elon musk, mark zuckerberg, J.K rowling! Are the names that come to mind.
3 from different background: a African immigrant benefiting from government spending, an American smart young engineer, and a female English successful writer.
They are no politicians, and cant be accuse of trying to gather some vote. Multi-billions amongst them.
I get they lean to the right to protect their cash, with less tax and regulation. I get they are racist because they fear some poor people will take their cash.
But why the hatred for trans people ? It’s 1% of the population, they cant do anything, dont threaten anyone. There is no rational or psychological reason
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Easy to scapegoat like most minorities that a large part of the population has never interacted with before.
They are frequently interviewed.
Which means they are frequently asked: “Why’s everything fucked up?”
They can’t give the real answer, which is “ultra-rich people”.
So they give no answer at all (in which case you don’t hear about it) or they cite the Enemy Of The Day.
Poor, trans, minorities, leftists, educated, and even moderate Republicans are all under attack. These billionaires participate so they can be part of the fascist takeover of this country, not through any personal conviction.
Musk: more politically oriented than just money now, had aligned himself with a very large part of the population that thinks at a minimum that even if some people need to transition for their own health, society retains the right to consider their pre-transition history to still be part of reality
Zuckerberg: profit driven, is aligning Facebook etc with the political reality in America and the real prospect of being fined or embargoed by a Trump administration, would flip back if a democrat won in 2028
Rowling: belongs to a British generation of certain age where trans people are superficially accepted BUT regards their pre-trans history to be something still relevant. That’s where this started and it escalated / deteriorated from there E.g. compassionate to a degree and willing to entertain the “fiction” that a biological man is now a women for the sake of that person’s mental health: see them at the shops presenting female? carry on as normal… talk to them? use their current name and pronouns out of politeness… BUT… if they want to access a female shelter, draw a line… if they want to teach young children, risk assess them including their pre-trans gender and history etc. Rowling then got into increasingly fractious arguments on Twitter, largely arising from other people she followed and liked and what the trans community inferred from that. At that point she doubled down declaring advocates on Twitter to be increasingly hysterical and deluded whilst simultaneously insisting she would treat trans people humanely in person. She’s then lashed out in numerous ways including in her writings aligning herself with increasingly extreme anti-trans people. FWIW, I think she would have carried on being a mildly tolerant (if dated) person of a certain age had she just stayed off Twitter entirely. But lashing out, being misinterpreted and misinterpreting others had led her to spiral down into viciousness and bitterness.
I consider your theorizing of “pre-transition history” being within the “rights of society” to “keep in touch with reality” as misleading and problematic.
In fact, these are the axioms of trans erasure I discuss in my other response. In the core of this reasoning is the idea that “men are inherently dangerous to women” therefore “women must know at all times the biological sex of any person they interact with”.
So you can’t go past the “transition” history for reasons that under all other circumstances you would decry as “misandry”, but only apply this to trans women (victims themselves of cis violence in bathrooms and all other settings). Why? Because you register trans women in the semantics of sexual perversion. Then, the “right” to know anyone’s medical history does not exist, on the contrary people have the right to privacy to medical interventions of any type.
Due to stigma and discrimination trans people are furthermore entitled to hands down secrecy, given that a random bigot can just shoot them down for being trans with zero consequences. But this is also hypothetical now. The amount of cis-passing is different for every trans people.
Some may pass for cis, most don’t. Besides the existential crisis some people experience when they can’t tell a person is trans, in practice stealth trans people are relatively rare, and there is not an iota of evidence that there is any societal harm from stealth cis-passing trans people. So there is no reason behind your purported “societal right to know”, apart from cisgenderist entitlement.
Enforcing such right is not only infeasible, but it sufficiently and necessarily leads to banning public trans life, with no other explanation other than cis people’s uneasiness. The civil rights movement has established that majoritarian uneasiness with minorities sharing their bathrooms is not enough to justify perpetuation of discriminatory segregation practices.
This is textbook transphobia.
I agree with your analysis. I think on Musk’s case there is also his estranged daughter, it has entrenched his position
True
There must always be an “underclass” in capitalism for the upper echelons to threaten the middle echelons. No exceptions. Wether that’s the homeless, psychiatric patients, gay or trans people… doesn’t matter. There will be some regional differences in what constitutes this underclass but the end result is always the same. Capitalism CANNOT FUNCTION without this implicit threat of excommunication and starvation.
The only real difference with the recent past is that all of this has become much, much more explicit than it ever used to be before. But make no mistake, even with a Biden or Harris at the helm, this would still be the case, just much more muted.
This is a feature of the system, not a flaw, and will never change as long as capitalism in its current form dominates.
preface: conjecture
musk and zuckerberg benefit from “othering” a group so that the majority of people get caught up in arguing about the rights of that group. While you’re busy being distracted by that they can push for agendas that benefit their companies and personal wealth, which inherently fuck you over.
musk does seem to have a personal vendetta as well given his issues with his trans daughter but I truly think this is ancillary to enriching his wealth and power. He also seems to love getting involved in topics that rile people up because deep down he’s a 14 year old reddit troll
rowling is double down and attention. She has a shit take, posts about it, people call her out. She’s a literal billionaire “beloved author” used to being surrounded by hangers on so being challenged wrecks her shit. Rather than reflect and look at scientific consensus she doubles down on her shit take. Because of people like above this gets her increasing amounts of attention and relevance so her beliefs are reaffirmed and deepened constantly. Now she’s consulted to speak authoritatively on the matter despite having no actual qualification other than being a rich lady who got into twitter arguments about it
Many of these apply to nobodies as well. Your stupid anti trans neighbor benefits from “othering” someone because it gives them someone to deflect blame onto. For most of American history it was black people, or Hispanic people, sometimes Jews, basically any minority. They also will double down when called out on shit takes and will absolutely respond to attention given for shit takes.
You can’t get ultra-rich while being a compassionate person
This, and all the more nowadays, because anything progressive has been intrinsically linked to a change of the Status Quo. And those trillions of fun bucks in the mattress (as well as their self-importance and self-perceived relevance) must be protected from those pesky Socialists!
My personal opinion is twofold:
- they need a diversion. Like a magician (or more accurate a pickpocket) they will take anything to make people blind while they amass their power. It is a sickness of the mind. They are addicted to power and ever anxious to loose it. Minorities are a good enemy for the people to blame the problems on that these people either cause themselves or dont want to take care of. In the past it was witches, nowadays it is other minorities.
- minorities have been fighting for a place in the world for a long time and there have been significant improvements. But that is not a positive development if you want to rule supreme. If you‘re power crazed, you need people to fall in line. Otherwise it wont work. We have ample evidence that only a sufficiently subdued population will not rise up against authority.
They want you fighting a culture war to keep your mind off the class war.
The mainstream “left”, such as the Democrats benefit from this too.
Draw the national party lines between bigoted and non-bigoted. Now everyone can fight over that and nobody has to address the fact that two thirds of the country want universal healthcare.
Products of their generation. As they die off others will take their place and society will move on to other groups to target.
They are a fairly small group compared to other marginalized groups, and particularly vulnerable compared to others. There is already a lot of misinformation about them. Average people often dont run into them or understand them Well enough to make informed decisions. Its easy for billionaires and republicans to wield religion against them. They are often vocal about their beliefs. Intersectionality is also important (e.g. supporting and protecting other minority demographics’ rights because it is the right thing to do, and tearing each other down is counterproductive) to them, which isnt always the case. Disappearing them sets an example and is a test run for setting up the infrastructure and means to take control. See: nazi germany with the deaf, and current marginalization by the trump administration of the trans and disabled communities.
Most people agree with the ultrarich on this issue (at least initially, before social media insanity), but only the ultrarich can afford making arbitrary people hate them without any good reason. That’s why it looks like only the billionaires are doing it.
Then they go to Twitter with these opinions and go insane and the whole thing enters a neverending tailspin.
Elon is slightly different insofar that one of his own kids is trans. So that’s not entirely due to Twitter, but there’s also some lived experience at the bottom of it all (I assume here that he spent time with said child).
It is easy for many people to think trans wars is a distraction, scapegoating, or a genuine threat to the authoritarian world view. I ask you to carefully consider that anti-trans hate is genuine.
Nazis had prioritized Jewish genocide and pursued it to an irrational degree, even prioritized the genocide to actually winning the war. Some analysts say that this shows their war was always and primarily against civilian Jews.
We have evidence to think this is the case with trans people now.
The recent “anti-christian bias” order outright frames trans rights as an enemy of their ingroup.
Reed has covered the leaked Christian emails that show them believe trans people are demons and evil incarnation and want to wipe them from the face of the earth.
Rowling has been caught on tape saying she wants to minimize the number of people transitioning so that they have less work to do “special accommodations later” for trans people.
For those aware of the term Sonderbehandlung this leaves no doubt: trans people are their primary enemy, they have poured their millions into the pockets of nutjobs and politicians that will relieve them from having to live side by side with trans people.
Don’t be fooled that this is just distraction and/or scapegoating by power-mongers.
They have a trans Holocaust in the making and they have already put the plot in motion. ACT NOW
Edit:
I realize I might have not responded directly to OP’s question. See the following for my take.
My analysis linking Bathroom Bans as early signs of completely banning trans people out of public life https://lemmy.ml/post/25037664
I wrote this while still believing that anti-trans hate was an election-winning distraction. It partly responds to where anti-trans hate comes from https://lemmy.ml/post/24711061
In this sense many people are deeply transphobic, but billionaires have the resources to eradicate trans people from public life. The rest can only curse, badmouth, trash, verbally attack, workplace harass, fire, refuse healthcare, sexually or physically attack or mob-lynch trans people. Every transphobe does as much as they can get away with. Billionaire transphobes can get away with genocide so they’re doing that.
Additional resources in support of the argument
Summary of early Holocaust course of events and why targeted people were not mobilized https://lemmy.ml/post/25008729/16208799
Erin Reed article on fundamentalist anti-trans lobbyists’ leaked emails https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/2600-leaked-anti-trans-lobbyist-emails
There are a lot of other good answers, but it seems worth remembering lots of poor powerless folks hate trans folks too.
Part of the reason they’re coming after trans people is because it’s human nature to hate or fear those you don’t understand and who are different. A dark, and sad part of human nature, but part of human nature nonetheless
All the other stuff folks are talking about is also a true, but it’s not like they’re unique in their contempt for people who are different
