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The Butte Public Library has canceled a talk on the history of LGBTQ+ and Two-Spirit people in Montana, citing a new anti-drag law with language so (deliberately?) broad and vague that it could easily be applied to trans people like the scheduled speaker.
The only surprise here is that it happened so quickly; the anti-drag bill was only signed into law last week.
Because these anti-drag bills, in Montana and elsewhere, aren’t really about “protecting” kids from drag queens; they’re an attempt to make it illegal for trans people to speak out in public settings.
Here are the details on the cancellation of the speech; I’d encourage you to read the screenshots in the following tweets to see the dehumanizing language used to describe the trans speaker.
This won’t be the last time laws like this will be used to shut up trans speakers and performers. This is all part of a Republican offensive against “transgenderism” that seeks, as The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles infamously put it in a speech, to eradicate trans people “from public life entirely.” As I’ve noted before, this is straight-up cultural genocide.
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Frankly, the worst part is knowing 90% of cis folks don’t even care about any of this. They don’t care that trans people are being literally silenced in the political sphere, that we are having our only way of nonviolently defending ourselves – with our words – stolen from us.
If a cis folk is LGBQ+ or they actually know a trans person that they regularly talk to, willingly, there’s a decent chance they know what’s at stake, but cis-straight normies who don’t, by and large, simply don’t give a single fuck.
“Gee that’s too bad” is the best I’ve gotten out of them.
We are unpeople, it seems, and it’s likely just a matter of time before they start rounding us up. And even then, I’m betting those folks will just look the other way.
It’s exactly how Jewish folks were silenced, legislated against, removed from German society to the ghettoes, then sent to the camps, and then finally the showers and the furnaces, with scarcely a peep from non-Jewish Germans.
History rhymes.
I wanted to work in medicine but frankly my faith in humanity is almost dead now and I’m not sure I could aid in treating a person who I knew wouldn’t blink an eye if I was murdered by the state for being trans.
Anti-trans reactionaries only need to claim they’re being silenced to get entire news stories, speaking engagements, and interviews in major media outlets. We ACTUALLY get silenced, and it’s just crickets from those same outlets….
@Seth
Oh, the original flavor Nazis came for us first too. You know that infamous picture of Nazis burning a big pile of books? Those were the research of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which was pioneering medical gender transition and depathologizing queerness.
So much this. It’s exhausting being targeted all the time. It makes me think horrible, ungenerous thoughts, like when FOX targets people applying for asylum and I feel glad that there’s a day that I’m not the target instead of feeling appropriate sympathy and solidarity for the people who are targeted that day. You just get worn out and when the time comes for you to stand up for others, you know you should, but you can’t always manage it. And then you feel like shit because, again, you know you really should be standing up for those other folks but you just need the fucking day off.
I hate it.
For movements that require an outgroup to hate, this hate will eventually come for them. But by then, there will be no one left to speak.
The alt reich screams about protests getting their events cancelled, but there are no laws preventing them from existing. Unlike all the absurd laws targeting trans people.
They call the left groomers while ignoring all the child molestation in churches and in fundie cults. They ignore all the right wing grifters drooling over fertile 12 year olds
It is all confession via accusation.
I wish there was a magic wand I could wave, this is such a pile of dog shit. And you know the UK won’t be far behind you in the cruelty, we do like to keep up with your worst politicians. 🙁
Seth S I don’t know what area you wanted to work in, but there are specialities that would make you very unlikely to encounter the slug slime, of course you have to do the general training before you specialise, so that is still a problem.
This is why Canada is working on legislation to make trans people refugees here. In Canada harassing or canceling a trans speech or drag queen story hour is a hate crime.
@Seth,
You’re absolutely right, and the parallels are not accidental. The right have very deliberately chosen trans people as their first target because of the reasons you outlined. Go after the easy prey, the one that most people won’t try to protect, get the masses used to the idea that this is how Undesirables should be treated.
As for “target for what,” again, you are quite correct with your comparison. Their goal, which some to not even try to hide, is extermination. And like their forebears, they won’t stop with the first group of Undesirables that they target. Or the second. Or the third…*
As a cis ally who is very, very scared and angered by this, I don’t know what to do. For every ten cis people who say they support trans rights, or at least don’t oppose them, maybe two actually care enough to do anything about it.
I have certainly learned that if someone does not care about other people, there really isn’t any way to convinced them to do so. I’ve tried the “enlightened self interest” model, citing Martin Niemoller, to get them to understand that this is step one towards coming after them. Fascism, after all, requires an Other to attack, and if they lack Others some group that had previously been One of Us will suddenly turn out to have always been the Other.**
But I have never had any success. They are always convinced that the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party will never have the leopards eat their face.
*As a disabled, autistic person who is the wrong sect of Christian, I have no illusions that I am not on The List. My being a straight white Christian cis male will not protect me.
**I imagine that the ultimate end-stage of fascism is a country reduced to two people in a bunker pointing weapons at each other, each declaring that the other is not a True Patriot but an Enemy of the People.
@Allandrel: see Babylon 5 “Infection”.
@general: I don’t see how this survives judicial review, to be honest. We have an overt, visible chilling effect on protected speech on display here. It’s doubtful even the Trump Court could come up with a plausible way to find in favor of this legislation without just admitting outright that they are no longer upholding the Constitution in any recognizable form, and that seems to be a step they’re not yet willing to take. (Ironically, Trump’s appointees might be the most likely to vote for upholding the Constitution, as compared to the clearly-on-the-take Alito, Roberts, and Thomas, whose opinions can apparently be bought and sold by Harlan Crow.)
@Allandrel:
I imagine that the ultimate end-stage of fascism is a country reduced to two people in a bunker pointing weapons at each other, each declaring that the other is not a True Patriot but an Enemy of the People.
No—that’s the penultimate stage. The end-stage is when life is utterly purified and gatekept and goalposted out of existence—and the drones perpetuate the war notwithstanding, because.
@ allandrel
I suspect you’ll be familiar with Doctor Who; and the fact Terry Nation wrote the Daleks to be Nazi analogues*.
[*Don’t you miss the old days before kids’ TV shows were political?]
@Alan:
That reminds me of, back when the whole ‘Sad Puppies’ thing started, one of the original people was ranting about how it used to be that when you saw a spaceship on the cover of a book, you knew you were getting a rollicking space adventure and not some sort of discussion of sociopolitical ramifications, and how he longed for the days back when SF was apolitical.
And then he mentioned Star Trek as an example.
And everybody else with any knowledge of the history of SF and fandom was going ‘Dude, not only are you just expressly judging books by their covers, Star Trek? Apolitical? Have you ever actually seen the original Star Trek? The show with the first inter-racial kiss on American TV? Let me put on this episode for you, it’s called Let That Be Your Last Battlefield…
(Which nicely ties back to Allandrel’s line about ‘two people in a bunker pointing weapons at each other’, since that’s pretty much how that ended.)
@ jenora
Indeedy.
To analyse the politics in Frankenstein would take volumes. But to cut to War of the Worlds; that’s literally an allegory on colonialism and animal rights. And in the more modern era, if you looked closely at Heinlein you could sometimes spot a few political themes there.
But of course we don’t need to tell anyone here about how sci-fi has always been used to talk about contemporary issues but disguise them as fantasy. Heck, that’s the entire premise of Star Trek. In a way that’s following on from Roddenberry’s inspiration, Hornblower. Those books are very much about world politics at the time.
It does seem though, that for some people, the authors disguised the politics perhaps a little too well.
I should add, there was a Doctor Who story in the 70s that was written by a screenwriter disgruntled at the tax system. What’s weird is, he was an avowed Tory, yet in the end of the story the big bad company is brought down by a bunch of workers literally quoting Marx.
But you can get a gist here…
Not just Star Trek, but The Twilight Zone had stories that these days would be sneered at by the ultra-right as being “political.” Some of them were more heavy-handed and/or clumsy than others, but when they captured lightning in a bottle, it sizzled for the ages.
I don’t consider political stories a bad thing, btw. As long as the story is entertaining and hits all of my other personal checklist items for “good,” it’s all good.
Really, in stories, there isn’t actually any such thing as ‘no politics’, just ‘no politics that jumps out at this specific reader’.
Which, of course, was the problem with the Sad Puppy types. It wasn’t that they disliked politics: it was that they disliked politics that challenged the status quo, and in particular challenging the status quo which had them in what they felt was their proper position on the hierarchy near the top. Anything that didn’t challenge the status quo wasn’t seen as political to them, even though it obviously is to anybody who isn’t in the cis/het/white/male territory.
As for Heinlein, I’ve noted that his political leanings very obviously changed over the course of his life, and in some ways you could tell just by the politics of the story he wrote which of his wives he was married to at the time. (Everybody knows about Virginia, who was in the Navy; but people often forget the earlier wife he was married to while he started his writing career, and she was an intense political activist in a different direction.)
One thing I like about Heinlein is that, whilst he certainly wears his politics on his sleeve, other viewpoints do get presented in his work. And not in a strawman way. Characters are allowed to make all the arguments; and often even the ostensible protagonists aren’t able to refute them. I think maybe that’s why his works are so often adapted as satires. If you didn’t know Heinlein’s real persona, you could easily think that the works were themselves satires.
Like in Starship Troopers. There’s much discussion pro and anti the service = franchise system. But in the end, the main proponent of the system states bluntly that there is no justification for it. It’s just that they stumbled into it and that’s how society works now.
I’ve always liked stories where ‘villain has a point’. Don’t get me wrong, I also love a bit of black hat/white hat derring do. But for example, one of my fave ‘political’ films is the original Rollerball. The supposed antagonist in that makes a really good argument; and there’s plenty of evidence in the film that he may well be right. Or at least that his view is reasonable.
Concerning the whole “Star Trek was good until it got all woke and political” thing, one of my top ten TOS episodes was The Errand of Mercy, a not exactly flattering commentary on the US involvement in the Vietnam War. It was aired while the war was in progress….
@ .45
This is sort of related.
I like theology and religious history. As you may know, some of the Old Testament books have this thing where you have supposed historical personages and events, but the story very much reflects the time they were written in.
But the best summation I heard on that was: “Remember, M*A*S*H was set in the Korean War but it was about the Vietnam War.”
Also related.
Back in the 80s some film makers wanted to do a TV series about the rise of the Nazis; and how they effectively came to power not through force but by the collaboration of seemingly ‘normal’ citizens.
But the TV execs said that was a bit controversial for Saturday night family viewing.
So they just updated their script to contemporary America; and we got this. But it’s not like the imagery is subtle.
(The original mini series is just phenomenal)
@Jenora Feuer:
Just to clarify (because some people might misunderstand you), the one with the inter-racial kiss was Plato’s Stepchildren. (The way you phrased it make it sound like it was Last Battlefield that had Kirk and Uhura making out.)
Not that would please them any better, since Stepchildren is pretty much about those with power oppressing those without. Heavens knows, we don’t need anyone calling attention to that little squabble.
i hate to put this here but I feel it’s important as a Black woman to put this perspective here because it needs to be said. Y’all ain’t got enough PoC speaking in these comments. I’m not trying to derail the discussion to make it about Black people, it’s just I think this perspective needs to be added. (You may continue with your regularly scheduled discussion after I’m through.)
Transpeople are not the end goal!
Y’all are the lever. The fulcrum is Black people!
Every attack on any member of the LGBT community is an attack with purpose of tearing down the political walls of those groups that are too strong to directly attack with impunity. Gay people, Black people, and even although it doesn’t seem so, women in general are too politically strong a force for them to successfully attack. They need to disguise, deflect, and attack us indirectly. This is why they lie so damn much. They can’t just come right out and say what they actually want to accomplish and still get elected to office.
It looks like an attack on you. Hell, it IS an attack on you! You should be concerned. You should be scared. You will be erased if they can accomplish that goal ,and yes this shit is exhausting as fuck. Trust me, black people fucking know how gotdamn tiring it is but you are not their endgame.
These people picked the smallest, least understood, and politically weak group of people they possibly find, because like termites, they are forever trying to find a chink in the social armor to return this country back to the Jim Crow era. Many of them are getting so grossly overconfident that they will win that goal because of their seeming success against yall, that they have just started openly engaging in slave fantasies and narratives, because that’s where they want things to end up.
That transgender people are destroyed in just a bonus to them. That immigrants are harmed is a bonus. That women are harmed is a bonus. Make no mistake, they do hate you, but the end goal isn’t you in a concentration camp. They don’t care where you go as long as you’re not here. Their end goal is always putting the n*gg*rs back in shackles.
All of the laws and rhetoric we’re all seeing today is exactly the same as was used on us, but the difference is y’all are not used to experiencing these pointedly direct attacks like this. We’ve experienced some of the worse behavior human beings could do to other human beings and we are still fucking here! We e been in the fire for decades. Compared to us y’all are only just starting to smell a little smoke, and y’all ain’t used to this. L
But we are! We know how to fight this kind of fight!
To that end, Imma need y’all to listen to your transgender brothers and sisters of color because they KNOW this fight too and have been here many times. They were the ones who lit the match at Stonewall. They probably gonna have to light this one too since y’all too busy panicking right now. (I know I sound exasperated right now but this kind of speech exasperates me because this is how we’ve been living in this country for four hundred years and we’re still here. I have to keep reminding myself that white transgender people are brand new at THIS kind of fighting, because y’all are the only ones I’m hearing this kind of desiring talk from, and despair talk is a huge trigger for me.)
And for the record, the people you’ve been speaking to who don’t care are the same people that have never cared! They will never care. Divest yourself of the anger and surprise at that now. Get it out of your system now. It took us nearly a hundred years to figure out that such people have never cared and it was a waste of time talking to them, and waste of energy to be mad at them, because nothing that happens to other groups of people upheaves their lives.
Also, there are probably more people who care about this than you think. Just because you’re unaware of other People’s efforts doesn’t mean those efforts are not happening. Cisgender straight white people who are not affected by any of the laws being passed or the rhetoric being used will always sit on their ass and shrug away other group’s pain. But the rest of us know what’s up. We recognize that transgender women are being used as the crack in the social foundation they’ve been trying to unsuccessfully tear down since the 50s.
This last part is specifically for white transgender people:
We need y’all to start doing what we did. Get fucking mad. Not despair, not depression, not defeat. I’m seeing too much of this from y’all and it’s upsetting.l
We gonna need y’all to get mad. To be angry, because that is the emotion that will get shit done! That’s what’s gonna save you.
To the transgender people in these comments I’m not mad at you or wanting to lecture you, (as I lecture you) but despair talk is a huge trigger for me and always makes me want to speak out. Your fear, sadness, and panic are all valid responses to these attacks, but these are not the emotions that will help you fight this. There are people out there who know how to do this kind of fighting and y’all need to be talking to them!
@Jenora Feuer,
I am not sure if my favorite part of that particular Sad Puppy rant was when he seriously complained that he could not judge a book by its cover, or when he whined that science fiction was not as homogenous and predictable as his favorite breakfast serial. Both were, apparently, terrible injustices.
First instance Tennessee court rules such bans are unconstitutional.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.tnwd.98391/gov.uscourts.tnwd.98391.91.0.pdf
@Lakitha Tolbert – Well said. And seconding the part about Stonewall.
To me, I read many other emotions and thoughts than just despair in what @Seth, @Dalillama & @Crip Dyke wrote, but I can see how that part might stand out. Everyone has important points here.
@Alan – That sounds like a huge relief, but I’m not sure what can happen from here. What are the implications of that decision? (If you or someone else has time/energy to talk about it)
@ epitome
Ok, so that’s a federal court. So any appeal would go to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Any decision from that court would also bind Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio.
Then any appeal from that would go to SCOTUS. SCOTUS doesn’t have to accept the case of course. But any decision from there would be applicable to the whole of the US.
I suspect there may be other state level challenges though. People will try to bring cases in states and within circuits that might give them a favourable opinion. The idea being that then they have some good persuasive opinion for any SCOTUS appeal.
Both sides will be trying that no doubt. So it might be a race through the court hierarchies.
I’ll keep an eye on developments and report back anything relevant. If I can persuade any of my US media lawyer friends I’ll see if I can get them on the media law channel to give their views on what might happen.