The Daily Wire’s Micheal Knowles inspired alarmed headlines, and deservedly so, when he declared that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” in a speech at CPAC on Saturday.
But what was missing from some of the coverage was the chilling context in which these words were uttered. As trans activist and writer Erin Reed puts it in a must-read Substack post that I’d like to highlight for you all,
it is important to recognize that Michael Knowles’ words are fully backed by the actions of the Republican Party. Transgender eradication is not a slogan – it is an active effort underway in over 20 states.
Indeed, there are a staggering 421 anti-trans bills that have been introduced so far. Reed, who has tirelessly tracked the Republican legislative assault on trans people, notes the intents of some of these bills:
Forced medical detransition for trans youth with methods for doctors to do it spelled out.
Bans on drag that include transgender people, that also state anybody “impersonating another sex” is guilty of a crime if they “excite lustful thoughts” in a cop or prosecutor.
Complete writing of trans people out of the law and banning of IDs and birth certificates.
Fines of $35,000 for calling somebody transphobic.
Forced detransition of incarcerated transgender adults.
Bills allowing people to kidnap trans kids and the kids of trans parents.
Effective bans on clinics providing gender affirming care through policies making the clinics impossible to operate.
Students in schools being given the right to bully trans kids by using their old name and pronouns.
Drag bans that could ban Pride.
Bills and policies that would charge parents with child abuse for gender affirming care.
Bans on any books with trans characters or gay characters, regardless of how family friendly they may be.
Adult bathroom bans that would charge trans adults with sex crimes.
Add to this a proposed national bill from Marjorie Taylor Greene called, perversely, the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act,” which would, as Reed notes,
ban gender affirming care for trans teens and force their medical detransition, ban insurance coverage nationwide for adult trans healthcare, and would even ban higher education organizations from teaching transgender healthcare.
It’s not hyperbole to call this cultural genocide. And it seems highly likely that upcoming bills will be even more cruel and draconian as the confidence of the anti-trans movement grows. We need to stand up and speak out against this war on trans people, before it’s too late.
I would strongly recommend following Reed on Twitter and supporting her Substack. She does amazing and sadly necessary work.
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Masse_Mysteria:
I gather that US Evangelicals have long fostered their own meaning for the word “confusion”, meaning roughly that people lose the correct understanding of God’s law and drift into sinful lifestyles. They also (and conservatives generally) apparently believe that most LGBT people are a result of a progressive upbringing and progressive general culture that is LGBT friendly and autonomy oriented, feeding the potential that some kids have in them to become queer. Obviously, for conservatives, saving most of these potential LGBT kids is far more important than helping the few legitimately queer people survive and thrive.
I see the term “gender confusion” pop up sometimes in US conservative discourse, and I think refers to the Evangelical meaning of confusion. It’s also a convenient dogwhistle for mainstream anti-LGBT political discourse. Nobody really gives a shit that many things in our world are genuinely confusing to children, but conservatives will cling to anything that sounds vaguely harmful to children.
I see the rhetoric about progressive sex education “confusing children” bleeding into mainstream political discourse, even here in Finland, because we copy everything from US social media. That said, I don’t think everyone who parrots this rhetoric is necessarily thinking or dogwhistling the Evangelical meaning.
@Surplus to Requirements:
It would be interesting to know whether there’s any validity to the idea that some disorders are only disorders in the context of a particular society. I have my own bit of weirdness where, if I had grown up in a society which predominantly used Arabic writing, would likely have been diagnosed with some kind of reading disorder. I can read multiple writing systems, for a certain value of “read”… just because I can work out the likely pronunciation of the text doesn’t necessarily mean I know what it says. (Like with all those pictures of Ukraine last year; I’m very familiar with the Cyrillic writing system, can read a little Russian, and know a smattering of words in other Slavic languages, so I could maybe sort of make out what some of the signs and such in the pictures probably say despite not knowing any Ukrainian. But not always.)
But trying to teach myself to read Arabic was a nightmare, the squiggles and squirms and hooks tore at my brain. It was profoundly unpleasant to look at for more than a few minutes, and I learned nothing. I can speak what little I know of the language just fine, so it’s not the words themselves. It might be some really narrow processing disorder which is extremely unlikely to matter under any other circumstances, and if so I’m fortunate not to ever need to deal with it. Or I might have been going about it the worst possible way, who knows.
Jumping in on the ADHD discussion to share this video by Inuendo Studios (generally a very good channel. Highly recommend the ‘Alt-Right Playbook’ videos. And if it happens that I picked this channel up here in the past… Well, consider it a reminder that it exists and is good). A frank discussion between two people about what it’s like to have ADHD. I shared it with my partner (who got an ADHD diagnosis over a year ago) and they found it extremely relatable as well. Especially the ‘good dopamine vs easy dopamine’ stuff.
https://youtu.be/-kwrjaApVYg
As someone who is regularly distracted by squirrels, and once drove through a hedge avoiding one, this seems to tie in also with the ringing the changes thread.
@Lumipuna
You make a good point. I admit I was talking mainly about what I’d heard here in Finland and wasn’t thinking about a bigger picture.
I suppose “confusion” is a bit vague way to refer to these things. Now that know there is such a thing as nonbinary and I know I’m that, I’m no longer confused about that. It seems that a lot of people who are either new to gender diversity or are misinformed somehow assign their own confusion to the people they do not understand. “I don’t get how anyone could be trans / nonbinary, it’s too confusing! All of these people are just so confused about things!”
A bit like the right-wing classmates I had back in the day, so sure that I was left-wing only because I hadn’t really thought things through. If I had, I would have arrived at the actual truth, wouldn’t I?
@Alan, if Secret Squirrel was in the belltower, where was Morocco Mole?
@Snowberry
You’ve basically stumbled on the main premise of The Social Model of Disability. It’s the main theory in the Disabled People’s Rights movement here in the UK but less well known elsewhere.
It basically posits that bodies and brains can be different from the norm in ways which may *or may not* cause some difficulties or suffering in themselves (the theory calls this “impairment/s”) but that the society in which the person who has an impairment exists can *disable* that person causing additional suffering and difficulties while often positioning the person’s impairment as the sole source of those difficulties. Or societies can change to *enable* people and prevent additional suffering and difficulties.
Here’s a link to a video about the “gender-criticals'” latest line of bullshit: screaming about how lots of autistic people seem to also be trans, and then insisting autistic people “have no voice” and therefore they, the GCs, must bravely speak for them:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/oceanoxia/2023/03/09/important-video-gender-criticals-autism/
It’s kinda long, but worth every minute. Also it ends with lots of autistic people speaking for themselves with their own voices, thankyouverymuch.
One shouldn’t over-generalise—perhaps it’s that a mere 80% of them give the other 20% a bad name—but I feel it likely that my stomach is not strong enough to know well what ‘excite[s] lustful thoughts’ in a cop or prosecutor.
Oh, great. It’s Gender Criticals Speak! A match made in hell if ever there was one.
Aha! Ye Olde Classification of Impairments Disabilities and Handicaps. Waaaaay back in the early 80s my husband’s job as well as his studies revolved around this stuff.
I’ve always thought this description system worked well. Anyone can be born with or otherwise acquire some anatomical variation that may or may not be amenable to correction. Sight is a good example. We can be born with anything from one or both eyes missing through to perfect vision which can be developed to extraordinary feats of distance vision and or fine handiwork with textiles (or marble sculptures).
At every point along that scale, it’s a society’s economic or other development that allows or prevents an impairment becoming a disability or a handicap. 200 years ago impairments of vision severely restricted activities in ways that are now routinely corrected with spectacles or other lenses even though their quality precludes work as a fighter pilot or restoring old masterworks.
Same thing goes with an extreme version of everyone’s left right discrepancies. Most people don’t notice their own or anyone else’s oddities of facial or other features. But it can’t be avoided when one foot is a whole size bigger than the other. This impairment is only a disability or a handicap if society has imposed physical or legal barriers to selling shoes like this. (The difficulty of imagination here is a good model for a whole lot of other impairments that someone like me would think is an easy fix and others see as insurmountable.)
re: ADHD, I hate when I can’t do something *I want to do* since I am out of meds. Just getting going in any direction is tough,
which lead to a depressive cycle, which is why I view my ADHD meds as part of my depression meds. (In my 20s, they thought I was cyclothymic –baby bipolar. Later it appeared that I actually have major depressive disorder with ADHD-inattentive.)
That sounds like that demand-avoidance thing. Though you say ADHD meds help greatly with it? Could the two (demand-avoidance and ADHD) be related?
@Surplus
Yes, one is a standard symptom of the other