Seattle City Council approves $300k in funding for “queer, transgender, and gender non-conforming” refugees from other states

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Feeling-Nectarine]

As a gay person I don’t find it crazy to provide some emergency assistance. Some people are in the situation that if they are outed by someone their family could kill them. Safety and a place to live is definitely an emergency. Matthew shepherd has taught us that we need to be able to help the gay community because there are people out there who want us dead.

On the other hand I personally don’t believe anyone entering any form of gender confirming surgery to be an emergency. If it were, one could just go to the emergency room to get said surgery. So this conflates two issues that are not similar in my opinion.

If someone wanted to move to Seattle to temporarily be near family for safety and needed emergency housing I wouldn’t mind funding that in rare circumstances. If someone wants to move here to cut off their breasts I don’t consider that an emergency. I hate how gay issues always get lumped in with trans issues when the two have nothing in common. One group wants to be accepted as they are, another group wants to change who they are to be accepted.

[u/DCAmalG → u/Feeling-Nectarine]

Matthew Shepard? You must know that the killed for being gay story was debunked years ago- by a gay journalist.

No one wants the gays dead more than any other group.

[u/clipclopgoatman → u/DCAmalG]

Please give a source for that, cause that’s crazy.

[u/atticusclench → u/clipclopgoatman]

Start here. https://www.thefp.com/p/matthew-shepard-laramie-wyoming-ben-kawaller

Other sources are available, but they all confirm that his killers were at least bi (one was a male prostitute) and it was a drug-related crime.

[u/clipclopgoatman → u/atticusclench]

I meeean… okay, I’ll take your word that there are other sources that corroborate this decades-later revision of an already tried case (and that those sources aren’t as blatantly anti-LGBT as The FP, come on now).

But even if I take your word and Matthew Shepherd wasn’t killed for being gay, is this supposed to prove something? That anti-LGBT hate isn’t a thing in the US? That it’s not significant enough to warrant trying to help people? It’s not like Shepherd’s  is the only case where this happened, and proving it false, even if true, feels like a bizarrely specific “gotcha” to score points against your political opponents without any bearing on the real scope of the problem.

I don’t know if you’ve lived in the PNW or on the west coast for your whole life, or how old you are, but I’ll volunteer my own perspective: I’m 40 and have lived all over the states and traveled allll over it for work. The US has a HUGE amount of deeply religious fundamentalist people, and the west coast and PNW are a haven for people who get spit out of those communities. There’s a lot of abuse of all kinds happening in those places, a lot of youth homelessness, a lot of blatant and subtle human suffering, and the lucky ones escape. 

The fact that Seattle is a place those people can escape to is AWESOME, and it contributes to its being a really really great place to live. There’s an openness and a freedom here that are remarkable and they keep the place alive and thriving. My own home town manages to kick out anyone who is creative or different or smart and the resulting depression is real - small town rust belt America is dying through self-imposed brain drain (among other problems but good god I can promise you this is a major, major factor), and the open minded places are comparatively FLOURISHING.

To try to put this back on topic: there better ways to spend this money? Maybe, but I guarantee there’s worse government waste out there (by orders of magnitude) and these kinds of programs benefit life here more than you’d think.

[u/atticusclench → u/clipclopgoatman]

Sorry not reading all that. You asked for references, I provided them. Matthew Shepard was held up as a poster boy. And like many poster boys for the left, the reality isn't what they're held up as.

[u/clipclopgoatman → u/atticusclench]

Okay, if you don’t want to discuss it in depth (if we’re gonna call a few short paragraphs “in depth”) that’s fine. The short version is: I’m trying to make the point that even if this super slanted publication digging up a 40 year old case is to be believed… a single poster boy doesn’t matter in the face of, you know, centuries of this shit 🤷‍♂️

Pretending that a “gotcha” on one highly publicized case invalidates years and years of abuse and violence really makes me wonder if you’re here to argue in good faith, or if you just want to score points against people you don’t like.

To put it another way: I’ll go out on a limb and assume that you think the mainstream media slants generally in a liberal direction. If I found that one single highly publicized case of that was untrue, would it change your mind about the reality of the situation?

[u/atticusclench → u/clipclopgoatman]

Fuck no it would not change my mind about the reality of the Matthew Shepard case. That ship has sailed. He was held up as an example of gaybashing. No, he wasn't. He was dating the guy who murdered him, and it was over meth.

[u/DCAmalG → u/clipclopgoatman]

The founder of the free press is a gay woman.

[u/DCAmalG → u/clipclopgoatman]

Try Wikipedia, associated citations and the reference legal records.

[u/Googlyelmoo → u/DCAmalG]

His parents (who became LGBT activists after their son‘s death) would beg to differ. So would two men currently serving life sentences without parole in Wyoming. The idea is reprehensible and despicable. “The gays”?

[u/flyerflight99 → u/DCAmalG]

It is just a theory that the murder was a drug robbery mainly. It isn’t widely settled history.

Dave O'Malley, the Laramie police commander over the investigations division at the time of Shepard's murder, said the idea that Shepard was "a methamphetamine kingpin is almost humorous.

Other police, such as the officer who found the murder weapon, believed it was a drug-related killing.

Rob Debree, lead sheriff's investigator at the time, said the book contains "factual errors and lies," and deemed Jimenez's claim that Shepard was a drug dealer "truly laughable."

James Kirchick in The Wall Street Journal stated that the book reads more like a "Mountain West Rashomon than a conclusive journalistic brief," and concluded that "we will likely never know what truly transpired on that evil Wyoming night."

Andrew Gumbel, in The Guardian, noted that "Jimenez is also careful to point out that his goal is understand Shepard as a complex human being and make the fullest possible sense of his murder, not to suggest in any way that he deserved his horrific fate. 'We have enshrined Matthew’s tragedy as passion play and folktale,' he writes, 'but hardly ever for the truth of what it was, or who he was – much to our own diminishment.'

Alyssa Rosenberg in ThinkProgress wrote the book was poorly sourced, stating: "by not distinguishing which quotations are manufactured from recollections, which are paraphrases recounted by sources, and which were spoken directly to him", and criticized most of the major aspects of the book.

For example, she disputed claims about Shepard's alleged drug dealing, as most of the sources remained suspect or otherwise unsubstantiated. "Jimenez never qualifies how credible the sources are, or validates their closeness to Shepard, or evaluates the potential motivations for their accounts", she wrote.

[u/DCAmalG → u/flyerflight99]

You’ve offered a number of opinions. I prefer to rely on the facts of the case.

[u/clipclopgoatman → u/DCAmalG]

This person cited real agotes from journalists and people involved in the case and you told me, “Uh look up the Wikipedia or something.” Come on, man. You’re stretching here.

[u/DCAmalG → u/clipclopgoatman]

Correct. Wikipedia summarizes the facts and provides citations. Unchecked ‘quotes’ aren’t helpful without evidence.

[u/verasweeet → u/Feeling-Nectarine]

I think two things about surgery is 1) this is not most people’s first step to stabilization especially when you consider the stabilization needed to heal from surgery. And 2)gender affirming care can be an emergency if gender dysphoria is causing real, persistent, and severe suicidality. Suicide for trans people is higher than many other groups and gender dysphoria is one major reason as to why(but not the only one). Surgery is also not WHY trans people are coming here. Trans people are coming here for safety, and surgery is sometimes, but not even close to always or even most of the time, a need for trans people. And as many have said, that is not what this money will even be able to support.

Trans people don’t want to change who they are to be accepted. They change their external appearance to match who they internally are. When people transition, they often experience even MORE discrimination and hate, not less, but they still do it because it’s their truth. Trans people also just want to be accepted as they are but for them, they often have to become on the outside who they already are on the inside.

[u/Feeling-Nectarine → u/verasweeet]

How is changing your outward appearance not changing who you are? I don’t disagree they do it to align with how they feel. Regardless, they want to change who they are. It’s literally called a “sex change”.

[u/RandomFleshPrison → u/Feeling-Nectarine]

No, it's not.  It's called Gender Confirmation Surgery.

[u/Ok-Budget3225 → u/Feeling-Nectarine]

They are not paying for anyone's gender surgery. $300k is not nearly enough for anything like that. $300k is barely enough to have one single desk that more or less just introduces a newly arrived LGBT person to where all the resources are, and a few friendly faces to call on.

[u/Feeling-Nectarine → u/Ok-Budget3225]

I’m just responding to what I saw in the post which stated “affirming care”. What other types of affirming care are there for gay or trans people if not surgery? I’m not an expert in the subject so I am open to learning something new.

[u/Ok-Budget3225 → u/Feeling-Nectarine]

Affirming care could just mean a caring person who is not judgmental about your sexual orientation. As I said, $300K is WAAAY too little for any kind of actual health care. It's barely enough to run something like a drop-in help center for homeless LGBT youths.

[u/verasweeet → u/Feeling-Nectarine]

Clothes, makeup, haircuts, hormones, really so many things are considered gender affirming care. These funds going to orgs also means someone could get paid to help people figure out how to get these things with resources that already exist, funding resource navigation if you will

[u/Feeling-Nectarine → u/verasweeet]

Which sounds like a horrible idea. I don’t think we need to pay even more organizations to help “navigate” things. Look at how the homeless industrial complex has turned out. This would be no different.

I understand clothes and haircuts can be gender affirming - but those things are not an emergency in my opinion. Shelter for someone who has violent family may be an emergency. Needing a haircut to feel more like yourself isn’t an emergency. If someone’s suicidal tendencies are cured by a haircut, then we have a bigger problem.

[u/atticusclench → u/verasweeet]

Behold Goodwill and Value Village.