elon musk, mark zuckerberg, J.K rowling! Are the names that come to mind.

3 from different background: a African immigrant benefiting from government spending, an American smart young engineer, and a female English successful writer.

They are no politicians, and cant be accuse of trying to gather some vote. Multi-billions amongst them.

I get they lean to the right to protect their cash, with less tax and regulation. I get they are racist because they fear some poor people will take their cash.

But why the hatred for trans people ? It’s 1% of the population, they cant do anything, dont threaten anyone. There is no rational or psychological reason

*EDIT: I read all the comments. A lot of interesting explanation: smokescreen/scapegoat, maintaining the male/female power structure, new face of anti-gay , projection / self-hatred , just louder voice …

I realize, may be, I didn’t post a good question. May be it is less about the ultra-rich but more about why that rhetoric work on the general population (else it would not have taken hold as it does). For that I have a 2 cent theory: The raise of the cult of Nature we have since the global warming. The idea, that everything natural is better. The ugly version is only natural male and female are worthy*

  • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    16 days ago

    trans people are a threat to the status quo of the patriarchal-capitalist Gender regime. the ideology of patriarchal capitalism is that your gender assigned at birth is immutable and there are only two. in patriarchal capitalism your gender defines a lot of what path your life will take, the societal expectations placed on you, and importantly what opportunities and privileges are afforded to you. obviously the setup is men dominating and oppressing women which has been going on for far longer than capitalism but worsened significantly under it. the division of reproductive labour is the social basis of gender. according to traditional gender roles, women are expected to act as broodmares to reproduce more worker stock and also perform most or all domestic labour in essentially a slave role. the existence of trans and trans nonbinary people disproves the two axioms on which this all rests, that your gender is immutable and one of just two. gender in capitalist ideology is little more than a tool or system of oppression, and by existing and living our lives as we see fit and not railroaded by traditional expectations based on assigned gender at birth, we show clearly that it doesn’t have to be that way. so to answer your question they come for us because we are a genuine threat to capitalist patriarchal orthodoxy, we show by our actions and existence that a better social order is possible, one where individuals are actually afforded self-determination instead of being locked into a predetermined role based on what genitalia you are born with.

    sorry it’s kinda an incoherent thought dump, there is plenty more to say this is just a quickie of the root superstructural reasons that we are perceived as a threat to patriarchal capitalism. of course, most transphobes won’t have these specific reasons in mind (in fact probably couldn’t comprehend them at all due to ignorance) and have just been convinced by capitalist propaganda and transphobic media to hate us because we are icky etc. the prevalence of misogyny also is why it’s so easy to get people to be transphobic, a lot of it just boils down to either “hah! why would a man want to be a woman?”, or “hah! a woman could never be a man”.

    • underscores@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      16 days ago

      I just want to add that it’s not just the idea of gender being immutable, it’s identity as a whole. So much of society is built around stuff like legal names. They use them to track and control people. And then trans people are out there deciding to change them just because we want to, or using prefered names that don’t match our legal names. The idea that people can just decide who they want to be is threatening to them.

  • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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    15 days ago

    I do wonder what their end game is. History surely will not look on them favourably, so who would want to be the villain on the world stage? Yes history is written by the victors, but only for a short while until the truths come out. I just can’t understand why anyone would deliberately want to be on the wrong side of history.

    • ooli2@lemm.eeOP
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      15 days ago

      most real-life villain thinks they are doing good. JK Rowling rhetoric is all about “protecting women”. She probably is certain she is some sort of martyr trying to save the world

      • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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        15 days ago

        I can actually believe that JK thinks she’s doing the right thing. She’s losing friends, money, reputation for saying what she truly believes, no matter how messed up. She never pretended anything but.

        Elon is not like that. Elon knew how to play the progressive part and have a progressive wife, and do/say progressive things to make himself look good when it suited him. The face-mask reveal and the 180 turn as he ditches his old friends (they served their purpose) for new ones, whilst his wealth skyrockets… this man surely deep down can’t believe that he has noble intentions.

  • prototype_g2@lemmy.ml
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    14 days ago

    It is a useful distraction from the surplus value extraction from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie.

    The Bourgeoisie hire workers and pay them for their work. But with what money? The money made by selling a product or service. But who did the work to create said product or service? The workers did. So workers do work, which makes money for the company. But do the workers receive all of it? After all, they did all the work. But no, no they don’t. If the Bourgeoisie gave all the money the workers to back to the workers, them how could the Bourgeoisie make a profit? It thereby must follow that the Bourgeoisie pay their workers less than the value they produce, thereby stealing that money from the workers.

    You might say “but the bourgeoisie own the company! And they also do some work themselves! Some people’s work just contributes more than others.” Yeah, yeah, but who gets to decide how much of the pie each person gets? How much should be reinvested and what not? Who gets to decide what is done with the money made? The Bourgeoisie! But why them? Why do the workers not have a say in how the money they made is used? Because the Bourgeoisie had enough money to buy the means necessary to make money (the factories, infrastructure or whatever) and the workers did not. How did the Bourgeoisie get all that money you ask? By stealing worker’s wages.


    What does this have to do with trans people?

    1. All it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.

    This whole anti-trans thing is a useful distraction. Bad people will believe it’s those dam trans people’s fault their country is shit and not investigate any further. Good people will be distracted arguing against the bad people on why being trans isn’t evil, all the while the real culprits laugh as we fight each other.

    Remember: Desperate people make great workers and distracted citizens. Keep people busy with basic necessities and they won’t have time or energy to realize who is really exploiting them.

    1. It makes trans folk more exploitable

    Racism a misogyny is useful for the Bourgeoisie as it allows them to pay lower wages. The bourgeoisie want to pay their workers a little as possible. Desperate jobless people are more willing to take a bad deal because any job is better than homelessness. That means the more desperate people there are, the lower the wages they can pay, as they can replace workers who demand a higher wage with workers from this reserve.

    Racism keeps people of color in poverty allowing them to be more easily exploited. Misogyny justifies paying women half the wage of a man, which is exactly what the Bourgeoisie want.

    Likewise, if trans folk are illegalized that will make it hard for them to find a job, adding even more people to the reverse army of labour.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    15 days ago

    Its alla diversion.

    Find some group that is different, then shit on them and make them look bad publicly while this relatively small group can’t so much to talk back publicly.

    It’ll outrage the public, they’ll start looking at the group while trump and Co then go and rob the state blind while no one is looking

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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      15 days ago

      Yep.

      To add to that, I’ve found a lot of people in the working class care a lot about class differentiators and will spend a lot of time trying to profess how they should be viewed at a higher relative ranking since they can’t rely on money or heritage to do it for them.

      So, if you create an out group for them, a lot of them will latch on to that idea since it raises their relative value in a meaningful way.

  • purplemeowanon@lemmy.ml
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    15 days ago

    A useful distraction to prevent class warfare and protect their wealth with a convenient and reliable scapegoat designed to ensure a divided working class.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    Products of their generation. As they die off others will take their place and society will move on to other groups to target.

  • thezeesystem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    16 days ago

    Mostly a people to blame and for others to fear monger, it’s a way to make people look the other way also, a common “enemy” instigated from the true enemy. And sense there is not a lot of trans people statistically it’s hard for them to defend themselves. It’s all about manipulation and control over the people

  • Robin@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    You can’t get ultra-rich while being a compassionate person

    • latenightnoir@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      This, and all the more nowadays, because anything progressive has been intrinsically linked to a change of the Status Quo. And those trillions of fun bucks in the mattress (as well as their self-importance and self-perceived relevance) must be protected from those pesky Socialists!

  • tootoughtoremember@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    Just the latest social group that’s still broadly acceptable to shit on.

    There’s not a ton of global census data out there, but in Canada trans and non-binary people make up 0.33% of the population. Which means there’s a lot of people who don’t know anyone who is trans or non-binary. Unfortunately there’s also a lot of people who are unwilling to emphasize, or even sympathize, for those they feel are different or strange to them. It take time and effort to listen to others’ stories and to gain appreciation for their perspective, and it’s an effort many people are uncomfortable making if it feels they are deviating too far from society’s norm. What you’re observing is those in power taking advantage of the same human weakness that’s been used forever to discriminate on whoever the current permissible outgroup to hate is.

    How many times have you heard, “I don’t care about anyone being/doing Y, but…”, and then proceed to say some sort of transphobic, homophobic, racist, or sexist shit? When I grew up it was the G in LGBT. When my parents grew up it was African Americans. Women only got the right to vote a century ago, you better believe some of our great granduncles had some shit to say that would make today’s uncles look like saints.

  • DinosaurThussy [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    16 days ago

    The reasons generally start out personal and become generalized as a political “position”, which really consumes your life after a while.

    Rowling has said that she had a queer “phase” and that if she were going through that nowadays, she would likely have ended up considering herself trans (incorrectly, by her assertion). That reads to me as some internalized bigotry that she never worked through. Musk has a daughter who’s a trans woman and disowned him for being a piece of shit. He started posting about “pronouns” soon after. And Zuckerberg seems to have seen the way the winds are blowing with the current administration and jumped on the anti-trans bandwagon because he’s a lizard man with no soul (metaphorically, not in the David Icke antisemitic way). These are all guesses, but not based on nothing.

    It ends up being socially unacceptable to say, “trans people remind me of my estranged daughter so I don’t like them,” and rightly so. So you have to retreat and bury the context, taking it up as a matter of principle. And your mind can backfill the justification over and over again, further cementing the ideas as people start to ask you to talk about trans people over and over again. After all, you’re a public figure who doesn’t like trans people. That’s a hot topic. People on Twitter want to talk about it. Reporters want to talk about it. So it snowballs from there. Transphobia can absolutely take over the life of a public figure.

    Philosophy Tube has an excellent video on something called phantasms and how people get stuck in irrational worldviews. Would recommend.

    • ooli2@lemm.eeOP
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      15 days ago

      astute observation. Zuckerberg with all his new 'masculine energy" stuff, could still fit in your approach: he dont accept his woman side

  • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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    16 days ago

    They are frequently interviewed.

    Which means they are frequently asked: “Why’s everything fucked up?”

    They can’t give the real answer, which is “ultra-rich people”.

    So they give no answer at all (in which case you don’t hear about it) or they cite the Enemy Of The Day.

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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    16 days ago

    Transphobia, just like any form of queerphobia, serves the maintenance of property rights and the reproduction of the workforce that generates billionaires’ wealth. This is where the antagonism comes from.

    Also, please don’t call Elon Musk that.