Anti-Trans Claims Are Utter Crap

 The truly amazing thing of the time in which we live is that we have so much information, yet people buy the bullshit mis and disinformation.  People are making incredible (as in unbelievable) claims, and people are buying them, doing so much harm.

Of all of this, the most angering, the most infuriating for me has to be the anti-trans bullshit promoted by the Republican Party, JK Rowling, the New York Times, and others.  First, trans people are a tiny group, hardly a threat to the culture or to anyone.  But their size makes them a handy target--they seem alien because most people do not know a trans person.  Traditional homophobia does not play as well as it used to because more and more people know gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, so those seeking to amplify hate have to find targets elsewhere.  Second, they were a group already facing marginalization and violence before these organizations and individuals began broadcasting trans hate.  Trans kids have long had a high suicide rate.  So, this is the epitome of punching down, which is appalling.  

Before getting to the three most popular and wrongest claims/fears, I should note that the trans panic has an impact--it has shaped attitudes, making the public more supportive of anti-trans laws.  It has helped abet efforts to silence research into all kinds of gender research, not just trans-related stuff.  And, yes, it has given Republicans (and so-called reactionary centrists*) a chance to make Democrats seem strange for protecting a tiny alien group.  Has it tilted elections?  No idea, but of all of the policy issues, this is the one where the public is closer to the GOP.  On pretty much every other issue, the Dems are squarely in the center of the American electorate.  No wonder the Republicans like to create fear against trans people.  A most rancid but pretty damned obvious form of distraction sauce.

First, kids are not being mutilated.  Kids getting any trans-related treatments are doing so after much effort by their parents/guardians, and the treatments for kids are reversible, such as puberty blockers.  The total of adults getting surgery is something like 200 a year, which is hardly justification for a panic, and kids are not getting such surgeries.  All this concern about kids being fooled into being trans is fake, the psychological harm that trans kids face from parents, churches, and others who try to deny them their true identity is quite real.  Oh, and the parties that do the most to "protect" kids from transitioning are the same ones that deny all kinds of benefits and care, such as medicaid, school lunches, and the like.  So, let's just admit they are a Bad Faith crowd.

Second, men are not transitioning to get a leg up in women's sports.  It simply is not a reality.  The number of trans women in women's sports is microscopic, hardly worth the trouble of regulating.  And guess what? There is little evidence to suggest trans women have physical advantages over people who were identified as female at birth.  The whole idea is rather preposterous--that men will sacrifice their sexuality in order to compete in women's sports.  Given the hate and ostracism facing trans people, who is going to do this?  There are significant consequences to becoming trans--most negative given the state of things--so who is signing up for just a competitive advantage?  No one.  If you can find one person or even a dozen, I would be surprised, but that would still not justify the policies aimed at "protecting women's sports."  The party of pedophilia wants to inspect the genitals of girl athletes?  That seems to be far more problematic and damaging to girls and women than the one in a million trans girl winning a trophy.  

Third, all this fear of trans women in bathrooms.  What is the rate of sexual assault committed by trans women?  Yep, it is not really happening.   On the flipside, trans kids are facing greater violence in bathrooms. Sure, fear men in women's bathrooms, but trans women are women.  Once you understand that, the fear should dissipate.  Unless, of course, the fear is politically motivated.

That some feminists--TERFS--are anti-trans is horrific since they are finding common cause with misogynists, racists, anti-semites, Islamaphobes, and other haters.  These hates usually ride together, so joining awful folks because they support your own prejudice is doing great harm to all kinds of causes, including your own.  Yes, JK Rowling is a shitty feminist.  While folks can identify heaps of racism and misogyny in her books,** her amplification of hate the past ten years is an utter betrayal of the central message of the books--that love defeats hate, that tolerance is superior to prejudice.  I can't help but ask JK: "Think, and try for some remorse."

We live in difficult times.  I hate that we have powerful actors making them more difficult than they need to be, and that these folks are either useful idiots or conscious allies of the truly awful actors who are doing so much damage to democracy and to human dignity.  

If you happen to have some beliefs that line up with one of these three myths, do some work, read a bit up on it, and realize you have been played.  We have nothing to fear of trans people but fear itself.  

 

* I will save my reactionary centrist post for another day.  

** I overlooked that stuff for many reasons including the central message.  Alas, I can't anymore.  I have given away my HP books and will buy no more swag.  I will keep my Gryffindor bathrobe because it is a really terrific bathrobe because I am cheap. 

When Did DeSantis Become Trumpish?

 I saw this post

DeSantis seems more like Trump each day in his disregard for rules, laws, norms, constitutions, and even the Bible-based Golden Rule. So much for moving past Trump and the threats he poses. My latest at @BulwarkOnline. https://t.co/U27Bh9TGfz

— Jill Lawrence (@JillDLawrence) May 31, 2023

and I had a case of deja vu.  I flashed back to when I pondered about when did Trump cross the line of no return.  When did he do something that he couldn't take back, something so awful that he would alienate so many people and couldn't get them back?  I was, of course, wrong about how many people would be alienated, but the point was really that he had revealed enough about himself before that the latest revelation should not have made much of a dent.  People were discussing Trump joking about NRA and death threats against Hillary Clinton way back in August 2016--was that too much?  And I pointed out that he started his campaign with racist stances that should already been too much.

Well, the cycle is starting anew and folks are saying that the latest thing DeSantis is doing means that he might not be really an alternative to Trump but another version of him, and my response is: ya think?  Jill responded back to my tweet, asking if I had read it, so, yeah, I hadn't and then I did, and my point remains that her focus was on the very recent stuff--not DeSantis's original "Don't Say Gay" position but his punishing of Disney for opposing that stance (weakly, belatedly but enough to set off this thin-skinned bad faith hater).  

At what point did DeSantis cross the line of no return?  Once again, I draw a handy graph:

To be fair, there are lots of bad things DeSantis did and anyone of them would be disqualifying if, you know, Republicans had values.  But shipping off immigrants to another state without providing resources or warning is just appalling. So, everything else he has done since then does not really change things much, maybe making him asymptotically closer to Trump in awful, but not very significantly.  Does this mean he is not electable?  Alas, I learned my lesson in 2016--that just because a politician is thoroughly deplorable does not make them unelectable when party id is a hell of a drug.  Trump still polls well among Republicans because they care more about power and domination (what they call freedom) than anything else.  

Bill Simmons used to write about the Tyson Zone--that once a person reaches a certain level, nothing they can do should be all that surprising--even biting an ear off an opponent.  Well, in politics, there is the Trump space--that once you get inside of it, no matter what evil thing you do or so should not be that surprising since you have already done enough to be considered thoroughly and completely irredeemable.  Trump is there, Cruz is there, DeSantis is there, as are heaps of other Republicans.  Indeed, Alito, Thomas have lifetime appointments to the Trump space.

There is no coming back.  Not even if they showed a hint of remorse, and, no, don't hold your breath for even that.

Oh, and for the Canadian equivalent, once you hug extremists occupying Ottawa, you can't go back either, sorrynotsorry, Pierre.

The Humiliation Fetish Index

Watching the Speaker of the House votes that have repeatedly rejected Kevin "I deserve it" McCarthy has led social scientists to ponder where he fits on the humiliation fetish index.   After much work and data analysis, the social scientists have left their lab, producing this:

As you can see, at this moment in time, McCarthy is near the top of the spectrum.  He may be approaching Lindsay Graham levels of self-chosen humiliation.  He has definitely exceeded that experienced by the average comedian, even beyond that by most prop comics.  He has matched those most cringe-y stars from 1960s and 1970s sitcoms.  It really is a stunning effort by McCarthy to embarrass not just himself and his party, but his country and democracy itself.  That he is being blocked by the most unsympathetic, most extreme, most moronic members of his own party just deepens the humiliation.  Yet McCarthy says: please, sir, can I have some more?  You would then an aspiring Speaker of the House would be more dom than sub, but McCarthy shows that the weakest, most craven can still potentially rise to the third highest spot in the land.  He has done it before, but this time, he needs to be especially craven.  

If humiliation put out energy, we could power the country for days from the fifth vote along.  Good thing it is not, as the potential for a meltdown would be significant.  I am not sure where this ends for the Republicans, for the House of Representatives, or for the United States.  But I am pretty sure that McCarthy will be bumping into Prince Humperdinck as they live in ignominy.  

The Beard Brotherhood

It looks like they are finally on to us--the beard wearing folk.  Yep, we all have connections to radical Islamist movements.  Tis true.  Me, Paul Ryan, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Grizzly Adams, James Harden, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin are/were all secret Muslims.

Just goes to show how incredibly ... dumb these folks are.  Of course, this accusation that Paul Ryan is now somehow not conservative but perhaps a fellow traveler just shows have far much of the GOP has slid off of the left-right spectrum and into crazy town that is where the far left and far left both reside.

I wonder if conceptual stretching has a partner in crime--conceptual narrowing.  Concepts become useless if they become so broad as to include everything: Canada as a great power diminishes what it means to be a great power (boy, was that fun to use in Intro to IR at McGill).  Well, concepts also become useless if they are so narrow that they only apply to the purest of the pure (usually the one who is doing the defining).  If Paul Ryan is not a legit Conservative Republican, then perhaps no such thing exists now?

Confidence Building Measures At Home

So, yeah, Texas.  The governor is actually deploying the Texas State Guard to monitor military exercises as there are some folks who think this is part of a conspiracy to gain control of Texas.  Conspiracy theorists imagining Obama engaging in totalitarian measures is nothing new.  But to have a sitting governor act on such silliness?  New.

I have a simple recommendation: if the governor of Texas is suspicious of the US military, how about we move the military's bases out of Texas?  This would be an excellent confidence building measure--withdrawing forces to a distance to assure a fearful population.

Sure, this would cause many jobs to be lost as these bases are major employers, but security from imaginary threats has got to be the highest priority, right?

Update:  This tweet provides some inconvenient truths for the governor:

Texas Gov. Abbott is skeptical of the US military. Here's how much his state benefits from it: http://t.co/KKORhgzoXt pic.twitter.com/kpbrtNMCrh

— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) May 3, 2015

Where should we move Fort Hood? Oklahoma should be far enough, and those folks would not mind profiting at the expense of Texas.  On the other hand, they probably have both conspiracy theorists in abundance and craven politicians, so maybe Nebraska?  Kansas?

All I can say for certain is that I am glad that I left Texas in 2002.  I enjoyed my visit last fall to Austin, but once I left, I was never applying for jobs in that state again.  Yeesh.

Is Kansas's Governor the Worst?

Probably.

by Brian McFadden, NYT

Rand Paul and the Tweet of the Day

Perhaps I will start posting a tweet of the day to encourage folks to check out twitter.  Perhaps not.  Either way, this thus far is the tweet of the day:

There are still spaces available for Prof. Rand Paul's spring lecture series on Gender Studies at Oberlin College.
— Peter Mellman (@pmellman) April 10, 2013