To the editor:
I am replying to Madison Mason’s letter of Dec. 14.
The word “transphobia” has lost all meaning. Nowadays it is used in an attempt to discredit everyone whose comments a sensitive person doesn’t like, no matter how true.
People have done this to the word “racism” and all other -ism words. Simply call someone one of these names, and you think they will shut down their beliefs and agree to yours.
This may have been true if it were actual transphobics or racists that you were trying to silence. This is no longer the case.
You just blatantly called the town bigots. “In Perry, people who aren’t white, straight or middle class are deemed failures or are targeted by residents of Perry, and I blame that on a bigoted community.”
This is why you will keep facing backlash. You took a whole group of people and labeled them based on interactions with specific individuals. This is exactly the ideology you claim to be against.
We take a group, separate them by color and then call them names and try to get others to join you in your assault on people you don’t even know. This is actual racism and bigotry, and it’s amazing to most people that you don’t have the self-awareness to realize that your own rhetoric is the embodiment of the things you say you are against.
It’s hypocrisy on full display and very telling of your view on people who don’t agree with you or don’t identify with your ideology.
Forcing people to use speech that is totally nonsensical and unscientific is the kind of tyranny that starts civil wars.
We have now taken this view to its logical endpoint: total subjectivism, requiring the destruction of any and all conflicting viewpoints or data. No one should ever be able to compel someone else’s speech either by law or, as we see now, societal pressure.
In other words, your personal fulfillment would require not merely an interior sense of identity but a sense of identity cheered and celebrated by everyone else. If all goes well, you would have people jailed for not going along with what we already know isn’t true.
It doesn’t matter to me or anyone I can think of what you want to call yourself or identify as, but it must be you who expresses that to an individual. You shouldn’t expect everyone you come across to know pronouns or what your situation is, and you should certainly not take a public platform to call your neighbors a bigoted community.
It’s a disgusting display of . . . well, bigotry.
Honestly, I don’t know how many more times you need to say that LGBTQIA+ people exist. People of color exist. Immigrants exist. (You forgot illegal immigrants exist also.) How does anyone not know that by now?
It seems like your identity and your color is much more important to you than the majority of people that just don’t care what you do.
By the way, I hate how the suffix -phobia is being used all the time. Transphobia? I don’t know anyone who is scared of trans people, and I don’t know anyone who actually hates them either.
Using the word “phobic” is an attempt at accusing others of a hate crime that only exists to someone who doesn’t want to acknowledge biological facts. The truth is not phobic or an opinion.
I don’t know who said what or what you heard that made you bring out your true prejudice side, but I’m sure it wasn’t me and, like many others, I don’t care to be convicted of something I was no part of.
I hope there aren’t very many more of you around. You need to do better and maybe think about what your prejudice is and where it comes from. Your whole point just took a backseat to your own hate and false accusations.
Give us a break with the trans stuff. Don’t try to make people say things that aren’t true. A name is a noun not a pronoun. We are no longer talking about men demanding that others identify them as “she/her” in contravention of all available objective science. We are now talking about people insisting that others call them vamp/vampself or kitten/kittenself.
It’s just asking people to participate in your delusion or your false reality. I’m sure if you asked someone to do so, it would be no problem. Demanding everyone to do so is just tyrannical and against people’s constitutional rights.
Either way, keep blanketing communities with a label like you did, and you will only see more backlash. It’s much more productive to call out a specific instance and confront that instead of calling my 93-year-old grandmother a bigot.
I haven’t seen any racists or bigots in town for a long time. It’s been probably 20 years since I’ve encountered an actual bigot that calls people of a certain skin color a derogatory name. Hopefully, I won’t have to meet another one after this. The very thread that is unravelling and destroying all societal decency.
Ian Clark
Perry
You were doing okay until your “(You forgot illegal immigrants exist also)” gave it away.
That trick’s old as the hills.