GioCities

blogs by Gio

The Génocidaires: Exterminationism

  • Posted by GiovanH in ⚖ politics

Okay. We looked at law. Let’s keep looking. Let’s gaze straight at the horrors until our stomachs churn and our eyes bleed.

Rhetoric background info§

Before we get too deep into the craziness, I want to explain a couple common talking points.

The Social Contagion lie & Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria§

In real life, the scary sounding “social contagion” is just the study of the propagation of ideas across a social network, more commonly known as memetics. As applied to transgender people though, “social contagion” is the conspiracy theory that transgenderism is an invented evil that is being spread to children through education and social media. This idea helps keeps people from seeing trans exterminationism as a true genocide: transgender people aren’t a “real” group of people, they’re actually an effect of people being tricked by “biased out-of-control transgender activists”, psychiatrists, scheming liberals, a cabal of elite pedophiles, or just Satan himself.

Ross Douthat, “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War”, NYT op-ed What we’re seeing today isn’t just a continuation of the gay rights revolution; it’s a form of social contagion which our educational and medical institutions are encouraging and accelerating. These kids aren’t setting themselves free from the patriarchy; they’re under the influence of online communities of imitation and academic fashions laundered into psychiatry and education — one part Tumblr and TikTok mimesis, one part Judith Butler.

At first this seems like the same basic myth as the debunked Homosexuality as Contagion false narrative now understood as the left-handed fallacy: the real cause for the increase in visibility is of course reduced social stigma and advancements in social and legal recognition. But the contagion myth has been recently “legitimized” by the pseudo-medical label of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria, describing a phenomenon where “children seemed to experience a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, appearing for the first time during puberty or even after its completion” correlating with “an increase in social media/internet use.” The only paper in the medical literature about Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria is the one that invents the diagnosis: Lisa Littman’s Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports.

Littman’s study has been widely discredited by actual medical doctors — a thing Littman is not — for pulling numbers from online straw polls in order to claim discovery of a brand new disease without even attempting to assess single case of it. The real fatal flaw, though, is right in the title: it’s a study of parental reports, where untrained parties not actually afflicted by the alleged condition are asked to assess its existence in people, who in many cases are actively motivated to conceal it for fear of abuse or rejection. Worse, due to the ultrapartisan anti-transgender bias of the websites on which the polls were conducted (4thwavenow, transgender trend, and youthtranscriticalprofessionals. No, seriously.), the data was from parents who were already upset about their children coming out as trans and looking for an external, pathological factor to blame.

There is a remarkable amount of literature discrediting this particular paper. See Restar, A. J. (2019). Methodological Critique of Littman’s (2018) Parental-Respondents Accounts of “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria.” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 49(1), 61–66., Brandelli Costa, A. (2019). Formal comment on: Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. PLOS ONE, 14(3), e0212578., Florence Ashley, B.C.L., LL.B. (2018). There Is No Evidence That Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria Exists, Brown University’s statements on gender dysphoria study (2019), and even the correction the original journal had to make. Suffice it to say, rapid-onset gender dysphoria isn’t a real thing, as convenient as it would be if it were for a certain category of parent who, without the label of ROGD to reach for, would conclude their child were a changeling and drown them in the river.

But it gets even worse than that. If we work backwards, it turns out the paper wasn’t just poorly sourced by some parents: the whole idea was devised by those parents, who had already decided amongst themselves their children’s behaviour was due to a social contagion, just within the last few years. Julia Serano wrote an excellent history titled Origins of “Social Contagion” and “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” in which she determines that both the “Social Contagion” and “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” labels were contrived by reluctant parents on a set of three websites: 4thwavenow.com, transgendertrend.com, and youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org. Yes, the same trio of websites that made up Littman’s entire sample set. Littman, whose study was conceived of, written, and published in less than a year of those ideas first being posted online.

This entire narrative was kicked off by angry parents of trans children bootstrapping themselves a narrative based on their own guesses as to why their children weren’t thinking the way their parents want them to, who then just cooked up phony scientific literature that consisted of those same assumptions evidenced only by them interviewing themselves about it.

And that’s still the best basis the “concerned parent” contingency has. ROGD was the main medical basis of Abagail Shrier’s now-infamous “Irreversible Damage - The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters”; a thoroughly unserious affair comprised of anecdotes, flagrant journalistic malpractice, and speculation about now-discredited fetish theory that ignores all available data that doesn’t directly serve the author’s agenda. But the book serves much the same purpose of giving parents enough plausible uncertainty to mistreat their children. Shrier uses her book to explicitly tell parents to reject their children’s identity, which is the primary cause of suicide in trans children. More on Shrier later.

A “diagnosis” of rapid-onset gender dysphoria is incredibly harmful to those children it targets. First and foremost, it’s a clear example of parents withholding support, which is astonishingly effective at inducing suicide: a research report from the Trans PULSE project found that 57% of trans adolescents and young adults without parental support attempted suicide in the past year, as opposed to just 4% with support. But on top of that, the idea of other-as-contagion leads to DIY conversion therapy and very real abuse. Panicking parents who read the wrong book now feel the need to “save their child” by denying access to media and culture, isolating them, and cutting them off from their friends and support networks.

And all that to advance the “Social Contagion” lie to affirm “Gender Critical” parents. It’s a horrifying ideology that sees the mind of a person as an afterthought, full of parents who are so opposed to treating their children with any dignity or respect that they would rather see them die, so long as the corpse had the right clothes and hormones.

“Groomer” & child sexualization§

You’ll also hear the word “groomer” thrown around a lot. “Grooming” is the act of a predatory adult psychologically conditioning a child into being compliant for sex. It’s used to describe other verbal and psychological conditioning designed to prime people for abuse: these are usually children, but it’s sometimes used in other cases. “Groomer” is a description of the worst-of-the-words: sexual offenders and child predators.

Recently, though, it’s become a favourite word of the more virulent anti-trans activists, who now use it to slur the entire LGBTQIA+ spectrum as child abusers by virtue of existing in public at all. It’s become extrordinarily popular rhetoric (mediamatters, wapo) but it’s incredibly wrong and harmful on many layers.

First and foremost, it’s a targeted slur to de-person and dehumanize queer people as a population. This is a crucial component of genocide campaigns:

Monroe, K. R. “Cracking the Code of Genocide: The Moral Psychology of Rescuers, Bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust” Genocidalists and their supporters … see themselves as a people under attack. There is a bitter irony to this, for in the genocidalists’ worldview, the Jewish victims of genocide are seen as threats. The following conversation with two Nazis illustrates how Nazis believed the Jews were threatening their world and had to be destroyed, much as the rest of us would destroy cockroaches invading our home.

…

In a camp in Upper Silesia, I asked one of our guards, pointing at the big gun in his holster, “Did you ever use that to kill?” He replied, “Once I had to shoot six Jews. I did not like that at all, but when you get such an order, you have to be hard.” Then he added, “You know, they were not human anymore.” That was the key: dehumanization. You first call your victim names and take away his dignity.

We can even see the core “groomer” idea in historical records from Nazi Germany: labeling the homosexual as predator in service of the §175 campaign. “Queer people are grooming” is literal Nazi ultranationalist propaganda.

This demonization reinforces a siege mentality: the idea that the persecuting community is actually the ones under attack, and that the victims of the genocide are threats. It exploits the human fear mechanism by demanding that survival depends on absolutely eradicating the scapegoat. This is parallel to the Nazi tactic of labelling groups as an “infection.” It’s an effective rhetorical tactic that serves the triple purpose of denoting the population to be targeted, re-enforcing the persecution complex of the perpetrators, and depersoning the victims both legally and in the minds of the perpetrators.

Glass, J. M. “Group phantasy: its place in the psychology of genocide” The euthanasia program of the late 1930s classified a number of different groups as infectious (either biologically or genetically) and therefore subject to extermination on the grounds of being a danger to the nation’s (or community’s) health. From the internal point of view – that is, from the group’s consciousness outwards – nothing of their action was perceived to be psychotic.

It also functions as a diffusal of criticism. This tactic says “This group is evil and dangerous, and anyone who thinks they should be protected is also evil and dangerous. You’re not evil and dangerous, are you? You’re not an active threat we need to eliminate, right?” We don’t need German Nazism to demonstrate this one, we have Republican officials from March of this year:

Note the three-step maneuver here: this measure protects against evil, if you’re against it (or, in this case, don’t actively support it) you must be evil too, and this should all go without saying. Deplorable, obviously. But ultimately this works. It’s a textbook example of laying the rhetorical groundwork for eugenics and genocide campaigns and inciting intimidation and violence in public.

In the “queer groomer” case, it’s actually worse than that because of the specific harmful work that particular word does.

First, using “groomer” to describe queer people fundamentally trivializes child abuse. The people using “groomer” as an offhand insult to describe queer people causing them social discomfort are equating their discomfort to that child abuse. They’re saying trans people peaceably living their own lives is equivalent to people sexually assaulting children. That’s reprehensible in both directions. It’s reprehensible to say innocent people are such extrordinarily awful reprobates, of course, but it’s also reprehensible to say that real child sex abuse should only be as serious as a mild annoyance.

Describing teachers teaching sex-ed as “grooming” is even more perverse, because sex-ed actively protects children from real sexual abuse. Demonizing the very education that empowers children makes them vastly more susceptible to abuse. Preserving “childhood innocence” by keeping children ignorant of sex keeps them ignorant of warning signs and robs them of the language to describe abuse when it happens, making them prime targets.

Is this intentional? Are people intentionally trying to shift the language so that the focus for “child abuse” is on the queer community, in order to let non-lgbtq people get away with sex crimes? There are certainly some abusers jumping on the anti-trans movement for that kind of personal gain. Actual sex predators love trivializing the word groomer like this, because it’s best for them if people don’t have usable language to identify and talk about predatory abusers. So they love to see this word weaponized against trans people, because the more the word is politically weaponized, the less it can be used to describe reality.

The idea of grooming isn’t just being diluted though. The idea of abuse is being invoked here as part of a larger mentality that queerness is inherently sexual, and queerness isn’t a natural and passive thing. This angle makes the idea of trans people sexually grooming children immediately intuitive and appealing to conservatives.

There’s a significant contingency of people — not just anti-trans activists — who see queerness as so unnatural that any queer person must only identify that way because they were tricked into it, and that eventually they’ll realize they’ve been duped and desperately want to go back to normal. (That, or they’re degenerate sexual fetishists.) I talked about this a bit before, as part of the idea of transgenderism being “taught” by teachers at schools as part of the “social contagion” narrative, as pushed by lawmakers.

comments from Florida “Don’t Say Gay” bill sponsor Sen. Dennis Baxley Gay is not a permanent thing. LGBT is not a permanent thing.

Why is everybody now all about coming out when you’re in school? And there really is a dynamic of concern of how much of these are genuine … experiences and how many of them are just kids trying on different kinds of things they hear about

LGBT ideology in schools Pat Cross cartoon

Teachers are already painted as being a key part of an ongoing power struggle between the liberal elite and all that’s good in the world: traditionalism, Christianity, and the family. “The professors are the enemy, still.” The idea of evil teachers corrupting your children with their dangerous ideas is — in addition to being a very familiar component of fascism in general — a key component in the social contagion lie. Now teachers aren’t just secular: they’re perverts, and an active danger to your children.

“Don’t worry, your parenting is perfect. It’s just that you’re under siege: evil comes from them, and so constant vigilance is required. We need to make teachers register their political beliefs with the state, to make sure they’re not teaching the wrong ideas. But you, concerned parent, you can act now. Find them online, dig through their personal lives, and have your outrage and anger ready to go.”

And since transgenderism is this fake plot concocted by the liberals, and not a natural thing, the only reason those tricky teachers would be tricking children into believing something “incorrect” about gender would be the adult’s sexual gratification.

Of course, there’s a “correct” kind of sexuality — bikinis at beaches, catcalling, mudflaps, hooters — cisgendered and heterosexual. It’s normal and fine to integrate into society. Correct sexuality is healthy. Pornographic billboard advertisements either aren’t a problem or are just invisible, because of how default heterosexuality is. It’s cultural heteronormativity.

But queer existence doesn’t get that treatment, because it is by definition “not correct”: nonstandard, different, “queer”. Every expression of queer existence — even just having a flag sticker — is seen as rooted in sexual perversion, existing only to satisfy sexual perversion, and thus must always be treated as the filthiest pornography until society is sexually homogeneous. This is the fundamentally hostile culture the “groomer” label seeks to propagate and re-enforce.

This is why “queerness” in media is seen as something that has to be snuck in by activists pushing an agenda, instead of… media just reflecting society, including the full spectrum of people who produce and consume it.

See how Chris “Swords Emoji” Rufo (who manufactured the critical race theory panic in Virginia) takes this weaponization of the spectre of sexuality one step further:

This is the whole playbook laid bare.

First, using words as weapons against the trans people for overtly political purposes. Pick the phrase with the most lurid connotations possible in order to incite discussions about how disgusting trans people are.

Second, prevent discussion of the issues. Real language allows for understanding and nuance; the goal of the fascist is to prevent that and instead create an “unstoppable argument” that wins political support.

Third, never play defence. Use misleading and manipulated media to make it seem like a problem exists. Use slurs to frame the discussion from the outset as an attack on objectionable people. Force people to untangle your knot of words instead of engaging with the issue, and it’ll look like you won while the other person tries to quibble about semantics. Fact checking as a stall tactic.

Overt exterminationism§

That’s authoritarianism, though. Back to rhetoric and violence overtly advocating for extermination, today. Back to the genocide.

Our Duty§

As an example of an explicitly genocidal manifesto, let me turn your attention to Our Duty group, an advocacy group for “parents with a child who thinks they are transgender”. They push the standard anti-trans ideology cocktail: that transgenderism is a recent trend and that it’s important to support Good Parents in their righteous battle against their children who have been corrupted by the the cult of “gender ideology” which grooms and brainwashes children into a belief system. And they only ever seem to cite peer “gender critical” groups within the echo chamber like “Transgender Trend” (really) to do it. This is circular reporting.

There’s a lot of really laughably terrible attempts at reasoning here (like arguing that any condition with subjective symptoms must be mental illness) that only make sense if you understand the whole organization’s purpose is to start with an assumption they have and try to string together some words to justify it.

I actually kinda love Our Duty just because of how incredibly telling their language is. They’re entirely willing to be upfront and honest about their cause and hide relatively little in political correctness, especially how they seem to categorically reject the practice of science. On all their pages, in all their literature, they keep hitting the same bell: “parents’ instincts are right”. It’s all about intuition and feeling: you’re right if “your instincts tell you that a ‘sex-change’ is an extreme solution for a problem which probably exists in the mind”ˣ, you need to know that “there are other parents who feel the same as they do”ˣ, that “[parents] know, instinctively, that a ‘sex change’ is not an appropriate treatment pathway for their (or any) child”ˣ.

When they do make some attempt to source their claims reputably on their little wordpress site, it’s something like using the flashy and exciting… CAG-00446N, an administrative memo that attempts to determine insurance coverage standards but that determines more studies are needed before any categorical decision can be reached, to make the claim that “Scientific data does not show that gender dysphoria and associated feelings of distress are alleviated in the longer term by medication and surgery”. Despite repeatedly calling their approach “evidence-based” as opposed to the “faith”ˣ of “gender ideology” (an “empty signifier” used vaguely by these groups to describe badness), the word “evidence” is as far as they go. (Remember postmodern rationalism?)

I told you there was a manifesto though. That’s found in their Submission of Evidence to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics1. There is far, far too much wrong in the full 13-page document for me to address every error (the word “evidence” in the title being the first), but here is a broad-strokes analysis.

This submission, like all Our Duty’s other work, bases its conclusions on collected anecdotes rather than peer-reviewed studies or work with any sort of academic rigour:

This submission is informed by the evidence of many parents received by us in support meetings, one-to-one interviews, and responses to our invitation to contribute to this exercise.
…
Our personal experience of using gender identity services comes as parents of the direct users – our children.
…
We propose that transgenderism could be very similar to a deep seated fear of growing up into one’s adult sexed body. Unfortunately, these personal anecdotes are the most rigorous this letter gets. Most of it is simply unsubstantiated assertions that, in most case, even the most cursory research reveals to be false: A child becomes transgender because the idea is planted and then is nurtured by others.
…
It is likely that persisting transgenderism is an unfortunate condition that could be avoided if it is resolved early enough in its presentation.
…
There is no good quality evidence that supports medical interventions for gender diverse children and adolescents.
…
When used in gender medicine [blockers] almost invariably lead onto [hormone therapy]. … Moreover, they do not even improve the short-term wellbeing of those receiving them.
…
The existence of a great many detransitioners is indicative that the GAMT is widely ineffective. The risk of OSIM failing to cure dysphoria combined with the very real risk of regret at the profound, life limiting effects of the treatment, means that the GAMT is patently unethical.
…
The administration of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in response to gender identity issues is at the extreme end of questionable medical practice. There is no evidence of any long-term good, and plenty of evidence of long-term harm. Patients are vulnerable and not yet mature enough to properly know themselves and are being taken advantage of.
…
it is widely acknowledged that adolescents do not mature in terms of long-term or doubly abstract thinking capacity until approximately 25 years of age.

(I swear to God that “25 years” metric is just thrown in completely unsourced. Simply incredible.)

As you can see this is mostly recitation of the basic premises of gender-critical ideology, presented as conclusions rather than assumptions. Children are being taken advantage of, transgenderism is being inflicted on society by an external semi-religious cabal, etc.

Our Duty presents itself throughout as being victims, rather than perpetrators:

We operate in a societal environment where it is difficult for parents to be public in their views and their opposition to the medical harm being done to their children. Our opponents are aggressive, intolerant, and very well funded.

But all that’s just garnish. The purpose of this paper is to let them make explicit demands on how trans people should be treated in specific situations, and they do just that:

Q: In your view, how should young people with gender dysphoria be treated, cared for, or supported?

A: A young person claiming a transgender identity needs immediate and holistic psychotherapeutic intervention … Social affirmation must not occur.
…
If gender dysphoria is to be ‘nipped in the bud’ then social transition must cease to be an acceptable practice. Society needs to do its part in rejecting ‘pronoun culture’ and the concept of ‘Self-ID’.
…
Puberty suppressants and cross-sex hormones should not be available, at all, for the purposes of treating gender identity issues in minors.
…
Each ‘persister’ that reaches ‘a point of no return’ with their [gender-affirming treatment] has been let down – let down by society, let down by the psychotherapeutic professions, and profoundly let down by the medical profession. It should be the objective of any advanced civilization presented with this problem to TARGET 100% DESISTANCE, and as early as possible.

This is what we in the evaluating-possibly-genocidal-causes business call “saying the quiet part out loud.” Explicitly claiming that any existence of the group is illegitimate, calling every instance of someone being trans is a failure of society, asserting that puberty blockers should categorically be banned regardless of medical opinion or patient consent, and finally — their all-caps, not mine — demanding that civilization must set as its goal 100% eradication.

Yeah. So that’s Our Duty.

Helen Joyce§

Here’s an excerpt of a streamed zoom call with British anti-trans campaigner Helen Joyce:

Helen Joyce: I think that for quite a while now this has not been about consciousness raising, that’s been irrelevant. That was important two or three years ago when there weren’t enough people, but there’ve been enough people to be critical mass, to be funding the crowdfunders, to be writing letters to MPs, all that sort of thing, to have a movement, to have support for women; and men of course, I mean there’s people like [Graham Lineham] of course as well who’ve got their necks stuck out on this but— We can’t win this by saying there’s 60x million people and we’ve got to persuade all of them or a great majority of them. We’ve got to get through to the decision makers and in the meantime while we’re trying to get through to the decision makers we have to try to limit the harm and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition…

Every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world. Like if you’ve got people who whether they’ve transitioned whether they’re happily transitioned whether they’re unhappily transitioned whether they’re de-transitioned if you’ve got people who’ve dissociated from their sex in some way every one of those people is someone who needs special accommodation2 in a sane world where we re-acknowledge the truth of sex and I mean the people who’ve been damaged by it the children who have been put through this those people deserve every accommodation we can possibly make but every one of them is a difficulty, you know And I know that sounds heartless I’m trying to say exactly the opposite of sounding heartless I’m saying every one of those people for 50, 60, 70 years is going to need things that the rest of us just don’t need because the rest of us are just our sex so the fewer of those people there are the better in the sane world that I hope we will reach.

This is, again, explicitly genocidal rhetoric. She starts with saying the only way to succeed is to infiltrate politics and go for institutional capture instead of getting real public support. Then her goal is explicitly to “reduce or keep down the number” of trans people because they’re “a huge problem” to the world. The reason she gives here is the trans community’s need for accommodation: the xenophobic case for genocide. This wasn’t caught on candid camera, this was public-facing, explicitly obliterationist rhetoric by a public activist.

Pride riots & Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok)§

There have been a number of disgusting protests against pride events. Here’s Trump organizer and “Bikers for Trump” activist Terry Beck using Facebook to target a pride event at a New Jersey school:

terry.jpg

She and about a dozen others showed up at the event, true to their word, although the calls for violence were reportedly contained by community support.

As seen with Terry Beck, these attacks on pride events are often coordinated beforehand on social media. I’ll defer to Parker Molloy’s The anti-LGBTQ right is going to get people killed and Cassandra’s Everything’s Coming Up Nazis, which you should read in their own right.

In particular, Chaya Raichik (the person behind the “Libs of TikTok” anti-lgbtq social media account) frequently highlights trans-positive pride events in order to make it easy for domestic terrorist groups like the Proud Boys or Patriot Front to directly attack the events, as they did in California and Idaho, respectively. As Parker notes, the Libs of TikTok account serves to “find an excuse to attack LGBTQ events.”

From Anti-LGBTQ threats orchestrated on the internet shut down trans rights and drag events:

“There is a very orchestrated network of right-wing accounts and personalities to coordinate on whatever the current attack message is and who’s going to be targeted. And they have an army of social media trolls who amplify their messages,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s a very orchestrated attack machine.”
…
The threats mostly aimed to shut down events for transgender rights and drag performances, which have become frequent targets of extremists, militias and far-right personalities during June, which is Pride Month. They come as more than 200 bills targeting LGBTQ people have been filed across the United States this year.
…
Michael Hayden, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights and legal advocacy organization, said the “level of disruption that’s happened in the last few weeks is new.”

He said the process of targeting specific LGBTQ events has become mainstreamed and systematized in recent months by far-right influencers with megaphones on social media. “The way this works is, that they have to get their targets from somewhere,” Hayden said. “Things get broadcast in advance by LibsOfTikTok and other major influencers on the right-wing right now. Then, extremists go into planning over it.” “There’s a level of chaos involved with the target, but the choice of target comes from top down,” Hayden said. “And the messaging is tied up with the far-right machine.”
…
[Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White] told reporters that he assumed the Pride event became a “flashpoint” for anti-LGBTQ groups. Groups that participated in the Jan. 6th riots such as the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters also appeared at the rally, along with Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi group.

Constitutional Coalition§

On to lighter, slightly less immediately dangerous imbeciles. “Speak the Truth … To Save Our Children” (ellipsis in title) from The Constitutional Coalition starts:

Today, somewhere in a public school classroom, five and six-year-old kindergarten children are being recruited by Planned Parenthood’s comprehensive sex education curriculum into a lifestyle glamorizing sex, which for some, ultimately results in castration and sterilization.

Teens as young as 15 in Oregon (and potentially other states) are receiving hormone blocking drugs and even surgery to change their gender without parent’s knowledge, [sic] leading to the child losing their ability to bear/father children, even if later the grown child wants to reverse the sex change. Adults, including doctors, are using the “affirmative care” approach that lets the child chart his future instead of allowing wise adults to provide sound science…

The article then — bafflingly — embeds the entire contents of an unrelated article calling pedophilia a natural extension of the queer agenda. The article has nothing to do with trans people aside from saying they were invented in 2014, which it wasn’t.

Again, this contents here are mostly false, but I’m mostly interested by the framing. “Somewhere in a public school your children are being corrupted by a devious liberal cult” — here, just meaning sex education — “and the crafty conspiratorial liberal elite are hiding it from you.” Again, we see the obsession with sterility, even though no actual procedure ever administered on minors involves sterilization.

Springer§

That “young as 15 in Oregon” bit comes from a Fox News article by Dan Springer. The core “story” of the article is mundane, despite the sensationalized “Oregon allowing 15-year-olds to get state-subsidized sex-change operations” headline: the Health Evidence Review Commission updated its decision guidelines for Medicaid to match medical consensus. The 15 number comes from Oregon’s age of medical consent, but that does not mean doctors are allowed to prescribe surgery to minors. The article spends extrordinarily little time on that, though, and mostly acts as a vehicle for the standard talking points:

“It is trespassing on the hearts, the minds, the bodies of our children,” said Lori Porter of Parents’ Rights in Education. “They’re our children. And for a decision, a life-altering decision like that to be done unbeknownst to a parent or guardian, it’s mindboggling.”

Skipping over the factual inaccuracy, this is another beautifully honest quote. To Lori here, the children aren’t even an actor in the equation, they’re just property of the parents. They’re paper dolls. This is a recurring idea we see in the background (trans peoples’ lived experiences are never considered) but this is the full version: the child as an object. The only possibility Lori can conceive of is an invasion by a foreign adversary on her turf; the child as a person is a non-entity in her worldview as expressed here. I love glimpses of thoughts like this: they’re honest, they’re illuminating, they’re real, and they’re so, so ugly.

Robert Foster§

That’s Mississippi republican gubernatorial candidate and two-term representative Robert Foster openly saying people who believe people can transition their gender — not just trans people, mind you, but anyone who agrees with the medical science — should be summarily executed. (And yes, this is criminalizing political dissent, but that’s the least of our problems here.) When asked about it in an interview, he doubled down:

I said what I said… The law should be changed so that anyone trying to sexually groom children and/or advocating to put men pretending to be women in locker rooms and bathrooms with young women should receive the death penalty by firing squad.

This wasn’t a one-off tweet, he circled back around in a formal interview to reiterate his position. “Round up and execute my political and religious opponents” is this guy’s actual policy stance, and he’s popular for it.

Robert’s case for genocide comes from the religious corner. In addition to his mention of an “early judgement”, he tweeted that the problem was that “the Godless have power” and “God will judge them” (although he thinks “they need to be sent to an early judgment”), and views himself as enthralled in a battle against “radical outside groups who are hard at work trying to rid [Christian values] from our society”.

Alisabeth Lancaster§

Another from the political barrel, here’s Alisabeth Lancaster. She’s running for the Santa Rosa County school board. At the “Closing Arguments” forum hosted by the Gulf Coast Patriots at St Sylvester Catholic Church, she introduced herself and explained her platform, including

These doctors that are going along with mutilating these children and prescribing hormone blockers to these kids, in my opinion, they should be hanging from the nearest tree.

which was met with raucous applause. So much applause, in fact, that the audience cut her off just to emphasize how enthusiastic they were about lynching people.

When asked about the incident later, republican state representative Alex Andrade commented “As someone who fought to pass the Parental Rights in Education Act, I know that common sense will win, and I’ll keep working in the Legislature to protect children from woke indoctrination” before reluctantly admitting that it’s wrong to “joke” about lynching. Perhaps he didn’t see the video.

Mark Berns§

Here’s Republican South Carolina congressional and “Donald Trump’s Top Pastor” Mark Burns campaigning on platform of rebooting the House Committee on Un-American Activities (yes, really) in order to hold public hearings to convict “traitors to the constitution” of treason:

Who does he consider to be traitors to the constitution? Who else? “The LGBT, transgender, grooming our children’s minds” who he thinks are “destabilizing the republic.” That’s a solid mix of social contagion lies and xenophobic “destabilizing” rhetoric used to lay out an explicit legal framework to execute trans people. You know what, South Carolina? I hope, for your sake, this isn’t your guy.

Stedfast Baptist§

On the subject of pastors, here’s Jonathan Shelley from Stedfast Baptist Church (a KJV-only baptist outfit, part of the “New Independent Fundamental Baptist Movement”, a revival of the 20s’ fundamentalist movement) speaking at an Arlington city council meeting:

I’m horrified and ashamed that this city has decided to promote and solicit “Pride” in this city. Pride is nothing to be celebrated, in fact it’s an abomination. … [Some confused theology about what the word pride means here] … We should humble ourselves to what the bible says (yup) and not what the small minority here that is bullying would say (amen)

…

I don’t understand why we would celebrate what used to be a crime (yep, mhm) not long ago (yup) (scattered laughter) In fact, according to the Texas penal code (council-member admonishes laughter for being disrespectful) homosexual conduct — a person commits an offence if he commits deviant sexual intercourse with another person of the same sex. In fact, that is still on the books today, even though Warrens v Texas overruled that in 2003. (mhm) But God’s already ruled that murder, adultery, witchcraft, rape, beastiality, homosexuality are “crimes” worthy of capital punishment. … [lists several biblical verses out of context, including some unrelated to any of those topics] …

…

They say that they “love” so much, but they hate children (yup), they hate baptists, they hate Christianity (whoop!), and they hate God. (Amen!)

We should eliminate pride month, we should eliminate the LGBT department liaison, we should eliminate the [unintelligible] LGBT, and everyone in this room should watch The Sodomite Deception (scattered laughter) which would clearly illustrate what the Bible says on this issue, providing actual stats instead of bullying people. (Standing ovation, “Amen”s)

So that, then, is the full-on advocation for a theocratic state, where homosexuality is a capital punishment that the city (???) should executing people for. (What he says about Texas having sodomy laws on the books is true, by the way, and those laws can go back into effect without legislative action depending on court ruling.) His speech, especially the parts advocating for state violence against pride, is met with affirmations and “Amen”s from the crowd — this is an agenda with popular support!

Moving out of city hall and into the pulpit, though, here’s “Why We Won’t Shut Up”, a sermon from Pastor Dillon Awes (also from Stedfast; it’s no wonder they’ve been labelled a hate group). I watched the whole hour-long recording (on “newtube”; looks like they’ve been kicked off YouTube already), and boy is this just a whole heap of shit. I want to say the “big moment” is when ol’ dilly boy here says all homosexuals should be put to death, but (a) he repeats that too much for it to count as a moment and (b) there’s a lot of really telling buildup to that point that’s really relevant to the phenomenon of churches as hate groups. So let’s go over the whole thing.

Awes at stedfast Awes: “They should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head!”

This message was delivered in the context of Stedfast already being a known hate group. Everyone in the building had to get through a wall of protestors outside to be there. Awes’ basic premise is that they’re being persecuted by “the LGBT Mafia” for preaching the Bible as it’s written, instead for their preaching extra-biblical extremism. This isn’t true, of course — the vast majority of this very sermon is blatantly distorting the text to match the speaker’s agenda including, I swear to God, “Love works no ill towards your neighbour… that’s why the loving thing to do is not to celebrate pedophilia in our nation, that’s why the loving thing to do is to put sodomites to death” — but this framing allows Awes to position himself as parallel to actual victims of persecution for being… banned on YouTube, apparently. (“The kings of the earth come together to conspire against god: Facebook, YouTube, Google… conspiring against the lord today” is a real, actual thing he says from the pulpit.)

But with that foundation of supreme biblical authority established, Awes can preach what he wants to preach, from the heart: that the LGBTQ community (he calls celebrators of Pride “sodomites” throughout, a classic misinterpretation of the text) are “brute beasts”, “dumb animals”, and “stupid dogs” “out to hurt you, that hate you” “made to be taken and destroyed”. (Much of the text for these descriptions do come from the bible… but they’re descriptions of entirely unrelated groups, certainly not the modern-day pride movement.)

That “sodomy” is “the worst sin in the bible” (???), that homosexuals are all pedophiles in their hearts and “aren’t like other sinners” because they’re always getting worse:

So here’s the thing: Maybe not every single homosexual has been with a child yet, but what about tomorrow when they’re filled with a little more unrighteousness? … These people are not normal, they’re not your average everyday sinner, they’re what the bible calls “reprobate”, they’re rejected by god, they have no hope of salvation. Now look at verse 30.

He preaches that the existence of gay people is the fault of Christians for not persecuting them aggressively enough, that “this probably could have been squashed like a bug a long time ago”, and that the church across the street with a pride flag is “screaming “we hate god” for doing so. That preaching “god hates sin but loves the sinner” is a vicious lie that keeps people from being as cruel to sinners as they need to be. That this failure of Christianity is evidenced by the fact that LGBTQ families “are so accepted that they can have kids.” That children in our society are becoming “meat” to the “predators” of LGBTQ families, who are all pedophiles, and that some (fake) churches hate Christians so much that they actually allow “sodomites and trannies” into the house of god. That the only reason the f*ggots (he says the word!) aren’t storming in and murdering us right now is their fear of law enforcement.

That gay pastors should be put to death, a point which should be obvious to anyone. That everyone queer should be put to death, really: “What does God say is the solution for the homosexual in 2022, here in the new testament, here in the book of Romans?” (Nothing, is the answer.) “That they are worthy of death! These people should be put to death! Every single homosexual in our country should be charged with the crime, the abomination of homosexuality that they have, they should be convicted in a lawful trial, they should be sentenced to death, they should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head!” The audience cheers, here. (Note it’s very important to him that the state legitimate this violence, because that’s baptist fundamentalism. It’s also a key numbing agent in genocide: see Robert Jay Lifton, “Gazing Steadfastly at the Holocaust: The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.) Awes continues “That’s what god teaches! That’s what the bible says!” This is not true. “You don’t like it, you don’t like God’s word, because that is what god says.” No!

Little pickle boy here covered all that within an hour. Also, he prophesies that God will destroy various US cities — that he names — by volcano eruption for their sin. Of queerness, he demands people “teach your children to be disgusted by it” and tells a fun anecdote about how even his wife was shocked by how much he despises gay people just existing in public. Also, he slips in “Zionists” infiltrating our government, because of course he does. All in all, this is propaganda to “Have zeal to fight the battles of the lord!” Which, in this religion, means the only way to demonstrate your virtue is overt cruelty to an outgroup you need to dogmatically believe is sub-human.

Matt Walsh & “What is a Woman”§

On June 1, right-wing anti-trans commentator Matt Walsh released anti-trans documentary “What is a Woman?” Which, well,

It’s a “gotcha” documentary meant to reveal how trans people aren’t being intellectually honest and going around trying to deceive people.

Now, about that. See, Matt Walsh is a vicious hack known for attacking LGBTQ people and generally acting in bad faith, so no trans person would volunteer to interview with him. So, instead, he set up a whole elaborate honeypot, as reported on twitter by Eli Erlick:

When “What is a Woman” reached out to people to interview, it did so as the fake “Gender Unity Project”, now defunct. The producer, “Makenna Lynn”, reached out to trans people to interview, claiming the documentary was self-funded. Lynn, though, is Makenna’s middle name; she was really Makenna Waters, Matt Walsh’s producer. The Gender Unity Project itself was registered to Justin Folk, a documentarian who works for Matt Walsh and Prager U.

Even after this was discovered, the documentary itself stole trans people’s photos from social media to use for commercial purposes without any sort of licensing, and specifically to degrade the people in the images.

There’s more information about the deception with perspectives from others in Eli’s twitter thread, and coverage on Insider and Blade. See also Nathan J. Robinson’s “What Is A Woman?” Is a Feature-Length Exploration of Conservative Ignorance and Prejudice.

As for the question, “What is a woman”? Well, that’s not too hard, actually. The actual ideas of “man” and “woman” that anti-trans activists are trying to conserve aren’t any kind of biological fact. They’re social ideas: how people dress, what kind of jobs they have, what their temperament is. There’s nothing about wearing a tie written as part of our DNA, or even mandated by God. The Two Genders, in all their holy wisdom, are inarguably social constructs themselves. It’s actually a disagreement over taxonomy, terminology, and methods of categorization. It’s a fight over conflicting definitions of categories, and ultimately it’s a conflict of the belief system of biological determinism against self determination.

I’ll also point to Kira Prince’s “What is a Woman?”, which answers this question well.

Lately the question has seemed to be on some people’s minds. There’s a whole documentary about it. Though sadly, the documentary in question doesn’t actually seem to be genuinely curious about the answer. Instead it’s very clear that it wishes to pretend to be curious as a pretense to spread its own underlying argument: “These people are nuts, they don’t want you to know the truth, trust your feelings and your 6th grade science teacher, woman=vagina.”
…
This is how gender actually works. We like to believe we’re seeing a biological reality, but we’re not. We see combinations of cues: a dress, long hair, dark mascara laden eyelashes, a smooth face, talking with hands, etc, and our brains go, “OH I KNOW,” and put that person in the woman box. And once they’re in that box we seldom let them out it. But of course we know that any one of those qualities individually doesn’t mean anything about gender.
…
Come across a particularly butch woman and you might very well assume she’s a man. Run too fast and you’ll get assumed to be a man too.
…
Which is why we tend to think gender and sex are the same thing, and that we’re seeing sex in our day to day lives when we aren’t. It’s that correlation thing. But some people, (GASP: THE TRANSES), don’t.
…
And then most people say, “sure fine, whatever, can you pass the ketchup?” And a smaller group say “Oh my GOD civilization is CRUMBLING I don’t know what to do! There’s an outbreak of pedophiles! God is dead! What is TRUTH?!? What do you mean I haven’t been perfectly aware of everyone’s genitals all the time? How am I going to know who to treat badly? WE NEED GENITAL INSPECTIONS NOW! HELP! I HAVEN’T BREATHED SINCE THEY ELECTED A BLACK MAN!”
…
Weird right? Sometimes pointing out the matrix does that to people. Those old simplistic worldviews are really sticky.

Irreversible Damage§

Abagail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage - The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” is an anti-trans book that’s become so popular it’s a cornerstone of the movement. Shrier’s views put her directly in the trans-exclusionary radical feminist category: she describes trans rights as “a war on women” and, as per the book’s title, is particularly concerned with the perversion of womanhood. Her book is so significant I can’t skip over it, but it doesn’t really have anything to say that we haven’t seen already.

Jack Turban MD MHS, “New Book “Irreversible Damage” Is Full of Misinformation”: The book’s central (and false) premise is that there are massive numbers of transgender youth who are not truly transgender, but rather just confused, and that they are all being rushed into gender-affirming medical interventions and surgeries that they will later regret. As a physician and a researcher who has dedicated my career to taking care of and understanding transgender youth, I recognized the book as bizarre and full of misinformation. I assumed it wouldn’t gain much traction. I was wrong.

Irreversible Damage is a huge advocate of rapid-onset gender dysphoria and social contagion myths. “The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” is right there in the title. Shrier argues that young cis women are “seduced” by predatory communities on social media and the internet into thinking they’re transgender, stealing them away from their families like fae in the night.

The book explicitly tells people to discount and reject their children’s gender identity, and encourages conversion therapy. In chapter 11, “The Way Back: What Should We Do For Our Girls?” Shrier explicitly advocates parents engage in those abusive behaviors: cut your child off from the world. Move to another state to reset her social circle. “If she is already at college, bring her home.” “Do what it takes to lift her out and take her away.” This is, again, extrordinarily dangerous.

Billboard: Your daughter is learning about gender identity on social media. Puberty is not a medical condition (Irreversible Damage)

The book itself is written in a vaguely journalistic style, which makes sense, because Shrier is a freelance journalist with no medical or psychological qualifications of any sort. Unfortunately, “journalistic style” is a phrase which here means “terrible science”. Shrier almost never cites any sources for her claims, and when she does they’re links to social media posts or anecdotes. In many cases she just wonders aloud about topics like “is becoming trans all an act of sexual withdrawal and avoidance?” At one point she cites an episode of the damn Joe Rogan podcast on Spotify to support the claim that someone said once that “adolescent girls today are in a lot of pain”. It’s the same nonsense circular reporting we saw in Littman.

The journalism itself though is blatant malpractice. A good portion of the book is dedicated to writing the stories of specific, real-world transgender adolescents. As Shrier makes clear, though, she never at any point interviewed or attempted to interview any of these subjects. Instead, she interviewed the parents, selecting for those who did not accept their children’s identities and platforming their grievances. Most of these parents were estranged from their children due to how thoroughly they rejected them. On top of that, Shrier states in an authors note that she changed details so people in the book would not be able to recognize themselves, denying them any opportunity to tell their side of the story or correct the accounts of their lives given by their oppositional parents.

I really can’t overstate how hard this book falls into the parent trap. In Shrier’s mind, the parents are entirely the victims, and the children are either adversaries or broken objects, not performing as expected. Even the expert sources she cites usually don’t have direct experience with trans patients: they’re usually just fellow amateurs who themselves heard grievances from unhappy parents. In Shrier’s view, children and teenagers can’t be trusted: they “lie to get on hormones, lie about being trans, and blame their parents for not being supportive of the lies”. (Trans adults, of course, are all predators).

A particularly disgusting facet of this is what Shrier describes as the “suicide narrative.” The kind of parental rejection that Shrier advocates for puts children in such intense distress that they kill themselves, and Shrier knows it. In the real world, when we know how our actions will harm others, the reality of that situation informs what we can and cannot ethically do. If one deprives their child of food, they starve, and that’s abuse. Understanding those things and doing what’s most healthy for the child is parenting. Instead, Shrier sees the requirement to do right by children as — what else — an attack on parents.

In a fit of foot-stomping tantrum, she describes “if you don’t affirm, your child may kill herself” as a threat being brandished against parents. “If you don’t support me”, your wretched children implicitly threaten, “I can’t go on.” And then, when the parents follow Shrier’s guidance and cause the deaths of their children, Shrier is there to pat them on the back and assure them it was the child’s fault for daring to have unmet needs. God. Yes, Abbie, the world does make demands on how you behave, and harm you inflict on others is counted against you. You cannot possibly be so privileged that you haven’t learned that yet. Grow up.

Suicide is the fatality case of dysphoria and other psychological ailments the same way cardio-respiratory arrest is the fatality case of rabies, or blood loss is the fatality case of being shot. Dysphoria is a psychological condition, and suicide is what a direct cause/effect relationship between the condition and the death of the patient looks like. The fact that it’s a suicide doesn’t imply that the person is interfering for personal gain, it’s (very obviously) the opposite.

When she does cite scientific theories they’re things like the thoroughly rejected autogynephilia theory which postulates that trans women transition due to a fetish. This has been rejected by the scientific community but we again see the sexualization angle in the use of this rhetoric: queerness must be a fetish. There’s a vague gesture made toward testosterone use increasing risks of “various cancers”, which isn’t cited and doesn’t appear to be true. The science that disproves her logic is flatly ignored; no mention given to the frequency of natural atypical genital presentation (as high as 1 in 200!), that gender-affirming care is known to give more positive outcomes, or the fact that the real regret rate of sex reassignment surgery is less than 1%.

I can point out all these problems, but I can’t quite convey how deeply ugly this book actually is. Shrier has taken these deeply toxic ideas, legitimized them with emotional stories and rhetoric, and wrapped them in flowery “womanhood is beautiful! :)” girlboss language. The whole thing has a decidedly “Dolores Umbridge” quality about it, the unfortunate irony of which does not escape me.

Bethel McGrew (@EstherOfReilly)§

So next I’m just going to reach into the grab bag and out comes self-proclaimed “Based Christian humanist, Twitter thought leader, hopeless Anglophile” Bethel McGrew, who wrote the article…

…Mutilating Our Bodies.

Scalpels

Good lord.

So I think what most gets me about this piece is how Bethel frames herself from coming from a place of sympathy. She talks about “minor boys and girls who are socially brainwashed into making catastrophic, self-harming decisions”, and frames the whole article as a (frankly condescending) paternalistic discussion about helping the vulnerable by saving them from themselves.

And she uses that framing to justify her conclusion, that conservatives be aggressive in attacking trans-friendly policies and ultimately ban all gender-affirming care, even for adults:

The time has come for conservative-thinking people to take a forward position in the transgender debate, grounded in metaphysical sureties and animated by a passion for the common good. While adults who regret their sex changes may themselves tend to libertarianism, their stories testify to a hidden horror: vulnerable, disturbed individuals of all ages hastily ushered into procedures that are nothing short of medical malpractice. Justice demands a reckoning in the form of penalties and strictures, for their sakes and for the sakes of others like them who may yet be saved from this Hippocratic Oath-breaking. We must not be silent. We must open our ears to the anguished cry of a Kellie Newgent, when she tells Matt Walsh through tears, “It got me at forty-two. Your child doesn’t have a chance.”

That nicey-nice act breaks down very quickly though, when there’s someone in the room who doesn’t agree with her:

It’s a kinder, gentler hand, to save people from the big scary liberal plot. But if you step out of line, you’re done. It’s us vs. them, and if you don’t want to be forcibly medically detransitioned when we ban gender care, it’s time for you to be gone.

Misc internet§

In addition to major players and organizations, I’m sure you’ve seen how this hate is everywhere online. Time for the lightning round.

Here’s a couple of people in a comments section casually talking about rounding up “leftists” to rot in prison in order to “snuff out” trans people. (Note “Activist” used here as a scare word, as if the people speaking aren’t pushing a political ideology themselves.) RealTXPatriot, meanwhile, is “giddy” about reporting their neighbour to child services. Boasting about turning in their neighbours. Giddy.

as described

Here’s Tyler Dinsmoor, small business owner and reactionary domestic terrorist (maybe we should just call that the Proud Boy Effect:

Fortunately, he was arrested before he got the chance to execute his attack on the June 18 event.

Here are some notes I took in January, when the video game Tabletop Simulator banned a trans user from global chat for mentioning their status, and gamers took to the Steam review pages for the game to… cheer the anti-lgbtq culture war stance.

This is a variant of the old gamer favourite, “hate raids”. See Nathan Grayson’s “Twitch hate raids are more than just a Twitch problem, and they’re only getting worse”

Here’s self-proclaimed “megaterf” replying to “Emilys mum”. Emily (her transgender daughter) was playing outside when a gang of kids surrounded her and instigated physical violence. One of the boys punched Emily so hard he broke his own hand, that was how violent this event was. Emily is a thirteen year old child.

megaterf emily broken hand

Megaterf blames Emily for invading the sidewalk. If Emily were a “real girl”, her skin would have apparently been softer, and her assailant wouldn’t have had any consequences. No, seriously, that’s how far gone this person is.

Killing trans people directly§

As bad as that abuse is, it gets worse. Of course it gets worse.

Terrorism§

The growing anti-trans movement radicalizes terrorists. I’ll start with Rebecca Boone’s introduction to the topic, written in response to the Patriot Front anti-lgbtq attack:

Rebecca Boone, “Right-wing extremists amp up anti-LGBTQ rhetoric online” A few weeks before 31 members of a white supremacist group were arrested for allegedly planning to riot at a northern Idaho LGBTQ pride event, a fundamentalist Idaho pastor told his Boise congregation that gay, lesbian and transgender people should be executed by the government.

Around the same time, a lawmaker from the northernmost region of the state, Republican Rep. Heather Scott, told an audience that drag queens and other LGBTQ supporters are waging “a war of perversion against our children.”

A toxic brew of hateful rhetoric has been percolating in Idaho and elsewhere around the U.S., well ahead of the arrests of the Patriot Front members at the pride event Saturday in Coeur d’Alene.
…
In the same way that it mobilized against Black Lives Matter in the nation’s capital in December, the Patriot Front harnesses what’s in the news cycle — in this case, drag queen story hours, disputes about transgender people in schools, and LGBTQ visibility more broadly. A “massive right-wing media ecosystem” has been promoting the notion that “there are people who are trying to take your kids to drag shows, there are trans people trying to ‘groom’ your children,” Lewis said.
…
Several posts have falsely sought to label teachers and librarians who accept the LGBTQ community as abusers or groomers of children. Others have lambasted pride events or drag performances as “depraved.”
…
At her public appearance weeks ago, she introduced two members of the Panhandle Patriots motorcycle club, who urged watchers to join them in “the fight” against LGBTQ people at the Coeur d’Alene pride celebration. They dubbed their counter-protest “Gun d’Alene.” “Stand up, take it to the head, go to the fight. … We say, ‘Damn the repercussions,’” the motorcycle club members said. “They are trying to take your children.” The Panhandle Patriots later changed their event to a prayer rally, saying they are “a Christian group that stands against violence in all its forms.”

The rhetoric is part of the movement. The laws are part of the movement. The propagandising of extremist ideology is part of the movement. And the terror attacks on people are part of the movement. It’s all one genocide.

Anti-LGBT+ mobilization has increased more than 400% just between 2020 and 2021. From ACLED:

Fact Sheet: Anti-lgbt+ Mobilization On The Rise In The United States

Anti-LGBT+ mobilization — including demonstrations, political violence, and offline propaganda activity like flyering — increased by over four times from 2020 to 2021 … ACLED data indicate that 2022 is on track to be worse than last year
…
Incidents of political violence targeting the LGBT+ community this year have already exceeded the total number of attacks reported last year
…
Nine times as many anti-LGBT+ demonstrations were reported in 2021 relative to 2020 … At least 15% of these demonstrations turned violent or destructive last year
…
Far-right militias and militant social movements increased their engagement in anti-LGBT+ demonstrations sevenfold last year, from two events in 2020 to 14 in 2021 … Their engagement in anti-LGBT+ events in 2022 is on track to either match or outpace their activity in 2021
…
Far-right militias and MSMs — like the Proud Boys — increased their engagement in anti-LGBT+ demonstrations sevenfold last year, from two events in 2020 to 14 in 2021. This is a dangerous trend: right-wing demonstrations are 12 times more likely to turn violent and/or destructive when far-right militias or MSMs are involved.
…
Similar to the cross-pollination opportunities presented by activism against issues like abortion access and critical race theory, anti-LGBT+ mobilization will likely offer a conducive environment for far-right militias and MSMs to build networks not only with the wider right-wing activist community but also amongst each other. For example, on 4 June 2022, a far-right demonstration against a drag show in Dallas, Texas, brought together a wide range of different groups as well as unaffiliated individuals, including self-proclaimed ‘Christian Fascists,’ adherents to the QAnon conspiracy movement, and affiliates of the American Populist Union, the New Columbia Movement, and Groypers

In New Hampshire, parent Shane Gobeil “threatened to show up and kill somebody” if his child was approached by a transgender person at school. “The school’s changing… Before you know it, there’s going to be a drag queen show and, you know what, I’m probably going to show up and kill somebody. A lot of body’s. … If you guys ever do that to Canaan and my daughter’s in that school, be ready for God’s wrath.” When state police investigated, he repeated the threat to them, saying “don’t take what I said as a threat, take it as a promise”. Police tried to cover for him by “advising” him to stop, but after his persistence he was detained and charged. He is prohibited from buying the AK-47 he said he intended to purchase… for six months, after which the prohibition is lifted.

Wisconsin Kiel bomb incident§

Another school attack stands out: the Wisconsin Kiel bomb threats.

In June 2021, the Biden administration restored protections against discrimination on the basis of gender to Title IX law that had been removed in the Trump administration. This triggered a wave of right-wing fearmongering. Conservatives protested, on the basis that… previous iterations of the rules — not the ones being proposed! — were problematic. Of course, that’s all just to cover for their actual outrage, that the changes protect against the kind of discrimination they want to engage in and encourage. They even explicitly complain that reinstating anti-discrimination rules might conflict with Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law… because of how aggressively that law discriminates on the basis of gender, which is the thing they like about it.

In the context of this charged atmosphere, in March the Kiel Middle School in Wisconsin followed up on a harassment complaint against students for bullying a student by misgendering and namecalling. This was almost immediately sensationalized by media outlets like Fox, One America News Network, and Libs of TikTok with the usual mismash of anti-trans hate rhetoric, but also as a First Amendment issue, because the bullying was spoken. Do I need to remind you about the conservative compelled speech pronouns laws? I’m sure I don’t. You’ve figured it out by now: there are no principles here, only violence.

And that violence culminated when anti-trans activists made multiple bomb threats against the school and local government. The bombers were clear as to their demands: they would bomb the locations if the school district didn’t drop the investigation by June 3. The police entirely failed to manage the incident for weeks, and the threats were so violent and credible that on June 2, the school board gave into the demands to appease the terrorist. (And, yes, the federal authorities called in to consult allowed this. The FBI, whose jurisdiction this is, did not intervene.) A vulnerable child was bullied, and violent, genocidal activists decided the bullies couldn’t be punished. And the terrorists literally won. Another man was arrested for threatening to kill school district staff over the incident. This turned out to not be directly related to the bomber; the media’s rhetoric worked two people (at least) into separate violent frenzies.

Trump-appointed federal judge Charles Atchley seems to agree with the terrorists, as he recently blocked enforcement of these Title IX protections after 20 conservative state attorneys filed suit, citing interference of “[states’] sovereign authority to enforce state laws.”

I like doing personal studies. Let’s do another personal study. Let’s look at George Will’s “When the pronoun police come for eighth-graders”, placed in the Washington Post’s opinion section on June 8. He decries “today’s progressive dogma” and “the arrogance and cynicism of the U.S. Education Department” for “making a mockery of Title IX”. His evidence that Title IX can overreach comes from 2014 — before even Obama’s reforms that added protection against gender discrimination. He defends the three accused boys as being “biologically correct, if politically incorrect”, as if grammar were somehow biological, while conveniently forgetting about the bullying wrapping that tidbit. But that’s just window dressing. What’s truly unforgivable about this is that it intentionally omits the weeks long terrorist campaign of bomb threats culminating in successful political intimidation from the conversation. Utterly shameless.

Of the overblown outrage over the original incident, LB Klein, a professor who specializes in LGBTQ health, said

When even a little bit of support is provided, or attention is provided, that there is such a backlash is a reminder to us of what trans and gender-diverse kids are facing every day in this country … Folks are acting out in violence about basic names, pronouns and terms, and that’s politicized — trans and gender-diverse kids are not being political, they’re being politicized.

… I don’t think we have these conversations when it’s not about trans and gender-diverse kids — I know a lot of people, as a parent, who have kids that go by names other than the names on their government documents, and people don’t bat an eye about that.

I can attest to that personally. I went to a conservative Christian high school, and I had a good friend. She was a cis girl, but she had a male-sounding legal name, so she stuck a -y on the end of it. It was a purely cosmetic, gender-affirming identity choice. And, since she wasn’t trans, it was (to my knowledge) never an issue. I only ever even knew the name from seeing it on a few old ledgers produced by outdated software. And if people had bullied her by refusing to call her by her chosen name? It would have been bullying. There are no surprises here, no special privilege being demanded by the all-powerful lgbtq lobby. It’s basic human decency, but when it’s time to show that decency to a queer person, it’s turned into an all-out war by those who want them destroyed.

Fake shooter assault§

Another incident of school violence, in a very different way. In response to the Robb Elementary School shooting, a right-winger on the internet (possibly as a “troll”) pulled photographs of a transgender person from reddit and accused them of being the shooter, without basis.

The baseless theory did spread and the internet ran with it. GOP lawmaker Paul Gosar saw the lie and liked how it gelled with his political agenda so much he boosted it himself despite (or, because of) it being blatant disinformation.

The girl in the photo? Used to spur violence. A group of four men outside a library saw a seventeen-year-old trans girl and used the disinformation pretext to assault her. “Yeah, you know it was one of your sisters who killed those kids,” they said. “You’re a mental health freak!” The shooter wasn’t her, the shooter wasn’t trans, but they just wanted violence against trans people so much that they made it work.

Murders§

And then there are all the murders.

The United States has some of the highest rates of transphobic violence.

Since 2015, the Human Rights Campaign has published a report on violence and homicides of trans people in the united states. There’s a lack of accurate data collection, so it’s difficult to know how widespread the violence really is; the data gathered is always a minimum amount, due to unreported incidents. Worse, an analysis of the FBI’s hate crime statistics revealed trans-motivated murders that went unreported despite evidence. The HRC even suspects its own numbers to be low, due to many more deaths and murders that could be, but aren’t definitively, hate-motivated. All in all, violence against the trans community has steadily increased from 2015 to present.

As this violence is primarily hate-driven, violence is wildly disproportionately more likely if the person is part of other targeted groups: trans black women, for instance, are disproportionately more likely to be effected. Likewise, in areas with more discrimination (notably the south), violence again becomes disproportionately more common. From their 2018 report, of transgender people killed in the US, 82 percent of them were women of color and 55 percent lived in the South, especially Texas.

Disproportionately more likely if in the south

Disproportionately more likely if in texas

HRC’s research is synthesized in its excellent report Dismantling a Culture of Violence; Understanding Violence Against Transgender and Non-Binary People and Ending the Crisis, published 2021. It links the startling outbreak of violence to anti-transgender stigma, denial of oppertunity, and increased risk factors. For example, 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ, often due to family rejection. “Exclusion from these vital safety nets doesn’t just worsen physical and mental health outcomes, it directly contributes to higher risk of homelessness, sexual assault and violence.” Being LGBTQ is a risk factor for violence, but the homelessness caused by this compounds the risk.

As I have done, the report notes the uptick in anti-LGBTQ political attacks and efforts to prevent transgender youth from accessing medical care and counseling, as well as dangerous conversion therapy practices.

Other organizations like the NCTE report similar findings; “Transgender and non-binary people who have had a professional try to stop them from being transgender or non-binary were far more likely to experience psychological distress, attempt suicide, run away from home and experience homelessness.”

There are also isolated cases that have gotten some attention, like the murders of Chynal Lindsey and Muhlaysia Booker in Dallas. Chynal, 26, was murdered and dumped in a lake just weeks after Muhlaysia, 23, was shot in the street. Both were young, black, trans women. Only months prior, Muhlaysia captured video of herself being assaulted after a routine exchange of insurance information escalated into the other man holding her at gunpoint. A crowd gathered and assaulted her; she suffered a concussion and broken bones. But her video of the incident gathered traction, making her a target for further violence.

Rev. Louis Mitchell said of the incident

This is intersectional. When you have the combination of a society that protects racism, misogyny and transphobia, it creates insurmountable odds. This is not so much an issue just in the Dallas area, but an international pandemic.

The idea that somehow no one is going to look for these women, that they’re so deeply disposable, and that level of disregard is horrible. It stems from misogyny, one of the things I would hope all women, cis and trans, recognize is the commonality of their plight when it comes to assault.

The bottom line is when you don’t treat trans people with basic dignity and respect that permeates to the rest of society.

It all comes back to that, doesn’t it.

There are more recent murders of trans women, even just in Dallas. Brittany White for one, and others who were never identified. But it’s part of the larger pattern of murders, which is part of the larger pattern of genocide.

Trans panic defence§

But maybe the ugliest part of homicides against trans people are those who are caught and still get away with it.

The so-called “trans panic defense” is the legal argument that killing people specifically because they’re trans is an okay thing to do. No, really. They think their feelings are worth that much more than trans lives. And it works on juries.

In 2014, US Marine Joesph Pemberton brutally murdered trans woman Jennifer Laude in cold blood by drowning her to death in a toilet after just seeing their genitals. After, he told a friend “I think I killed a he/she”. He argued in court that he “felt like Laude had raped him” and was so “repulsed” that he acted to “defend his honor”. Pemberton was granted an absolute pardon, and Laude never got justice.

Fifteen-year-old boy Larry King was shot execution-style in front of his teacher and classmates by his classmate, fourteen-year-old Brandon McInerney. He walked into the classroom with a .22 calibre handgun and shot Larry, and only Larry twice, then left. Larry’s crime, in Brandon’s eyes? He wore girls’ clothes. Nothing against the rules, nothing sexual, just a target for bullying. But Brandon was “disgusted”, and the jury found him not guilty of any hate crimes. Also, just think for a second: what kind of family creates a fourteen year old child willing to kill a classmate for that? Imagine the pressure cooker of hate these people are being raised in. That’s abuse.

Jorge Steven Lopez-Mercado (gay, not trans) was decapitated, dismembered, and burned. But the police investigator’s professional opinion of the matter was “people who live this lifestyle need to be aware that this will happen.”

In 2022, Virginia Tech footballer Isimemen Etute was found not guilty for the murder of Jerry Smith. The two met on Tinder, met up in person, and engaged in consensual oral sex. Etute later regretted the encounter, sought him out a second, groped Smith’s genitals and then beat him to death. Etute was an elite athlete, and vastly overpowered Smith, breaking every bone in his face. Etute testified that he felt “violated” because Smith catfished him on Tinder. In a public statement, Isimemen’s lawyer said “Nobody deserves to die, but I don’t mind saying, don’t pretend you are something that you are not.”

The American Bar Association has argued for the abolition of the panic defense, but so far this has not happened and, given the current political climate, isn’t likely to soon.

Trans panic defense prohibited in minority of states

And even in states with the trans panic defence prohibited, it still happens. Virginia has specific legislation prohibiting trans panic as a defence, but it was still used successfully in the Etute case.

It’s the Rittenhouse problem: it’s not that people don’t really think this won’t harm trans people, it’s just that a lot of people think we should be doing that.

Bathrooms§

Fine, let’s talk bathrooms. Everybody wants to talk about bathrooms, I have to talk about bathrooms.

Not only do people not regularly engage with each other’s genitals in bathrooms, nobody wants trans men in the women’s bathroom or trans women in the men’s! That’s obviously absurd! It’s not about that, it’s about applying as much pressure as possible wherever there’s a scary case to be made.

That’s the full aside I originally wrote for this. But then the Butler County incident happened.

The anti-trans lobby got what they wanted in Butler County, Ohio. The law requires people use sex-specific facilities according to the sex they were assigned at birth, rather than their current gender.

Noah Ruiz is a man who was assigned female at birth. He now identifies and presents as man. You can see him on camera starting at 0:40 here; like I said, nobody wants him in a women’s bathroom, and he needs to use the men’s. But he went camping in Butler County, where that isn’t allowed. He even checked with the manager. So he used the only bathroom he was allowed in, the women’s, and was brutally assaulted for it. Another woman in the bathroom saw him and started screaming expletives and demanding he use the men’s, but of course he explained that was illegal.

When he left the bathroom, a group of large men came up, heard the distress, and assaulted him. They grabbed him, lifted him off the ground, choked him out and threatened to kill him for the perceived sexual slight. He was left with bruises on his head from being punched, as well as large cuts and gashes.

The Preble County deputies arrived, found the beaten and bloody Ruiz yelling in his own defence, and arrested him. They didn’t listen, just shoved him into the dirt and arrested him. The men who assaulted him were not arrested, and he was only ever permitted to make an assault report later.

Of course, this is the whole game, right? Heads I win, tails you lose. The bathroom bills aren’t about making spaces safer for women, they’re about finding a new way to attack trans people. And when those laws backfire, they’ll attack trans people for that too. The endgame is making an overtly hostile environment and ultimately criminalizing the existence of trans people outright.

butler gender critical comment

And there’s always one more step of nastiness. You can always peek behind one more door, and find the gender critical forums, where people are gathering to talk about how “she” did it to “herself”; that she was “asking for it”. That he was “walking around in a sex offender costume”, and it was a good thing he was assaulted. How “disguising yourself as the opposite sex is a dangerous game and always has been. Women have done it mainly for survival and freedom, men do it for fun and perverted thrills.”

Passing§

In the Butler County story we find this contradiction when it comes to trans people passing. “Passing” is when someone “passes” as the gender they’re meant to be. This is a bit reductive, but it’s still a useful concept to investigate. Basically, if a person “passes”, it means you can look at them and tell what their gender is from their presentation, whether they’re cis or transitioned. Modern medical science is remarkably good at this, even without surgery.

Anti-trans people hate passing, for a couple reasons.

When they picture trans women, they picture John Cleese playing a lady, not Abigail Thorn. And for trans men, instead of Benjamin Melzer, they’re picturing Gal Godot in a hat. The fact that people can and do effectively change their gender presentation breaks their whole worldview. Gender transition is supposed to be an invented fetish, self delusion, not a totally achievable thing. See how in the Butler County story the existence of a passing trans men didn’t fit into the imagined world they were trying to regulate, and failed gender policing erupted into violence instead.

thorn melzer

Abigail Thorn, Benjamin Melzer

But trans people passing also prevents discrimination. Which, for some, is a bad thing.

Toby Beauchamp’s “Going Stealth - Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices” is a full 200-page book studying this issue. It shows how surveillance that profiles people and identifies threats based on categories of difference is threatened by nonconforming expression, especially gender nonconformity. Beauchamp argues that part of the resistance to trans normalization is motivated by transgender people’s perceived threat to the U.S. security apparatus.

But the security case applies in the case of ideologically motivated anti-trans sentiment too. People effectively passing prevents them from being effectively policed: In our world, where trans people can pass, attacks on trans people based on their appearance that are thorough enough to catch most trans people will also effect a large number of cisgendered people.

Look too closely at TERF communities and you’ll quickly notice nonsense gender phrenology: people trying to analyze their friends’ bone structure to determine their sex, often ultimately determining that their cis friends are undercover trans “handlers” assigned to them by the trans cabal, because 1) they’re angry and vulnerable people looking for enemies behind every corner and 2) their absurd gender dousing methods don’t work. (See related reading: Miles Klee, “Unhinged ‘Transvestigators’ Think They’re the Only Cis People Left”)

phrenology

This happens in other cases too. Famously, testing for “normal” levels of testosterone and estrogen to determine sex doesn’t work. There is no “normal” level of testosterone; even just participating in sports increases your testosterone levels above the reference intervals from the general population. In fact, the estrogen levels of cis women can actually overlap those of cis men! So there’s no possible way to make a reasonably-accurate “sex test” to determine if someone is trans. When “gender eligibility” tests are implemented, they backfire catestrophically, as seen in Wafcon 2022 where cisgender female olympian Barbra Banda was excluded due to her naturally high testosterone levels, even after taking artifical testosterone-lowering drugs. Anti-trans would like to be able to scientifically test for gender, but unlike passing, biology can’t be regulated by fiat. Hormones are a chemical example, but the point remains for the aesthetic case: trans people passing impedes anti-trans ideologues from discriminating against trans people.

These reasons are a major reason that anti-trans activists push so hard to prevent trans healthcare. Trans healthcare, especially hormone blocking and HRT, is safe and effective. But what it’s effective at is letting people pass and be comfortable in their own skin, and that’s precisely what the war is against. This is especially the case for trans children: trans kids who were properly treated with puberty blockers earlier life pass more easily as adults, and removes an element of coercion. For the trans genocide, it’s vital that people are coerced into being an assigned gender, and so a main part of the reason people advocate against trans healthcare is to prevent the specific desirable outcomes it provides. The healthcare is great for the patient, but it’s not good for the genocide.

Related Reading§

  1. To be clear, The Nuffield Council is a legitimate organization that writes reports on ethical issues in medicine, and — to my knowledge — not crackpot genocidal whackjobs, yet. ↩

  2. There is a nugget of truth here, in that gender transition is an externalization of a problem from a (repressed) place that didn’t directly affect society to a place that does, and needs some level of accommodation. But the appropriate response to that is providing that reasonable accommodation, not waging a genocide on the inconvenient. ↩

Howdy! If you found my writing worthwhile, the best thing you can do to support me is to share an article you found interesting somewhere you think people will appreciate it. Thanks as always for reading!

Comments

Loading...