The American/Western right-wing is a threat to queer people worldwide
This is something I've been thinking about for a long while. I will try to briefly explain my reasoning.
I live in a country that's not a western country. It has plenty of its problems with right-wingers, and they certainly do hate queer people. However, for years I've been observing and interacting with these people. Many of them, especially teenagers, 20 and 30 year olds, use the language and rhetoric of the American/Western right-wing.
They constantly talk and complain about SJWs, even though there is barely any left-wing in this country, much less a "SJW" type. They talk about "blacks" infiltrating the tv shows, movies, games. They talk about black people as if they are invaders. An ex-friend of mine, whom I cut contact with because of his increasing radicalization due to right-winger brainrot on Twitter, even said they will come here and ruin our country, "like they did to Europe". He doesn't talk to or have any friends from another nation, and has said this due to the American and Western brainrot spreading on Twitter.
This is extremely weird, because nobody before recent times had a major problem with black people here, because it's an extremely rare occurance whenever you see a black person. So, even right-wingers didn't seem to pay any attention to them. But this all changed with the utter shit rhetoric spread by the American and Western right-wingers on social media sites.
This applies to queer people as well. I've heard and seen so much imported rhetoric that I'm amazed at the international connectedness of right-wing hate. For example, even though trans people never were the focus of any big attention on social media before, thanks to the weird "tranvestigation/infiltration" rhetoric spread by American and Western right-wingers on social media, local sites here started fixating on trans people, especially trans women. However, this in time spread to hating on queer people in general. Just the other day I reported a major hate speech graffiti I saw in my neighbourhood. Luckily it was removed, but I heard from friends similar recent occurances of this hate speech graffiti targeting queer people. Never before in my life I had encountered such a thing. I suspect the trigger was the propaganda spread by American and Western right-wingers.
Why did I create this topic?
Well, first of all, I wanted to share my story and observation.
Second, I wanted to bring attention to a problem I deem important.
And third, the userbase of this site seems to be mostly Americans, and I wanted to challenge an assumption many Americans seem to have—that hateful propaganda on social media seems to almost exclusively come from USA's enemies. No, American and by extension western right-wing is extremely strong. It has extreme reach and powerful rhetoric. It's a global problem. I've been paying attention to this topic since 2015, and in recent years more and more American alt-right rhetoric I've seen in 2015-2016 on American internet started being voiced here more and more.
So, I guess, queers from other countries, beware of American alt-right rhetoric. It has a powerful effect on local right-wingers in other countries, and you might benefit from studying and learning to deconstruct and fight it.
This is also another reason why USA's elections are everyone's problem. The internal power struggles and ideological battles there are exported to the rest of the world.
I feel like this is a well-documented phenomenon, just one that is ignored in America because 1) we have to live with these people, so their presence is normalized, and 2) the American media doesn't give a crap about internal politics of other countries. For those paying attention, though, the proliferation of Trump supporters in Canada, Europe and beyond is easy to see, as is the echoing synergy between the right-wing fringes of several countries.
More purposeful intervention like the concerted efforts of Evangelicals to reshape Uganda's laws on homosexuality is also something that has been going on in open view for ages.
The hateful propaganda has always been ours. Foreign actors definitely do their part to encourage it, but they wouldn't be able to start so many fires if we weren't so damn flammable.
Believe it or not, but the LGBT+ is actually fractured at the moment that a gay friend of mine dropped an "in-quote" among the circle, "Gay is the new straight." Gays have become so accepted (actually all of the LGBT+ minus T) that they have begun to swing right. Why? Well, according to my gay friend and his circles and extended circles at least, it's because eventually they fall into the same mid-to-upper class conundrum, which is that they want lower taxes, less immigrants due to competition and perceived unease about safety around immigrants, and so on. Mind you, the right is not just about brain rot hate speech. The right is also about a lot of other things like low taxes (despite being favourable to corporations), stricter border control, harsher punishments to offenders, and so on.
There are LGB+ (minus T) talking points about how the T community is actually ruining their image and souring relationships. For one, cultural studies have shown that M-F T's are really not that accepted yet by Women's Groups (not just TERFs, mind you), especially since the Paris 2024 Olympics have sowed talking points about Women's Category becoming an Open Category. Thus, the LGBT+'s ally (Women's) is soured because of this.
There are deeper conversations, but do note that the left is also not just about LGBT. The perceived rising cost of living, unemployment, and overall dissatisfaction is also why the LGB+ is tending rightward.
The thing that bothers me the most about the “LGB drop the T” crowd is that they are so incredibly ignorant about history. LGB history is also T history. There were trans people at Stonewall! They also fail to understand that they are repeating another part of history; by integrating themselves into this shitty worldview they are mirroring how groups like Italians and Irish people slowly became “white” so they could participate in the more politically powerful side of racism.
But they don’t even need to know these things to realize how shitty their ideas are and how it actively hurts real people.
And let's not forget the days when the U.S. Women's Rights movement leadership referred to lesbians as the "lavender menace". [They also failed to advocate for the rights and dignity of women of color.] I'm old enough to have had the conversation with a second-wave feminist about how slicing and dicing solidarity is a well-worn propaganda strategy for ensuring that people with common interests are too divided to succeed in their political aims.
Authoritarians always need out groups to identify as a common threat.
Being a women's group that excludes trans women is still transphobic. TERF is still an accurate description for how the word is used these days. Conservative women have always been anti-queer as a community. Because when women's rights became "standard" it became even easier for women to fall into conservative beliefs than it is for queer people. But trans women aren't a threat to women. And anyone who sells that line is not an ally in the first place.
The queer community has always had its share of racism, misogyny and intra-community conflicts. There's a reason there have been log cabin Republicans this whole time. And if people want to sign up for the Leopards Eating My Face party and be shocked when the leopards come for them, I suppose that's their choice.
I don't think the broader community itself is fractured. But I also don't think being queer puts you into a box that excludes you from being shitty.
I’m familiar enough with Leopards Eating Faces, but as someone outside the US, I’ve never come across “log cabin republicans” as a phrase... can you please point me to somewhere I can learn more about the phrase and its origins?
Wikipedia: Log Cabin Republicans
Wikipedia link
Sure thing they're a reference to Abraham Lincoln, and a group of primarily gay Republicans.
Oh gosh, they literally have a Wikipedia link. It’s a name/phrase I’ve never heard before, and it sounded like it could have been some reference (like how a remote cabin in the woods is a great setting for a horror movie or something) so I didn’t even think to do a search!
Thanks for the link, I’ll try to be more proactive next time and just search it out myself!
No worries, I didn't capitalize it to make it clear it was an actual group
I think the one thing that needs to be clear is that if what the right is espousing isn’t fascism, it is certainly close enough that a distinction isn’t terribly useful. They are a social movement that is based on feelings of superiority and upset over perceived slights from outside groups.
I can understand why people want to be accepting towards these people, but seriously, fuck that. They don’t know how dangerous that idea is. Do they not notice how powerful these people have become? Do they not realize how much damage their irrational beliefs have already done to our society within the last decade alone? I’d imagine they are ok with them because they are not LGBT or don’t have a functional uterus, but that is both a heartless position to hold and one that leads to self-destruction; as fascists gain power they will either start coming for them or they will have to join them and start speaking the same harmful rhetoric. Their ideology needs to be stamped out wherever it shows up, which is why I am so disappointed that our largest social media platforms let them stick around or even actively promote them.
I agree with @TMarkos; the voices spreading this are certainly domestic. I live in the state of California, and it seems that everyone around the world thinks this is a liberal utopia. But the reality is that the SPLC has identified more hate groups in this state than any other in the union.
Things are made worse in that our media is extremely forgiving and accepting of their ideas rather than denouncing them strongly and clearly. One of the podcasts I listen to did a two-part episode about it recently and the host published a write-up that covered the topic. It covers the historical rise of Nazi Germany and how it was covered both in Germany and the US.
I look at the SPLC map and it more or less looks like a population map. That California has the most hate groups is not particularly surprising given that California has the most people to form those groups. Texas, Florida, and New York are similar.
I am very curious to see such a density map normalized by population, say by state or by county. So far I haven't found one but I'll keep looking or see about building my own.
It really doesn’t matter if it matches population; the point is that that damaging ideology is literally everywhere in the US.
I disagree. Seeing if something matches population or not let's you understand where culture and policies are incentivizing or disincentivizing certain societal outcomes. Normalizing by population is a first step to understanding if there are local effects to explore further.
And I think tangiblelight's point is that population adjusted, California isn't necessarily any more (or less) hateful than the rest of the country, which someone could mistakenly get the impression of if they only look at absolute number of hate groups.
That's exactly my point. I suspect that the ugly truth is there's some fraction of the population everywhere that behaves this way. I suspect that normalizing this by population would be more or less a solid color on the map.
If that's not the case and there are islands of high population with no hate, you can ask what those places are doing right. Or, vice versa, what are the other places doing wrong.
Yes, but that's exactly what I was trying to say! This isn't a problem with just some small township or a single state; it's everywhere.
Maybe at one point there was just a few small concentrations of these kinds of groups or people who had these ideologies, but then we invented telecommunication. The ubiquity of the internet in combination with our complete unwillingness to regulate speech on it has meant that what could have been a localized tumor has metastasized and spread throughout not just the United States, but the rest of the world as well.
It's really good you reported it and the graffiti got removed! Just this August, some unknown people have sprayed anti-trans graffiti (calling for the murder of trans people) on two lgbt spaces in Munich (I've actually been to one of them a few times). A few weeks earlier, some people (possibly the same due to similar handwriting) also sprayed "Kill all Trans" and "Kill all Gays" on a train station and on a rainbow-colored bench in the same quarter (which is known for being the "gay neighborhood").
But more than a thousand people showed up to protest against lgbt-hate as a reaction, which is pretty great I think.
I definitely agree that many reactionaries use US-influenced rhetoric and talking points, but I don't think the issues where I'm from (Germany) are issues imported from the US (but I agree different flavors of politics, hate and so on could influence each other globally very easily, and I agree the US has a lot of cultural capital).
Germany has a long (and native) history of hate against lgbt people and against trans people and gender minorities specifically. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was founded in 1919 in Berlin, and later raided and forced to close by the Nazis. Magnus Hirschfeld started to get targeted in the 1920s by the burgeoning national socialists, and one of those incidents where he got beaten up took place in Munich, which illustrates the continuity of those issues in Germany quite well. It is definitely not merely an imported issue here, I would say it's mostly some of the old hate but sometimes dressed up in the modern language and cultural context of the anglosphere.
Even some disagreements and debates within the lgbt communities from back then resemble those which are still being had today, just dressed up in different language. For example, some German gays in the early 20th century tried to hold up the ideal of gay men being particularly masculine (with plenty of greco-roman aesthetics, glorification of soldiership, and racism), and they really hated Hirschfeld and his ideas of "intermediate sexual types", "third genders" and so forth, which kind of reminds me of the "LGB+ (minus T)" talking points of today that were mentioned by @flowerdance in their comment. There was a really nice exhibition in Munich about lgbt people in the early 20th century, and they still have some free online material if anyone is interested: https://www.nsdoku.de/en/tobeseen
I've also seen many right wing people arguing trans identity (and other lgbt topics) basically just being American imports, and that's just provably false. So personally, I'm always a bit skeptical when people argue certain sociological or political issues are American imports, but I obviously don't know how it is in non-western countries etc.
Yeah, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say USA or "the west" is the only actor to blame. And for that part, any right-wing hate that happens here, first and foremost the right-wingers here and their beliefs are to blame. They've been hateful toward women's, minorities', and workers' rights even before the rise of the American alt-right propaganda. However, what I'm trying to illustrate and bring attention to is two-fold.
First is based on the fact that this site, like many places on the English-speaking internet, is a US-centric space. So, US's international right-wing propaganda through social media and the internet in general tends to get ignored. So, it's barely talked about. If this site's userbase mostly consisted of another big power, like Russia or China, these blindspots would be different and so would the resulting conversation I've started. As it is, while having these discussions, I think it's good to keep in mind that USA, through social media sites and such, spreads a lot of right-wing propaganda.
Second is that right-wing is ironically very connected online and internationally. They are united in their hatred toward women and minorities (I'd say anti-worker propaganda is a bit more varied, as there are many countries with populations that skew toward economically left-wing beliefs). I think this is an important reason why interconnectivity, internationality, and intersectionality, all those buzzwords, are important for left-wing worldwide. We need to coordinate, counteract, and overcome the rise of right-wing, because it hurts a lot of people and it may go to even worse places. Plus, this provides us with an opportunity to become better than even before, so there's a positive aspect to this anxious ordeal.
Gender, sexuality, and family are such fundamental controls on the human psyche that every authoritarian scheme throughout history, regardless of geography, has used them as othering tactics. I can point to patriarchal Islamic and Jewish gender segregation, Stalinism, Nazism, the Taliban, Boko Haram, the imposition of Christian morality on colonized nations (e.g. the British Raj did a great deal of harm to Hindu norms of gender and sexuality)...
I think you're also not taking into account the rapidity with which Westernized ideas of human rights and LGBTQ+ freedoms have spread globally, and the corresponding speed of backlash.
Global gendered propaganda has been facilitated by the power of microtargeted messages and state actors who are adept at running bot armies and controlling information channels. This is a problem everywhere, from Brazil to Iran to India to Russia to Indonesia to Nigeria.
Absolutely, there's coordination of the backlash from Western nations. The U.S. right wing is, relatively speaking, extremely wealthy and has centuries of experience promoting its narratives, in tandem with a network of Christian religious outreach.
But don't underestimate the enormously rich carbon barons, who also use Orthodox Christian religion (Russia and the Baltic states, Greece) and Islamic religious networks.
I absolutely agree with you that the global human rights narrative is failing to achieve the reach and resonance of authoritarian messaging. Some of that failure is attributable to the fact that Western nations don't match universalist words with universalist actions (archive link). Non-capitalist global institutions like the United Nations are inadequately funded, frail and failing.
It's no surprise that people who are struggling to meet their material needs, or in fear of declining living standards, will be vulnerable to traditionalist messaging. We're in desperate need of solidarity and science to overcome the climate change-induced polycrisis, let alone the daily suffering of billions from the loss of basic necessities and freedoms.