Right Wing Watch 👀 At CPAC, Republicans Weaponize Transphobia in a Sign of What’s to Come.

Kristen Doerer

“The left has told us something that should put fear into the heart of every parent,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene began her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday morning. “They said they’re coming for our children.” Dressed in a light pink blazer and with straightened bleach blonde hair, Greene painted a gruesome (and fictional) picture: a multibillion dollar industry preying on kids and eager to subject them to life-altering surgery.

“I am going to be introducing my bill, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, that will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender care on children,” she said. The crowd roared in applause.

At CPAC, held this past weekend at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in National Harbor, Maryland, trans bashing—and talking about kids’ genitals—was a main theme. Panels were dedicated to it, speakers harped on so-called “transgender ideology,” and politicians threw out one-liners about trans people when they were short on applause. CPAC is a place where rhetoric and strategy are typically tested, where politicians get a sense of what lands with their base, and this past weekend, Republican politicians eagerly deployed transphobia for their gain. 

Continue reading @ Right Wing Watch.

US Republicans Weaponize Transphobia

Right Wing Watch 👀 At CPAC, Republicans Weaponize Transphobia in a Sign of What’s to Come.

Kristen Doerer

“The left has told us something that should put fear into the heart of every parent,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene began her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday morning. “They said they’re coming for our children.” Dressed in a light pink blazer and with straightened bleach blonde hair, Greene painted a gruesome (and fictional) picture: a multibillion dollar industry preying on kids and eager to subject them to life-altering surgery.

“I am going to be introducing my bill, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, that will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender care on children,” she said. The crowd roared in applause.

At CPAC, held this past weekend at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in National Harbor, Maryland, trans bashing—and talking about kids’ genitals—was a main theme. Panels were dedicated to it, speakers harped on so-called “transgender ideology,” and politicians threw out one-liners about trans people when they were short on applause. CPAC is a place where rhetoric and strategy are typically tested, where politicians get a sense of what lands with their base, and this past weekend, Republican politicians eagerly deployed transphobia for their gain. 

Continue reading @ Right Wing Watch.

20 comments:

  1. Gender/Identity 'science' is in a pre-paradigm phase. Identity affirmation for children & minors may yet turn out to be unwise. Likewise, allowing transgender women to participate in female categories is highly suspect.

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  2. This nonsense is nothing more than mass hysteria/social contagion that people who really should have known better allowed to go unchallenged. I refuse to partake in someone's mental illness or sexual fantasy. Much like religion, you can play with your toys all you like, stop forcing the rest of us to play with your toys. I don't want to play along with your toys in a game that's in your head only.

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    1. This is the same sort of irrationality that was all too frequently used against gay people and still is: the hate theology types would label gays as an abomination or mentally ill which gay conversion therapy could cure. That was the nonsense, not they gays.
      Why the bilious need to stigmatise transgender people as mentally ill?
      There is no need for you to agree with them or their choices, but to label them for choosing seems much more harmful than anything they are doing.
      I think Gearoid O Loinsigh makes some good critiques yet it is not the people he attacks but the woke mentality that seeks to suffocate discussion of the matter.

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  3. But it's ALL about labels. What they want is for the rest of the world to play along with what is verifiably false. As it stands a person can display all the outward biological markers of a sex and because they 'believe' they were born into the wrong body we all must go along with it..I'm sorry but no. I'm not going to be anything other than respectful but I'm not going along with it.

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    1. You don't have to go along with it. The right to dissent is paramount. But don't be saying you are being respectful when you are labelling them as mentally ill.

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    2. They label themselves as they wish and want the rest of the world to go along with it. Fundamentally it is a mental disorder despite what the woke media try to push. They very well may indeed feel they are in the 'wrong' gender as to what is on the outside but that just reaffirms it. They have my pity but not my compliance. There's going to be hell to pay in a few years when the doctor's who went along with 'gender affirming' treatments on minors have to pay the piper when they get older and realise they don't feel that way anymore...and wake up to mutilated genitalia and screwed hormone system. Not to mention a lot of these kids might just be gay and haven't worked that out, I'm surprised the gay community haven't said anything about this too.

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    3. They want to be accepted for what they are - most people do. Same mental disorder slur was thrown the way of the gays. So you can understand why I am suspicious of it. They don't have your pity when you are accusing them of being mentally ill, any more than the Gay Therapy gang pity the people they say need therapy.
      I think the point about hell to pay might prove valid. I feel it unwise for a society to rush into these things. The one thing is that it is not being carried out forcibly against the wishes of the young person or without their knowledge. That can't be said for circumcision and and clitoridectomy - abuses that I hope result in court cases when the children come of age.

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    4. OK maybe my wording was too abrasive. But my opinion of what it is hasn't changed. If a deeply held belief about something is genuinely held...so what? You'd be the first to go nuts if some dress wearing theocrat tried to teach kids morality, and you'd be right to do so, but what if their belief is also deeply held? Should we acquiesce?

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    5. You don't have to accept the deeply held belief of another. You don't even have to respect the belief. You are free to criticise it. It should never be imposed on you in the style of theocrats. The difference between trans and theocrats is that theocrats want their life situation to be replicated throughout society and for everybody to be a theocrat. The Trans don't want you to be trans nor recommend it for others who believe they are not trans, but simply want you to allow them to be trans without you pathologising their dissent from the norm you subscribe to.
      The great thing about science is that it can intervene and make life much more tolerable for people. So why not avail of it? At the same time the very real concerns expressed by people like yourself, Henry Joy and Gearoid need to be factored into any understanding of and discourse on the phenomenon. My issue is not your difference of opinion but the smearing, as I see it, of Trans people as mentally ill. It is an old Soviet tactic and has been used against the Gay community.

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  4. Doctors can perform cosmetic surgery they cannot change a persons biological sex. They will still be the sex they were at birth and nothing can change that. What they appear to want is for the rest of us to pretend they have magically changed from a woman to a man or the much more likely ( x 2- x4 times!) man to woman. I couldn't care less about a person's sexual preferences as long as they are not a nonce and it's consensual but I'm just not going along with make believe. That's all.

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    1. And what would it matter if they can't change a person's biological sex? They can't grow a new leg for an amputee but few are gonna get on their high horse and rant about prosthetics not being real legs. If it gets people through the night, why should it matter to others? Sounds a bit like insisting on telling a step mother that she is not the real mother to the child. She behaves like the real mother, the child reacts to her like it would the real mother - it would take a zealot of some hue driven by whatever to keep proclaiming 'I am not going along with that.'
      I don't give a flying fuck if biologically they can't change sex. If they can change from A to B and it gives them a quality of life previously denied them I am not going to shout 'retard - you should be in a mental institution.' Fuck that.

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    2. What bathroom should they use?

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    3. It is hard to imagine modern complex societies not overcoming that problem. Off the top of my head, those who are legally recognised and have made the transition can use the toilet of what legal gender they belong to. Self declaration would not be enough. Unisex toilest is probably where most societies will evolve. I doubt there will be a problem in men's toilets but the space for women has to be protected.

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    4. What a woman has always been. Then in my view we have transwomen: people who were men but felt totally alienated from the male form and with the help of science made the trans. They now feel they are women - if science can be used to improve someone's life rather than them living a life of misery and unhappiness, I'm fine with that. If science can remove the hump from our back, good. Those who wish to shout 'hunchback, go back to being what you really are', I'm not fine with that. I see that as cruel, not making the trans.

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    5. OK fair enough but now we are bringing a 3rd categorisation into the mix. I'm never going to hurl abuse at someone, but I'm not comfortable with my 10 year old daughter going to a public bathroom with a potential fully grown adult male who's trans so call me all you like just don't call me late for dinner. The unisex toilet is a non-starter. I can't imagine any woman wanting to sit in a cubicle next to Bob the Builder who's been on the turps and curry the night before as he shatterblasts the bowl in a loud and triumphant manner. Besides the queues would be miles long!

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  5. Right wingers have certainly been weaponising transphobia for their own ends (incorrectly depicting most as sexual deviants and potential paedophiles whenever the vast majority just want to be left alone to live their lives in peace), but it's often ignored by some that it's the left who keep handing the right such opportunities by insisting that

    - there are no differences between men and women
    - that 'man' and 'woman' are social constructs

    By blurring the boundaries between gender and sex (as well as insisting that the state teach children about matters that were normally left to parents), the left have allowed themselves to be painted as, at best, people who do not understand science (which is ironic as most of them screamed "LISTEN TO THE SCIENCE" during COVID) and, at worst, people who do not care about the safety and welfare of vulnerable children and adults, pushing them onto a life altering path that they have little understanding of (by naming yourself 'Barbie Kardashian', you are either trolling or your understanding of womanhood is so minute you may as well have lifted such a worldview from pornography).

    Trans people have existed for millennia. No denying that. But while virtually all trans people (up until fairly recently) wanted to 'pass' as their particular gender, the above has led to situations where people can openly state that they are 'trans non-binary' (a contradiction in terms) and, if someone does not accept this, then such a person can be vilified.

    According to Spiked (yes, yes, I know):

    "Laoise Uí Aodha de Brún, founder of the Countess, an Irish organisation advocating for women and children, has likened the treatment of women in Limerick Prison to Ireland’s ‘historic incarceration and systemic torture of unmarried women and the trafficking of their babies’. This was ‘a system overseen, inspected and funded by the state for 80 years’. In (Barbie) Kardashian’s case, ‘The Irish state failed a little boy who maybe had a chance, and is now placing a monster of its own making in the same wing as the women under its care and custody in Limerick Prison; women whose pathway to incarceration was male violence’. ‘This’, she says, ‘is the face of “New Progressive Ireland”. The Irish media have not dared question this policy.’ Indeed, until Varadkar was questioned last night about Kardashian, not a ‘single elected representative’ had been called on to defend it, she says."

    Maybe a little strong to compare such a case to the institutional abuses suffered. However, thanks to the enforced silence around this case, and the violence towards women, I can see why some would make the comparison. It's also a logical outcome of the thinking depicted above and has led us into a situation where we have rapists identifying as women in order to get into female prisons.

    Is it any wonder right wingers have been so keen to run with this?

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    1. I avoid using the term phobia - because of how Brendan O'Neill characterised it - the pathologising of dissent. Social construct theory has been around for aeons, much of it based on the rejection of essentialism. There is a clear distinction between a man and a woman, yet both belong to the human species. Within that species the trans can be made without detracting from the species. That is the value of the science. There are lots of things that follow on such as the issues around women's prisons and in the sporting arena that concern me more than people making the trans.
      I think it should be the role of the state to teach things that were traditionally the role of parents. The state has an obligation to provide children with a minimum standard of education and that might infringe on the traditional role of the parents, particularly if it clashes with the rleigious beliefs of parents. Is trans something that should be prioritised? I can think of other things I think would be more beneficial if taught in school.
      Dissenting from the trans view or the gay view for that matter should be permissible. Villification is the risk we all run in a secular society with its defence of the right to mock ideas. Nobody should be persecuted for not agreeing with the gay or trans view of the world.
      I keep going back to the point that trans in and of itself is not the problem - the attempt by the dictatorship of the woketariat to compel eveybody to believe what they might not believe is the more serious issue.
      Plus the points often raised by Henry Joy and Steve - is society abandoning a duty of care to vulnerable people by taking a fad approach rather than a reasoned one? In short, is it rushing its fences without giving due consideration to the long term effects?
      Bottom, line, I suppose, is should people have the right to trans?

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    2. "Bottom, line, I suppose, is should people have the right to trans?"
      Unequivocally yes.

      Should children be allowed to access hormone blockers and undergo sex reassignment surgery?
      Fuck no.

      There have been studies showing that kids who are confused at an early age settle into their identities if left well alone. The vast majority of these just turn out to be gay, which is perfectly OK. I have first hand experience of what someone who was confused went through, a child of narcissistic parents, who thought the only way she could be happy was to transition into a boy. She's now a very happy mother after a lot of work and a successful businesswoman to boot.

      It used to take a year of weekly meetings to get the ok from the Medical establishment to transition, now it takes 3 meetings and the doctors are terrified of refusing. WTF is that about?

      We have gay blood relatives who are increasingly uneasy about the who trans thing for very good reason, those kids are probably just gay, and that result would probably be a lot less impactful on the kids when they grow up.

      This is an interesting article.

      https://www.saltwire.com/atlantic-canada/news/canadians-who-reverse-gender-transition-need-better-care-advocates-say-100831401/

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    3. "Social construct theory has been around for aeons, much of it based on the rejection of essentialism. There is a clear distinction between a man and a woman, yet both belong to the human species. Within that species the trans can be made without detracting from the species. That is the value of the science. "

      Agreed. Hence why I find it infuriating to read people trying to pass off unverified scientific reports as fact, while others are nearly suppressed.

      "There are lots of things that follow on such as the issues around women's prisons and in the sporting arena that concern me more than people making the trans."

      Agreed. However, those issues have arisen out of people trying to broaden the definition of the tern 'trans'.

      "I think it should be the role of the state to teach things that were traditionally the role of parents. The state has an obligation to provide children with a minimum standard of education and that might infringe on the traditional role of the parents, particularly if it clashes with the rleigious beliefs of parents. Is trans something that should be prioritised? I can think of other things I think would be more beneficial if taught in school."

      Parents and schools need to compliment each other. It shouldn't be up to the school to instill morality into their pupils. Parents and immediate family should supply that. Kids should also be taught that there are alternative viewpoints as well. However, if this report is to be believed, teaching gender ideology as a fact, is a little worrying: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/mar/08/sex-education-review-is-politically-motivated-say-teaching-unions

      "Dissenting from the trans view or the gay view for that matter should be permissible. Villification is the risk we all run in a secular society with its defence of the right to mock ideas. Nobody should be persecuted for not agreeing with the gay or trans view of the world."

      Once again, agreed. However, I think we all know that it also comes along with death threats, cancellation attempts and (in some cases) physical violence.

      "I keep going back to the point that trans in and of itself is not the problem - the attempt by the dictatorship of the woketariat to compel eveybody to believe what they might not believe is the more serious issue."

      Yes, but there's also something deeply postmodern about the attempts to expand trans into something that plays on the insecurities of vulnerable people.

      "Bottom, line, I suppose, is should people have the right to trans?"

      Absolutely, providing they are over 18, have gone through counselling and it has been concluded by both patient and doctor that this the only way to go.

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