Earlier I mentioned that fascists love transphobia because it makes people cease to think.

Jasmine running

I also mentioned how it's beneficial to them to stigmatise the voices of trans (and gay) and neurodivergent people: An important way of controlling people is to make unwanted thoughts too uncomfortable to think, which can be done by association to stigma. But we're often sufficiently different in how we perceive stigma that it doesn't work on us. And we're not less rational than anyone else. So our voices must be associated with enough stigma that nobody will listen when we happen to say one of the unconformable thoughts out loud.

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Jasmine running

But there's a third reason why fascists love transphobia. Fascism wants to declare martial law and end democracy. But you usually can't just do that without a threat. And most threats go away when you fight them, because they're actions. People who do the actions will either be eliminated or go into hiding if put under enough pressure, and then the escalation of violent power doesn't have a reason to continue.

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Jasmine running

What doesn't go away is people. Racism works for this, because you can't just stop being who you are. It's not the best target though, because ethnic or racial minorities usually have a community with some strength. And once you get rid of an ethnic minority, it's not going to magically repopulate.

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Jasmine running

So trans people are easier targets. It is much easier to lie about such a tiny and heavily misunderstood minority, especially when it's so dispersed geographically, making us quite isolated in comparison.

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Jasmine running

And we won't go away. Unlike racial minorities, if you eliminate all of us, new trans people will take our place, because we're already there. Lots of cis people just haven't realised yet that they aren't actually cis, and many inevitably will, because living in denial is painful. And as if that wasn't enough, we're part of every generation born, all around the planet, everywhere.

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Jasmine running

Trans people, and further down the line all gender nonconforming people, are the "threat" that just won't go away, no matter how much violence is used. And that's what fascism needs to escalate the violence until they can declare martial law.

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Riley S. Faelan

@jasmine Studies show that the personality behind fascism yearns to have a Designated Bad People, whom they can ritualistically hate. The technical term for this pattern is authoritarian aggression. Orwell described the Two Minutes Hate long before scientists collected solid data for it, but the basic idea matches up.

Designating the scapegoat is something that authoritarian followers expect from the führer, and there's some criteria as to what they expect from the designation, and there's some other criteria as to which designations are the most convenient for the führer. Under both criteria, it's important that the fascists get to experience the hatred every now and then: (references to) the scapegoat must be readily available, and visible in the society. Even though the hatred may end in a genocide, during the preparatory phases, it's important that the scapgoat can't pick up and go away. A visible, not-easily-passing, ethnic minority is the most common scapegoat. And, of course, the scapegoat must not be able to effectively fight back, lest it break the sweet flow of hate dopamine in the fascist's little brain.

On a separate axis (although a correlated one), fascists tend to have closure-seeking minds. They feel that things, importantly including people, should have Immediately Obvious Immutable Natures. They like to rush to assigning people categories — such as ethnic labels —, and they dislike when these turn out to be incorrect. This dislike can translate to lashing out at the victim, and accusing them of trying to deceive honest fascists. As a result, trans people, whom fascists conceptualise as people who change their immutable sex, happen to fit particularly well into the fascists' idea of what a Designated Bad People are supposed to be like.

Because of these factors, Republican strategists have been actively promoting the idea that trans women and children are Bad People ever since the Obergefell ruling, which they conceptualised as gays and lesbians having become politically too strong to continue being viable Designatd Bad People.

BUT, once a designation is released to a fascist population, it never really goes away. Fascist brains suck at backtracking. The focus may shift, but just because it now seeks to target trans women and children doesn't mean the fascists who picked up the Bush-era hatred of Muslims, the formerly Catholic hatred of women who enter a family planning clinic, the old European hatred of Jews, or the evergreen American hatred of Latin Americans (commonly euphemised as "illegal immigrants", but immigration status is not immediately obvious, the way that ethnic characteristics can be) give up their old prejudices.

Riley S. Faelan

@jasmine Fascist followers are unhappy when they don't have a fresh, active, readily available Designated Bad People to hate. If a fascist führer shirks his (sic) fascistic duty(tm)(c)(r) of telling his followers whom to hate, they may even abandon him and pick a new führer.

Riley S. Faelan

@jasmine Or nonconforming another arbitrary label system that the fascists hold dear. Closure-seeking brains hate ambiguity in general, not just gender ambiguity.

A fascist particularly hates what a führer tells them to hate, though. Look up authoritarian aggression.