There are a lot of factors at play that make transness an easy target to be the scary other bigots rally around.

The simple truth is that unless you yourself are trans you cannot understand the trans experience. There is no way to explain the scope or impact it has on someone's life. It's automatically alien and provides essentially a permanent out group. Anyone who is uncomfortable with people who are different or that have different experiences than themselves are almost certainly transphobic to some degree. Right now to the best of my knowledge transphobia is the only thing all hate groups share.

Trans people are the current scapegoats because prior to the pandemic we had an explosion of trans people feeling safe enough to come out online (I blame Obama making us all feel safe). They are particularly effective because both white nationalists and evangelicals use queerness as a scapegoat all the time anyway so it was easy for them to rally around. Which is why conservative politicians fearmonger around trans people.

It's not that simple, but it's close enough for a lemmy comment.

It seems like it's always projection with these fascists.

They are the ones whose "party" is full of violent sexual predators. They will never bring up the monsters (including their "president") on their own "team".

FYI

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nashville-christian-school-shooter-appears-former-student-police-chief-rcna76876

They're people, just like the rest of us. Some are great, some are not.

Fear, control, indoctrination, tribalism, double standards, poor mortal character, hypocrisy, and because it 'makes them feel icky' and so they have to be loud and obvious about it so that they're community sides with them and doesn't suspect that they're (allegedly) total closet cases.

Conservatives are afraid of change, because they control current status quo. They can't let people escape from that control, so every nail that is a little outside it's hole gets hammered.

In short, they rather prefer trans (and broadly queers) to hide or die, unless they can control them. Everyone different from what they can control is a big danger. Imagine if everyone could be like they feel like? Conservatives see this as chaos, they are the guardians of peace and good values, so anything not already controlled by them is the opposite, chaos, destruction, fire.

That's why they rarely present anything new, their policies and general opinion tend to fight the natural evolution of civilization. USA, as obviously all of the American Continent, was built by immigrants (and slaves). Now they fight immigrants, undocumented ones mostly, because they can't control them. And we know what happened when 'the libs' back then tried to end slavery, you know, other people that they CONTROLLED.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

I only know of one, and she's an expert at everything related to fiber channel and tape drives. So I guess it might be that US conservatives are ideologically opposed to cheap long term offline storage.

First, I'd challenge the 'most people' part. In my experience most people really, truly do not care one way or the other if someone is trans. But to be fair, this may vary between countries, societies, etc.

Edit: I wrote a bunch of other stuff here, but wasn't happy reading it back. Someone else here said religion and bad science, which is close enough to the point I was trying to make that I'll just say that.

Ok, am conservative.

I'm going to give my thoughts.

So I'm fine with most things between consenting adults. The problem is when there isn't consent and in a larger group, a lack of consensus.

Kids can't consent, and despite claims to the contrary, there's been a couple of trans kids. The issue I see is the amount of push back on passing laws against trans kids. Why on earth do y'all care so much about banning something that isnt happening?

I'm not into sports, but I can see how unfair it is when a bio man fights a bio woman. Even if they're taking mtf hormones, there's still a ton of testorone. Just from a safety aspect, they shouldn't allow bio men in women's boxing or MMA or anything like that. Chess and stuff of that nature doesn't really care about the sex that much. And there's been more a couple of sports women who are against it too. There's a lack of consensus.

As an aside, we were making a ton of progress against gender roles, and now here we are reinforcing them. Can't even wear drag now without being called trans. It's annoying.

Why are you guys so obsessed with labels? Let dudes wear dresses and women wear whatever. You don't need a label for it.

I never heard of one shooting up a school church or whatever.

First off, one must be very careful of generalizing to an entire group from the actions of a small sample [1]. Using the metric of whether there have been trans people who have engaged in mass shootings is quite reductionist, and is a faulty generalization — if I am to interpret what you said to mean that "conservatives" are "against" all trans people because they think that they are all responsible for "shooting up" schools and churches. Second, to address your belief, to my knowledge, there has been at least one instance of a school shooter being trans [2].