Let's start here with a basic fact: Treatment for gender dysphoria, that is, gender-affirming treatment and care, has deemed medically appropriate by literally dozens of health-related organizations including every major pediatric institution in the country, including:the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
the American Academy of Pediatrics
the American Medical Association
the American Psychiatric Association
the American Psychological Association
National Association of Social Workers
the Pediatric Endocrine Society
the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine
and more than a dozen others.
Despite that, using the same devotion to facts and logic that enabled them to claim COVID was "just the flu" and to encourage infections by opposing mask mandates - the current death toll is approaching 1.1 million - GOPpers and other assorted proto-fascists have over the past two years directed levels of viciousness toward transgender youth that are nothing short of barbaric.
And it's gone from sneering to attacks about school sports to witch hunts about "grooming" to have reached levels of outright eliminationism.
Gender-affirming care is banned in Arizona and Arkansas; gender-affirming surgery for minors is a felony in Alabama; in Texas, state agencies are required to consider gender-affirming health care to be child abuse and anyone who provides it or supports children in accessing it a potential abuser. A bill passed the Idaho House to sentence health care providers who offered gender-affirming care to life in prison.
Note that some of these provisions and some of those in other states have been blocked by courts from going into effect, at least not yet, but that cannot deny either the intensity or the intent, marked perhaps most clearly by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who celebrated the passage of an anti-trans school sports bill by by directly comparing support for transgender rights to terrorism.
Meanwhile, in Congress, 50 House GOPpers, lead by QAnon butt-kisser Marjorie Taylor Greene, the brainiac who's against solar power because she thinks it doesn't work at night, are pushing a bill to outlaw gender-affirming care for minors nationwide, including a ban on any federal money for any form of such care, banning any coverage under the Affordable Care Act, and even requiring institutions of higher education not to offer any training on such care and accrediting agencies to refuse to accredit any institution or association that offers such care. Criminal penalties can range up to 25 years in the federal slammer.
But on October 13, a group of Michigan Republican state representatives went all the way, introducing a bill that would see parents and health care professionals facing the treat of 25 years to life in prison for providing gender-affirming care to a minor.
The bill would change the very definition of child abuse to explicitly include anyone who “knowingly or intentionally consents to, obtains, or assists with a gender transition procedure for a child.” "Procedure" is defined as including not only to gender-affirming surgery - which is very rare for teens - but also to hormone treatments and puberty blockers, even though such treatments are both harmless and completely reversible: You start to transition, decide you don't want to, just stop taking the meds and your body takes care of the rest.GOPpers are the majority in the Michigan House and they are expected to throw full support behind the bill. The only sort of good news here is that if it passes both the House and the Senate, also controlled by GOPers, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would likely veto it - assuming she survives the dark money-funded assault from GOPper and all-around definition of right-wing fakery Tudor Dixon.
But that's not the worst, as the bill goes beyond that. It not only bars the provision of new treatment, it mandates that trans teens in the state who are currently receiving gender-affirming medical care be forced to stop their treatments and undergo compulsory medical detransition.
This is outright eliminationism. This is saying to trans youth "You are not allowed to be that way and we will force to you not be that way. You are not allowed to exist."This at a time when the Trevor Project’s 2022 survey on the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth determined that more than 60 percent of LGBTQ+ youth said their mental health has deteriorated as a result of these sorts of attacks. Nearly one in five transgender and nonbinary youth attempted suicide in the past year, while 42% of youth who identified as LGBTQ+ contemplated suicide - a figure that rose to 52% for trans kids in particular.
And every one of those figures is worse for LGBTQ+ youth of color.
These laws, despite all their screeching about "Protect the children!" are going to see children die.
And you know, it's always about "The children! Think of the children!" It's what this sort of moral panic seems to be always about. From the Salem witch trials right up through in my lifetime comic books, rock and roll, day care centers, Dungeons and Dragons, video games, and the Internet, it keeps being about "Omigod the children!"
But there is a difference in this case. Most moral panics seems to emerge sort of organically. Somehow, a few people get an idea about something, it gets talked about so a few more hear about it and for some reason invariably related to broader social fears and stresses, it catches on and grows by feeding on itself in a feedback loop until at some point it burns itself out.
Not this one. There is nothing natural or organic about this one. This anti-trans panic has been manufactured, created, consciously and deliberately, top-down, by right-wing and repressive forces and their associated think-tanks to create fear and then exploit that fear purely for their own extremist self-interest.
David Neiwert has looked at and followed the topic of eliminationist rhetoric - that is, the use of expressions of "You do not have the right to be here" or even "You do not have the right to exist," for reactionary political gain - for years. He says "the entire point of such rhetoric is to create permission to direct violence freely at the targeted minority group."
Or, as in this case, the targeted group plus "anyone in the general vicinity," such as supportive teachers, parents, and health care professionals - and more recently, performers at drag shows reading to children - who are all either "groomers" or outright pedophliles or predators or all three, or in the case of drag show performers, also "perverts." And do not think for an instant that the overt physical intimidation directed at those drag shows by such as the Proud Boys, whose pride lies in being right-wing thugs, is not a manifestation of this eliminationism
For evidence this is all deliberate, we can look to a report from August out of The Human Rights Campaign and the Center for Countering Digital Hate looking at the increasing anti-LGBTQ+ hate rhetoric on social media and by the way thanks to David Niewert for the link and for more background on the issue.
The groups looked at tweets containing slurs like "groomers" or "pedophiles" in the context of conversations about LGBTQ+ people between January and July of 2022. There were nearly 990,000 of them - plus an additional 130,000-plus using the dismissive smear "ok, groomer."
One key finding was that after Florida Gov. Ron DeSandTick got his "Don't Say Gay" bill through, the rate of hateful tweets more than quadrupled, apparently because, I'd say, the bill's passage was felt to somehow legitimize the bigotry.
More significant, however, is the finding that much of the hate is being generated by a handful of well-known right-wing influencers. The researchers determined the 500 hateful “grooming” tweets had been viewed the most times had been viewed an estimated 72 million times and 2/3 of that total - 48 million views - were generated from just 10 people.The top four contained no surprises:
Marjorie Taylor ColorOfNausea-GreeneJames Lindsay, an “anti-woke” activist who described the pride flag as that of a "hostile enemy"
Lauren "Pistol-packin' mama" Boebert
and Chaiya Raichik, the sniggering clown behind the “LibsofTikTok” account.
Among the rest we find Ron DeSandTick press secretary Christina Pushaw, who pulled language right out of QAnon to take the "groomer" crap mainstream, two pundits for the far-right outfit Turning Point USA, one from BlazeTV, which is where you go if you ever wonder what the hell happened to Glenn Beck, and one from The Daily Wire, the reactionary "news" source founded by poster boy for privilege and winner of The Erickson's Report Clown of the Year 2019, Ben Shapiro.
In other words, a pretty standard collection of right-wing grifters, greedheads, and gasbags, backed by the usual band of bullshitters like the cretins at Faux News, which ran a series of shows on pedophilia in March and April, which included a guest on Fox and Friends claiming children were “being ripened for grooming for sexual abuse by adults” and another on America Reports insisting that affirmative care for trans children “goes beyond predatory grooming” into “psychological torture.”
The fact is, reactionary groups and movements like Christian nationalists - including fundamentalist preachers demanding that gay people be lined up and shot in the head - and neofascist white power groups like Patriot Front, with their individual ranges of ideological focuses, have banned together to wield “groomer” rhetoric like a bludgeon for one purpose only: As put by Justin Unga, the Human Rights Campaign's director of strategic initiatives, "pure politics," adding "It is no coincidence that people have inflamed and used this rhetoric during the period of the primary elections. They are," he said, "inflaming the most extreme elements of their fan base to gain notoriety, to build a brand that they see as politically and financially profitable."
In other words, it is about what the right wing is always about: greed, selfishness, egotism, and power-hunger.
These people don't give a single flying damn about the children they claim to be protecting. They don't care about the bullying, about the harassment, about the violence, about the suicides. They don't care about the prospect of children being ripped from supportive parents precisely because of that parental support - remember, in Texas and not only there, that's called child abuse. They don't care about the increase in hate crimes directed against gender nonconforming people. They do not care.
Because for them, these children aren't real, they are just cartoons, cardboard cutouts, stage props to be named, labeled, and moved around however they think it will produce the desired result in the audience. The realities of the lives of these children don't move them, the realities of their deaths move them even less. It's all about the posturing, the pose, the play.
If Diogenes were to move among these people I expect he would be very lonely and extremely disappointed. They are, in a word, despicable.
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