• Cadende [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    4 days ago

    yeah. felt like an attempt to “call their bluff” as if they were bluffing about hating her. Did she genuinely think if she seemed normal-christian-white-girl enough they wouldn’t touch her? Or maybe that part about “I know that you won’t arrest me” was just the catholicism talking and she actually understood she would probably be arrested. She did seem to have some idea of the risks. Still a needless stunt, I can’t imagine this getting through to many people :(

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      4 days ago

      I’m still stuck on what she said. It’s extremely USAmerican to say, “I’m not a political activist,” and then do political activism.

      • Cadende [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        4 days ago

        Yeah its honestly an affront to language and words how this concept has shaken out… as political action of any kind and caring about things have become so demonized

        What she’s saying is “I’m one of the normal ones, I’m just like you, I’m not political

        Some parts hide it better than others but the US is a deeply fascist society

      • Nacarbac [any]@hexbear.net
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        4 days ago

        Big part of liberalism. Create a false division of “political” and “private”, where to be political is icky and taboo and has nothing to do with the task of human coexistance, and being a private individual is cool and fun and allows you to be a small god within your dominion.

    • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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      4 days ago

      It may have gotten into interesting territory if instead of going to the Capitol herself, she had a cis girl look-alike go in her place, and pretend to be her.

      I wouldn’t expect it to change much but there would be some spectacular gears grinding in the process of detaining a cis woman for entering a bathroom, on suspicion of being a trans woman entering a bathroom.

      The winning perspective here is that a bathroom police is eventually going to come for us all.

        • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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          4 days ago

          It’s a crime to impersonate a cop or politician, and impersonating public figures often is in conjunction with fraud. But a private citizen who consents to it? I don’t think there’s a case there.

          • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.netM
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            3 days ago

            Its pretty common for cops to fuck with trans people on impersonation charges. Like if you look like a girl but ID says male they’re going to mess with you

            • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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              3 days ago

              The cops would only be interacting with the accomplice in the situation, not the trans woman.

              The goal would be to see if they jump the gun in their eagerness to arrest a trans woman and don’t look closely enough to realize that they’re just barging into a bathroom and arresting a cis woman.

    • WoodScientist [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      4 days ago

      Did she genuinely think if she seemed normal-christian-white-girl enough they wouldn’t touch her?

      There are definitely some strains of thought of that kind in parts of the trans community, especially among the trans medicalist folks. There’s a subset of trans folks that believe the present upsurge in bigotry is due to the presence of nonbinary people, polyamorous folks, and any other trans folks that don’t present as conventional binary heterosexual. Her vibe really screams that. “I just have to show these police that trans people can be perfectly normal, and they’ll leave us alone!”

      I see this belief as a tragic and misguided self-defense mechanism. It’s really hard to accept that there are simply people that will hate you for no reason. It is deeply hard to accept that there are people that want you dead, and there is nothing you can do to dissuade them. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if trans people simply all acted “normal,” then the hate would go away. This kind of thinking is comforting to some people. It at least provides a path out of the nightmare the trans community finds itself in. If we all just became straight-presenting, then everyone would leave us alone. It provides a kind of desperate hope. There is some path forward for the trans community to escape bigotry. If we just assimilate, we can end the madness.

      In truth the recent upswing in anti-trans hate has nothing to do with the existence of nonbinary or any other less conventional form of trans folks. People that we would now call nonbinary have existed for generations. The recent upswing in hate is entirely artificial and the result of a deliberate propaganda campaign by Republicans. They lost on the same-sex marriage issue, they managed to overturn Roe, and now they need a new moral panic to rile up the base. That’s it. The trans community could be composed entirely of trans women that look and act like this woman and trans men that look and act like frat bros, and the recent upsurge in anti-trans bigotry would still have occurred. They needed someone to hate, so they found someone to hate. It’s fascism 101, always find and target the Other.