Content Note: This article contains references to transphobic slurs and hate speech.
The anti-trans hate movement is continuing to gain steam, targeting not just trans people themselves, but anyone who supports trans people. Last week, two schools were the targets of hate crimes. One was an elementary school in California.
Basically, the teacher supported a student who came out as trans by telling the rest of his class his gender identity and new name, then showing a video called “Call Me Max” to help explain what it means to be trans. Then, a local newsletter called The Conejo Guardian caught wind of this story of a kid feeling welcomed and included, and rushed to publish an inflammatory article accusing the school of promoting “radical sexual agendas.”
Multiple parents have spoken out against the article. One parent, Lauren Najjarpour, defended the teacher:
“She just said that the student went by one name and the teacher said now we are going to refer to the student by this name, and she said we support all the kids in this classroom and that was it and it wasn’t a big deal.”
Another parent, Megan Goebel, said that
“If we don’t [the kids] the freedom to explore, if we tell them that these kinds of things are wrong, think about what that does to a child. It really crushes their spirit, crushes who they are. It makes them think they can’t explore things even outside of gender.”
I won’t quote the article in the Conejo Guardian because it’s absolutely vile, but suffice it to say that it got someone riled up enough to graffiti “Pervs work here” on the school. Luckily, the school board and the superintendent have come out in support of the teacher and student, issuing a lengthy statement, saying that the district “proudly serve[s] ALL students and even more proudly affirm[s] to be a place where ALL students belong.”
Meanwhile, a school in Wisconsin was subjected to bomb threats after trying to do right by one of their trans students.
The threats were in response to a Title IX investigation that focused on boys who were reportedly harassing a nonbinary student. After the threats, the school shut down the investigation.
In case it’s not already clear, the anti-trans movement is a terrorist hate movement, inextricably tied to far-right fascism. In the transphobe’s ideal world, women are subservient to men, and the fuzzier the line between women and men is, the harder that hierarchy is to maintain. The thought of fluid, joyful, expansive gender is terrifying to them because it saps them of the power they’re desperately trying to hold onto. That’s why you get these explosions of violent hate at positive, life-affirming events like a trans kid taking on a new name.
One thing that’s absolutely vital to understand about the anti-trans movement is that it’s multi-pronged, with some branches hiding behind more palatable topics like feminism or women’s athletics. Terrorizing school kids may (hopefully) seem pretty awful to you, but the media landscape is also saturated with subtler, more “reasonable” rhetoric that’s expressly designed to desensitize cis people to this exact kind of violence. And we know, from the horrifying number of trans people murdered each year, how far this violence can go.
For example, if you’re cis, you may have heard murmurs here and there that women’s athletics aren’t fair anymore, and that trans athletes are winning all the medals everywhere. Maybe you saw people on Twitter claiming that cis women are no longer allowed to call themselves women, or that lesbians are now required to date trans people against their will, or that men are pretending to be trans so that they can get access to women and children.
The thing is, absolutely none of that stuff is true. All those claims and rumors are carefully crafted talking points that are spewed onto the Internet in order to build up a caricature of trans people and chip away at cis people’s empathy. The anti-trans movement is run by liars trying to pave the way for the kind of terrorism now facing these schools. Their endgame is the erasure of trans people, pure and simple.
So if you’re cis, and your cis friends are debating this or that aspect of trans rights? Shut that shit down immediately. State, unequivocally, that you support trans rights 100%. Because to protect trans people from harm, we have to stop this movement in its tracks.
(image: Ted Eytan/Flickr (CC BY-SA))
