LGBTQ: They scapegoat us intentionally, and we have to survive

They're lying about us for their own political advantage

Worldwide, the fascist scapegoating of trans people is intentional and opportunistic.

"This is the key insight of a comprehensive new report by Over Zero, which documents the connection between LGBTQ scapegoating and threats to democracy. The report explains how LGBTQ scapegoating can be used to facilitate authoritarianism, supported by international case studies and informed by expert interviews. (Over Zero has been an essential source of communications research and analysis in our dangerous times; they’ve issued expert guidance on how to de-escalate and build resiliency to political violence; methods for communicating about political violence and countering misinformation; and more.)"

— "Why are autocrats so fixated on trans people?: LGBTQ scapegoating and the authoritarian playbook." Sohini Desai and Justin Florence. May 28, 2024.

Desai and Florence continue:

"Over Zero’s new report builds on Protect Democracy’s The Authoritarian Playbook, which describes seven common tactics deployed by autocrats and offers a framework for distinguishing authoritarian-style approaches from politics as usual. One of those seven tactics is scapegoating vulnerable communities."

And:

"LGBTQ scapegoating often takes shape through the lie that queer and trans people are groomers and pedophiles, intent on abusing children. Returning to Orban for a moment: This tactic helped his rightwing Fidesz party build out immense powers of censorship and media control."

Plus, "scapegoating...goes hand in hand with 'restorative nostalgia.'" Fascists scapegoat certain groups for supposedly corrupting reality and obstructing a return to "imagined, idealized past."

'Culture war' is psychological warfare

Annalee Newitz:

"...we're deep in the midst of a really bloody culture war in the United States. And the more I researched, the more I realized that what we call culture war really is just an extension of something that the military codified as psychological war, long ago. And so a huge thrust of my research and writing in the book is about not just, 'How do you recognize psyops?' or 'How do you understand the history of them?' But also, 'What do you do to survive them, and and how do you protect yourself against the trauma that they cause?'"

— "There's No Way You Can Talk Back to a Gun": On Psychological Warfare. Annalee Newitz, interviewed by Charlie Jane Anders. Happy Dancing. May 28, 2024.

Psyops, they explain, "call on myths, or stories that start long before our own lifetimes. That's part of the reason why psyops can sometimes be mistaken for common sense, and why people get fooled by them. They're like, 'Oh, that sounds like something I heard before as a kid.'"

For example: In the 1930s in the US, J. Edgar Hoover "was working on a really horrific child murder case that actually never was solved, and he decided that it had been associated with homosexual activity. He began to really create a moral panic, without evidence. So his focus in the FBI became rooting out these 'sex criminals,' which was again basically just attempting to surveil, arrest and harass gay people." It led to "the lavender scare, a period during the 1950s when the U.S government started place people under surveillance, interrogating them about their sex lives, and firing them if they were gay. This is a psyop in the sense that no actual war was being declared. No one was being sent to prison, no one was being accused of any crime other than just being gay. This was a way of destroying people's lives without ever openly declaring that those people are criminals." Today, in the 2020s, "it's come back full force with politicians constantly using the term 'groomer' to refer to gay people. This feels to their followers like common sense, because they're calling on this multi-generational story of what it means to be gay in America."

Some sci-fi writers assisted "propaganda efforts during both World War I and World War II, and up into the present. And what they bring to this project is an interest in how you create a story that's really immersive and makes your audience feel like it's real. Science fiction is really good at this because, like pop psychology, it often uses the language of science to bolster realism. Writers will describe faster-than-light ships in great detail, or depict an alien civilization in such concrete ways that you feel like an anthopologist standing there, looking at this alien world."