Most Americans believe that it’s a “problem” that Republicans are transphobic.
A new YouGov poll asked Americans whether they thought that certain issues were a “problem” for either party. 44% said that transphobia was “a major problem” among Republicans, and another 24% said they thought it was “a minor problem.” Only 32% of respondents said it wasn’t a problem.
Transphobia was the second most likely issue to be labeled a problem by respondents, after “hostility toward immigrants.” “Tolerance of political violence,” “conspiracy thinking,” “white supremacy,” “homophobia,” and “fascism” followed closely behind.
Oddly, 40% of respondents said that “transgender ideology” was “a major problem” for Republicans, and another 20% said it was “a minor problem.” 41% said that they didn’t think it was a problem at all for Republicans.
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There just aren’t that many trans people compared to how often conservatives make a big issue of them. And the number of times that a trans person has actually caused a tangible problem for other people in a way that is related to their being trans is even more rare. Not that it doesn’t happen, but it might as well be a unicorn.
That’s an easy way to tell for sure that they are using the issue as a distraction.
It’s not really a distraction, IMO. The enforcement of gender norms is kind of essential for conservative ideology. The idea that someone can transgress or opt-out from the enforcement of their rules is anathema to them.
If people assigned female at birth can become male and vice-versa, then all of the biological essentialism they believe in, that women are one way and men another due to their inherent characteristics, is proven false. It’s an important part of their ideology and without it a lot of other enforced heirarchies they care about inherently fall apart.
Sadly, a lot of the left is really naive to just how fucking evil these kinds of people are.
They worked hard to craft the narrative around trans people as the new sub-human scourge trying to destroy our nation etc. It was deliberate from the start, they picked a group that has low representation and low population, whom average people don’t understand or connect with.
You don’t fix this kind of thing with education, outreach and lecturing. You fix this with regime change. All of the transphobic chuds and all of the terfs have the attention-spans and emotional consistency of toddlers, that’s why they were vulnerable to the narrative to begin with. If we had new leadership who, no matter what ideology they represented, said “trans people ain’t a big deal and we ain’t going after them” you would see vast waves of people lose interest and start looking for the next target to hate and scapegoat.
