I want to do something for International Down With Cis Day, but ideas fail me. Every year since I started at FtB has gotten materially worse for trans rights and the well-being and safety of trans lives. I hold the shitbird governor of Texas as especially emblematic of the whole situation – blatantly using open bigotry to score political points, bible bashing while using rhetoric generously provided by terfs, pushing for the worst anti-LGBT policies this side of China or Iran.
So I think, meme his ass. Political cartoon like this was 1922. But nothing comes to mind except depictions of him on the receiving end of terrible violence – you know, madame guillotine putting in an appearance, somebody setting him on fire and kicking him off a cliff, etc. Not funny, not a good look.
Hm…
https://www.google.com/search?q=respect+existence+or+expect+resistance+trans
Not bad, but still feels wildly inadequate to the struggle right now. We’ll see what we’ll see.
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American politics has moved past the point where it can be remotely funny, I think. It’s warping everyone around it, it’s so sick. My idea of “humor” runs toward drawing and quartering nowadays and a little voice tells me “too soon.”
sean bean got drawn and quartered in a movie once, right? i should track that down and video edit abbott’s face onto him. deep fake murder fantasia… wait, no, I should not do that. no homicidal ideations, nope.
I forget the specific wording, but once saw a meme? that said something along the lines of “respect my trans sibling’s pronouns, or I’ll make your pronouns to was/were”
Kinda similar energy to the “be nice to animals (or I’ll kill you)” tshirt
i like that, loch. feels good.
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It’s hard to make the humor biting enough to sting without leaning into some of the **foolish** crap they believe enough to make fun of it. But without being a member of the group that has to deal with that dumb crap in the first place, it’s hard to know which bits you can ridicule without also dredging up bad feelings from the targeted group.
And in situations like this, if your humor isn’t stinging the assholes then you’re doing it wrong.
-EDITED BY MOD
I edited your post for compliance with my possibly ridiculous ableism policy, but agreed. And it’s so difficult to make that humor work, I’m gonna do something else, if I can do anything at all.
Sorry about that. That reply was the end of a thought train where I thought of and tossed aside other replies before eventually settling on that one. I started describing a comic style response but realized it had a problem, and the problem became what I hit “post comment” on. The word choice slipped through while I was distracted with the process.
As far as responses to bigots… I think anything that makes them scurry like roaches to hide back under their rocks is the right response. Humor and ridicule can do that. Violence might work but it comes at a cost, whether verbalised or acted out. Shaming without humor works too as long as they don’t have some support mechanism like a Trump presidency to embolden them.
Trump is like a goblin king in a fantasy realm. Goblins on their own might be pests in a fantasy world but give them a goblin king and suddenly they want to take over the place and run things their way. That’s why the various responses to Charlottesville were both necessary and effective but didn’t bury that mess for at least a generation like it should have.