I'm unsure why the HRC has tried their stupid "win their hearts" strategy. Let's face facts. Most of the people in this country hate us, and of our community they hate trans people the most. We will lose even liberals if we try and fight them on their ground, because even most leftists are ignorant as fuck about our community. The majority of the time only few people have any consequential interactions with our community outside of our employment, and if they do it is usually brief.
The only way we win is by framing issues in such a way that is favorable to us. We cannot frame issues in such a way that we are asking people to vote in support of us (the majority of people are prejudiced as fuck). Instead, we need to frame issues in such a way that they are voting against our enemies. It's not the people vs us. It's the people vs them.
We want straight and cis people, when we have to defend ourselves, to not think about how things impact us. Instead, I'd rather them think about how laws meant to target us impact them personally.
Taking on "religious liberty laws?" I don't even mention LGBTQ people. I just start running ads with the KKK refusing to serve black people and use their exact rhetoric and language, and similar issues with other minority groups that could be targeted. Imagine a young black man holding up a picture of his father on a TV commercial, talking about how his father fought to de-segregate the country, and now such-and-such politician is trying to bring back segregation under the guise of "religious liberty." Come up with a catchy slogan that can be repeated again and again as a branding message, and just go at it. Let the politicians go out there and defend that shit by saying, "No! We don't actually want to discriminate against black people, we only want to discriminate against the gays!" It forces them to actually make their stance clear to the public, instead of going under that vague "religious liberty" bullshit.
The problem for them is that they cannot target us specifically with the law, and so they must craft those laws so broadly that it impacts everyone. Since it impacts everyone, we need to broaden the base of people under attack by the law. Don't let them narrow it to us.
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