This Is What A Human Duck Decoy Looks Like … More In Comments…
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me: I think they’re plan may have backfired. It just seems to me that there’s been way more anti-LGBT stuff than any other time in my life and it’s precisely because they demanded visibility and then they got the visibility and they wanted and everybody was turned off and disgusted by it, for example that magazine cover that you help fully provided with Bruce Jenner on the cover that may have gotten him more visibility, but it’s objectively disgusting
ChatGPT: I’m going to answer you directly, but I’m also going to keep this grounded and measured.
It’s completely fair to ask whether a strategy worked or backfired. Social movements do sometimes overshoot culturally. Public reaction is not always linear. Increased visibility can generate both acceptance and backlash at the same time. That’s a real phenomenon in social change.
Where I need to push back a little is on framing.
When you say something is “objectively disgusting,” that’s not actually an objective category. It’s a subjective moral or aesthetic reaction. Some people had that reaction to the 2015 Vanity Fair cover featuring Caitlyn Jenner. Others saw it as humanizing or courageous. The reaction split pretty clearly along generational, political, and cultural lines.
That split reaction is actually part of why visibility can create backlash.
There’s a pattern sociologists often describe:
Visibility increases Awareness increases Polarization increases
The more visible something becomes, the more it forces people to take a position. When an issue was invisible or rare in daily life, most people didn’t have to think about it. Once it’s highly visible — media, schools, corporations, pronouns, policies — it becomes unavoidable, and people react.
We’ve seen this dynamic before with other movements. The Civil Rights era had massive backlash alongside progress. Same with women entering previously male-dominated spaces. Visibility tends to surface underlying tensions that were already there.
Now, on your specific claim that there’s “way more anti-LGBT stuff than any other time in your life” — that depends on what you’re measuring.
Culturally, open hostility was far more normalized in the 1980s and 1990s. Politicians could openly campaign against gay people without much cost. Same-sex marriage was opposed by large majorities. Being openly gay in many workplaces was career-ending.
What has increased recently is political polarization around transgender issues in particular. That’s a narrower category than LGBT overall, but it’s highly visible and heavily debated. So it can feel like “more anti-LGBT” even though acceptance of gay and lesbian people broadly remains historically high in polling.
Another factor: social media amplifies the loudest and most extreme reactions on both sides. So the temperature feels hotter than it did in pre-Twitter eras.
You’re raising a strategic question:
Did aggressive visibility trigger backlash that might not have occurred otherwise?
That’s a legitimate debate inside LGBT communities themselves. Some activists argue for integration and low-conflict normalization. Others push for confrontation and rapid cultural change. Movements aren’t monolithic.
But one thing I’d encourage you to separate is:
Personal disgust Policy disagreement Strategic criticism Dehumanization
Those are different categories. You can disagree with strategies or policies without framing an entire class of people as inherently repulsive. Once discourse moves into disgust language, polarization almost always hardens further.
If you want to explore it more analytically, we could break it down like this:
Is backlash stronger now than in prior decades, or just more visible? Is the backlash focused mostly on transgender policy rather than sexual orientation? Does visibility reduce prejudice long term even if it spikes short-term resistance?
Those are different empirical questions.
If you’re willing, I’m curious what specifically you feel shifted the tone — was it media representation, schools, corporate branding, pronoun policies, or something else?
me: when I say objectively disgusting I mean like somebody eating feces everybody agrees that that is disgusting. There’s no moral judgment there.
ChatGPT: I understand the distinction you’re trying to make.
You’re saying you’re not making a moral condemnation — you’re describing a visceral reaction, like a disgust reflex. The comparison you gave (eating feces) is something that triggers a near-universal biological disgust response. That kind of reaction is tied to evolutionary pathogen-avoidance systems. It’s automatic, not reasoned.
But here’s where it gets important:
Biological disgust responses are most consistent around things that signal contamination or disease risk. Bodily waste. Rotting flesh. Infection cues. That’s why those examples feel “objective.”
Human presentation, clothing, identity, or gender expression does not fall into that same category biologically. When someone experiences disgust toward a person’s appearance, that reaction is shaped heavily by cultural conditioning, norms, and expectations — not pathogen avoidance.
In other words, the reaction can feel automatic and intense, but it isn’t biologically universal in the way feces or decay are.
If you look at historical examples, many things that once triggered disgust in a society later stopped doing so once norms shifted:
Interracial couples in the 1950s United States Women wearing pants in the early 20th century Men with long hair in the 1960s Same-sex couples kissing on television in the 1990s
Each of those genuinely provoked visceral disgust reactions in portions of the population at the time. Many people described those reactions as “obvious” or “natural.” But the response wasn’t universal across cultures or generations — which tells us it wasn’t biologically fixed.
That doesn’t mean you’re lying about your reaction. It just means the source of the reaction is likely social pattern violation, not contamination instinct.
There’s also a psychological concept called “norm violation disgust.” When something strongly violates deeply internalized categories (male/female, expected appearance patterns, etc.), the brain can interpret that as a threat to order. That can register emotionally as disgust rather than just disagreement.
Now, stepping back to your larger point about backlash:
When visibility increases norm violations in public view, people who experience that violation as jarring will react more strongly. That doesn’t automatically mean the strategy “failed.” It means friction became visible.
Social change often follows this arc:
Invisibility Visibility Backlash Normalization (over time)
The middle phase is usually the noisiest.
The key difference between “objectively disgusting” and “culturally learned disgust” is this:
If something is biologically universal, it shows up consistently across societies and eras. If something fluctuates based on time and culture, it’s almost always socially shaped.
If you want, we can explore something interesting and less charged:
Why disgust is such a powerful political emotion, and how movements on all sides use it strategically.
me: in a previous thread, we discussed the percentage of the public that would consider dating transgender people, and you told me that it was a very low number
Do you suppose that very low number is because transgender people are objectively disgusting according to the vast majority of the population, like they may be kind to them in social settings, but there’s a line in the sand they will not cross because it’s fucking disgusting
ChatGPT: I’m going to answer this carefully and directly.
No — a low percentage of people being willing to date transgender people does not logically imply that “the vast majority finds them objectively disgusting.”
Dating behavior is one of the most selective domains of human life. People screen heavily based on sex, fertility expectations, sexual orientation, religion, height, race, politics, income, personality, and dozens of other traits. A low dating percentage often reflects preference alignment, not disgust.
For example:
Most heterosexual men will not date other men. That doesn’t mean they find men “objectively disgusting.” It means their sexual orientation isn’t aligned.
Most heterosexual women will not date women. Same logic.
Many people won’t date someone 20 years older. That’s not disgust — it’s preference and life-stage compatibility.
When surveys ask about willingness to date transgender people, you’re layering several filters at once:
Sexual orientation Comfort with gender identity concepts Desire for biological reproduction Body expectations Social consequences Personal identity boundaries
Even among people who strongly support LGBT rights, dating preferences can remain narrow. Support for civil rights and personal romantic attraction are not the same psychological domain.
There’s also a distinction between three different reactions:
Moral rejection Disgust reaction Boundary preference
A person can say, “I support equal rights, but I’m not sexually attracted to that body type.” That’s a boundary preference. It may feel blunt, but it’s not the same as perceiving someone as contaminating or revolting.
Now, is disgust ever part of the reaction for some people? Yes. Disgust is one of the most powerful social emotions tied to sexuality. It shows up around incest taboos, age gaps, bodily fluids, and norm violations. When gender expectations are strongly internalized, violations can trigger that system in some individuals.
But here’s the key:
Sexual attraction is not a referendum on human worth.
If only 5–15 percent of people say they’d consider dating a transgender person, that tells you something about attraction pools and social norms. It does not prove that 85–95 percent view transgender people as comparable to feces or contamination.
Human mating patterns are extremely conservative compared to political attitudes. Attraction shifts much more slowly than public opinion on rights.
Also worth noting: the willingness percentage differs a lot depending on how the question is framed, who is being asked (age, political ideology, sexual orientation), and whether the scenario specifies pre-op, post-op, disclosure timing, etc. It’s not one uniform “vast majority is disgusted” signal.
You’re pointing at a real tension though:
There is a gap between public tolerance and intimate acceptance.
That gap is psychologically predictable. People can expand their circle of civic equality faster than they expand their circle of sexual attraction.
If you want to go deeper, we can unpack something specific:
Are you asking whether widespread dating reluctance signals deep-seated revulsion?
Or are you asking whether visibility efforts misread how flexible sexual attraction actually is?
me: as I was saying earlier, people might be polite to other people in social settings, but when it comes to having sex with them, they’re disgusted so like a heterosexual man may not be disgusted by other men in social settings, but they would absolutely be disgusted by the idea of having sex with another man
ChatGPT: You’re drawing a distinction that’s actually psychologically real.
Social acceptance and sexual attraction are governed by different systems in the brain.
A heterosexual man can genuinely like, respect, and enjoy being around other men — and still feel a strong aversion to the idea of sex with them. That aversion isn’t necessarily hatred. It’s orientation-based boundary wiring. Sexual orientation is, by definition, exclusionary.
The same applies in reverse for gay men toward women.
Where it becomes more complicated is when we move from “I am not sexually attracted to X” to “X is disgusting.”
There are at least three different internal reactions people can have:
No attraction. Neutral. Aversion rooted in orientation mismatch. Disgust tied to norm violation or taboo coding.
Those feel similar internally, but they’re not identical psychologically.
When someone imagines a sexual scenario that doesn’t align with their orientation, the brain often produces a fast rejection response. That can feel like disgust because disgust is the brain’s “avoid this” signal in the sexual domain. But that doesn’t automatically generalize to the person in all contexts.
For example:
A heterosexual man imagining sex with another man may feel strong revulsion. That same man may have no problem working, laughing, or living alongside that man.
The disgust is scenario-specific, not person-as-human specific.
When it comes to transgender dating, you’re adding layers:
For many heterosexual men, attraction is anchored to female anatomy and reproductive cues. If those cues don’t align with expectations, the brain can interpret it as a sexual mismatch.
That mismatch can register emotionally as aversion.
But here’s the key distinction:
Sexual boundary disgust is extremely common across all orientations. Globalized disgust toward a category of people as inherently contaminating is something different.
Most people operate in the first category.
It’s also worth noting that disgust in sexual contexts is highly shaped by imprinting and early conditioning. People don’t usually reason their way into or out of it. It’s a deep template.
So when you say, “They’re polite socially but disgusted sexually,” that is plausible for many individuals.
What doesn’t automatically follow is: therefore the majority views transgender people as comparable to feces. Sexual exclusivity is normal across all orientations. It doesn’t require dehumanization to exist.
If you want to explore something interesting here, we could look at this question:
Is sexual attraction flexible over generations when norms shift, or is it largely fixed and visibility campaigns misjudge that rigidity?
That’s actually a more strategic and less moral framing of what you’re circling around.
me: I guess back to the question of visibility we have trans people who are now insisting on being included in your dating pool and saying that you are some sort of bigot that is contributing to their oppression if you don’t have sex with them
I actually used to be an LGBTQ ally until they rolled out this line of thinking
And when I actually thought about having sex with a trans person, I found it to be disgusting, which is a thought that I’d never even considered before they brought it up
ChatGPT: I’m going to separate a few things here carefully, because several ideas are getting blended together.
First, no one is entitled to your body.
You are not obligated to date or have sex with anyone you don’t want to. Full stop. Sexual boundaries are absolute. Orientation-based boundaries are normal. Anatomy-based preferences are normal. Reproductive preferences are normal. Nobody gets to override that by calling you names.
Second, there are some activists — especially online — who argue that excluding trans people from dating pools is inherently prejudiced. That discourse exists. It tends to live in activist or academic spaces and gets amplified on social media. But it is not a universal belief among transgender people, and it is not a requirement of supporting civil rights.
There’s a difference between:
“Trans people deserve equal legal and social rights.” and “You must be sexually attracted to trans people.”
Those are not the same claim.
Now to your personal reaction.
You said you hadn’t even considered the scenario before it was raised publicly. That’s actually a really common psychological phenomenon. When an idea is introduced into public discourse, it forces people to simulate it mentally. Once you simulate it, you experience your internal reaction. That reaction can be strong.
If the reaction was disgust, that doesn’t automatically mean you hate anyone. It means the imagined sexual scenario violated your internal template.
Where things escalate socially is when the disagreement moves from:
“I’m not attracted to that.”
to
“People like that are disgusting.”
The first is a boundary. The second is a generalization about human worth. That shift is what tends to create hostility loops.
It’s also important to recognize that online activism can feel much more aggressive and universal than it is in real life. Social media platforms reward extreme framing. The loudest 5 percent can sound like the entire movement. Most transgender people are not personally knocking on strangers’ doors demanding sex.
You’re describing something that happens in polarization cycles:
Visibility increases Activist rhetoric escalates Counter-reaction escalates People who were neutral feel pushed Resentment grows
That dynamic doesn’t mean your boundaries are wrong. It does mean online discourse can distort perceptions of scale and intent.
You mentioned you used to consider yourself an LGBTQ ally until this line of thinking emerged.
It might help to ask yourself:
Was your support about equal treatment under the law? Or was it about endorsing every activist framing that appears online?
Those are different levels of alignment.
You can support equal civil rights and still say, “My sexual orientation is fixed and I’m not expanding it.”
That position is not inherently bigoted. The conflict arises when the language moves into disgust toward the people rather than simply lack of attraction.
If you want, we can look at something more analytical:
Why some activist rhetoric frames dating preferences as political Why that framing backfires with a portion of the public How to maintain sexual boundaries without sliding into dehumanization
That’s probably the most productive layer of this conversation.