I was hanging with a group consisting of mostly older millennial gay men who don’t like that trans people are being included alongside them in conversations about human rights, sexuality, and gender. They think it takes away from the fight their community has gone through over the past few generations.
I chewed them out. Like, a lot. I am usually not at all confrontational but I pretty much stunned them into silence. Now I’m waiting to let them process, expecting a couple to reach out to me to step back from some of the shit they were saying. If that doesn’t happen, I guess I’m not really welcome in that group anymore and I’m ok with that.
There are no trans people in this group. I’m not a gay man nor am I trans. But when I hear shit like that, I hear echos of gay men activists not being willing to work with lesbian women activists, white feminists not includig black women, male laborers trying to keep women out of labor rights movements. It’s stupid. It’s tribal and hateful. It undercuts the strength the movement could have if we weren’t asshats about it.
Rights campaigning 101, strength in unity. This is basic ass shit.
While I do agree that unity is the way to go in the fight for rights, I can understand why one would want to separate the T from the LGB. It’s an issue of consistency - L, G, and B all describe sexuality, while T describes gender. The two are related, but ultimately separate concepts - one does not inform the other, and grouping them can hypothetically lead ignorant people to think that they are directly related, which could hypothetically lead to non-straight cisfolk experiencing more oppression than they would have otherwise experienced due to the perceived association with transfolk, as non-conforming sexuality is more generally accepted today than non-conforming gender.
That being said, it’s all hypothetical, and what matters is the reality that people from all spectra of nonconformity are regularly oppressed, and in many places, the oppressors treat anyone LGBT+ with the same disdain. So grouping them is vital for the sake of the most oppressed.
I mean, you could similarly reason that bisexuals aren’t welcome (both gays and lesbians are solely attracted to the same sex, after all), or that asexuals aren’t welcome (you can be asexual and heteroromantic, after all), and so on. I think, ultimately, that unity between us is important, and allowing the umbrella to protect all members of gender, romantic, and sexual minorities strengthens the overall cause rather than weakening it.
Marxism is correct and more relevant than ever.
I’m curious what makes you say that. What evidence is there to support Marxism? Isn’t Marxism just communism? Just genuinely curious. I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history. Not trying to say I think Capitalism is perfect. I definitely agree that Capitalism that is unrestrained and companies that are allowed to reign free is bad for the common people.
I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history.
The more accurate lesson would be that communist nations have been defeated by capitalist hegemony multiple times throughout history, mainly during the Cold War; the countries didn’t just implode of their own accord. Now, it’s fair to criticize them for this, if you have an ideology all about material conditions and then you aren’t able to survive those conditions, you probably messed up, but I think that’s a very different assertion from “communism doesn’t work”.
Marxism is Communism, yes. Communism has been proven to work multiple times, and does to this day.
I suggest reading Blackshirts and Reds if that goes against what you believe to be true, though if you have specific questions I can do my best to answer.
I guess in real life that’s polarising…
On here it’s just preaching to the choir, thus the upvotes.
School is where the passion for learning goes to die and the desire to cheat is born
In this day and age, hobbies are the last bastions of passion and curiosity. One who is engaged in a hobby is intrinsically motivated to learn and apply what has been learned in novel ways, just as the scholars of old have done. School, reviled by many a student, has earned its reputation by perverting the concept of learning and exploiting students’ passions. The desire to cheat is most unnatural among students, a telltale sign that one’s passion and curiosity for the topic at hand has been extinguished, replaced with a desire to rid oneself of a burden, the burden of learning only for the sake of becoming learned.
Yep. Sadly, I’m not sure there’s another way for most people. On Lemmy we’re mostly nerds, but would most people have learned even basic math if they didn’t have to?
In some ways, the most motivated or talented students are just as ill-fitted to the production line system of education as the disabled ones.
Using a word incorrectly 1,000,001 times shouldn’t change the actual dictionary definition of the word.
