Maybe this is just me, but honestly, I'm feeling quietly optimistic that we're going to win this thing and I rather suspect it'll be soon. It won't be without cost, and I have no doubt that they'll be a whole generation of fucked up, pissed off people, but generally? I think normality is going to return. I think in maybe twenty years, popular consensus will be to look back at this with a sort of quietly embarrassed "Huh, that was pretty weird, right?",
if it's even looked back on and remembered
at all.
Perhaps it's a bad comparison, but I've been thinking a lot, recently, about bronies. Chris (PBUH) getting banned from that brony convention had something to do with it, but I was, I must confess, musing on it before that happened.
I've spoken before about how, about ten years ago and for quite some time, bronies used to be completely ubiquitous on the Internet and that you'd see them everywhere you went. Such was their prominence online that, to this day, I know an embarrassing amount of information about My Little Pony and none of it, I hasten to add, was learned by choice.
But look at the state of the Internet now. You don't see bronies any more. The fad's over. The fandom's dead. There are some people that are still into it, true enough, but they're fringe and they were kind of into weird shit like furfaggotry and rule 34 and other creepy, fringe shit to begin with. You don't see anyone proclaiming themselves 'proud to be a brony' any more, like they used to, there aren't people making presentations to their classes about what My Little Pony means to them, it doesn't happen any more. The moment's gone, your average brony from back in the day has moved onto other things (including, I suspect, for a large number of them,
being a trans woman).
The one vital difference, admittedly, is that bronies didn't have establishment backing. I mean, yeah, the bronies had corporate support, what with Hasbro appeasing them to try and milk them for their money, but it wasn't on a governmental level - the police wouldn't come knocking for you if you called one of them a horsefucker online, and I think that's going to be a real sticking point in years to come. That's where things will get nasty. But ultimately, I think the appetite for this trans shit will just dissipate among the general population. Troons are narcissists and narcissists always push people too far. The pendulum is already on the backswing. People are, certainly in my country, starting to look at this stuff and go, "Yeah, nah, fuck off, mate."
I dunno, maybe I'm being naive, but I feel strangely hopeful, really.