I was debating whether this should come in two posts or one.

Alvin McEwen (aka Black Tsunami), author of the Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters blog, just posted another detailed and accurate dissection of rightwing and religious hate propaganda against LGBTQIA people.  From his post:

Visual montage – Just a few of the times conservatives have accused LGBTQ people of ‘indoctrinating,’ ‘recruiting,’ or ‘grooming’ children

So now in defense of Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law, folks are labeling LGBTQ people as ‘groomers’ who are targeting children for sex talk. It’s an ugly claim, but it’s hardly new. In fact the most potent weapon in the arsenal of the anti-LGBTQ industry for decades has been the accusation that gays are ‘indoctrinating children,’ ‘recruiting children,’ or (as it is spoken now) ‘grooming children.’

It’s powerful because it touches on the most primal fear of parents – that their children are going to be harmed. That fear coupled with the continued ignorance about LGBTQ lives and our families (some people aren’t even aware that we are raising children) becomes a powerful weapon which can be used to undermine our equality time and time again.

Below are just a few examples of conservatives and religious right playing the ‘gays want your children’ card over the years. Some go as far back as the mid 1980s.

While he doesn’t say it explicitly, you can tell he’s drawing comparison to the KKK’s racist hate propaganda of the 1960s.  Both the “cartoons” and false accusations of sexual predation and violence racists hurled against Black people are the same type of propaganda aimed at LGBTQIA people now.

Hate propaganda works for two main reasons:

1) It’s easier to tell the lie than it is to refute it.

2) Those who believe lies will repeat them without checking.

Xtra Magazine published a damning article linking TERF ideology and fascism.  TERFs willingly side with ideologies that would take away women’s right to work, health care, birth control, education, and even their right to vote, simply because those they align with hate Trans people.

The worst part is, they know.  They would rather give up their rights than allow people outside the cishetero binary to exist.

How the far-right is turning feminists into fascists

When I first started asking about the connection between anti-trans politics and the American right wing, my concerns were simple. I’d covered abortion for several years, and some of the tactics being used by organized transphobes—noisy “protests” outside clinics, or doxing and harassing doctors—were similar enough to the “pro-life” movement’s that I expected some groups were working together. 

I was right; there was a connection, which I’ve covered already for Xtra and other outlets. What I did not expect was that asking researchers to situate anti-trans activists in the context of the broader right would turn out to be one of the scariest questions I’d ever ask. Every researcher I spoke to told me that the situation on the ground was far worse than I thought. Anti-trans activists had not hitched their wagons to the American right wing. The far right was using transphobia to advance their larger agenda, and that agenda was both more violent and a lot more successful than I knew. 

What follows is an attempt to summarize that agenda—although the full picture, comprised as it is of activist splinter groups, bizarre conspiracy theories, social-media hate campaigns and titanic global funding initiatives, is both too complex and too weird to ever fully summarize. It’s a story in which “eco-fascists” infiltrating lesbian folk festivals bump up against anti-Semitic conspiracy bloggers and Vladimir Putin’s global dark money operations; strange enough that it’s hard to take seriously, but very serious, and increasingly dangerous to us all. This is how trans-eliminationist thought became mainstream politics, and it has grave implications, not just for trans people, but for democracy itself. 

TERF is insufficient since it generally only applies to those who are cis XX.  WXYZ is now my preferred term for male anti-Trans bigots:

white (W) male (XY) cis (Z)

Collectively (as one collects garbage to dispose) I now call them AHAB:

AHAB: Assigned Human At Birth

They have given up any sense of human decency with their racism, anti-semitism, xenophobia as their core ideology, along with their hate of Transgender, Non-Binary, and others outside the tiny cishetero binary.  AHAB is apt because it applies to all of them, right wing bigots and others: fake and performative feminists, apologists, and Caitlyn “Death Race 2000” Jenner.