content, like with the principal who was fired for showing the statue of david to his students. The content matters less than the political will. It's not a good-faith debate about appropriate developmental stages in children or something; it's an attempt at a hostile takeover.
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Aug 25, 2023 17:44
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BiggerBoat posted:Talk radio was all over this yesterday his letter briefly mentions that NPR stopped using "biological sex" as a phrase when referring to trans people as supporting evidence of their being ideologically untrustworthy. Like yeah dude, you want NPR to spend more time litigating people's gender identity? There are far more neutral ways to talk about trans people without using the dogwhistle  rhetoric.it's one of those things where it's like, what kind of conservative perspectives do you want NPR to better represent? Could it be that there's an important conversation happening on the other side of the political line that I'm not aware of? Oh wait no, you just want NPR to be more willing to give voice to transphobes and "gender critical" terfs? come on dude, you can't pull the "but my moms were lesbians!" argument on this poo poo. I had to stop reading the Atlantic bc they spent years signal boosting even the mildest forms of transphobia, while refusing to cover any of the attacks on trans rights. But I guess if NPR reports on transphobic bills without actively attacking the validity of trans existence then I guess it has succumbed to ideologically poisoned groupthink. the idea of total ideological neutrality when one side has elected officials who openly call minorities "imps, demons, and x-men" that need to be eradicated--it's just insane.
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Apr 14, 2024 04:15
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