By Exeutive Order: Trans People Don't Exist!

 

Hi! Your friendly local "gender ideology extremist" here, who isn't trans because there is no such thing as a trans person, you see. According to the new federal policy, recognizing trans people in their lived genders is "invalidating the true and biological category of 'woman,'” endangering them and "replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept!" Therefore, by executive order, the federal government has declared it will not recognize any change of legal sex, in order to protect women’s rights.

Ha, those cherished rights in the Equal Rights Amendment the new administration also won't recognize?

Yesterday as promised, immediately after being inaugurated, the president followed the Steve Bannon Principle of "flooding the zone with sh*t." We all knew it was coming. He signed executive orders declaring he will send troops to the border, and ignore the Constitution by invalidating birthright citizenship. Orders withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, making us a rogue nation promoting pandemics and climate crisis. Pardoning the1600 convicted criminals who invaded the US Capitol four years ago. Strangling the IRS so it can't stop the ultrawealthy from cheating on their taxes. Declaring inclusion to be exclusion and equity to be discrimination. The list goes on! (Of course, the president wrote none of these orders. They were handed to him tied with a bow, in the form of the ultra-reactionary Project 2025, which he claimed never to have heard of while campaigning.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The tactic of “flooding the zone” is meant to instill panic and confusion, and to divide and conquer. Don't give in to that! There are so many bad things happening at once, and none of us can fight them all. The hope is that we'll therefore spend our time fighting one another over priorities, or just sit there paralyzed, with everything on fire. Instead, pick a fire to fight and do that, while calling out encouragement to people fighting other fires. And this will be a long fight, so pace yourself. Just do something! If you don't know where to start, ask people how you can help. If you can't think of what else to do and your energy is limited, you can always commit to making one phone call or writing one email every day, or every week. Contact a politician to let them know where you stand, or a community leader to let them know you see and admire what they are doing, or a person you see is suffering to send them emotional support. 

There are a lot of people who are going to need support, and that's just as important as more “political” action! When my government says I do not exist and am instead a deluded hazard, I roll my eyes. Oh, I know that this will have real and concrete negative impacts on my life, but I'm 60 and I have been here before. When I was a teen in NYC and started getting involved in what we'd call LGBTQIA+ politics today, my peers were queer street kids thrown out of their homes around the nation by their parents. They made their way to New York, where many of them were supporting their underage selves with sex work. Then HIV swept the country, and many of them died while politicians talked about “homosexuals” causing a plague, and speculated about putting us in concentration camps where we couldn't infect "the innocent." And so we fought for our lives and those of our friends--protesting with ACT-UP, yes, but also making memorial quilts and advocating with doctors and bringing food to the homes of the sick. 

As MLK would tell you, people don't gain rights by sitting quietly in their homes, hiding and waiting for those mistreating them to see the light and realize what they are doing is wrong. One has to take action--directly, yes, but also indirectly by supporting others.

I saw ACT-UP create change, and Queer Nation grow behind it. There were positive social shifts toward LGBTQIA+ acceptance! But progress sure wasn’t handed to us on a plate by the government. Reagan called queer folk mentally ill. Democrats weren’t much better. Bill Clinton passed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which forbade federal recognition of same-gender marriages if any state should decide to perform them. During the Bush years, a majority of the states passed laws or amended their state constitutions to ban such marriages. I joined thousands of others going door to door trying to convince voters not to support amending their state constitutions. We lost in my state. But we survived and kept fighting! And in 2015 we finally won marriage equality, after decades of struggle. 

So I can take a long view, personally. It’s the young people I worry about. It is so scary to be a trans youth today, and to see your state and then the federal government declaring you have no right to exist, are deluded, are a monster threatening cis girls. A decade ago, we were promising LGBTQIA+ kids that we’d protect them from bullying at school and that they were loved. Today, it’s the opposite, and I see a lot of college students feeling massively betrayed by the people who were supposed to be the wise adults in the room. These young people need us to fight with and for them, and they also need us to support them. To affirm that they are valid and beautiful and loved. 

We know these will be ugly times. But we can preserve beauty in them through love, as people have throughout history! Fight to preserve empathy for others, respect for yourself, justice, truth—in whatever way you can. Once more: none of us can hope to fix all of this. But all of us can do something. 

Take it from your local “gender ideology extremist!”

 

On Bots and Trolls Spreading Transphobia while Pretending to be Leftists

 

This is a photo that appeared in the NY Times today in the coverage of the Supreme Court hearing on a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors. (Just over half the states have passed such bans in the past few years, though a number of those are not yet in effect while lawsuits take place. Some of these states--like Tennessee--have made it impossible for adults to legally gender transition as well, by banning changing one's gender marker on a driver's license or birth certificate.) 

Considering this photo, what I want to point out is something I've heard basically no discussion of in the mainstream media, and that is a core tactic being deployed by those opposing trans people's civil rights. There are three main such groups that are real: politicians and influencers who generate outrage for attention, clicks, and votes; transphobes motivated by hate; and foreign nations who deploy social media bots to say provocative things in order to promote division among Americans and weaken the country. But there's a fake fourth group that you find all over social media, and portrayed in big media events like the protests outside the Supreme Court today.

And that fake group is "concerned leftists." Often social media posts state that they are being written by a "lifelong Democrat" who feels compelled to speak up because the party has gotten lost and gone too far. Then that "lifelong Democrat" asserts something outrageous as truth, like "Kindergarten teachers are sending children for sex changes!" This is intended to horrify centrists. Another claim is aimed at progressives: that gender transition is a nefarious rightwing plot to convert gay and lesbian youth into straight people. 

You see both of these forms of propaganda in this photo in the NY Times. Two pre-printed signs read "STOP TRANSING GAY KIDS." And another preprinted sign you can partially see claims that the protest group is "DEMOCRATS AGAINST PUBERTY BLOCKERS."

I am not saying that TERFs do not exist--cis women who espouse a radical feminism for cis women only, and who frame anyone who has or had a phallus as inherently evil. But realistically speaking, they are a small group. This contrasts with what social media threads on trans issues often look like, where it appears that a majority of people opposing trans rights are "lifelong Democrats" and "LGB people" who just have to speak up as the voice of reason, before trans rights renders Democratic politicians unelectable or erases the (cis) gay community.

This is tactical. It is an attempt to convince people on the left that vast swaths of their fellow-travelers oppose gender transition. It is an attempt to move the Overton window to make overt transphobia seem the "normal" position on the left. And its effectiveness can be seen in how little it is noticed and discussed--even though it's hardly new. For example, an organization that played a key role in rolling back the rights of trans youth in Britain is the "LGB Alliance." Supposedly, this is a group of cis gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals who believe gender transition is a mental illness, and one that endangers the existence of LGB people by destabilizing sexual orientation. In fact, the organization is allied with neo-Nazi groups and American anti-LGBT groups, and says opposing same-gender marriage isn't homophobic. Oh--and a poll of people who joined the organization found that the vast majority of the members were straight. It's classic false-flagging, hiding the wolf in sheep's clothing.

As for the NY Times, they keep publishing opinion pieces in exactly this vein, by people who present themselves as LGB progressives who feel morally bound to take a stand against trans rights in the name of sanity, protection of the vulnerable, and preserving the future of the Democratic party. Ugh.

It is important for cis folks on the left to be aware of this tactic. Don't just take it at face value when you read some social media comment that a person spewing transphobic statements is the "lifelong Democrat" they claim to be. Don't believe that there is some huge movement by the cis gay community to ban gender transitions. Do be aware that there are trolls and bots trying to make you believe that you are behind on the trend of people like you reassessing their acceptance of trans folks.

It is important for all of us to be aware of how we can be manipulated!