He could have dressed a little better.
Posted on 05/03/2023 1:41:50 PM PDT by nickcarraway
In an ironic twist, San Francisco Pride’s campaign to push back against transphobia, to be unveiled this week, has been disrupted by its own brush with transphobia.
SF Pride was all set to make a big statement this week about anti-LGBTQ attacks by announcing that the battle cry for this year’s event would be the iconic Twisted Sister rock anthem, “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”
Choosing the 1984 song was intended to show how the community was going to push back on the hundreds of pieces of anti-LGBTQ and anti-drag community legislation being passed around the country and the endless amount of hateful venom spewed online. The band’s front man, Dee Snider, a longtime supporter of LGBTQ rights, had agreed to perform the song at the event’s center stage.
It was shaping up to be an only-in-San Francisco moment — one with the potential to appeal to many different subcultures, and perhaps soften the venom coming from others. It could have helped SF Pride to refortify itself as an institution that has held one of the most powerful political megaphones in the LGBTQ community for the past five decades.
That was the plan until Tuesday, when Pride leaders broke with Snider after learning that he recently supported a transphobic Twitter post by 71-year-old rock star Paul Stanley.
On Sunday, Stanley, who rode to fame more than five decades ago as a member of the band Kiss, tweeted that “There is a BIG difference between teaching acceptance and normalizing and even encouraging participation in a lifestyle that confuses young children ... as though (it is) some sort of game and then parents in some cases allow it.”
Stanley chided parents who “mistakenly confuse teaching acceptance with normalizing and encouraging a situation that has been a struggle for those truly affected and have turned it into a sad and dangerous fad.”
Snider, who like Stanley, frequently wore makeup onstage, responded on Twitter: “You know what? There was a time where I ‘felt pretty’ too. Glad my parents didn’t jump to any rash conclusions! Well said, @PaulStanleyLive.”
And that killed what could have been an image that beamed around the world at SF Pride’s June celebration: A moment when a 68-year-old cisgender heterosexual rock icon stood up as an ally for the embattled LGBTQ community.
Snider may have been a longtime ally to the community, but Pride officials couldn’t feature him after that.
“When we were notified about the tweet … we were heartbroken and angry,” Suzanne Ford, executive director of SF Pride, said Tuesday. “The message perpetuated by that tweet casts doubt on young trans people’s ability to self-identify their gender.”
Ford said, “With transphobia proliferating and becoming more and more enshrined in law throughout the country — we have to stand up for the most impacted among us.”
Ford, a trans woman, knows personally the power that Pride can have. Ford told me that for many San Franciscans, Pride is mostly “a rallying point for our community. It started out as a riot, and it has since progressed. It’s still a riot, but now we are also celebrating our culture and commemorating our heritage.”
But for people who live outside of San Francisco, it means something different. Growing up in rural Kentucky, Ford, 57, recalled seeing clips from Pride on the TV news once a year. It wasn’t always in a complimentary way — particularly in the 1970s, when there were few LGBTQ people living openly near her.
“Seeing San Francisco Pride on the national news said to me, ‘Oh, there’s hope. There’s a place in the world where I could be me if I could get there,’ ” Ford told me. “You don’t think that’s possible when you don’t see people like you in your daily life.”
Nguyen Pham, the president of the SF Pride board, said the organization realizes that San Francisco represents “a beacon of hope to the rest of the nation and in many parts of the world.”
“What we’ve found is simply by inserting ourselves as best as we can into more of the mainstream, we gain more visibility, we effect better representation and we demonstrate more inclusion,” Pham said. “And all of that is baked into this idea that we can change hearts and minds that way.”
But this year, SF Pride will have to change hearts and minds without someone who could have reached into different parts of the mainstream. The official theme of this year’s event: Looking Back and Moving Forward.
Unfortunately, Snider’s good intentions were subverted by what he was trying to get people to defeat: transphobia.
So, Martina Navratilova, who was publicly a lesbian, at a time when before it was accepted, would no longer be welcome?
phobia=censorship
That's rich. They're the most pandered-to and promoted group of people in the world. In the hierarchy of the special interests, they are on the top.
This was written by a reporter? It reads like a press release from a pro-tranny organization. There was nothing transphobic about Paul Stanley’s tweet. It was just common sense. The only people with any phobias about this are the trannies - they have a great fear of the truth and reality, not to mention biology.
For those that remember, Snider posted a cease-and-desist order against the Trump campaign back in 2016 for them not to use “We’re Not Gonna Take It” at his campaign rallies.
Stupid liberal.
Twisted Sister: Well, a little twisted, but not that twisted!
Suzanne Ford is just a man pretending to be a woman, like that loser who ruined bud light, Dylan Mulvany!
LOL
“Unfortunately, Snider’s good intentions were subverted by what he was trying to get people to defeat: transphobia.”
Or perhaps what he said has nothing at all to do with nonsense made-up “transphobia”. He just isn’t a fan of perverts messing with kids, no matter how tolerant he is of that particular variety of pervert.
Yep.
He could have dressed a little better.
Biologyphobes and biology deniers.
People self identify however they want. A black, gay, female, poor, naturalized citizen, college alum, middle-aged architect can choose to identify with any or even all of those characterizations. Which one is most important?
I think these aging cisgender white male rockers have a point though about acceptance of what adults choose vs phases that adolescents and teens go through. Everyone who is or was a teen found themselves in some or another awkward crises. As time goes on those issues work themselves out. What’s the rush in forcing kids to choose a sexual identity so early in their life? When you think about it kids really only have extemely narrow experiences in life: What happens at home (which they often go through a rebellion phase), what happens in school (which often finds them put in a position of peer pressure, repression, and feeling mocked), and what they see on TV and their phones (which is often highly sexualized and violent). They have no perspective on life itself outside of those three main situations. Their minds have not fully matured and they do not have enough information (or too much information?) or experience to process information. It can be overwhelming and push some kids to drugs (either prescribed by doctors, or drugs/alcohol of abuse) to escape it - if only ever so briefly. Those tools never resolve the issues. And the people they turn to (so often not their parents but teachers, counselors and doctors) are now being coerced into affirming whatever narrowly decided whim the kid is going through rather than give them perspective and room and time to grow into themselves.
Given time, they’ll figure it out and they should be given the leeway to learn a few things about themselves and their lives before being pigeonholed by interest groups or faddish sociopolitical trends. Let them learn on their own without adding more pressure on them.
All, ever single one, of these people are sick. They’re given up to reprobate mind, those who are seriously mentally I’ll and those who approve of them.
Corrected:
All, every single one, of these people are sick. They’re given up to reprobate mind, those who are seriously mentally ill and those who approve of them.
Propaganda and lie much, Joe Garofoli?
One crappy song thirty nine years ago and still riding that wave.
Mark, 7:21.
LOL. Well said.
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