GOP Transphobia

The Republican party is a mess. It has been a mess for as long as I can remember as they've always built their support base around moral panic of some sort. Right now it's the transgender people who are their targets, and it shows how far Republicans are willing to go while sowing hate, fear and prejudice.

If you're working class and live in America and still vote Republican, I can't help but ask: why? Who do you hate so much that you're willing to vote against your own interests so hard? It's the party of tax cuts for the rich, it's the party that wants to break down whatever little social safety net there's left in your country. Why vote for such a party? Why vote for politicians who can't even decide among themselves who to make their Speaker of the House? As I'm typing these words, Kevin McCarthy has lost 13 rounds in four days; the last time multiple rounds were needed was exactly 100 years ago in 1923, and that vote was decided after 9 rounds. But this internal bickering isn't even the main sign of this party's incompetence and uselessness; it's their decades long reliance on targeted campaigns against some underprivileged and marginalized section of the population, just because they know there's no other way for them to get the votes.

Their newest targeted campaign is against transgenders. Suddenly they're very worried about amateur sports and what bathrooms are used by this tiny part of the population. This started a few years ago already but really heated up before the mid-term elections last year. When Lia Thomas became the first trans athlete to win the NCAA swimming title in March 2022, it made international news because suddenly the anti-trans brigade was very interested in college sports. But when they are asked if they remember who finished second, they don't know, revealing that it's not the sport they're interested in, just the politicized debate around transgender participation.

Proposals for anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has increased exponentially since 2016. Fortunately not all these laws were passed, Republicans don't control every state after all, but the mere attempt to deny these people their right to simply exist, to participate in life just like any other citizen, should tell us something about how deep the hate goes. Mind you, almost none of the people who repeat the concerns spouted by the conservative opinion makers have contact with, or are in any way influenced by LGBTQ+ people in their personal lifes. They'll almost certainly never even meet a transgender person, but they still feel it's necessary to make their lifes hell.

To see how deep their hate goes, look no further than the Utah ban of transgender athletes in girls sports. They had to override Utah's GOP governor Spencer Cox veto to push this legislation through. And for what? Well, there are four transgender kids competing in school sports, out of 85,000, and only one of those four competes in girls' sports:

“Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day,” Cox said in the letter explaining his veto, in which he cited suicide rates for transgender youth. “Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live.”
_{source: Politico}

That's a very reasonable Republican speaking there. Problem is that he's in an unreasonable party, and is well argued veto was overridden, and the legislation was pushed through. Banning transgenders, all one of them, will have very little to no impact on sports, but will send a wider and deeply painful message to an already vulnerable section of the population. And that's the GOP's only goal; it's to victimize even further those who are already vulnerable, sow hate against them in order to win a few votes. When Cox said that "rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few", he must have temporarily forgotten the Republican Party's history of fear-mongering, whether it's welfare queens, the Satanic Panic, Critical Race Theory, aids-spreading gay men or Covid-spreading Asian Americans, they'll find a helpless target every time.

Now before I leave, let me just say that the GOP is not uniquely bad: the Democrats aren't much better at serving working class Americans; both parties have sold their souls to the big money interests that fund their campaigns. That's capitalism for ya. But the Democrats are still slightly lesser of two evils. So please watch the below linked video discussing this latest particular campaign against transgenders; it describes in detail how the GOP suffered a great relative loss in the latest mid-term elections, especially seeing that the predicted "Red Wave" didn't materialize.

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