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Under Ron DeSantis, Florida is rapidly getting worse for trans kids and LGBTQ+ people generally. And the collateral damage from ill-conceived GOP legislation could hurt a lot of others too.
First, there’s Don’t Say Gay, the Sequel. Florida is expanding its “Don’t Say Gay” law to ban the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in all school grades. Because, you know, if we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist, right? Florida’s DeSantis-packed Board of Education will vote on the new rule in April; it doesn’t need to pass the legislature.
Speaking of which: Republicans in Florida’s state legislature are attempting to pass a bill that would restrict the use of personal pronouns in public schools, requiring employees and students to only use pronouns that correspond with the sex on their birth certificate. Republican Senator Clay Yarborough says that while a student’s parents may be OK with their child using preferred pronouns, there could be other children in the classroom whose parents are not OK with it.
Florida Republicans claim they are fighting for parental rights–but really, they’re pushing to prioritize the privileges of bigots over the rights of trans children and their parents.
Meanwhile, a Florida House of Representatives committee has advanced a bill that is so anti-trans, and whose language is so broad and vague, that it could even prevent people from getting treated for breast or prostate cancer. The bill would ban gender-affirming care for minors, forcing them to detransition. But “in their zeal to persecute trans people, they are banning treatment for cancer,” lawyer and trans activist Alejandra Carabello wrote on Twitter.
The bill’s sponsor is Randy Fine, a former gambling industry executive who apparently didn’t get the memo that young people can get breast cancer. Whoops, guess he forgot to consult with actual doctors before drafting this bit of legislation.
In Florida, it seems, they’re more concerned with denying healthcare to trans and LGBTQ individuals than saving lives.
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How does a state with average winter temperature of 15 C have so many snowflakes wandering around.
That should be right wing snowflakes.
https://tenor.com/view/bugsbunny-florida-saw-cut-island-gif-5578844
Very recently it finally clicked. I knew that all these “parent’s rights” bills in Florida and elsewhere were disingenuous, it’s just a fig leaf to cover up enforcement of bigotry, but only had a vague notion of where they were ultimately going with this. I wasn’t sure how to articulate it until now.
My hypothesis: they’re trying to create a standard of “community standards” for their whole state, without necessarily getting much input from communities existing within the state what those should be. Call it meta‑community standards. If someone is deviating more than slightly from their community standards (which in turn cannot deviate more than slightly from the state standards) then the government will empower other people to force them to conform. This is what “state’s rights” are really all about, and trans kids are just the latest issue in this respect.
But it goes further than that; the chain goes something like “children (including adult children) belong to their parents” → “parents belong to their communities” → “communities belong to higher institutions (like the church, or the state government”) → “higher institutions belong to their countries” → “countries belong to God”. Which would suggest that they don’t consider the US Government legitimate if it doesn’t enforce meta‑meta‑community standards which are highly compatible with their community standards.
It would also suggest that this is why some of them want the US to split up, in order to remove/replace that “broken link”. And then there’s that thing where once they finally got the state’s rights on abortion bans which they long demanded, they’re now moving up towards a national abortion ban…
I expect this law is going to conveniently end up functionally banning hormonal contraception as well. Part of me thinks that’s the primary intent and the anti-trans moral panic is being used as packaging to help get it under the radar.
@Snowberry: It is also about destroying public education. The Texas equivalent to Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill also funds private schools and homeschooling.
Of course destroying public education is also related to the enforcement of bigotry.
@Snowberry:
But it goes further than that; the chain goes something like “children (including adult children) belong to their parents” → “parents belong to their communities” → “communities belong to higher institutions (like the church, or the state government”) → “higher institutions belong to their countries” → “countries belong to God”.
And let’s not forget that by God they specifically mean “God as interpreted by White American Conservative Evangelical Christianity, His conveniently available divinely ordained spokespeople.” (Any other model of the divine is diabolic, or at very best deluded.)
Related to my previous post, but off topic: There has been an idea floating around that instead of completely breaking up, the US should go close to full states-rights and arrange a property-exchange program of some kind where people exchange properties of a similar value and type so that those who are willing to leave states which don’t share their personal values can have an easier time of creating new lives elsewhere. In case someone might be wondering “why not just sell your property and buy a new one?” When you’re dealing with a large-scale mass migration, even spread out over many years, you run into the problem of people being unwilling to sell unless they have something lined up, but they can’t get anything lined up because no one else is willing to sell until they get something lined up either.
The people who are suggesting this don’t really seem to be thinking about how this privileges the slowly-shrinking portion of the portion of the population who both own property and are easily able to afford to move (some people who own homes have inherited them or become poorer over time). Not being able to afford to move could be handled with some form of “transfer aid”. Not actually owning property is trickier; a straight-up rental swap probably wouldn’t work, but I doubt this is an insurmountable problem. This still leaves the issue where some people have to deal with the dilemma of giving up something(s) which have great personal value to them, which cannot simply be replaced by moving, and if that is or includes their existing community, then that might get disrupted anyway even if they stay.
Of course, all this assumes some questionable things. It assumes the general public would go for this. There are a lot of people on the Left who aren’t willing to sacrifice the children of conservative families who might end up trapped in an environment which will be a nightmare for some of them (see: LGBTQIA+ kids, though not limited to them); while it might be possible to set up some sort of perpetual relocation program for escape purposes (and also to get people with conservative natures somewhere more suitable), 18 or more years is a long wait, and some people may not be able to leave so easily even then. There are also a lot of people on the Right for whom “states rights” is just a stepping stone towards making the US a Christian theocracy; this would at best be a poor consolation prize, and at worst completely shut them out of their ultimate ambition.
It also assumes that there are sufficient “good enough” exchanges available. I don’t know if this whole idea started as a compromise to the “Greater Idaho” concept (in which Idaho ganks the less-populated ⅔ of Oregon and a small corner of Washington and California) or if it merely popularized this, but an exchange entirely within that area would mostly involve swapping conservatives in rural areas with liberals in Boise. That would involve a major lifestyle adjustment for all involved. Scaling things up to the whole US would make things a bit less of an issue but still pretty unbalanced.
There are probably a lot more issues, some of them probably not obvious; off the top of my head: what if parents can’t agree on whether to move and who gets the kids if they split up; what if the conservative states all go “white homeland”, even if all they can do is create a hostile environment, where are the non-white conservatives going to go; how would this ultimately affect Native lands; how would this affect suburbs when the core urban area is in an adjacent state with very different laws; would the exchange value of properties need to be adjusted based on the estimated change of income to be truly fair? In all, probably a bad enough idea that it would require a rather specific (and desperate) set of conditions to be realistic.
TL;DR the “property exchange compromise” is more complicated and problematic than it first appears.
Snowberry: that sounds like something Gorbachev suggested for Black Americans back in 1987: give them their own state and “encourage” all of them to move to the state that had been designated as their “homeland.” Which is what the USSR did with all the various ethnic groups that had been part of the Russian Empire: march ’em all to their respective SSRs or ASSRs and pretend they were being given “autonomy” or “self-determination.”
EDIT: Also, other US white racists have advocated something similar, on the grounds that it’s just totally impossible for different races to ever live together, so we have to have “separate development,” a.k.a. “apartheid.”
EDIT 2: Also, Gaza comes to mind.
@Raging Bee:
So, “Trail of Tears 2: Electric Boogaloo”.
Lovely.
Americans sure do love their sequels, don’t they? <smh>
In my understanding, the USSR didn’t try to segregate ethnic minorities into traditional or assigned homelands. Rather, any ethnically targeted uprooting of people was generally done for the purpose of scattering and mixing up people, thus aiding assimilation.
@RagingBee; @Surplus to Requirements; @Snowberry; @Lumipuna:
Wasn’t that also pretty much how South Africa’s Bantustans (arbitrarily chosen, arbitrarily race-sorted “ancestral” “homelands”) worked?
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/homelands
They did both. They often ostentatiously created a “homeland” somewhere in Siberia with a big cultural museum and then actually scattered the minority throughout or scattered Russians throughout where the minority actually lived.
Dave – That’s what I meant. It’s not segregation to create an ethnic republic or whatever, if the ethnicity is not actually concentrated there.
“Unintended consequences be damned”?
Pretty sure that those consequences are intended—just not to be openly discussed.