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Is there a youth backlash brewing against LGBT?
I came up out of the subway the other day, and nearly my entire field of view was filled by a massive glowing screen full of flapping pride flags, wall-to-wall and six feet tall. It was a project by some charity or other claiming that "hate crimes" (or victimization, or incidents, or whatever they measure) jump by 60% during pride month. I've been so burned out by the sight of that flag everywhere that the only reaction I can muster is "maybe stop being so obnoxious about it then?" From the POSIWID perspective, one could consider the purpose of pride month to be to spike hostility against LGBT people, so why do it?
A long tweet from sci-fi author Devon Eriksen claims that pride month is downstream of the "toaster fucker" problem, in reference to an ancient greentext. Condensed: the internet brings together people with bizarre niche interests (what he calls "toaster fuckers" — he claims it's meant to be a general term but he's clearly writing about the LGBT theater of the CW). A supportive online community stops these people from leaving the toaster in the kitchen and adjusting to the normal world around them, and instead these online groups metastasize, eventually spilling over into the wider world: intra-group status competitions start with "who can fuck the most toasters", lead to "'toaster-fucker pride' bumper stickers" and then "bragging about how they sneak into other people's kitchens and fuck their toasters, too" and "swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking."
I think I agree with some of that description but not all of it, and may write it up in another thread if I get time, but it's not so important for this post. I need it as context for the bit that I think is more accurate: the normies getting fed up with all the toaster-fucking, the backlash, and the response (lightly edited to concatenate multiple small tweets, but no words changed):
I think this explains the split in normie opinion pretty well: red states have had more than enough and that's led into the various legal battles that Devon alludes to, school choice advocacy, campaigns to replace progressive school boards, etc. I don't think I've seen "beaten with fenceposts"-level backlash (I figure it would pop up here if it was an issue), but even the memory of such events in the semi-recent past could explain normie "I want to be a good person so I'll call myself an ally"-ism. Compare the number of "racist hate crime" hoaxes over the past few years, to the point where "the demand for racism exceeds its supply" has become a dark joke among cynical online commentators. I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents (certainly none as badly as Jussie Smollett did), but it seems useful for a group to have opposition to keep its supporters energized ("our work is not yet done!") and I could definitely see obnoxious pride month displays as accidentally serving this function.
Onto youth. A recent tweet by a newish Twitter account, America_2100, claims a drop in support for LGBT over the past few years (2022–2023: US-wide: -7 points; Republicans: -15 points, to a 10-year low of 41%; Democrats: -6 points; "young people": -8 points). In particular, they claim Gen Z's support for gay marriage dropped by 11 points between 2021 and 2023, which is double the time span of the other stats but could indicate an ongoing decline in support. Unfortunately the tweet doesn't source the surveys it refers to beyond saying that it came from PRRI and I don't have hard data beyond a couple of anecdotes. Lime, a scooter rental company, made a pride-flag crosswalk in Washington a 'walk-the-scooter' zone after several teenagers were arrested for leaving skid marks on it. I saw a recent comment on a gaming subreddit (sorry, I can't find it), in response to yet another pride-month-themed mod, saying something like "don't be discouraged! 50% upvotes for a pride mod is pretty good these days". But when I interact with university students, the discourse is still very pro-LGBT: they talking about being excited for pride events, etc.
So, questions for the floor:
LGBT refers to an activist coalition, not a community (there is a gay community, and a largely separate lesbian community which rather famously does not, in fact, include straight guys who self-identify as lesbians). If said activist coalition has shifted from LGB issues to T issues (and it has) and LGB is more popular than T (which it is) then that would be sufficient to make "LGBT" as a dangling signifier less popular.
I can't say I managed to find a way to verify this, but the word on the street is that the lesbian community has been decimated, largely because they failed to not include straight guys who self-identify as lesbians.
failed to include or failed to not include, this is confusing.
The latter. Failed to exclude, to make it clearer.
It's all anecdotal, but there's a demographic bitter lesbians, bemoaning the decline of the lesbian scene, because they couldn't keep trans women out. They could if they wanted to, of course - gay guys had no issues keeping trans men out - but despite all the talk of gender nonconformity, seems like even outliers tend to be closer to the behavioral average of their respective group, than to the other.
As a counterpoint there's also talk of lesbians going trans themselves, I think Katie Herzog had a whole spiel about that.
To be fair I don't think it's a similar category of problem, in the same way trans men trying to get into male prisons doesn't cause the same concern as trans women in female prisons.
I think being a biological female in, say, a men’s locker room is just unpleasant enough to resolve itself very fast.
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From the anecdotes I've heard about it, it seems that the primary problem is other women (or female persons who identify as not-women) who embrace the new trans religion and therefore consider it fundamentally immoral to try to maintain a penis-free lesbian scene.
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I mean, it seems to me a butch lesbian could become a transman just by switching which side the buttons on her flannel shirts are on.
In my experience, it tends to be trans women who go down the purely social transition route. I've encountered plenty of male people who put on a dress or makeup and demand that people call them "Lilith", but express no interest in medical transition (hell, I've met a handful of "Liliths" who don't even go to the trouble of swapping out their wardrobe or shaving their beard). For trans men, it tends to be a "go hard or go home" thing, wherein they don't bother to identify as such unless they're (at a minimum) taking testosterone - I don't recall ever encountering a self-identified trans man who was wearing makeup, six-inch heels and a pushup bra. Female people who want to maintain their femininity but still gain oppression points tend to just call themselves non-binary.
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This is why I'm relatively convinced that LGB and T belong together, because the most obvious examples are mismatched-brain things. You can see it in some gay men if you see a couple of them; it's very obvious that one of them has a "female" brain and one of them doesn't (the former may or may not have a lisp, but the latter won't).
Of course, this is all hidden by the discourse and the letters, and it also tends to run into being really insulting to tomboys and tomgirls which are only described by "must have received the wrong brain" in action, but not in thought (or perhaps, if privately in thought, they're reasonable enough to keep it to themselves). But I haven't found a better way to describe this effect.
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