Tears For Us.

A couple of weeks ago the White House press secretary shed tears for us when questioned by a reporter about the Republican attack on trans children. Let us convert those tears to action.

Jen Psaki in tears during interview on Republican anti-LGBTQ ‘cruelty’
The Guardian
By Richard Luscombe
April 19, 2022


The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, broke down in tears during an interview in which she condemned the “cruelty” of a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation sweeping Republican states.

Known for her toughness at the briefing room podium, Psaki showed a more emotional side during the discussion with Jessica Yellin, host of the News Not Noise podcast, in an interview released on Tuesday.

“They’re doing that in a way that is harsh and cruel to a community of kids, especially,” Psaki said, in tears, after Yellin asked her to “make sense” of the Republican push for legislation that marginalises the LBGTQ+ community.

“I’m going to get emotional about this issue because it’s horrible. But it’s kids who are bullied, and all these leaders are taking steps to hurt them, and hurt their lives and hurt their families.

“And you look at some of these laws in these states and who’s going after parents, who are in loving relationships, who have kids. It’s completely outrageous. Sorry, this is an issue that makes me completely crazy.”

Polls show that the people are supporting us. In a post from last month I wrote about that support people have for us. An article in The Hill said,

More than 70 percent of adults believe transgender people should have equal rights and be protected from violence and discrimination, according to a new report from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.

The people know what the Republicans are doing and don’t like it, in another Guardian article…

Republicans are dusting off a tried and true election strategy: hatemongering
Male voters have been drifting right in record numbers – and Republicans are taking a viciously homophobic and sexist tack to appeal to them
By Moira Donegan
April 15, 2022


[...]

Despite the large degree of analytical attention that has focused on the voting habits of suburban white women, it seems that it’s men who are changing their voting habits most dramatically. The NBC News polling shows that men with college degrees have moved dramatically to the right, lurching towards Republicans by 26 points since just 2018. Men on the whole have moved towards Republicans by 20 points.

The Republican party’s exploding support among men comes as the organs of rightwing media and many Republican politicians have embraced a vitriolic language of gender grievance. For months now, the conservative media has been hammering a message of gender and sexual disorder, seeking to stoke the fears, bigotry and resentment of its audience against the social and legal gains that have been made by women and LGBT groups over the past decades. This message has been enthusiastically taken up by Republican politicians, and issues of sexual anxiety have come to preoccupy every level of American government, from local school board meetings to the recent confirmation hearings of a new supreme court justice.

And all that hate is focused at us in the trans community.

In an article in Education Week looks at what is driving this anti-LGBTQ+ legislation,

What’s Driving the Push to Restrict Schools on LGBTQ Issues?
By Stephen Sawchuk
April 19, 2022


A raft of legislation in the statehouses taking aim at LGBTQ students this year draws from the newly ascendent discourse about parents’ rights, curriculum transparency, and schools purportedly indoctrinating students via critical race theory and other ideas.

[…]

1. Lawmakers introducing these bills echo older fears about LGBTQ people.

Since March, the political discourse has been dominated by outrage over Florida’s vaguely written bill prohibiting instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-3, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law in March. But Education Week found many other proposals in the statehouses that would affect LGBTQ students.

About 30 pieces of legislation would variously circumscribe LGBTQ representation in the curriculum, the pronouns that students and teachers can use, and put limits on school clubs, among other things. Those are on top of other proposals seeking to criminalize medical professionals who provide gender-affirming care, or to limit which sports teams transgender players can participate on.

I would like to point out that many, many times schools have banned, in the case West Side Community Schools v. Mergens the Supreme Court ruled that schools could not ban after school religious clubs if they allow other clubs.

2. The parents-rights framing has a long history.

Parents’ rights recently became a rallying cry again following a widely publicized gaffe in late 2021 by Virginia gubernatorial Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe, who when asked about opting students out of lessons on books parents objected to said he didn’t think parents “should be telling schools what they should teach.” Republicans seized on the opening, claiming the banner of the “party of parents” and championing new parents’-rights and curriculum-transparency bills.

The push for “parent’s rights” in schools also has a long history, and variations on this go back to the 1980s and 1990s, when it was a key part of a campaign to legalize home schooling across the states. And it has periodically resurged: in 2009, Republican lawmakers unsuccessfully sought to make it a wedge issue, Politico reported at the time.

Legislative templates on parents’ rights have thus been floating around legislatures for decades. They have been sponsored in federal legislation and as an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

[…]

3. The issues may be old, but the political tools are new.

For some observers, the new wave of legislation represents a particularly cynical brand of politics—a way of riding the coattails of the nation’s current frenzy about school indoctrination to pass policies about LGBTQ people, some of which might be unpopular on their own.

[...]

“These are movements that have been around for a while,” said Young of PEN of the proposals. “The critical race theory frame and curriculum-transparency frame are new, and have been wildly successful, in part because they’re smart framing and smart politics. And in part it’s because there’s an incredible amount of national money going to support them, and from their proponents’ view, a degree of success at the ballot box.”

[…]

5. Bills about transgender students are being coupled with aggressive new rhetoric—and are heightening advocates’ concerns.

From bathroom bills in 2017 to the more recent focus on transgender students in sports and gender-affirming care, the issue has shot to the top of cable news coverage and think-tank agendas. Groups like the conservative Heritage Foundation have recently accused schools of promoting “a radical gender ideology;” far-right news sites have picked up and amplified similar language.

The focus on students’ pronouns and who can select them, how schools should interact with trans students, and increasingly on gender-affirming care seems to have boomed following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling establishing the right of gay people to marry, said Murib.

“It’s another way to assert what’s really [white evangelicals’] core set of values—men and women make up the nuclear family that is reproductive,” they said.

But what’s at stake is not merely political rhetoric, but an existential threat to transgender people, Murib said.

6. Emergent nonprofit groups are fueling the flames.

Increasingly, the discourse about LGBTQ issues in schools is being echoed and promoted by newly emergent parent-advocacy networks, like Parents Defending Public Education, No Left Turn in Education, and Moms For Liberty.

This is the beginnings of a new Lavender Scare and Anita Bryant Save Our Children of the fifties and sixties all over again.

We won then and we can win again.