Bucking the Backlash: Why I’ll be writing more about the attacks on trans people

I had not noticed the change, but I welcome it.

It’s frightening how well this whole backlash was coordinated to reach a fever pitch during Pride Month.

@LouCPurr:

I think we need to take the pandemic into account when it comes to timing. Once the strict lockdowns mostly stopped in Summer 2020, liberals largely voluntarily engaged in “soft lockdowns” whether or not they were locally/currently in effect, but conservatives largely refused to do so.

The over-all result was that conservatives dominated the social scenes for nearly 2 years, and saw an nation that largely reflected themselves. Liberals, being more isolated from their friends and family and having spare time not spent socializing in person, often spent a lot of time discovering themselves – and some people realized and/or came to terms with the fact that they were some form of LGBTQIA+ faster than they would have otherwise. Pride events happened, but they were virtual, and thus invisible to most outsiders.

It seems that since April (maybe? probably varies a bit by region) this year enough people have collectively agreed to pretend that the pandemic is over (it is not) so there have been public events which have not seen the light of day since 2019, in many cases because they are of little interest to conservatives (except maybe for them to hate on). They’re starting to see a public life which no longer largely revolves around them, and they don’t like that.

After spending the past several years working up their demonization of LGBTQIA+ people, particularly trans people, up to a fever pitch, after starting to see them everywhere again and there’s more of them than before, after violent far-right extremists have become emboldened to act more freely in recent years (particularly but not exclusively in the US), and now the much-hated perversion fest is suddenly back and being shoved in everyone’s faces? (I’m speaking from their perspective, not mine.) Why would it be surprising, at least in retrospect, that this would happen now?

I agree with you, David.

I‘m very concerned about fairness in sports. That’s why I support building accessible facilities in disadvantaged areas, free programs for disadvantaged children, and economic reforms to reduce inequality so children have more equal access to the time, nutrition and equipment they need to support their interests in sport. We need to abolish the kind of elite programs and leagues that foster a sense of superiority in richer kids while often abusively skewing their childhoods. And mandate more equal media coverage for womens and disabled sporting events, and equal pay scales for women and disabled athletes. Then there’s encouraging more varied and non-competitive sports so that more people can be drawn into enjoying moving their body without harmful assumptions about what bodies and skillsets are required for that.

There’s a hell of a lot of unfairness in sport that’s more significant than what genitalia a very few athletes were born with, so it’s pretty unbelievable that that’s the focus of a genuine concern.

Luke Tryl of More In Common wrote an article on UK attitudes off-line which is out in the grauniad today:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/16/twitter-trans-rights-gender-identity-report

The part that really struck me at the time as unfair was that Raza… was doing exactly what fat kids are relentlessly commanded to do, and engaging in vigorous physical exercise.

See, the fat-shamers do not want us to be thin. They do not, as they claim, care about our health. They enjoy having a group of people that they can mock so they can get those little hits of pleasure that bullying gives them. Remember that video of a fat man dancing joyfully until a group of women started laughing at him?

I am here for Bucking the Backlash!

Did anyone else picture a rodeo-esque event where the bulls were replaced with mammoths when reading the new tag line?

In regards to sports – at least at the US high school level – I’d be happy if they stopped being treated as the Be-All and End-All in the lives of the young athletes. I know of at least two instances of teen players being told they couldn’t get an excused absence from a practice that was scheduled over the Thanksgiving holiday break, and would be penalized if they decided to go traveling with relatives instead.

No, Seriously, the coaches at some of the high schools in my area decided to schedule A Very Important Practice Session during the 5-day break that traditionally involves families traveling cross country – and further in some cases – to spend time with other family members they might not have seen for months. And deciding that any kid who chooses spending time with their distant relatives instead of training for The Next Big Game should be punished for not taking their sport seriously.

Because everyone knows that the only thing that anyone at a funeral asks about the deceased isn’t ‘were they a good person’ or ‘they discovered The Cure for Cancer’, but ‘did they help their team win The Sectional back in high school’?

It’s probably a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but I’m currently trying to explain to non-Brits on twitter what panto is.

Is this really something that other countries don’t have? I thought it was an Italian word.

@Alan Robertshaw:
Panto is somewhat known here in Canada, at least. Ross Petty (a long-time stage actor and the husband of Karen Kain, who used to be the prima ballerina and later artistic director at the National Ballet of Canada) has been doing an annual panto over here since the mid-80s, a show which generally ends up recorded and broadcast on the CBC as well. He also usually has at least one stunt-casting role for a local Canadian celebrity; one year it was Ernie Coombs, who used to work with Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood and who ran the Canadian children’s show ‘Mister Dressup’.

At least in part because of Petty’s work reinvigorating the art form here, a lot of smaller panto productions have sprung up as well. A few years back I attended a panto production of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves at a little community playhouse in Sidney, B.C. As usual for a panto, there were all sorts of side references and holes in the fourth wall: from the opening narration which stated that they only actually had four thieves because the others kept running off with the props; to the Ali Baba character doing an internal monologue while everybody else was standing still to keep him in the spotlight, and ending it with him walking around and waving hands around the other actors with a confused expression on his face as to why they weren’t moving; to the end where one of the more self-absorbed semi-villainous characters is pursued off-stage while yelling “But I thought pantos were supposed to have a happy ending!”

I mean, Petty had worked in other countries and was pretty obviously bringing the British panto tradition over here where it hadn’t been a big thing before, but it is still a known thing over here for almost forty years now.

OT, but the Ukraine war is looking more and more familiar.

It’s Vietnam. Except that the role played by the United States then is being played by Russia now.

Consider it. It started as a civil war, with a pro-Russian faction versus a pro-Western one. Both the US and Russia backed their aligned faction with weapons (except for that one shipment Trump withheld as blackmail, demanding dirt on Hunter Biden — did Nixon do anything comparably dirty in Vietnam?). Then one of them backed their faction with actual troops. Then the whole thing bogged down into a seemingly unwinnable quagmire.

The symmetry extends to the US involving itself in Vietnam to contain Warsaw Pact expansion and Russia involving itself in Ukraine to contain NATO expansion.

Ukraine is Russia’s Vietnam.