Bad Horse.

If it’s anything like me, half the people in your social circle you “boy mode” around already suspect. 😆

The falsehood was that the election was lost because a large number of people decided “both sides are the same.” That is a comforting lie.

Some people just have different ethical systems than you do. Please have the humility to acknowledge that and not be so judgy. For millions of voters, supporting the Gaza genocide was a bridge to far. And no, you cannot placate these voters just by reflexively saying Trump would be worse for the Gazans. This is about ethical lines in the sand, not a balance of the greater good. The people who voted against Kamala because of Gaza do not follow your ethical framework. They simply look at the world differently than you do. They have a different world view, and that world view is just as valid as your own. Have some respect and quit pretending your way is the only way. And if you just call them stupid, they’ll continue to not vote the way you want. You don’t win votes by calling your voters stupid. Kamala tried that path of arrogance already.

This has all been hashed out before. But ultimately you have an ethical system that goes for a utilitarian greater good approach. Others have a respect for persons ethical system. The latter says vote for the lesser evil. The other says, vote for lesser evil, but there are some ethical lines that simply cannot be crossed.

Yes, you can say that’s stupid. But you’re talking about two different ethical traditions, each with generations of scholarly work behind them. It makes you seem like a child. To just dismiss an entire ethical philosophy out of hand is not only the height of hubris, but a recipe for losing elections. If you cannot be honest about why some people didn’t vote for your candidate, you’re going to continue to lose.

It appears you prefer feeling morally superior over actually winning elections. Respect for persons says that there are certain actions that are simply unacceptable, regardless if they result in a net benefit to the world. We could cure a lot of diseases by involuntarily experimenting on people, and on net we probably would save lives. A utilitarian philosophy like yours would tell you that using prisoners as involuntary test subjects is perfectly ethical, as long as it results in a net good for society.

And I actually voted for Kamala. I just have the honesty to acknowledge why she lost.

This is actually a fun bit of historical trivia. That passport isn’t something someone just cooked up in Photoshop. It’s real.

In 1976, his remains were issued an Egyptian passport (nearly 3 thousand years after his death) so that he could be transported to Paris for an irradiated treatment to prevent a fungoid growth.

You fundamentally do not see trans people’s healthcare as legitimate. You are not welcome here.

People come to Lemmy precisely to escape enlightened centrists like yourself. Stay on the mainstream sites where you won’t have to see the icky trans people talking about their issues.

I think a better solution is to pass a law requiring that blood donors receive a check equal to half of whatever the hospital charges the patient that receives the donated blood. As long as we’re going to have a for profit healthcare system, blood donors should be paid just like anyone else.

You would rather let the innocent die than see a guilty person receive a gift?

So you can accuse others of internalized transphobia, but not the other way around?

I mean, unless you were raised by hippy parents who raised you androgynous from birth, if you are a trans woman, you experienced male socialization. All that means is people treated you like a male. It doesn’t mean anything beyond that. Socialization refers to things external to you.

I think there’s a degree of internalized transphobia in rejecting such a clear and straight forward concept. I get not wanting to acknowledge our pasts, but it is internally transphobic to deny one’s own trans experiences.

There’s nothing shameful about having been socialized male.

I don’t believe in living my life according to what bigots do.

Is it more useful? Because in this context obsessing over intersectionality just seems to be muddying the waters to the point of opacity.

Trans “healthcare” is, ultimately, not health related, it is cosmetic surgery or changing your body for cosmetic reasons.

In the same way someone getting their face reconstructed after a brutal car accident is “cosmetic.” Both are ultimately about making people comfortable in their skin.

Trans care saves lives. It saved mine. I don’t know what kind of monster can look at a 41% suicide attempt rate, look at the only care proven to massively reduce those rates, and then try to trivialize that care. Trans health care is one single most effective classes of medical care in modern medicine. Gender reassignment surgery has far better long term outcomes than knee replacements.

As for why there are so many trans people on Lemmy. Most of us left other spaces, often to get away from enlightened centrists who see our lives, healthcare, and civil rights as privileges to be granted if it’s politically convenient.

Don’t get me started on “Latinx.”

No. I said Democrat for a reason. Stop thinking in terms of a single election. I’m talking about coalitions and power balance within parties. You need to get past “Democrats good, Republicans bad.” Both parties are themselves coalitions, coalitions whose fortunes can rise and fall within the party.

Republicans are always going to be evil. But if the Democrats turn against us, now both parties are out to get us. That is the real threat, where trans persecution gains bipartisan support. We’re completely and utterly fucked if that happens. I fear a future where transphobia becomes so entrenched in both parties, that advocating for trans rights becomes as politically radioactive as a politican advocating for the rights of pedophiles in today’s world. I am willing to lose an individual election to Republicans if it means transphobic Democrats do not gain power within the party.

A transphobic Republican winning means pain for a few years. For me, ensuring that at least one party is not militantly transphobic is a far higher priority than winning a single election. I personally had to flee my home to escape Republican political persecution. I became an internally displaced refugee in my own country because of them. But at least now I live in a blue state with solid protections at the state level. If Democrats turn the way of Republicans, I will have to flee the country entirely.

Again, stop thinking of things just between parties. Parties are not a monolith.

One should not slander people who simply have stricter ethics than oneself as “both sides are the same.” That’s how you lose elections.

But none of them have ever actually met the definition of communism.

I really dislike this kind of thinking. People citing that we’ve never had a communist country tend to think:

1. Only true Communism counts as communism. (So no failures of any real nation can ever be attributed to it.)

2. Any country with any degree of market economy counts as capitalist. (So the sins of any nation can be attributed to capitalism.)

They use an extremely tight definition for communism and an extremely loose definition for capitalism. I’m a leftist myself, but I can recognize the intellectual inconsistency.

By the same logic, I could argue that the Catholic Church never covered up sex abuses by priests:

True Catholicism has never existed, as there’s never been a time it’s been truly universal. (The word “Catholic” means “universal.”) Obviously we can only ever talk about the failures of Catholicism once we’ve actually achieved true Catholicism. Until literally every single living human being is a devout Catholic, any discussion of the merits of Catholicism is purely theoretical and shouldn’t serve to guide our decisions.

For certain kinds of communism/socialism, authoritarianism does seem pretty much inevitable. It’s not inevitable for more distributed community-oriented forms. But for any socialist/communist government organized at the national level, authoritarianism seems inevitable to me.

In order to seize the means of production, you have to do just that - seize it. You have to send scores of armed men out with guns to physically take control over all the productive assets in a country. And those assets are then available for the state to use, for whatever reasons it wants. Sure, the people in power will promise to use those resources for the greater good, but who is going to stop them if they don’t?

If we’ve seen anything in the last 20 years in the US, it’s that power and wealth are interchangeable. Wealth is power. Power is wealth. It’s why I oppose the very existence of billionaires - no individual should have that much power. If that weren’t true, I wouldn’t care so much about them. I really don’t care if a billionaire builds an obnoxiously large yacht. I do care if they start throwing their money around and controlling national policy. And whenever a government seizes control of the entire economy, it now owns the entire wealth of a nation. And if you have all the assets, have complete authority to decide who works what job, have complete say on where people get to live? Well that government now has total power over everyone’s lives.

Any government that powerful immediately falls to authoritarianism. Why? Because there is one and only one locus of power in that country now. Ambitious people can’t start a business or seek power through some other level of government. All resources are controlled by the central state. If you want to have any influence at all over that society, you need to get in power of that central government. The government is all-powerful. The stakes are total. Power is completely centralized. You as a leader either control everything or nothing.

It’s rather impossible not to end up with authoritarianism when a form of government requires, as a first step, to gather all power and wealth under the control of a single authority.

When did we start seeing a handful of DNC candidates shifting on this position? When the candidates winning elections, the GOP, went transphobic. So the DNC losing more elections won’t make them less transphobic, it will make them more. We’ve seen this in real time in the last 2 years.

It depends entirely on why they lose. Democrats didn’t lose in 2024 because of transphobia. Polls show trans issues were near the bottom of voter priorities.

When a party loses an election, politicians start to innovate. They change their messaging and start modifying their platform to try out something different. If those changes improve electoral results, those changes will stick. If they’re a net negative, they’ll end.

What we’re seeing with the Democrats is experimental transphobia. They’re testing the waters to see if it improves their odds. I as a trans person need to do everything I can to make sure that experiment is a resounding failure. Most Democrats aren’t openly transphobic…at least not YET. It’s unusual and “innovative” to be a transphobic Democrat. If a Democrat experiments with transphobia, and they win an election, that teaches every other Democrat that transphobia is a winning strategy. If they lose in landslide because the queer vote abandoned them for their betrayal, the experiment fails, and other Democrats will be less likely to take up transphobia.

WTF. Its a good thing I never said anything of the sort. I don’t even think you need me in this conversation when you’re the one putting words in my mouth, and then criticizing me for it.

You were almost certainly going to. After all, you just said I advocated for the GOP. Which should be pretty obvious I don’t support. Whenever I point out that sometimes trans people need to vote against some Democrats for larger strategic reasons, someone with a room temperature IQ will come out of the woodwork and say, “well that must mean you love Trump!” I wasn’t accusing you of putting words in my mouth. I was asking you not to do that. However, you still did it anyway when you accused me of advocating for the GOP.

You are the one advocating for the GOP and voting for GOP candidates directly opposed to trans rights. You are directly hurting my trans sister. You are the person with the torch setting fire to the country.

That is not the case. In almost all scenarios, I support voting for a Democrat over a Republican. But a Democrat experimenting with transphobia against a Republican? Regardless of how that race goes, a transphobe is going to win. From my perspective, that particular election is already lost. At that point my priority is making sure the transphobic Democrat has as little credibility as possible. And that’s achieved by making sure they lose by the largest margin possible.

You will only see this as advocating against trans issues if you have the future time horizon of a fruit fly.