Bringing people together.
Posted on 05/03/2023 1:41:50 PM PDT by nickcarraway
In an ironic twist, San Francisco Pride’s campaign to push back against transphobia, to be unveiled this week, has been disrupted by its own brush with transphobia.
SF Pride was all set to make a big statement this week about anti-LGBTQ attacks by announcing that the battle cry for this year’s event would be the iconic Twisted Sister rock anthem, “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”
Choosing the 1984 song was intended to show how the community was going to push back on the hundreds of pieces of anti-LGBTQ and anti-drag community legislation being passed around the country and the endless amount of hateful venom spewed online. The band’s front man, Dee Snider, a longtime supporter of LGBTQ rights, had agreed to perform the song at the event’s center stage.
It was shaping up to be an only-in-San Francisco moment — one with the potential to appeal to many different subcultures, and perhaps soften the venom coming from others. It could have helped SF Pride to refortify itself as an institution that has held one of the most powerful political megaphones in the LGBTQ community for the past five decades.
That was the plan until Tuesday, when Pride leaders broke with Snider after learning that he recently supported a transphobic Twitter post by 71-year-old rock star Paul Stanley.
On Sunday, Stanley, who rode to fame more than five decades ago as a member of the band Kiss, tweeted that “There is a BIG difference between teaching acceptance and normalizing and even encouraging participation in a lifestyle that confuses young children ... as though (it is) some sort of game and then parents in some cases allow it.”
Stanley chided parents who “mistakenly confuse teaching acceptance with normalizing and encouraging a situation that has been a struggle for those truly affected and have turned it into a sad and dangerous fad.”
Snider, who like Stanley, frequently wore makeup onstage, responded on Twitter: “You know what? There was a time where I ‘felt pretty’ too. Glad my parents didn’t jump to any rash conclusions! Well said, @PaulStanleyLive.”
And that killed what could have been an image that beamed around the world at SF Pride’s June celebration: A moment when a 68-year-old cisgender heterosexual rock icon stood up as an ally for the embattled LGBTQ community.
Snider may have been a longtime ally to the community, but Pride officials couldn’t feature him after that.
“When we were notified about the tweet … we were heartbroken and angry,” Suzanne Ford, executive director of SF Pride, said Tuesday. “The message perpetuated by that tweet casts doubt on young trans people’s ability to self-identify their gender.”
Ford said, “With transphobia proliferating and becoming more and more enshrined in law throughout the country — we have to stand up for the most impacted among us.”
Ford, a trans woman, knows personally the power that Pride can have. Ford told me that for many San Franciscans, Pride is mostly “a rallying point for our community. It started out as a riot, and it has since progressed. It’s still a riot, but now we are also celebrating our culture and commemorating our heritage.”
But for people who live outside of San Francisco, it means something different. Growing up in rural Kentucky, Ford, 57, recalled seeing clips from Pride on the TV news once a year. It wasn’t always in a complimentary way — particularly in the 1970s, when there were few LGBTQ people living openly near her.
“Seeing San Francisco Pride on the national news said to me, ‘Oh, there’s hope. There’s a place in the world where I could be me if I could get there,’ ” Ford told me. “You don’t think that’s possible when you don’t see people like you in your daily life.”
Nguyen Pham, the president of the SF Pride board, said the organization realizes that San Francisco represents “a beacon of hope to the rest of the nation and in many parts of the world.”
“What we’ve found is simply by inserting ourselves as best as we can into more of the mainstream, we gain more visibility, we effect better representation and we demonstrate more inclusion,” Pham said. “And all of that is baked into this idea that we can change hearts and minds that way.”
But this year, SF Pride will have to change hearts and minds without someone who could have reached into different parts of the mainstream. The official theme of this year’s event: Looking Back and Moving Forward.
Unfortunately, Snider’s good intentions were subverted by what he was trying to get people to defeat: transphobia.
He got canceled for not being incurious with blind loyalty about transgenders and alleged transgenders by militant fascists who have purposefully weaponized empathy for their own power and prosperity. They don’t care about people. They care about their agenda
Great meme!
Call it what it is.
Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19132621/
What is apotemnophilia?
Abstract. Background: The syndrome of apotemnophilia, body integrity or amputee identity disorder, is defined as the desire for amputation of a healthy limb, and may be accompanied by behaviour of pretending to be an amputee and sometimes, but not necessarily, by sexual arousal.
Failed at law school, failed at her shitty little coffee house, got radicalized by, surprise, surprise, the SF Human Right Campaign Obergruppenfuhrer, and promptly dragged her wife and her kid out to Shitinthestreets Frisco. LOFL.
“Seeing San Francisco Pride on the national news said to me, ‘Oh, there’s hope. There’s a place in the world where I could be me if I could get there,’ ” Ford told me. “You don’t think that’s possible when you don’t see people like you in your daily life.”"
This is also horseshit. First of all, this dude was not old enough to drive a car for the entirety of the 70s. Maybe 2 networks available, and back then, none of them praised Pride, go back and look at Bob Schieffer reporting on Pride and f@gs from the 70s! He had that dismissive tone in his voice -- perhaps the only thing he was good at. His brother Tom was a Bushite!
Bringing people together.
I don’t ever remember seeing the Pride parade on the news in the 80s.
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