Because stirring up hate against vulnerable minorities, by positioning them as a threat is a well tested and effective technique for the power hungry to gain and retain power. And it's effective, because it works by pulling people in and making all of the conversation about whether or not it's right to hate on the group they're targeting.

As someone who grew up in a conservative household in a deep red state, I think that part of it is that a lot of people are letting Lizard Brain dictate their response to transgender people.

Let me give you a personal example. A while back, I went to a social dance, and there was a trans woman there. Before the dance starts proper, the couple that runs it will teach a dance lesson, and we rotate partners while that's going on. Eventually, I was rotated into being her partner. For some background, she was obviously early on in her transition; she still looked like a dude in a dress, she didn't quite have the appearance down yet. But she gets huge props for not only having the bravery to go out as herself, but doing it in fucking Arkansas.

So I rotate over to her, and it dawns on me that she's trans. In my head, Lizard Brain immediately starts screaming. "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?! THIS PERSON IS OBVIOUSLY A DUDE IN A DRESS, HE MUST BE UP TO SOMETHING IF HE'S DRESSING AS SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAN WHAT HE IS! RABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLE"

Keep in mind, where I grew up, you just didn't see trans people, and even now, it still tickles that primal part of my brain that was trained to be uncomfortable around people who aren't white and straight.

The difference between me and many of the people I grew up around is that I recognize that it's happening and try to tone Lizard Brain out when it starts screaming. A lot of other people listen to it and don't care that the person that it's screaming about is exactly that: a person.

For a simple example: my mother is Catholic and until Trump came along, a lifelong single-issue Republican voter who always said she would be a Democrat if it weren't for abortion. She attends church in an extremely progressive, famously LGBTQ-friendly town.

There's a transwoman who attends her church (let's call her Rita). This lady is probably in her mid-50s to mid-60s and has been a fixture at the church for at least 5 years. My mom has been in choir and bible study groups with her for years now. She still just can't see Rita as a woman. Treats her politely but behind her back refuses to call her "she" and says she's a "man in a dress".

She's really offended that Rita uses the ladies' room. I've asked her why and she can't articulate it, she just feels like it's an invasion of her privacy, because men don't belong in the ladies' room. And when I point out that Rita isn't a man, she just rolls her eyes. I've asked her if she's worried that Rita is in there for predatory purposes and she admits that she doesn't think Rita intends any harm. I've asked her how she'd feel if she were forced to use the men's room and she says "but that's different!"

My mom prides herself in being a moral person, and still can't manage to get past her bigotry to see Rita as a woman. There are just too many mental blockades against it. But since she thinks she's so highly moral, she thinks she must be correct in this situation. It excuses her from finding empathy and bettering her attitude toward trans folks.

My longwinded point is that when people who consider themselves highly moral are bigoted, there's almost zero chance of getting through to them. And I think a lot of the people who are bigoted against trans folks feel that morality is on their side and being trans is morally deviant, so they think they're justified in their prejudice.

It's strange to them.

When people encounter something that's different from what they are used to, they don't know how to process it. It makes them uncomfortable. Some people, instead of learning how to deal with that feeling like a mature adult, blame the individual for making them feel uncomfortable and resent them for "making them feel that way". Just staying away is not enough, they must be punished for existing.

All because someone felt a little icky when they thought about a girl with a weiner.

I'm a southerner. Take what I'm about to tell you as close to the grain of the problem as possible, because it is.

Here's the thing. 9 times out of 10, a Southern man is going to meet a lone trans or gay person, have a pleasant experience talking to them and go about their day, they even make friends with the person, spend years talking to them, send gifts, become family members, etc.

But you know what?

Behind closed doors, it's "fuck those trannies", "not in my schools", etc. My mom does it, her sister does it, my dad did it. It's hypocrisy at an extreme level while also ignoring it at an extreme level.

"Well I have gay friends... I'm not homowhatzit"

THEY'RE TEACHING WHAT!?

"Double Standard" might as well be the tagline for the entire South. They'll protect their religion and the expectations put on them by their parents and social norms on a general level across the board, while still shaking hands and eating cake with their lgbtq+ buddies.

Just remember any southerner is one thought from God away from stabbing you in the back at all times, because no matter how close you get to them, even as a family member, that book and the expectations behind it means more, was beat into them more, every day since they were born until you met them.

Materialist answer (inspired by a video called Why The Political Compass is Wrong: Establishing An Accurate Model of Political Ideology, by breadtuber Halim Alrah... and also Jane Elliott's famous experiment)

Business owner makes money by paying workers to produce widgets at $6 / unit. Owner sells these widgets at $10 / unit, making a $4 profit each sale.

Before long, the workers catch on to the reality of the situation: the owner could be making a lot less and still be able to provide "leadership" (or whatever it is he provides). They decide not to work for less than... $8 per unit. With this price, the owner will still be wealthy (the business makes hundreds of widgets, after all). But now, so will the workers.

So the workers save up money and use it to go on strike.

However: business owner comes up with a better solution to the problem: he divides the workers into brown-eyed workers and blue-eyed workers. He then uses his money to discriminate against the brown-eyed workers. His cronies in government make it legal to deny brown-eyed workers jobs and housing. His cronies in the media write hysterical anecdotal stories about various brown-eyed rapists, thieves, and murderers.

Terrified mobs -- stoked into a frenzy by the business owner's well-funded propaganda -- tear down brown-eyed people's homes and food supplies, leaving them destitute before the strike is done.

The brown-eyed workers now must choose between returning to work for the business owner at $5 / unit... or starving to death.

The blue-eyed workers, meanwhile, have just been tricked into betraying their own team. Some were not tricked, but simply unprepared. These unprepared workers stood by in either shock, uncertainty, or laziness, unable to comprehend how their fellow blue-eyed workers could have become so foolishly self-defeating and cruel.

But now the business owner can put up the illusion of no longer needing the blue-eyed workers. He can run his factory on a skeleton crew of desperate, brown-eyed workers, and say to the blue, "uh oh! Looks like the brown-eyed workers just stole your jobs!"

Much like the brown-eyed workers, the blue-eyed workers have a restricted set of choices: A) admit they were suckers --fooled into attacking their own team -- and try to apologize and rebuild their union, B) double down and blame brown-eyed people for undercutting them... but reluctantly return to work, because the strike is broken, or C) just like the brown-eyed workers, they can choose to starve to death.

(A) will be the most difficult. As Mark Twain said: "it's easier to fool people than convince them they have been fooled."

The business owner wins, and now society has an eye-color-discrimination problem. Eye color was an arbitrary characteristic. Yet now it decides where someone lives, who they spend time with, and what kinds of opportunities they have access to.

The business owner can rinse and repeat for: skin tone, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. As the saying goes,

"Divide and conquer."

You asked why trans people are currently the subject of fear and hysteria? No reason. Not any new reason at least. Trans people are different. Any and every difference between workers is an opportunity for those fatcats rich enough to own "The Daily Mail" and the "The New York Post" to separate us into camps and drain us dry, one camp at a time.

Because fascists need a _{scary other} to scapegoat to erode everyone’s rights.

I think most commenters here are missing the point.

There is a more extreme reaction to transgender people as opposed to gay or lesbian people, because of issues like sports and bathrooms. And that hits at people's sense of injustice. For example if you have a young daughter, a lot of people will hate the idea of a person with a penis going into the women's room and being around their little girl. Or if that daughter grows up and joins a sports team, the idea of somebody who is hormonally male and thus naturally more muscular competing against your daughter is unpleasant.

Put differently, I think a lot of people we now classify as 'transphobic' don't actually have much problem with trans people themselves. Rather, with how the efforts to ensure trans people receive the full treatment of their chosen gender can affect the rest of society.

For me personally, I don't know what the answer is. I generally don't care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. I have no problem with anyone presenting themselves to the world as whatever they wish, if it makes you happier than by all means. At the same time though, I don't think it's transphobic to point out that somebody who is largely or entirely biologically male will have a natural competitive advantage in the field of sports.
So while I certainly don't want to exclude anybody, I think there is at least a little justification for restricting some women's sports to those who are genetically female.

It's artificial boosting of the same bigotry that's been ongoing for generations. The new part switching the target.

See, there's been a very concerted effort to radicalize the right wing of the American populace by media oligarchs. It's part of an overall strategy going back to at least the post-nixon era.

Want to crush black people? Find a way to villainize them indirectly. "Inner city" crime. Step up arrests for things that are disproportionately a part of black people's lives. Spread drugs into the chaos brought about by destabilizing black communities to engender greater violence between gangs. And it worked. Look at how many black people are in jail compared to pretty much any other group.

Go back to Stonewall, when the biggest movements for gay rights got going hard, and remember that trans people were involved from the beginning, but didn't have a convenient label, they didn't have a way to be a distinct group. Gay rights efforts worked to some degree. Enough that the far right plans to use gay people as the enemy had to find another target the same way that they had to change targets from black people to Hispanic people in the form of "illegal aliens".

When your plan rests on fomenting anger, hate, and fear to stir up the lowest common denominator of a populace you have to have a target, ideally more than one since there's always going to be gaps where your desired audience will fall prey to the manipulation for one hate focus, but not another, like when you run into conservatives that aren't actually racist, but hate anyone in the LGBTQ+ umbrella because of religion, or sheer stupidity.

So, when gays weren't a useful target for hate any more because enough people knew gay people, and there were enough gay people of prominence to make it harder, why not switch to the next best thing? Trans people!

See, we had a major shift in awareness of trans issues back in the late nineties and early naughties. That's was followed by a large shift in trans people now having a serious chance at transitioning as medicine advanced, funding shifted, and there was just enough support that more people could transition and not be alone.

This meant that the assholes pushing their agenda to gain and maintain both wealth and power had a gift given to them. A new label to attack, using the exact same rhetoric they'd been using against gay people. "It's unnatural", "but what about the children?", along with the ability to use lingering misogyny via to attack trans women in specific since they are now women, but used to be men (in the rhetoric), so they must be groomers sneaking into bathrooms.

It's the exact same bullshit over again.

People have forgotten that the same methodology has been in place every time people in power needed to scare the populace enough to achieve a goal. Remember reefer madness? Before my time, but the entire thing was built in order to continue the oppression of black people, to keep them firmly under the boot.

Go back further, and it was the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, whatever group was "other" at the time.

But the modern version is so directly a rehash of the anti gay rhetoric that's not even fifty years in the past that I'm amazed it isn't glaringly obvious even to the people that have jumped on the bandwagon of both.

I've said it before, but people are stupid. They're easy to manipulate, easy to fool, and that's the majority. Even the ones that aren't easy to manipulate can still fall prey to it if they aren't paying attention. People are also lazy, and have little long term thinking ability, or attention spans. That's why we got zero lasting changes after George Floyd was murdered. Anyone that's made it this far, think for a second. How long did it take you to remember that name and what it means? Now, ask yourself how many people didn't remember at all.

That's why trans hate is working. People suck. The vast majority are easy to control, and will believe anything fed to them with the right language behind it. It just so happens that while all of the distractions being used to build up the hate also created a smoke screen to hide gerrymandering, which ends up with more and more control over what language is being used everywhere.

So, here we are with a manufactured, strawman enemy being propped up as the target and then painted with the word "trans". None of the bullshit used to build up the hate is true, it isn't accurate, and most of the people behind the hate actually know it's bullshit, but they aren't allowed to hate the blacks and the gays out loud any more. They can't just scream the n word or call people removeds at whim the way they used to.

So, now they've got trans people to hate. And they want that hate because it means they don't have to look at themselves, their own lives and choices. They don't have to stop and think that maybe everything they've built their identity around is empty, so they scream about "wokeness" and "transgenderism" as code words.

There's no serious, legitimate arguments against trans people being allowed to have the full protection of the law, to have full medical access, to have whatever gender they want on their driver's license. There's just the bullshit excuses to have someone to hate. There's not even a good argument about bathrooms, they're all built on bullshit too, and that's the one that's the low hanging fruit because it seems reasonable to people that aren't buying all the bullshit immediately, but aren't quite bright enough to think it through all the way on their own. Which, again, that's the majority, stupid people too drowned in lies and manipulation to bother thinking.

So, Don, if you've gotten this far, I know I went wide of what you asked, but it really is all related. It all comes down to the same thing in different faces over time.

For anyone else, I know this got a little ranty in parts. I know it is long enough to look a little crazed. IDGAF. This shit is patently obvious, it's not even a secret. The people that have been running the right wing of things for my entire lifetime and before have outright and publicly talked about it. One part of it, the "southern strategy" they brag about. It's infuriating, so I get ranty.

Fascists are cowards who attack the most vulnerable people as a standard tactic.

You all are overthinking it way too much.

Most people hate anything that's different or uncommon to themselves and their "world".

Simple as that.

It's heterophobia in the semantic sense of the word "fear of anything that's different".

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Far simpler than whateveryone else is saying. The best way to rally humans to your side is to give them a common enemy. So conservative politicians picked enemies that are small in number and told everyone how they are to blame for all that is wrong in the world.

Conservatives come in two types. The rich ones who want more and more money. And the poor ones who also want more money but are unable to obtain it because the rich hoard money.

The rich conservatives need to stop the poor conservatives from realizing the rich are why the poor can’t get money. So they make up vulnerable groups to blame for the poor’s problem, and the poor are generally too poorly educated to catch on to this game.

Different groups have been the scapegoat. Women, blacks, the italians, the irish, asians, gays, and now it’s transgender people.

The good news is transgender people WILL get full rights in about 20-30 years if you look at historical cycles. The bad news is it will be a fight and many will die before they get treated as human beings by these asshole conservatives.

They are just propagandized. In general, it's so much like racists - they may know trans people and just think they are the exceptions, like them as individuals and still think they hate them as a group. They are intentionally riled up by being forced fed edge cases and disinformation.

Trans people are just people. They aren't angels who are never criminals and they aren't degenerates who are always criminal, they are a diverse group like all of us are. But you can bet your ass that whenever a trans person does something criminal it will be blown up so big in conservative media and used to paint them all as criminals. It's just the right wing media machine.

How to say it delicately.. Many conservative/religious men really, truly want to just impale their throats on lady dick, but they are indoctrinated from birth to believe that a zombie from space (who they agree watches them shower and have sex) will be mad at them if they do what makes them happy. So to distract themselves from that always burning urge to ravenously aspirate dong nog, they performatively hate things as a hobby to pass the time until they die - profoundly alone and completely unhappy (see Lindsey Graham)

And then the conservative women are taught that they are stupid, useless furniture pieces there to look pretty and parrot - not capable of an opinion outside of the one provided by their husband or father.

They’re an easy minority to scapegoat. In the US they make up between 0.5% and 1.6% of the population. A sizable portion of straight people associate being transgender as something sick and weird and a sexual deviancy, so it’s easy to target them and to try to associate them with actual objectively bad things (ie pedophilia). They’re just people trying to find their place in the world and live their lives, same as most of us.

I'm going to get all sorts of fun responses for trying to empathize with those with whom I disagree (instead of just writing "dumb bigots") but here goes:

First, remember that even gay marriage is fairly new to America, it's been around for less time than the MCU.

There are a lot of folks who almost have mental whiplash, gay marriage went from illegal to "you could get fired for being vocally uncomfortable about it" in fairly quick order.

Now, to make things even more wild for those folks, mainstream culture is pretty insistent that gender isn't even a thing anymore. Add in some pretty wild news stories/videos*, worries for their kids and the notion that the Left refuses to say there might be any issues whatsoever and you can kinda see where a backlash could crop up.

• eg: trans women being reassigned to women's prisons and then assaulting the women etc, a 6"2, 220lb woman practically murdering her handball oppoisition, some fairly sketchy research practices by some of the authorities (WPATH) on the subject etc.

Religious people control their kids through the village support system of their church. Some kids are learning things at public school which are not in line with those beliefs. This is scary for parents. Parents don’t want to lose their children, and can’t imagine loving them as somebody else. Case in point Elon And his trans daughter Vivian.

I’m quite liberal and atheist, but the prospect of a transitioning child is troubling to me. While I’d have no problem supporting a gay child, I feel very strongly about body acceptance, and I reject body dysmorphia. Transitioning to another gender is to me, not too different from a woman who wants augmentation surgeries or a man who is taking steroids. That said I could care less what anybody else does. I think cosmetic surgery and steroids should be legal. I don’t think the government needs to be involved. It’s a decision to discuss with a child, doctor, and parent.

I guess what I’m saying is, I can empathize with the transphobia of conservatives. Where we differ is in how we deal with that fear. They want the government to make society conform to their beliefs. I think it’s up to the individual parent to grow the love in their heart to accept and love whatever their child decides to be.

Hating gays isn’t cool anymore and will get backlash even from conservatives.

Trans people are the new gays in this sense

After it became less acceptable to explicitly hate the gays in public they needed a new target. There's a lot of people who like being riled up with hatred, who are fearful and need a bogeyman, etc. It's either human nature or something deeply embedded in our culture. Eventually they will move on and find a new target to focus their hate on.

Their systems of power rely on having an "in" group and an "out" group. Overt racism is less acceptable these days because now there are brown Republicans, but transphobia? Very in.

They're just choosing a new group to "other" so that we don't realize they're coming for everyone who doesn't fit into their narrow worldview.

1. People fear new unknown things (as perceived by the individual), especially when it comes to bodies and human form, instinctively.

2. It doesn't conform to their strict societal standards as crafted by thousands of years of culture and history. The authorities have always persecuted and cracked down on anything that threatens the patriarchal standard.

3. Minorities make the easiest targets. Trans people are an extreme minority.

4. Some people think it has more to do with sexuality and sexual urges, so their perception is that it is perversion.

It's a failure of empathy. People hate and/or fear what they don't understand.

They can't empathize with someone not feeling right in their own skin like that, so all their rationalizations for things like "why would they want to use that bathroom" end up stemming from what they have left, which is unsavory intent, making them threatening.

Unless I am wrong I never heard of one shooting up a school church or whatever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting

Because queerness (trans, gender non conforming, gender fluid, agender, bigender and related) threatens hierarchy.

In western society regardless of how ‘progressive’ some parts of it have gotten, for the majority there’s still a strict hierarchy. Man most important, then woman, then children first boys then girls. Trans people completely disrupt this hierarchy by being able to change what they are and those who cling to hierarchy freak the fuck out over it.

Then there’s the sexual panic, a straight man who’s insecure is gonna freak out if the woman they think is cute actually has a penis.

Uneducated people in rural areas struggle very much with understanding their experiences of others, and have very strange ideas about how the world works. I told my grandmother I wanted to move to Chicago - she’s convinced I’m going to get gang murdered. (She would be horrified if I told her about wandering around LA on foot)

The idea that there are options other than cisgender heterosexual people is threatening to their understanding of their world. Many have not thought about their gender or sexuality; it’s assumed that you’ll get married to the opposite sex, get gender appropriate jobs, have kids, and go to church on Sunday. That’s what life is in Anadarko or Siloam Springs. Many also struggle with unaddressed trauma from the opioid/fent crisis, or military service - so they think the appropriate response to anguish about your body should just be to just cope with it.

Many of these men are secretly bisexual. Many, many, many heterosexually married men seek out sexual encounters with gay men on the side. They would never want to be in a relationship with a man or someone they perceived as a strange, mentally defective man - for many of them that would also assault their understandings of a relationship as more of a property thing. They feel guilty about porn usage, especially the Christian ones, but externalize it as hatred.

The woman are miserable and are committed to making everyone else miserable as well. You gain power in those communities by policing others, especially young women. They are threatened by the idea that they weren’t locked into compulsive heterosexuality and performative femininity. There was a possibility that they could have graduated college, or not had children.

They get the program though. They’re proper Puritans. If life is suffering then the only joy to be had is in watching other people. And what better target than those who are defying our most basic sociological roles? These are the same people who host gender reveal parties - it matters to them. So it must matter to everyone else.

That’s my guess as a trans man at least, obviously I’m biased.

We have a lot of LGBTI people in our climbing group

I have never had an issue with any of them

But the people trying to be hyper masculine? Yep..

I feel like it's because they never left high school. A lot of them are simply trying the same thing that worked when they are a kid. Everyone else grows up

This video explains it better than me, but mostly a combination of religion being against trans people and bad science.

Because hateful people always need an other. an outsider. Someone be fearful of, yet feel smugly superior too

It used to be black people.

then it was the irish and the itallians.

then it was hispanics.

then it was gays

and now its trans people.

Sorted by controversial, wish me luck boys!

Nazis do this dumb thing where they go "hey that small and therefore relatively defenseless group (badassness of individuals aside) is the cause of all our problems, let's kill them to solve everything!"

Surprisingly, it never works.

So they do it again with somebody else, and somebody else, and somebody else, until everybody on earth is killed by nazis or somebody stops them.

As for why anybody is dumb enough to fall for it in the first place...it's anybody's guess.

Because of tropes like https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreepyCrossdresserfrom movies like Silence of the Lambs, Dressed to Kill, and Psycho. It puts the idea of men dressing like women as a means of tricking women to attack them into the collective unconscious.

Because Trump spent $19 million on transphobic ads during football games in battleground states. Because they need a Boogeyman to rile up their base.

It doesn't have to make sense. You might as well be asking how can the KKK hate people of color or how can Nazis hate Jewish people.

Because conservatives are smooth brained and small minded. They need someone to hate in order to make themselves feel superior so they don't feel like complete losers

They're conservative. The whole name is based on the principle that they want to maintain the old way rather than progress. I think it stems from fear of a changing world. The old world with the old rules provided safety, it was understandable, the rules were clear, and the rules didn't hurt them. Now some people are "attacking" their world, their rules, everything that offers them safety and understanding. So they feel attacked.

It's the same thing, but with another subject every time. Whether it is women getting rights, which threatens their safe world with clear gender roles. Or gay people, who threaten the simple rules like "boys love girls", "in order to be successful, get a job, marry, and get kids". Or non-white people getting rights. What if they vote for things that "we" don't want? What if "they" ruin the world that "we" got so used to.

Trans and especially non-binary people are just the next group in line that threatens their simple world. When men are people born as men and women are people born as women, it's way easier to force people into the traditional roles. The old rules still work, "boy marries girl, gets kids". And when they speak out about their "concerns* they are (rightfully) called out for it. So they become defensive and start doing whatever they're doing now.

They have to have somebody to hate so they don't hate themselves so much.

They're a convenient political target because it makes insecure men not want to be associated with them. Believe it or not, a similar thing happened last time Republicans won the popular vote in 2004 - back then the issue was gay marriage. Bush went hard on opposing that and it helped him win.

Conservatives use fear to manipulate their constituents as their primary means to rally support. A minority scapegoat many of their supporters don't know in person, like trans people, are easily demonized by politicians and clergy to pretend trans folks are pedophiles and sex assaulters projecting their own party and priest crimes, it's the same thing they try to do with fear mongering homosexuals as a previous scapegoat to distract and deflect from their awful policy privileging the wealth class and harming poor and middle class people, they need someone to blame for their own awful behavior and choices.

It seems that way because the minority of people who are against trans people are very loud and obnoxious, and their voices are heavily amplified by sites like Facebook and Twitter.

some schmucks want to exploit the very basic fear of the unfamiliar, and they pointed it at trans folk to get votes or whatever.

I don't think it's most people. I (choose to) believe that's a loud minority.

I see a lot of mostly correct answers here, but as a trans person myself I can't help but feel they are all missing the core concept.

People hate trans folk for the same reason "get back in the kitchen" is still said to women in any non-"traditional" role or the "angry black man/woman" is said about anyone advocating for their own rights. There are strict gender and racial roles that are enforced by our society so rigidly, that many have assumed them to be naturally correct laws of the universe. Anyone existing outside of those roles is seen as either mental illness to be corrected or malicious evil-doers wanting to cause trouble.

When in fact the reality is much simpler, that being human is a more diverse expressive and dynamic experience than those holding on to those "natural laws" would like to admit. To exist outside the role you were "assigned" is a threat to society that assigns the roles, ergo a threat to the very way of life for those who see gender, sexual and racial hegemony as innate truths.

Conservatives who hold high tradition are naturally the first to speak out and seek to regulate us back in to "normal society" via legislation but liberals are absolutely not immune. To reduce transphobia to a political wedge issue, while correct, doesn't quite explain the more innocuous yet quite prevalent transphobia inside left leaning spaces.

I can only recall one instance of a trans person going postal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting

In a less direct way one standing theory is that it’s tied to cultural issues with gender relations and due to the lack of a cultural role for us (at least in cultures where that applies or where those roles were damaged during colonialism, which was very common). Then there’s also the oversexualization of trans people.

For the first one Julia Serrano does a good job going into a lot of detail for a big chunk of it, but the quick summary is that there’s two axes of sexism: traditional (one sex and that which is associated is better than the other, traditionally prioritizing the masculine over the feminine) and oppositional (that that which is associated is deeply connected and immutable). All sorts of people run up against oppositional sexism, from cis gay people to dudes who like to sew. But it’s likely necessary to reinforce traditional sexism.

Then there’s the lack of cultural space. It’s being built, but it isn’t done yet and until it’s been uncontroversial for some time it’ll be at risk. It’s the issues of “I don’t know how to treat them” and “it’s against god”. It’s people angry that their understanding of one of the most vital parts of their culture is being called to make space for something that’s new to them

Then there’s the oversexualization. Trans people all throughout the world have a long history of resorting to sex work to survive. That means that to many people our existence is seen as inherently sexual. I grew up where trans people only appeared on tv as tragic sex workers, jokes of erotic disgust, or Springer style freak shows, and the next closest depictions were as murderous erotic crossdressers (which many saw as the same thing). And so now here I am, one of them, demanding you treat me as an educated professional and a peer and a decent chunk of bigots will see my face as inherently pornographic and therefore unfit to display around children. They hear about teenagers wanting to transition and think of it as sexualizing them. And for a certain portion of people they’re mad that a porn category and type of exotic hooker is demanding rights

There’s more, and I didn’t say it all the best I could (typed it out off and on over a while between doing things as well as it being something I mostly break down in discussions with other trans people). But yeah, we’re different and we challenge basic understandings of some of the foundations of society and culture, but our liberation helps break down the issues you’re already facing and a lot of the time the requests we’re making make life easier for cis people once y’all get used to us being around.

I support trans people to do whatever they want to themselves but unfortunately one did shoot up a school https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting

Since when do conservatives care about mass shootings?

There are a lot of factors at play that make transness an easy target to be the scary other bigots rally around.

The simple truth is that unless you yourself are trans you cannot understand the trans experience. There is no way to explain the scope or impact it has on someone's life. It's automatically alien and provides essentially a permanent out group. Anyone who is uncomfortable with people who are different or that have different experiences than themselves are almost certainly transphobic to some degree. Right now to the best of my knowledge transphobia is the only thing all hate groups share.

Trans people are the current scapegoats because prior to the pandemic we had an explosion of trans people feeling safe enough to come out online (I blame Obama making us all feel safe). They are particularly effective because both white nationalists and evangelicals use queerness as a scapegoat all the time anyway so it was easy for them to rally around. Which is why conservative politicians fearmonger around trans people.

It's not that simple, but it's close enough for a lemmy comment.

Not that it really matters as a legitimate cause to dislike trans people, but the 2023 Nashville shooting at a school was done by a trans person.

It seems like it's always projection with these fascists.

They are the ones whose "party" is full of violent sexual predators. They will never bring up the monsters (including their "president") on their own "team".

Fear, control, indoctrination, tribalism, double standards, poor mortal character, hypocrisy, and because it 'makes them feel icky' and so they have to be loud and obvious about it so that they're community sides with them and doesn't suspect that they're (allegedly) total closet cases.

FYI

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nashville-christian-school-shooter-appears-former-student-police-chief-rcna76876

They're people, just like the rest of us. Some are great, some are not.

Conservatives are afraid of change, because they control current status quo. They can't let people escape from that control, so every nail that is a little outside it's hole gets hammered.

In short, they rather prefer trans (and broadly queers) to hide or die, unless they can control them. Everyone different from what they can control is a big danger. Imagine if everyone could be like they feel like? Conservatives see this as chaos, they are the guardians of peace and good values, so anything not already controlled by them is the opposite, chaos, destruction, fire.

That's why they rarely present anything new, their policies and general opinion tend to fight the natural evolution of civilization. USA, as obviously all of the American Continent, was built by immigrants (and slaves). Now they fight immigrants, undocumented ones mostly, because they can't control them. And we know what happened when 'the libs' back then tried to end slavery, you know, other people that they CONTROLLED.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

First, I'd challenge the 'most people' part. In my experience most people really, truly do not care one way or the other if someone is trans. But to be fair, this may vary between countries, societies, etc.

Edit: I wrote a bunch of other stuff here, but wasn't happy reading it back. Someone else here said religion and bad science, which is close enough to the point I was trying to make that I'll just say that.

I only know of one, and she's an expert at everything related to fiber channel and tape drives. So I guess it might be that US conservatives are ideologically opposed to cheap long term offline storage.

I never heard of one shooting up a school church or whatever.

First off, one must be very careful of generalizing to an entire group from the actions of a small sample [1]. Using the metric of whether there have been trans people who have engaged in mass shootings is quite reductionist, and is a faulty generalization — if I am to interpret what you said to mean that "conservatives" are "against" all trans people because they think that they are all responsible for "shooting up" schools and churches. Second, to address your belief, to my knowledge, there has been at least one instance of a school shooter being trans [2].

References

1. "Faulty Generalization". Wikipedia. Published: 2024-03-25T17:50Z. Accessed: 2024-11-23T02:49Z. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
2. "2023 Nashville school shooting". Wikipedia. Published: 2024-10-28T23:08Z. Accessed: 2024-11-23T02:51Z. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting.

:::

Ok, am conservative.

I'm going to give my thoughts.

So I'm fine with most things between consenting adults. The problem is when there isn't consent and in a larger group, a lack of consensus.

Kids can't consent, and despite claims to the contrary, there's been a couple of trans kids. The issue I see is the amount of push back on passing laws against trans kids. Why on earth do y'all care so much about banning something that isnt happening?

I'm not into sports, but I can see how unfair it is when a bio man fights a bio woman. Even if they're taking mtf hormones, there's still a ton of testorone. Just from a safety aspect, they shouldn't allow bio men in women's boxing or MMA or anything like that. Chess and stuff of that nature doesn't really care about the sex that much. And there's been more a couple of sports women who are against it too. There's a lack of consensus.

As an aside, we were making a ton of progress against gender roles, and now here we are reinforcing them. Can't even wear drag now without being called trans. It's annoying.

Why are you guys so obsessed with labels? Let dudes wear dresses and women wear whatever. You don't need a label for it.

I'm going to be an apologist for conservatives for a sec, just for the sake of giving out my theory of mind of these people.

I think this all happens mostly due to the stress trans people are inadvertently causing their parents. When your kid comes out of the closet, this will happen to a parent regardless of how liberal-minded they are. Even if you have no problem with the concept, your kid being trans brings about new kinds of threat scenarios you never had to think about before. If you're a sensible, smart and handsome person like I truly fucking am, you can process it in a few years and come out as not being a 100% asshole towards the issue.

But if your reference group is republican church goers, there's a high probability that such a person just simply does not have the mental or social toolset to process it in any sensible way. They will construct a toxic viewpoint for this issue, strengthen it from outside sources and then start to spread that toxicity.

Rural IL here. Full of conservatives.

Nobody here cares if you are trans. Couldn't care less.

Never met a school church shooter either.

Most conservatives I know think it's dangerous to entertain trans ideas in children. They say kids don't know what gender really means because they haven't experienced puberty yet but the most effective time to use hormone blockers is before puberty. So they feel like it's the parents who are encouraging use of hormone therapy for their kids because the parents are brainwashed by left media, and essentially committing child abuse.

Because there are only 2 possibilities:

1. Trans people are real and the Bible is a book filled to the brim with bullshit

or

2. Trans people are not real but merely EVIL men and women possessed by Satan because god created Adam and Eve, not they and them

They are in fact mutually exclusive. So what do you think the moron cult members will choose, the option that requires deprogramming... or the option that aligns with their stupid bullshit cult beliefs?

I'm pretty sure they just think it's icky.

A lot of conservatives want to simplify life because they have a simple mind.

It's who their owners say to hate, so they hate them. Could be anyone and for no or any reason. They're cultists and they do, say, hate, and fear who they're told to.

Gender and separation of humans based on those lines have been a thing for longer than humans even called themselves "humans", and transpeople threaten that. So it triggers a flight or fight reflex in people who aren't used to the concept.

I find when people know me for awhile and THEN find out I'm trans, their reaction is less "I'm scared", and more "That's neat", but if people find out I'm trans before they get to know me, they will be hostile the whole time.

conservative ideology is built around hate, and thus attracts hateful people, or indoctrinates people susceptible to to such ideology. There must always be some outside group to blame every problem on, and to feel superior to without having to actually be better. Conservatives have enough hate to go around that they're not focused exclusively on trans people, but this flavor of hate is the new hotness for them.

From what I have seen, it seems trans and gay people are used as a "bar." Since these people aren't inclined to be gay or trans they believe themselves to be above the bar they have set. Racism works the same way.

They tried to put their religion into politics and it backfired; now their religion is just random politics with a few supernatural beliefs that do not effect their day to day actions.

I don't encounter a lot of ads but I was just listening to the Economist talk about this one which the trump campaign played over and over again and it struck me as a small window of an answer to your question.

The ad strikes me as cruel but the thrust (and I imagine there's a blend of fact and fiction) is that Harris used tax money to pay for a woman's sex change after being convicted of first degree murder and serving life in prison. They also have Harris saying she was using her power to "push forward the movement and the agenda."

Even for supporters of trans rights, I imagine not everyone loves having to defend using tax money to pay for expensive gender surgery, especially on criminals.

So I could see people, who might otherwise be supportive of trans folks in their own lives, being "against trans people" on an issue framed like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3BXYjoAzq0&ab_channel=TheJimHeathChannel

Because they tell teenagers that you might accidentally kiss a man and let hormones and immaturity handle the rest.

Trans people give conservatives feelings in their pants and scare and confuse them. They lash out in fear, hatred, and self-loathing.

Because most people don't actually know any trans people, and find unfamiliar things to be weird and scary.

But also because terrible people have weaponized those feelings for personal political gain. Most people probably wouldn't give a fuck, even if they found them weird, if talking heads weren't stoking the flames of bigotry.

Cause they were told to.

I’ve never met a person against trans people. I talk to lots of people as a Uber driver in Denver. What state do you live in?

Well you have to understand everyone takes it as settled science to varying degrees.

Some think theres nothing left to learn, all settled and people need to stop asking questions and just agree. On the other end are those who think its pure fantasy and that, since its not science at all, must be being used as a tool against children.

I'm not sure how big those two ends are, but theres the people in the middle too, who think there is likely something going on here but aren't sold on the current implementation. Some are hesitant and want more time and research. Some are concerned that societal pressure is trumping doctors advice.

Maybe theres some other group I'm not thinking of but either way, the angriest group isnt always the biggest, but will be loudest. That might skew your perceptions of how people generally feel on average.

In my experience and speaking with transphobes I think it’s caused by our current culture of trying to force people to accept them.

Most people in my experience are happy not knowing or ignoring signs that someone is trans or gay. However when you start bringing it up in casual conversation or being overtly flamboyant for lack of a better term people start giving push back on it. I would compare it to the vegan stereotype. No one cares you’re vegan but when you constantly bring it up or try to make every conversation about you being vegan people get annoyed.

We as a society need to accept that racists and transphobes won’t change. You can’t force them to accept anything.

Why would you ask this question on Lemmy. You will get few, if any, legitimate answers. This platform is an echo chamber.

Because conservatives are mostly dumb, and dumb people don't understand things and won't make an effort to understand things, and people fear what they don't understand. Very simple A-to-C.

Because people don't shut up about it.

I'll try actually answer the question and get hated for it I'm sure rather than circle jerking something to the top. But I think it goes like this.

Imagine you had a ball and a cube. Then everyone agrees the ball is a ball and a cube is a cube. Been like this as long as anyone remembers.

Then suddenly someone comes around and says one of those cubes is special and is actually a ball. Then everyone agrees that person is mental. Years go by and more people start saying that some cubes are balls and you feel like you are losing you mind. You know what a ball is, everyone knows what a ball is! How can anyone say a cube is a ball. People attack you for it. People say you are wrong that you are hateful, horrible but you know! Surely everyone knows this is a joke.

They started painting cubes to look like balls and everyone acts like they are balls. But you know they aren't balls.

You are happy to group them on different measures. Sure some balls and some cubes are red, some are yellow. Both balls and cubes can be spiky, sure balls are more often spiky but there is nothing wrong with a spiky cube. Each to there own. Most cubes are smooth but some balls are smooth. That's fine.

There are a million and one ways to group these shapes. But at the end of the day a cube is a cube and a ball is a ball. Anything else is madness and you're not standing for it. You can group them however you want, choose whatever is the most important, fine is doesn't matter. But don't say something that is obviously a cube is a ball and what is obviously a ball a cube. You can't change the definition of a cube to be what that shapes feels it is, that's meaningless. It defeats the purpose of the word. Sure make a new word but don't use that word.

What?

At this point I'm assuming that loads of them either want to be trans, want to have sex with a trans person, but they feel they can't do either because they were told it's evil

It's the same as the gay hating, any guy very visibly hating gays always ends up snorting cocaine from a gay escort dick.

Why does it seem most people, mainly conservatives, against Trans people?

I think it's important to establish the validity of the claim, and the assumptions being made, since you cited no sources, nor did you provide any definitions, nor did you specify any assumptions; I will presume that by "conservative", you are referring to American Republicans.

Why does it seem most people [...][are] against Trans people?

It does not appear that "most people" (I assume you mean "the majority of people") are "against trans people" (I'm not entirely sure exactly what you mean by this, so I will assume it means not being in favor of protecting trans people from discrimination) [1.2][1.1].

Why does it seem [...] conservatives [...][are] against Trans people?

It does seem that the majority of Republicans are against trans protections [1.1].

ADDENDUM (2024-11-23T06:49Z): Could someone who's downvoting this please tell me why they are doing so? I'm rather confused about what the rationale could be. I didn't even state any opinions; I was only fact checking. Was I perhaps too abrasive sounding? I wasn't intending to be rude.

References

1. "Americans’ Complex Views on Gender Identity and Transgender Issues". Author: Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown. Publisher: Pew Research Center. Published: 2022-06-28. Accessed: 2024-11-23T02:35Z. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/.

   1. 

   2. 

:::

Among the many factors, I think that we shouldn't lose sights on the fact that statistically there is a percentage of any population who has no "normal" sexual orientation. This means that there a percentage of conservative/religious fundamentalists who are non-heterosexual CIS in the closet, who fight against sexual diversity to defend their chosen belief structure. There cannot be queers, thus they are an abomination that must be stamped out.

because they're gay and weird or christian and dumb

the existence of GNC people undermines the thin facade of identity that people construct based on their assigned gender roles. they lash out against internal discomfort

Because the science ia highly debated and we are yet to come to a real consensus on the issue. From what ive seen most people really dont gives a fuck about being anti trans they give a fuck about trans intervention with children.

pretty trasphobic community here.. blocked.

If I remember correctly uvalde was a trans person, but most of the time its just people using one good thing about themselves to justify being horrible. Think holier-than-thou type shit.