stuff like this are why a lot of trans folks are freaked the hell out right now. They’re literally wondering if they are going to end up like the Jews in the Holocaust.
Such concerns are very justified. It’s now common financial advice for those who can do so to keep liquid funds avaliable to flee in a short period of time (and it’s pretty rare for transfolk to have those funds) These concerns are increased heavily for those living in purple/red states. I already know parents who have fled states over similar laws.
I know Biden is fighting and doing the best he can federally, but his power is limited. It’s going to take not losing too bad in the midterms, and that’s an inside straight right now.
This isn’t about the kids. This is about the frantic GOP mommies whose little Timmy decided he wanted to wear a tutu and lipstick one day, and the mom’s are DESPERATE that nobody undermines their message that it’s NOT OK, YOU HAVE TO GROW UP AS MY MANLY BOY CHILD!
I figured this was all about DeathSantis’ upcoming primary bid where he could show how he stuck it to teh gays and isn’t he a great conservative. Gay people in Florida be damned, he’s running for President!
Same with Abbott and his transgender shit in Texas.
While I don’t think Alstein’s worry about “death camps” is warranted there’s no doubt that the GOP is riding the Culture War to Putin-esque levels of contradiction and social collapse that Democrats don’t quite fathom. The inchoate anger of rando conservatives in Tea Party / MAGA hat / QAnon / Trucker-anti Vax Convoys are fueled entirely by culture warfare propaganda, and they’re not going to be content until liberalism’s face is buried in the mud with their boot on it, with themselves howling in simian rage.
Thanks @arrendek for sharing. I can’t imagine what your family is going through with your state government passing hate laws against you and your kid. My heart goes out to you and yours.
Aside from all the obvious things (fuck the theocrats forever and ever, amen), the thing that I’m shocked-not-really-shocked by is how naked the fascists are these days about “rules for thee, not for me.” It’s all about personal freedom – no bureaucrat can make the right decision compared to someone with skin in the game / better information! – until people start making decisions they don’t like, then it’s all life-in-prison felonies and aggressive enforcement.
I’m seriously concerned for my brothers and sisters and siblings in the red parts of the country. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better :(
Yup. Look at the COVID response for another example of this. “Local government is best government!” right up until a metropolitan area needs to introduce a mask mandate during a surge in which case the state will come in to void it. The Utah legislature has taken almost all the power from state health departments and local governments during COVID. And yet, in the same legislative session, they whine about “federal overreach” and how local decisions are always better than ones further removed.
The doublethink on display since Trump has been mindboggling to me.
I want to thank @arrendek, @Alstein and others here with more information about this bill and what’s going on. It’s very hard to understand things like this with just the media blurbs. This reminds me so much of NC’s Bathroom Bill a few years ago and everything that entailed. Just like this, it was a fear based bill, which seems to be the GOP’s operating rules for everything: generate a false controversy, tie it to a social change movement, prop up candidates who talk about it constantly, get elected. It’s sickening.
And like the other thousand times I’ve done it, all I can do right now is shake my head and wonder how on earth we got here.
That’s why the gloves have to be off now. I never really thought of myself as a “liberal” until the racist anti-Obama forces that resulted in Trump turned GOP-led government into a tax-funded lynch mob.
Whatever reservations one may have about blockers etc., it should be clear what the GOP’s actual motivations are; all of them are unacceptable in a democracy, and none of them are defending children.
Let them all be clusterfucked by Mongols dressed as Disney princesses.
I hear you, John. I was in a relationship with a Republican/conservative leading up to the 2008 election. Our relationship did not survive the campaign, needless to say. At the time I thought it was just she that was a conspiracy theorist outlier, it took me another year or two to fully realize the entire party was bobsledding down that path.
I never thought of myself as a liberal or a Democrat (in fact, I hadn’t registered as such until 2016) but they kind of made that choice for me!
My kids got the sex talk when they were 4 or 5 years old. That’s about the age that boys stop dressing up in dresses and start preferring cars over dolls. They’re gonna get an early education in gender roles whether you like it or not. And kids that young are perfectly capable of understanding injustice, prejudice, and the importance of self-actualization. My thinking wrt my kids has always been that more information is better. If they feel like a topic is taboo, they’re gonna seek information from sources other than me.
It’s worth noting, too, that “gender roles” and whatnot are reinforced from the word go to kids in any case. How many classic kids stories, movies, etc., feature love stories (and they lived happily ever after), families, coming of age/becoming a man/woman, etc.? This stuff has all been part of the dominant culture for as long as we’ve had stories, and in all that time, nuclear families and cishet couples were the overwhelming norm. That’s something that seeps into a child’s understanding of how the world functions and “should be” almost earlier than they can string the words “Mommy loves daddy!” together.
Conservatives are aghast at the idea that fiction or media or commercials might portray a gay couple or a non-cis person, much like they were about single moms or interracial couples in fights past. They want to stamp everything but white bread (and white skinned) WASP cishet mono relationships out of existence in the broader cultural awareness, right before they round anyone who doesn’t fit that mold up and toss 'em into a death camp.
Conservatives are an enormous and existential threat to millions of lives right now. They cannot be abided or allowed to continue to exist in any politically relevant form.
The thing is that at like 5 years old, it isn’t a sex talk, its a “there are lots of kinds of people” talk. It doesn’t become an “adult sexuality and gender” thing unless it has already been pathologized. Our convos with our kids have been something like:
Kid: “Somebody said X was gay. What’s gay?”
Adult: “You know how Uncle Dave has a boyfriend? Some boys like girls, and some boys like boys.”
Kid: “Oh. Okay!” *continues coloring*
We’ve had the same convos multiple times, because that’s just kind of the way it is with kids. Once or twice, our kids have been like “But don’t boys usually like girls?”, and we were basically like “You know how lots of people like ice cream, but your friend Bobby doesn’t? Some people like different things”, and that’s basically been it. (Kids really like concrete categories and taxonomies, so non-binary gender can be a little bit of a harder thing to make stick, but its similarly neutral in tone).
Which is kind of exactly what the people pushing these bills are aware of and afraid of. Normalizing these kinds of conversations at a young age makes it significantly harder to push their narratives. To a degree, they’re right: it’s going to be really hard to get the genie back in the bottle once everybody just kinda talks about it, they just see that as a bad thing rather than a good thing.
I mean we had both kinds of conversations. We definitely many times reinforced “sometimes boys like boys”. But we did absolutely talk to our kids about the physical mechanics of sex when they were 4 or 5.
Yeah, my daughter asked about what sex was when she was maybe, 6? My wife provided a reasonably detailed explanation, at which point my daughter burst out laughing, saying that it was “the silliest thing she had ever heard of”, and that she was pretty sure she would “never want to do that”.
