Vote me down but I think adding more stripes to the rainbow flag is harmful.
It erases different communities that have different interests. I was a fan of Trotskyism in the early 1990s (even slummed a bit with Stalinists and met Gus Hall) and saw first hand how raising the highest and most radical flag meant that fewer and fewer people showed up at each protest, it was only when a black nationalist put the smackdown on my vanguardist nonsense that I understood, everybody else was too polite.
L and G folks have always wished B people would make up their minds. LGB people want to be accepted, Q people aren't going to stop until they aren't accepted. A appeals to people who are shopping for the identity of the day. A crazy high percentage of young women think they are B but maybe it's because they heard a certain Katy Perry song. I people feel they were violated by the same medical procedures that T people believe help them feel whole. When I first saw I added I thought it meant incel because those people sure are dissatisfied with the cishetreonormativepatriarchy.
If T people are going to overcome the stereotypes that are rapidly diffusing over the population (including myself, who was T positive for a long time because a T person made a huge positive impression on me in college) they've got to erase the idea that 99.4% of the population isn't allowed to have any interests.
Allowing people to draw a line in the sand for an acceptable level of deviation from the normal leaves you open to them nudging that line just a bit further to ostracize more and more of the vulnerable. I've never been the biggest fan of the progress flag, but because I think the basic rainbow already includes all of those groups. I've never loved it more than I do now that I've heard the idea that people prefer the rainbow flag because it actively excludes the people the progress flag was created to actively highlight.
That's the kind of black and white and moralistic thinking that are causing people to distance themselves from today's ideological transgenderists.
I can support your right to be safe as a person but not believe everything you say or state that your ideology and tactics are wrong. You get ahead in this world and gain acceptance through practical thinking, not moralistic thinking.
I grew up in a lily-white city, some of the first black people I met were a couple where the man was an engineer at the Raytheon plant that made Patriot missiles. My family was out riding our bikes and one of us got a flat, they helped us fix it and gave us some lemonade in my kitchen. After that I wanted to see more black people move to my town.
The first transgender person I met was a great engineering student, amateur astronomer, and science fiction fan. I found out all those things before I found out she was transgender. She got kicked out of the air force academy but our nation's loss was my gain.
When I got on Mastodon I was just shocked with how many transgender people were sharing hateful image memes, complaining about everybody else and insisting that everybody else's thoughts and feelings were wrong, like all the rest of us didn't have the right to make any decisions at all. If that was the first thing I'd ever seen of transgenderism I'd think it was a disease.
Alright, sure, some of the flag designs are not well done, but I doubt you're talking about vexillology.
Queer just refers to "not straight". It's a general term. Bisexual people have made up their minds, they like more than one gender. Asexual people face stigma just the same as gay and lesbian people do. They're all just different sexualities that differ from the norm, so why not include them together? It really doesn't erase any individual community in my experience.
As far as intersex and trans people are concerned, maybe you just haven't thought it out that much. Of course intersex people would feel differently about surgeries performed on them than trans people would. The former had a surgery forced on them without consent. The latter choses (or not) to have something done. Incels very clearly have nothing to do with "cis-het" discourse.
Even if I was to disregard all of that, trans people still belong in the community for the simple reason that they're a large part of how the modern queer community has formed. They've faced the same stigmas as lesbian and gay folks. Even within lesbian and gay communities, there's been quite a lot of gender-nonconformity (look into lesbian movements in the 70's for example).
Trans people exist and have for much longer than you probably realize. Maybe you need to go back to your roots and actually talk to some trans people. You might realize that the popular caricature isn't as accurate as you seem to think.
I'll happily vote you down because political power is formed by collaboration. Excluding trans people from the liberation movement makes the gay community weaker against attacks, not stronger.
The trouble with that argument is if you consistently take the most radical position on every issue, people will leave. Either they leave outright or they just check out emotionally. That's not the same as excluding trans people. [1]
Myself I have gone out in drag in the past and seen for myself from people's microexpressions that it is not entirely safe. I think people should be safe to express whatever gender characteristics they wish whenever they want to express them. In the past 15 years the T community went through a sharp ideological bend that is reducitivist and deliberately polarizating that is making it less safe to be different from other people, not more safe. Just because I practice Foxwork and channel an entity which might be a different gender than myself means I need to endorse the self-described 'egg-hatcher' who persuaded a neurodivergent friend of my son to go down a path that hasn't solved his [2] real problems but has added more problems.
[1] speech is free, listening is priceless; want to be part of a movement, understand that movement in all its diversity, don't make a black-and-white there-is-no-alternative declaration that other people have no choice in the matter
[2] he says we can call him 'he' at this time even though she goes by 'she' at work
> don't make a black-and-white there-is-no-alternative declaration that other people have no choice in the matter
say the person who quite literally can't accept that there can be more than three letters in an acronym, less the entire world order be thrown to the wind
It erases different communities that have different interests. I was a fan of Trotskyism in the early 1990s (even slummed a bit with Stalinists and met Gus Hall) and saw first hand how raising the highest and most radical flag meant that fewer and fewer people showed up at each protest, it was only when a black nationalist put the smackdown on my vanguardist nonsense that I understood, everybody else was too polite.
L and G folks have always wished B people would make up their minds. LGB people want to be accepted, Q people aren't going to stop until they aren't accepted. A appeals to people who are shopping for the identity of the day. A crazy high percentage of young women think they are B but maybe it's because they heard a certain Katy Perry song. I people feel they were violated by the same medical procedures that T people believe help them feel whole. When I first saw I added I thought it meant incel because those people sure are dissatisfied with the cishetreonormativepatriarchy.
If T people are going to overcome the stereotypes that are rapidly diffusing over the population (including myself, who was T positive for a long time because a T person made a huge positive impression on me in college) they've got to erase the idea that 99.4% of the population isn't allowed to have any interests.