Queer and Trans hero children of Thanksgiving
I was going to tackle the Vox story about Bonnie and Clyde, but Miguel beat me to it.
That got me wandering around the Vox website, where I found a couple of articles that I had to take apart. This is the first of them.
How queer and trans people are turning the internet into a safe holiday space
From turkey tips to transgiving, the internet is helping queer and trans people survive the holidays.
“Thanksdreading: when you’re trans and dreading Thanksgiving dinner bc you’re gonna be surrounded by a whole buncha family that don’t know [or] respect your preferred name and pronouns.”
For fuck’s sake. Another story about how what is normal for the vast majority of Americans is really torture for an endlessly aggrieved fraction of a percent of society.
For many people, going home for the holidays is difficult: It can mean crossing ideological lines, entering into charged political conversations, or even worrying that your basic identity — your mere existence — might offend some of your relatives. This can be seen across the internet, as members of marginalized communities publicly grapple with the anxiety that surrounds holiday family gatherings on an annual basis.
But if the internet is a place where people feel able to articulate these fears, it’s also becoming a tool to combat them. Through social media, private chat platforms like Slack and Discord, and word-of-mouth internet spread, people are leveraging their online presence to help make Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the rest of the holiday season safer for more people. The result is that Thanksgiving in particular, with all its fraught origins and weighty history, might have become a more welcoming, more communal celebration than it was before.
It’s only that way for the always angry Lefties who have to use every opportunity to politicize everything.
When 87-year-old Grandma asks Suzie the lesbian “have you found a man yet” most people know to shake that shit off because Grandma loves Suzie and only wants what’s best for her and is just stuck in her ways.
Progressive Suize retreats to the internet about how Grandma is an agent of the cis-hetero-patriarchy and subjected her (Suzie) to a hate crime that erased her identity.
For the vast majority of people, that makes Suzie and not Grandma, the asshole. Don’t be Suzie.
First things first: The traditional story associated with Thanksgiving is pretty much completely wrong. The reality surrounding the day is extremely dark, and fraught with a lot more conflict than the holiday celebration normally acknowledges. We like to teach one another that Thanksgiving is about a celebration of unity despite our differences, but in reality, Thanksgivings historically gave rise to more conflict and even violence committed against Native Americans by English colonizers.
First things first: Fuck everyone at Vox to death with the fury of a dying star.
This experience is often even rougher for marginalized groups like queer and trans people. They frequently have to deal with a lack of familial support while also feeling pressured to suck it up and be with their families during the holidays, regardless of how hard it might be. Tumblr, for example, is full of messages of support between queer people in particular who face difficult family interactions, as well as advice and encouragement for how to make the time less stressful. “My ask box is open if you need to vent, or have an audience for the gay jokes you can’t say in front of others, or want to be reminded you aren’t alone,” one such post reads.
Meier also told Vox he’d noticed the trend of “friendsgivings” and other alternate holiday practices on the rise. “I have heard people talk about friendsgivings more and more, especially this year,” he said. “Which I can only assume is because of queer communities, and found families. I think this will get more true as this younger generation of queer people grows up too. At least that’s what I hope! It’s nice to see queer people finding their families and celebrating with them!”
Indeed, for queer and genderqueer people in particular, the internet’s ability to facilitate alternate holiday celebrations is a vital and evolving tool.
I am reminded of the child spies from Orwell’s 1984. Parents feared them and they became child heroes if they ratted out their parents to the state for disloyalty.
This was not entirely fiction. Both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union weaponized children against their families.
All of these articles, clearly aimed at younger, Woke Millenials has the same message: be more loyal to your political/gender/sexual/identity than to your family.
They want the kid home from college to antagonize and proselytize, and if or when that fails, to give up on their family all together and unite with other people of the same identity.
The Left has always hated the nuclear family. The family is the enemy of total state power. The point of every holiday for the Left is to send the children in to break up the family by starting some shit.
This is evil beyond measure.
