Republicans discover their heartless new culture war
Straight people have often asked me what I, a gay man, have in common with someone who’s trans. There are many answers. Here’s one: I know what it’s like to have my identity, my dignity — my very hold on happiness — pressed into partisan battle and fashioned into a political weapon.
I know what it’s like to be used. And right now, trans people are being used, cruelly.
You probably heard about what happened in Arkansas. On Tuesday, lawmakers there voted overwhelmingly, by a 3:1 ratio, to override a veto from the Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, and effectively ban gender-affirming medical treatments, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for trans youth under 18.
Republicans are experts at identifying vulnerable, marginalized populations and demonizing them in the interest of political gain. That’s what Republicans in Arkansas, in Alabama and in dozens of other states are doing with scores of active bills, many of which focus on denying trans youth gender-affirming treatments and dictating how they may or may not participate in sports.
They’re inventing a problem to whip up a culture war that they’re convinced will redound to their benefit. Worried that their party can’t retain or wrest power with its positions on the economy and prescriptions (or lack thereof ) for health care, they’re fighting on other turf, with no pause to contemplate the need for their offensives and no thought for the casualties.
Many Republicans portrayed me and my kind as leches, even child molesters, laundering perversion into propriety. It’s a hell of a thing: to hear words from civic “leaders” that openly or tacitly encourage people to hate you, maybe even to strike you. It puts fear in your heart and rage in your brain.
And it’s happening to trans people. Republicans’ response to their party’s political failures at the ballot box in 2018 and 2020 is to find an issue they believe paints Democrats as convention-smashing libertines and themselves as the defenders of innocent children and a moral order. It’s to name monsters and take up torches against them. The issue is trans equality. The monsters are trans people.
Not by accident, they made a prominent appearance in Donald Trump’s first big speech after his exile from the White House.
“Joe Biden and the Democrats are even pushing policies that would destroy women’s sports,” he told an audience at the Conservative Political
Action Conference in Florida in late February. An overnight feminist, he added that young girls and women “are now being forced to compete against those who are biological males.”
He was suggesting that a relatively rare scenario was pervasive. That’s a classic wedge-issue strategy. And when Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, grandstands in a Senate hearing by comparing surgery elected by trans people to the “genital mutilation” of girls in cultures that seek to subjugate women by stamping out their sexual pleasure, that’s not an debate.
Lawmakers are staging a medical intervention, on the grounds that one group of people (doctors, parents) must be controlled for the protection of another (children). If that’s OK in this case, why not when COVID-blasé Americans reject masks or refuse vaccines, putting other Americans at risk? Some of the same Republicans who claim they’re coming to rescue children receiving testosterone are fine letting us marinate in the coronavirus.