Conservatives Strive for a New Low in Their War Against Transgender Citizens
The Despicability Quotient of the Republican Party continues to escalate as its evil tentacles grasp for yet another vulnerable scapegoat!
There’s an organized, well-funded, quickly spreading, terror campaign going on in America right now. No, it’s not coming from the Commies. Not from the Russians (they are busy in Ukraine). Not from Al Qaeda, ISIS or the Taliban. Not from Boko Haram. Not from Black Panthers. Not from Mexicans. Not from Drug Cartels. Not from Gangs. Not from Anarchists. It’s actually no surprise where it’s coming from.
It’s coming from our old friends. The Slavers. The Indian-killers. The Tories. The Confederates. The White Supremacists. The Anti-Semites. The Anti-Suffragettes. The Anti-Environmentalists. The Strike-breakers. The Gay bashers. The Meatheads. The Conformists. The Clones. The Bullies. The Born-Again. The Fascists. Yes, the Prohibitionists are back. It’s the Conservatives! Same as they ever were. Conserving their advantage, privilege and power… rising to impose their will on everyone else, demanding the freedom to trample on that of others, and ever seeking weaker scapegoats as fuel for their fear, loathing, hate, division and violence. Divide and conquer… that’s the only way they can win.
So here we go again. In the crosshairs of their ignorant insecurity, vitriol, disgust, hatred and neediness for yet another wedge issue to daze and confuse their ignoble constituency is THE MOST vulnerable population in this nation: transgender people, including little children.
Emboldened by their exhilarating theft of full autonomy for women, reducing them once again to second class citizens, robbing them of the birth control and healthcare they formerly legally possessed and forcing then again into the back alley shadows or midnight runs across state borders for an abortion, conservative zealots are now deigning to sever from society its transgender problem, writing laws in over 30 states that will ban discussion of the subject in schools, criminalize doctors and clinics and reach right into the homes and lives of families to tell parents how to raise their children. Ah yes, the “small government” folks… except when they aren’t.
These conservative monsters would take away the liberty, the equality, the justice, the education, the healthcare, the community, the identity, the self-autonomy, the very lives of these Americans. Inflamed by an array of entirely despicable human beings masquerading as patriots, throwing aside science, decorum, decency and morality, the Republican Party has now officially declared war on transgender people. The Party of “Liberty!” is once again busy, busy, busy determined to use hook or crook to deny liberty to someone else. Death will be the result.
According to conservatives, it’s a war of morality. It damned sure is. And they are — surprise, surprise — on the wrong side. Again.
Well, who can be truly surprised? It’s far from the first time conservatives have attacked other Americans. For centuries, they had no problem whatsoever snuffing out the lives of Native Americans, Black slaves, revolutionary soldiers, Union soldiers, and countless other innocent victims in the long reign of white, male, “Christian,” conservative, unquestioned hegemony. If we, in the modern world, had believed that, just maybe, we had exited the worst of that foul stage of history, look who is back to remind us that they haven’t changed a bit. No vulnerable minority is safe from their exploitation, subjugation, oppression… or eradication. Ask the many Native American tribes that no longer exist. Oh, sorry, can’t do that… because… they no longer exist!
Extinction is the fate that some — make that many — conservatives are now angrily projecting for this thing, this creature, this offense to their ever so fragile sensibilities and not so loving god, this abomination called transgender. Hello and wake the hell up if this doesn’t send a shiver down your spine.
Again, the mob is being led by a clever elite who should know better, but are drunk in pursuit of power. There are no actual facts behind their fear and rage. Never mind any biology or psychology or history or philosophy or morality which underscores how natural, though somewhat unusual, are variations of sexual biology, not to mention the complexities of the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses that forge the brain of any particular human being. Trans people are a tiny minority, but not all that rare. They are in every community of any size, and maybe even within your extended family, whether you know it or not. They have existed throughout history, and all around the world. In many cultures they were accepted, even revered. In India, one of the primary deities is bi-gender. In Buddhism, one of the most popular deities is Avalokiteshvara, who departed India as a male and wound up in China as the female Guanyin. Beautiful stories.
Not here. To American conservatives transgenders are a malevolent force to be feared, something to be erased, by hook or crook. Why, transgender people lurking in society would destroy their world, taint their lifestyle, impinge upon their tradition, agitate their custom, corrupt the nation… just like freed slaves, voting women, workers with rights, biracial and gay marriage, Obamacare, to name a few past (and perhaps future) boogey-men, were going to do. Oh woe are the poor, victimized conservatives, shaking in their penny loafers. They truly are the biggest fraidy cats in all the land. Which leaves them extremely dangerous.
Heaven knows conservatives don’t give a damn about what Jesus actually said and called them to do (you know, love one another?), fixated as they are simply on the myth that he was resurrected from death and now stands as their convenient portal into their other myth, heaven. But the actual, brown-skinned, dark-haired, Jewish, Yeshua actually knew all about transgender people, and was perfectly fine with them… indeed hinting that they might just be spiritually superior to the cisgender condition.
Check out Matthew 19, where Jesus says:
“What God has joined together, let no one separate… I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
Oops, sorry, I was still thinking about how conservatives don’t give a damn about what Jesus actually said. Just after the divorce bit, he also says this about “eunuchs,” the term of the era of which some were most certainly what we today would call “transgender.”
“Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs [usually slaves] who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept this.”
This may well be the most ignored paragraph in the entire New Testament. But in some ways it is one of the most profound. The “kingdom of heaven is within you” concept is one of the most important utterances of Jesus. It concords with mystics in many other traditions, the idea that you need nothing else: happiness, bliss, love are already inside you… just open up to it. Here in this passage, he is stating that others know about this “kingdom of heaven” thing, that to them “this word” has “been given,” and apparently they didn’t need the dead Jesus to find it. This refutes that later, perversely divisive, Christian belief that Jesus, himself, is the one and only way to ascend to heaven. Also, here he is, again, imploring his flock to accept and befriend the stranger, the misunderstood, the downtrodden, the outcast.
These people Jesus knew and apparently befriended who “were born this way” might today include some inter-sexed people with variations upon the normal XX or XY 23rd chromosomal pair, but also those whose sexual organs were standard but brains were wired (by God?) in utero, to think and feel in ways diametrically opposite to their biological apparatus. Those who “choose” to live this way are people who gave the societally-ordained “birth gender” an extended try, but eventually decided to risk, well, everything, to live a life more authentic to their thoughts and feelings. They just want to live their lives. They (except in the rarest of rare occasions) don’t want to hurt anyone. It is surely a physical transformation that they embark upon (thus the “trans”), but it’s potentially far deeper than that… it is a psychological reckoning, an emotional balancing, a spiritual quest… the all-American pursuit of happiness, to locate and embody one’s true self. Isn’t that the Land of Opportunity’s higher “dream” — not possessions, but full knowledge and possession of the Self? Declaring “Gender Liberty,” an all-American declaration of independence from the tyranny of biology is, in fact, a brave and thrilling gift to everyone! It opens up exponentially wider opportunities for ways of being in the world. Such a transformative journey is not just physical, intellectual and emotional; it carries great spiritual potential, as well. In a sense, it is that interior “kingdom of heaven” they seek.
But, of course, none of this makes a flicker of sense to the inflexible, unimaginative conservative, determined to conserve their ignorant conformity, hoary customs and binary thinking. Throughout history, all such “liberations” of and for individuals outside the conformist core of society have ripped at the cloth of the dominator hierarchy. Its backlash can be cruel, unjust and tragic.
Alas, Jesus was right about “not everyone can accept this word.” You know who he was thinking of there, don’t you? Of course. Conservatives… the ones he knew would eventually kill him! And they did not disappoint.
There are a lot of “words” and “truth” and higher consciousness conservatives cannot accept. Like everything else in the Bible, or American sacred documents, that they don’t like, conservatives simply shove the offending passages aside and continue rummaging for bits and pieces that seem to condone their domineering… even as they profess to be the “real” believers in both Christ and America.
These friends of Jesus are no friends of theirs. They are fiends. Freaks. Mutants. Perverts. Miscreants. Disgusting deviants. And look! Give then an inch, they will take over your girls’ soccer team. These creepy queers are now coming out of the woodwork! Infecting all of society with their wacky pronouns. Indoctrinating our precious bot-kids with their drag shows and egads, rainbows! Upsetting the holy duality of the world and poisoning culture in wanting to use the wrong restroom.
News flash! There are hardly any true “dualities” in the Universe. Holding such a worldview is to be deaf, dumb and blind to reality itself. The world explodes into colorful diversity, spectra upon spectra upon spectra. Everywhere you look there’s a rainbow.
The same is true of biological sex and gender. So why in the world, in the 21st Century, are we still talking about sex and gender in the same uptight, skittish, priggish, uninformed, unenlightened, dualistic way as were dolts of Victorian England? Well, conservatism, of course. We have yet to break free from the Spell of Stupidity and Blanket of Belligerence that it chronically attempts to throw upon society.
It is crucial to note that in their zeal to protect their children from the scourge of the LGBTQ “agenda” (or “menace” depending on the extremity of their confusion), they are doing those same children no favors. Told matter-of-factly at a young age that some boys like boys, and some girls like girls, and some boys want to be girls, and some girls want to be boys, the response from kids is almost universally an affable, “Okay!” They have not one mote of a problem with it. Instead, it is their creepy parents who are deviously inculcating, “grooming” the next generation of sadistic dominators, saddling innocent children with a quite likely permanent, irrational sexual psychosis (that may ricochet with a vengeance between the eyes of the parents if that kid turns out to be trans… something no amount of bullying is going to succeed in suppressing) and a self-bedeviling prejudice that is very likely going to be socially reprehensible (again) in the near future. There breeds the bullies, and murderers, of trans people in the near future.
Back to that 23rd chromosome pair, the oddball duo at the end of a deft and talented string of twenty-two other pairs of autosomes. This troublesome chromosomal pair only serves one purpose: to facilitate reproduction (well, it can also pass along nasty medical conditions, such as hemophilia). Why is culture so transfixed by this single pair, particularly that testy Y chromosome… out of forty-four other building blocks of our physical selves? Why are we so beguiled as to think of ourselves, so publicly, so prominently, so primarily, so primitively as “male” or “female?” Other animals do not seem to be so obsessed with ever preening and presenting as lady or gentlemen in their respective habitats and social encounters. They have sex, have babies, then get back to being just bears or giraffes or trout or kangaroos or whatever. Not us. We feel the social imperative to, at every waking moment, prove our self manly man or pretty woman. Anything less, or in between, is regarded with suspicion, pity, disgust. And, too often, violence. Toxic masculinity and pathetically primping femininity are not admirable features of human civilization, they are nasty bugs. Both men and women, and everything in-between and beyond, are emotionally crippled by this absurd, reductionist and inescapable self and societal identity. There it is everywhere, on every document, an “M” or and “F,” in the immediate pjudgment of every onlooker, “male” or “female!” Why reduce women to maiden, seductress (whore), mother, crone, and men to big bwana hunter (in one way or another) rather than everyone as dreamer, thinker, doer of a rainbow of things that don’t give a damn what private parts are brought to the activity? Imprisonment in gender penitentiary becomes especially malevolent when one inmate deigns to further dominate and sequester a “weaker” inmate (though the latter may have the last, bitter laugh, outliving the barbarian). Surely much of what passes as “gender norms” is unapologetic misogyny and a kind of fascism masquerading as genteel society.
Autocratic conservatives with corncobs up their butt demand that we are all prisoners of our biology, and, specifically, slaves of the 23rd chromosome. Biology is destiny, they say, there is no escape. The “X,” the “Y,” this is your essence. First and foremost, they believe, you and I and everyone else are sexual beings. This perception seems bizarre coming from those to whom sex is naughty, nasty, obscene, corrupt, sinful, vulgar, sordid, pernicious, debauched, reprobate, degenerate, disreputable. So believe those who, obviously, are so self-repressed they are obsessed with what is dangling, or not, between their legs, and yours, and everyone else’s. They don’t see anyone as fully human; just a sex doll. Of course, believing like this makes it incredibly easy to accept that all people are “born in sin,” and thus dirty and dangerous. And through this distorted lens they don’t see trans kids as just children, little souls, hearts and minds trying to pursue happiness; they see sinful little dicks and pussies where, in a rigid, frigid world, they don’t belong.
That pathetic, simple-minded perception is bad enough. But then conservative confusion and fear turns to irritation, anger, meanness and violence. “Pro Life” these people are decidedly not. Indeed, life is ridiculously cheap to these dullards. And this entire anti-trans stunt, designed strictly to rev up the ire of the voting base, is virtually guaranteed to create a wave of bullies… and murderers… of trans people. Their blood will be on the hands of these political demons.
What right do they have to interfere so severely in the lives of trans people? None. Zero. But they don’t agree. Remember: they are the proper rulers of society. Put more than three or four of these anachronistic true-believers together and a crusading, persecuting mob you have. Such is what is building, nationwide, as Republicans stir up the gullible to march out again on one of their favored activities: hunting witches!
Watch carefully. And beware. America should not be rushing to join the other nations where trans people are also verboten. Those would be some of the worst countries on the globe. Hello Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Nigeria. Yet so long as conservatism is hale and hardy in our nation, that possibility is ever present. Hopefully, this episode of trying to eradicated transgender people from society may soon go down as yet another shameful chapter in a long, long list of abject conservative moral failures. On the other hand it could be a vote-winning, springboard to further steps backward toward the Dark Ages. Conservatism is always in need of such scapegoats to demonize. If you aren’t a fairly well-to-do white, male, hetero, cisgender, “Christian,” your turn to have the crooked, black hat shoved down upon your crown by the mob may be coming soon. They only had to pack the courts with like-minded, puritanical judges to suddenly abolish legal abortions. Just think what their hand-picked judges could do about the problem of… you!
