Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature passed a law to ban any discussion of homosexuality in school; the legislation is known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Other red states are rushing to pass copycat legislation. Some are using their gag orders to target both critical race theory and any discussion of LGBT.
PEN America, the authors’ organization, summarized this frenzy:
Last month PEN America reported that 2022 had seen a steep rise in the introduction of educational gag orders. So far this year, 103 different bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country, many of which target higher education and feature severe punishments. Cumulatively, they represent a national assault on our education system, censoring both what teachers can say and what students may learn.
Some top line numbers:
- Since January 2021, 156 educational gag order bills have been introduced or prefiled in 39 different states
- 12 have become law in 10 states
- 113 are currently live in 35 different states
Of those currently live:
- 105 target K-12 schools
- 49 target higher education
- 62 include a mandatory punishment for those found in violation
The effort to censor anti-LGBTQ identities is expanding rapidly
Of the bills currently live, many are progressing quickly through their state legislatures. Florida’s HB 1557, better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, is a typical example. Having won support from Governor Ron DeSantis last week, it was swiftly voted out of the state senate. This bill would prohibit public K-12 teachers from “encourag[ing] classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” in primary grade levels, as well as teachers in any other grade level from doing so in a manner that is not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.” As commentators have noted, HB 1557 would be a magnet for censorious lawsuits, allowing a school’s most conservative parent to dictate what every other student learns.
But Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill is just the tip of the iceberg. While race, sex, and American history remain the most common targets of censorship, bills silencing speech about LGBTQ+ identities have also surged to the fore. Currently, 15 such bills are under consideration in 9 states. This is in addition to the wave of book bans sweeping through schools and public libraries, bans that overwhelmingly target materials dealing with gender and sexuality or that center LGBTQ+ characters. Many other bills currently under consideration target LGBTQ+ students for special scrutiny and exclusion in other ways.
What’s behind this sudden interest in censoring these topics and themes? In reality, it is not very sudden. Rather, what we are seeing in 2022 is a convergence between two distinct but related sets of actors: First, anti-LGBTQ+ activists, well-established but with limited success in penetrating public schools; and second, the “anti-Critical Race Theory” movement. The latter has primed the public to support sweeping censorship of classroom speech. For anti-LGBTQ+ activists, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, a chance to ram through bills that are far more restrictive than anything the public would normally accept. The goal is quite simply to lock LGBTQ+ topics on the wrong side of the schoolhouse gate.
No bill better exemplifies this trend than Kansas’s HB 2662. Introduced last week, it appears at first glance to be a typical “curriculum transparency” and “parents’ rights” bill, similar to many others we have seen this year. The first six pages are a long list of rules about curricular materials, where they must be posted, how parents are to be notified, etc., all of it punctuated by occasional broadsides against “racially essentialist doctrines.” In other words, standard “anti-CRT” fare. But tucked back toward the end, HB 2662 also proposes to make a change to the state’s obscenity law, making it a class B misdemeanor for a teacher to use any material in the classroom depicting “homosexuality.” Note well: not sexually explicit depictions of homosexuality. Just homosexuality in general.
Bills like this are piling up. South Carolina’s H 4605 begins by enumerating a now-familiar list of concepts to be prohibited in the classroom (e.g. that “one race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another race or sex”), but abruptly shifts halfway through to forbid teachers from “subject[ing]” students to “controversial and age-inappropriate topics” like “gender identity or lifestyles.” Indiana HB 1040 operates similarly: The bill contains 19 pages of rules about race, sex, and American history, before declaring on page 20 that teachers would be prohibited from discussing in any context “sexual orientation,” “transgenderism,” or “gender identity” without parental consent.
The list goes on. A bill introduced last month in Indiana would require schools to consult with parents before inquiring about a student’s preferred pronouns. Arizona HB 2011 would force students to seek their parents’ permission before joining any school club “involving sexuality, gender or gender identity.” As a result, gay and bisexual students seeking support from their classmates would essentially have to out themselves to their parents first. HB 800 in Tennessee would prohibit public K-12 schools from adopting any instructional materials that “promote, normalize, support, or address lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) issues or lifestyles.” And under North Carolina’s S 514, teachers and college faculty would have to report to a parent if their child displays signs of “gender nonconformity.” This last bill has stalled in the state senate, but it remains live and a renewed push could come at any time.
Everywhere across the country, anti-LGBTQ+ advocates and the “anti-CRT” movement are converging. The more that lawmakers warm to classroom censorship, the more anti-LGBTQ+ activists will seek to exploit that fact. And as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill’s speedy progress in Florida shows, this strategy can be successful.
Spotlight: Oklahoma
Perhaps no state has gone further or with greater speed than Oklahoma. As of today, lawmakers there are considering ten separate educational gag orders of varying scope and severity. Of the five most extreme, all contain major implications for how teachers, librarians, and school administrators talk about LGBTQ+ identities.
The first is SB 1142. If passed, public school libraries would be prohibited from placing on the shelf any books that:
make as their primary subject the study of sex, sexual preferences, sexual activity, sexual perversion, sex-based classifications, sexual identity, or gender identity or books that are of a sexual nature that a reasonable parent or legal guardian would want to know of or approve of prior to their child being exposed to it.
SB 1654 contains a similar ban (no library may distribute any materials that “make as their primary subject the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender issues or recreational sexualization”), but extends the prohibition to teachers.
Higher education is being targeted as well: SB 1141 would bar public colleges and universities from requiring students to enroll in any course “that addresses any form of gender, sexual, or racial diversity, equality, or inclusion.” This bill supplements HB 1775, which was passed in Oklahoma last year and applies a similar ban to college training and counseling. That law has already chilled classroom instruction on race and sex, as detailed in a federal lawsuitfiled by the Oklahoma ACLU.
Lastly, there are two Oklahoma bills that, while not addressing LGBTQ+ related issues explicitly, would nevertheless likely expel all mention of them from the classroom. SB 1470 forbids public schools from employing any person who “promotes positions in the classroom or at any function of the public school that is in opposition to closely held religious beliefs of students.” And HB 614 requires colleges and universities to offer an “unbiased education that does not endorse, favor, promote, demean, show hostility toward or intentionally undermine any particular religion, nonreligious faith or religious perspective.” If passed, the bill would also establish a hotline that students can use to report a professor who besmirches their faith. Again, these bills do not mention LGBTQ+ identities explicitly. Nevertheless, it requires little imagination to see how they could silence any discussion of such topics, to say nothing of conversations about natural history, cosmology, or biology.
Censorship goes mainstream
It is important to understand that to their supporters, these bills are not extreme. On the contrary, they are the natural extension of the “anti-CRT” movement and its critique of classroom “indoctrination.” State senator Robert Standridge, for example, justified his support for SB 1142 this way:
The purpose of our common education system is to teach students about math, history, science and other core areas of learning – all of which are further expanded on in college as students pursue their fields of interest. Unfortunately, however, more and more schools are trying to indoctrinate students by exposing them to gender, sexual and racial identity curriculums and courses. My bill will ensure these types of lessons stay at home and out of the classroom.
This sort of “indoctrination” argument opens the door to all manner of classroom censorship. Anti-CRT activists did not invent it, but they certainly have made it popular. And in the wake of their success, many more ideas and values will be targeted for exclusion next. After all, LGBTQ+ identities are clearly regarded by some as “divisive concepts.” If systemic racism is unfit for classroom discussion, what is the principled argument against censoring conversations about homophobia too?
From book bans to educational gag orders, schools and universities are being threatened today to a degree that has no recent parallel. There is a willingness, and even eagerness, to bring the weight and power of government to bear on controlling classroom speech. And as is always the case in such times, students will be the ones to pay the price.
This update from PEN America was compiled by Jeffrey Sachs and Jonathan Friedman.
Note: the number of bills has been updated as of 2/15/22.
And one day – and hopefully soon, this will backfire big time.
It will when a legislator’s son and his boyfriend confront dear old mom or dad in public… or when legislators are outed… and tragically, when statistics on suicide risk assessments and causes for bullying are published for schools in their states
Amen, PV!!!!
It’s national. Actually international.
Meant to write, definitely national.
Ooof. That Florida law is really bad. Just mean spirited and nasty.
Meanwhile, all the people who screamed and yelled about masks and vaccines and CRT in public schools for the last 6 months have accomplished absolutely nothing positive or productive to help public schools recover from the pandemic.
What did public school students gain from this political campaign conducted inside their schools? A huge expansion of vouchers and nasty laws designed to weaken public schools- so, nothing.
Once again the lavishly funded ed reform “movement” that employees thousands of adults doesn’t come through for public school students and instead is focused solely on privatization and attacking public schools.
Public schools and students can do better than this. Time to look outside the echo chamber and hire some new people- people who actually value public schools and public school students.
Didn’t you mean to say “elect some new people…?”
Or is it that you really mean the gop is hiring the people who represent the public and govern?
“Mean spirited” and “nasty” are Ron DeSantis ‘ middle names.
The guy is filled with hatred for anyone who is different from him.
I can’t help but think that this is another flanking maneuver perpetuated by 21st century US conservatives that is intent on overwhelming the public schools to the point of extinction.
This is exactly the point. The only way a reactionary government can have longevity is by making the education system serve its ends. That way those not privileged will not have to deal with the messiness of governing and focus on their jobs.
yes, churning up emotions so that voters vote against their own best interests
I thought the same thing when NCLB was unleashed and I think, to some degree, it worked. It certainly ushered in the for-profit charter pyramid scheme.
There is no such thing as TQ++++. No one is born in the wrong body or with the wrong brain. This is a mental illness that needs talk therapy until it subsides. TQ+ was a Trojan Horse riding in on the LGB rights victories of the Obama Era and then they took over all the LGB Alliances. Even the LGB folks want the TQ+++ out of their organizations. What better way for Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex to make $$$$$$ (think the AMA & Tobacco Lobby stance on cigarettes and smoking before C. Evertt Koop decided to put a stop to it) than to market it to children going through puberty. It’s wrong and it needs to get out of schools…and yes, it is being “marketed” in schools and heavily on the internet.
This has visited my Progressive Dem. home. I’ve done my research. I’m all for getting this out of our schools. And before anyone decides to slam me, let me just pose a simple question. If an adolescent presents with anorexia or bulimia (a mental illness) should a Dr/teacher/guidance counselor suggest liposuction or diet pills as a cure for the anorexia/bulimia?
Follow the $$$$. Martine Rothblatt, Jon Stryker, Jennifer Pritzker , the Arcus Foundation (Autogynephelia AGP….a sexual fetish). Lots of $$$$ to be made from the medicalization of children/teens/young adults.
I am not slamming you, but it is not that long ago that being gay was considered to be a mental illness.
You are correct and that was wrong. Being LGB is about who one loves while TQ+++ is about how one feels based on stereotypes……2 very different things! If you have some free time and want a trip into my insane world, Google Lesbians with penises and start from there. Next maybe look up swimmer Lia Thompson (aka William) of Penn Ivy. Keep going and you will see how this social contagion has taken hold (the initial stage is pronoun usage) No such thing as “trans”….it’s made up. Gaslighting hormonal youth is amoral. I stand with the bills to get it out of schools as do most LGB activists who have seen their organizations get taken over by crazy. Most don’t want to hurt LGB people….they want the cult of gender ideology out of society and schools. Follow the $$$$.
Littlejohn vs Leon Co School Board (FL) or the Speckles case of Northern CA in case your interested in some of the lawsuits starting to be filed. This will not bode well for public school systems because they are (and have bee) refusing to acknowledge the situation. MSM is refusing to cover it all.
Yes, Joe.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/stop-using-phony-science-to-justify-transphobia/
It is also a blatant lie that being trans is being “marketed” in schools.
It can be true that young people, especially in teen years, may be exploring different gender identifies that may not be permanent. But your vision that they can be psychoanalyzed out of the reality is very harmful.
Bruce Jenner didn’t adopt a “fashion”. Jenner felt that way throughout his life, but hid it.
The fact that young people aren’t stigmatized is a GOOD thing.
I certainly believe that doctors should not rush to do gender reassignments surgeries on minors nor readily hand out hormones. But my understanding is that they do not. The fact that they don’t immediately leap to force questioning teens into anti-trans therapy that is just as likely to make them suicidal than change their desire to be another gender is also a GOOD thing.
GregB….Scientific American took a lot of heat a few months ago for posting phony research on “trans”. They skewered one of their own writers. SA has become a rag the likes of the National Inquirer….they should just start reporting on the “lizard people” living among us and how their DNA has been changed by climate change, G5 networks and cell phones.
Yes, all the authors who contribute to SA are part of a grand sinister plan to make money off fooling kids into believing they are what they aren’t and liberal public schools deserve as much of the blame as anyone or anything. It makes so much more sense when I write it out like that.
Has Lia Thompson set any NATIONAL records in women’s swimming events?
I don’t like the ugly innuendo that any swimmer who ever had faster times than Lia Thompson did in any of the women’s swimming events over the past decade or two must secretly be a man.
I’m uncertain about Lia Thompson. Lia clearly has a physical advantage in woman’s swimming events. I support Lia’s right to be whatever, but I’m not so sure Lia should compete in women’s sporting events. The great swimmer Diana Nyad expressed the same concerns in the Washington Post.
Diane,
But Lia Thompson is not the issue. It is very likely there will be a rules change about the level of testosterone a swimmer in women’s events can have for a given number of months (which should actually apply to all swimmers including those who aren’t trans.)
There have for quite a few years been young adolescents playing sports who identify as a different gender. They weren’t significantly “better” than other players. But this is the excuse to ban them from participating.
“This is a mental illness that needs talk therapy until it subsides.”
LisaM, are you suggesting that it is simply that some trans people are gay but feel so ashamed of being gay that they prefer to change their identity to being a different gender to avoid what they feel is the stigma of being gay?
I also caution you from making sweeping judgements that are extremely harmful to so many people just because of something that happened to your own child. It is no different than those folks who said their child got autism from the MMR vaccine and claimed that MMR vaccine caused autism in all kids.
Jane E. Brody wrote the Personal Health column for the NYT since 1965 – more than 50 years – and today wrote her farewell column. She mentioned some columns she was wrong – including a page one article from 1971:
“More Homosexuals Aided To Become Heterosexual”
“Therapists, using a variety of psychological approaches, have found that the young homosexual who is strongly motivated to change his sexual orientation has an excellent chance of success.
Furthermore, the therapists report that they have helped between 25 and 50 per cent of all their homosexual patients—regardless of age or original motivation—to make a hetero sexual adjustment.”
Brody’s 1971 article sounds a lot like what you are saying.
For the record, I have no doubt that there might have some people who lived as straight for the rest of their lives because of that therapy. But the kind of sweeping claims that you made and that the article made were absolute lies.
Brava, LisaM.
Or maybe I should have said “Bravx.”
LisaM: “No one is born in the wrong body or with the wrong brain. This is a mental illness that needs talk therapy until it subsides.”
FLERP!: “Brava, LisaM.”
Wow, just wow, FLERP! Talk therapy to make sure those kids with “mental illnesses” are only called a he or she according to how they were born.
I am shocked to learn that flerp is a parent who believes that ALL of his child’s classmates who are trans or use the pronoun “they” have “a mental illness that needs talk therapy until it subsides”.
I can just imagine a parent having a conversation with their own teen/young adult children to help their kids understand that NO ONE should ever be referred to as anything but the gender they are born with and if their kids have any classmates like that, their classmates have a mental illness that needs therapy until it subsides.
Bravo FLERP! or
Brava FLERP!
FLERP!, I don’t want to deeply offend you so please identify your gender so I can be certain to use the proper form in the future.
Thank You! I’m Team TERF (Trans Educated Rational Female). Let the lawsuits begin! Can’t wait for this cult to get exposed.
Just saw this the other day, thought you might find it worthwhile. It covers “tumblr” culture among other things.
https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name
I read it the other day when she first posted it….but Thank you! She has been posting on Twitter and DeTrans sites for over a year now. Left leaning MSM will never pick up any of this. There are thousands on these DeTrans sites telling the same stories over and over.
OMG, she is blaming her family!
“On the other hand, even at a young age I was beginning to experience some deep emotional difficulties unrelated to gender that would get more urgent over time. I suffered a serious loss when I was seven, and the rest of my family took the “don’t talk about it” approach, so my grief festered like an infected wound. My family was also very preoccupied with image, especially dieting and weight, and this began to have a pronounced effect on how I saw myself (and on my brother, too). By the time I was thirteen, I was isolating myself, self-harming, and had developed an eating disorder.”
She implies that the terrible parenting made her much more susceptible to the kinds of things online that children raised by good and caring parents aren’t susceptible to.
You know what — I don’t buy it. It was NOT this person’s parents and the damage they supposedly did to her that made her “susceptible” to the very same things that so many young people aren’t.
What is really growing exponentially is the number of young people who ACCEPT other teens who go through this and aren’t taught by their parents that any classmates they have who might be trans are mentally ill and badly need therapy. No doubt there are still some teens whose parents make sure they learn that lesson.
Those young people who ACCEPT other teens aren’t more likely to be trans themselves. If you want to blame the parents of trans teens, then I strongly disagree. That is absolutely false to blame the family for forcing their daughters into such a state of mind that they are “susceptible to the on-line stuff that all of the other teens who were supposedly raised by better parents are not susceptible to.
A teenager may suddenly become a born again evangelical Christian because of something his parents failed to do that drove him to it. However, that does NOT mean that all teenagers who turn to Evangelical Christianity have a mental illness and need therapy to get them to stop believing it.
Seriously, I do find it odd that two people would use this blog for “therapy.” (I honestly could never discuss such a personal issue on a blog.) Their obsession with this issue reveals things for which I would guess no one on this blog has the professional capacity to deal with. And there are professionals out there who I am sure can be very helpful.
Agreed. I don’t know what they are talking about. It’s not relevant to the passage of laws banning topics in school.
It’s very relevant. Parents want the TQ+ out of schools and parents have a right to know that this is being promoted in public schools.
Greg, I am loath to disagree with you about anything because you are so learned and perceptive and compassionate, but I think I disagree with you about this. People need to be able to talk about the major stuff that’s disturbing them, and it’s worth listening to them. At least I find it so. Yes, that stuff should also go to therapy. But any port in a storm.
Is Lisa willing to ask her daughter if she’d like an opportunity to add to Lisa ‘s view as posted at the blog? The daughter’s observations may confirm or they may differ.
In writing, the daughter could express herself, uninterrupted and without the visual cues of dismissal and judgement.
This is well-put, LisaM.
That boy likes dresses? And makeup? Maybe he’s really a girl! Does he like to bake, too?
That girl likes sports, and doesn’t like makeup, and hates having long hair? She could be a boy!
“That girl likes sports, and doesn’t like makeup, and hates having long hair? She could be a boy!”
FLERP!, the fact that you would put it that way shows how misinformed you are. That is one of the more ignorant comments you have ever written and it demonstrates a lack of understanding of how so many students experience their gender identity.
NO ONE except ignorant dolts who are homophobic/transphobic would ever make such a statement. That is exactly what people used to say about lesbians, too. What a nasty piece of work you are. How dare you say that about what KIDS feel. How dare you impose your own ignorance about what it means to be male or female and assume that is what adults as ignorant as you tell nice young girls to convince those nice young girls that they are really boys. What a nasty, nasty thing to say.
I know trans kids. And I can tell you that their gender identity had nothing to do with whether they liked sports or had long hair or liked to cook. It had nothing to do with what ignorant adults like you have decided is the reason that they feel as they do. You speak with the most ignorance and I hope that you never come into contact with any trans student with your disgusting certainty – despite being entirely ignorant — that all trans students are mentally ill and need counseling.
I guess your head would explode if you ever heard of a trans kid who didn’t like sports but identified as a boy. No doubt you are certain – in your ignorance – that every trans boy loves sports and hates having long hair.
^^I guess it never occurred to you that Bruce Jenner liked sports. Is your head exploding that he identified as a girl? Or maybe you think it was his long hair that made ignorant adults like you tell him he must really be a girl and brainwash him into believing he was female?
It is astounding how tone deaf these “freedom worshiping” states with right wing governors are. Their so-called freedom laws include stepping on the toes of vulnerable groups like the LBGT community. These types of muzzling laws are trying to turn back the clock to the 1950s and further restrict free speech in public schools. DeSantis’ distorted version of freedom is authoritarianism. We will be likely see other copycat bills in red states that will spread as fast as Covid
Make no mistake folks. We are at the very beginning of a reactionary revolution and schools are the tip of the armor-piercing bullets against democracy. While folks pat themselves on the back for checking out a book banned in Tennessee, the policy lives and is spreading.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/diversity-schools-equity-battles-crt_n_62139f21e4b0f93b261bd883
yup
How is it that it is always the Democrats who are accused of doing nothing except focusing on “identity politics”?
It has always been the Republicans accusing the Dems of doing what they are doing.
Aside from tax cuts for the wealthy, is there anything the Republicans stand for except identity politics – i.e. dog whistles to white supremacy?
Far right wing Republicans want to tell Americans what they are allowed to read and what their schools are allowed to teach and what their children are allowed to know about and how students in school are allowed to pray and which party Americans are allowed to register to vote for. And they want to give the rich a big tax cut.
That’s it.
In addition to “identity politics,” Democrats are accused of being radical socialists. As for the GOP, it has chosen with a few exceptions to rally around the big, bloated identity of Donald Trump,and, as you mention, tax cuts for the wealthy.
I know — it is a sign of how simply awful the so-called liberal media is that the Republicans are able to mischaracterize the Democrats two diametrically opposing ways to different audiences with the NYT and Washington Post and other liberal media LEGITIMIZING it.
So, one week it is dozens of stories about how the Democrats just focus on identity politics and nothing else. The Dems won’t do anything for you except force your kid to be trans or read books that make him feel suicidal about his whiteness. Those stories run at the appropriate time — right before an election where a far right wing Republican campaigns to save folks from identity politics.
The next weeks or months — whenever the good legislation that the Dems try to get passed is mentioned — the so-called liberal media runs non-stop articles about how the socialist Dems want to take away private property and how “we can’t afford” any of the programs to help middle class and poor Americans.
When a right wing Republican runs with a pro-rich anti-middle class economic agenda, the so-called liberal media runs only stories about the only the Dems stand for is “identity politics” to make your kid feel terrible about being white.
When Democrats might have a chance to pass good economic legislation that would help middle class and poor Americans, the so-called liberal media runs stories about how all of the many good programs the Dems are trying to pass are too socialist and aren’t affordable.
And the so-called liberal media has helped so many right wing Republicans win by repeating the right wing talking points about their opponents only caring about the evil “identity politics” during the election, that when the media moves on to the far right propaganda’s contradicting narrative about how Dems want too much socialist policy, there aren’t enough elected Dems to vote it through.
Curious, who here believes it’s transphobic and wrong to disagree that a person with XY chromosomes and a penis and testicles is a woman?
FLERP, your comment and the discussion of personal views about homosexuality are diversions from the issue at hand:
Governor DeSantis and the Republican legislature have banned the discussion of gender and sexuality in Florida elementary school classrooms. Other red states are hurrying to adopt similar bans. Books about gender issues are being removed from school libraries.
The law is known as “don’t say gay.”
What problem will this solve?
This is a natural extension of GOP hysteria over “critical race theory.”
Do these morons really think they can close the minds of children by banning topics?
Do they think that kids who are gay will change because they don’t read a book in school about it?
I really don’t see why your personal opinions about homosexuals are relevant.
Unless you are saying that you agree and want every state to follow the lead of Florida.
I don’t think content bans are good ideas in general, and I don’t think they’re good ideas here.
Curious, though, why you think I was saying anything about homosexuality in my comments here. I wasn’t, and I think that’s obvious.
FLERP, you posted this irrelevant comment to change the subject:
“Curious, who here believes it’s transphobic and wrong to disagree that a person with XY chromosomes and a penis and testicles is a woman?”
Diane,
Thank you for noticing that when people try to change the subject when the subject is anti-gay laws, it is clear their agenda is to quiet criticism of anti-gay laws.
I have noticed that a huge number of the Republicans who support those anti-gay laws claim they aren’t “anti-gay” personally.
Because TQ+ rode in as a Trojan Horse on LGB civil rights and now LGB people don’t have much say in their own organizations. LGB people realize now, that they should never have allowed the “T” under their umbrella. Unfortunately, the LGB will have to suffer because a small group of AGP’s have used the civil rights movement of the LGB to promote an alternative agenda. Let reality reign and let the lawsuits begin!
I’m not part of any movement so I have no idea whether it’s been hijacked. The number of transgender people must be very small so I can’t see them taking over anything.
And for the record….I have family members and friends who are gay. We are all pretty progressive, vote Dem and for social policies. We have gotten our Covid shots/ boosters and abided by mask mandates and social distancing and wish to return to a more normal existence. It doesn’t make us right wing trolls.The rhetoric by the far left is getting really old and the omission of truth /full disclosure is becoming a lie.
I’m not part of “the far left” so far as I know, except that I have very strong views about racial equality. Who are you accusing of what?
There is enormous confusion about these terms sex and gender. This really needs to be clarified. All this goes back to the brilliant Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book The Second Sex, where she said that one is born female but becomes a woman. She was drawing a distinction between sex–the biological inheritance–and gender–all the cultural baggage attaching to sex–social roles, dress, rules for behavior, etc. Among the Maasai, for example, gender expectations for men are that they will be into arts and crafts and wearing colorful clothing and gossiping with other men, exactly the opposite of the gender expectations of, say, 1950s America.
So a transgender identity would properly be, if the term were being used correctly, an identification with the prevailing norms for behavior (dress, grooming, social behavior, etc) for persons of the opposite sex. If the terms are to be used properly, transitioning via medical procedures is not a matter of being transgender but, rather, of being transexual.
I hope I’ve cleared that up. And, please note, there are many people who are intersex. And there are many who have from very early ages been transgender in their inclinations.
Years ago, in high school, I had a great friend with whom I would take long walks. We would talk about books and girls and politics and girls and music and girls and our dreams for the future. I was going to go to college and become a great scholar, the sort of scholar whom people spoke of in hushed and reverent tones. He was going to be Hemingway and live down and out in Monterey and Paris and write the Great American Novel. This guy was from Utah and wore cowboy boots and a Stetson on top of his already imposing height. Very, very conventionally masculine appearance. And though I was his best friend (I think), he never told me that he was transgender. I didn’t learn about that until years later, when I met his ex-wife in a poetry class and then, later even, when I read the magnificent novel that he wrote about growing up trans in the extraordinarily narrow-minded Midwest.
So, from my limited experience as a kid, here were two examples of other kids who were trans long before people were out about it. And that’s what I think is happening. It’s not about some “social contagion.” It’s about people being out about who they are.
Btw, I also had a friend who was one of the first people in the US to undergo transition hormone therapy and surgery. Very successfully, I might add. He married his long-time girlfriend, they adopted some kids, and they lived very happily together thereafter.
I think this burst of racist activity in mostly RED MAGA states is due to the solid conservative majority on the US Supreme Court, a stolen majority thanks to McConnell blocking a floor vote for Obama’s recommendation almost a year before the 2016 election. An election that saw Trump lose the popular vote by millions while winning a thin Electoral College vote to become president.
Of 46 presidents, this country has only had FIVE that lost the popular vote but won through the Electoral College.
1824
52 years would pass before
1876
1888
I’m sure that the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction had something to do with 1876 and 1888.
After 1888, it took 112 years before it happened again.
2000 Bush vs Gore
2016 Clinton vs Trump
I think that white supremacy and racism is at the core of both those elections.
I also think the 2000 and 2016 elections are proof that the Republican Party has come up with a cheating strategy and lie-filled formula to mislead and manipulate targeted voters through hate and fear in the right states to win more elections through the Electoral College while losing the popular vote.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/05/29/mcconnell-blocked-obama-supreme-court-choice-wouldnt-stop-trump/1268883001/
And McConnell seems to be ready to it again for a Biden recommendation for the US Supreme Court.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/25/mitch-mcconnell-supreme-court-biden-pick-block
I am curious about what people here think about Rachel Dolezal. For those that don’t remember her, she in some sense transitioned from being white to being black. That transition was thought to be illegitimate at the time, but perhaps now the posters here would think it legitimate.
Well, white people passing as black is weird, but I can think of worse crimes. A lot of us are mixed race. Here, something I wrote about a controversy along these lines:
I think the canned response today is that although race is an arbitrary concept, with little or no meaningful genetic basis, being legitimately “black” requires the first-person lived experience of oppression. You can’t fake it and if you try and get found out you’ll be ridiculed and punished.
Whereas “gender” is a social construct and performative, and thus mutable. At the same time, it’s an essential part of individual identity.
So it’s legitimate for a biological man (a highly contentious term among the genderqueer left) to declare he is a woman, even if he does not have the first-person lived experience of sexism or many other things experienced by actual women. And anyone who doubts the declaration is committing a kind of violence by “denying” that person’s “right to exist.
again, this is a confusion of sex and gender
How so?
Again, I think that for clarity’s sake, we should start reserving, when we are speaking technically and precisely, as in an argument, the terms male and female for references to biological sex and the terms man and woman for references to gender roles. This is what Beauvoir was getting at when she wrote, “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient” (One is not born a woman; one becomes one).
If we do that, then “biological man” is a misuse. The proper term would be simply “male,” with this being assumed to be a biological matter. And since the term “woman” refers to gender role or identification, all who adopt such a role or identification would be women, but all would not be female.
I recognize that this is not common usage now, but the distinction is important, as is the distinction between being transgender and transexual, and we can’t talk clearly about this stuff without making the distinction. If we don’t make it, we are muddling things from the start, and lord knows that they are muddled enough.
And we must recognize that in both cases, with regard to both sex and gender, there’s no simple binary that always applies. There are intersex people. There are people who are in some respects male but produce little in the way of androgens. There are people who are in some respects female but produce a lot of testosterone. And gender is extremely mutable and exists on an ever-changing continuum.
I don’t really care whether blacks pass as whites, or whites pass as blacks. Does it matter?
I do not think that trans women think of themselves as “passing” as women. I think they argue that they are women. If trans women are correct, I think that Rachel Dolezal is black, not “passing” as black, independent of her genetic heritage.
Do folks here agree that the condemnation of Rachel Dolezal was unjust?
Teachingeconomist,
Are you really telling us that because you believe that Rachel Dolezal isn’t black, you believe that all trans people are – to quote you – “illegitimate”?
You are the one that is trying to tie the two together, so clearly you have very strong opinions yourself that either both have to be illegitimate or both have to be legitimate. That is YOUR view, not anyone else’s here.
We are all curious to hear whether you believe that in order not to be a hypocrite in your own eyes, you feel you must condemn all trans students as “illegitimate” just because you believe Dolezal is white.
TE isn’t trying to do anything other than drop some bait and hope someone takes it.
NYCPSP,
I did use the word illegitimate in my post above, but that is the only way my post resembles your characterization of my post. Let me try again.
I think if you read my original post more carefully you will see that my claim was that society took Rachel Dolezal’s transition from white to black as being illegitimate at the time largely because she did not have the first hand experience of being raised as a black child in our society. The lived experience of transgender women would appear similar: Lia Thompson, for example, did not have the first hand experience of being raised as a girl in our society. It seems to me that if transgender women are women in all ways despite not having the same lived experiences as cisgender women, Rachel Dolezal should also be considered black despite not having the same lived experiences as people who were born black.
If people want to change their racial designation, who is hurt by that? Are you? I think what shocked people about Dolezal is that she was willing to abandon her privileged status as a white person. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
If the Repugnicans succeed in capturing it all, the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court, they are in for a BIG surprise. They have no notion, none at all, how BACKWARD they are, how far behind the youth of our country. The only way they will be able to hang onto it is through expanding the Court into an Extreme Court and using violent suppression of voting and dissent.
I’m entirely with Lily Allen about homophobes:
I sort of wish that people hadn’t hijacked this thread to start debating transgender issues. Homophobia is real and evil, and we are seeing in these don’t say gay bills the first salvos of an attempt by Republicans to roll back LGBTX gains. Right now, they are being a teenie bit cautious in how they go about this, but once they control all the levers of power, make no mistake about it, they will go full fundie on this.
But since people have turned this into a discussion of transgender rights and a supposed transgender contagion epidemic, let me say this about that. LOL. Gender is a collection of sociocultural norms traditionally but not necessarily associated in a particular society or culture with people of a particular sex. I am old enough to remember when there were arguments about whether girls should wear pants. The nations that girls wear dresses and play with dolls and boys wear pants and play with toy trucks and guns are matters of gender. Wearing makeup and heels are matters of gender. Being transgender is a matter of adopting sociocultural norms traditionally associated with people of the opposite sex. It’s Harry Styles wearing pearls and a dress. It’s girls playing tackle football. It’s boys gossiping together in groups in the hallway and men having friends they call for heart-to-hearts when they are having problems in their personal lives. It’s giving a big _U to those kinds of limitations on the range of acceptable human behavior. And here’s the thing that’s left out of these discussions: the ability to do that, to say _U to those gendering limitations, is a GREAT BIRTH OF FREEDOM. It’s saying, no, I don’t have to be snips and snails and puppy dog tails because I am a boy; no, I don’t have to be sugar and spice and everything nice if I’m a girl. I don’t have to be an aggressive, go-it-alone, competitive jerk if I’m a boy. I don’t have to be demur and coy and silly if I’m a girl. I can, if I am a girl, go to school rockin’ my James Dean haircut and jeans and bomber jacket if I damned well want to.
A great birth of freedom.
All power to the kids. They are figuring some things out here. Yeah, it will be rocky for a time. And yeah, they need to grok the difference between gender and sex. Everyone does.
Years ago (back in the 1970s), I read a book-length report by a Yale psychologist on a massive study he had done of middle-aged American men, a group that in many ways had been understudied by psychologists. One of the things he did was to ask men across socioeconomic groups to list their five best friends. Then he asked the men on those lists to do the same things. And bizarrely, these people weren’t on one anothers’ lists!!! American men at the time DID NOT EVEN KNOW WHO THEIR FRIENDS WERE. They were extremely emotionally isolated, having been brought up in an environment that microconditioned them to be competitive with other men. If they got together with other men to do stuff (bowling and poker on one end of the social spectrum; golf and sailing on the other), it was toddler-like parallel play. If they had problems, they didn’t jump on the telephone with their friends to talk about them. They kept them inside or dumped them all on their wives. This isn’t as bad as it used to be. It’s changing. And that’s a really, really good thing.
Aie yie yie. My comment is in moderation. I hate that.
It enables the enemy when writers like Sachs deliberately separate the anti-LBGTQ laws from their source – the religious right.
If the laws are to be fought successfully, there can’t be buy-in to the framing that religious conservatives want. “Culture War” is an example of the rhetoric of contrived guise.
“Culture” laws that the majority of Americans don’t want are crafted by and pushed by the alliance of conservative Catholics and evangelicals. A refusal to admit that aids in taking away the rights gained by women, POC, and LBGTQ.