The point the comic is making (Old meme, unedited):
Like the rainbow murals of Trump making out with Putin, where the focus of the art is clearly meant to be a gross-out effect.
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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Yes, but the point the comic portrays wrong is that it is not about the gender affirming care, but about the hypocrisy.
If you use it, then I don't have a problem with that. Just shut up and let other people use it as well.
Was that supposed to be gross? I thought it was just symbolising how pro-putin the trumby is
I see how it would have an additional gross-out effect for bigots looking at it, but is that really what was intended by the piece?
Given Putin's stance on LGBT issues, yeah I'd be surprised if it wasn't partly intended. Kinda playing to "loud homophobe is secretly gay" trope.
Doesn't matter, victim fetish will continue until morale improves
I don't think the point of that comparison is to put down trans people. It's just pointing out that the same actions that trans people are criticized for are praised in another context.
it does get praised?
look how right wingers glaze clavicular
I'm non-binary. Never once have I ever seen this argument used in this fashion. Nor have I ever talked to another trans-person who sees it this way.
This is poisoning our own argument that gender-affirming care isn't some fringe, abnormal procedure used solely by people who's body don't match their gender but a normal, every-day thing that is, in fact, so fucking normal, cis people don't even fucking think about it!
Everybody deserves access to gender-affirming care. Everybody, period. Full stop. Nobody is bashing bigots for getting it, they're pointing out that they're hypocrits for getting it and then trying to deny it for trans peoppe. That's what the argument is, that's what it has always been, it has never been this.
If someone ever makes the argument in this fashion, then they're an unserious person; either a bad actoror fool to be ignored, or they're ignorant and need to be corrected.
Pointing out that cis people get gender affirming care is not meant to degrade them but point out that it's normal and usually not scrutinised.
Chill
excuse me, societies lowest creature is the billionaire. dont lump us in with those leeches.
This is a silly take. The point is not to compare someone to something they hate, as if that is an insult in itself, to propagate their hate. The point also not to say that things that affirm the gender of cis people is the exactly the same as trans care. The point is the hypocrisy. The point is that their hate is baseless and irrational and they often share more in common with those they hate than they will even acknowledge. They don't have to be hypocrites for their hatred to be irrational bigoted, but when they are, it make it all the more apparent and easily seen as egregious. There is value in highlighting the hypocrisy and those commonalities for them and others to see, and in normalizing things that affirm ones gender identity, cis, trans or otherwise. Why are we pretending that pointing out those things is somehow a microaggression against trans people or a sign of sharing in that bigotry?
For a much less loaded comparative example, If someone made fun of someone for liking comic books while wearing a batman/punisher tee shirt, you aren't shitting on comic book fans by pointing out the contradiction. Yes, I'm aware that is a reductive comparison. It's for illustrative purposes, not to reduce the plight of trans people to a hobby. Don't come at me.
As a trans person, I still get really uneasy when I hear people comparing cis cosmetic treatment to gender-affirming care for trans folks. It always seems trivializing to the struggles trans people face and the deep need trans people often have for these treatments.
The problem with equating cis cosmetic treatments to trans gender-affirming care is that you're then implicitly arguing that trans treatments are cosmetic. Yet trans rights activists have had to fight for decades to stop insurance companies from considering trans care as "cosmetic" and to recognize it for the life-saving reconstructive treatments that they are. Comparing GAC to cis cosmetic treatments directly hurts trans people's ability to access medicine.
Comparing SRS to a cis gal getting breast augmentation is implicitly playing into the hands of bigots that have always labeled trans care as cosmetic.
Trans rights advocates have had to argue for decades that trans medical care isn't like a cis person getting a boob or nose job. They've had to argue that trans care is more like the kind of serious reconstructive medicine you get after a severe car crash. If trans care is no different from a cis person getting a nose job, then there's no reason for trans care to be covered by insurance.
Unless the cisgender "gender affirming care" you're citing is commonly paid for by insurance, you are directly harming trans interests whenever you make this kind of comparison.
I get what you are saying. Certainly many do treat it as cosmetic. And insurance companies will do anything they can get away with to not pay for care, no matter who you are.
My counterpoint is that these people that are getting elective cosmetic treatments and surgeries to affirm their gender expression see that as important for themselves. But there is no way to justify that importance and not see that it is no where near as important to them as actual gender affirming care is to a trans person. To minimize or reject the later while choosing to seek the former is outrageous. That is the kind of hypocrisy that I'm saying can shine a light on the actual importance of trans healthcare.
But there is no way to justify that importance and not see that it is no where near as important to them as actual gender affirming care is to a trans person.
Sorry. I cannot parse this sentence, it's a triple negative and I'm not sure what you're trying to say. My apologies.
To minimize or reject the later while choosing to seek the former is outrageous.
Performative outrage perhaps. But anyone outraged at this shows they really haven't put in the time to understand or respect trans issues. This is the difference between real allyship and just putting pronouns in your bio. The difference between simply tolerance and actual respect and understanding. If you can't understand the difference between a trans person getting gender-affirming care and a random cis person just getting a nose job they want, well I have to say, you really don't understand trans people at all. Being trans is not just a quirky body mod people do for fun. This stuff kills people. This is life-saving medical care. I would be dead without the healthcare I received as part of my transition. I would literally be in the ground right now. To compare that healthcare to a random 18 year old who would just prefer her boobs be a little bigger is insulting.
I know it's tempting to ignore all nuance and just say, "everyone should get what they want. Love and rainbows. Looking at hard reality and real world limits are too difficult. I love everyone and just want everyone to be happy! #uwu" That's lazy liberal hugboxxing. Here in the real world, the hard truth is that insurance will never be able to pay for absolutely every cosmetic treatment people want. The difference is that trans healthcare has decades of research behind it showing that it greatly reduces suicide rates and directly saves lives. When a similar body of evidence exists to support cisgender access to an otherwise cosmetic treatment, I will consider them equivalent. Until then, you're directly hurting trans people by comparing the two.
Again, if you can show a treatment is similarly effective at preventing suicide in cis people as GAC is for trans people, I will consider them comparable. But if that isn't the case, it's trivializing and demeaning the life-saving care that many trans people rely on to literally keep living. It's the difference between someone taking ozempic because they're morbidly obese and will die if they don't take it, and someone taking it because they would like to lose ten pounds to fit in their summer swimsuit. Would it help both people to feel better about themselves? Sure. The already skinny person will have their well-being increase slightly. But to say the two situations are remotely comparable is insulting and outrageous. Same medicine. One is life-saving medical care, while the other is cosmetic. Nuance matters and we shouldn't take the lazy hug box approach and just say, "well I guess all the people who want this must be in the same boat!"
My point boiled down to the fact that someone cannot justify their stance that trans Healthcare isn't necessary while thinking their cosmetic care is. That those two things are not comparable in either importance or their life-saving outcomes. Again, I'm not reducing trans gender affirming healthcare down to cosmetic care by drawing the comparison to it. The point is that there is no comparison between them beyond the superficial.
I don't think the ideia is to bodyshame people, but to point out that Everyone has gender dysphoria (yt)
I… don't think saying looksmaxxing is in some way trans is meant as an insult? The way we tend to think of gender dysphoria is as a diagnosis specifically meant for people experiencing a different gender than the one assigned to them at birth, ie. trans people. A lot of people are now starting to point out that dysphoria is experienced by a lot of cis people as well. Although I suppose the guy in the comic almost definitely exists and I don't want to run defense for him so: fuck that guy.
Seems mean spirited either way.
this comic is wild
i'm sure someone, somewhere, has used this argument in a demeaning way to trans people, but i can't imagine that's common among actual allies. it feels more like something that the right would use as a purity argument among itself, except they lack the logical rigor required to do so
and then it depicts the guy as actually being affected by that argument, as if he wouldn't just go "yeah but it's gender affirming care for my real gender that i really am" 💀
i poked around the author's bsky a bit, and i think she must have had some shithead say something like this directly to her, because there's a comment asking about using the same argument in a different context ("i was arguing that, since i have such easy access to testosterone, trans men / my trans son should" https://bsky.app/profile/warstrike.bsky.social/post/3mnaipvuvp22y) and she was like, yeah that seems fine
so there is some nuance here that i think is absolutely not being portrayed by the comic, namely that it's implied this is a common part of this broader argument, rather than a specific, shittier flavor of it, where instead of trying to get people to empathize with trans people, we're using trans people to imply certain cis people are shitty (e.g. "he's not a real man because he got ", with the implication that gender-afffirming procedures aren't necessary for cis people of some arbitrary caliber)
i think this may also miss the usually implied "for cis people" that's included with this kind of dunking? ofc, it's logically consistent to interpret that as being demeaning towards trans people, but i think it's mostly an acknowledgement that, ofc trans people (on average) need it more, we went through the wrong puberty (without addressing the nuances of how much an individual may or may not want to transition medically)
there are just different implications for cis people getting gender affirming care than trans people. it's different if you're unhappy about what you got as the result of the correct puberty (ignoring for a moment that there are some trans people who can/did go through the correct puberty and may still need gender affirming care)
ofc, we should be striving for a society where anyone can get the gender affirming care they need to feel comfortable in their body. there's just a lot of nuance about this situation that i think is both not covered by the comic, and even more that is possibly missed entirely
I literally just got into a mini argument on lemmy last week with someone that was being shitty to an office bigotexactly like this. Saying things like "how is your transition going" to try to get at them.
Not saying its a majority but people are definitely doing unnecessary mental gymnastics to justify this type of bullying because it is against their enemy
idk this might be too many layers of sarcasm and double negation stacked on top of each other for me to properly process. but that ... seems like a well-established argument already? that non-trans people take pills too to do stuff.
We pretty much explored the entire planet (I know there's a ton of the ocean we know nothing about, but let me finish).
So now the frontier to be explored is the interior of the human mind.
People who explore their inner selves and discover that they are trans or queer or some combination come out into society and say "Hey, here's what I found, and I like what I found, and I want to share it with the world."
And then there's a chunk of humanity that looks inward and they do not like what they find. They find smallness and cruelty and vanity and emptiness and vulnerability and fear and confusion and a lot of things that they are not prepared to deal with, and so they turn outwards and they make life a living hell for the rest of us, rather than expend even a little effort to introspect and deal with the mysterious unexplored wilderness within their own minds.
Fuck those motherfuckers. Do the work. Figure out what you do and don't like about yourself and then use that to make the world a better place. Fuckin' hunkered-down-in-Plato's-cave-ass motherfuckers.
So now the frontier to be explored is the interior of the human mind.
I don't think we should give up on space just yet.
Also, this whole exploring-your-mind thing would be a lot easier if mushrooms were legal.