No Stupid Questions

I don't know if it's just Reddit and Lemmy, but it feels like the internet in general just started trending heavily towards transgender-related stuff in the past few years. Just references to Femboys and trans flags all over the place, it's kind of weird how quickly it gained such traction. I don't have any problem with the trans community, if any of my kids came out as LGBTQ+, I would love them just as much. In high school I literally wore dresses and got beat up and made fun of for being different (more for the punk/goth aesthetic), so I've had some understanding of what they go through, even if I don't identify with any of it personally. I sympathize with what they're going through right now given that an entire political party has decided to turn them into scapegoats.

And I think it's great that they're building a community around themselves and are able to find other people that accept them for who they are, but I find their online communities tend to be incredibly hostile and militant to anybody that is less than completely loyal to the cause. Even just asking questions, giving opinions, or commenting any sort of criticism of their militant behavior gets you banned if you're not 150% supportive. Anything you say is twisted around to make it seem like you're a bigot who completely hates trans people and you're essentially a nazi. It tends to be incredibly negative, like they're looking to be outraged at the slightest provocation. Their tactics tend to be incredibly heavy-handed, just absolutely no tolerance for Cisgender people not understanding their lifestyle.

So I've just started blocking trans and furry content because I just don't care to see it. It's just not my bag, nothing against people that are in that community. The same way nobody else would really care to see if I made posts glorifying heterosexuality and being a boring vanilla binary white guy, I'm just not interested in celebrating lifestyle choices simply for the sake of celebrating it. I'll go to LGBTQ+ weddings and I'll defend anybody's right to love whomever they want or be whatever they want to be, but I just have other things I'm more interested in reading about. Board games, science, technology, politics, climate change, graphic design, art, music, movies, and whatever else other than someone else's sexual identity. Maybe that makes me closed-minded, I don't know, I thought the point was equality?

Gays are to Boomers as Trans is to Gen-X ers. I've been wondering what the marginalized group Millennials are going to have trouble with. My current guess is Poly, but that is just a guess at this point.

Not sure about transgender posts, but the communist posts are probably because other platforms are owned by huge corporations, and huge corporations generally don't like communism. Lemmy can never be bought by a huge corporation (at least not entirely).

IDK, I see tons of left and trans content on YT and Twitter, for example. That is because that's the type of content I like, and the type of people I follow. I suspect what you're noticing isn't so much the presence of communism and trans people, but the absence of dumb shit.

I would expect it's due to suppression on mainstream platforms.

And unlike hate-based subcultures like you find in conservatism or disgust-based subcultures present in traditionalist circles which require some ~~targets to criticize~~ hosts to sink their mandibles into and suck the blood out of, the LGBTQIA+, Anti-capitalist, Furry, Weeb, etc subcultures are quite happy existing without the presence of bigots, corpo-simps, or chuds in general.

Lemmy is a free open source software project. People into FOSS like the idea of something being built by a community to the benefit of everyone and not being controlled by any one person or company who could seek to benfit only themselves. It makes sense that their political ideology mirrors that.

FOSS and just programming and tech in general have an unusually large number of trans people. I'm going to be honest, I'm not exactly sure why. I can only assume because programmers are judged based on their code and not their appearance.

I’m not entirely sure that is the case, but I’d believe that if one forms part of a group that has non-conformity to a general standard as part of the expected traits to belong, that same behavior will apply to other aspects of the life of the person.

Idk but I mostly block all communities involving the former (but the latter doesn’t bother me at all). I don’t use lemmy to argue politics or first world problems, especially with people who are often incredibly hostile to dissent

The way I understand from what I've seen and read is that these are mostly people who were banned, shunned or chased away from other platforms. While Reddit can ban you, you can just spin up an instance of Lemmy, Mastodon or whatever yourself and play by your own rules.

Interestingly, on Reddit there were tons of trans related posts and comments, but what I see here (and other fedi platforms) is trans people posting whatever interests them, and not about being trans. It's like they can just be themselves without people constantly talking about or questioning their identity.

People congregate where they feel safe. Sometimes that looks like the nerdy introverted kid living life on the internet when their immediate community doesn't understand them, and the roles they're expected to play don't work for them. Turns out a lot of nerdy introverted kids who felt misunderstood by their families were trans, which isn't too surprising.

What's interesting to me is that most trans-people in tech are AMAB, and I think that reflects computers being seen as an ok "masculine" hobby (in lieu of sports or cars, etc.) . I often wonder where all the AFAB transpeeps end up instead, I know they're somewhere!