this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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Having a thread for people to ask stuff is a good idea
thanks! my only hesitation is that I don't want to create a moderation burden, but I hope people will both be civil, but also willing to open up about their concerns, questions, and perspectives - I find the trans topic is weirdly taboo IRL (at least with people who know I'm trans), so it's hard for people to have honest conversations and learn anything (and also, for me to understand what they're feeling and wondering about).
That said, I notice this most with liberals and cis allies, people who wish to be polite and respectful are the most likely to not talk about it.
Conservatives and anti-trans people are more willing to share their opinions, but also usually less willing to listen or take seriously any information or perspectives that are presented. That said, I still have found respectful conservatives more willing to talk about trans stuff than liberals, and early in transition I found that more satisfying and helpful, it made me feel less alone and gave me a way to think with people in a way I couldn't get from my liberal friends. That's really unfortunate, I think (for lots of reasons, it's not exactly healthy for me to be exposed to anti-trans views, even when I can see why they don't make sense rationally).
Did you also find unicorns?!
They do exist in places where it's just the default politics. One has to suspect that if they seriously learned and thought about things, they'd move left.
assuming religious and community ties don't keep them from doing that, I tend to agree - I think most people are decent, and come to reactionary positions because of exploitation (such as religious indoctrination)
Community, status and not being economically punished are way bigger motivators than being abstractly correct, right? Nobody really goes looking for inconvenient truths. Unless those naturally nice, understanding conservatives start meeting a lot of very different people, like if they move, the worldview will probably stay put.
To be a little more doomer than you, I'd actually say there's lots of people that go the other way as well, and go looking for a cult to join as an outlet for whatever nastiness is inside of them. Consider that in the grand scheme of things, monotheism and racism are both new.
I do think being autistic might correlate with prioritizing abstract truths over social statuses that might be harder to understand or grasp the consequences of going against. It's not uncommon for people with ASD to also be strongly invested in social justice, and I think these might be connected.
I think even meeting new people, they will usually just find some way to rationalize and maintain their current status while granting exceptions to those local to their life. My conservative friends are sorry that I have to flee a state for its transphobic views, but they personally endorse those views and also vote and donate money to further anti-trans movements. How they reconcile these views is a matter of rationalization, but they hold both that I am precious to them, and that trans people should be rotting in prisons and denied care.
I very much doubt racism is new, I think tribalism is probably on some level a biological instinct: those closer to you have more moral status than strangers, and especially the people we can't speak the same language as, etc. Taken to further extremes of "stranger", we can see this tendency in our speciesism (the tendency to see humans as the only animals with moral status).
That said, monotheism does seem to be "newer", at least its absolute dominance and spread can be traced back a few thousand years compared to what as far as we can tell is a much longer period before of at the very least an absence of monolithic culture and religion, usually animism was polytheistic it seems.
Tribalism is ancient for sure. As is cultural bigotry. Hating people primarily do to skin colour and related features is a thing that specifically developed 1500-1700, as the trans-Atlantic slave trade got going (and needed to be rationalised).
When the Romans or Mesopotamians hated on their neighbors, it was over food preferences, language and customs. If they ascribed anything biological to it, the prevailing theory was more about response to the local climate than heredity. Then, once monotheism got going deviation from religious orthodoxy became the most popular way to hate. It's not a coincidence that "Slav" and "slave" sound similar, because pagan Slavic people were a major source of slave labour in medieval Europe. It drove the crusades, and it had a role in the early stages of expansion into the new world.
The first slave ship came to English North America in 1619, but the passengers were treated as normal indentures, and at least some became free later on. They kept coming, though, and by 1700 or so black people had to be slaves and that was pretty much it. (Colonial Spain had their own, somewhat divergent system a bit earlier)
The Romans had emperors drawn from Africa and the Middle East, and had conflict with Germanic and Celtic people that could easily have been Latin by appearance. The first sub-Saharan African in Japan was made a Samurai, and now there's a videogame about it. That's not to say the difference in appearance wasn't noticed or remarked upon (they tried to wash the dark off of Yasuke, and Heterodotus makes special note of the woolly hair and stature of the distant Africans) but in every pre-modern story I can think of it was gotten over quickly compared to other, behavioral things.
Anyway, I guess the point is just that there's been steps backwards as well. There would have to be, otherwise ignorance would have gone extinct over the millennia, right? Maybe it still will; we live in a totally transformed world now, but it's going to require continuous effort. Hate is always shifting and changing and evolving from things that might even have started off as harmless or positive (Jesus is less controversial than later Christians).
ha, I guess so - both cases are relationships I've had for a long time before I transitioned, so there was a lot of good will built-up. Not claiming their views are respectful, or they are respectful to everyone - but at least they wanted to be respectful and polite with me. You have to understand that where I lived at the time, the ratio of conservatives to liberals was 7 to 3, in terms of voters (and probably more than that generally speaking). Ah the South 😅
Idk if this fully explains the weird taboo you described, but I’m personally reluctant to ask people questions I know they must get all the time. It can get annoying/draining fielding the same questions from every second person even if they’re mostly well-meaning, so especially in cases where people can’t just not reveal the attribute/hobby/whatever I’m curious about I just try to remember the question to look up later.
Not sure how common that is, but if that’s the cause then what you’ve done with this post is the ideal way to bypass this hesitation imo; just being clear (even just from the context) that you’re choosing to talk about this and not just feeling pressured to explain would make the difference at least for me personally.
Anyway idk if this is relevant at all for you, but if it is I hope it helps :)