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*
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.
Scapegoating
Oh so now we’re blaming the goats
what the heck!
Gender is a load bearing brainworm for capitalist society. Capitalists need stratification, having a gradient of various degrees of precariousness for workers to experience that would push them into accepting a worse deal for selling their labor. Gender is clearly one of the primary ways to achieve this: an absolutely incredible amount of domestic labor is performed without compensation by women every day, and society would fall apart if it wasn’t. The rigid structure of the patriarchy is a key feature of this system, which means that trans people represent a clear break in that logic; if AFAB individuals can just choose not to be subjected to gender-based exploitation, it starts to rip the whole thing apart. Equally, transfeminine people represent another break in the opposite direction. The patriarchy is more or less incompatible with the existence of trans people, at least without significantly transforming itself.
very interesting take. Thanks
I wanna add that the way I formulated it is incomplete, or at least too partial to the functional perspective that someone who wishes to preserve the status quo would have. Obviously trans people don’t just “choose” their gender, it’s much more complicated than that. But I think it’s worth looking at things from this lens to understand why the billionaires in particular are recalcitrant about gender.
They will pick whatever group they think will suddenly put as many idiots as possible under their control when they say “GROUP A IS BAD”.
Most of them don’t care they are trans, they only care that they can take advantage of the oppression of a minority group in order to consolidate control over people so that they can oppress more people.
When everyone alive and dead is either oppressed or under your control, you become god. This is the goal, but they don’t care about the process to get there.
They saw /egg_irl and blame them for why eggs are now expensive.
Easy to scapegoat like most minorities that a large part of the population has never interacted with before.
Also, societal attitudes have changed to the point where at least open racism or homophobia aren’t really acceptable any more. So they needed a new scapegoat.
Divide and conquer. A united population is harder to subjugate.
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Its alla diversion.
Find some group that is different, then shit on them and make them look bad publicly while this relatively small group can’t so much to talk back publicly.
It’ll outrage the public, they’ll start looking at the group while trump and Co then go and rob the state blind while no one is looking
Yep.
To add to that, I’ve found a lot of people in the working class care a lot about class differentiators and will spend a lot of time trying to profess how they should be viewed at a higher relative ranking since they can’t rely on money or heritage to do it for them.
So, if you create an out group for them, a lot of them will latch on to that idea since it raises their relative value in a meaningful way.
As far as I can tell, they didn’t. J.K is a straight example, but Elon went looking for an edgy movement to align with, and Zuckerberg just wants to stay rich.
Your everyday regressives want to go after trans people because they don’t think they can take gay people on anymore. Some political movements have capitaised on this to gain their support, and have captured rich supporters as well because trans abuse is compatible with the rich continuing to gain more and more power.
How rich are the Wichowski sisters? You bet they’re not a fan of any of this.
Elon has a trans daughter
Huh. He wouldn’t be the first person to shit on their trans kid, I guess.
Yeah he blames society for taking his son from him basically
You might be right: it’s a rebranding of anti-gay sentiment.
I really think it is. Like you said, it’s such a small group there’s no rational, pragmatic reason for cis people to get upset.
Actually it’s because Elon thinks the “woke left” took his child away from him. Even though he was an absent father who was never around. He has a trans daughter who he refers to as his son because he’s a sack of shit.
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.
I always thought it was about power. Maintaining power structures requires a clear dividing line, somewhere. The line between women and men is artificially upheld, to create the illusion that there’s “naturally two categories in everything”. If people got the idea that you could “transition”, that would overthrow a whole lot of the artificial divides that we have in our society today.
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!
They keep you fighting a culture war so you don’t fight a class war.
The US right-wing was constantly bitching about “cancel culture” and now that they are in power they are cancelling everything they can.
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.