I’m a southerner. Take what I’m about to tell you as close to the grain of the problem as possible, because it is.

Here’s the thing. 9 times out of 10, a Southern man is going to meet a lone trans or gay person, have a pleasant experience talking to them and go about their day, they even make friends with the person, spend years talking to them, send gifts, become family members, etc.

But you know what?

Behind closed doors, it’s “fuck those trannies”, “not in my schools”, etc. My mom does it, her sister does it, my dad did it. It’s hypocrisy at an extreme level while also ignoring it at an extreme level.

“Well I have gay friends… I’m not homowhatzit”

THEY’RE TEACHING WHAT!?

“Double Standard” might as well be the tagline for the entire South. They’ll protect their religion and the expectations put on them by their parents and social norms on a general level across the board, while still shaking hands and eating cake with their lgbtq+ buddies.

Just remember any southerner is one thought from God away from stabbing you in the back at all times, because no matter how close you get to them, even as a family member, that book and the expectations behind it means more, was beat into them more, every day since they were born until you met them.

Fear, control, indoctrination, tribalism, double standards, poor mortal character, hypocrisy, and because it ‘makes them feel icky’ and so they have to be loud and obvious about it so that they’re community sides with them and doesn’t suspect that they’re (allegedly) total closet cases.

Hating gays isn’t cool anymore and will get backlash even from conservatives.

Trans people are the new gays in this sense

They’re conservative. The whole name is based on the principle that they want to maintain the old way rather than progress. I think it stems from fear of a changing world. The old world with the old rules provided safety, it was understandable, the rules were clear, and the rules didn’t hurt them. Now some people are “attacking” their world, their rules, everything that offers them safety and understanding. So they feel attacked.

It’s the same thing, but with another subject every time. Whether it is women getting rights, which threatens their safe world with clear gender roles. Or gay people, who threaten the simple rules like “boys love girls”, “in order to be successful, get a job, marry, and get kids”. Or non-white people getting rights. What if they vote for things that “we” don’t want? What if “they” ruin the world that “we” got so used to.

Trans and especially non-binary people are just the next group in line that threatens their simple world. When men are people born as men and women are people born as women, it’s way easier to force people into the traditional roles. The old rules still work, “boy marries girl, gets kids”. And when they speak out about their "concerns* they are (rightfully) called out for it. So they become defensive and start doing whatever they’re doing now.

Because of tropes like https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreepyCrossdresser from movies like Silence of the Lambs, Dressed to Kill, and Psycho. It puts the idea of men dressing like women as a means of tricking women to attack them into the collective unconscious.

Because Trump spent $19 million on transphobic ads during football games in battleground states. Because they need a Boogeyman to rile up their base.

It doesn’t have to make sense. You might as well be asking how can the KKK hate people of color or how can Nazis hate Jewish people.

Nazis do this dumb thing where they go “hey that small and therefore relatively defenseless group (badassness of individuals aside) is the cause of all our problems, let’s kill them to solve everything!”

Surprisingly, it never works.

So they do it again with somebody else, and somebody else, and somebody else, until everybody on earth is killed by nazis or somebody stops them.

As for why anybody is dumb enough to fall for it in the first place…it’s anybody’s guess.

FYI

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nashville-christian-school-shooter-appears-former-student-police-chief-rcna76876

They’re people, just like the rest of us. Some are great, some are not.

Since when do conservatives care about mass shootings?

As someone who grew up in a conservative household in a deep red state, I think that part of it is that a lot of people are letting Lizard Brain dictate their response to transgender people.

Let me give you a personal example. A while back, I went to a social dance, and there was a trans woman there. Before the dance starts proper, the couple that runs it will teach a dance lesson, and we rotate partners while that’s going on. Eventually, I was rotated into being her partner. For some background, she was obviously early on in her transition; she still looked like a dude in a dress, she didn’t quite have the appearance down yet. But she gets huge props for not only having the bravery to go out as herself, but doing it in fucking Arkansas.

So I rotate over to her, and it dawns on me that she’s trans. In my head, Lizard Brain immediately starts screaming. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?! THIS PERSON IS OBVIOUSLY A DUDE IN A DRESS, HE MUST BE UP TO SOMETHING IF HE’S DRESSING AS SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAN WHAT HE IS! RABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLE”

Keep in mind, where I grew up, you just didn’t see trans people, and even now, it still tickles that primal part of my brain that was trained to be uncomfortable around people who aren’t white and straight.

The difference between me and many of the people I grew up around is that I recognize that it’s happening and try to tone Lizard Brain out when it starts screaming. A lot of other people listen to it and don’t care that the person that it’s screaming about is exactly that: a person.

Uneducated people in rural areas struggle very much with understanding their experiences of others, and have very strange ideas about how the world works. I told my grandmother I wanted to move to Chicago - she’s convinced I’m going to get gang murdered. (She would be horrified if I told her about wandering around LA on foot)

The idea that there are options other than cisgender heterosexual people is threatening to their understanding of their world. Many have not thought about their gender or sexuality; it’s assumed that you’ll get married to the opposite sex, get gender appropriate jobs, have kids, and go to church on Sunday. That’s what life is in Anadarko or Siloam Springs. Many also struggle with unaddressed trauma from the opioid/fent crisis, or military service - so they think the appropriate response to anguish about your body should just be to just cope with it.

Many of these men are secretly bisexual. Many, many, many heterosexually married men seek out sexual encounters with gay men on the side. They would never want to be in a relationship with a man or someone they perceived as a strange, mentally defective man - for many of them that would also assault their understandings of a relationship as more of a property thing. They feel guilty about porn usage, especially the Christian ones, but externalize it as hatred.

The woman are miserable and are committed to making everyone else miserable as well. You gain power in those communities by policing others, especially young women. They are threatened by the idea that they weren’t locked into compulsive heterosexuality and performative femininity. There was a possibility that they could have graduated college, or not had children.

They get the program though. They’re proper Puritans. If life is suffering then the only joy to be had is in watching other people. And what better target than those who are defying our most basic sociological roles? These are the same people who host gender reveal parties - it matters to them. So it must matter to everyone else.

That’s my guess as a trans man at least, obviously I’m biased.

They’re a convenient political target because it makes insecure men not want to be associated with them. Believe it or not, a similar thing happened last time Republicans won the popular vote in 2004 - back then the issue was gay marriage. Bush went hard on opposing that and it helped him win.

Gender and separation of humans based on those lines have been a thing for longer than humans even called themselves “humans”, and transpeople threaten that. So it triggers a flight or fight reflex in people who aren’t used to the concept.

I find when people know me for awhile and THEN find out I’m trans, their reaction is less “I’m scared”, and more “That’s neat”, but if people find out I’m trans before they get to know me, they will be hostile the whole time.

I’ll try actually answer the question and get hated for it I’m sure rather than circle jerking something to the top. But I think it goes like this.

Imagine you had a ball and a cube. Then everyone agrees the ball is a ball and a cube is a cube. Been like this as long as anyone remembers.

Then suddenly someone comes around and says one of those cubes is special and is actually a ball. Then everyone agrees that person is mental. Years go by and more people start saying that some cubes are balls and you feel like you are losing you mind. You know what a ball is, everyone knows what a ball is! How can anyone say a cube is a ball. People attack you for it. People say you are wrong that you are hateful, horrible but you know! Surely everyone knows this is a joke.

They started painting cubes to look like balls and everyone acts like they are balls. But you know they aren’t balls.

You are happy to group them on different measures. Sure some balls and some cubes are red, some are yellow. Both balls and cubes can be spiky, sure balls are more often spiky but there is nothing wrong with a spiky cube. Each to there own. Most cubes are smooth but some balls are smooth. That’s fine.

There are a million and one ways to group these shapes. But at the end of the day a cube is a cube and a ball is a ball. Anything else is madness and you’re not standing for it. You can group them however you want, choose whatever is the most important, fine is doesn’t matter. But don’t say something that is obviously a cube is a ball and what is obviously a ball a cube. You can’t change the definition of a cube to be what that shapes feels it is, that’s meaningless. It defeats the purpose of the word. Sure make a new word but don’t use that word.

Because fascists need a ~scary other~ to scapegoat to erode everyone’s rights.

Religious people control their kids through the village support system of their church. Some kids are learning things at public school which are not in line with those beliefs. This is scary for parents. Parents don’t want to lose their children, and can’t imagine loving them as somebody else. Case in point Elon And his trans daughter Vivian.

I’m quite liberal and atheist, but the prospect of a transitioning child is troubling to me. While I’d have no problem supporting a gay child, I feel very strongly about body acceptance, and I reject body dysmorphia. Transitioning to another gender is to me, not too different from a woman who wants augmentation surgeries or a man who is taking steroids. That said I could care less what anybody else does. I think cosmetic surgery and steroids should be legal. I don’t think the government needs to be involved. It’s a decision to discuss with a child, doctor, and parent.

I guess what I’m saying is, I can empathize with the transphobia of conservatives. Where we differ is in how we deal with that fear. They want the government to make society conform to their beliefs. I think it’s up to the individual parent to grow the love in their heart to accept and love whatever their child decides to be.