How many “large-scale,” “structural” complaints actually amount to: it’s hard to get people to see me the way I wish they would see me?
I’m not sneering at that. It’s one of the realest emotional pains that humans experience, and finding a way to alleviate it at scale is one of the major components of any utopian project. But: trying to push your narrative by using cultural coercion to destroy competing narratives is never, ever, ever going to work. You will kill everyone in the world with psychic toxoplasma long before you get that kind of mental power over the people who are hurting you. You need a better strategy.
First point true. The second point… the hell you can. You might destroy way more than it’s worth on the way, but you can’t tell me gay people haven’t made enormous strides, since 2000 alone, by basically bullying people into saying you can’t look down on them.
This is, I think, a misreading of the situation.
There are lots of things you can achieve through bullying, particularly tangible concrete things on the political front. The gay-rights movement (which became the LGBTetc. movement) did a lot of that, much like the civil rights movement before it, and got excellent results.
The gay-rights/LGBTetc. movement also did a lot of actual good hearts-and-minds work in terms of getting its members portrayed sympathetically in media, pushing for a particularly-palatable agenda, etc. (Also, consciousness-raising worked better for them than it could possibly work for almost anyone, since “remember that these people exist and they’re sad if you’re mean to them” has a lot more punch when lots of people have kids who randomly turn out to be these people.)
These were not the same, even though to some large extent they happened at the same time. And I think that, in fact, all the “you’re a horrible bigot if you’re not with us on this” stuff did a lot to cement anti-LGBTetc. prejudice in places where it wouldn’t otherwise have stuck.