And especially that research about transgender was among the first books to be burnt.

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That’s just wrong. The Rainbow Flag represents LGBT Pride and does not include BIPOC.

I don’t know why you don’t like the progress flag, but it’s not racist and it’s not transphobic and it’s not segregating. It highlights the diversity of human rights movements and points out that all human rights movements have the same goal and should work together.

I feel more includet in the Progress Flag than the standard Rainbow. That’s just me, but why should that be less valid?

The trans community, or any other community of marginalized people for that matter, is not a threat to any one person but to conformity and the status quo.

Throughout history, very similar people held the most power and wealth, and power and wealth were passed on not by means of merit but through connections.
But this power was always fragile and dependent on others, on servants, the lower casts and classes. Every now and then though, the lower classes unite, revolt and force the ones in charge to make concessions or straight up replace them.

The rich and powerful obviously want to limit these occasions and the most effective way to do so is to make the lower classes believe that they are not the enemy and someone else is to blame for the misery, someone else wants to take the few breadcrumbs the lower classes have, someone else is the villain. As longs the lower classes have another enemy to fight, they’ll conform to the class system bestowed upon them by those who hold power, serve the system, consume the goods sold by the rich.

But you cannot vilify just anyone. If you make the majority and enemy, they’ll resent and ultimately revolt. You have to pick those who are few and have limited capacity to fight back. Refugees, Sinti and Roma, Jews, the LGBTQ+ community.

nor what the rest of the world did to us once World War 2 ended.

There’s a reason jews and dissidents are the only holocaust victims publicly talked about. I am german, went to school in Germany (history lessons about the Third Reich, Holocaust and WW2 are super extensive here and take up basically 3-4 school years), yet we only ever talked about jews and dissidents of the nazis. No Sinti and Roma, no queers, no nobody else was ever talked about during these lessons.

Not surprised. Rich capitalists benefit from directing the majorities’ hate towards minorities so that we cannot build focus towards the few who are in power and want to keep it.

Nobody expects the spanish inquisition

They do. They are by far outnumbered by most older generations though.

Do I read you right that you equate having many crushes and/or falling for ‘love at first sight’ with being a shallow idiot?

True. In Germany, there are still criminal procedures held against and sentences passed on former guards of concentration camps, even though they are close to a hundred years of age. Because even though it was “normal” and even legal back then, it was never okay and always crimes against humanity.

I disagree. TERF is not a slur, nor is cis. If someone chooses to be offended by a term that is not offensive in any way, it’s not my fault. ‘Gender-critical activist’ is nothing but trivialization, and if we start to use it, it gets validated.

I can absolutely imagine someone trying to find answers about themselves, reading terf bigotry, and getting forced way back into the closet to become the trans version of the “everyone gets crushes on their friends” lady.

That’s a sad image. I personally feel quite privileged by having grown up in a relatively (for the time and location) queer-friendly environment and now living in a quite accepting bubble (including my employer, coworkers, family and friends), yet I consider myself an egg that’s not guaranteed to hatch due to personal insecurities and stuff.
I can’t imagine how tough and gut wrenching it must be to not be this privileged and wonder about the things I do.

Fair enough. I always perceived the term ‘alt right’ more of an umbrella term for ‘gender-critical’, ‘democracy-critical’ and ‘all-that’s-not-hardcore-conservative-chistian-critical’ ‘activists’ though.

gender-critical activist

Well, that is taking trivializing transphobia to a whole new level. What’s next, calling fascists “democracy-critical activists”?

I am very aware of the dystopia. Maybe that’s part of the appeal for me, the contrast.

Great, I just wanted to have that set. At the latest since Cyberpunk 2077 became big, the subculture and the artistic genres are all to often reduced to the aesthetic, basically ignoring all the punk elements.

i have not heard of the matrix having any trans relationship, other than the directors.

There’s more all over the movies, but central in the first movie is Neo’s transition of Thomas Anderson, someone who builds an online persona, searching for something he cannot quite get a grasp of, taking the red pill (sad but ironic how that term is used nowadays) which symbolizes the first steps on learning the truth, waking up from the Matrix and climaxing in the death of his old persona, then being reborn his true self, Neo.
Of course, this can be interpreted in many ways, but then you see the context of who made this.

That video sounds interesting, I’ll try to watch it tomorrow.

It depends on the media you prefer. The classics would be The Matrix, 1995’s animated Ghost in the Shell (though the transgender theme is more accidentally AFAIK) or William Gibson’s 1988 book Monalisa Overdrive.

Monalisa Overdrive also inspired Janaína Overdrive, a brazilian short movie by Mozart Freire (which is still on my watchlist though).

There is then Martine Rothblatt’s From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form (again, still on my list), and the general theme of transhumanism, which is often a stand-in or expansion of transgender.

However, something you should be aware of, cyberpunk is generally dystopian and can be pretty depressing. The shiny neon aesthetic is just the sugar-coated topping. There is another world beneath it. The real world.

Yes it is. Fun side fact: transgender is a common theme especially in cyberpunk, definitely worth looking into if you didn’t yet ;)

Yes, “queer” originated as a slur and mostly got adapted as a self describing term for the community. I use it to describe myself and the community, partly because it rolls off the tongue more easily and partly because it’s a nice and easy term to describe everyone not cis heteronormative.

The term “punk” has a similar story, btw. It came into being as a slur for people that didn’t quite behave as expected by society and punks then took it as a name for themselves, saying “Yeah, I’m a punk, there’s nothing wrong with it and you can’t do shit against it,” which is also why I like to use the term “queer”. Because there’s nothing wrong with being queer and people can’t do shit against that.