cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22334414
Summary
Two transgender women, Dahlia and Jess, were attacked at a Minneapolis rail station, with onlookers cheering their assailants instead of helping.
After confronting a man yelling transphobic slurs, the situation escalated into a violent assault involving four or five others, leaving both women unconscious.
Advocates attribute the rise in anti-trans violence to emboldened transphobia fueled by misinformation and political rhetoric, including Donald Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
The local trans community is responding with solidarity rallies, self-defense classes, and firearm training to prepare for a potential increase in attacks.
Police are investigating, but no arrests have been made.
Please arm yourselves and learn to shoot. Never pull a gun you are unwilling or unable to shoot.
Counterpoint: get into a gunfight anywhere someone is trying to beat you to death and you have a gun
Or just, you know, walk away? Try to deescalate the situation maybe? Pulling out a gun and blasting away seems like the worst option here.
Fistfights exist everywhere but rampant gun violence does not. “Buy a gun to deal with that hypothetical problem” is terrible advice compared to, idk, deescalation training. Yeah if you’re already on the ground getting punched in the face it’s too late to deescalate but there were choices made before that. Buying a gun so you can shoot up a train station isn’t exactly the most beneficial way to deal with bigots as a society.
people shouldn’t need to murder other people in order to live safely. responsibility for 100% of this falls on the violent fuckheads who assault innocents. nothing more needs to be done than taking them out of the community. asserting that innocent victims safety should be predicated on their ability to shoot others, and the likelihood that assholes willing to assault innocent people are also the same kinds of assholes who would carry firearms leads me to believe that the assholes are the problem, not the victims.
for fuck’s sake, stop blaming victims and fix the fuckheads already.
You cannot fix stupid in anyone else except yourself. You cannot force curiosity or self awareness. You can inspire them, but this is not deterministic.
It sucks. It is not blaming the victim. It is acknowledgement of the fact that worrying about things you cannot change is a pointless and useless waste of time. Only worry about things that are within your power to change right now. You can alter you. You can take every measure available to defend and protect you. In the present climate of politics, you need to take every available measure seriously. I have no emotion in this recommendation. It has nothing to do with blame or individuals. I don’t care that the victims here were trans. To me, we’re all just a spectrum of people and no people deserve prejudice or discrimination when they do no harm. Those that do harm deserve discrimination.
A gun is no guarantee and can be just as dangerous to the person carrying it, but personally, I would rather have control over my own destiny even if that means I only get to decide the one other person that leaves with me or if I’m ready to check out. That last one is loaded with my own chronic outlook and not intended as any implication or insinuation. I battle a lot with being a useless burden to family and get a ton of prejudice for other reasons. I get it. Life can suck when you’re different. Don’t go picking battles with your allies and friends willing to tell you the hard truths with love.
Oh, so one of the cities with the lowest levels of racial equality also has a problem with transphobia? I’m not shocked, I’m not surprised. Between this and the people in Springfield Ohio instilling fear in the towns Haitian residents, I will never understand how people can become so hateful.
It should not be forgotten that it was not the wider ‘people of Springfield’ who pushed that shit. There were certainly kooks/nazis in Springfield who were willing to say it, but the responsibility falls on the politicians/media organizations who maliciously propagated it.
People are emotional, tribal, creatures. It’s very easy for us to hate the out group. That was probably beneficial for pre-history humans, where the other tribe could be a real threat. It’s not so useful today, where “the other group” is just some people waiting for the train.
I think the best paths forward have to make people believe more people are in-group. That’s a reason why stuff like representation matters. People might be like “who cares if there’s a trans main character in a movie?”, but that helps people be less hateful. They don’t hate the character from the movie, they relate to them, and then a person in real life gets seen in that light.
I don’t understand why people think it’s a good idea to express themselves in a specific way if it WILL turn out badly for them. That’s just plain stupid and dangerous. Don’t get me wrong though, I fully believe people should be able to express themselves however they want. But that doesn’t mean one should walk around a warzone and think they wouldn’t get a bullet in their face because they oppose that war. Same goes for equality in a city without equality.
Stay safe.
I just don’t understand how so much hate can exist for your fellow person :(
Very Christian guys. I’m sure Jesus would love all this violence!
“Jesus is a woke DEI hire and we don’t listen to that libshit.”
-American “Religious” Right
Middle eastern hippie Jew says be kind to each other and pay taxes! Nail to cross!
This is America. They’d shoot him or lynch him. We don’t like to waste time when we execute innocents.
Some of these fucking comments, jeez. Interesting how its always the highly victimized populations who get the “Kumbayah” speech, and not the people who follow those populations around harassing them to use ANY response as justification for violence.
