For those not familiar with upper midwestern geography, Minnesota is right next to North Dakota. The largest city in North Dakota is squished up right next to the border, with Moorhead, Minnesota paired up right next to it. North Dakota is extremely conservative (although Fargo is less so), while Minnesota is fairly liberal. This leads to interesting situations.
Fargo hosted popular Pride events for many years. But no more!
A contentious political climate coupled with safety concerns and summer construction has prompted two Pride events historically held in Fargo to move to Moorhead.
Both Pride in the Park and the Pride Parade, noted as the area’s largest rural Pride celebrations, are set to begin in August and will be held in Minnesota and will not enter downtown Fargo.
Don’t worry. The organizers are not abandoning North Dakota, but have simply made a pragmatic decision that Minnesota is safer.
“Logistically, we are still finalizing event details, but we are excited to hold two of our major community events in Minnesota this year,” Diederich said. “With that said, we belong in North Dakota and we are not leaving. We will still hold events in private event spaces in the community where many of us work and live.”
Why is that? Sorry to be an ignorant outsider, but I noticed in that map of trans friendly states, Minnesota stands out as a little oasis of rationality abutted by ignorance. It’s a striking discontinuity and I wonder why it exists.
Botched the link, but people know the map I mean:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/files/2023/05/anti-trans-risk-map.png
Meanwhile just to the north in Manitoba, there’s going to be Pride events all over the place. Even the Premier of the province who is a member of the Conservative Party is marching in Winnipeg’s Pride Day March.
North Dakota is such a weird anomaly given Manitoba and Minnesota.
Both Dakotas have surprisingly little population.
If enough Minnesotans move to strategic places there and register to vote, they can play murder with the (probably gerrymandered) voting districts. You could basically annex the place.
As a former resident of this region (and current MN resident), I’ve noticed that the rural areas of ND, SD and MN are all conservative and that the few cities in the region can be viewed as urban progressive(ish) islands in a sea of conservative countryside. ND isn’t an outlier, but looks more similar to the rest of rural midwestern US. MN is the outlier in this region because about half of the state’s population is concentrated in the Twin Cities metro which makes the state as a whole trend more progressive. Remember that real estate doesn’t vote–people do. Even those progressive urban islands in the rural hinterlands are not as progressive as larger urban areas in the middle of the US such as the Twin Cities, Chicago, Denver, etc. Most of the cities in MN & ND such as Fargo and Moorhead are made up of people leaving smaller towns and farms in the region to get jobs and urban amenities in the “big city.” I know people from rural ND who are afraid to drive in Fargo or who keep a pistol in their car when they go there for shopping trips.
How pleased they’ll be with themselves! They drove some of us out, if only temporarily. One thing they still haven’t learned, however: you can’t get rid of us for good. We’re everywhere, we pop up everywhere, where you least expect us there we are. Think about that, you timid little souls: we’re tenacious people.
As you may already know, homosexuality is genetic. One is born that way… there is no choice. I didn’t realize that until I went to a rheumatologist a few years ago, one of the finest doctors I’ve ever met. I told him I had ankylosing spondylitis, and he ordered around 30 checks of my DNA. When I looked at the results, there they were, at the top, highlighted as potential problems: homosexuality, autism, and ankylosing spondylitis. Those are the three defining characteristics of my life. When you tell one of the haters that homosexual behavior isn’t a choice, but one is born that way, cognitive dissonance sets in. They won’t believe it, no matter how many links you give them where they can read about it.
@opossumboy #7 – It’s a little more complicated than that. There are cases known of equal twins where one is gay and the other is straight. Of course that doesn’t mean that the haters are right, just that genetics alone are insufficient to explain sexual preference.
To my knowledge things like being gay or gender dysphoria are all about embryonic development and appears to have a constant probability, so it is probably not only genes.
My guess: Pleiotropic genes that have an important function so they are ubiquitius, while also having a stochastic component affecting things like sexual orientation and gender identity.
There are other people in the commentariat that can probably give a better explanation.
Not quite related to the two states, but here is another critique of the Youtube failed explanation of trans people.
https://youtu.be/pjIkj-gDt7s
or
https://youtu.be/pjlkj-gDt7s
Warning. Scientists should always be aware of implicit bias. If they think that gay and trans people need explanation but straight and cis people do not, they should explicate that. The mere fact that gay and trans people are a minority is an insufficient explanation.