…only the targets ever change, and then only for a while.

So there is apparently a new survey MAGA is waving around that shows a decline in the number of people identifying as transgender. Elon Musk and Matt Walsh are celebrating it as a victory over “transgenderism.”

Oh really?

I was drafted, not entirely against my will, into the gay civil rights struggle ever since I fell in love back in my teen years, and I have seen how this game is played over and over. The idea is to minimize our numbers, as if that makes our demands for equal rights seem unreasonable and excessive. Oh you don’t want equal rights, you want Special Rights. But when you question people for a survey about sexual orientation, in a climate of hate, you are unlikely to get a lot of honest answers. Combine that with people’s own misunderstanding of their sexual orientation because they’d grown up with nothing but myths, lies, and superstitions about it, and a good many of your respondents will give what they think is an honest if completely wrong answer. Then add to that the spectrum of sexual orientation. There’s a reason Kinsey’s scale goes from zero to six, not zero to one.

I would have answered incorrectly about my sexual orientation if asked, before I realized I was in love that first time and saw that everything I had been taught about homosexuals was wrong, even though I was crushing madly on the object of my affections. I was 17…what did I really know about it back in 1971? And even knowing I was gay at that point, I would have been unlikely to publicly identify as that, in a time when almost every state had a sodomy law on its books, and you could be discriminated against in jobs, housing and services. I’d like to think mom wouldn’t have thrown me out of the house had I identified, but lots of gay kids had that happen to them.

What does it mean to Identify As? Being willing to stand your ground and say publicly Yes I Am…or is it a private Yes I Know.

So no surprises, they’re doing the same playbook now against transgendered people. This from comments in a thread about the new survey…

“It’s raw data of those who took the survey. Going just on that, it’s much more probable people are less likely to say they identify given the hostile politics. And when it’s actually weighted correctly, the data shows a 9% increase, not a decrease.”

There is nothing complicated about this. Transgender people start coming out of the closet and asserting their own true identities. A vicious backlash ensues in the commercial press, political campaigns, and social media. Hostile billionaires throw tons of money everywhere they can to demonize transgender people. And then transgender people find themselves facing a torrent of threats against their lives and livelihoods. And surprise, surprise, they start ducking for their own safety and mental well being. And the bigot industrial complex declares victory when their surveys show a decline in the number of people identifying as transgender.

My people have been there too. We know how this game is played.

And understand this: they don’t think the actual number of transgender people has declined. What this survey is telling them (which it actually fucking isn’t) is their expensive hate mongering is working. Transgender people are afraid.

Victory.