Think of the Children: Ban Religion
#164
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This edition:
Opinion Essay
Opinion Essay
From Tennessee’s lieutnant governor liking fat-bottomed twinks on Instagram from his official account while his state party passes anti-trans bills to seemingly every anti-drag talking head having done drag themselves or done gay for pay – the Right’s hypocrisy and hysteria reached an all-time high this week.
To add insult to injury, anti-drag/trans sentiment has been great for neo-Nazi recruitment. I guess it’s not too surprising when the christian fascists have begun using blatantly exterminationist rhetoric. Nazis tend to love that.
In regards to drag bans, you’ve no doubt heard about Tennessee by now.
The GOP isn’t stopping there either with similar bills in dozens of states.
Texas wants minors to be able to sue drag performers, along with other repressive bills. Many of which are hellbent on erasing Queer folks from education.
Arizona’s state senate already passed its own anti-drag bill.
Kentucky and Georgia raced their bills through the legislature.
These bills exist for no other reason but to terrify and control. It’s a coordinated attack. The Right is already so empowered by their successes and the masses’ overwhelmingly silence on the attacks that they’ve begun targeting pornography. They won’t rest until they have their claws into the personal lives of each and every individual American.
In no way do these bills exist to “protect children.” If that were the case, we would be banning kids from churches and keeping them away from anyone in Republican halls of power. They are meant to deflect and distract. Nothing more. Giving them any additional credence only serves to fan the flames building against Queer people.
They claim that these laws pushing back against a growing wave of “transgenderism” and “bodily mutilation” but when you actually look at the numbers, it’s pathetic this is a discussion at all let alone the topic at the center of our political universe.
According to the podcast If Books Could Kill, in 2021, there were 30-40 million kids aged 10-17 years old in the US. Using the low end number of 30 million, that means:
1,390 got puberty blockers (0.00463%)
4,231 got hormones (0.014103%)
282 mastectomies (0.00094%)
56 genital surgeries were performed over 3 years. (0.000187%) We have no information on how many of these were intersex-related or other applicable situations. However, it’s clear that bottom surgeries on minors are virtually nonexistent.
Less than 8% of trans people detransition, and of that group only 0.4% report detransitioning because they were no longer trans. The vast majority say detransitioning is only temporary and parental pressure is cited as the number one reason for it. (Erin in the Morning)
How can anyone justify this hysteria over a population that small?!
Even if you don’t “care” about Queer issues or people, and find yourself to be a neutral observer, surely it has to trigger the warning sensors part of your brain that something is seriously amiss. At some point, the greater population of cishets will need to start asking themselves – unprompted – what is the actual motive behind these attacks?
History shows us how and where this goes. Morality and sex panics are baked into the American DNA. It’s sadly one of the conservative’s favorite tried and true tricks. We’ve done it time and time again in the US. Hell, the first anti-drag/trans laws actually popped in SF after the Gold Rush. Whenever gender nonconformity and queerness start to find a foothold, the forces that be go into overdrive to bury it.
“This ban actually mirrors laws that were on the books decades ago even here in San Francisco, ‘decency’ laws that forbid cross-dressing,” said Honey Mahogany, the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee chair and co-founder of the Transgender Cultural District. “They’re taking us back in time. This isn’t a small chip at our rights, it’s a big chunk.”
Drag does not harm kids. Like adults, it empowers them to expand their concept of who and what they can be. Which is ultimately what the christian fascists are able to rile people up about. Those possibilities terrify them and, I truly believe, they want to keep everyone trapped in the tightly bound boxes they’ve been trapped in their whole lives. If they have to suffer, then so do the rest of us. In their worldview, that suffering is what all of us deserve as “sinners” and “demons.” When you’re trained to view the whole world as nothing more than a den of sin waiting a savior to return to cleanse us, then the doomerism is bound to project onto everything in front of you. After all, if they don’t, that might mean they’re wrong and that suffering was all for nothing.
Which it is.
As always though, there are some shining lights in all of this darkness.
State Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh (D) of Nebraska has been filibustering her state’s anti-trans law(s) for three full weeks and vowed to block every bill in this year’s legislative session until the bill is dead. So far she’s succeeded. Zero bills have passed in 2023. We need more Democrats like Senator Cavanaugh.
“If this Legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful — painful for everyone,” she said when it all began. “If you want to inflict pain upon our children, I am going to inflict pain upon this body, and I have nothing but time, and I am going to use all of it.”
“I will burn the session to the ground over this bill.”
Four Democratic state senators in Missouri – Senators Greg Razer, Tracy McCreery, Doug Beck, and Lauren Arthur – successfully filibustered an anti-trans bill until the spring recess began, adjourning for more than a week.
Michigan became 22nd state to pass LGBTQ+ protections after decades of fighting to expand its nondiscrimination law.
President Biden condemned Florida’s anti-LGBTQ+ bills as “close to sinful.”
World of Wonder, the production company behind “RuPaul’s Drag Race",” launched the Drag Defense Fund with the ACLU to fight back against the anti-drag/trans laws. This Friday’s episode of Drag Race even featured a rusical, aka a musical challenge, called “Wigloose” about a town that bans drag. Incredible timing on the producer’s part given this season was filmed last year. (Not to mention that none of the responses from RuPaul, Drag Race, and the Ru girls came until the Queer internet started to criticize Ru for his perceived silence around the Republican onslaught. I could write an entirely different post about the dynamics behind that criticism and why it’s unfound, and I may just write it, but not right now.)
To put my money where my mouth is, I will match up to $500 in donations to the Drag Defense Fund from my readers.
Reply to this email that you’ve donated and I’ll respond with my match. Also, I’ve opened up comments to everyone for this post so please share with everyone once you’ve contributed to encourage others to participate!
Every little bit counts right now. Every dollar. Every ounce of solidarity.
Queer folks will always rally together but we need everyone right now if we’re going to stop this wave of hate. We’re approaching the point of no return when the christian fascists will have enough of a foothold to creep into every American’s personal life. No inch of American life will be free from their tyranny unless we stop them.
Join the fight today by donating to the ACLU’s Drag Defense Fund.
Stay vigilant and healthy, beautiful people.
As always, thanks for reading. (And, don’t forget to “like” this post!)
Kyle (@kgborland)
PS – Check out these other great perspectives.
Drag Has Always Been in My Life. (Underscore_SF)
With all the glitz and glamor I was subjected to growing up, you’d think it would have unwillingly forced me to become a drag queen. But it didn’t. I had no interest or desire to do drag as a young brown queer boy navigating white gay territory. It wasn’t until years later, when I jokingly asked my friend Mr. David to put me up in her for Halloween, that I truly fell in love. It was the early 90s, and the AIDS epidemic had buried the community in darkness and death. However, drag made me feel alive again — allowing me to find new creativity and express a different side of my artistic self. Thirty years later and a lifetime of drag influences, I still look pretty.
This week Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the provision into law explicitly banning drag shows in public and doing so while images of him doing drag circulated on social media.
As the haters continue to show their faces in our government, on the news, and on social media, we must continue to show ours.
I’ve often suggested to people whose family has disowned them for being queer to still reach out to them — even if it’s just a letter — to let them know how great your life is and all you’ve done. It’s a small act, but it helps break up the paradigm that queerness is a hindrance when we all know it isn’t. If anything, it’s a gracious gift.
Please share your story with your friends, families, and allies; we need their voices. Tell everyone about your triumphs and struggles of being queer; this will hopefully trigger something in those who hate, as a simple reminder that we are all human and made of love.
Everything Everywhere All at Once Director Says Drag “Is a Threat to Nobody” (them)
Jon Stewart takes on Republican lawmaker who wants to ban drag shows in viral interview (LGBTQ+ Nation)
‘Our state is at war with our family’: Clergy with trans kids fight back (WashPost)
Tennessee and the Anti-Drag Race (New York Times)
Not long before Lee signed the bill, a 1977 yearbook photo surfaced showing him dressed in drag when he was in high school. The howls of hypocrisy came quickly.
But I don’t think people like Lee see that as hypocrisy. They see hilarity in straight men donning women’s clothes to mock femininity but see obscenity and perversion in (usually) gay men doing the same (only better!) to celebrate femininity and find a sense of affirmation and self-realization.
They see their role as guarding the border between their narrow, normative definitions of “masculine” and “feminine” and making sure no one traverses it. They are sentinels of the patriarchy, all too willing to oppress or try to intimidate their fellow citizens.
And the imprecise wording of Tennessee’s law seems calibrated to provoke the maximum amount of doubt and, therefore, fear: How is impersonating a man or woman defined? (Does a high school stunt, for example, count?) Could transgender men and women be prosecuted? How is harm to minors defined, and who defines it?
As Grzanka told me: “Forget about accountability. There doesn’t even have to be internal consistency to the legislation so long as it promotes hate.” He sees the anti-drag law as a continuation of “a kind of legislative waterboarding” by the political right to generate backlash against L.G.B.T.Q. progress that many see as “a massive threat to white Christian heterosexual values.”
He believes the law is part of a “retrenchment politics that is designed to put L.G.B.T. people back in our place, and of course the place is cowering in fear in the closet.”
According to the Human Rights Campaign’s State Equality Index, 29 out of 315 anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills were enacted into law in 2022, and the group is now tracking approximately 750 L.G.B.T.Q. bills introduced in state legislatures around the country. As H.R.C. points out, “over half are bills that will cause real harm to the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community.”