When They Go Low, We Get Hurt
It’s passed time for Democrats and allies to take the gloves off and protect trans youth.
My community is under assault. Red-state legislatures across the nation are copy/pasting bans on trans youth’s (mainly trans girls’) participation in school sports and gender affirming care for trans minors. Each state is rubbing their own special fecal mark on their iteration of these measures. Last month, Idaho decided to classify gender affirming care, including puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy (HRT), as akin to genital mutilation, a felony “punishable by up to life in prison.” Earlier this month, Alabama also classified such care as a felony, but settled for a max prison sentence of ten years. Never to be outdone where such things are concerned, Texas has reinterpreted existing state law to define parental support of trans kids as child abuse, and is threatening supportive parents with loss of custody. And then there’s Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis, lambasted by the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson in a recent opinion piece as “America’s hottest new dictator-curious Trump-manqué,” signed his state’s trans sports ban into law on the first day of June — Pride month — last year. And now the Florida Department of Health is contributing to the state’s purge of woke math and science by banning trans youth from receiving any sort of medical intervention, even puberty blockers, and also banning “social gender transition,” that is, allowing students to be affirmed with appropriate names and pronouns, and to dress and otherwise present in a way that feels congruent. Put simply, FDH is trying to erase trans youth from “the free state of Florida.”
The reasons for this absurdist cruelty are in general the same as those driving the moronic misappropriation of “CRT” and the equally absurdist escalation of anti-choice measures:
(1) fundraising
(2) “red meat” for base voters/advancing power grab
(3) fundraising
(4) diverting attention from the failure to address substantive “kitchen table” issues (cf. columnist Heather Cox Richardson on the timing of the Texas measure)
(5) more fundraising
(6) securing a cis/heteronormative patriarchal order Scotch-taped to a looking glass world iteration of “Christianity”
(7) $
It goes without saying that in pushing these bans, red-state legislators are ignoring the testimony of medical experts, parents and other allies, and of course the trans community. More worryingly still, as a recent WaPo analysis of national polls points out, views on trans rights remain mixed, and the question of trans athletes’ participation in particular is “a difficult question for Americans, even if they might not support lawmakers getting involved.” Translated into GOP-speak: “There’s blood in the water.” HHS recently issued guidelines on protecting and supporting trans youth, and Pres. Biden put out a concurrent statement condemning the Texas measures as “cynical and dangerous” and “government overreach at its worst.” These responses are of course welcome, in particular after the unrelenting attacks of the previous administration. Still, they feel somewhat belated, and fail to match the virulence and persistence of the GOP assaults. And the longer these assaults are met with skimpy or tepid pushback, the more substantial the harm that is visited on trans youth, and the trans community generally, will be.
While the cynical cruelty of these new laws is worrying, equally disturbing is the likelihood that the far right’s relentless othering of trans folks will encourage haters to indulge in increasingly extreme extralegal crap. Consider an exchange on the April 14 episode of [Slightly] Offensive, a program on the Glenn Beck-founded Blaze TV streaming service. The episode is titled ROASTING [the SH*T Out of] GROOMERS, and is summarized on YouTube as follows:
The initial all-CAPS caveat is striking: everything in the episode is “meant as parody”? (Presumably that means the nonsensical, Alex-Jonesesque hysteria that follows in the summary itself — “turn your freaking kids gay” etc. — isn’t part of the parody.) We get a good taste of what passes for “[slightly] offensive” “parody” around the 14 minute mark of the episode, when host Elijah Schaffer describes an exchange he had with someone about the plight of trans youth. Schaffer claims his interlocutor pointed to a “mass genocide that’s happening of trans kids from fascists” in the U.S., and when pressed for evidence, referred to the situation in Texas. The person in question isn’t identified, nor is an independent source for the conversation provided (presumably none exists), so there’s no way to know if their comments are being quoted/paraphrased accurately, or exaggerated or mischaracterized for “parodic” effect — or for that matter, if the conversation even happened. If we give Schaffer the benefit of all of these doubts, there’s an argument to be made that “mass genocide” is hyperbolic at least in terms of the commonly understood meaning of the word “genocide” as mass murder. (More on this below, however.) At this point, Landau, who like Schaffer is a Texan, is solicited for his opinion, and the ensuing conversation devolves as follows:
“Yeah, we all have to put a trans kid and drag ’em behind a truck.”
Schaffer replies, laughing, “Yeah, which…How many trans kids did you kill this week?”
The rest of the exchange is censored on YouTube: Schaffer informs viewers in deadpan snark, “This is the part of the show where Elijah talks about things he shouldn’t have etc.,” and says it can be viewed on the Blaze TV site, while a squiggly red warning sign revolves around the center of the screen.
The good people at LGBTQ Nation went to Blaze TV and transcribed the full exchange, though, saving the rest of us the trouble of enduring it:
“Uh…six, they come with a toll tag,” Landau said.
“You told me you did three, I did four, I was trying to beat you this week,” Schaffer responded.
“The Blaze ships us the better trans kids. You should really talk to them,” Landau said, referring to the hosts of Louder with Crowder, of which he is one.
“I feel really cheated because I get like My Patriot Supply ads and stuff, meanwhile you get trans kids to genocide!” Schaffer replied.
“Trans Kids Supply, yeah. It’s a pretty good company,” Landau said.
“They come in a tackle box, it’s like a half-dozen. And you kill them any way you want, it’s pretty good. Only in Texas, though, apparently,” Landau said. “I didn’t know that cause I’ve been killing them everywhere so I better stop.”
“Me too,” Schaffer said. “I started in California — talk about the Trail of Tears, I did version two, it’s a new movie.
Hi. La. Ri. Ous.
Let’s unpack the claim that this exchange, like all statements in the episode, are “meant as parody,” since such claims are a by now familiar and transparently bad-faith tactic of far-right trolldom. Strictly speaking, parody is a comic imitation of a particular style of speech or writing, so perhaps Schaffer simply didn’t pay attention in English class and meant “satire.” If we presume that to be the case, satire’s aim is to hold up for ridicule — or “put on blast,” to use the nomenclature of the episode summary — views you find risible or reprehensible, with the aim of elevating implied alternative views. Since the digression’s jumping-off point is the assertion about “mass genocide,” it’s the most obvious target of ridicule. What’s the implied alternative view, though? If Schaffer and Landau find that assertion hyperbolic, absurd, etc., one would assume that they’re implicitly calling for such terms not to be tossed around lightly or inaccurately. That assumption doesn’t square with the recreational vigilantism they describe, however. That is, they too are using “genocide” inaccurately — unless we include state sanctioned terror among the means by which the systematic extermination of a given group, in this case my own, is effected. Given that the Texas GOP actively solicited vigilantes to enforce their 2021 abortion ban, it’s not a stretch to imagine that the Abbott administration would be down with citizen participation in their policing *wink wink* of trans kids and their parents.
Since Schaffer and Landau are playing fast and loose with the definition of “genocide” as well as “parody,” it almost goes without saying that neither of them gives a fuck about accuracy where the trans community is concerned, if it is to be based on the voluminous testimony of the people in a position to know best: trans folks themselves, their friends and families, and the medical community. The stuff that immediately follows the duo’s fantasy murder spree amply bears this out:
Schaffer: Revoking parents’ custody of their trans kids is fine if they support their kids’ journey because “chopping off your [kid’s] dick” and “chemically castrating your kids before their prefrontal cortex is developed” count as child abuse. Some fun facts:
(1) Vaginoplasty may not be a gender affirming procedure to the bro set, but it is for many trans women.
(2) Genital and other gender affirming surgeries on young people under the age of 18 are rare.
(3) If by “chemical castration” you’re referring to the use of puberty blockers, their effects are not permanent, unlike “castration,” nor are they punitive, unlike the negatively connotated word “castration.” If you’re referring to hormone therapy, it’s not punitive, unlike “castration.”
(4) All of these misinformed assertions unsurprisingly relate to trans girls — trans boys are a thing too ftr — since you seem unable to move imaginatively beyond your own junk.
The two then get around to something resembling proper, if very unhilarious, satire of the “mass genocide” claim: Schaffer: A genocide in which no one dies “would have been so good, it’s like hey, the Holocaust, but the Jews all live.” Landau: “Right, they all live, and the parents who abuse them are in trouble.” So parents who seek affirming care for their kids are Nazis, and the kids being denied this care are Jews who survive…Another fun fact: The risk of suicide is higher by orders of magnitude among trans youth than it is among their cisgender counterparts, and gender affirming care saves lives.
After some valid points about the deleterious effects of a poorly regulated food industry on our nation’s health, Schaffer: “It’s not the hormones that [the state is] keeping [from] kids [that’s the problem], it’s the system that’s making kids think they’re trans that’s the problem.” Voilà: Being trans isn’t real, “the system” is grooming kids. Cue Q.
To recap: “Everything we say is parody, but we don’t know what parody means so maybe we’re being satirical instead, but we’re kinda fuzzy on the meaning of that word too, so maybe we’re just making fun of someone for exaggerating the word ‘genocide’, but we think genocide is really a redneck free-for-all, and hey that sounds fun, oops we mean funny, cuz really these kids need to be taken away from their parents cuz OMG our junk, oops we mean their junk, and while we’re at it let’s genocide the kids cuz it sounds fun, oops we mean funny.” These two smug, glib bros aren’t satirizing the exaggerated fears of some “lib,” they’re “joking” about murdering children who are members of one of the most vulnerable minorities in the nation. And if they go on to cast the kids as victims of a “system” of “groomers,” that portrayal is based not only on QAnon batshittery, but also on a willful ignorance of what being trans is — a wholesale denial of the reality of trans life. What they’re communicating to the show’s 449,000 subscribers, then, is a simple, brutal message: “Trans kids have two choices: be erased or be exterminated.”
One last fun fact: As defined in Article 2 of the UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, “genocide” is understood to include not just “killing,” but also other “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” a group such as “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;…[and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” (emphasis added). Telling kids that they aren’t who they know themselves to be, and who parents, friends, and the lion’s share of the medical community affirm them to be; that they thus can’t receive potentially life-saving medical care, and in Texas will be taken away from their parents if they try — erasing their existence and forcibly lumping them in with cis kids: call me crazy, but these actions do seem to meet the UN definition.
[Slightly] Offensive is of course not the only, nor is it the loudest voice pushing this and related content. Notably, the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, spotlighted in a recent Washington Post article, is credited by Media Matters’ Ari Drennen with almost “single-handedly taking us back a decade in terms of the public discourse around LGBTQ rights;” and it’s the account’s anti-trans tweets, the article notes, that have gone “especially viral.” All this false, fiercely negative messaging, moreover, is being beamed into the media ecosystem of a sizable subculture that has become increasingly locked into a bellicose, shoot-first-ask-questions-never brand of toxic masculinity, viz. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s mix-n-match AR-15s, Ted Cruz’s beard, Madison Cawthorn’s call for mothers to bring up their sons as “monsters,” and Tucker Carlson’s fretting over decreased testosterone levels in American men and advocacy of testicle tanning. Perhaps uncoincidentally, the trans community has experienced elevated levels of violence over the past few years. #Math
It’s passed time that Dems, and all people not all in on the evangelical/QAnon alt-reality view of us, take the gloves off and start pushing back forcefully and unapologetically against all this anti-trans garbage. As a model of such pushback, let me recommend the recent floor speech of Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow. Accused by a Republican colleague, Senator Lana Theis, of being a “groomer” because she’d stood up for the LGBTQ+ community, McMorrow didn’t get defensive, nor did she try to remain disdainfully above the fray. Instead, she took Theis’ unfounded, nonsensical allegations on, owning her identity as “a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom,” talking about what being “Christian” means to her — notably, being “of service to others, especially those who are marginalized, targeted, and who [have] less” — and condemning her colleague’s slurs as “hollow [and] hateful” and her brand of the faith as “performative nonsense.” She went down into the trenches and stood up to a cynical assault on us and the rest of the LGBTQ+ community. If Theis’ unapologetic response to this pushback is any indication, it’s unlikely that McMorrow has changed many hearts and minds in the GOP (sub)cult(ure). But that her speech garnered praise from figures ranging from Hillary Clinton to conservative columnist Bill Kristol conveys the kind of impact taking such a stand can have on the majority of the nation not beholden to Q and the former guy. Bringing that disaffected, radicalized voting bloc back into the small-d democratic fold is a desirable long-term goal. However, looking the other way when the lunacy flares up from political considerations or simple disdain is not an option when the lunatics are hurting the most vulnerable among you. Failure to shut down this political Grand Guignol isn’t going high, it’s going home.
