Republicans Attack Trans Children
Children are the primary targets in the new Republican ploy to use transgender rights as wedge issues.
Good Christian “conservatives” really do hate queers in general, but especially transgender persons at the moment. Why exactly gender norms and definitions are so important to good Christians is not at all clear, but they obviously are. The Vatican issued a nasty statement about transgender persons not too long ago.
Christian Republican attacks on LGBT civil rights are sincere on their face, but they also offer a psychologically gratifying proxy for their opposition to civil rights in general, especially the civil rights of African Americans, which good Christian Republicans have never reconciled themselves to in the first place.
But at the moment, in typically cynical fashion, the Party of overt Christianity in the United States, the Republican Party, sees transgender rights as a fructive wedge issue for pushing their culture war, since they have no other policies to offer anyone.
That the easiest ways to target transgender persons at the moment mostly involve attacking children slows good Christian Republicans down not a whit.
One favorite is laws that would exclude transgender youth from participating in sports, usually by requiring athletes to identify as the gender that conforms to their original birth certificates. If you don’t remember elected officials caring much about girls’ sports before, it’s because they did not until they saw an opportunity to use them for political gain:
Even more pernicious are the bills that would prohibit specific forms of health care for trans teens. No surprise that Tucker Carlson at Faux “News” offers a telling distillation of the Christian Republican position on this issue:
Note his repeated use of the term, “chemical castration,” which must win some sort of award for hugely loaded terminology. It also suggests that he only cares about male to female transgender persons, not female to male.
As usual, the Party that supposedly champions individual rights and individual responsibility also advances policies that socialize decisions about health care, some of the most personal choices humans can make, and choices that should be highly individualized and reside solely with individuals and their doctors.
The stories of individual transgender persons too easily get lost in the noise, but they are out there, and they deserve more attention. Of course, Tucker would never think to ask an actual transgender person or the parent of one what they think about laws that socialize their healthcare decisions. He has no interest in that perspective. In good Christian Republican fashion, he just wants ordinary people to shut up and let ol, white guys make their decisions for them.
So, to repeat, good Christian Republicans are only too happy to attack children in their zeal to use transgender rights as a wedge issue.