The Only Thing Keeping Overweight People and the Trans Community from Being Immune From Criticism and Mockery is the Enormous Amount of Cruelty and Ridicule They Face Every Day
There is a shockingly large contingent of folks who labor under the delusion that what they see as the excesses of identity politics has resulted in a paradigm shift where it has become verboten to treat the overweight or trans community with anything other than reverence lest they become “cancelled” for their thought crimes by the woke brigade.
At their most paranoid and conspiratorial these folks like to fantasize that it has actually changed so dramatically that non-trans kids and the insufficiently plus-sized have become outcasts and children are relentlessly bullied for not being part of the LGTBQ rainbow.
In the minds of these people, alternate sexualities aren’t just being presented to young people as an option rather than a sickness, a one way ticket to hell or a perversion; they seem to think that EVERYONE is being subtly and not so subtly being encouraged to be gay by everyone other than Ben Shapiro: schools, Girls Scouts, Boy Scouts, “woke” corporations, “woke” churches, “woke” bowling alleys, the whole lot.
These folks tend to oscillate between extremes. On one hand they seethe with anger at trans people because they think that they enjoy unfair advantages over the non-trans community, that they’ve affirmative actioned their way into a lush life where they cannot be touched or criticized in any way. On the other, they see these groups as hopelessly damaged and broken, as mentally ill, delusional and overwhelmingly suicidal because they know they are living in violent defiance of God’s laws and the incontrovertible laws of nature yet are protected by well-meaning fools unwilling to face certain cancellation if they dare say anything less than glowingly effusive about LGTBQ people.
They seem to feel the same way about the overweight. They act as if the mere existence of a single plus-sized model on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue is enough to single-handedly undo decades upon decades of intense, widespread social conditioning to see thin people as sexually desirable, enviable and healthy and the overweight as repulsive, weak and unhealthy.
They’re right, of course. The only thing keeping the overweight and the trans community from leading hopelessly sheltered, protected existences where no one is allowed to criticize them in any way is the ENORMOUS, OVERWHELMING amount of hatred, judgment and mockery they experience every goddamn day of their lives.
When Sports Illustrated ran the aforementioned cover with the plus-sized model Jordan Peterson, a preeminent “intellectual” of the right felt the need to publicly state that the beautiful woman on the cover was “not beautiful” and that the only reason ANYONE might look at a woman in a bikini that weighs more than 100 pounds without projectile vomiting in disgust is out of political correctness and fear.
People were annoyed but they weren’t particularly surprised because we live in such a violently divisive world that men who consider themselves serious thinkers and gurus feel not only free to say that the bikini model didn’t give them a boner and consequently should be publicly shamed for being insufficiently sexy; they feel weirdly obligated to do so.
Take The Babylon Bee. They’re sadly one of the most popular fake news websites in the world, and they have one joke and one joke only, and that involves lazily mocking the trans community by running an endless series of largely interchangeable articles predicated on the idea of people “identifying” as unlikely people and things.
If the trans community were anywhere near as untouchable as Conservatives like to pretend it is, The Babylon Bee would be shunned as pariahs rather than the favorite website of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and a troll ostensibly in the process of Twitter.
Musk seems to be buying Twitter specifically so that his beloved Babylon Bee can deadname anyone they want, particularly Chelsea Manning, who is now giving Grimes the kind of explosive sexual satisfaction that Musk never could when they were together.
Despite what folks might like to believe, the trans community and the overweight do not have it easy. While certain elements of society are more culturally sensitive than before there are plenty of other elements that feel the need to be less culturally sensitive as a response.
With progress invariably comes a ferocious backlash. We’re seeing that now with #Metoo, fat positivity and trans rights. We’ve made progress but we still have a VERY long way to go.
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