these things come up whenever the right wing needs a distraction. they have to keep finding new groups to blame society’s ills on, so that conservatives don’t realize it’s their politics that lead to those.

whenever a group inevitably becomes too accepted (or at least not feared enough) to be a distraction, they move on to the next group. sometimes they bring an oldie back because that’s fashion for you.

Astroturfing. Also, look up the genesis of the conservative media apparatus - specifically, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and how that whole thing came to be in the post-Nixon era. There’s a lot of context, and none of it was done in good faith. The intent was always to game social norms and leverage populist appeals to emotion into tribal ideologies (I.e. us-vs-them/ingroup-vs-outgroup). That’s ultimately the fundamental basis for conservatism.

The forces of reaction never went away, they just weren’t as narketable for a few years, there. Companies are trying to increase their marketshare among bigots while also not alienating the people that don’t hate gay people. So you get pinkwashed corporate logos and genocide along with cancelled gay shows and an increase in false history nouveau Westerns.

You’ve gotten enough good answers that I think it okay to address a tangent.

Things are definitely at the point where christofascists, and other hate driven ideologies are getting louder.

But, and this is vitally important as to why the pushback is making it a matter of public discourse at the level you’re asking about, there’s more allies now than ever.

Be ready for old man talking here, and ignore if not interested. Disclaimer: I have arthritis, and it’s easier to type gay than LGBTQ, so I’ll be using the shorter word for that reason, not as an exclusion.

Back in the seventies and eighties, gay rights was a thing for mostly gay people. Before that it had been gaining minor support, and the eighties were when social restrictions started changing enough that gay people were allowed to have some degree of public awareness in both news and fiction.

I keep bringing it up in various places, but Billy Crystal played the first recurring openly gay character on television. That was in 1977, and ran until 1981. I don’t think it can be said enough how huge that was in bringing awareness of gay people as just people was. That role brought gay into our homes and lives in a way nothing had before.

When something makes a group real to the majority, makes things stop being a dirty secret and just another part of life, you get kids growing up that are more open and accepting. As acceptance grew, so did the amount of people coming out.

As people came out, the straights realized that not only had they always known gay people, but they liked them, and even loved them for years, sometimes a lifetime. When that starts spreading, you have more people that are willing to support gay people and their rights as fellow humans.

Instead of being pariahs, gay people became part of life, part of our hearts. Eventually, more and more people that didn’t have direct relationships with someone gay became allies, supporters.

However, the more gay people became a part of life, the more noise bigots made, in their own homes and in public. So, instead of it being a dirty little secret nobody talked about, that way of thinking got nastier and louder. Before, it wasn’t something everyone would even know about until much later in life, but as the gay rights movement in the seventies started building up steam, you had more hatred being spewed as well. There had been before, but it was more likely to be handled with dismissive or contemptuous remarks rather than outright venom and bile in the open.

Now, us folks that were kids during the late 70s and early 80s didn’t just accept gay folks. We would often defy elders that opposed gay rights or bad talked them. As time passed and we grew up, the segment of that generation that became allies tended to be more and more vocal in our support. By the nineties, my generation was moving into adulthood and willing to vote our conscience. We were willing to put our time and money into the cause. Sometimes, we’d put our bodies on the line when things got ugly.

Move forward to now, and you’ve got two or three generations actively and loudly opposing the bigots, and not just the gay people. The bigots are smaller in number, but have been pandered to by political groups around the world, so have more weight than their numbers should give them.

Mind you, the bigots also include people of every generation too. Don’t imagine that there aren’t kids even that spew the same kind of nastiness that’s been used since before the 70s. But there’s more in direct opposition to them, and plenty of passive dismissal of the bigotry. Bigotry is not a relic of the past, nor is it limited to older generations; some of the loudest and most obnoxious hatred gets spewed by younger adherents. But the seeming percentage of hate is lower in younger generations, and the seeming percentage of outright support is higher.

That puts us in the situation we’re in, where hate has a bigger voice than it should, and love/acceptance has to shout louder to oppose it.

20 years ago we were killing people for being gay, 10 years ago that was the worst thing you could be, what are you on?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard

Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people’s understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.

It’s all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.

Like “There are trans rapists in women’s prisons”… Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery isn’t enough for trans women.

Or

“Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men”… When hysterectomy isn’t even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.

But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won’t.

The 1% needs to endlessly divide the working class against itself. It’s an old game with new tricks.

Because social media amplifies and incentives minority, hateful views to make it seem like everyone is concerned about these things.

The reality is, it’s the same small group of hateful idiots who are always in the spotlight.

In real life, even in small towns, people either don’t care or they celebrate how far we’ve come as a society.

It’s all about distraction. All of us seek entertainment because our lives are usually quite dull. So the media feeds us things to have opinions about. Politicians, big tech psychos, gender issues…

It’s all pointless and keeps us from actually making any real difference. People here on Lemmy fight over which words to use, gender issues, or god forbid, someone admits they are not vaccinated…! Wow. Nuclear bomb right away.

None of this matters at all, it’s just entertainment… Nobody changes their minds from getting downvoted either. Sometimes it feels like keyboard warriors here think they are fighting some kind of fight. But nobody changes their mind guys, even if you downvote them.

So it’s actually pure entertainment and distraction from what matters… :) We don’t have to be so serious.

Michael Parenti addresses this well:

Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploita­tive one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.

Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and power are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impres­sive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;’ "upper class;’ or “moneyed class.” And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the “ruling class.” The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion’s share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are them­selves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.

Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a sim­ple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into “conspiracy theory.” The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the “working class,” a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;’ for then one is talk­ing about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.

The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the sooth­ing adjective “middle.” Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt con­cern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of soci­ety. By including almost everyone, “middle class” serves as a conve­niently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actu­ality of class power.

The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimiza­tion: the “underclass.” References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society’s most vulnerable elements.

Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpe­trated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinc­tiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.

source

Cultural progressivism has been used as a shield to implement bad economic policies.

Wedge issues. Equal rights for everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation of ethnicity are something that we, as a society, actually solved decades ago that aren’t even a question. They were brought back into public discourse by corrupt people that seek to keep us distracted while they rob us all blind. The two party system in the US (and any nation that uses a FPTP voting system that limits us to a MAXIMUM of two viable parties) is a HUGE reason why they still exist.

The reason we still argue endlessly about these solved issues is that the two parties have decided to highlight those issues (as if there’s even a debate about them) because the super wealthy people at the top don’t want us talking about things that will cause us to stand up and demand improvements to our material conditions.

Conservatives have been furious about that progress this whole time. They will never accept progress. If permitted, they will undo every bit of anti-bigotry progress made in the last 100 years and return us to a slave-based economy.

Conservatism is a deadly social cancer. It always has been.

american school system. decades of wrong education by specialising while not having broader knowledge and making education a side hustle while college football is their slave business.

this has led to a mostly degenrated society. an idiocracy.

So you see something that concerned 2% to 15% of the population use to hide in the closet and or we didn’t talk about it or know.

Now people are done hiding. Which impacts tons of people who barely understand their anatomy let alone their wives. When school never taught intersex and gender despite it being a thing that was understood in science in the 60s and 70s. A lot of people are suddenly confronted with a reality they don’t understand. When peoples bubbles are popped first comes rejection of thing then comes fear and anger. Issue is with 8 billion people there is constantly people learning about sexual orientation, gender, and sex.

Let’s not even talk about the internalize confusion of you people either. This is just current existing people learning about this stuff today.