A Republican and cultural conservative war on transgender people is under full steam, and recent reporting brings into sharper focus the fundamental immorality of this regressive movement. As the New York Times details, conservative leaders see the targeting of transgender Americans as a way to rile up and invigorate their right-wing base. Since previous efforts to demonize gay Americans have been swept away by majority acceptance of such crucial markers of equal rights as gay marriage, and as a backlash to eliminating abortion rights threatens to turn current success into a Pyrrhic victory of epic scale, the conservative movement sees fear-mongering around transgender issues as a key way to drive fundraising and votes.
Particularly sinister is how right-wing politicians re-tooled early efforts to target transgender Americans when those initiatives met with widespread rebuke and failure, such as North Carolina’s “bathroom bill.” A little polling and cynical calculation later, Republican politicians and right-wing activists have seized upon the idea of parents’ rights and the protection of vulnerable children as the most efficient fuel for their anti-transgender hate machine.
Nowhere in this whole sordid effort is evidence of actual Christian values purportedly held by these social conservatives, which would at a minimum entail compassion towards the transgender community, and certainly not the demonization on clear display. Also absent is any real attempt to try to understand transgender Americans’ point of view, or to engage with the issues of identity and sexuality they provoke. Instead, what we’ve seen is a knee-jerk response on the part of millions of ordinary conservatives, seized upon and further incited by the calculations of amoral political operatives, in an effort characterized by sadism, scapegoating, and willful ignorance. With the religious right quickly shifting from complaints about transgender Americans playing in girls’ sports to outright bans on gender-affirming care, fear-mongering has quickly shifted into what is better characterized as hatred and repression — having decided that transgender people should not exist, multiple Republican statehouses and governors are now working to twist the law to deny the basic right to determine one’s own sense of self in the world.
As with the movement to eliminate abortion rights, extreme religious beliefs are being passed off as unimpeachable morality in the defense of innocent children. Look beneath the surface, though, and we see fear and bigotry masquerading as sanctity, cruelty cloaked as kindness, and immorality resold as righteousness. The fact that the rhetoric and actions of this movement are feeding stigmatization, cruelty, and violence toward the transgender community — that this purported movement to protect children is leading to actual, measurable harm to both children and adults — seems to matter not a whit to its proponents. This tacit embrace of violence is the final clue we need, as if more were needed, is that this is a movement that now only sees Christ in the rear view mirror.
Not surprisingly, the “parents’ rights” quackery of the anti-trans crusade has not been satisfied to stop with this line of attack. As the executive director of a Florida anti-discrimination group told the Times, there is “a direct line from the right’s focus on transgender children to other issues it has seized on in the name of “parents’ rights” — such as banning books and curriculums that teach about racism.”” The common thread is an urge to impose the right’s own hatred and ignorance — against non-whites, against non-Christians, against sex and sexual expression — onto everyone else.
Cultural conservatives, having been on the wrong side of every major cultural fight of recent memory, have now chosen to target one of the smallest and most vulnerable targets possible — transgender Americans. Bullying is among the least of the indictments that can be leveled against this movement, but ganging up on a population perceived as relatively defenseless and powerless provides a gut-level measure of how cynical this war on transgender people truly is. Anyone with even a minimal sense of justice should be appalled and enraged by this hideous scapegoating by immoral right-wing crusaders who, like a roving band of political junkies, are ever on the lookout for the next fix to incite hatred, goose vote counts, and divide Americans against each other.