I am very good friends with a trans women who I worked with for a number of years. She is seriously considering leaving the US because of this bullshit. So yes, please vote for Biden.
Also, I hope you son is doing well! It's a hell of a process.
My best friend is trans and he's considering doing the same. It's so bullshit that he has to leave an entire life behind because the conservatwats are so hateful.
I want to leave the US but I honestly don't know how. I have no idea if I have any skills that'd let me get hired by a non-us company, which is kinda what's necessary to immigrate to another country, right?
Hey not everyone from ml is a dipshit. Some of us just stumbled into ml because it was a stable and popular instance when we joined.
Hexbear on the other hand? I don't think you would just accidentally join that place, at least not without getting banned the first time you say something against their pro fascist hive mind.
I've been a trans woman for 10 years and an immigrant for much longer. This is one of the worst existential threats I've faced. I have had to sit down and discuss serious contingency plans with my partner if he wins because there is no chance I'm sticking around.
I just want to exist dammit. I'm tired of being persecuted for simply existing.
People don't realize (and some people just outright refuse to admit) that we are in the middle of a genocide of trans people. Trump will make that so much worse.
I wish your son, my daughter's best friend who is trans, and all the other trans people in this country the best life. That won't happen if Trump gets in.
I just had a disagreement with someone on Lemmy a couple days ago who said Biden did nothing for the LGBTQ+ community. Maybe we just need more Trump headlines to educate people? Y’know, since they don’t read headlines about Biden
Biden did a lot of good shit. People saying he's the same or even worse than Trump have completely lost the plot or are just RuZZian bots / useful idiots parroting RuZZian propaganda.
I think this is something I've come to realize about every candidate, even trump, when we get to the polls.Through 4 years - unless something specific stands out(like how Bush got to ride 9-11 sympathy 3 years later for reelection) most of their accomplishments and failures (especially the ones in the first 2 years) are hard to remember and require a primer before November.
"What did turnip do that was so bad in his first 2 years? Shit can't remember, but he fucked up covid real bad and that's enough to vote biden"
So yes its nice that he is refreshing us all on what actually had been accomplished to ensure we are all informed voting. Even if he is trying to be an ass about it.
Yes it's kind of mind-boggling. People pushed for decades and decades and decades for marriage equality. The Obama administration had no intention of tackling it at all. Until Joe Biden spoke. He's literally one of the reasons we already have marriage equality. For however long we might keep it. Not to mention the nlrb union busting decision. Or the recent FTC abolishment of non-compete contracts for most people. There is no question that Biden is an outdated crusty old dumbass. Who may be far less Progressive or left-leaning than most of us would like. But he's also ironically one of the most positively consequential presidents of the last 50 to 70 years since FDR.
The reason most people have no idea about all this. Is because they were all victories against the ownership / capital class. The ones who own all the major media. They may make a low-key passing mention of these victories. Then never bring it up again ever. But they will harp for days months and years about how some policy hurts businesses or "wealthy" americans. Manufacturing consent for their owners. It's all by design. No one should get their information from publicly traded companies.
Not saying Biden has done nothing, but if you haven't noticed yet, the GOP standard play is to take the most lukewarm democrat positions, pretend it's the end of western civilization, and then promise things will be fixed once he's elected.
Ie, CRT, Wokeness, DEI, whatever "monster of the week" they pick as an enemy. They always swap it around.
Because getting people riled up in culture wars gets their mind off of real issues. It’s the ol street magician trick of getting people to look at their right hand while the left hand is stealing your watch.
The liberals think they can push cathode ray tubes on the rest of us?? I'm fine with them using sinful processing components in their own homes, but this would be violating my rights as an american!
If Joe Biden hasn’t done anything, then why does Trump have so many things to revoke and reverse?
A lot of it is posturing.
Trump claims that Joe Biden made the military Woke and bimbofied all the generals. All the universities teach are the Perverted Arts. And the TikToks are turning your kids Chinese.
But when he's President, he promises to fix all of that on Day One.
They're against anything that the Democrats want. If the Democrats decided to fix the pothole out front, Republicans would rally in favor of potholes' right to damage your car.
Biden hasn't done well addressing the core issues driving the voters he needs--ie young voters and POC voters.
Trump is doing his best to mobilize his supporters, as turnout is going to determine who wins in November. I'm not sure this was a wise move for him as it could energize his opposition as well. We shall see.
"Day one!!!" I'm not even LGBTQ, but that's the Republican Nominee saying his main priority is to hurt minorities. For no gain, just spite. If you know someone with "Conservative" tendencies, you owe it to everyone in this country to talk to them about this...
Here we go again and again on this repeat episode of Hold Your Nose And Vote For Joe Where as Joe is enacting and upholding protections for the LGBTQ community, Trump is only too happy to repeal that shit so fast. Not only that, but big boi Trump also has alluded to glassing Iran, which is way further than Biden has escalated towards. Biden is sadly, our current cold comfort here. We're stuck between a rock and a slightly more malleable corrupt WW3 causing dipshit rock
The more people vote for the left, the further left their position will become. It's a well established component of political theory called the Overton window.
Thank you for the reference! Learnt something new. As far as I've read, the Overton window is not just that, but describes a general window of acceptable ideas or propositions. Of course, influenced by possible (public) majorities.
The problem is that there isn't a left to vote for, you either vote for right or far-right. That's why the ratchet effect exists, both parties are right wing, just separated in how extreme they are, with the Reps being overt fascists.
Actual leftist change is not going to come from voting for liberals. Absolutely vote for Biden if you wish, this isn't an argument against voting for him. However, if you think voting for a right winger will shift the overton window to the left, you don't understand the nuances of the overton window.
Actual leftist change comes from direct action and organizing. Strikes, mutual aid, canvassing, raising class awareness, spreading leftist theory, protesting, actual outside pressure is what changes the overton window.
And you think that would be different under Trump?
Trump and Bibi are besties. There wouldn't even be the token resistance Biden puts up; he'd hand Israel enough weapons to turn Gaza into a glass parking lot, and probably would have done the same to Columbia by now.
The thing about it is, Biden can be pressured to, eventually, take steps towards the right thing. Trump cannot; he already sees everyone but himself and his bootlickers as subhuman anyway.
This is a quote by Martin Niemöller, a German theologian who spent eight years in concentration camps towards the end of WW2 and who afterwards publicly spoke out a about the dangers of complacency in the face of fascism.
First they helped fund a literal genocide, and I did not speak out—
Because it wasn't my realtives being killed by US bombs and I was afraid that standing up and doing the right thing would have costs for me personally.
I don't get it. Well I do. But I've yet to have a satisfactory conservative response to the following :
Intersex people exist. That is, at least 1 out of every 1,750 babies are born with both sexual organs. Therefore by their existence we know that there is a blurred line between genders and those people exist there. Even if I go along with them that transgender behavior is a mental illness (it's not, this is just a thought experiment), what exactly do they propose we do about intersex individuals who are literally neither male nor female?
1 out of 1,750 would put the intersex population in the United States at approximately 194,000 individuals. For reference, that would be about 10% of the population of Nebraska or Idaho. That's how many people I am discussing and who seem to always be left out of the conversation.
Oh, they include it in the bills that ban trans care: continue forcing "corrective" surgery on intersex people. That kind of surgery on the genitals of children is always exempted from the trans care bans.
That seems so cruel, I don't get it at all. Sorry you triggered another rant, I'm not shouting at you I'm just shouting, lol.
Using conservative logic, should the babies, made by God, not be left as He made them?
It also seems cruel to mutilate a child born between genders before they have the opportunity to come of age and know who they are. I've heard multiple accounts of intersex people, who the doctor removed one of their sexual organs then become suicidal when they reach adulthood because they essentially feel like a castrated man, or the female equivalent.
Just imagine you were born and had your sexual organs removed as a baby, how would you feel? Pause and imagine living life castrated. If I invest 3 seconds of thought into that, I conclude, "Nah, best not risk doing that to someone, if I was born that way I'd certainly prefer a choice. Let's let them grow up first."
Does being conservative simply require a lack of imagination about these things? It seems so obvious.
Yeah, that is scary. Chosen by whom? I'd imagine if anyone reading this paused and thought, "If I was that baby, who would I want to make that choice?" I think everyone would pick themselves. Men reading this would wanna pick male and women reading this would wanna pick female.
Anyway it's fun to think about. But I'm done thinking.
TL;DW: The modern concept of gender as separate from sex was not (originally) a progressive move. It was conservatives' reaction to the medical discoveries of the nebulous nature of biological sex, to justify imposing the gender binary on trans people and especially intersex children.
Conservatives claim to care a lot about protecting trans kids from "radical decisions", but the places that enact legislation to prevent teenagers from using puberty blockers are the same places that still allow and encourage mutilating surgeries on intersex babies.
It is not an accident. It is ideologically consistent with conservatives' drive to impose their religious and cultural vision of the binary gender as a completely fixed universal truth, and they'll use extreme violence to ensure it remains binary, fixed and universal.
I moved here from reddit because I feel like every time you try to open your mouth there about how important it is to vote, you get absolutely mobbed by so-called leftists who "just can't reconcile their values with voting for biden" as if they are helping the world and their brave stance is going to help people.
Seriously, between this issue and the "bear VS men" debate, I just can't anymore, I can't deal with people, I have no idea what super-villain has irradiated the population with a density-ray, but people right now seem almost surreally ignorant, like I always knew it was bad, but I'm beginning to finally see after four and a half decades how bad it really is out there. And it's far, far worse than any of us ever imagined.
I had a terse argument with someone in RL the other day who didn't know what lava was. Like, the molten rock that comes out of volcanos? They never in their lives questioned what a volcano was, and just assumed all the "red goo" that comes out just has to get cleaned up after it cools, and that the government should try to plug volcanoes. It turned into an argument because he didn't believe my "mainstream science" explanation.
It's okay to be dumb out there, dumb is actually good, dumb can be fixed. What's terrifying me for our future is the doubling-down on ignorance, the weird pride in "choosing your own truths."
Trump may get elected again and this fact alone should terrify all of us. Not just for what Trump will do in office, but what it means for our population that there are enough people who have chosen an entirely separate set of axioms and truths about the world, and just fukkin discard actual, verifiable facts. Now we have AI exploding into the world and distorting things worse. We're in a lot of trouble.
Going on YouTube taught me that a huge chunk of Americans don't just support Trump and people like him, they adore him sand encourage and cheer his awful behavior
He's got a cult of personality to the tune of about 50 million. He just needs to convince another 20 or so to show up (or 20 of the opposition to sit home) to get the electors he needs for the presidency.
If you are against a child taking a puberty suppressing drug they want to take at age 10, but are ok with tearing off the genitals (not circumcision, the whole thing) of a day old baby, you aren't against transition, you are against children's autonomy.
What the hell makes him think he'll be president again? If he loses the election he won't be president. If he wins the election Biden can just refuse to leave office. It's legal because everything a president does is legal. There is litterally a case before the SC where Trump is making that argument.
Supreme Court is dragging their feet on that decision. Probably not gonna decide til after the election. If Trump wins they'll decide presidents get total immunity, but if Biden wins they shoot it down.
The big funny would be if they decided that Trump was legal before Biden left office. The lights would go out when they came back on a lot of people would be disappeared.
Whine, post misspelled toilet rage tweets, sell/accidentally blab national secrets to our adversaries... Yah know, the usual entitled baby who gets put in charge stuff.
He won't even get to it. The moment he's elected he'll probably die or something. Fascist would take power. Then everyone who's not straight white and only does missionary sex will be sent off to the camps.
I can't believe we exist in such a bastardized backwards timeline where someone like Donald Trump can be lording over us again. If not for my wife I'd be taking my retail related boxcutter to my throat
You’re so rude! He also loves whichever human lavished him with the most praise in the past 24 hours (he doesn’t have the memory to recall more than that)
Hahahahah bitch you gonna die soon, there's only so much stimulants a 77 year old cheeseburger addict can take before that decrepit clogged heart of yours goes boom.
Don't underestimate the magic of presidential healthcare.
Nixon was the last president to die before his nineties.
If Trump were a regular person like the rest of us, he'd likely already be dead, but whatever voodoo those presidential doctors perform, I wouldn't be surprised to see him zombie along for another twenty years.
Sadly, if he doesn't, his many fascist benefactors will. The transgender community exists in an existential horror where a genocidal fascist movement slowly builds itself against us, but it's being led by some of the most idiotic repugnant people who have ever lived. One Google search can immediately dismantle 99% of the nonsense they say about us, but it doesn't matter because no one who supports them cares.
So...I'm a Christian and still can't for the life of me understand the appeal of these vicious, hateful positions.
I'm even pretty direct-to-the-bible in my theology, thus the ideas that we are "fearfully and wonderfully made," and that God doesn't make mistakes, lead me to believe that choosing a different gender than you were born with is probably missing out on God's best for us.
Yet despite some common ground with the "religious right", I'm still to this day completely at a loss as to how you would get from literally anything you find in the bible to encouraging or applauding the removal of protections for very at-risk persons.
I promise, you can not read the Bible as a serious undertaking and arrive where these people have.
If god doesn't make mistakes then the existence of trans people is not a mistake but rather a test of basic regard and compassion or something of the sorts.
There's one word in what you said that's the lynchpin: "choice". Trans people don't choose to be trans. Who the fuck would choose to be dysphoric.
Yeah exactly, trans people don’t choose to be trans; they choose to treat their dysphoria. When they don’t, they often die.
The medically proven effective and successful ways to do that include transitioning, hormone treatment, etc..
Medically proven ineffective ways are what republicans push for and is what’s happening all across the US: conversion therapy, denying gender dysphoria exists at all, public shame and ridicule, exclusion from society by eliminating housing, employment, and other non-discrimination protections, painting trans people as delusional/dangerous, denial of healthcare, having the state take trans children away from their parents, claiming “transness” is a social contagion, trying to criminalize being trans in schools and in public by banning dressing in a way that’s not stereotypical or traditional for one’s sex/gender, and mocking the 40% suicide rate among trans people that are denied care and lack social support.
I'm sorry but this logic doesn't make sense to me. If everyone is perfect the way they are, then Trump is also perfect the way he is, and he is a monster in disguise, far from remotely acceptable.
He is perfect. What you need to realise to see that is that his purpose in life is to be a warning example to others. Actually, about 100% of humans are supposed to be that but most of us not to Trumpian degrees.
I disagree with you about the bible stuff, but I have great respect for how you handle it.
You might disagree with trans people's interpretation of their bodies, but it sounds like you hold more highly their rights to be kept safe. Even if they may be doing something you may disagree with, we agree that vulnerable people should be protected, especially when they're not harming others.
It's almost like there's no asterisk after "Love thy neighbour"!
I'm sure as a result you do not wear glasses, refuse medical care, etc right? God doesn't make mistakes, right????
I have news for you, every bigot thinks their theology is direct to the Bible. They're right, it's a despicable book full of vile conduct, most of which is supported by the ugly nonexistent tetragrammaton tyrant you worship.
None of these people have read the bible, probably never even opened one. Their beliefs are the culmination of their echo chamber of ignorance - what their social peers have told them is 'in the bible'.
Yeah, doesn’t the bible say not to judge, and to leave judgement up to the all-knowing God who is infinitely more experienced than his followers? I assume you agree with that. I wish most Christians would put that into practice and focus on being good to one another. I’m glad that you recognize the anti-trans hate and cruelty when you see it.
I’m so tired of cis people telling trans people that trans people are immoral, or that trans people don’t deserve equal rights, or don’t deserve to exist in society, or are lesser than cis people. And then cis people have the audacity to pass laws that vilify trans existence, restrict trans rights and strip them of their autonomy.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one...
Galatians 3:28
This is one of the few sentiments that's both in the earliest primary source documents of Jesus and the apocrypha:
"...when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female..."
Gospel of Thomas 22
When Salome inquired when the things concerning which she asked should be known, the Lord said: When ye have trampled on the garment of shame, and when the two become one and the male with the female is neither male nor female.
Lost Gospel of the Egyptians via Clement
At the time Jesus was actually alive, the interpretation of Genesis 1:27's "So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them" was widely thought to mean that there was a hermaphroditic original 'Adam.' This was widely discussed just a few decades after the time of Jesus among the Egyptian Jews in Alexandria, particularly Philio, contemporary to Paul.
As well, at the time he was alive there was a very brutal form of forced hormone alteration by castrating prepubescent boys to leave them more feminine. Only a few decades after Jesus's crucifixion the emperor of Rome even married someone this was done to (just a few years before the extant gospel of Mark is finalized, talking about marriage only being between a man and a woman).
The ways in which a historical Jesus would have been thinking about the notions of gender or sexuality may be different than you might think back then.
In my mind, the historical people at the center of the tradition has always been more important than the echo of them leftover in books confirmably marred by edits, revisions, and omissions. For both the old book and the new.
And I think the historical Jesus might have agreed.
His disciples said to him, "Twenty-four prophets have spoken in Israel, and they all spoke of you."
He said to them, "You have disregarded the living one who is in your presence, and have spoken of the dead." [...]
Jesus said, "Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him."
The people who had a version of Jesus saying this also thought he was talking about matter being made up of indivisible parts, something only proven to be true beyond any doubt around a century ago.
It's easy for false prophets to cast weeds among the wheat, but it's very hard to plant seeds that mature well with the times. To do that takes true foresight. Eventually as the years drag on, what was wheat and what was weeds inevitably becomes clearer as each grows - it's an inescapable separator between truth and fiction.
The Old Testament is flat out wrong when Elihu claims in Job that "why it rains and where snow comes from is beyond human understanding." This knowledge had even become known in Jesus's time, in the same Roman book published just 50 years before he was born in the Roman empire which also talked about Greek atomism and survival of the fittest.
The church, in an age where people were still peeing on their hands to clean them, appointed itself an arbiter of what was wheat and what was weeds and proceeded to uproot anything it declared a weed.
TL;DR: Having blind faith in those who have even more blind faith sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind to me. Maybe one would be less in danger of blaspheming the holy spirit and the notion of divine revelation if avoiding declaring anything absolutely true or false for sure until having sufficient confirmable information to evaluate it.
That "wait and watch" approach is even the methodology of how the aforementioned book 50 years before Jesus got all that other stuff right about evolution and atoms. A book sharing word for word similarities with one of Jesus's most famous parables, about how only what survived to reproduce multiplied. Also the only parable in the earliest written canonized gospel which has a "secret explanation" for what was a clearly public telling of the parable itself to thousands.
I suggest you make a more thorough reading of the Bible. The vitriol and hatred of what you call the "religious right" isn't too far off if you compare it to the pettiness of Yaweh through the Old Testament, often killing hundreds or thousands of people, when not provoking absolute catastrophes, just to punish the deeds of one person or a few, or even simply due to his fragile ego.
You sound like a person with much better moral values, however. It would just be strange to me that you'd choose to worship that character when you're clearly more inclined towards tolerance, provided you're familiar enough with Christianism.
We can't rely on voting. This person and many like him are inhuman and hateful and that right there should disqualify you from holding office, period.
Voting is just being able to influence panicky, problematic, fearful people to get hateful people to win. Nothing is going to be fixed in the long run if we keep allowing these people to hold office. We need a set standard for people that have respect, intelligence, dignity, and compassion for human beings of all kinds to be able to hold office. Voting is just going to make things worse and even if it happens to temporarily fix things, it will eventually swing back the other way.
This country is just inviting fascism by letting the common person have a say in how things are ran.
Yes, because that is so working so goddamn well in fighting fascism.... all of this wonderful not fascism we have from the hateful, spiteful, right that has totally been destroyed by all of this overwhelming voice of the people stuff we hold so dear...
You have to be fucking kidding me. The REASON WE ARE ON THE CUSP OF BECOMING ONE OF THE MOST FASCIST COUNTRIES EVER IS BECAUSE A BUNCH OF IDIOTS VOTED FOR IT. Are you really this blind and stupid?
This country is just inviting fascism by letting the common person have a say in how things are ran.
Ok, so only uncommon people get to vote. Trans people, neurodiverse people, lefties, redheads, little people, anyone with a vestigial tail. Sounds interesting.
Nobody votes. We run on a platform of common sense, intellectually based, humanitarian, pro-freedom ideals and any single person in our government who even considers opposing those is out on their fascist ass.
Except we're still being screwed over by "states rights" (what a laughable concept) and our supreme court and other sources. Trump isn't president and we're still becoming more fascist by the day thanks to his corrupting influence. We limit EVERYONE by creating a system of common sense and humanitarian rights that cannot be crossed in any way.