10
votes
The perpetual discourse over who comes to Pride, and what they look like, explained
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- Title
- Can Pride even be radical or kinky if it's sponsored by Target and JPMorgan?
- Authors
- Alex Abad-Santos
- Published
- Jun 2 2021
- Word count
- 2187 words
Been watching this discourse play out online on social media this year and I find the argument of kink at pride a tiresome one, especially when 30+ legislatures are pushing cookie cutter anti-trans legislation across the nation. This is not just a US issue - in many places around the world there is a significant conservative push against trans rights in response to the growing visibility of this marginalized community. I find it rather disconcerting that the focus is on this stupid conversation, instead of redirecting towards matters which will likely cause unnecessary suicide of transgender youth and harm to those who are not (genital inspection laws) as well as other legally protected discrimination against transgender individuals. There are much bigger threats we should be focusing our efforts on discussing.
Agreed. I don’t love telling people what they should and shouldn’t care about, but I feel like if assertions about kink at Pride muster up someone’s anger (regardless of whether they’re in favor of its presence or absence), then widespread and systematic infringements of trans people’s rights, dignity, and safety should really piss them off.
The fact that this doesn’t seemingly hold true for many people makes me wonder whether there’s a widespread misalignment of priorities within our community, or if the people getting mad with regards to kink simply aren’t very deeply invested (if at all) in our community in the first place. It sounds judgmental as hell when I phrase it like that, but I don’t know how else to put it. Part of being LGBT to me means that when some of us are hurting, we share that hurt even if it’s not our own. And there is far more hurt out there from anti-trans sentiment and legislation right now than there is from having/barring kink at Pride.
I honestly think it's because the main use of complaining about Kink(y people & their 'stuff') at pride and corporate participants is:
So entry-level conservatives associate LGBT pride with corporations trying to get your money and use that to argue the establishment is socially liberal and thus social liberalism is bad in order to tie this perception of pride with LGBT rights and people, or to claim LGBT discrimination is not a problem anymore
(and probably a meme or 2 about how the Saudi/Russian/Polish divisions are based for not celebrating pride.)
So more overtly homophobic conservatives associate LGBT rights and people with the most outrageous forms of bondage, perhaps being applied to them.