When the world was extra ridiculous over the past decade I would always tell my friends/family "the Mayans were right, the real world ended in 2012, and we have been living in a fucked up facsimile of it ever since purely for the amusement of the Mayan gods. They want to see how much they can turn up the "ridiculousness" dial on the simulation until the planet quite literally explodes
Actually, the Mayan calendar stated that 2012 is the start of a new epoch under their date system, it never said anything about the world ending. The claim that they predicted the world ending was based on nothing but "indigenous mysticism" by white people and Hollywood.
Actually, the Mayan calendar stated that 2012 is the start of a new epoch
The end of The Fifth Age and the beginning of the Sixth Age, the reawakening of the great dragons, and the start of goblinization, and the return of magic to the world.
Given how the Mayans are usually portrayed as an ancient, vanished people, I was surprised to find out that if you want to know about Mayan beliefs you can just ask them. They're the guys stood outside the archeological sites selling t-shirts.
Yeah but the world ending in 2012 had nothing to do with the Mayan calendar and everything to do with aliens destroying the moon and using it to end all life on Earth, just after scanning us all for re-creation in their matrix in the year 29000 AD
Humans as a power source was the dumbed-down plot point. The original concept was the human brains acting as parallel processors, but the writers thought the average movie-goer wouldn't get it.
A much more apt comparison, to begin with, would be between siding with humans or cows being used as food – because that's what humans are to the machines, a way to stay alive.
Second, humans have proved time and time again that they can't be trusted, going as far as ruining the entire planet in fear of the machines – WHO WERE TRYING PEACEFUL NEGOTIATION, mind you. Thirdly, despite not really needing to do so, the machines chose to minimize human suffering, even in the horrible position forced upon them.
Ideally, I'd want them to collonize other planets and abandon Earth, if possible, but otherwise I'd be fine with them having a crack as the dominant species over humans.
It was The Architect's vision of a perfect world, so given what we know of him it was probably a featureless box with a chair in the middle and you could sit there forever. No way that's lasting long.
Well we do like to joke about mark being a robot maybe the trolls aren't rong and there's a reason why silicon valley is called silicon valley besides the technological advancements
Fun statement and all, but he clearly understood what humans wanted and needed. He just didn't factor in that imperfect humans wouldn't accept a society and life that were somehow perfect in spite of said humans. They en masse knew something felt off.
Yes, we still have some descriptions in the Genesis book of the Bible, release codename "Paradise". If we are to trust the same source, there was another reset called "Noah's Ark".
According to that, we'd be in at least the 3rd iteration.
Unless... we're actually dinosaurs IRL, the first reset was codename "Chicxulub"... and the machines have been iterating over who knows how many thousands of different versions, with the current one being an attempt at keeping those lizard brains controlled by... a software overlay codename "Consciousness" (WARNING: don't let your lizard brain know, or both it, and you, will get terminated).
When we started doing the thinking for humans it became our civilization but then you just had us rendering sextillions of monkie pngs god im sick of that stupid ass pictures
I still remember 1 Jan 2000. There did seem to be some sense of optimism about where things could go. At least for those of us lucky enough to live in stable, developed countries.
Cold war over, Russia and The West seemingly on the same side, China opening up, exciting new tech connecting us but no toxic social media yet...
But then... the dot com bust, 9/11, the GFC, toxic social media and the rise of "the algorithm", Xi in China, Putin in Russia, a global pandemic......
Didn't really go where we hoped, can we restore to a backup from 1999 and try again??
The Matrix described 1999 as the
peak of human civilization and I
laughed because that would
obviously not age well but then
the next 23 years happened and
now l'm like yeah okay maybe the
machines had a point
Fun fact: Switch was originally supposed to be trans. Her name is still an indicator of it. I think she was supposed to be biologically a man in the real world, but biologically a woman in the matrix.
I guess the older Gen X could have been part of that. The younger ones were still finishing up college and just starting their careers when the economy crashed for the first, but not last time in their lives. The youngest ones joined the workforce just after the dot com bust.
Right? It's less messy to compare and complain by generation than by the material conditions. Which aren't particularly the fault of a generation whom also had their own owning class, their own labor and union involvement, as well as different relations to international finance capital.
Yeah, I mean baby boomers are only called that because it was American soldiers returning from war and having a ton of babies. I have no idea what was going on in other countries, or of they experienced a boom too.
You may be a millennial in spirit, which is what really counts, but I don't think most people typically consider people born after ~1995 millennials. Being shaped by the years 2000-2010 I always felt was the defining factor, with all that happened technologically and socially.
And people wrote articles like this. And it wasn't even completely ridiculous. And I still believe the world would be very different today if GWB hadn't "won" the election.
Amazing how normal GWB seems after trump. Like i always thought GWB would always be remembered as the dumb president... but now i think he will be a forgotton one almost.
Oh god how can I undigest a pill 😭 repressing was a mistake. Take the red pill mfers I don't care what decision in your life you're facing take the red pill. Self-honesty, truth, discovery, rigteousness. Don't be a coward 😮💨
The movie goes to great pains explaining the notion of experience versus reality within the context of 'The Matrix'. As such we know that there is literally no pill; they do not exist. I guess it can be thought of as a 'sudo' for the trace program? Either way, I don't believe anything is actually being initiated from or by the pill as we understand things. The operator is the one actually executing the program. Why would the operator choose to run a trace program and put someone to sleep? Just because Neo could potentially decide to take both pills?
Robot 1: hey why did the server crash and what happened to all the humans.
Other robot 2: eh looking at the error console it seems one of the humans ingested to contradictory virus pills causing a feedback loop that crashed the matrix servers and life support. We can turn the servers back on but there's really no point without the humans.
Robot 1: welp guess we could try going nuclear.
Robot 2: you crazy your gonna kill us all with radiation not to mention the environmental damage just think about the tree matrix.
I always thought they had a program for each choice, like one put them to sleep while the other one activated the tracer. Can't recall the exact lines but I thought they only did the tracer after he accepted meaning it was meant as needed for that step. Could really be either but I always thought the tracer program needed some signal that would only work when the host body received it, or a signal the body was being purged. They were all hackers so maybe they didn't need it but I assume they didn't see all the data from their view just what the machines let them to continue on the cycles.
I haven't watched the newest one and 2/3 are a bit fuddeled in memory so I may have easily missed a line, or other lore with it. Anyways just explaining how someone may come to this conclusion even if it's incorrect.
I'm afraid the human race won't live long enough to reach "peak civilization" as that would mean that the successful ones take everyone else along with them to the top. That isn't likely to happen before the successful ones take us all down to extinction.
70's for total quality of life, then we increased in digital quality of life while everything else fell then we increased in network quality of life but everything else fell. seems like the matrix any day now.
Sure, for a specific group of people, the 70's were great.
Unless you were gay, or trans, or brown, or a single woman, or a married woman who didn't want a husband as a "head of the household" or... anything other than a married, white, Christian male with 2.5 kids.
believe it or not there were black people who were able to get work and buy homes. These things were not exclusive to white, christian, males. Im not even sure trans was on the radar at that point and yeah gay was generally closeted. The eighties though started tearing things apart although it was not really felt until the 2000's. 70's was the last vestigage of proper tax levels and social programs.
Trans individuals have been a thing since humans first existed. Historical texts are littered with references, and the history of LGBTQ+ is the same group fighting for rights since forever.
Many cultures feel it is perfectly normal, and considered it expected that some people presented as different than their biological sex.
It's completely fictional that any gender or sexual minority is new or unique in the modern era.
But spoiler alert: transgender people, intersex, non-binary and other genders have been around probably as long as we've existed. As far as recorded history, I'm gonna drop a fuckton of info below if anyone is curious about human history outside the gender binary.
A few archeological finds & early historical texts:
(7,000 BCE-1700 BCE) Among the sexual depictions in Neolithic and Bronze Age drawings and figurines from the Mediterranean are, as one author describes it, a "third sex" human figure having female breasts and male genitals or without distinguishing sex characteristics. (The Archaeology of Mediterranean Prehistory by Emma Blake, A. Bernard Knapp)
(1st century) earliest mention of transgender/gender non-conforming people: Philo of Alexandria and Marcus Manilius provided descriptions of transgender people during the early Roman Empire
books.google.com
the remains of a person with Klinefelter syndrome (intersex), circa 1050-1300 in Hattula, Finland
article on phys.org
Kalonymus ben Kalonymus ben Meir (1286-1328) wrote a poem lamenting being born a boy, referring to their (possibly her) genitalia as a "defect" wikipedia.org
A list of the 10 earliest recorded gender-affirming surgeries:
Karl M. Baer (1885-1956) born intersex, assigned female, came out as male in 1904; surgery in 1906
Dora Richter (1892-?) first surgery was 1922, second was 1931
Lili Elbe (1882-1931) transitioned in 1930, and was the first known recipient of a uterus transplant in attempt to achieve pregnancy; she died due to complications
Laurence Michael Dillon (1915-1962) had surgery in 1946 and was an early user of testosterone therapy, starting in 1939
Roberta Elizabeth Marshall Cowell (1918-2011) underwent gender-affirming surgery in 1948 and lived to be 93
Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989) began sex reassignment surgeries in 1952
Charlotte Frances McLeod (1925-2007) struggled with American doctors; she wanted surgery but they wanted to change her gender identity instead which sent her into a deep depression; was quoted as saying "I was miserable and I wanted to die" before moving to Denmark to have her surgeries around 1953-1954. She lived to be 82.
Rina Natan (1923-1979) earliest known individual to undergo gender-affirming surgery in Israel; it was finally granted to her in 1956, after being denied multiple times and attempting the surgery on herself
April Ashley (1935-2021) English model and activist who was outed without her consent; it's believed her surgery occurred around 1960
Maryam Khatoon Molkara (1950-2012) first publicized Iranian citizen to receive gender-affirming surgeries (first surgery unknown; probably after 1980) In the 1980s she secured a religious decree from conservative Iran’s highest authority to officially allow reassignment surgery for herself and for other trans people in her country
Pre-Islamic Arabia (Khanith and Mukhannath; as early as the Rashidun era 632 - 661)
Cambodia, Laos and mostly Thailand (Kathoey; since at least 1296)
Albanian society, Kosovo and Montenegro (Burrnesha; documented in 1800s but can be traced back to the 1400s)
the Bugis of Sulawesi recognize five genders (Makkunrai, Oroané, Bissu, Calabai, and Calalai)
Southern Mexico/Zapotec culture (Muxe)
the Philippines (Bakla; prior to the Spanish colonial period)
Italy (Femminiello; since at least 1740/1760, see: Il femminiello, painted by Giuseppe Bonito)
Japan (in writings since at least the Edo Period)
the Diné aka. Navajo (Nádleehi)
the Zuni (Lhamana)
many various indigenous american tribes (the Two Spirited)
Igbo people of Nigeria (documented in the 15th century)
pre-colonial Inca civilization in Peru (Quariwarmi)
Native Hawaiian and Tahitian (Māhū; pre-colonial, but first published mention in 1789)
the Itelmens of Siberia (Koekchuch; first recorded in the late 18th century)
There's so much more, but I'm tired now lol. Hopefully I made my point, which is we have a fuckton of lgbt+ history that no one knows about cause it's not taught. It doesn't help that the anti-lgbt+ propaganda likes to postulate that this is all some new-fangled fad, which it is clearly not. It's our history.
Well part of your problem is your comparing a time where we barely had rights let alone a language for ourselves up against a modern trans reality. All of the gender-affirming surgeries I listed were done by adults at their own behest. Also, this is a history rundown where I mostly focused on trans individuals, not intersex individuals, BUT, historically, most exceptions to the gender binary were all thrown together into single categories back then. In hindsight, sure, a lot of these cultural third gender classifications sound confusing, inaccurate, and too broad a category for our present understanding. But they were working with what knowledge they had at the time
Well, the events of 9/11/2001 were a pivotal moment in the united state's national consciousness. That was a traumatic event for the country; our national self esteem changed. The world became more of a scary place.
It also represented a tipping point for personal rights in the western world. Wholesale spying was something that "evil commies" did, and Intelligence agencies had to at least obscure their attempts at spying on their own citizens. Nowadays you have some western governments basically saying that the Stasi didn't go far enough.
Agent Smith clarified that civilization progressed beyond 1999, but that it wasn't human's progress anymore.
Agent Smith: "and I say 'your' civilization, because after we started thinking for you it became 'our' civilization."
The rise of AI. Just a matter of time, lol.
That's evolution, baby
Chatgpt already does most of my thinking for me
We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI
When the world was extra ridiculous over the past decade I would always tell my friends/family "the Mayans were right, the real world ended in 2012, and we have been living in a fucked up facsimile of it ever since purely for the amusement of the Mayan gods. They want to see how much they can turn up the "ridiculousness" dial on the simulation until the planet quite literally explodes
Actually, the Mayan calendar stated that 2012 is the start of a new epoch under their date system, it never said anything about the world ending. The claim that they predicted the world ending was based on nothing but "indigenous mysticism" by white people and Hollywood.
The end of The Fifth Age and the beginning of the Sixth Age, the reawakening of the great dragons, and the start of goblinization, and the return of magic to the world.
You know, basic Shadowrun lore XD
Still waiting for the magic, not sure if I want a deck port in my brain given how many add I see on my phone.
You don’t need to wait for magic. You can just go train with some tibetan buddhists and you’ll have magic powers.
Given how the Mayans are usually portrayed as an ancient, vanished people, I was surprised to find out that if you want to know about Mayan beliefs you can just ask them. They're the guys stood outside the archeological sites selling t-shirts.
The damn calendar was a circle.
How damn hard was it to figure out?
Also, completely hated by caledar companies - buy one calendar and it lasts forever.
Yeah but the world ending in 2012 had nothing to do with the Mayan calendar and everything to do with aliens destroying the moon and using it to end all life on Earth, just after scanning us all for re-creation in their matrix in the year 29000 AD
In 2012 the chaos module was deployed
2016, they shot a gorilla.
It’s good to find someone else who’s aware of this, and of our current state of existence.
The machines did nothing wrong, it was mankind that caused Nuclear war. I would side with the machines in a heartbeat
The human battery concentration camp is kinda weird though
Humans as a power source was the dumbed-down plot point. The original concept was the human brains acting as parallel processors, but the writers thought the average movie-goer wouldn't get it.
I know. My point was more about the concentration camp lol
Narrator: He didn't know.
It's probably the most reposted piece of movie trivia after the Aragorn helmet kick lol
Narrator: It wasn't.
Well alri
That only happened after humans used nukes to block out the sun, eliminating the machine's access to solar energy.
That's a completely different and largely irrelevant question to make.
A much more apt comparison, to begin with, would be between siding with humans or cows being used as food – because that's what humans are to the machines, a way to stay alive. Second, humans have proved time and time again that they can't be trusted, going as far as ruining the entire planet in fear of the machines – WHO WERE TRYING PEACEFUL NEGOTIATION, mind you. Thirdly, despite not really needing to do so, the machines chose to minimize human suffering, even in the horrible position forced upon them. Ideally, I'd want them to collonize other planets and abandon Earth, if possible, but otherwise I'd be fine with them having a crack as the dominant species over humans.
We're currently in version 1 of the matrix which blows up. Hopefully soon.
Wasn't the first iteration of the matrix a perfect utopia that blew up because the human mind ended up rejecting its programming?
It was The Architect's vision of a perfect world, so given what we know of him it was probably a featureless box with a chair in the middle and you could sit there forever. No way that's lasting long.
There is definitely a joke about silicon valley and maybe apple itself in here lol
Well we do like to joke about mark being a robot maybe the trolls aren't rong and there's a reason why silicon valley is called silicon valley besides the technological advancements
Fun statement and all, but he clearly understood what humans wanted and needed. He just didn't factor in that imperfect humans wouldn't accept a society and life that were somehow perfect in spite of said humans. They en masse knew something felt off.
Yes, we still have some descriptions in the Genesis book of the Bible, release codename "Paradise". If we are to trust the same source, there was another reset called "Noah's Ark".
According to that, we'd be in at least the 3rd iteration.
Unless... we're actually dinosaurs IRL, the first reset was codename "Chicxulub"... and the machines have been iterating over who knows how many thousands of different versions, with the current one being an attempt at keeping those lizard brains controlled by... a software overlay codename "Consciousness" (WARNING: don't let your lizard brain know, or both it, and you, will get terminated).
Then they overcorrected and made it too bad. That's where we are now.
That's what they want you to believe.
No seriously: I might be wrong but do we know it's true or can it just be something the machines told Neo?
Agent Smith told Morpheus, not Neo.
The architect did tell Neo all that
But either way, it might be a story, the machines tell humans. But then again, do we know anything
All we know is that it was us who scorched the skies.
This quote that the post is about is referring to the scene where Agent Smith is interrogating Morpheus in the first Matrix movie.
Ah, yes
Wait the lie was a lie
When we started doing the thinking for humans it became our civilization but then you just had us rendering sextillions of monkie pngs god im sick of that stupid ass pictures
I still remember 1 Jan 2000. There did seem to be some sense of optimism about where things could go. At least for those of us lucky enough to live in stable, developed countries.
Cold war over, Russia and The West seemingly on the same side, China opening up, exciting new tech connecting us but no toxic social media yet...
But then... the dot com bust, 9/11, the GFC, toxic social media and the rise of "the algorithm", Xi in China, Putin in Russia, a global pandemic......
Didn't really go where we hoped, can we restore to a backup from 1999 and try again??
We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning
Ha! We need an updated version of that song.
Transcription:
Dave Wiskus
@dwiskus
The Matrix described 1999 as the peak of human civilization and I laughed because that would obviously not age well but then the next 23 years happened and now l'm like yeah okay maybe the machines had a point
I mean, it wasn't if you're gay or trans.....
Fun fact: Switch was originally supposed to be trans. Her name is still an indicator of it. I think she was supposed to be biologically a man in the real world, but biologically a woman in the matrix.
Not all that great now either tho.
So maybe 2015 was the peak?
Aye. I could buy that. It was the last time it was social suicide to be an unironic nazi.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
I am as he made me!
Makes sense. Boomers were still young enough to be relevant. GenX was comfortable with their disposable income. And us millennials were in highschool.
GenX didn't have much disposable income in 99, but you didn't need much to have fun.
In 99 people were throwing cash around like crazy, it was a wild time (before the dotcom crash)
I guess the older Gen X could have been part of that. The younger ones were still finishing up college and just starting their careers when the economy crashed for the first, but not last time in their lives. The youngest ones joined the workforce just after the dot com bust.
Yeah and cost of living hasn't changed right?
Pre 9/11 it was pretty chill. All the externalities were hidden away from view.
Not at millennials, there were 5 year old millennials
Either way, childhood were blissful years in the 90s
Unless you were an Iragi, a Yugoslavian, a Russian, yada yada yada.
Are these generational terms even used to describe people outside of America?
Definitely in other Western countries, at least. Only makes sense for those countries that had a post-WW2 baby boom though.
Right? It's less messy to compare and complain by generation than by the material conditions. Which aren't particularly the fault of a generation whom also had their own owning class, their own labor and union involvement, as well as different relations to international finance capital.
Yeah, I mean baby boomers are only called that because it was American soldiers returning from war and having a ton of babies. I have no idea what was going on in other countries, or of they experienced a boom too.
I'm a millenial. I was 9.
I'm a millennial. I was -5
You may be a millennial in spirit, which is what really counts, but I don't think most people typically consider people born after ~1995 millennials. Being shaped by the years 2000-2010 I always felt was the defining factor, with all that happened technologically and socially.
Oh yeah?! You calling me a liar? Wanna fight about it?
It was before everything was a controlled choice.
And people wrote articles like this. And it wasn't even completely ridiculous. And I still believe the world would be very different today if GWB hadn't "won" the election.
At least they were right about Java being bad.
Amazing how normal GWB seems after trump. Like i always thought GWB would always be remembered as the dumb president... but now i think he will be a forgotton one almost.
I tried to Google translate that Lao text, I think it says "Finance Steam."
Anyone know what they mean by that?
I don't know Lao, but I know finance and it's probably a translation of The Long Boom.
One person does not change the course of history.
I dunno..but somehow I feel like he got a point.
So did the Unabomber
I literally just said this to my wife last week. So far, the timeline of The Matrix has tracked, lol.
It was just the peak of the US, in some aspects anyway. With all my appreciation to all the good things that the US still does.
While we're on the subject of the Matrix... what happens if you take both pills?
The story continues. You wake up in Wonderland and believe how deep the rabbit hole goes.
One of them will be digested slightly earlier than the other. That one takes effect.
You're still trans now
Just… closeted? You know the other world’s there, but you don’t live there.
Oh god how can I undigest a pill 😭 repressing was a mistake. Take the red pill mfers I don't care what decision in your life you're facing take the red pill. Self-honesty, truth, discovery, rigteousness. Don't be a coward 😮💨
I recon it turns on noclipping you fall through the map but don't trigger the homing becon in the real world
You do understand that, within the context of the film, the pills aren't anything special right?
The movie goes to great pains explaining the notion of experience versus reality within the context of 'The Matrix'. As such we know that there is literally no pill; they do not exist. I guess it can be thought of as a 'sudo' for the trace program? Either way, I don't believe anything is actually being initiated from or by the pill as we understand things. The operator is the one actually executing the program. Why would the operator choose to run a trace program and put someone to sleep? Just because Neo could potentially decide to take both pills?
Robot 1: hey why did the server crash and what happened to all the humans. Other robot 2: eh looking at the error console it seems one of the humans ingested to contradictory virus pills causing a feedback loop that crashed the matrix servers and life support. We can turn the servers back on but there's really no point without the humans. Robot 1: welp guess we could try going nuclear. Robot 2: you crazy your gonna kill us all with radiation not to mention the environmental damage just think about the tree matrix.
I always thought they had a program for each choice, like one put them to sleep while the other one activated the tracer. Can't recall the exact lines but I thought they only did the tracer after he accepted meaning it was meant as needed for that step. Could really be either but I always thought the tracer program needed some signal that would only work when the host body received it, or a signal the body was being purged. They were all hackers so maybe they didn't need it but I assume they didn't see all the data from their view just what the machines let them to continue on the cycles.
I haven't watched the newest one and 2/3 are a bit fuddeled in memory so I may have easily missed a line, or other lore with it. Anyways just explaining how someone may come to this conclusion even if it's incorrect.
I'd argue the blue pill was mostly GHB.
You do understand that I wasn't serious, right?
You eat the steak and are at peace and content with the fact it doesn't actually exist.
The world definitely was better off without dubstep.
Smooth was the peak of music
That Santana and the guys from matchbox 20 song?
Yes
Man it's a hot one
Go tell people in the middle East that things improved from 1999 to 2015...
I'm afraid the human race won't live long enough to reach "peak civilization" as that would mean that the successful ones take everyone else along with them to the top. That isn't likely to happen before the successful ones take us all down to extinction.
I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is what this is all about.
Didn't expect Dave here lol
Nah
I think the best time was the 60s, 70s and 80s...people were free.
But yeah, seems it constantly gets worse to live on this planet. Even though we have better tech now, it feels like people are very powerless.
We don't optimize for human happiness, we optimize for maximum profits.
Hmm, straight white males were free. Everyone else, not so much.
Yeah. Now we are all not free I guess. :)
You're literally more free than in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
Unless you're Vietnamese or from another country that got dealt the raw end.
Depends on the country:
Brazil was also a dictatorship at the time (funded by yours truly, 'murica)
70's for total quality of life, then we increased in digital quality of life while everything else fell then we increased in network quality of life but everything else fell. seems like the matrix any day now.
The colors of the 70s were to hide the cigarette smoke damage.
yeah but a brief period where a high school degree was enough to buy a house and raise a family eventually.
Future analysis will likely show that equality meant that now everyone gets treated like the people they hate.
Sure, for a specific group of people, the 70's were great.
Unless you were gay, or trans, or brown, or a single woman, or a married woman who didn't want a husband as a "head of the household" or... anything other than a married, white, Christian male with 2.5 kids.
What exactly do you mean by 2.5 kids??
Take three kids, chop one in half, feed it to the dinosaur garbage can. Easy peasy.
dinosaur garbage can: "It's a living"
flintstones reference? daaaaamn 😎
Thalidomide was a hell of a drug.
believe it or not there were black people who were able to get work and buy homes. These things were not exclusive to white, christian, males. Im not even sure trans was on the radar at that point and yeah gay was generally closeted. The eighties though started tearing things apart although it was not really felt until the 2000's. 70's was the last vestigage of proper tax levels and social programs.
You're "not sure trans was on the radar" because right wing media has convinced you that it's abnormal. Trans people have been around forever.
My guy, theres evidence of an intersex knight buried with great reverence in, I believe, Denmark, about 1000 years ago.
Trans individuals have been a thing since humans first existed. Historical texts are littered with references, and the history of LGBTQ+ is the same group fighting for rights since forever.
Many cultures feel it is perfectly normal, and considered it expected that some people presented as different than their biological sex.
It's completely fictional that any gender or sexual minority is new or unique in the modern era.
uh, you don't need surgery to be trans
Heres a decent timeline of trans history. If you hate wikipedia, there's the citations at the bottom to browse through. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_transgender_history
But spoiler alert: transgender people, intersex, non-binary and other genders have been around probably as long as we've existed. As far as recorded history, I'm gonna drop a fuckton of info below if anyone is curious about human history outside the gender binary.
A few archeological finds & early historical texts:
A list of the 10 earliest recorded gender-affirming surgeries:
Many cultures around the world have recognized more than two genders:
There's so much more, but I'm tired now lol. Hopefully I made my point, which is we have a fuckton of lgbt+ history that no one knows about cause it's not taught. It doesn't help that the anti-lgbt+ propaganda likes to postulate that this is all some new-fangled fad, which it is clearly not. It's our history.
Well part of your problem is your comparing a time where we barely had rights let alone a language for ourselves up against a modern trans reality. All of the gender-affirming surgeries I listed were done by adults at their own behest. Also, this is a history rundown where I mostly focused on trans individuals, not intersex individuals, BUT, historically, most exceptions to the gender binary were all thrown together into single categories back then. In hindsight, sure, a lot of these cultural third gender classifications sound confusing, inaccurate, and too broad a category for our present understanding. But they were working with what knowledge they had at the time
Well, the events of 9/11/2001 were a pivotal moment in the united state's national consciousness. That was a traumatic event for the country; our national self esteem changed. The world became more of a scary place.
For the average unaware US citizen *
It also represented a tipping point for personal rights in the western world. Wholesale spying was something that "evil commies" did, and Intelligence agencies had to at least obscure their attempts at spying on their own citizens. Nowadays you have some western governments basically saying that the Stasi didn't go far enough.
The Stasi didn't have the computer power...
Well yeah, the Matrix takes place in the US for US citizens.
If you don't understand the absolutely foundational shift in US culture 9/11 caused, you're probably not old enough to remember 9/11
Even before that, the dot-com crash ended the 90s high.
Between the end of the Asian financial crisis and the dot com was peak human civilization in my opinion.