Opinion Transgender Megathread V1.

[nostradumbass]

Remember when “sexual preference” was changed in the online dictionary an hour after ACB used it in her hearing because it was deemed bad so they had to change it to mean bad?

I remember.

On behalf of Mazzie Hirono, who sounds like a kid in 3rd grade who can't read and it's his turn to read aloud.

 

[Kirra]

That video.

Jesus fucking Christ, dude.

These people have obvious and SEVERE mental illness and are suffering from hallucinations and delusions.

"Oh, you're a Demon are you? Cool story Dem, I'm a fucking AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, and my pronouns are Wopwopwop and Pewpewpew".

These people need to be locked up in mental institutions and it's coddled freaks like these that make me despise them, their retarded attempts at forced speech (pronoun war) and everything else to do with their "movement".

If they died tomorrow, the world would be a much better place without idiots like them in it.

You do realise that this is the same as finding some of the dumbest conservatives out there and claiming that all conservatives are like that?

The media is mostly showing the fringes of the LGBTQ+ movement because the weirder people they find the more views they get. And seeing how mad that got you it seems to be working.

 

[MoparOrNoCar]

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105544325/drag-shows-children

NPR subtly promoting kids attending drag shows.

Article starts out talking about the big bad republicans and proud boys doing their evil work and ends with a bunch of talk about how good drag shows are for children's health.

 

[ShadowRun]

 

[Deorum]

They're valid, should have equal rights and opportunities, but by definition not normal. We're all abnormal in some ways.

Is it even bad?

Do you accept conservatives or tolerate them?

Conservatives are actually pretty soft these days tbh, but yes and I was raised in an overtly rural conservative protestant family and social environment myself. The imprint and influence of that is often very obvious in a lot of ways.

Tolerance is absolutely fine for some things including gay behavior. We dont have to celebrate it to prove a damn thing to you. I dont want to be an ally. I just dont care who and how you fuck as long as they are over 18 and its consensual. I will tolerate it and you will tolerate that.

It's more than enough, but I don't really accept that it's subject to anybody's tolerance to begin with and the idea of that rubs me the wrong way. It's as simple as people will stay the fuck out of my personal/private business, space and property or they will be brutually murdered infringing on it (for any reason) which is incredibly inconvenient on multple levels and something I'd rather not deal with. I'm just trying to enjoy my life and be left alone. You're voluntarily tolerant? That's amazing and I legit appreciate it, can't fathom how and why that isn't enough for people.

Thats all you can do. equality is an entirely different issue. Its a layered conversation im almost certain you are incapable of beyond the now ancient marriage debate.

And "gay marriage" is preposterous. However, I don't care enough to say that it shouldn't be legal or have any desire to deny that right to other people simply because I have zero interest in it personally. I'm a heathen, not a subscriber to Abrahamic faith so there's no tangible religious scruples involved either because there's no dogmatic doctrine. ᛏᚺᛖ ᚺᛁᚷᚺ ᛟᚾᛖ does explicitly recommend having biological sons though and I've done that.

 

[ElKarlo]

Remember when “sexual preference” was changed in the online dictionary an hour after ACB used it in her hearing because it was deemed bad so they had to change it to mean bad?

I remember.

Yep. Once you have to change the meaning of words to make yourself not look so bad, it looks very bad

 

[ElKarlo]

How about this.....My daughter has a girl in her study group. She tells people....She is " Asexual, except for romantic love. She can fall in love but does not desire sex. For the romantic love she needs to find someone she has a strong emotional connection to, so she calls that Demi but also Pan because she does not care what Gender they are or if they are assigning themselves different genders. BUT.....she may be open to a sexual relationship if the other person is also demisexual with sexual needs, but only if that person is the same sex as her......WHAT? To me this is someone that has had some shit in their lives that made them like this and could benefit from some help.

Weird. Sounds like she’s just a super picky person. I’ll only eat a hamburger that’s idk angus and grilled on wood chips, but not wood chips that give off too much odor. Also the meat has to be marinated. But not with tomato based sauce. It has to be vinegar and be painted on when it’s being grilled. Whole wheat bun and grilled but not browned onions.
Sounds like that kinda crap. We’re she’s been babies so long that she has become a pampered weirdo with crazy expectations to meet

 

[So Fresh]

These people will be looked upon in 20yrs time in the same way the Nazi scientists were looked upon - with utter disdain.

Well maybe they can go work for the US government then

 

[So Fresh]

You do realise that this is the same as finding some of the dumbest conservatives out there and claiming that all conservatives are like that?

The media is mostly showing the fringes of the LGBTQ+ movement because the weirder people they find the more views they get. And seeing how mad that got you it seems to be working.

You’re saying this to someone who would be found in that particular group.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some sherdogger pops up in a good liars trump rally interview

 

[Rob Battisti]

 

[sangreporsangre]

Interesting perspective on the lawsuit filed against the California department of corrections for their policy of transferring intact male rapists into women's prisons by female inmates and the ACLU lining up beside the state to help them further oppress these women. This guy writes for Rolling Stone I believe (not exactly a compliment and not sure if he's even still there) so this is probably as close to the mainstream as this story will get.

On November 17, 2021, the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF, filed a civil rights lawsuit in California that drew almost no coverage. A press corps gearing up to be outraged en masse by the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation case had zero interest in a lawsuit filed by far poorer female abuse victims.

Janine Chandler et al vs. California Department of Corrections targeted a new California state law, the “The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act,” a.k.a. S.B. 132. The statute allows any prisoner who self-identifies as a woman — including prisoners with penises who may have stopped taking hormones — into women’s prisons. There was nothing TV-friendly about the scenes depicted in the complaint:

Plaintiff Krystal Gonzalez (“Krystal”) is a female offender currently incarcerated in Central California Women’s Facility. Krystal was sexually assaulted by a man transferred to her unit under S.B. 132. Krystal filed a grievance and requested single-sex housing away from men; the prison’s response to Krystal’s grievance referred to her assault by a “transgender woman with a penis.” Krystal does not believe that women have penises…

After a week spent denounced for reviewing the Matt Walsh documentary What is a Woman?, and for saying things I think will be boring conventional wisdom within a year, I was ready to never go near trans issues again and move to the impending financial disaster. But accident sucked me back. I’d made a point of pride of not reading a line of commentary about Heard-Depp, but listened to an episode of Blocked and Reported that touched on it after it was over, and learned three things that made me furious and think immediately of Chandler.

One, the ACLU, in apparent exchange for a pledge of $3.5 million, ghost-wrote Heard’s offending editorial, and in particular a line about her having “felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.” Two: Guardian writer Moira Donegan declared, “We are in a moment of virulent antifeminist backlash.” Three: Vice proclaimed without irony, “We’ve all failed Amber Heard.” Almost as one, the establishment press declared itself concerned with the suffering of a rich actress. However, there’s a gaping loophole in their concern for women, and Chandler sits in the middle of it.

Let’s talk about “the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out” in the context of this case:

Chandler is the headline legal action in a nationwide battle over whether or not prisoners who self-identify as women, including those with histories of rape or sexual abuse, should be allowed to transfer to women’s correctional facilities. There have been both official and unofficial policy changes on this front in a growing collection of states across the country. These often happen little to no public debate, because this issue may be the most impenetrable media taboo in America now.

The group bringing the suit, WoLF, has been targeted from every conceivable angle by pressure and censorship campaigns. While we at least heard about protesting Canadian truckers having their GoFundMe campaigns frozen, WoLF didn’t even bother trying to raise money on that platform, “because they just ban you really easily,” as legal director Lauren Adams put it.

They moved to a purportedly speechier platform, GiveButter, hoping they would have “less of a censorious kind of view.” But even GiveButter soon gave WoLF the boot (I reached out to the company, which hasn’t provided public comment yet). “It was just a general fundraiser,” Adams explains. “And they said we violated their community standards. So now we’re on GiveSendGo, which is a Christian crowdfunding site.”

If there’s a better illustration of the upside-down state of politics in 2022 America, it’s a feminist activist group forced to seek cyber-refuge in a Christian fundraising company.

It’s become tantamount to career suicide to be associated with WoLF. In April, one of its board members, Devin Buckley, was disinvited to a speech on British Romanticism she was scheduled to give at Harvard. The author of Buckley’s rejection letter fairly shivered with intellectual fright:

My co-coordinator has refused to extend to you a formal offer to speak at our colloquium. I can’t fight for you on this… Even if I were to push your visit past [the co-coordinator], it will be near impossible to get our two faculty members to sign onto funding your visit once they learn of your online presence…

WoLF has trouble attracting Board members because as a 501(c)3, the names of board members have to be public. Even the group’s advisory council is quasi-secret by necessity. “We have women on our advisory council who have to remain anonymous because they have jobs, or their spouses have jobs,” Adams says. “There are so many people who just can’t publicly associate with us.”

Even people who submit declarations in WoLF’s prison case may not be immune. On May 31st, biologist and Substack author Colin Wright submitted a declaration in the Chandler case essentially testifying to the biological difference between men and women. “Being male or female is an immutable characteristic of each human,” he wrote.

On June 10th, Wright was informed by the online commerce platform Etsy that, after a “comprehensive review,” his account was permanently closed. A letter from the firm’s “content moderation team” deemed him guilty of “glorifying hatred or violence towards protected groups.”

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-worlds-most-taboo-legal-case

One thing I learned from this is that the New York Times just published a piece that was ever so slightly skeptical of the "trans kid" industry and this Taibbi guy seems to think that this signals a turning point.

In a fascinating development this week, the New York Times ran a long story by Emily Bazelon called “The Battle Over Gender Therapy” that read suspiciously like Timesian interpretation of work by oft-denounced people like Jesse Singal, Katie Herzog, Wright, and even Abigail Shrier. The paper described a working group of clinicians trying to develop standards of care on behalf of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) who, among other things, wondered if the “rise in trans identification among teenagers” could be the result of “social influence.”

The piece also flatly said hormone treatments can “permanently alter” bodily characteristics like voice depth and breast development, and quoted researchers who suggested that teens and preteens undergo “comprehensive diagnostic assessment” and demonstrate “several years” of persistent identification with another gender before proceeding to medical transition. Even mentioning these ideas a year ago was a cancelable offense.

Anyone who knows how the media works knows an establishment supertanker like the Times flying this kind of feature is usually an indication of a major shift in elite political attitudes. It’s also often a precursor to a sudden outpouring of more permissive discussion of a previously taboo issue in other establishment outlets.

Predictably, this Times piece stressed the dangers of giving certain talking points a wide berth because “right-wing politicians” will turn them into “political dynamite,” for now preserving the fiction that only Republicans are pushing back on these issues. But the worm is turning, and everyone knows it, which is probably why the reaction to the Times article was so furious (“Imagine thinking this is the time to publish that piece,” seethed the ACLU’s Chase Strangio).

The piece is here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/magazine/gender-therapy.html

It is a hell of a lot more balanced than basically any other piece NYT or comparable outlets like WaPo have published so I think Taibbi might be right. There has been an insane meltdown over it on Twitter from trans activists of course but that's to be expected.

 

[sangreporsangre]

If the insane "gender identity" ideology that has taken hold of our society seems so completely inorganic and astroturfed, it's because it is. Recommended read:

The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities (SSI)
The wealthy, powerful, and sometimes very weird Pritzker cousins have set their sights on a new God-like goal: using gender ideology to remake human biology

One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

I first wrote about the Pritzkers, whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call “transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

Through investments in the techno-medical complex, where new highly medicalized sex identities are being conjured, Pritzkers and other elite donors are attempting to normalize the idea that human reproductive sex exists on a spectrum. These investments go toward creating new SSI using surgeries and drugs, and by instituting rapid language reforms to prop up these new identities and induce institutions and individuals to normalize them. In 2018, for example, at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at the University of California Los Angeles (where the Pritzkers are major donors and hold various titles), the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology advertised several options for young females who think they can be men to have their reproductive organs removed, a procedure termed “gender-affirming care.”


The Pritzkers became the first American family to have a medical school bear its name in recognition of a private donation when it gave $12 million to the University of Chicago School of Medicine in 1968. In June 2002, the family announced an additional gift of $30 million to be invested in the University of Chicago’s Biological Sciences Division and School of Medicine. These investments provided the family with a bridgehead into the world of academic medicine, which it has since expanded in pursuit of a well-defined agenda centered around SSI. Also in 2002, Jennifer Pritzker founded the Tawani Foundation, which has since provided funding to Howard Brown Health and Rush Memorial Medical Center in Chicago, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Foundation Fund, and the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, all of which provide some version of “gender care.” In the case of the latter, “clients” include “gender creative children as well as transgender and gender non-conforming adolescents ...”

In 2012, J.B. Pritzker and his wife, M.K. Pritzker, worked with The Bridgespan Group—a management consultant to nonprofits and philanthropists—to develop a long-term strategy for the J.B and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation. Their work together included conducting research on developments in the field of early childhood education, to which the foundation committed $25 million.

Ever since, a motivating and driving force behind the Pritzkers’ familywide commitment to SSI has been J.B.’s cousin Jennifer (born James) Pritzker—a retired lieutenant colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard and the father of three children. In 2013, around the time gender ideology reached the level of mainstream American culture, Jennifer Pritzker announced a transition to womanhood. Since then, Pritzker has used the Tawani Foundation to help fund various institutions that support the concept of a spectrum of human sexes, including the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the Williams Institute UCLA School of Law, the National Center for Transgender Equality, the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Palm Military Center, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), and many others. Tawani Enterprises, the private investment counterpart to the philanthropic foundation, invests in and partners with Squadron Capital LLC, a Chicago-based private investment vehicle that acquires a number of medical device companies that manufacture instruments, implants, cutting tools, and injection molded plastic products for use in surgeries. As in the case of Jon Stryker, founder of the LGBT mega-NGO Arcus Foundation, it is hard to avoid the impression of complementarity between Jennifer Pritzker’s for-profit medical investments and philanthropic support for SSI.

Pritzker also helps fund the University of Minnesota National Center for Gender Spectrum Health, which claims “the gender spectrum is inclusive of the wide array of gender identities beyond binary definitions of gender—inclusive of cisgender and transgender identities, gender queer, and nonbinary identities as a normal part of the natural expression of gender. Gender spectrum health is the healthy, affirmed, positive development of a gender identity and expression that is congruent with the individual’s sense of self.” The university, where Pritzker has served on the Leadership Council for the Program in Human Sexuality, provides “young adult gender services” in the medical school’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health.

Pritzker’s philanthropy is also active in Canada, where Jennifer has helped fund the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, a teaching institution invested in the deconstruction of human sex. An instructor in the Bonham Centre and the curator of its Sexual Representation Collection—“Canada’s largest archival collection of pornography”—is transgender studies professor Nicholas Matte, who denies categorically that sexual dimorphism exists. Pritzker also created the first chair in transgender studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The current chair, Aaron Devor, founded an annual conference called Moving Trans History Forward, whose keynote speaker in 2016 was the renowned transhumanist, Martine Rothblatt, who was mentored by the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil of Google. Rothblatt lectured there on the value of creating an organization such as WPATH to serve “tech transgenders” in the cultivation of “tech transhumanists.” (Rothblatt’s ideology of disembodiment and technological religion seems to be having nearly as much influence on American culture as Sirius satellite radio, which Rothblatt co-founded.) Rothblatt is an integral presence at Out Leadership, a business networking arm of the LGBTQ+ movement, and appears to believe that “we are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful, and beneficent.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/...ushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers

 

[MoparOrNoCar]

Interesting perspective on the lawsuit filed against the California department of corrections for their policy of transferring intact male rapists into women's prisons by female inmates and the ACLU lining up beside the state to help them further oppress these women. This guy writes for Rolling Stone I believe (not exactly a compliment and not sure if he's even still there) so this is probably as close to the mainstream as this story will get.


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-worlds-most-taboo-legal-case

One thing I learned from this is that the New York Times just published a piece that was ever so slightly skeptical of the "trans kid" industry and this Taibbi guy seems to think that this signals a turning point.


The piece is here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/magazine/gender-therapy.html

It is a hell of a lot more balanced than basically any other piece NYT or comparable outlets like WaPo have published so I think Taibbi might be right. There has been an insane meltdown over it on Twitter from trans activists of course but that's to be expected.

Rape is less of an offense than hurting peoples feelings in the minds of the ACLU.

 

[ssBaldy]

These people will be looked upon in 20yrs time in the same way the Nazi scientists were looked upon - with utter disdain.

Nazi scientist actually achieved a lot - experimenting on people let them make their testing very informative. Unethical, some times sadistic, but effective.
This bullshit has nothing to do with science and won't bring any good results.

 

[Fluffernutter]

Interesting perspective on the lawsuit filed against the California department of corrections for their policy of transferring intact male rapists into women's prisons by female inmates and the ACLU lining up beside the state to help them further oppress these women. This guy writes for Rolling Stone I believe (not exactly a compliment and not sure if he's even still there) so this is probably as close to the mainstream as this story will get.


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-worlds-most-taboo-legal-case

One thing I learned from this is that the New York Times just published a piece that was ever so slightly skeptical of the "trans kid" industry and this Taibbi guy seems to think that this signals a turning point.


The piece is here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/magazine/gender-therapy.html

It is a hell of a lot more balanced than basically any other piece NYT or comparable outlets like WaPo have published so I think Taibbi might be right. There has been an insane meltdown over it on Twitter from trans activists of course but that's to be expected.

How often does the ACLU support the government within a legal matter? I thought their point was to support people who feel the government overreached their authority.

 

[Fluffernutter]

Interesting perspective on the lawsuit filed against the California department of corrections for their policy of transferring intact male rapists into women's prisons by female inmates and the ACLU lining up beside the state to help them further oppress these women. This guy writes for Rolling Stone I believe (not exactly a compliment and not sure if he's even still there) so this is probably as close to the mainstream as this story will get.


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-worlds-most-taboo-legal-case

One thing I learned from this is that the New York Times just published a piece that was ever so slightly skeptical of the "trans kid" industry and this Taibbi guy seems to think that this signals a turning point.


The piece is here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/magazine/gender-therapy.html

It is a hell of a lot more balanced than basically any other piece NYT or comparable outlets like WaPo have published so I think Taibbi might be right. There has been an insane meltdown over it on Twitter from trans activists of course but that's to be expected.

I live in a town that is quite diverse.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to chaperone a field trip to a Pride event at another school. The event was well received and had lots of students.

Quite a few of the students identify as something different than what they were assigned at birth.

Each year the number of students that I teach who identify as trans continues to grow.

What I didn't realize until now is that even in such a diverse community, the trans students that I have taught tend to be white. Not POC.

In my life, the amount of LGBTQ people I know tend to match quite evenly with the diversity of the community.

I never really thought about it until I read the articles above regarding astroturfing. Is it just a coincidence that, at least within my current home town, that the trans movement seems...well...white?

 

[deviake]

I live in a town that is quite diverse.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to chaperone a field trip to a Pride event at another school. The event was well received and had lots of students.

Quite a few of the students identify as something different than what they were assigned at birth.

Each year the number of students that I teach who identify as trans continues to grow.

What I didn't realize until now is that even in such a diverse community, the trans students that I have taught tend to be white. Not POC.

In my life, the amount of LGBTQ people I know tend to match quite evenly with the diversity of the community.

I never really thought about it until I read the articles above regarding astroturfing. Is it just a coincidence that, at least within my current home town, that the trans movement seems...well...white?

I haven't looked into the stats but I've seen this postulated before. Is interesting, isn't it. I wanna find out meow.

This is a relatively minor point but whenever I see "assigned at birth" it comes across to me like it's something someone decided when it's just the reality of the situation. Humans are sexually dimorphic, we're not assigned a sex, we just are one sex or the other. I may be being pedantic though and ascribing intent that's not there. Assigned at birth may have always been normal parlance in the medical field.

 

[sangreporsangre]

How often does the ACLU support the government within a legal matter? I thought their point was to support people who feel the government overreached their authority.

Seeing as how their stated purpose is to protect the civil liberties of Americans, I believe that most of their work historically has been standing up against the government. I'm not sure how many times they've attempted to intervene in a case on behalf of the state as they're doing now in Cali, this may be a first. But lately they've been pretty comfortable lately voicing support for power as long as it has a (D) next to its name; they gave full-throated support to Biden's attempted workplace "vaccine" mandates even when that directly contradicted the position they took for dealing with a pandemic. As an organization they've lost their way.

Regarding your other post about how it's almost all white kids who are adopting these identities, that's been what I've witnessed in my kids' schools and you think it would make people realize that this is a social contagion rather than a natural phenomenon. Also the fact that so many more teen girls have seemingly been "assigned" the wrong body than teen boys, that should be another massive red flag. But people are pretty good at not realizing the obvious there days and it's because they've been conditioned like that.

 

[Otto!]

I saw some bird the other day who's pronouns were:

"She / Them".

They aren't even trying to hide it anymore. It's just made up nonsense. It makes no sense whatsoever - so the word "she" is fine, denoting a female, but the word "her" isn't even though that also denotes a female?

Fuck off you attention seeking, immature, mentally ill cunts. Worst people on the planet after paedophiles - at least some murderer's have redeeming qualities depending on who they've killed and why.

I don’t get this either.

-Bob: “I am a woman now, please call me Linda. Also refer to me as Zer.”
-Coworker: “Well Linda, shouldn’t I just refer to you as she/her since you’re a woman?”
-Boblinda: “Reeeeeeeeeeee”

 

[ElKarlo]

I live in a town that is quite diverse.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to chaperone a field trip to a Pride event at another school. The event was well received and had lots of students.

Quite a few of the students identify as something different than what they were assigned at birth.

Each year the number of students that I teach who identify as trans continues to grow.

What I didn't realize until now is that even in such a diverse community, the trans students that I have taught tend to be white. Not POC.

In my life, the amount of LGBTQ people I know tend to match quite evenly with the diversity of the community.

I never really thought about it until I read the articles above regarding astroturfing. Is it just a coincidence that, at least within my current home town, that the trans movement seems...well...white?

It’s a free and easy way to get discriminated against points. Go from the worst aka white male to pretty up there, trans and you forgo all kinds of guilting and what not