So the latest company to rouse the ire of the right-wing boycott-threatening squad is Crayola. Yes, the crayon company. Crayola’s sin? The company posted three pictures of a disabled trans man on its social media accounts as part of their celebration of #DisabilityPrideMonth.
Here’s one of them:
The Crayola post explains that
Julian Gavino, aka The Disabled Hippie Life Coaching, (he/him) is a fashion model, writer, and activist who identifies as a transgender man. He was born with a progressive neurological condition. Julian is passionate about advocating for his respective communities. As someone who grew up not seeing anyone who looked like him in the media, Julian is determined to normalize disabled and trans bodies in the fashion world.
The crayon connection? Gavino told Crayola that
he truly believes you can connect to your soul and others through creativity. He says, “You can do it through fashion, art, you can do it through color. … When I felt frustrated, I would turn to art. It’s important to have outlets like that.”
It turns out that even the idea of a trans person rhapsodizing about the importance of art is too much for the right-wingers to bear. A headline in the far-right Gateway Pundit declared:
Crayola Posts Transgender ‘Model’ Wearing a Chain-Link Bra Over Clothing to Virtue Signal About Diversity
“Model,” in scare quotes. Of course, in the eyes of the right-wing critics everything about Gavino deserves to be put in scare quotes — from his career as a model who has worked with a number of top brands to his gender. Gateway Pundit describes him as something that “appears to be a man.” American Thinker is even ruder, deliberately misgendering him as “Ms. Julian Gavino … an unhealthy-looking, mentally ill (with gender dysphoria), bearded lady in a wheelchair.”
So what exactly are the right-wingers angry about? In their version of the world, even acknowledging that trans people exist is some sort of symbolic sexual assault of the young children who draw with and occasionally eat Crayola crayons.
The right-wing blog Moonbattery declared that
In a country run by moonbats, there can be no safe haven for children’s innocence anywhere. Even Crayola is pushing LGBTism on tikes.
American Thinker, meanwhile, argued that
Any person, place, or thing that has sex as its central focus is something that is not healthy, whether for itself or for others.
None of the pictures of Gavino are revealing or overtly sexual, unless you count that chain-mail bra worn on the outside of a jacket.
Apparently just being trans means your very existence is something “that has sex as its central focus.” And apparently just the sight of you can turn small children trans. Even if they can’t tell you’re trans.
The logic here is baffling. And when RedState tries to explain this logic in a little more detail it becomes even more baffling.
The world is changing fast. Not long ago, people were people. And “communities” were geographic areas in which residents stood to gain by banding together. All that’s been removed — your community is defined by those who share a singular trait and who will never know or affect you. And within that empty notion exists a bunch of bodies.
And those bodies, if they choose, can grab some crayons. In doing so, they’ll support more soldiers in the war for wokeness.
But the one think clear from all this hubbub is that right-wing homophobes don’t just want to ban drag queen story hours or protect cis women from trans women in bathrooms, or whatever their latest pretend complaint is. They don’t want trans people to exist in public where a small child (or a large adult) might see them.
And that’s what makes this latest controversy, as silly as it might seem at first glance, so genuinely unsettling once it’s examined in any detail. At its heart, this is eliminationist logic. And as human beings with a basic knowledge of twentieth century history, we know where this kind of rhetoric can lead us.
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He looks fierce and like a whole lot of fun! My house is all on one level, so he can come and color with me any time. And maybe help me get a more interesting wardrobe.
I remember back in the day, Playboy had a centerfold who was a trans woman. She was gorgeous and looked more feminine than me. It was a nine-day’s-wonder and nobody threw a hissy fit over it. Hefner DGAF.
I like him already.
I also like Crayola. Both for this; and generally.
And contrary to popular belief they’re perfectly safe to eat.
The world is burning and economic inequality is at an all time high but conservatives only ever want to complain about trans people instead. Or anyone else who is non-cis het white male and just wants to live their lives.
I’m so fucking sick of this.
@sunnysombrera
Yeah, they’re always offended by the most inoffensive stuff.
Great. Since you’ve covering feminism and LGTBQ rights, I hope that you can cover disability rights as well.
I have seen more sexually suggestive clothing on mid-90s Barbies , early 2000 Bratz and in L.O.L kids toys today. This person hoewer is transition goals for me
I’m honestly despairing over the state of the world. It’s getting harder to believe they aren’t winning
I’d be inclined to agree. But then, we’d disagree of the application of that descriptor. I’d say it describes incels, the manosphere and those obsessed with the sexual purity of white women way more than it describes any LGBTQ+ individual or group I ever met.
It’s almost as if these asshats reduce these people to that singular trait to better dehumanize them or something.
@David Futrelle:
They don’t want trans people to exist <strike>in public where a small child (or a large adult) might see them.</strike>.
I’m sure I must have told this story before but it bears repeating. Shows that these dimwits know as few children as they do women girls men married or single.
55+ years ago I was a Sunday school teacher. Most of us were in the high school to early 20s age group. One friend, same age as me, was pregnant and had been preparing for a hasty wedding until her blokes father talked him out of it on the usual scumbag excuse that it might not be his baby.
She and her family and all of us were determined that her life should be as normal as possible through the pregnancy and we’d all support her afterwards.
Then … a couple of sourpuss church deacons said she shouldn’t be allowed to “influence” our innocent students. Innocent is what they were. They called each and every one of us Mrs regardless – all on the basis that we were, or looked to a 7 yr olds eye, adults.
Nowadays kids are not so oblivious as that. But the point remains. Kids (and most other people) will happily go along with most things and most people so long as some killjoy sourpuss malcontent doesn’t tell them to be nasty rather than nice.
what i think is perverse is that a society can be awash in violence and the people who are benefiting from that violence have the nerve to accuse queer people, who merely want to exist in peace, of being that society’s downfall. this is your brain on white supremacy.
@Alan Robertshaw:
And contrary to popular belief they’re perfectly safe to eat.
Drop the other shoe: do you know this from product liability research or personal experience? (And does the color affect the flavor?)
I recall seeing recipes for making your own custom lip tint from food-grade or mineral oils, using crayons as a colorant (source: U.S. women’s magazines in the 60’s and 70’s—which might reflect memories of wartime privation but would predate electronic social media.)
Oh, you mean popular culture in general for many decades? I mean, Hugh Hefner used the bodies of young women to build a sex empire. It’s nothing new. But I guess it doesn’t count if it’s conventionally attractive young women being served up to straight white men.
@ full metal ox
Both!
It started with “Did you know Play-doh is edible?” and progressed from there (back in Alta-vista days).
But I was curious as to whether the different colours were different flavours.
They’re not; they’re like if somebody made candle flavoured fudge.
@GSS ex-noob
Hefner was a scumbag though, no offense. (Gloria Steinem might be Problematic now, but “I Was A Playboy Bunny” is pretty horrifying.)
Also in general, the cis men who lusted after us were quite happy to let us die of AIDS and drug overdoses as “inevitable consequences” of providing on-demand pleasure for them. Which a lot of trans people only did because they couldn’t find a better job.
Porn is sadly not a good measure of acceptance. Right now sucks as a trans person, but I still consider myself very lucky not to have grown up in the premarin era.
When was this? I feel like there are some words missing from that description. Words like “white”, for example.
I couldn’t care less about Julian’s trans status. What I care about is the fetish gear being worn in the crayon ads. And for the people who talk about how bratz dolls are more sexualized, so I should shut up? I don’t approve of sexualized toys like “bratz” dolls, either.
@Jackie: this isn’t an ad. Click on the link and read the post and then please explain what your objection is.
I honestly didn’t even notice the chain mail bra till I read the fulminating. Probably because I’m not obsessed with sex and gender expression, particularly other people’s.
Regarding “unhealthy”, other than needing a wheelchair, he looks pretty healthy to me. Put him in a regular chair and you’d never know.
@Battering Lamb: remember, with right-wingers, every accusation is a projection and admission.
@Moggie: “people were people” is the really disturbing part of that. Anyone who isn’t cis-SWM isn’t a person to them.
And, you know what the German government of 1933-1945 thought of the existence of disabled and LGBT people. No wonder their spiritual heirs think the same.
Community? That’s a very limited notion of community. It’s true that I, being the poster child for boomer babes born before 1950, lived in the kinds of communal streets where we dragged fruit boxes out into the street to act as the cricket stumps we needed for our games.
But, just like everyone else, all of us, All of us, were also members of other communities. In 1950s Australia, the biggie was catholic v. Protestant. But there were others. Scouts and guides, various sports, choirs and other musical groups, gymnastics-ballet-calisthenics, drama clubs. And the eternal passionate Australian allegiances to their football clubs and codes – these were still fairly strongly tied to localities. But even then many children held fast to “their” team despite moving to a completely different area when adult.
Oooh, his boots are so shiny. That makes me happy.
Person? Perhaps. But thing? What about condoms, for instance? Sex as “central focus,” often used for health reasons.
i wonder how the “sex as a central focus” commenter feels about gun culture 🤔
Veep Harris: “I am Kamala Harris, my pronouns are ‘she’ and ‘her.’ I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.”
Lauren Boebert: “This is what happens when your speechwriter quits and you hang around with Geriatric Joe too long.”
(Context which Boebert ignored: This was at a meeting with disability rights advocates, some of who were blind.)