I am glad I am not alone in noticing this. The number of bad takes on HN regarding gender issues is grand and mighty.

Even the belief that “trans-ness” is something new or “modern” is erasure and possibly even revisionism [1], to claim that there isn’t even science on this is absurd as the topic has been studied since Freud.

The worst of all is that the perpetrators of the bigotry end up causing mass hysteria and reactionary measures that actually harm innocent people. People like any of us who just happened to draw a bad card at birth. Why is it this difficult to show compassion? We show compassion for rarer diseases. Why is it this difficult for people to imagine that they could have been in the shows of the people they spill vitriol against?

Occam’s razor says the dehumanisation employed by Fox and the likes is the cause. Dehumanisation has always been used to justify atrocities and attacks since the Dawn of time. We should have been better at this point.

> Sumerian and Akkadian texts from 4,500 years ago document priests known as gala who may have been transgender. Likely depictions occur in art around the Mediterranean from 9,000 to 3,700 years ago. In Ancient Greece, Phrygia, and Rome, there were galli priests that some scholars believe to have been trans women. Roman emperor Elagabalus (d. 222 AD) preferred to be called a lady (rather than a lord) and sought sex reassignment surgery, and in the modern day has been seen as a trans figure. Hijras on the Indian subcontinent and kathoeys in Thailand have formed trans-feminine third gender social and spiritual communities since ancient times, with their presence documented for thousands of years in texts which also mention trans male figures. Today, at least half a million hijras live in India and another half million in Bangladesh, legally recognized as a third gender, and many trans people are accepted in Thailand. In Arabia, khanith today (like earlier mukhannathun) fulfill a third gender role attested since the AD 600s. In Africa, many societies have traditional roles for trans women and trans men, some of which survive in the modern era. In the Americas prior to European colonization, as well as in some contemporary North American Indigenous cultures, there are social and ceremonial roles for third gender people, or those whose gender expression transforms, such as the Navajo nádleehi or the Zuni lhamana.

> In the Middle Ages, accounts around Europe document transgender people. Kalonymus ben Kalonymus's lament for being born a man instead of a woman has been seen as an early account of gender dysphoria. Eleanor Rykener, a male-bodied Briton arrested in 1394 while living and doing sex work dressed as a woman, has been seen as a trans woman. In the Balkans since the 1400s, female-assigned people have transitioned to live as men called sworn virgins. In Japan, accounts of trans people go back to the Edo period. In Indonesia, there are millions of trans-/third-gender waria, and the bugis of Sulawesi recognize five genders. In Oceania, trans-/third-gender roles like the akava'ine, fa'afafine and fakaleiti exist among the Cook Island Maori, Samoans, and Tongans.

> In colonial America, Thomas(ine) Hall in the 1600s adopted clothes and roles of both men and women, while in 1776 the genderless Public Universal Friend refused both birth name and gendered pronouns. During the 1800s, some people began new lives as men and served in the military, including Albert Cashier and James Barry, or otherwise transitioned, like Joseph Lobdell; trans women like Frances Thompson also transitioned. In 1895, trans autobiographer Jennie June and others organized the Cercle Hermaphroditos; in the 1900s, musician Billy Tipton lived as a man, while Lucy Hicks Anderson was supported by her parents and community in being a woman.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history