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Okay, I just saw this image pop up when I was bullying a Nazi elsewhere on this platform as a way to justify hating the LGBT+ community, and I am going to go through this one by one because it’s very very stupid.
1. This 60x more likely statistic is only down to the grievous inaction of Western governments like the Reagan administration towards fighting the epidemic, due to a false belief that homosexuality was immoral. To use this stat of proof that being gay is wrong is preposterous
2. So what if people have lots of sexual partners, how is that immoral? This is hardline right-wing prudishness at its most concentrated and virulent
3. “Up to 50% of lesbians report sexual abuse” this statistic does not say who is abusing the lesbians: assault of lesbians by straight men is alarmingly common in society. And even if we view it as abuse from partners it’s still not enough to justify hatred of all lesbians
4. For the strangers statistic refer to point 2, and so fucking what if people change their mind about their sexual orientation? What’s so immoral about experimentation
5. The next three points can be explained by point 1 by and large, syphilis is a disease that requires treatment, medication is expensive in America with its shitty healthcare system, and LGBT people are proportionally more likely to live in poverty than straight people
6. Next point can be explained again through the previous syphilis argument, as well as the next point about mental conditions. Poverty and the societal discrimination LGBT people face leads to huge impacts on their mental health, they aren’t “intrinsically damaged”
7. The way this is framed is to suggest being gay is more likely to make you a serial killer, and any sane person knows that there’s no correlation between sexuality and thirst for human suffering, or at least there’s been no studies to say otherwise
7. (cont.) Also, there have only been a few hundred serial killers in the US since its inception, and many hundreds of millions of non-serial killers have lived and died in this country, so this is the very definition of a non-issue.
8. So a lot of gay relationships are open, if everyone involved consents what’s so bad about it. The implication behind the divorce statistic is that gay people aren’t faithful to their partners, and there’s a lot more factors that go into divorce than that
9. This statistic does not clarify whether these “steady relationships” are open or not, which they most likely are. The word “affair” implies that these people are cheating, which if the relationship is open they are not, therefore the “affair” is not immoral
10. Point 2 for the next one, and a higher risk of anal cancer from doing da bum sex is kinda just a risk of the job, doesn’t make it immoral! People shouldn’t be denied treatment for a deadly disease just because they enjoyed their lives
11. This statistic is true, and the main reason behind it is societal discrimination and denial of the truth of their identity. If we want to stop trans people (transsexual is an outdated term) from trying to commit suicide a change to society is what is needed
12. Even if this is true it doesn’t make a trans person’s gender identity any less valid. Gender is a social construct, therefore you are how you identify. This statistic also fails to show any actual correlation between parental BPD and amount of trans children
13. The wording of this question is very strange, and seems to be trying to say that trans women deliberately don’t report having HIV. This is not out of malice, but due to the social stigma of HIV and lack of access to medical resources trans people face
14. The increased rates of HIV that trans women have is due to lack of resources, poverty and discrimination. There are a lot of sex worker trans women who face bad working conditions and rights, and outside of that they face power imbalances in sex regarding protection
The phrase in the final factoid, “normal people” also tells us all we need to know about what this image is trying to do. Truth is not the goal here, but an otherising of the LGBT community from straight people, or “normal people” as this image so bluntly puts it.
The approach I’ve taken in this thread has not been one of debunking the actual statistics, even though many of them seem highly dubious, but that of how even if we accept these as true on their face, they do not in any way justify hatred for the LGBT community
