>But the quote isn't about "ideas" being in power. It is about people.
False distinction, people are machines inhabited by ideas, just like how programs inhabit computing machines. Ideas can't be in power, just like programs can never actually be "ran". Both are electromagnetic patterns in the physical medium of some computational architecture (mammalian brains/Von Neumann processors), "Ideas In Power" was a metaphorical shorthand by me, what's in power are people inhabited by those ideas, and the obvious result is that they mount strong resistence to any opposition and make it quite costly to criticize or make fun of their ideas.
>I think it is plain to see that gay people and transgender people are definitely not "in power" in the west in any special way.
They are, in the sense that their identities and thought patterns motivate and emotionlly charge people in institutions ranging from the white house to mega corportations to do things they might have otherwise not done, sometimes to the detriment of the institutions.
Your implicit argument seems to be:
- for a person to be in power, he/she/it has to wear funny clothes and be
referred to with funny titles.
That's a very naive view of how power works. The catholic pope in the middle ages was never directly in charge of more than a small principality's worth of land and people (although he did wear funny clothes and was referred to with funny titles), yet he had immense power that spelled the downfall of the byzantine empire, demarcated the whole world between 2 other empires, and ignited a series of civil wars that killed millions. That's because his "Ideas were in power", i.e. the papal way of thinking and typical thought patterns inhabited people of immense power and motivated and charged them to behave and say as the pope behaves and says.
Ideologies essentially assemble people believing in them into super-organism, just like an ant colony can be a force to be reckoned with while an individual ant is a trivial organism; In the same way, one can say that gays, transgender people and feminist women/men are in power but none of them - individually - necessarily holds any special power.
(Note the 'feminist' modifier on women, it's quite disingenuous to equate women with feminism, one is an ideology, the other is a natural subset of humans whose vast majority haven't even heard of the ideology or care enough about it's first world problems).
>Unless there is some actual secret shadow government operated by women, gay people, and transgender people
That's quite a funny cartoonish version of the argument that you have constructed for yourself right here, the "secret" and "shadow" modifiers also serve no meaningful role other than to evoke a general vague sense of ridicule.
It almost never works like that, when communism were in global supremacy in the 1950s and the 1960s it wasn't a secret shadow government that controlled the world behind the scenes, it was a bunch of (sometimes contradictory) ideas that inhabited various powerful people and motivated and charged millions to live and work and die. Communism was in power. You were allowed to criticize Stalin or Lenin in plenty of times and places, in fact in some of those times and places you were even suspect if you didn't criticize them, but you were never allowed to criticize the Ideas in power, which were all a variant of communism.
The quote never actually says that
- The people in power are a single monolithic entity that is omniscient and
omnipotent
- The people you aren't allowed to criticize are the same as the people in
power
Which seems to be 2 implicit assumptions you keep making. It's most obvious interpretation is "When there are disproportionate costs to criticizing some idea or group or lifestyle, that idea or group or lifestyle is that of people who have dominion over you in some way or another". This is almost tautologically true: People in power will not be pleased to see anyone criticizing something they believe in.
>the quote is idiotic on its merits
Not the quote, the peculiar interpretation of it you have, which seems almost constructed to be easily refuted. The natural interpretation is so obvious as to be trivially true, which is to be expected of an aphorism.