Trans student’s arrest for violating Florida bathroom law is thought to be a first
Trans bathroom bans are ultimately just a means of driving trans people from public life entirely.
This is not an exaggeration, the anti-trans movement literally aims to "eradicate [trans people] from public life entirely", those are their words.
Here are some citations, numbers, and evidence to back up what you're saying and why we should view trans bathroom bans as genocidal rather than about safety, like anti-trans activists claim:
When laws permit transgender people to access sex-segregated spaces in accordance with their gender identities, crime rates do not increase. There is no association between trans-inclusive policies and more crime. As one of us wrote in a recent paper, this is likely because, just like cisgender folks, “transgender people use locker rooms and restrooms to change clothes and go to the bathroom,” not for sexual gratification or predatory reasons.
Conversely, when trans people are forced by law to use sex-segregated spaces that align with the sex assigned to them at birth instead of their gender identity, two important facts should be noted.
First, no studies show that violent crime rates against cisgender women and girls in such spaces decrease. In other words, cisgender women and girls are no safer than they would be in the absence of anti-trans laws. Certainly, the possibility exists that a cisgender man might pose as a woman to go into certain spaces under false pretenses. But that same possibility remains regardless of whether transgender people are lawfully permitted in those spaces.
Second, trans people are significantly more likely to be victimized in sex-segregated spaces than are cisgender people. For instance, while incarcerated in facilities designated for men, trans women are nine to 13 times as likely to be sexually assaulted as the men with whom they are boarded.
...
In society at large, between 84% and 90% of all crimes of sexual violence are perpetrated by someone the victim knows, not a stranger lurking in the shadows – or the showers or restroom stalls. But trans and nonbinary people feel very unsafe in bathrooms and locker rooms, though others experience relative safety there. In fact, the largest study of its kind found that upward of 75% of trans men and 64% of trans women reported that they routinely avoid public restrooms to minimize their chances of being harassed or assaulted.
These laws aren't designed to protect cis women, they are designed to police gender (this impacts cis people too!) and eliminate trans people.
Why is it confusing? The woman who was arrested, Marcy Rheintgen, is a conservative Catholic who thought when push came to shove, they wouldn't actually arrest her ...
ironic SEO image, at this point is Newsweek anything but a low quality right-wing rag?
Unlike most large American magazines, Newsweek has not used fact-checkers since 1996.
...
In November 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Newsweek had "taken a marked radical right turn by buoying extremists and promoting authoritarian leaders" since it hired conservative political activist Josh Hammer as editor-at-large. It noted the magazine's elevation of conspiracy theorists, publication of conspiracy theories about COVID-19, views such as support for a ban on all legal immigration to the United States and denying adults access to trans-affirming medical care, and failure to disclose potential conflicts of interest in the content published on Hammer's opinion section and podcast.
from Wikipedia
thank you for checking!! maybe if I get the gumption to, I can make a pull request ta add a user setting to disable the custom emojis in the autocomplete 😄
web interface, using Firefox (i.e. I just go to https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/, login, and browse - no special client or extensions)
EDIT: also, thank you ❤️
My concept of Christianity is rather expansive, and Christian anarchists are often inspired by Tolstoy, who is someone I have read about and whose works I have given some attention. I can confirm they are rather different than most Christians - Tolstoy in particular rejected the Church after he saw they were committed to enabling war, which is clearly un-Christian. Dorothy Day is another relevant Christian anarchist, and I have worked with a Catholic Workers House locally, so I have some IRL exposure to these folks as well.
I tend to think "Christian" is an almost meaningless term without more context or clarification, people who call themselves Christians hold opposite views on many different positions. "Buddhism" is no different, if anything it is worse, so this isn't particular to Christianity. Nor is it particular to religion, Marx spent some time in the Communism Manifesto clarifying what he meant by "socialism" and the different kinds of socialism he was aware of - there are many such overloaded terms and concepts. It seems particularly common in any political context, where there is power struggle it seems there are struggles between meanings for a particular word.
It is religion ...
Yes, the Christians I am talking about believe in predestination, and they disagree with, for example, Baptists about whether people can save other people or whether people can save themselves. Instead they believe God predetermines who ends up being saved or not, through the grace of God alone.
And to answer your question about what is the ultimate point if there is no motivation through free-will, their answer is usually either "it's a mystery" or "to glorify God".
They still believe in a kind of free-will, but only within the confines of God's pre-determined choices. God chose for you, but it was you that did the choosing and are responsible. One explanation I was given is that you make the choice out of free-will, and then God observes your choice and then goes back in time and determines it from the beginning. It's not a coherent view, as far as I can tell - there is no compelling logical or reasonable compatibilist account they offer, it just sounds like contradiction and fantastic thinking.
Also, their view is that our nature is fallen (total depravity), and the only good is from God and God chooses who receives the gift of salvation and thus who will become cured of their evil nature. They believe they should do good things and proselytize to convert others to Christianity because God commands them to, not because those things will save themselves or anyone else. Obedience is very important to this mindset.
I don't agree that it is doomed to fail, but I also don't believe humans are inherently Fallen, and especially not in the particular soteriological sense that Christians believe (i.e. all later generations have inherited the guilt from the single act of disobedience by Adam & Eve dooming all of humanity to endless toil and suffering, as well as an evil nature).
That said, I do think humans behave in sometimes predictable ways, and it might be useful to look at what kinds of choices about society might alleviate suffering and promote well-being and fairness in society.
That said, I don't think that's going to happen without significant social upheaval, and that itself seems to bring about a lot of violence and the kinds of suffering I think we should all avoid ... so, yeah - these are hard problems.
Even the more devout Christians I know (who actually have opinions about different theological positions) believe Earth and human society should not be modeled on heaven and attempts to do so will fail due to humans being inherently / essentially Fallen. This is part of how they rationalize their resistance / apathy towards movements for justice, at the very least they believe it is futile to seek justice in this life.
So, in a conversation with someone in the midwest who said he watched Trump's state of the union address and was appalled by the protests organized by the Democrats, that they are beyond lost because they would protest something that anyone should agree with (I think he was referring to not clapping for some veteran or something?) ... anyway, yeah - we're cooked as a country. ☺️
sure, of course - I just meant my memory of the book wasn't that it emphasized industrialization in particular - I remember the evils of poverty, and of company towns, and so on ... automation wasn't a theme I particularly remember from the book, even if it is certainly related. That said, I read the book decades ago, lol
Interesting, my experience was that it was more a critique of capitalism than about industrialization itself ...
you may be interested in the book How to Read the Bible by James Kugel
most books I read impact and change me, lol
With regards to politics, reading Marx (especially the 1844 Manuscripts) and Chomsky initiated a major change in my ideological thinking, and from there it was mostly history books helping fill in the details.
Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, for example, was a history book that really impacted my way of thinking.
was going to say, the invasion of Mexico (like 1848 or so) was naked greed and caused some countries to doubt the U.S. was serious about its supposed founding ideals, lol
Unsolicited advice, but you have to escape your - to make it not create a bulleted list.
Lemmy uses markdown for its formatting, and this means - is has special meaning, it is syntax used to create bulleted lists with.
For example,
- Isaac Asimov will look like:
- Isaac Asimov
If you want it to look like
Isaac Asimov
you have to escape the - character with a \:
\- Isaac Asimov
The \ basically says "ignore the special syntax meaning of - as starting a bulleted list, and instead treat it as a literal -".
leaded gasoline was fun, huh?
EDIT:
Someone else suggested it first, oops. Still, the video I linked is a fun deep-dive. I had no idea leaded gasoline is still used in small airplanes.
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I'm personally impressed by Ada's moderator skills - it's not easy to deal with people, but she makes it look easy ...
Yes, the Catholic Church is anti-trans, but you have to understand that trans people are just like everyone else, they are subject to the same influences and pressures as cis people, and they come from the same backgrounds - from religious families, from conservative families, etc.
While trans people in the U.S. form an alliance with lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, two-spirit, and intersex individuals - this does not mean every trans person accepts the label "queer" or thinks of themselves that way, let alone how they think of other trans people. There are many self-hating trans people, and lots of trans people who hate other trans people.
Caitlyn Jenner is a Trump supporting Republican who went on Fox News to deliver anti-trans remarks about a trans athlete.
Blaire White is a Trump supporting Republican who makes a living supporting right-wing and anti-trans talking points on YouTube.
The Log Cabin Republicans are mostly LGBT+ folks who are Republicans, and they show up to support anti-trans legislation, like in the recent California vote to ban trans athletes.
I think you have to understand that labels like "queer" and "LGBTQ+" are political identities, and lots of people who are descriptively queer based on their sexuality or gender identity refuse to identify that way for political reasons. Some people remain closeted and hiding, but other people are open about their sexuality and just don't connect the dots between their sexuality and the political struggles of people with those sexualities, refusing to identify as gay or queer and instead just insisting they're "straight" even while openly engaging in queer sex.
Sure, it boggles my mind too, but it's unfortunately very common. I think a lot of this has to do with the dominance one identity has, like one's identity as a conservative or as Christian, over another, such as one's identity as a queer person. When those conflict, it's not surprising that sexuality or gender identity are not always the winner - especially in cases like Christianity where the religion can have a hold on your entire life (your job, your spouse, your whole family, your entire community - everything might depend on a religious identity like that and it's very difficult to escape). This is especially the case for a binary trans woman who transitioned so young and can live as a cis-passing woman, there might be very little visible about her trans identity at that point, making it easier to live as a conservative Catholic.