Republicans Are Creating Refugees Right Here in the USA
This is not just a simple political disagreement.
On December 4, 2022, Vice News released a documentary on several families being forced to flee from their states (Texas and Arizona) as a result of Republican governors and legislatures introducing and implementing draconian anti-trans laws.
A week or so prior to that, on November 27, Politico released an article on the same issue. In Texas in particular, Governor Gregg Abbott’s recent directive would allow the state to prosecute parents of transgender kids for child abuse. The directive would also allow the state to prosecute those who knew the kid was transgender but did not report their parents to the authorities.
What this means is if a kid is openly transgender, they are putting their parents in danger, and anyone else they tell. And even if the charges have no teeth and this is just a scare tactic, it’s clearly working.
Within days, Cass recalled, they were bursting into Carrie’s room, filled with suicidal thoughts.
“I knew there was a spotlight on me and … it felt like I embarrassed myself in public, like I was naked, and everyone was looking at me,” Cass later recalled. “It was a very dark time.”
We have a term for people who flee their homes due to government persecution. They are called refugees. GOP politicians are creating refugees right here in the land of the free.
This is not a lesser evil option. This is not a price to be paid for a greater benefit. This is cruelty for the sake of cruelty.
THE NARRATIVE
The Republicans have crafted a narrative, a lens through which their base views the world around them. This on its own isn’t particularly nefarious. All political groups craft a narrative to suit their political agenda. What is nefarious is the rampant use of lies to serve an agenda of cruelty.
The narrative the GOP is presenting is that transgender kids and even adults have been “groomed” into being trans by their parents or teachers. In their mind, the left is pushing a so-called “radical gender ideology”. The left thinks that men can be women and women can be men, and the left is pushing this ideology on children to make those children think they are trans for some nefarious purpose. Few are actually explaining what this nefarious purpose is but the implication you get from listening to people spouting this narrative is that leftists just get off on it.
According to this narrative, trans kids and adults are just victims of grooming by the left into thinking they’re trans when they actually are not because they believe trans people aren’t real. They can’t conceive of the idea that sex and gender would be different despite nearly every researcher agreeing with this. This is a different world than the one they or their parents grew up in and they are scared that things are getting more complicated. There’s no better example of this than Matt Walsh intentionally playing stupid when a professor is explaining his field of work and the complexities that come with it, and then acting as if him playing stupid proves he’s right. It’s based on a belief that complex answers are inherently wrong and simple answers are inherently right.
Now, let's call this what it is. This is a conspiracy theory. They believe that a powerful group of individuals is conspiring together in trying to turn kids trans for some reason and that is why we are seeing such a sudden increase in kids identifying as transgender and/or LGBT.
Wait until they find out about all the kids who were groomed by nefarious teachers into writing with their left hand.
Well, would ya look at that? Left-handedness was very uncommon in the days when children were actively punished for writing with their left hand, but then when that practice stopped and we started letting kids write with whatever hand they chose, suddenly the number of left-handed people vastly increased. How awful of those teachers to groom those kids into writing with their left hand. How did we let them get away with this?
Putting aside the sarcasm, it seems this recent increase in the number of LGBT youth has a much simpler explanation that doesn’t involve radical leftist cabals plotting to turn our kids gay for unspecified reasons. Being LGBT used to be actively persecuted, and now people broadly are much more accepting of the LGBT community, so more people are openly LGBT than before. This isn’t very complicated.
Also notice that even as left-handed kids were persecuted, they still existed. Guess what. Trans people have also existed long before modern times. There were quite a few working in Berlin in the Institute for Sexual Research in the 1920s and 30s. This institute was among the first targets of Nazi persecution including the first large-scale book burning. Going back even further, you can find examples of outright or at least suspected gender dysphoria and transgender people even back in ancient times. Various different cultures throughout the world have accepted third genders or transgenderism long before the 20th century.
The logical extension of this view that some Republicans are unwilling to voice but which others are more than happy to express is that LGBT people themselves, by their mere existence, are child groomers. If exposing children to LGBT topics is inherently child grooming, then an open LGBT person being around kids is grooming them. In this narrative, they are not victims, but perpetrators.
Now let me make this clear: The only determining factor in whether or not a particular politician or pundit expressly endorses that logical conclusion of their rhetoric is based solely on what they think they can get away with saying. The result of both narratives is the same; they justify the persecution of transgender and other LGBT people. The first narrative painting these people as victims, a narrative which is increasingly being overtaken by the second much more extreme narrative, is the one used to justify the laws targeting parents of trans kids in Texas. This essentially forces trans kids into the closet who need not be, which has severe mental health effects and massively increases the likelihood that those kids commit suicide. The GOP doesn’t seem to care about the fact that their laws are effectively killing trans kids, and would in fact like to expand these laws to affect more people and to become more draconian.
CALL IT WHAT IT IS
As the GOP becomes increasingly radicalized and anti-democratic and begins to be taken over by the most radical people on the right wing, we can expect to see things get even worse. Mainstream GOP politicians and political pundits are already calling LGBT people child groomers and actively dehumanizing them, inciting violence against them (and also drag queens), and weaponizing government power to persecute them and/or force them back into the closet. Let's call this what it is. This is the beginning of a genocide.
When you demonize an entire group of people based on immutable characteristics and accuse them all as a group of sexually grooming children, the result is stochastic violence. When you use state power against that group to make their lives intolerable, driving them either away from their homes or to suicide, that’s genocide. This is happening right now and there is absolutely no reason to think it’s going to stop. In fact, there’s every reason in the world to think it will increase in severity. The previously-mentioned state of Texas is creating a registry of trans people. Whenever you give the Republicans an inch, they take a mile. This will be no exception. They are primarily targeting trans people right now, but they are including gays and lesbians in their groomer rhetoric so there’s no reason to assume they’ll stop at trans people, nor would this be any less of a problem even if they were to draw the line only at trans people.
What we are seeing right now is dehumanization, stochastic violence, and conspiracism, all directed toward people with immutable characteristics and in certain areas backed up with the power of the state to suppress these people. This is the beginning of a genocide, and if we don’t actively fight back against it with any possible means at our disposal it will progress. There is no “trans debate”. This is not a dialogue on abstract ideas, this is a war about people’s basic human right to live freely. There are those opposing genocide and those who are supporting it.
IT’S HAPPENING
That was going to be then of my conclusion, but as I was finishing up this article and getting ready to publish it, some more news dropped.
OKLAHOMA BILL WOULD BAN GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE FOR PEOPLE UNDER 26, COULD FORCE SOME TO DETRANSITION
I cannot overstate how much this proves my point. This bill, if passed, would apply to anyone under 26 years old, ie. 25 or younger. 25 year olds are not children. They are capable of making their own choices. As the trans-panic becomes more and more severe, we can expect to see bills like this popping up all over the country. Bills banning gender-affirming care and potentially detransitioning ADULTS. This was never about protecting the kids, it’s about purging an element of society they hate for no rational reason.
