Donald Trump had recently finished a familiar riff about banning gender transition surgery for children when the former president, speaking to an audience of Evangelical voters, moved on to something new: a policy that would affect transgender adults.
“I will ban all taxpayer funding for sex or gender transitions at any age,” said Trump, receiving thunderous applause at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington last month. The Republican leader, who moments earlier had also pledged to reinstate a ban on transgender men and women serving in the military, paused for several seconds to soak in the crowd’s adulation.
It’s the kind of moment — and the type of policy — increasingly common on the GOP presidential campaign trail this year.
Well obviously. It was never about children, because gender affirming care doesn’t involve surgeries or hormones for children. Those were all lies feeding into an anti-trans narrative so they could push for more drastic changes.
Start with children, because no one in their right mind would want to see children suffer, and then move on to the rest. After all the trans people are dealt with, they’ll come after the gays, and then the women and people of colour.
Only thing I’d dispute here is the “after that” part — republicans and conservatives in general are already coming for LGB, women, and minorities. Transphobia is their smokescreen / highest priority, rather than a first step. If they succeed (I hope not!) that will result in more of their energy going into attacking the other marginalized groups, rather than starting to attack those groups.
If they succeed (I hope not!) that will result in more of their energy going into attacking the other marginalized groups, rather than starting to attack those groups.
They already have. They were largely successful in their crusades against Target and Bud Light, which has emboldened them to use their thinly veiled threats of violence to push their agenda even more. I mean, we now have Republicans criticizing the Barbie movie because of they way a map is drawn in one of the background scenes. Or something.
The Barbie movie. Barbie. You know, the plastic children’s doll. Yes. That one. According to Republicans, the Barbie movie is a secret vessel to indoctrinate children with CCP propaganda. I wish I was joking.
This is what the Republican party has come down to. Everything they don’t like is a conspiracy theory that needs to be eradicated.
What is their fixation on this? Why does this issue matter out of all the other issues that they could be bringing up right now?
Hate disguised as truly held belief is a helluvah drug.
Edit: Also, fuck assholes that think this way and fuck Donald Trump.
It’s utterly bizzare. Spend 10 minutes browsing YouTube shorts and you’ll see an absolute torrent of transphobia, with many users outright calling for violence and murder, and YouTube does nothing.
If shorts are any indication, youtube actively promotes such content.
They’d like to hate on gays like in the good old days, but that’s no longer socially acceptable. Trans folks are the next best thing.
They’re going to get back to hating the gays publicly soon too/have already started. Just look at what they did around Pride Month and what the Supreme Court is up to. It’s a matter of time if we don’t push back hard against their transphobic shit now.
The “dog caught the car” in the Supreme Court abortion ruling. The GOP can no longer use abortion as a wedge issue, because the issue is, essentially, resolved. They got what they said they wanted.
But the GOP always used abortion as a wedge issue, to drive people to polls to vote against their otherwise best interests because “Democrats will kill babies!” or similar.
The GOP is desperately looking for a new wedge issue and an enemy. And like most fascists do, they look to a marginalized group to demonize that doesn’t have the ability or numbers to fight back. They appear to have settled on trans people for the moment.
It’s not about actual trans people, it’s about making their base mad about something so they’ll vote ( R ).
They don’t have the abortion debate anymore, the gay debate is a bit too mainstream to end well, the gun control debate is always there but not particularly in focus, and they don’t have the states (yet) to repeal the 13th.
So what to rile their base up with? Transphobia and calling their enemies pedophiles, the latter of which is kinda par for the course, but the former is a relatively new patch on the ol’ hate quilt.
Transphobia and calling their enemies pedophiles, the latter of which is kinda par for the course, but the former is a relatively new patch on the ol’ hate quilt.
Transphobia was always on the list, but they didn’t need to start beating that drum because they had abortion as their boogeyman of choice. Once that got taken off the table, Transphobia just became the most convenient thing to make as the new boogeyman.
And once they’re done with that, it’ll be a new marginalized group. I haven’t heard any members of the GOP pick on kids with cancer lately, but I’m sure they have their sights set on eradicating this bunch of freeloaders looking to leech off our healthcare system too, or something.
Starting to think the right just loves to be mad at something. Yelling and controlling is what they’re after, not actual change
They just want an excuse to be pissed off at the world.
Nothing is more delicious to conservatives than a small, powerless group who do not fit into the so-called social norms to attack as a scapegoat. Perfect for distracting their supporters from all of the fuckery and wanton neglect that conservative parties pursue, and perfect for whipping up emotional fervour in the mind of those who cling to conservatism out of fear of difference.
Other groups & causes which conservatives tend to target may willing to jettison the needs of a tiny group for their own ends if they can get their own ends met, and fracturing solidarity is incredibly useful, if not essential, to conservative goals.
As such, people who are seeking treatment for gender dysphoria are the perfect target for the GOP to rail against.
Why does this read word by word like the way the Nazis came to power in Germany?
Ohh, because it is the standard facist playbook.m on how to get people to follow you despite working against their interests.
It’s the same thing they did to black people and indigenous people, then gay people, and now it’s trans people. It was never about protecting anyone, it’s about maintaining their own power by targeting others.
The modern republican electoral ecosystem is sustained through rage and hatred. Their entire campaign strategy is built around the assumption of having a target of some form. Republican voters are simply not able to be activated to go vote (and to stay voting republican) in sufficient quantities without a rage-hate target.
Republicans fundamentally need something to target and hate and be rage filled about. Whether it’s gay marriage, Obamacare, abortion, ebola (remember that in 2014? forgotten the day after the election), immigrants, mask mandates, critical race theory… They need something, anything, no matter how illogical, unethical, or completely incoherent it might be. They do not care about any of those negative details.
Trans people became the conservative rage-hate target of the moment. They throw everything at the wall and this was the target that stuck for the present day.
Republicans are fueled by hate. Issues do not matter to them. Hate and anger matter to them.
Not true, the most popular issues in politics (jobs, roads, economy) used to be the strongest in GOP messaging. This kind of culture war nonsense gets more views on news shows, but polling shows people care about money, healthcare, education, and security more than anything else when it comes to actually voting.
“Used to be” being the operative term. The GOP you speak of is dead, has been dead for many many many years, was dying for many years before it died, and will remain dead until the current party coalitions break down and we see a new alignment of the electorate.
It’s always been a big hate thing and to be seen empathising could mean you’re ‘one of them’ and be outcasted from the tribe. I think they’d find that not many of them actually care but say they do for fear of what the others think of them.
It was never about the children.
Not just it never was, it never is. Anytime you hear anyone saying something should be done to protect the children, they’re almost certainly not being honest. It’s the oldest play in the book, and it still works.
I think they are thinking of protecting the children.
They think they’re protecting the (straight cis) children from trans people. I.e. the only children they actually care about. (And maybe that excludes non-white children, too).
But that’s the issue, they only care about specifically “protecting” their kids from the scary crossdressers and penis scissors, but give a free pass for those same kids to be fetishized at a beauty pageant, molested by a church youth group leader, turned into Swiss cheese by a gunman, or exploited left and right by corrupt businesses withholding essential goods or re-instituting child labor.
The hypocrisy is that they claim they want to protect children while letting them suffer from all these other problems, which are entirely unaddressed and sometimes directly promoted by the RWNJ governments they vote for. Because it’s not really about protecting their kids; it’s about hurting strangers they’re instructed to hate.
Your religion does not prohibit me from anything, it prohibits you. Learn the difference.
And it’s not even about Trans Adults, or Trans Kids, or other LGBTQA+ groups, or any other small marginalized group that really doesn’t have a real political power.
What it is about are sociopathic assholes that want political power and money, who are using the bigotry of simple minded assholes to create “boogie men” that only the sociopaths can “fight” to protect the bigots’ children. When the last “boogie man” has been defeated, there WILL ALWAYS BE ANOTHER that requires the bigoted to vote for the sociopaths to “protect them” yet again. These groups, LGBTQA+, are targeted because there are not enough of them, or they are so marginalized already, that they are unable to push back effectively in the political arena (actually don’t think that is true for LGBTQA+ as a whole, as long as they fight together).
It’s LGBTQA+ now, next it will be some other group that poses a “threat to society”. In 1930’s Germany, this marginalized group were the Jews and, if you read your history, you know how that went. With 4,000,000 Jewish men, women, and children killed. All so that some sociopathic assholes could have power and money.
If you really want to see this in action, read about Germany’s history in the 1930’s.
It is sick, it is disgusting and it is happening in the United States RIGHT NOW.
There are no appropriate apologitics for this type of behavior, PERIOD THE FUCKING END.
How to fix what is going on? If you are of age (18 in the U.S.) to VOTE, then make sure you go to EVERY FUCKING ELECTION you are eligible to vote in. There are a LOT more elections going on, than the Presidential and and mid-terms. You are on the internet, the list for all elections you are eligible to vote in is easily available with a simple search with your favorite search engine.
Tl,Dr: If you are over 18 in the US… GET OUT AND VOTE! It may not be cool, or rad, or whatever the current thing to say is, but if you do not want a future where politicians are living in your uterus and bedroom, VOTE. Especially if you are in the younger generations (Gen Y and Z). Full disclosure, I am a Gen X’er with Silent Generation Parents (pre-Boomer generation).
Voting in Red States is extremely difficult for anyone that has a job and family. That is by design to make sure only the Conservatives vote.
It’s difficult, but not impossible. The GOP counts on making it just difficult enough to add a barrier that will discourage the least interested voters (and particularly in locations where their voter base isn’t located). We still can combat those barriers. Eg, if your state has passed voter ID laws, spread the word well ahead of time and help people get ID. If your state has shitty placement of polling stations, help arrange transportation. Make sure people know about legal protections afforded to them for taking time off work to vote.
And above all, simply encourage voting and dispel misconceptions about “mY vOTe dOeSn’T MattER”. Most people who don’t vote are eligible, have means to do so, and aren’t working the full stretch of polling station hours. They don’t vote because they simply don’t care or are discouraged.
But it is about those groups, it was us first targeted by the Nazis and now it’s us first on the chopping block again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_für_Sexualwissenschaft
In the state of Florida, it is illegal for school teachers to tell their students WHICH books the Nazis chose to burn first.
Elections aren’t going to save us. I will make sure to vote against anybody who has the slightest whiff of engaging in this anti-trans hysteria, but you could hardly describe this place as a democracy to begin with. The desires of the people have absolutely nothing to do with what gets enacted as public policy in this country.
We need to prepare as if the state will do NOTHING to protect us, and treat any counterexample as a pleasant surprise.
Red won the election in 2016: Abortions no longer a civil right nationwide.
Blue won my state in 2020 and 2022: Abortion a right again. (Staewide)
Elections do have impact. Republicans won the election in 2016, so we see their will writ large. Vote, vote, vote, or it will only ever get worse.
Evangelicals hang onto this chump’s every word. They have zero credibility. Funny how they’re supposed to love everyone and be tolerant, but they’re the most hateful intolerant people I’ve ever known.
It’s thanks to Trump and the churches’ not only acceptance, but adoration, that has made me completely dismiss religion. These people are completely full of shit and have zero credibility.
The veil is gone. They have no plausible deniability. They have lost the moral high ground with the rest of the country.
Please check out c/moderate_politics for some high quality discussion!
yup Trump is literally the epitome of lying, greed, adulterering,etc… They just choose to not believe any of it… That’s the problem with people like this. They’ll believe any fucking nonsense and that’s the only proof they need… Their faith.
We as a species that needs to evolve and hopefully last 65 million years like dinosaurs did will need to get past this phase of humanity. Sadly in my lifetime it wont happen, but hopefully eventually it will.
Need some fucking aliens to show up or something
He literally represents every single one of the seven deadly sins.
Well when you see evangelical leaders making millions of dollars and living in multi million dollar mansions and telling their congregation they need to give more because Jesus wants them to have a private jet, pretty sure they’re in it just for the money at that point and they don’t care about anything else. I mean, anyone can get up on stage and talk out of their ass once a week for an hour and make it sound like God chose them for whatever. The only difference between them and the crazy person on the street is that the crazy person doesn’t have a congregation in front of them.
If anyone’s surprised by that, they haven’t been paying attention.
I feel like there’s some relevant saying about this…
“First they came for the trans kids, and I did not speak out because history has shown that authoritarians are perfectly happy to marginalize one very small group and then stop there.”
Or something like that.
They find a lot of joy in making people hurt.
There’s no hate quite like Christian love.
They believe that suffering brings one closer to God, therefore they want us all to suffer as much as they imagine they are suffering.
The vaunted Mother Teresa didn’t want the sick to heal; she actively wanted them to suffer, as it was beautiful to her. It’s not particularly crazy to argue that Christianity is a kind of death cult.
Just adding to what you said. She denied people medicine and medical care because it was “godly” while receiving said care herself.
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It doesn’t stop with trans people, folks! Pretty soon you’ll need a priest to say you can get heart surgery!!
Lol you’re off the deep end pal. You’re free to do whatever you like, all they oppose is you doing it at taxpayer expense.
How fucking naive. You think the evangelical church gives a single fuck about taxpayers? How about they, as an organization, pay taxes first? That would help relieve some of the tax burden placed on literally everyone else to cover the services that they use.
This is 100% related to puritanical social conservative bullshit and has nothing to do with taxes. At all.
Why can’t I oppose things at the taxpayers expense then? Burn any church that isn’t paying taxes to the ground
You’re perfectly free to oppose government spending. I never said otherwise. I fail to see how that relates to arson against people you don’t like
If what it really came down to for people is “taxpayer spending,” then forcing churches to pay taxes should be a front and center issue for conservatives.
But it’s not. Gee I wonder why.
Why would I want the government to tax even more? I want less spending and less taxes. Why would increasing taxation be front and center in that?
Because if churches paid their fair share for all the freebies they get, the average person can pay less in taxes because they stop paying the churches share? How do you do not get this?
It’s just showing that people like you have the dumbest arguments time and time again
They’re against “socialism” as they drive on publicly funded roads. Against “welfare” as they use WIC on food. Against where “my tax dollars go” when they are too poor to pay taxes. Hyper-pro second amendment people who get irritated when people enjoy the 1st amendment in ways they don’t like.
Societies don’t work when everything we hate is shut down. And for the loons on the right, that involves shutting down just about everything.
I’m not sure where and when it became a desired trait to be selfish and lack empathy with people like you, but it’s pathetic
This is my shocked face. This was always the goal
Eliminating excessive government spending is always a good goal
let’s start with the military budget then. There will be no appreciable drops in spending without starting with the Military budget, which accounted for $767,000,000,000 (12.2%) out of the budget last year. For context, NATO recommends member states spend roughly 2-3% on military budget, or $188 Billion from the US budget.
We can also substantially drop costs for the government by nationalizing healthcare, nationalizing railroads, and nationalizing other infrastructure like communications and electricity. Then we can further reduce long-term costs by prioritizing denser housing, eliminating minimum parking requirements, building non-market housing, and substantially increasing the investment into public transit.
I’m not sure what you expect me to do with that because I don’t have any ability to enact national policy changes.
We can also substantially drop costs for the government by nationalizing healthcare, nationalizing railroads, and nationalizing other infrastructure like communications and electricity. Then we can further reduce long-term costs by prioritizing denser housing, eliminating minimum parking requirements, building non-market housing, and substantially increasing the investment into public transit.
Sorry pal, the real world isn’t a general retail advertising campaign. “the more you spend, the more you save” is a lie. You’re just spending more than if you didn’t spend it at all
clearly you haven’t actually looked at the numbers then. It’s cheaper for the country, and all Americans, to have nationalized healthcare. It’s cheaper to handle infrastructure as a nation rather than leaving it to private companies. It’s cheaper to have public transit. It’s cheaper to make housing that doesn’t seek profits. Public transit will actually bring in revenue vs roads, which make $0 in revenue and cost cities/states/the country money to maintain. It costs money to fix the natural disasters caused by companies like PG&E from failing to maintain their electrical infrastructure. It increases GDP and makes people happier when they aren’t dependent on cars. Facts disagree with your feelings.
As long as these dipshit ugly republican women can freely make their face look like they’re allergic to bees yet stuck their face in a hive, how about we just let people take hormones, which only affects themselves, to feel better?
Children getting treatment or not is a legitimate debate and it’s not my call
But we let adults drink themselves to death, watch Fox news, gain 600 pounds, box each other, avoid brushing their teeth, get Botox, get plastic surgery, get tattoos on their faces, use antidepressants, decide to be Christian, damage their hearing at concerts, avoid working out, and any number of hundreds of things that some people find harmful.
But suddenly they draw the line if someone they never associate with wants to take medicine or alter themselves, affecting only themselves. Why? You never have to deal with them. Just let them live
Elon’s hairplugs. Joe Rogan’s roids. Trump’s hair-replacement surgeries and shoe lifts. Andrew Tate’s beard. Tim Pool’s beanies. Little blue pills in every nightstand.
Right-wing men love to address their own dysphoria.
Well, if you’re a loser you have to peak at some level. Still loser but you have more of something. Those people are heroes to them
You can be utterly stupid, annoying, ignorant, and revolting but there’s a place for you to succeed. Losers need loser heroes
yeah have nothing against it.
also i like how they’re screaming “My body, my choice”, but shut up immediately as soon as trans people are mentioned.
I think that hrt should be limited to 16+ just like most other life changing decisions tho.What they do with kids isn’t transformative though. It’s literally a pause so they can get counseling on how to proceed. Then when they’re older and sure they either just unpause or start hormone transition. It’s about not traumatizing them with a puberty going the wrong way. You can’t just ignore it until 16-18.
They always have a rallying cry until it affects them then it’s clear it was never about that. Always for prayer until it’s not Christian. Always for states rights until a state wants to do something like legalize abortion. Always for freedom of speech until companies use it to set their own terms of service.
Just lying sacks of hypocritical shit. They’re free to live the miserable, difficult, stifled, no fun life they’ve chosen to live. But that doesn’t give them the right to force others into their hellscape
Respect!! You really pointed it good.
Well yeah they’ve been mad ever since we started demanding to be treated as equals and stopped pretending it was ok to shovel us all into roles of their shameful prostitute.
I think it’s more insidious than that. Plain old bigotry is one thing. It’s wrong and bad, but I don’t think this is that. They need a targeted out-group to organize their in-group against so they don’t look at what bad things they’re doing and instead look at what they’re doing to the “bad” people. It’s not that the politicians necessarily hate trans people, rather that villainizing trans people let’s them sneak behind the bigots backs and do things that harm them without them even noticing.
Exactly! It’s telling people to hate their neighbors, coworkers, even their children sometimes just so they can pick their pocket and poison their air. Or even just encouraging the hate already present. A true act of evil if I ever saw one
“I will ban all taxpayer funding for sex or gender transitions at any age,” said Trump
Who the fuck thinks taxpayers are paying for people to transition? I mean, if we had medicare for all, that’d be the case. But no one is getting a government handout to transition. And yet the hate continues to fester.
It is possible to get transition care while on Medicaid in some states, at least. Because it’s healthcare! So that would qualify at “taxpayer funded.” I know some states explicitly ban it, and not sure what Medicare covers. There are also government employees who can get transition care through their insurance, so could be considered taxpayer funded?
In any case, I’d much rather have all trans people be able to get taxpayer funded transition related care.
They are. Namely for poor people, veterans, government employees. Basically people who the government provides healthcare for. My bottom surgery was partially subsidized through the ACA as I was unemployed at the time and because it’s a medically necessary procedure (according to the AMA and APA) that I’d been pursuing for years.
As a complete aside, many, many years ago, before the internet was really a thing, and trans people were not nearly as visible, a friend once told me about a friend of theirs who was getting “bottom surgery” and, because that was literally the first time I’d ever heard that term, I had concocted an image in my head of like, a butthole widening or something, you know, to help him become a better bottom. It’s been 30+ years and they still make fun of me for that.
This is the best interpretation ive ever heard and I will now introduce it to my trans masc friend.
And the people who froth about this shit the most don’t even pay taxes.
Poor people in poor states, churches/pastors and shit. They pay less in taxes than a teenager working at McDonald’s yet they think they can tell everyone how it has to be spent
Armed forces maybe?
I learned that some folks maybe have coverage. Best wishes to those who were covered!
First they came for the trans people…
Trans people aren’t their first victims. Just ask black people.
Trans, Blacks, Foreigners, Poor People, Women, Homosexuals/etc., Atheists, Democrats - basically anyone who is not Wealthy, White, Christian, & Republican are their victims, both past and future.
i wish the left could just pass a law banning harmful religion
i personally don’t care what you believe nor should freedom of religion go away, but this is exhausting
it’d be nice if we could just split into different countries; tired of dealing with these people. let them have their own fascist christian everyone-that’s-not-a-cishet-white-man-phobic country with zero taxes and fucked up roads and people realizing they have no choice but to hang themselves by their bootstraps when shit hits the fan. the rest of us will have a country where we take care of each other and don’t engage in harmful, childish drama.
let them have their own fascist christian everyone-that’s-not-a-cishet-white-man-phobic country
Gay and trans people would still be born there.
they can move to our progressive country with zero barriers.
So assuming the fascist nation doesn’t restrict the movement of or exterminate lgbtq people, will your theoretical progressive nation provide relocation expenses and therapy for the ~20 years of abuse that is growing up lgbtq in a house of hate? Because there’s no way the fascist faction is just sending their kids to the enemy. They have to make it to adulthood in a dangerous environment, figure out their circumstances without education or information on the subject, and make the decision to leave behind everything they know for at best total mystery/at worst every lie they’ve been told about the enemy. Considering the extreme disparity of lgbtq acceptance and safety already extant, this idea changes very little. It lumps all the safe and unsafe places together, making it more difficult to get to a safe place.
what are you currently doing for all the children in all the other countries where it isn’t safe to be lgbt? is your plan to take over those countries? what is your plan here now? if we don’t secede, what are we doing? the fascists are winning here. we can leave or we can let them win; we are doing nothing which is letting them win. you can’t save everyone.
Not that this is really relevant to your fantasy of a Glorious Civil War of Separation, but I am a trans woman with a history of winning over conservatives and helping them grow to understanding in the rural Midwest. When I worked at a trucking motel, I led a series of truckers to the conclusion that trans people are just normal people, except this particular one who is the best damn front desk agent they can get for under $200 (for the record, our CDL rate was under $100). Now I work at the single busiest dispensary in the city where I do the same thing because even fascists love weed. Even without any group affiliation, I put myself in danger to do important and successful grassroots work in my day to day life that I could not do if separated from the people who need to see and hear me. I am pushing for change every day in one of the battleground locations for trans rights and have never lived somewhere that was safe for and accepting of me. Separating into a fascist and free state abandons people like me, people who fight where it counts because we were born where minorities don’t get rights.
This was essentially our approach for slavery, but it’s fundamentally flawed. Allowing exploitation and bigotry in some other location isn’t a fix.
so we allow them to continue to pass bigoted laws? because that’s what’s happening. i’m disabled, unable to work, and lgbt. i’ve got maybe $10 to last me for a month, not enough food stamps to cover food. this shit is scaring me. if i want to move to a progressive country i need to work there; they aren’t accepting people who will drain their resources. they’re killing us. let them kill themselves.
And for the people like you who happen to live in the new Fascist America, fuck them? Fascism is not a joke you can just quarantine, it’s hyper militaristic and imperialistic. If the country split, and one half was fascist, we’d be at war within a decade.
yes! what about the people currently all over the world who are lgbt and live in countries where being lgbt is fucking illegal? what are you doing for them?
yeah, it’s not a fucking joke, it’s spreading and we’re just sitting here complaining about it while it fucking gets worse. abortion rights out the window, lgbt rights out the window. it is already happening here. what’s your alternative?
My alternative to a fascist America is a non-fascist one. Fascists are reactionaries, they see the writing on the wall and they come out of hiding.
As boomers die off, the percentage of bigots in relation to the total population will continue to drop. Instead of giving them safe refuge in another country, we actively combat these fascist ideologies, and also allow their main proponents to die off naturally.
like in an abusive relationship, the abused are not responsible for the shitty actions of the abuser. you don’t tell the abused to stay and wait for the abuser to have a change of heart, you get them the hell out of there.
There’s certain things a parent wants to hear, or doesn’t, that makes them happy and proud.
When my daughter said she isn’t religious, mostly because her fundamentalist cousins turned her off to it, I was a proud and happy dad
