DL Open Thread: Thursday, March 30, 2023
Nazis Target The Trans Community. How else should I phrase it?:
The Republican-dominated Kentucky legislature voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to override the governor’s veto of a bill that will create a host of new regulations and restrictions on transgender youth, including banning access to what doctors call gender-affirming health care.
The bill, described by L.G.B.T.Q. rights groups as among the most extreme in the nation, was vetoed on Friday by Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, but it was overridden in both the State House and Senate, where Republicans hold supermajorities.
The law, which began as a fairly narrow bill but steadily grew into a much larger package of restrictions, specifically bans surgeries, puberty blockers and hormone therapy for children under 18. It also forbids school districts from requiring or recommending that students be referred to by pronouns that “do not conform to a student’s biological sex as indicated on the student’s original, unedited birth certificate.”
The law also compels doctors to cease treating patients who are undergoing gender-transition care, adding that if physicians deem that ceasing treatment is likely to “harm the minor,” they may set a time frame to “systematically” phase out treatment.
The law is part of a wave of legislation filed in recent years by Republican state lawmakers to restrict and regulate the lives of transgender youth. At least 10 states have passed similar bans on transition care, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Tennessee and Utah.
On Wednesday, the governor of West Virginia signed a bill into law that will also ban transition care for minors unless the child has been “diagnosed as suffering from severe gender dysphoria” by at least two health care providers and has parental consent. In two more states — Idaho and Missouri — the passage of bans appears imminent, according to Erin Reed, a legislative analyst who is opposed to bills limiting access to transgender medical care.
The Nazis are coming for the Trans Community. It’s up to us to fight back.
How Disney Outmaneuvered Hapless DeSantis: AKA, when is a Board not a Board?
In apparent retaliation for the critique, DeSantis replaced the previous Disney-friendly oversight board known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District with a new board, the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, made up entirely of his own appointees, including religious and conservative activists. The board is responsible for approving infrastructure projects, as well as maintaining more mundane aspects of the park, such as trash collection and management of sewer systems. Disney would have been to some degree beholden to DeSantis’s board for its sign-off on major projects, in theory allowing it to hold sway over the company.
But in a bureaucratic coup, Disney and the previous board signed an agreement on Feb. 8 — the day before the Florida House passed a bill paving the way for the DeSantis appointees — that transferred much of the board’s power to Disney.
The new board, much to its chagrin, apparently discovered the agreement only recently.
“I’m surprised that they didn’t tell us about it as soon as we were appointed,” one of the board members, Brian Aungst Jr., told local station News 6 as the board held a meeting on Wednesday. “We had to find out about it late at night on a Friday night.”
Ron Peri, another board member, said at the meeting that under the agreement, “this board loses, for practical purposes, the majority of its ability to do anything beyond maintain the roads and maintain basic infrastructure.”
Sad.
FACT: Israel Hasn’t Been A Democracy For A Long Time. Yes, it’s an opinion piece, but it’s a fact:
It is a fractious stalemate. But it is not new. Indeed, at its root is the more than 50-year-old military occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. What has changed is that the right was once more content to follow Netanyahu’s lead, to let him “manage” the occupation as it entrenched itself more with each passing year. Now, the hard right wants to move beyond managing the occupation toward what some of its politicians, like finance minister Betzalel Smotrich, call a “decisive” moment – toward the final defeat of the Palestinian national movement, the de jure annexation of the West Bank and the expulsion of the Palestinians living there. Rightwing control over the judiciary is the first step toward making this a reality.
For this reason, Israeli politics will remain fundamentally unstable as long as the occupation persists as a putatively temporary military dictatorship that Israel upholds indefinitely. Yet the problem is that the very same factors that enabled the protest movement against the judicial overhaul plan to swell to the size that it did prevent the movement making the conceptual switch that it must make if it is not to fight the same fight over and over again. It must move beyond a defense of the status quo against the threat to it posed by the radical right and toward a recognition of the roots of the right’s judicial plan in its annexationist and eliminationist agenda. But the occupation is precisely what many of the protesters – who draped themselves in Israeli flags, who took to the streets in their military caps and berets, who pledged only to return to serving in the occupied territories if the judicial plan was dropped – don’t want to talk about. The great unity of the protest movement was possible because it left thorny issues like territorial compromise to the side.
Yet Another Advertorial From The News-Journal. The beneficiary of this butt-kissing? Target. No, I will not excerpt. I would, however, appreciate some public explanation for the editorial policy guiding this almost-daily occurrence. Because, whatever it is, it’s not journalism.
What do you want to talk about?
Town residents refused evacuation “until I finish my Old-Fashioned.”
Some accountability but where is are the sanctions against DHHS and the plethora of State folks that shoveled money into an organization that in its last years was failing the states most vulnerable, the addicted, the mentally ill and more?
https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/crime/2023/03/30/connections-founder-cathy-devaney-mckay-settle-fraud-narcotics-charges/70057826007/
DHHS is the federal agency. DHSS is the state one.
Yep, it’s Israel again. As noted the nation operates like a military dictatorship, the public be damned (Gee, reminds me of most Red States) and now seeks to complete the far right dream of driving out the Palestinians and getting all their land while their at it. On the other hand America operates as a Plutocracy whose goal is to end what little democracy there is here. Final countdown for both? As yes, it can happen here, and there as well.
If this gets me booted, so be it, but the Trans identity movements made themselves a target and its creating a lot of resentment among former allies.
Some background: My adolescence was defined by Reagan, H.W., and AIDS. I grew up with the modern gay rights movement. It was slow march with a lot of setbacks. I had a lot of friends move away to Massachusetts and California, when it looked like those were the only places where it was possible to enjoy basic partnership protections. I was anchored here by work and familial obligations. It wasn’t until the mid -aughts that I was formally out in most social circles. It was slow and incremental but it felt like we had made real advancements through persistence and patience.
Transgender identities in the 90’s and 00’s were present but rare. What was much more common were the more femme or butch presentations; in some ways there was a greater de-coupling of gender roles than there is today. Trans identities were not a point of discussion and people (who in hindsight I suspect were trans) presented themselves in ways that very clearly indicated their preferred pronouns. If it isn’t clear, we were also all adults at the time, in our 20s and 30’s.
I can only speak from lived experience, but there is a massive disconnect between the trans adults I knew 20 years ago and what is going on with kids right now. So much of modern youth discourse centers around the trans experience that it has become a permanent identity unto itself, instead of a way to describe a set of circumstances. To put it in other words, trans used to be analogous to a condition like scoliosis, something you were born with that could be fixed. Now its more like someone who is currently “in recovery” – no real resolution, always the potential for a backslide, someone who needs to be handled a bit more carefully for fear that you’ll cause a setback.
To be clear, I treat every person with courtesy and will always address them in the manner they request. But to be honest, it is taxing, when someone requests that you use She/They pronouns when all of their body language and affects signal biological maleness. There is already a massive amount of cognitive dissonance in America in 2023, and it feels like it adds an additional weight to that load to play a game of pronoun roulette anytime you meet someone.
At some point, (I think around 2014) trans identities became associated with the bleeding edge of social activism. Perhaps gay had gone mainstream (and it had, Pride had gone corporate years earlier), but cisgender gays no longer represented the “safe” oppressed minority (Dave Chappelle really got this one right when he described the how welcoming certain progressive communities were of trans people relative to hetero, cisgender black men; but he used the “T” word so all the nuance was lost).
Before 2014, trans identity was such a niche topic that it barely registered in the national discourse. The responsibility for elevating trans identities and placing them at the forefront of the progressive movement is entirely shouldered by the left wing. A minority of the trans community have sold their community out by pushing too hard, too fast, in a society that wasn’t and still isn’t ready. A lot of us waited our turn and they can wait too. Instead of pulling back, the trans identity movement has doubled down, effectively serving up their peers and allies on a silver platter to the neo-fascists for a culture war feast. It goes without saying that some of these bills are starting to include explicit anti-gay legislation.
These people and their selfishness are going to wreck it for the rest of us. The trans identity movements needs to sit down and shut up for a few years and let the dust settle. They’ve added nothing to the discourse and actually made the situation worse.
Honestly, fuck you. If you “waited your turn” and were denied your identity and humanity, lived under constant physical threat, were called a pedophile, and wish that someone else in the same situation would wait their fucking turn, then fuck you.
TERFs are the worst.
I agree TERFs are the worst of the RFs.
Jean’s account rings mostly true to me (up until the “wait your turn” part; that brought out a “fuck you” reaction in me too).
Fuck this person. I don’t buy it one bit. This is exactly what Tucker Carlson would sound like if he strained against every asshole impulse he usually allows to run free.
Here’s the other thing, the whole trans didn’t used to be a thing bullshit is exactly what people said about the gay community until the straights started giving a shit. Because for the previous 1000 years everyone pretended that they didn’t exist. And when someone found out that they did exist, they were killed, maimed, imprisoned, excluded and ostracized.
It wasn’t until the 90’s that people started saying that the gay community should be respected and celebrated for their contributions.
So now we have assholes like this TERF saying this shit like they didn’t get their ass beat on the regular for being gay. It’s your responsibility to make it better for the people coming after you.
I didn’t get my ass beat, because I took my time and could read a room. People knew me for years before I was finally out to them. That’s why I survived.
It may not be fair or right, but we took care of ourselves and didn’t make ourselves a burden or demand instant validation. The whole mythos around Pride, being loud and and proud, St. Marsha P. Johnson, etc is a fairy tale. The people that did the real heavy lifting of gay rights were those that lead quiet, unassuming lives in the suburbs. We were the ones that demonstrated that there was nothing frightful or alien about gay people, and we did it on such a low intensity way that even if we didn’t gain true acceptance from the religious right we at least reached a detente that would have melted away once the old guard died off.
This new identity movement is so plugged into the mythos that they can’t see the unintended harm they are causing. I reject the notion that I didn’t help make things better for the ones that came after me. It cost me the excitement of the city in my youth and it was decidedly unsexy. But I lived the life and demonstrated to all the straights that I could be a boring slob just like everyone else. I did my part and a small contingent of immature people with their glory-seeking behaviors and absolute lack of strategy are going to put all of that at risk. If that makes me a terf then so be it, I’m not going to continue to ally myself with people who jeopardized everything my friends and I worked for
I stand by my initial point, fuck you.
“I learned to hide my identity, so should they.” Your rights are wasted on you.
This precisely what they said when people started holding pride parades: That they were undermining the movement. That turned out not to be true.
You are trying to justify your own choices. You did nothing to forward the acceptance of gays, no matter what you tell yourself.
The mistake in your thinking is the belief that it’s transgenderism itself that motivates the hate. I don’t believe it is. If the trans community were quieter, the haters would simply make more noise about other targets.
Gays, Muslims, Mexicans — they will hate whatever group is handy, and if they get any help from other quarters (as they do when more progressive people make economic arguments against immigrants, for example), they will gladly seize on their hesitation as alliance.
That’s what is happening now to the transgendered. Because many otherwise liberal people are squeamish about minors proclaiming a trans identity — you yourself are a good example — those marginalized become easier targets.