All evidence points towards LGBTQ always existing but just becoming more open.
Trads being Counter Culture? That's the same double speak that gets us Citizens United and Right to Work. Where did these trads get their radically traditional values? From the majority.
My wife and I are fairly traditional in that I work full time and she's a housewife/mother. Most people are mildly surprised that she doesn't work, and there's definitely been the occasional awkward social interaction where she was clearly being judged by other women (notably non-parents) for that decision. This is in an extremely blue city, I imagine if we moved out even into the suburbs things would shift.
Counter-culture is location-dependent.
This is only because Catholics and Christians often don’t mention when workplace behaviors make them uncomfortable. I’ve been in multiple situations where coworkers have used names of God as expletives or made jokes about things I consider holy.
And if you’re a Catholic and “trad” and planning lunch with colleagues, things like “is it Friday” or “is it a Friday in Lent” would affect others (except that, today, there’s a lot of vegetarian options for independent reasons).
Across every single metric, trans people, especially trans POC face disproportionate adversity. i.e. income, murder rate, housing insecurity, education etc...
Someone changing their gender identity is pretty surprising and asks that you change how you interact with them.
And I think the traditional people are doing so in much more subversive ways now - plenty of our friends are going private and Catholic school to get their kids out of the public schools, which are getting pretty wild in the indoctrination.
Nope. The number of letters keeps increasing as more people are brought in. In schools these days it's trendy to be anything but straight.
Big disagree. You carry a pride flag in the wrong parts of town where I am, you'll get beat up.
Walk around preaching hellfire and damnation and at most you'll get a lot of annoyed looks and at best you'll get people cheering you on.
> In schools these days it's trendy to be anything but straight.
In high schools in my town people get beat up for coming out. A friend who went to college out of state was mocked because people thought he was gay, despite him being straight.
Also, you appear to have a misconception of what the LGBTQ acronym includes.
LGBA - these are related to attraction. TI - These are for Trans/Intersex individuals and have nothing to do with attraction. Q - Questioning/Queer. Can be used by those who don't feel as though they are properly described by the above descriptions, or who are opposed to them for some reason.
There are other letters, but for the most part they are subsets/synonyms of the above labels, at least as far as the use case here is concerned.
Anywhere in California you would not experience any of that. In fact it really is as OP describes. Look at polls of kids in elementary schools where 50%+ of young kids are identifying as non-binary because it is trendy.
Physical violence (and any indicator of physical needs- shelter, food, safety) basically signals 'cheap animal unit', and animals are useful tools to be managed by the machinery (of capital, patriarchy, globalism, blah blah etc whatever left or right wing flavor of 'power structure' you mentally choose to sketch it out, it's there churning, by whatever name you like)
you seem to confuse elite signaling and countersignaling with personal sufferings when in reality, both are exactly how it's supposed to go
The cultural machinery works thru contradiction and desperate elite mimicry, people trying to aspirationally sound like the class right above them, leading to tragedy of the commons, for example:
Rich women support bail reform/ islamic immigration/ transgender craze/ porn-culture that gets poorer women raped/ scared/ fired / cheapened, and that's the new feminism
Pragmatic feminists/terfs/lesbians/mom groups/anti-vaccers are the new witches to be burned as the purity test for desperate psuedo-middle-class aspirational women, supplying the cultural fodder content mill, while Republican women/Christian evangelicals make popcorn...
Abortion rights are a cheap voting lever, the more passionate you are the more the machine knows how to use you, people are putting their carrots and sticks in their bios, announcing the best ways to control them with a smile lol
Women in Iran and Afghanistan not allowed to go to school, that is defacto no longer a feminist issue but something something 'why not both' meme-mumbles by nonbinary mental illness connoisseurs.
Gays getting beat up by rural whites so they move to metropolis and work for the rainbow utopia of corporate America is exactly how the machine eats :)
Indeed, I now hear acquaintances on the right referring to them derisively as the 'alphabet mafia.' I wonder if maybe it's gotten meaningless when there are so many letters. Sometimes I see "+" used instead, after the first few letters. In that case, do the members of the groups that come after feel marginalized compared to the big ones that make up the first few letters?
And what about the people who self-identify as one of the groups but don't want to advertise it as their defining characteristic? What do they do? That's a hard one, I think there are quite a lot of people that are in that situation.
I suppose the holy grail will be if/when we just decide that such labels don't matter.
Outside of those spaces, I generally prefer LGBTQ or LGBTQ+ for that reason.
That holy grail would be nice to reach some day.
For those looking on and saying "well, you're doing it to yourselves":
The answer is that currently we _have_ to do it because any many parts of the USA/world people who fall under that umbrella aren't able to live in a way that brings them joy.
As such, they need a banner to organize under and belong with. Once that need passes eventually so will the labels.
Is Christianity also meaningless then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denomination...
I am still on the fence whether or not this is a left-handedness situation. (The number of people who are left-handed sharply increased within 1-2 generations once we stopped beating children for primarily using their left hands. But this was generally not considered a social contagion or some grooming behavior from left-handed teachers or something.) If it is, then we should see identification level out within a generation or two.
I mean yes, physically they are a minority. Culturally, they are incredibly mainstream. There are examples everywhere.
There are tons of big movies and TV shows featuring gay people coming out.
_Every_ company changes their logo during pride month.
Look at the Apple Watch or iPhone, they come preloaded with Pride wallpapers and watch faces, they produce pride bands for the watch, which sell very well.
Disneyland has Gay Days.
Defcon has a massive attached event called Queercon that dwarfs all other subcons.
Googlers who are gay are called Gayglers.
So many famous actors and politicians are openly gay.
Biden literally just did a major interview in the Whitehouse with a TikToker who's only claim to fame was making videos about becoming trans.
I could list SO many more examples of this everywhere in our culture, and these are random things I could think of off the top of my head, but they are decent examples of culture I think.
I don't have a problem with any of this, I think it's great. But there is absolutely no way you can claim that this is not the mainstream now.
It sounds like you consider talking about trads that way to be dangerous, like it might bring them back or something.
All of these things you listed merely acknowledge that non-cis gendered people exist, that's it. There is no massive shift in the mainstream culture. In fact, there are legions of reactionaries incredibly aggrieved by having this existence "shoved in their faces" such that they will push for laws banning discussion of sexuality in schools, call bomb threats in to hospitals, or lose their shit when gay people kiss in a movie.
Criticize it in even the most mild way at most companies and expect to be fired from your job.
The dominance goes even further. Direct criticism isn't necessary. Try to promote straight culture and you'll also get dogpiled and fired. (Brandon Eich)
The idea that LGBTQ is a minority in the population is true, but they are a plurality of contemporary expressed culture
> I think this is ridiculous, LGBTQ is a minority.