Not really relevant to their actual goal of destroying democracy, just a little culture war to throw a minority under the bus so the masses squabble over it instead of the broader, more universally opposed changes.
Yeah but it also gets used to sweep normal people into all that neo-nazism because they're poorly educated and will believe whoever they think has authority to speak on the subject. The GOP can't be defeated by calling them evil. They have to be defeated by stopping away their authority and exposing, in plain and simple terms, how they're all hypocrites and that they will throw ALL OF US into the fire, not just the people whose identities are confusing.
The hate they are engineering is deliberate, but it isn't because they all personally hate queer people. It's because they do not care about any of us, and queer people are the easiest group to misinform the public about, so they can fear-monger and keep us putting out fires.
I'm not saying we should stop putting out the fires, I'm saying we should recognize that the fires aren't the goal.
Cruelty is happening to whomever is easiest to target for cruelty. Conservativism always leverages that to allow for hate to take deeper roots. Because people who operate solely off of hate are the easiest to control of all
Normal people in this context CLEARLY means "not fascist" not "not queer", stop being intentionally obtuse. Queer people can be normal or not normal, and so can straight cis people. They're all individuals who decide for themselves how they want to live. Fascism is never normal though.
I'm not talking about the uneducated right-wing populace when I say "they don't personally hate trans people". I'm talking about the leadership of the conservative fascist movement who recognize that generating hate towards queer people will further their goals. Some of them do it because they hate trans people, others do it because it's easy to manipulate people to hate each other for things they don't understand, and hateful people are less likely to think critically about a government that affirms their hatred.
Fascism is a multi-headed hydra, and queerphobic rhetoric is only one head. We need to defeat the whole dragon to stop the head from regrowing, and the first step to accomplishing that is to recognize the dragon as a whole.
Edit: this whole interaction seemed weird to me, I'm not sure if I was dealing with a troll or a kid but I found a recent comment that gives me a bit more context to who this person is: https://lemmy.world/comment/10757207
I don't really feel too bad about being blocked by someone like this