elon musk, mark zuckerberg, J.K rowling! Are the names that come to mind.
3 from different background: a African immigrant benefiting from government spending, an American smart young engineer, and a female English successful writer.
They are no politicians, and cant be accuse of trying to gather some vote. Multi-billions amongst them.
I get they lean to the right to protect their cash, with less tax and regulation. I get they are racist because they fear some poor people will take their cash.
But why the hatred for trans people ? It’s 1% of the population, they cant do anything, dont threaten anyone. There is no rational or psychological reason
*EDIT: I read all the comments. A lot of interesting explanation: smokescreen/scapegoat, maintaining the male/female power structure, new face of anti-gay , projection / self-hatred , just louder voice …
I realize, may be, I didn’t post a good question. May be it is less about the ultra-rich but more about why that rhetoric work on the general population (else it would not have taken hold as it does). For that I have a 2 cent theory: The raise of the cult of Nature we have since the global warming. The idea, that everything natural is better. The ugly version is only natural male and female are worthy*
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They may not be politicians but they spend money to get themselves into positions of political power as these few days have shown with Musk. And these people get most of their power from the masses that are dumb enough and bigoted enough to be swayed by a shared common hatred of groups to scapegoat for everything.
Transphobia, just like any form of queerphobia, serves the maintenance of property rights and the reproduction of the workforce that generates billionaires’ wealth. This is where the antagonism comes from.
Also, please don’t call Elon Musk that.
My conjectures:
Musk: Trans kid who disowned him for being shitty so obvipusly it must be trans peoples fault and not his.
JKR: I firmly believe she’s selfhating in the closet trans. The equivalent to the homophobic pastor who eventually gets caught with the choir boy. We just haven’t seen the choirboy yet.
Zuck: Not transphobic, just a sociopath (at worst) who will go whatever way the wind blows.
Poor, trans, minorities, leftists, educated, and even moderate Republicans are all under attack. These billionaires participate so they can be part of the fascist takeover of this country, not through any personal conviction.
They are frequently interviewed.
Which means they are frequently asked: “Why’s everything fucked up?”
They can’t give the real answer, which is “ultra-rich people”.
So they give no answer at all (in which case you don’t hear about it) or they cite the Enemy Of The Day.
My personal opinion is twofold:
- they need a diversion. Like a magician (or more accurate a pickpocket) they will take anything to make people blind while they amass their power. It is a sickness of the mind. They are addicted to power and ever anxious to loose it. Minorities are a good enemy for the people to blame the problems on that these people either cause themselves or dont want to take care of. In the past it was witches, nowadays it is other minorities.
- minorities have been fighting for a place in the world for a long time and there have been significant improvements. But that is not a positive development if you want to rule supreme. If you‘re power crazed, you need people to fall in line. Otherwise it wont work. We have ample evidence that only a sufficiently subdued population will not rise up against authority.
There are a lot of other good answers, but it seems worth remembering lots of poor powerless folks hate trans folks too.
Part of the reason they’re coming after trans people is because it’s human nature to hate or fear those you don’t understand and who are different. A dark, and sad part of human nature, but part of human nature nonetheless
All the other stuff folks are talking about is also a true, but it’s not like they’re unique in their contempt for people who are different
Mostly a people to blame and for others to fear monger, it’s a way to make people look the other way also, a common “enemy” instigated from the true enemy. And sense there is not a lot of trans people statistically it’s hard for them to defend themselves. It’s all about manipulation and control over the people
You can’t get ultra-rich while being a compassionate person
This, and all the more nowadays, because anything progressive has been intrinsically linked to a change of the Status Quo. And those trillions of fun bucks in the mattress (as well as their self-importance and self-perceived relevance) must be protected from those pesky Socialists!
preface: conjecture
musk and zuckerberg benefit from “othering” a group so that the majority of people get caught up in arguing about the rights of that group. While you’re busy being distracted by that they can push for agendas that benefit their companies and personal wealth, which inherently fuck you over.
musk does seem to have a personal vendetta as well given his issues with his trans daughter but I truly think this is ancillary to enriching his wealth and power. He also seems to love getting involved in topics that rile people up because deep down he’s a 14 year old reddit troll
rowling is double down and attention. She has a shit take, posts about it, people call her out. She’s a literal billionaire “beloved author” used to being surrounded by hangers on so being challenged wrecks her shit. Rather than reflect and look at scientific consensus she doubles down on her shit take. Because of people like above this gets her increasing amounts of attention and relevance so her beliefs are reaffirmed and deepened constantly. Now she’s consulted to speak authoritatively on the matter despite having no actual qualification other than being a rich lady who got into twitter arguments about it
Many of these apply to nobodies as well. Your stupid anti trans neighbor benefits from “othering” someone because it gives them someone to deflect blame onto. For most of American history it was black people, or Hispanic people, sometimes Jews, basically any minority. They also will double down when called out on shit takes and will absolutely respond to attention given for shit takes.
Because there are alot of ignorant people in the world afraid of what they perceive as different.
In your first two examples, regardless of not being politicians it’s clear that by helping put politicians in power they benefit, so whether they genuinely care or not, it’s just about money and lack of compassion to them. And continuing to drive class warfare continues to benefit them.
In your last example, I think that person is just in the ignorant and afraid of change category with an unfortunate amount of exposure.
They want you fighting a culture war to keep your mind off the class war.
The mainstream “left”, such as the Democrats benefit from this too.
Draw the national party lines between bigoted and non-bigoted. Now everyone can fight over that and nobody has to address the fact that two thirds of the country want universal healthcare.
A lot of them genuinely hate us. Don’t discount that.
No doubt. But if you look at the whole ecosystem, a lot of them are just maggots that are personally indifferent but are happy to get people killed to secure a pay rise.
Musk might have fried his brain hotboxing farts with his sycophants. Someone like Thiel however; I can’t imagine he really cares but he’s happy to fund whatever dorks will start a podcast about why they “left the left” because that shit will - he’s hoping - get people to vote for politicians that give him more economic power.
trans people are a threat to the status quo of the patriarchal-capitalist Gender regime. the ideology of patriarchal capitalism is that your gender assigned at birth is immutable and there are only two. in patriarchal capitalism your gender defines a lot of what path your life will take, the societal expectations placed on you, and importantly what opportunities and privileges are afforded to you. obviously the setup is men dominating and oppressing women which has been going on for far longer than capitalism but worsened significantly under it. the division of reproductive labour is the social basis of gender. according to traditional gender roles, women are expected to act as broodmares to reproduce more worker stock and also perform most or all domestic labour in essentially a slave role. the existence of trans and trans nonbinary people disproves the two axioms on which this all rests, that your gender is immutable and one of just two. gender in capitalist ideology is little more than a tool or system of oppression, and by existing and living our lives as we see fit and not railroaded by traditional expectations based on assigned gender at birth, we show clearly that it doesn’t have to be that way. so to answer your question they come for us because we are a genuine threat to capitalist patriarchal orthodoxy, we show by our actions and existence that a better social order is possible, one where individuals are actually afforded self-determination instead of being locked into a predetermined role based on what genitalia you are born with.
sorry it’s kinda an incoherent thought dump, there is plenty more to say this is just a quickie of the root superstructural reasons that we are perceived as a threat to patriarchal capitalism. of course, most transphobes won’t have these specific reasons in mind (in fact probably couldn’t comprehend them at all due to ignorance) and have just been convinced by capitalist propaganda and transphobic media to hate us because we are icky etc. the prevalence of misogyny also is why it’s so easy to get people to be transphobic, a lot of it just boils down to either “hah! why would a man want to be a woman?”, or “hah! a woman could never be a man”.
I just want to add that it’s not just the idea of gender being immutable, it’s identity as a whole. So much of society is built around stuff like legal names. They use them to track and control people. And then trans people are out there deciding to change them just because we want to, or using prefered names that don’t match our legal names. The idea that people can just decide who they want to be is threatening to them.
Correlation is not causation.
Personally I just think they’re just pandering some group of people who have real power to determine how money flows in a society and they happen to be right wing conservatives.
US democracy is collapsing and the future throne is probably already set and they might have inside information.
Like you said, trans people can’t really do anything. Perfect target when you want to show where you are planning to stand.
