Anti-trans activists have never felt the need to map their words onto reality.
One major expression of this is how often the talking points are couched in terms such as “gender ideology.” Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur and her recent ad campaign denouncing “transgender ideology” is only the latest one to demonstrate this.
The motivator in the Ohio Congressional race (other than transphobia) is team sports psychology. The Democratic Party is the half of the duopoly that has historically been more comfortable with espousing trans rights. Somehow, I think Ohio Democrats who support trans rights are hearing a lot of “you don’t want the Republican to win, do you?”
Basically: ‘it’s not trans people, it‘s wokeness and gender ideology- don’t get it twisted or you’re a traitor.’
One of my favorites in this category of hide the ball is the Cold-War-era-communism-to-wokeness theory. Jordon Peterson is fond of that one: he thinks trans people wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for communist sympathizers during the Cold War smuggling their ideas into western universities disguised as feminism.
There’s a handful of obvious refutations for these talking points, not least among them are the uniformity of the awareness of transgender people of their identity across cultural and geographical lines. What about the conservative trans people who would scream bloody murder if anyone connected that to them? What about the large numbers of us who just don’t follow politics that often?
I mean, most of us are tuned in pretty hard these days. But before the post-2024 regime but there’s still some typical diversity. Lots of trans people are inclined to be apolitical for the same reasons as anyone else: it’s stressful, it’s a lot of information and we all have lives (or at least more of one than that, right?).
How many conversations on TV and the internet turn toward the dangers of cultural fluidity while casually tossing out things like preferred pronouns as examples without dwelling on it for longer than two seconds? How often is the name Dylan Mulvaney used as a byword for leftist-cringe? What did she do again? Oh yeah, her face was on a beer can for…what was it? A month or so, out of one summer? For making Kid Rock put sleeves over his beer so he doesn’t have to be seen drinking Bud Light in public?
This is particularly insidious when it comes form figures associated with the left like Marcy Kaptur and Bill Maher. Maher said- between 2020 and 2024 -that the solution to beating Republicans was not “throwing trans people under the bus.” Post-2024, he says that the Democratic Party needs to change it’s stance on “gender”. There’s a reason why he’s stopping at the most vague language: he doesn’t know what he’s railing against. He saw the Quiet On Set documentary about the rampant pedophilia at Nickelodeon studios throughout the nineties, drew a connection to Disney and jumped on board with Ron DeSantis calling LGBT representation in Disney media child grooming. Oh yeah, then he got drunk in front of children on Club Rando and used a little girl for a prop in a sex joke.
Tulsi Gabbard is another gem. Before her MAGA pivot in 2022, she professed LGBT ally-ship. Gabbard said, on at least one occasion, that she would “always” stand by the LGBT community. Post-2022, she said that the Democratic Party, as a whole, was ideologically committed to erasing biological sex. This, she said, amounted to a war on proper-noun Truth. She promptly hosted interviews with professional loser Riley Gaines about the fears of “men in women’s sports”.
The sports fixation in general is revealing. There is nothing to be said against us objectively so they have to hyper-focus on niche areas where complains can be found and elevated.
I could go on.
I’m a trans person myself so I’m bound to be a little provincial about this. Yes, it has the potential to weaponize public policy against me, my family and people like us. But there are consequences beyond the transgender community. Tulsi Gabbard may have hung her argument on trans people but she relates her conclusions to modern feminism in general. Bill Maher didn’t say the Democratic Party needs to change its stance on transgender people at first: he began with the Democratic stance on “gender.” Meanwhile, Roe V. Wade gets rolled back and public figures get to say- out loud, in public -that women shouldn’t have the right to vote.
If you don’t see the ripples then you haven’t been paying attention. Yes, equating civil rights for trans people to feminism in a conspiratorial idea-constellation is a neat little slight-of-hand move that your average dipshit won’t see past. It makes it easier for anti-feminists to get on board and obfuscates the fundamental reality of trans people regardless of societal context. While we are not and never have been a social movement, these lines of thought are designed to make people see us as one.
I wrote another entry a while back about this Gallup poll from a few years ago. The amount of respondents who said that being trans was morally acceptable exactly matched the percentage of respondents who said they knew a trans person. That’s kind of what my mind keeps coming back to. What if we just don’t occur in nature very often, which means only a tiny number of cis people know us, meaning only a tiny number of cis people aren’t afraid of us?
I really don’t wanna go down that route. But a lot of people make it look easy.
https://youtu.be/Mufh9oKYf5Y?is=vP26PZA8dIKOBS7C
https://youtu.be/oGtseVUw-_M?is=VnEXTjTJuuZEEKch
https://youtu.be/giBhwQnuy9k?is=u9Yvkct-JInjyv_2
