I think part of the issue is there’s a lot of misinformation. Someone told me today that they heard about someone claiming their baby was transgender. I highly highly doubt that happened. Transgender advocates believe people should say for themselves what gender they identify with, no sane person would presume to speak for a baby. I could see someone maybe trying to avoid thinking of their baby as one gender or the other until they’re old enough to self-identify. But there are a lot of weird stories out there about transgender people acting like lunatics and, although most of them probably aren’t true, people believe these stories and use them as reasons to be transphobic. And there’s the persistent lie that transgender people are lopping penises off of six-year-olds and other things like that.
It’s the satanic panic all over again, once again being pushed by Christian extremists.
Personally I think treating babies as babies is the sane option, it’s bizarre to me we dress literal babies in extremely gender identifying ways… they’re a baby! Me choosing greens and yellows, purples and grays isn’t saying my baby is trans it’s saying my baby is a baby and if you want to know more about them you should talk to me about them… it’s really not complicated.
The hyper fixation on gender for babies and kids is bonkers
There are a few really loud people. Most of us don’t care
And you can really feel it.
The Alberta racists are being emboldened by Marlaina/Trump.
Now explain every other province.
E: It was rhetorical; this isn’t a province-by-province kind of problem, nor it it an Alberta issue.
20% of any population is not very smart and susceptible to emotional manipulation, schools don’t teach critical thinking very well, and 10% of a population is dark triad (‘evil’) or adjacent.
It should be pointed out that the last provincial election in BC came down to just a handful of voters in a couple of ridings. A few butterfly wingflaps and we could have had that mouth-breather Rustad as premier.
The rabid right feeds off of fear. Stop that shit when you see it.
Conservatives and American/Rowling propaganda
In BC it’s the same shit honestly. The official opposition party just chose an extremely racist and transphobic leader. It’s just people who are emboldened by the same shit happening down south and falling for disinformation/scapegoatism.
By blaming this all on Alberta you’re making the situation worse rather than better. For one, many Albertans who would otherwise be your allies are now offended. For two, it gives a pass to all the other hateful people throughout the rest of Canada.
You’re right. Sad that you’re getting downvotes.
IMO the upvote/downvote system is the Fediverse’s biggest mistake, and eliminating it its biggest missed opportunity. There simply isn’t enough of a userbase for it to be meaningful, most threads end up with just a few dozen comments so sorting them by vote ratio doesn’t really accomplish much. Meanwhile it helps drive communities into ever tighter social bubbles by giving such an easy mechanism to express “go away” vibes to anyone with a view that isn’t perfectly in line with the existing consensus.
Not only is he not blaming everything on Alberta… The only albertans oblivious enough to be offended by what he’s saying are the bigots we’re talking about.
The classic “if you’re offended then you must deserve to be offended.” Kind of ironic in the context of an article about bigotry.
The article is discussing a Canada-wide problem and he jumped straight to “it’s about Alberta.” The article actually calls out Saskatchewan as having the steepest decline in acceptance of gender diversity.
Sorry are you just unaware of the separatist movement galvanizing maple maga across the country? Or do you just lack reading comprehension?
Stop misunderstanding people. Or stop putting words in their mouth. Pick one and do it.
I can literally look out my window right this moment and see the yard sign I’ve got up opposing separatism. I’ve canvassed for anti-separatist movements, I phone banked for the NDP in the most recent provincial election, I went door to door in support of them. I live in one of the ridings that sent an NDP member to parliament, I voted for them too.
But yeah, clearly I’m the bigot here. It annoys me that Alberta is considered a big blob of traitors and racists and therefore I must be a racist myself.
Do you not see how this kind of attitude is harmful?
“Do you support gender diversity?” “Well, our government says if I don’t, it’s potentially a hate crime/hate speech – sorta like calling out the genocide in Israel gets termed as such, or questioning the narrative around first nations – so, uh, yes, I support it, sure whatever, so long as there’s no financial commitment involved or followup questions. Let me get back to my life”.
As the commenter below demonstrated, there is a growing number of Canadians falling for misinformation.
Bill C-9 was about stopping hateful people from using religion to justify the crimes they had already committed. But the propogandists told them it classified the bible as hate speech.
Clearly they are misappropriating Pro-Palestine censorship in the UK to validate their entitlement to baselessly espouse residential denialism.
Most of my community is Christian/conservative and while I see more people espousing anti-trans views, it’s all chronically online people who I know personally stopped forming their own opinions in 2016.
The context behind poll numbers like this is that MAGA is scraping the bottom the barrel. Same total support, but more MAGAs signing up to answer surveys.
If it helps, I had previously tagged that poster as “Islamophobic cunt” so they’ve been on the wrong side of history.
But the propogandists told them it classified the bible as hate speech.
The optimists you mean.
This probably won’t be popular but it is true nonetheless.
What has happened is that people, on the both the right and the left, bring up legitimate concerns with regards to gender diversity issues. They’re concerned that we might be going overboard with preferential hiring, they have concerns about men and women’s showers and the like, and while there are often answers and discussions to be had around these issues even if you don’t agree with them they are legitimate
But instead of treating them like legitimate issues and engaging with people that have these concerns unfortunately the transgender advocate community and many on the left have lashed out and basically called anybody who has questions about any of this transphobic scum who need to be locked up and should be disposed of and silence and any other nasty names they can think of.
This tends to polarize these positions and people start feeling attacked and they tend to move into the anti-transgender camp. A child is banned from a school just for saying he believes there’s two genders 100 parents out there start thinking the things have gone too far and if they see a chance they’ll oppose this
Then you wind up with two sides. And there’s never any discussion between two sides, it’s just us versus them and them versus us.
And once that takes hold it’s really hard to beat. Unfortunately transgender rights issues got handled very poorly in the last six or seven years and now there’s growing opposition that’s not being driven by rational concerns but rather tribalism
Have you had actual experience of this or is it something you read about?
It’s true that that is your opinion. It reflects on you and your subjective experiences, perceptions, and interpretations; not on reality. Introducing an opinion as “it’s true” can come across pretty closed-minded.
Extremists always demand things go their way or they threaten harm of one kind or another. The left has tyrannical extremists who do not compromise or converse and the left adamantly refuses to acknowledge they exist nevermind disavow them, possibly partly due to that harm being threatened upon them if they do. The right extremists are called out and vilified constantly and right refuses to disavow them too.
Power is power, however it is formed, if it is used to compel compliance, it is tyranny. Extremists being accepted in both sides are pulling in opposite directions and tearing the center. The center needs to form a cohesive leadership and pull support from both sides to starve these extremists of the audience they need to exist. Disavow them and kick them out. If the left can’t even admit their extremists exist, the right has no reason to disavow their crazies.
We have to. Everybody fucked off from all the major platforms and this issue went from something that was defendable to not
TBF the owners of said major platforms are siding with the bigots and selectively enforcing their own TOS with extreme prejudice.
Because said platforms are increasingly hateful and harmful
Idk, I see these kinds of headlines and I can’t help but think about how skewed/messed up government studies/statscan data seems to be. Like there was a study released this year about how women working as TFW’s in the interior/north of BC are mistreated. CBC, I think, went up to talk to people in the region, and they were all like “Women? Everyone, what’s this women only thing? We’re all facing potentially precarious work conditions / abuse from our bosses”. So the data, as presented by our ideologically motivated/biased government, does not reflect the reality on the ground.
I’d argue that acceptance of the rather far-left gender-diversity crowds multitude of genders was always generally low, and largely based on opinions of convenience for people asked. “Do you support gender diversity?” “Well, our government says if I don’t, it’s potentially a hate crime/hate speech – sorta like calling out the genocide in Israel gets termed as such, or questioning the narrative around first nations – so, uh, yes, I support it, sure whatever, so long as there’s no financial commitment involved or followup questions. Let me get back to my life”.
Most older folks are likely ‘fine’ with male/female, gay/lesbian/bi. The two survey questions the article highlights, are specifically if you’d support a family member who came out as trans, and whether people should be free to express their gender however they want. Back in the earlier survey, they didn’t ask the same trans question, so the inferred decrease in support there is totally misleading. As for people expressing themselves, back before the gender folks got pushing and it was mainly viewed as ‘just’ male/female gay/lesbian/bi, you hadn’t had cases like that shop teacher in Ontario dressing up as a garish trans-woman (I believe it was, months and months later, out’d as a fraud he was committing for some benefits etc). You also didn’t have as aggressive a push to educate young children about the fringe cases of sexuality / expose them to that stuff with clearly political/ideological intentions, I mean, no real surprise in my book that people are less inclined to say “Yeah, sure, express away!” and are leaning more towards there being limits when it comes to social spaces.
