Paul Cantrell
A dire warning for everyone in the “LGB” part of who thought they could keep themselves safe from the fash by throwing “TQIA+” under the bus:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/03/republicans-same-sex-marriage
And if you’re none of the above, I promise you, whatever •your• letter is, they’re coming for yours sooner than you think. Stop them now or pay later.
𝚝𝚓𝚠
@inthehands all those brainless center-left transphobes who thought there was a contingency of pro-LGB but not T people out there that Dems should appeal to are gonna find out real quick that those people are simply anti-LGBT.
Paul Cantrell
@thomasjwebb
Yeah, there is in particular a coterie of Democratic strategy consultants who are stuck in this mindset. And there’s plenty of people wandering around the halls of the party labyrinth who get, too, but not enough. Never enough.
Paul Cantrell
Something that makes fascism a particularly pernicious form of authoritarianism is that it doesn’t just need the population crushed and subservient; it needs to •keep actively destroying• whole subsets of the population in order to stay alive.
Fascism is a fire. Its fuel is the othering of minority groups; its oxygen is fear. It will keep finding — creating, if necessary — more and more “others,” without limit. Unless you cut off that oxygen or that fuel, it will keeping burning until there’s nobody left.
Paul Cantrell
When you all saw the Republican campaigns go straight for the throat of trans people and immigrants — all those horrid commercials, all those lies, just straight for the jugular of highly vulnerable people who aren’t hurting anyone — that should have been your alarm bell.
A vulnerable population portrayed as the reviled “other” + fear. That it’s it. That’s your alarm bell. That’s all the warning you get.
If you didn’t recognize that pattern right away, I don't know…go do some work on your own head.
Paul Cantrell
And I mean…look, if you •are• a transphobe or a xenophobe, (1) ew, wtf, but also (2) do you really think you’re safe just because they’re targeting people you don’t like?
If you see the curtains in your living room going up in flames, do you think to yourself, “Eh, let them burn! I never liked those curtains anyway! I’m •sure• the rest of the house is safe if we just let the fire go!”???
quixote
@inthehands Well, women aren't exactly a minority group, but I know what you mean. Misogyny is the leading indicator. The practice ground for inflicting humiliation. (The current crew aren't slackers in this. At all.) It's the easiest place, right at home, right where you work, right on the streets you use every day, to implement your longing for might to make right.
Paul Cantrell
@quixote
For sure. Abuser behavior so often surfaces first against women.
Paul Cantrell
@Darth_Tiktaalik
Yeah, people hearing that story don’t realize the miserable story of its author. Instead of “I said nothing” it should read “I cheered them on.”
Darth Tiktaalik
@inthehands This is actually what that "first they came for" poem was about, it was written by an antisemite who voted for Nazis but eventually found himself on the hostile end of nazi ideology.
James Endres Howell
Consider this photograph: Little Rock, Arkansas, on the morning of September 4, 1957. My own parents, in other states, were high school students that day. Living memory.
Note the primatology. A screech like a chimpanzee might make, pure aggression, part of our nature.
This emotion, hate. It is a potent mix of terror, rage, righteous indignation, and incendiary mob approval.
Our enlightened rhetorical questions about medium and long term consequences are a tragic category error.
Paul Cantrell
@possibledog
I'm sympathetic to that argument in many ways — I'm a programmer and a mathematician, and I like to handle things in the general case! — but in the past 10 years or so, I've really come around to the importance of •individually naming• each marginalized subgroup.
BLM activists in particular taught me about this. The danger of using an umbrella term is the “All Lives Matter” pitfall: a term that •theoretically• should include everyone ends up •in practice• only including people culturally regarded as the neutral default. And such terms don't challenge anyone whose thinking dwells in that default: someone who doesn’t really think of Black people at all when they hear “all lives,” or doesn’t think of transgender people when they hear “queer.”
Possibly a Dog
this is one reason the term should always have been “queer” — the alphabet soup of LGB…+ aspires to be inclusive and comforting but mostly only divides
yes, some people are discomfited by “queer” but its history as a slur actually helps make the point that it’s not any one specific difference that marks you as a target for bullying: bullies will fix on **any** difference as a target for their disgust and fear and hate
Paul Cantrell
@possibledog
So, yes, I personally like the term “queer” in the broadly inclusive bell hooks sense of capturing a wide spectrum of gender-related experiences that may not even have a good name yet — but I •also• appreciate the specific enumeration of identities in “LGBTQIA+,” even if that enumeration is sort of laborious.
My brother, a math teacher, often talks with his students about the importance of examples, counterexamples, and non-examples. It's not enough just to have a theorem, even if you have a proof! Mathematicians think about specific cases, and ground their thinking in them even when they've found suitable generalizations (or •think• they have; cf Fourier’s heat equation blowing up calculus and forcing the development of Real Analysis). A similar principle applies here.
Paul Cantrell
@possibledog
Yeah, “LGBTQIA+” clearly is not good chant material. The detailed enumeration has its place; so do the catchy single words. Many important tools in the kit!
Nice chatting with you too.
Possibly a Dog
@inthehands I agree that the alphabet-soup enumeration is useful, but my point is that as a popular term its disadvantages outweigh its advantages. It just sounds elite and effete and academic and pompous and silly, and it's way too hard to deploy in political arguments.
"We're here, we're ell gee bee tee queue eye eh plus, get used to it!" just doesn't have that same ring, now, does it? ;-)
Not that it matters, it's too late now; this is just an academic argument about academic terms. Nice chatting with you.
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