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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:
I'll caveat at the start that I'm really not convinced on the underlying question. Not just in the obvious way that I (and a lot of other people) became furries at a time where you had to go pretty far out of your way to get exposed to the furry fandom, and where "cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow [x]" was impossible and discouraged even inside the fandom.
That "in the [x]-fucking group, the axis of prestige aligns with fucking [x]" is pretty wrong. Furries know of people with a ton of art commissions, or who had the most 'fun' at a conventions (though even there, no one's going out of their way to claim partial responsibility for putting 'ranch' on a certain pizza, you don't want to know). But you can be a High Profile Furry by organizing, by creating media, hell just by having a decent voice when playing weird online games; many big-name furs aren't convention-room-party goers, some don't even do adult stuff in media format (or only began doing so long after their rise in popularity).
Status derives from status and its games, for better or worse.
Okay, on the more immediate question of a vibe shift:
I think a lot of the poll variances in the recent short term (to the extent they actually exist), largely reflect changes in what people perceive as the question being asked. Just as poll questions in the 1980s weren't really about gay marriage, even if some people were starting to think about it, polls in 2010 were overwhelmingly perceived as about gay marriage even if other matters were starting to percolate. And while I think social conservatives overstate some of the matters -- kids just don't care about Drag Queen Story Hour, unless they're stuck listening to it -- there's both a ton of reversion to mean and a lot of more controversial topics at easy grasp, today.
This is a place where there's obvious an Official Correct Answer, and there has been for the better part of a decade (eg, most teenagers' lifespans as political animals), and that impacts answers and views in a variety of complex ways. While social conservatives focus, not unreasonably, on how this encourages agreement with that Official Correct Answer, it also results in matters where respondents presume questions from authorities are either tests or presumed within the window of that Official Correct Answer, or where people will show what looks like resistance where 'resistance' is only incidentally touching on these matters.
It's... difficult to get a real grip on ground level politics for students, especially if you're someone who does play by the 'keep it at home' rules. I deal with more students than most adults, and I'd still be really hesistent to extrapolate from the few times students have brought this topic up in public.
There's some awareness that something's going wonky among the progressive parts of the world, but most of that's perceived as a 'Last Gasp Of <Insert Today's Demographic Boogey Man>', or perhaps young leftists not knowing 'What We're All Fighting'. Even the true versions of this stuff aren't really things the progressive movement is willing to actually handle rather than confront, and they're not that often true, so I'm not sure how much to take from it.
Furry fandom is benign. If your children get involved in furry fandom, the worst that can happen is that they get mixed up in inverting Laplace Transforms. Yes, there is Yiff, and Bad Dragon, but humans are obsessed with sex; human social life is equally obsessed with sex outside of furry fandom. Keeping them out of the fandom provides zero protection.
One example of the fandom keeping it sane is Fox Dad with its gentle self-mockery reminding everyfur not to take it too far. And notice that fursuits are removable. What frightens parents about transgenderism is that it encourages changes that are permanent. Or take a moment (or an hour and a half) to enjoy the Anthrocon 2023 fursuit parade which is taking place inside the convention center. I'm tempted to argue that there is no backlash because the fursuits are so cute, but I'm missing the point. It is inside the convention center not in the street! The normies are not going to reject something that they never see. Furry fandom doesn't have a toaster fucker problem because it is really just Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit.
That's true, and the seriousness of the policy disagreements are definitely part of the pressures making transgender politics so prominent in public discourse; not just that they are permanent, but that they're permanent in ways likely to be undesirable outside of the axioms and assumptions of the movement.
I think my argument is more that FoxDad can happen even (arguably especially) in communities with a lot or even revolving around 'toaster'-fucking, and this kinda puts a fork into the thesis from the greentext.
That said, I do think that people can and do treat benign communities as dangerous and harmful.
I was there, watching usenet and VCL-era wars over a zebra pool toy inflationist. Furries absolutely were a matter of serious controversy, believed to be self-modifying their sexuality in ways that directed them to same-sex attraction (probably wrong direction of causation) or made real-world 'healthy' sexuality difficult or impossible, in ways that can't be changed back, and in ways that made us a threat to innocents or even animals. There's still social conservatives circles doing that sorta thing, today; there actually been a recent mess in about (nonsexual) furry teenagers in schools. And some of the lesser-known stuff can modify you in even weirder ways -- I've got more respect for therians and therian self-modification than most people here would, but I'm not convinced mirror-dwellers are doing their brains any good.
((It might even literally be the specific target for this greentext: there's a long-standing meme in the fandom about protogen, a fantasy cyborg species, as toasters. Though the timeline is tight enough that it probably isn't, at least not that directly.))
There's a fair argument that they're wrong, for furries, and I'd agree with you. I could point to LGBT spaces that consider themselves self-criticizing, or where they keep the more prurient stuff moderately out-of-sight. ((Or rare places where a furry or furry group insufficiently policed the private behavior rules, or where public behaviors are accepted and should be acceptable: there are absolutely out-of-convention-center-doors fursuit parades. And bowling events.))
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