Some young folks are practicing RCTAーrace change to another

July 30, 2023 1:54 PM

“Subliminal” videos have been popping up on YouTube and TikTok recently that purport to be able to manifest physical changes in appearance and even genetics to match those of East Asians.
posted by ener (71 comments total)

FTA:
Since before she hit double digits, Alisa, 15, said she has felt a special connection with Japan. The high school student, who asked to be anonymous for fear of being doxxed online, was born in Ukraine and lives in Maryland, but she now goes by the Japanese name Miyuki and listens to “subliminals” that promise she will wake up and be Japanese. So far, she believes that by listening to YouTube videos with lo-fi music and photos of East Asian facial features while she sleeps, her vision has cleared, her eyelids have become smaller and her hair is just a bit darker.

Practitioners of what they call “race change to another,” or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to become a different race. They tune in to subliminal videos that claim can give them an “East Asian appearance” or “Korean DNA.”
posted by ener at 1:55 PM on July 30, 2023

"By keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in his mind
Or somewhere in the back of his mind
That he might, by force of will
Cause his face to approach those of his ideal"
posted by Windopaene at 2:04 PM on July 30, 2023 [29 favorites]

Didn't we try this once in the Eighties with The Vapors?
posted by hippybear at 2:09 PM on July 30, 2023 [32 favorites]

Is there any evidence that this is an actual trend, or is it just a fringey little blip being hyped up by NBC as a weird tangent to the anti-trans panic?
posted by heatherlogan at 2:22 PM on July 30, 2023 [93 favorites]

I feel really uncomfortable with 15 year olds doing/saying really cringe things being broadcasted in the news like this is new or different. Yes, this here is some new scam that some ( few?) people are participating in wholeheartedly but 15 year olds are in fact children.*

*this comment does not include gender identity stuff such should be taken very seriously.
posted by AlexiaSky at 2:32 PM on July 30, 2023 [41 favorites]

Even the article itself concedes that it's not an actual trend. The popularity of the YT pages may be just people coming to gawk at them and the hastily posted Tik Tok pages (within the last few weeks?) make me wonder if those aren't the result of some kind of prank wave.
posted by Selena777 at 2:41 PM on July 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

the overwhelming majority of the RCTA community wants to be East Asian, and similarly, most race-related subliminals aim to transform listeners into East Asians.

Interesting to compare to people trying to become members of other races: Dolezal (black), pretendians, scholars trying to be Latina.
posted by doctornemo at 2:41 PM on July 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

My question is, where is this 15 year old getting these supposed subliminal race change recordings? That's the real source of this news article -- who the fuck is creating these things for others to consume?

Also, did anyone else get a pop-up looking at the NBC site that wanted a sign-up for Asian-related news content that was something like "News. Content. Tea." for the headline?

Would they aim that headline at UK citizens? That in and of itself felt racist to me and I'm not a racial minority in any way.
posted by hippybear at 2:42 PM on July 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

I mean, I skimmed the article, but is there at any point any indication that the journalist did any actual journalism beyond interviewing people listening to these things? Seems like that's the Easy Way Out for writing an actual article about these things. Who is making them is the more interesting question.
posted by hippybear at 2:43 PM on July 30, 2023 [13 favorites]

Didn't we try this once in the Eighties with The Vapors?

The 1880s?
posted by mhoye at 2:53 PM on July 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

More seriously: Didn’t we go through a news cycle of suddenly kids thinking they might be wolves a few years ago? I feel like we need some sort of embargo on news stories about kids trying to figure themselves out, the stories are always basically the same shape. “When a child is trying to learn how to pilot an adult body through evolving relationships with home, school and their social spaces with the help of unreliable presumably-adults, equally terrified peers and The Internet, things can get weird and that’s ok. For the most part they’ll figure themselves out if they have a reasonably safe place to do that. Let them have that and quit gawking, you’re not a tourist at some teenager zoo, mind your own business.”
posted by mhoye at 3:00 PM on July 30, 2023 [74 favorites]

I mean, I skimmed the article, but is there at any point any indication that the journalist did any actual journalism beyond interviewing people listening to these things?

Yes, there is actual journalism in the article beyond just interviewing the people who listened to the subliminal videos.
posted by jimw at 3:15 PM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hippybear: Didn't we try this once in the Eighties with The Vapors?

I really think so.
posted by dr_dank at 3:40 PM on July 30, 2023 [56 favorites]

hippybear, it's possible that an adult is making the recordings, but it wouldn't surprise me if 15 year olds are capable of making them.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:09 PM on July 30, 2023

Don’t mock The Vapors. Their second album, Magnets, was amazing.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:12 PM on July 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Literally NOT mocking The Vapors. Mocking this... other thing.
posted by hippybear at 4:15 PM on July 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Yep, public mockery. Exactly what your average 15-year-old trying to figure their shit out needs.
posted by not just everyday big moggies at 4:18 PM on July 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

If she can hear me, I'd be happy to have a deeper conversation with her.

If the creators of these things making ridiculous promises can hear me, I'd like to have a different conversation with them.
posted by hippybear at 4:21 PM on July 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

It’s impressive how teens always find new wild things to be delusional about that adults are bounds to get hand wringy over
posted by Betty_effn_White at 4:30 PM on July 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm Asian and I'm not even offended by this because it's so goofy.

But experts underscore that it is simply impossible to change your race.

I love how NBC had to mention this specifically. And consulted experts about it.

Also, Alisa could just go by "Arisa" in Japanese... the option was right there...
posted by airmail at 4:53 PM on July 30, 2023 [10 favorites]

Is this like the new "trend" of eyeball licking?
posted by zardoz at 5:25 PM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Some young folks are practicing RCTAーrace change to another

No they aren't
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 5:25 PM on July 30, 2023 [13 favorites]

“When a child is trying to learn how to pilot an adult body through evolving relationships with home, school and their social spaces with the help of unreliable presumably-adults, equally terrified peers and The Internet, things can get weird and that’s ok.

yeah, this all plays to my general notion that we do our young people a disservice by not being honest with them well before they hit puberty -- that there is a phase coming in their lives that will last as much as fifteen years wherein they will kinda go crazy, not all at once, not all in the same way, but one way or another, as they transition from being a child to an adult, they will inevitably get it all wrong at least for a while ... and it's nothing to be ashamed of or particularly frightened about, it's completely normal, we all do it. And if we do it right, sometime around our mid-twenties, we don't so much suddenly become uncrazy as find a way to accept our particular craziness into our identities ... who we uniquely and beautifully are.

at least, that's how it worked for me.
posted by philip-random at 5:31 PM on July 30, 2023 [46 favorites]

it's okay, if the videos actually work on them, they can just use an AI photo editor to undo it
posted by one for the books at 5:48 PM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

mhoye, I think you should republish that as a self-help book for parents of teens.
posted by eirias at 7:12 PM on July 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'll just leave this here.
posted by evilDoug at 7:27 PM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Indulging teenage nonsense is bad parenting. Most successful people these days were disciplined and focused as teenagers. “Confused” teenagers generally end up loser adults.
posted by MattD at 9:04 PM on July 30, 2023

I hope you someday learn how profoundly wrong your oversimplification is.
posted by FallibleHuman at 9:14 PM on July 30, 2023 [49 favorites]

But experts underscore that it is simply impossible to change your race.
I love how NBC had to mention this specifically.

The ability of people to believe weird shit should not be underestimated. Exhibit A is QAnon, i presume. I know a woman with a PhD in Zoology who believes alien lizard people have cross-bred with humans. Pretty sure you have to have a little genetics to get that PhD, but she's apparently chosen to ignore it.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:18 PM on July 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

“Confused” teenagers generally end up loser adults.

or they become radio DJs, join noise bands, write novels, commit random acts of art and poetry, make movies, even get paid for some of it.

at least, that's how it worked for me.
posted by philip-random at 9:53 PM on July 30, 2023 [45 favorites]

For a second there I thought MattD was putting himself forward as the example, but then philip-random helped me realize my error.

(Cuz philip-random sounds cool.)
posted by klanawa at 10:24 PM on July 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Indulging teenage nonsense is bad parenting. Most successful people these days were disciplined and focused as teenagers. “Confused” teenagers generally end up loser adults.

Relatives who talk like that are the reason a lot of folks don't go home for the holidays.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 10:28 PM on July 30, 2023 [85 favorites]

Zelig is not DC nor Marvel cannon.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 12:22 AM on July 31, 2023

Most successful people these days were disciplined and focused as teenagers.

You have surrounded yourself with an anomalous set of successful people. FYI in case you don't like what it does to you.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:53 AM on July 31, 2023 [11 favorites]

Trying to look like an idealized different race is nothing new--plenty of people do it, it's still common to try to look more white but looking more black in certain ways is popular now, too. With the popularity of K-pop and K-drama I wouldn't be surprised if non-East Asians are trying to look more Asian.

I am surprised that it's only through these little teen hypnosis videos, though--I suppose the news hook is that if your child looks at their phone too long, they'll start hating themselves and turn genders, races, or into a cat.
posted by kingdead at 1:00 AM on July 31, 2023

The change would be very subtle
It might take ten years or so
Gradually his face would change its shape
A more hooked nose
Beady eyes... a larger forehead
posted by Meatbomb at 2:07 AM on July 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's hard for me to see this story as anything but another way to deligitimize trans people and teenagers and teenage trans people.
posted by kokaku at 2:13 AM on July 31, 2023 [14 favorites]

This article doesn't demonstrate that teens are stupid or gullible, it demonstrates that NBC has at least one editor who is both.

There's a lot of it about. Perfectly clear to me that it's part of the anti-trans backlash currently being peddled by the Right for its own purposes.
posted by flabdablet at 2:20 AM on July 31, 2023 [13 favorites]

This is a deliberate transphobic propaganda piece saying "children can't be trans" because look at them they think they are wolves, otherkin, animals, other race, whatever ridiculous nonsense.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:55 AM on July 31, 2023 [24 favorites]

Perfectly clear to me that it's part of the anti-trans backlash currently being peddled by the Right for its own purposes.

RCTA is part of the wider subliminal community, there are "subliminals" to help with better grades, more money, a boyfriend/girlfriend, or to even look prettier. They work by including affirmations embedded subtly into the audio, and supposedly that allows your subconscious mind to react and act upon them. These have existed for decades.

It has absolutely nothing to do with transgenderism.
posted by buffy12 at 2:57 AM on July 31, 2023

It has absolutely nothing to do with transgenderism.

Tell me you're cis without saying you're cis.

In this political climate, anything that frames children making "bizarre" identity decisions feeds into anti-trans rhetoric, which lies and distorts the truth that is the reality of trans people existing in the world.
posted by kokaku at 3:04 AM on July 31, 2023 [32 favorites]

It has absolutely nothing to do with transgenderism.

This is nonsense. It absolutely does. First of all, "if you can change your sex what's next you're gonna change your race?" is a commonplace transphobic talking point. NBC is just pretending (lying) that this is a new thing they just discovered.

And if the subliminal stuff is so commonplace and ordinary, then where are all the articles talking about grades and money and all the rest that you mention?
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:05 AM on July 31, 2023 [19 favorites]

Also, transgenderism? You do realize that's an offensive term, right? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you don't know better.

An ism is an ideology. Being trans is just another way of being a person in the world. We don't grow spring forth fully formed as adults, we begin as children often damaged badly by a world that does not accept us.
posted by kokaku at 3:06 AM on July 31, 2023 [27 favorites]

It is possible that subliminal self-help has nothing to do with transgenderism, and at the same time this news piece fits on the transphobic propaganda spectrum. Propagandists are not known for their intellectual honesty.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 3:07 AM on July 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

Search NBC news site for "subliminal" messages. How many of them are about "grades, more money, a boyfriend/girlfriend, or to even look prettier". I have bad news about that.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:13 AM on July 31, 2023

It is possible that subliminal self-help has nothing to do with transgenderism, and at the same time this news piece fits on the transphobic propaganda spectrum

It's not about the self-help. That would be an obscure corner of the internet if a major media outlet didn't run a story about it. That's the problem.

Also, again, maybe you just used the term the first person used, but transgenderism is an offensive anti-trans term. It only exists to other trans people.
posted by kokaku at 3:17 AM on July 31, 2023 [17 favorites]

And if the subliminal stuff is so commonplace and ordinary, then where are all the articles talking about grades and money and all the rest that you mention?

When I said that it had nothing to do with transgender people, the "it" was referring to the subliminal community. The article is obviously trying to connect two different things. The attempt to connect the 2 was disingenuous.

But there are articles that talk about subliminal community better: like this one.

That would be an obscure corner of the internet if a major media outlet didn't run a story about it. That's the problem.

Subliminals and other new age stuff like the law of attraction are very popular, they are all over TikTok and I've seen people use them in real life. I've known about them since I was a kid.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you don't know better.

English is not my first language, I didn't know, sorry. My wording in general was a bit off but I think we agree on the same point.
posted by buffy12 at 3:25 AM on July 31, 2023 [7 favorites]

Subliminals and other new age stuff like the law of attraction are very popular, they are all over TikTok and I've seen people use them in real life. I've known about them since I was a kid.

This is common knowledge. Everybody knows about stuff like Led Zeppelin backwards "satan" thing and so on. That is not the point. The point is that a major publication, which has never cared about stuff like that, has now decided to suddenly publish a piece about "young people are silly amirite, changing their races, that's dumb!" in a situation where there is increased, systematic, heavily media fuelled rise in transphobia. The function of this article is to delegitimate people's decision about themselves, about their very identity. Thereby contributing to the overall transphobic hysteria.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:42 AM on July 31, 2023 [11 favorites]

The Subliminal subculture? grift? community? sounds like it would make for an interesting FPP — there seems to be a lot there, like relatively popular creators confessing that they put “dark messages” in their videos, which is weird on a number of levels.

However, this NBC article, by focusing on teens and one aspect of Subliminals without a lot of reference to the rest of it, is careless at best and is setting up another article or two by Jesse Singal or his ilk, who are really fond of the “confused teens” story as way to attack trans people. So it’s hardly surprising that trans people and allies would give this article a hard stare.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:04 AM on July 31, 2023 [12 favorites]

Indulging teenage nonsense is bad parenting.

"Indulging" implies supporting anything a kid thinks about their identity is wrong. "Teenage nonsense" = same.

Helping a child navigate their emerging identity is "bad parenting?"

You have that completely backwards.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:37 AM on July 31, 2023 [18 favorites]

Indulging teenage nonsense is bad parenting. Most successful people these days were disciplined and focused as teenagers.

With absolutely epic midlife crises.
posted by thivaia at 5:39 AM on July 31, 2023 [14 favorites]

Most successful people these days were disciplined and focused as teenagers.

"Most?" "Successful?" By what metric?

"These days" uh oh

"Disciplined" meaning THEY acted disciplined, or someone did some disciplining, meaning, in this context, shut up about your identity?

"Focused" on what? Success?

Is success, as it's usually determined, guarantee one is happy? Including with oneself?

“Confused” teenagers generally end up loser adults.
posted by MattD

So instead of helping "confused" teens (but may be right that their future identity matches their current feelings) with their internal world, anyway tell them to be quiet), tell them they'll be losers if they explore?

Face over hand emoji. Please don't.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:52 AM on July 31, 2023 [11 favorites]

(Hand over face emoji)
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:03 AM on July 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

But experts underscore that it is simply impossible to change your race.

Well,
Passe blanc

As a technical matter, you can't change your ethnicity but you can change your race and caste status by changing your government.
posted by eustatic at 6:15 AM on July 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

As a technical matter, you can't change your ethnicity

I would argue against this. Ethnicity is the expression of your ethnos, your nation, your culture, not your genetics and ancestry, and while those things contribute to ethnicity, they are not the whole of it. Why is someone Latino? Not because of genetics but because of growing up in a Spanish-speaking culture, being part of a Spanish-speaking community, observing Spanish-speaking customs, eating Spanish-speaking cultural foods, etc. One could "become Latino" through assimilating over a long time into a Latino community.

Once upon a time, before modern nation states, this process of assimilation and acculturation happened, but now, there's a nationality (your statehood, which can change) and your race (your "biological identity" as perceived by others that doesn't) but ethnicity predates that division.

Native American nations often had processes for becoming part of those native nations, an immigration into the nation/ethnos. Jewish people have the same, a process for becoming part of the Jewish nation. In both cases, I would argue that a person's ethnicity does change through this long process, even if their genotypes and phenotypes obviously don't change.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 6:31 AM on July 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

By this same token, people cannot "become Asian" but they do become Japanese, Thai, Korean, etc, but never unilaterally, and it doesn't happen like this. I do agree this is an almost non-existent fad that NBC has pumped up for it's fear-mongering about youth and trans people.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 6:34 AM on July 31, 2023

Race is not your biological identity.
posted by eustatic at 6:55 AM on July 31, 2023

Yes, that's why I put it in quotation marks. Race is seen by larger society as being biologic and immutable, while it is obviously sociologic and shifting.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 7:10 AM on July 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

I know a woman with a PhD in Zoology who believes alien lizard people have cross-bred with humans.

The former chair in my wife's biology department also ran the zoology lab which contained a huge variety of reptiles. Somehow he was a creationist.
posted by slogger at 7:40 AM on July 31, 2023

i truly hate that "transracial" has become this sort of weird attempt to delegitimize transgender people.

transracial has an explicit, exiting meaning, and refers to adoptions crossing different ethnicities--for instance, all those east asian children (mostly korean and chinese) that were adopted by american (mostly white, christian) families, who then grow up and find themselves confronting a discordance with and barriers to the culture of their ancestry, as well as having to live with and exist in a space where they are immersed in the culture of their adoptive families and emotionally/internally exist as one of them, and yet become recipients of racism because of their external appearance; this is often compounded with a lack of understanding that asian countries are different or poor recordkeeping; for instance, this redditor, or (spoiler for a movie):

this year's film joy ride includes this as a plot point

as far as "becoming japanese/korean/etc", that's a longer, larger discussion that this article doesn't really touch on (i.e., ethnic nationalism, political nationalism, in-group/out-group dynamics, homogeneity of the population, colorism, minority issues), except in the most glancing, oli londonesque way (which, btw, fuck that milo-level grifting piece of shit). instead, it focuses on the weird tiktok of subliminals viewed through a touchy, explosive lens of race, and yet doesn't bring into focus either the problem of influencers mimicking east asian aesthetics and racefaking, or the occasionally problematic nature of subliminals and asmr.

in general, there is a problem with appropriation and fetishization of east asians, though from a different angle it's interesting that for younger generations the aesthetic has shifted from white american to something not, coinciding with a general decline of american soft power abroad and the "peaceful" rise of china, a resurgence of cool japan (thanks to greater access of anime, for instance) and the korean hallyu. with that in mind, however, that zoomers/alpha are using tiktok, youtube, and other video-based platforms to try to connect to that ~vibe~, in some ways, seems no different to me than how millennials/genx/boomers did the same but with physical objects like katanas, buddha head decor, kimonos, body pillows, and folding partitions; the difference is merely age, vector, and gender. in all cases, many of the more extreme cases seem to be one of wanting to have the outward trappings of an "exotic" people without respecting the cultural origins. (the article using an example of more lateral appropriation by interviewing someone from a developing country is an interesting development, but it doesn't detract from the greater point about fetishization.)

with respect to the transgender aspect of this article--i think in some ways it's awfully clever, and by that i mean awful--the article itself tries to make the distinction, but i want to note that many readers will take the next step and say things that can easily lead to anti-trans rhetoric (and even if the commenters aren't transphobic/cissexist or bigoted, the words written are extremely similar to many of what actual bigots say); we see it in this thread, with comments such about "confused" teenagers "getting it wrong". i think that the editor and the writer likely put themselves in the ally camp, without realizing that the framing and reporting make it extremely easy for people to read-in similar arguments against transgender people, even though the Tiq Milan quote underscores exactly how differently transgender existence and this sort of racial fetishization operate:

“When it comes to who we are as racialized people, it is how we present to the world, but it’s also how people treat you,” Milan said. “It’s not just putting on the hair and the makeup and talking and walking [in] a kind of way. That is fetishizing, and it’s objectifying, and it reduces the beautiful and complicated cultures of people of color.”

i bring this up because one of the more common arguments deployed against trans people, specifically transfeminine individuals, is the concept of "womanface" (which is itself enormously racist because of its appropriation of the concept of blackface)--because to a lot of anti-trans activists, being trans is viewed as fetishization and objectification, ignoring the fact that for the vast majority of trans people we are gendered by other people and depending on how one passes (which is, itself, another large, thorny conversation, precisely because of links and echoes of racial passing), treated either as gender failures, gender traitors, or as our genders under a patriarchal system.
posted by i used to be someone else at 7:47 AM on July 31, 2023 [23 favorites]

anyway, i could have also done without people just skimming the article and riffing on that stupid fucking 80's song written at the height of the panic around japan's rise
posted by i used to be someone else at 7:47 AM on July 31, 2023 [6 favorites]

I think we could all stand to spend a lot less attention on what teenagers are up to, unless they are murdering people or something.
posted by rhymedirective at 10:05 AM on July 31, 2023 [5 favorites]

I suppose the news hook is that if your child looks at their phone too long, they'll start hating themselves and turn genders, races, or into a cat.

If it helps set your mind at ease, the Economist took this idiotic moral panic seriously enough to write an article debunking it: No, American schools are not encouraging pupils to identify as cats.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:40 PM on July 31, 2023 [6 favorites]

On Adam Conover's podcast he recently explained the origins of the conservative talking point about schools supposedly putting litter boxes in classrooms to indulge kids who identify as cats. There was actually a proposal to put litter boxes in classrooms so kids would have a place to go to the bathroom in the event that they were hiding from school shooters. The conservatives heard about it and instead of doing anything to stop the epidemic of gun violence, they deliberately twisted the facts so they could use it as an anti-trans thing.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 1:13 PM on July 31, 2023 [6 favorites]

If it helps set your mind at ease, the Economist took this idiotic moral panic seriously enough to write an article debunking it: No, American schools are not encouraging pupils to identify as cats.

oh, so there is a limit to how much transphobic nonsense the economist will publish and support
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:48 PM on July 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

I honestly had never conflated the furry panic associated with the litter box bullshit with transphobia. Maybe that's a reading of it that is genuine and I'm just dense for not getting it, but it came out during such a cartoonish period of repetitive news cycles about American Youth Being Corrupted By Everything Except Gun Culture that I just rolled by eyes at is as being adults not having a clue about furry culture and how being a furry representing in the real world isn't about wanting to become an animal but wanting to pretend the world is full of anthro animals.

I do notice, at no point did the litter box discourse get into who was using which bathroom which might have litterboxes. And this was at peak "can't let trans girls pee in the place that matches their presentation". I sort of feel like if this were misplaced trans panic it would have involved much more about restrooms on some level.
posted by hippybear at 2:01 PM on July 31, 2023

the trans panic does not revolve solely around restrooms

the "identify as ..." phrase that anti-trans activists like to use to denigrate trans people is used constantly with shit like "i identify as an attack helicopter" and "i identify as a chimp" and so on, and part of that moral panic had less to do with furries and more with the idea that the youths, whose imaginations are less bounded, would 'identify as an animal' as part of this whole "trans ideology"

c.f. many of them saying that when they were kids they used to think they were dinosaurs, or that their kids wanted to be puppies or cats or whatever, as a means of trying to imply that trans kids do not know their gender

assume that if you are not trans that your priors as to what parts of the moral panic are 'misplaced' or displaced and what the bigots focus on may not be wholly accurate
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:13 PM on July 31, 2023 [14 favorites]

I honestly had never conflated the furry panic associated with the litter box bullshit with transphobia. Maybe that's a reading of it that is genuine and I'm just dense for not getting it, but it came out during such a cartoonish period of repetitive news cycles about American Youth Being Corrupted By Everything Except Gun Culture that I just rolled by eyes at is as being adults not having a clue about furry culture and how being a furry representing in the real world isn't about wanting to become an animal but wanting to pretend the world is full of anthro animals.

It was entirely about trans people.
posted by hoyland at 2:43 PM on July 31, 2023 [15 favorites]

I've been hated as a part of the furry fandom for so long, it's difficult to tell for me, really.
posted by hippybear at 2:47 PM on July 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Indulging teenage nonsense is bad parenting. Most successful people these days were disciplined and focused as teenagers. “Confused” teenagers generally end up loser adults.

If you step off the treadmill, you will surely die, right? Nothing out there but the abyss!

Count me in with the crowd of "this is barely reporting, plus exploitable by bad people."
posted by praemunire at 3:18 PM on July 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

Mod note: One deleted. Let's avoid making generalizations of the "X ethnic-people are like Y" variety, thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:54 AM on August 1, 2023