I wrote in an earlier post about how infuriating it was to read about the deaths of women denied medical care because of the extreme anti-abortion laws in many states that were enacted following the overthrow of Roe v. Wade in 2022. But that is not even the only terrible policy the Republicans and the creepy Trump-weird Vance ticket have promoted. We also have them use vile anti-trans rhetoric to fireup their base.
Donald Trump has made his opposition to transgender rights central to his closing argument before Election Day, using demeaning language and misrepresentations to paint an exceedingly narrow slice of the U.S. population as a threat to national identity.
…His rally speeches now feature a spoof video mocking trans people and their place in the U.S. military. The montage, interspersed with clips of the Vietnam War movie “Full Metal Jacket,” typically draws loud boos at his rallies, as do Trump’s false claims about female athletes and his mocking impression of what he says is a trans woman lifting weights.
…His running mate, JD Vance, alleged Thursday that white teenagers in the “middle class or upper middle class” can identify as transgender to more easily get into elite universities. In doing so, Vance was citing conservative anger about affirmative action and other programs geared toward historically disenfranchised groups.
“Is there a dynamic that’s going on where if you become trans, that’s the way to reject your white privilege?” Vance said, speaking to podcaster Joe Rogan. “That’s the only social signifier, the only one that is available in the hyper-woke mindset, is if you become gender nonbinary.”
While often overshadowed by his emphasis on migrants, Trump’s broadsides against LGBTQ people have seemed to grow more frequent and ominous in the campaign’s final days, intended both to stir his core supporters and coax votes from more moderate voters who may not mesh with Trump on other matters. It’s part of an overall campaign in which Trump has pushed his own brand of hyper-masculinity, most recently referring several times to CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, who is gay, by a woman’s name, “Allison Cooper.”
The GOP’s attacks on women’s rights carry real risks of blowback for them because women make up more than half the voting population and can punish them at the polls. But the transgender community is minuscule in number and have no real political power so they make for an easy target, perfect for cowardly bullies who love to attack those who are not in a position to fight back. Apart from the. many acts of discrimination against them, they are already the targets of abuse and harassment and violence. It is unconscionable for politicians with loud megaphones to incite their followers against them.
Attacking and mocking the transgender community is despicable and unforgivable. I just hope that the sheer meanness of these attacks infuriates large numbers of people to vote against GOP candidates across the board. This kind of rhetoric needs to be repudiated in the strongest possible terms and the best way to do that is to throw those who utter such things into the dustbin of history.
Donald Trump has made his opposition to transgender rights central to his closing argument before Election Day. …
This stuff is nothing new. People transgender in some way or another have been around for at least 5000-6000 years (since Sumer), and at least since Christianity took over, we’ve been suppressed, persecuted, imprisoned and murdered. Yet we’re still here. It’s only been in the past few decades that we’ve had some measure of public acceptance (ask the people who transitioned in the 1980’s or earlier.) So this anti-trans stuff is simply sort of “regression to the mean.”
Even if they institute harsh regressive measures, and they kill a lot of us, trans people will survive. And, in contrast to 1933, what has been learned can’t be destroyed by simple book burnings — with the Web, this knowledge is everywhere. At some point the transphobes will find some other group to hate-campaign against, and when the focus is no longer on us, we’ll crop back up, like weeds in the abandoned spaces in a big city.
Gender dysphoria is probably just the result by fetal development going “hiccup”, just like when people get an extra pair of ribs or the heart locared on the right side of the chest.
The idea that people could be ‘brainwashed’ into being transgender is as absurd as brainwashing someone into getting an extra pair of ribs.
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But the low-information voters courted by GOP since Reagan and earlier are incapable of absorbing facts once they have made up their minds.
It is like the lie about scools providing cat litter for people that identify as cats.
This problem will continue until an asteroid hits the Fox News HQ, or the Trump voters die off of age or from extreme cholesterol.
The attacks against transgender people are failing. People are getting tired of hearing them, rather than what GOP candidates are planning to do. Also, in recent years candidates for offices local and statewide that focus on ‘transgender issues’ tend to lose..
It’s definitely not surprising and likely not a coincidence that anti-trans becoming a primary message (rather than one of multiple secondary messages) happened around when Musk got actively involved in the campaign.
Populists need to create “the other” to rail against. Populists do not have a tangible positive agenda, they are just against something.
And “the other” should preferably not be a group with the power to push back.
If no suitable group is around you can invent a fictional one. The satanists in the 1980s, the witches in the medieval/ early modern era.
Give them time and they will blame the Eskimos*.
(Homer Simpson would argue they are made up)
Punching down….
You are more optimistic than me. I despair of humanity and I wish i could give up my gender card because the one I am in is determined to make other peoples lives miserable if it means a few $ more to them.
I spent my Diwali party arguing with someone who said while he doesn’t like Trump -- he thinks the Dem’s “woke” policies are too much -- wherein woke Democrats teach children “how to be trans” and push them to “be trans” -- also I learned that Trump is not a Nazi sympathizer till he passes a law that says minorities can be gassed to death(or a specific Nazi policy).
The cruelty is the point.