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There's a "protect trans kids" poster on Gwen Stacy's bedroom wall in Across the Spider-Verse. This is the second time I've seen this exact phrase, after Don Cheadle wore it on his shirt when appearing on Saturday Night Live.
Okay, my curiosity is piqued. What does this phrase mean?
I assume this message is in reference to a specific threat that exclusively, or at least disproportionately, impacts trans children. Specifically, my assumption is that it relates to bathroom bills and/or gender affirming care, but I have a close friend who insists that it refers to hate crimes, and he says that I'm "living in a bubble" if I don't think it refers to hate crimes. But I really haven't heard anything about a hate crime surge against transgender children, real or exaggerated. I heard plenty about the supposed hate crime surge against Asians three years ago, so if there was a similar narrative going on with trans kids, I figure I'd hear about that too.
Which isn't to say that I never hear people complain about hate crimes against trans people! But when I do, the discussion is about transgender people of all ages, not specifically children. The only activist movement I hear about that specifically relates to trans children is their supposed right to medically transition, but my friend says I'm being uncharitable if I assume that that's what is being referred to.
I'd appreciate it if you guys help clear this up for me.
Edit: When I told him about this post, my friend clarified that he thinks the ignorance is that I think it implies exclusively to these issues and not to violence.
It doesn’t. Or more specifically, it’s a political slogan that can mean any of 20+ things, few of which are specific to trans kids. It could mean ‘I’m a good blue triber’, it could mean ‘the lgbt+ community can do no wrong, literally’, etc, etc. political slogans don’t always have a specific meaning.
This makes me angry because it's so vague and cannot be inferred, but my pattern recognition tells me this is a problem I have because I'm autistic, and that neurotypicals either find context clues or don't care. Probably the latter.
You try to understand it as an individual entity, it is a wrong way to treat it. It is part of the network of relationships, and in this network it has a symbolic meaning, and that's how most people see it - as a sigil that marks the place of this person in the network of cultural relationships. Signs often have relational meanings - i.e. the sign "A" has meaning within English language when it is combined with others, but by itself it's just a weird geometric shape, there's nothing inherent in it. Most people pick (and sometimes over-pick) the relational and contextual clues and use them all the time, though I know autistic people often have trouble with doing this automatically.
That makes sense, but it's also infuriating, because as far as I'm concerned, it means nothing, but I'm supposed to be able to tell what it means.
I support all trans rights except the right to receive hormones prior to the age of consent, and I hate their language policing and intolerance of comedy that pokes fun of them (which is a problem with leftists in general, but especially trans people as of late). Does that mean I should say I support trans rights, or that I want to protect trans kids? I don't know! From what you're saying, it sounds like, in doing so, I'd be performing a shibboleth for the wrong clique. This concept really does remind me of how high school is depicted in movies and TV.
My K-12 education didn't have cliques. It had friend groups, but nothing like the hierarchies and allegiance tests you'd see in Glee, Heathers, Mean Girls, High School Musical, etc. But my adult life has been full of them. I wonder why my school life didn't have them. Did they go dormant for a couple decades after the 90's before resurfacing? Were Hollywood writers projecting adult experiences onto teenagers all along? Were they always there, but I just didn't notice because nobody cared about politics until I finished high school?
You should. They are not owners of your expression, and they have the same ownership claim on the language as you and every other person on the planet. You should recognize their relationships are not the only possible (despite them pretending it is the case), and their language use is not the only correct one, and support the usage that agrees with your beliefs. At the same time, you should not be blind to what is happening in the world around, and be aware that there are forces that work hard at usurping control over the language and make "protect the kids" mean only agreeing with their ideology. Recognizing such attempts and calling them out (even if only inside your own head) is part of maintaining the habit of independent thought and mental hygiene.
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As much as unsolicited advice might be rude, I'd recommend learning not to be infuriated by such stuff, because such stuff constitutes roughly 99.99% of all communication in politics, and I'm not sure about the other 0.01%. It's not good for your blood pressure or your mental health.
I wonder about this too. My middle school had some clique-ish behavior, but nothing like the tropes you see in films, and my high school had basically none. In my 20s right after college, I noticed adults around me behaving in cliquish ways that seemed ripped straight out of films. My schooling was mostly late 90s and early 00s. Perhaps it was real in the 80s and early 90s, and filmmakers were drawing from their experience from those eras, with concerted effort by educators to break up the cliquish behavior succeeding by the time we were in school. But then why did such behavior return with a vengeance in my adult life? Particularly with such cliquish behavior being pushed as the obviously morally correct thing to follow (as long as it's right cliques, of course)?
Could just be random dumb luck from the schools we went to, of course. That's probably the correct presumption to have by default.
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It’s definitely the latter. Do you think ‘groomer’ has a terribly specific meaning? How about ‘America first’?
A groomer is someone who subtly leads children or similarly vulnerable to make decisions that they otherwise wouldn't make. In recent years, its connotation with sex has overshadowed all other meanings. The people accusing trans activists of being groomers weren't, to my knowledge, accusing them of sexual grooming when the meme took off, but it's devolved into that because dumb social conservatives are conflating this very real problem with the gay agenda they tried to warn about a decade ago.
America First means putting the needs of one's nation above the other needs of other nations, and American citizens over the needs of foreigners.
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