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Lesbians Like Me Joined Forces with Conservatives. Now They’re Turning on Us.
(www.queermajority.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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Leopards Ate My Face
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The problem isn’t so much about things becoming problems once they affect a person, it’s often that these people were never exposed to things affecting them personally before they became adults.
I am of the opinion that empathy develops best when people are exposed to life (for this exercise you are welcome to define “life” how you see fit).
While I have not personally been mistreated for my gender or race, and I have never had anybody murdered or abducted in my personal life, I have had a lot of other Bad Things(TM) happen to me that has developed a healthy sense of empathy. I can then use that empathy and apply it to those other situations. It’s like the analogy of lifting weights can train you to pick up and move heavy things (not just barbells).
People like this have led what I believe to be very sheltered lives. Maybe they were spoiled, never told no, whatever. As far as they ever knew the horribleness of the world only happened to other people (in books, papers, movies, and TV shows), who they were taught were deserving of such things, and that it would never happen to them regardless pf anything.
None of this is meant to excuse anyone’s behavior or lack of empathy. Never would I suggest such a thing. But it may help your sanity in having a possible understanding of how it might happen in the first place.
It may not; I am not presuming to know you or how you will react to anything I’ve just said.
YMMV.
Along the way in life I have met plenty of people who did have the awful things in life happen to them, and yet they still take this position. I have met many people who have been subject to bigotry all their lives, but then an trans person comes into the picture, and they expose themselves to be equally bigoted, and equally without empathy, and just as vicious.
People develop this way because they desperately want to be part of the power holding in-group, not the powerless out-group. So they will have their own out-group of marginalized people, whom they can feel some of that power over.
It could be a lot of things. I have learned that with how the world works there is no one single answer for why people do the things they do. So yeah, it could be ignorance as I suggested, a power grab/sense of belonging like you suggest, and/or something else entirely.
I also think people like this person in the article gets wha they deserve, regardless of why they are the way they are.