You see, the hate groups won't admit it publicly, (well, most of them, a few have conceded), but they know they've lost this contrived culture war against gays. They still fire volleys but there's no gunpowder left in those shells.
They know that more and more people actually KNOW real gay people. And knowing real actual flesh and blood gay people dispels all the fearmongering bogeyman stories that the Religious Reich likes to spin to scare the fearful and ignorant into giving them money. They know their donor base is either dying off or waking up.
The problem is that these hateful people, who swear they're not bigots while blatantly lying through their teeth about gay people to sow fear, NEED that donor money to survive, because as hateful and dishonest as they are, there's pretty much NO other way for them to have an income that grants them the life they've built on the backs of gay people. They NEED to have a bogeyman, an intangible "other" they can use to terrify the ignorant into paying for their mansions and caviar.
And so, while trans folks have always had to deal with ignorance and hatred, even FROM gay people, the Religious Reich in the United States has heavily ramped up the transphobic bile of late, stirring up more anti-trans fear than ever before, and it's working.
Articles about trans stories like that of Coy Mathis have always attracted ignorant hateful and stupid people to the comments sections. But of late the transphobic bile has multiplied. Where it used to be reasonably balanced in comment sections between the ignorant haters spouting bile and actual trans folks countering them with facts and reality, lately the haters seem to be drowning us out, overwhelming us with sheer numbers and shouting over us to drown us out. The hate is a flood now and it's difficult to not drown in it.
And it's Religious Reich hatemongrrs like Tony Perkins, Peter Sprigg, Jennifer Roback Morse, Brian Brown, Peter LaBarbara, and Linda Harvey ramping up the whole "Transsexuals are just men in dresses who want to rape your women and children in bathrooms!!!" Meme that has caused this sudden surge in trans hate.
You'll note they almost never discus trans MEN when they spout their bile. Trans men don't even exist in their eyes.
And that makes it even more important now more than ever for us to stand up to these professional bullies, to counter their every lie with the truth, to dissect their dishonest fearmongering with facts and reality.
To show the world we matter as much as anyone else and have every bit as much right as everyone else to be protected from discrimination and abuse under the law.
No matter how hard it gets, how much bile we have to wade through, how hopeless it often seems, we MUST keep fighting. The Gay lobby isn't going to stick their necks out for us. WE have to fight for our right to exist.
Because the haters are getting us killed. And we have to disarm their transphobic bile as the gays did their homophobic bile, and render their bigotry impotent and powerless.
Because the alternative is just rolling over and dying. And that is no alternative at all.
