Apparently worried about competition from Florida governor and anti-trans crusader Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump has announced a terrifying anti-trans agenda he promises to enact if (god forbid) he is returned to office.
In a campaign video released yesterday, the oft-impeached former president vows to undo Joe Biden’s pro-trans policies the moment he (god forbid) re-assumes the presidency. “The left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse,” Trump declared in the video.
Vowing to stop what he dishonestly calls “the chemical, physical, and emotional mutilation of our youth,” Trump also made clear that he would basically make it impossible for adults to transition as well.
I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.
I will then ask congress to permanently stop federal tax-payer dollars from being used to promote or pay for these procedures ….
He plans to essentially eliminate gender-affirming care for kids by cutting off Medicaid and Nedicare funding to any facility involved in what he insisted on calling “the chemical or physical mutilation of minor youth.” Apparently, in his mind, puberty blockers are a kind of “chemical mutilation.”
He also declared that his Justice Department would go after “big pharma and the big hospital networks” to see if they’ve “deliberately covered up horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich,” another accusation without merit.
Under his administration, he says, teachers would be required to “promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers” and prevented from “erasing the things that make men and women different and unique.” Teachers who tell children they’re “trapped in the wrong body” would face “severe consequences.”
He would also ask Congress to pass a “two genders” bill saying that the only genders recognized in the US would be male and female. In addition, he would ban trans girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.
Lying again, he accused the “radical left” of inventing the idea of transness “just a few years ago.”
Trump’s crusade would be disastrous to trans people of all ages in America. Civil rights attorney and trans activist Alejandra Caraballo warned on Twitter that
they wouldn’t even need legislation to do most of this … They’ll weaponize the administrative state and turn it into an arm of the reactionary far right. We are in serious danger of a Russian-style fascist crackdown on LGBTQ people in this country and being in a blue state won’t protect you when the federal government is targeting you and holding federal funding to an entire state hostage to eliminate your rights.
If we want to keep the US from turning into Russia, we need to keep Trump out of office.
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He probably doesn’t even know what trans even means…
America is definitely a swamp. Politics is annoying, even at the tamest times. Hopefully global warming submerges the coastlines of Texas, Florida and New York State. That way the world will be spared having to endure the tortures of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ron deSantis and their horrid ilk. Have alligators eaten Bolsonaro yet? The next care packages distributed can be composed of Alligators and scuba gear. Maybe they can hire “loose cannon” Chuck Norris to gross us out with more surreptitious tokenism, blatant misogyny and brain dead overcompensatory macho-man penile platitudes, while passing along the Russian aeroflot barf-bags. I mean really, why all of the sociopathic focus on transgender people? I understand that these people like Trump are not your ordinary closeted basket-case sadists. Btw, when almost all of 1 out of 1000 males in America have never been diagnosed with Klinefelter Syndrome, who will ever know if they’ve been having sex with someone having ovaries or someone having undescended testes? I find all of this insanity hairbrained and constructed, where they just make the stuff up as they go along.
Great so now the right are going to get even crazier with this bullshit. That will be fun with my obviously queen ass returning to school. Especially with how much the proud boys love to come to the PNW and cause trouble
@ .45
He doesn’t have to know what it means to make things hellacious for people who are trans. As if life isn’t already difficult enough…
I cannot vote in the US. But I do not like where this is appears to be headed…
@Nilsine, good luck.
I’m in a relatively safe part of the PNW, but it still sucks sometimes to be semi-obviously not 100% Cis. Most people, fine. Some people, really not fine.
Really hoping this current hate-wave dies soon. Kind of anticipating that it’s gonna be a long haul though. Other people have faced this garbage and persevered, hopefully we can too.
Politicians are like: “Why fix actual problems when I can just scream about trans people being evil? It’s so much easier, and gets me name recognition! Engagement! Yes Protect Our Kids, but not from the things we have data that suggests actually cause harm, that’s too hard. No, protect them from The Woke! Gender Ideology and Critical Race Theory and Sexual Education, HORRIFYING!”
I hate it. Fricken harming folks just to score points and get power and grift for ‘campaign’ donations.
And too many people are just taking their word for it.
Just noticed … cynicism 101, I never completed the program … there’s something about all this that should surprise but doesn’t.
If all this fuss about managing transgender conditions was really true and honest, then the easiest solution is obvious. Every school student and every prenatal woman should be taught (or refreshed) a complete and truthful anatomical, social and familial curriculum giving school students straightforward guidelines on behaviour and expectations.
But that’s not what they want. They want people everywhere to be just as ignorant and fearful as a medieval peasant.
I’ll bet good money that by the time November 2024 rolls around, Trump’s promising to ban all schools from putting down litterboxes for the nonexistent furries.
If you want to talk cruelty to kids, purity culture and abstinence only education telling girls who have sex that consent doesn’t matter and that they’re used chewing gum if they have sex before marriage would be a great place to start.
@Fraser:
If you want to talk cruelty to kids, purity culture and abstinence only education telling girls who have sex that consent doesn’t matter and that they’re used chewing gum if they have sex before marriage would be a great place to start.
Let’s not forget the message that boys are savage beasts—and keeping their Dickzillas under control is girls’ job, and it’s their fault for having tempted Preacher Pedobear or Coach Groper with those slutty spaghetti straps.
…In case anyone wonders where the whole litter box thing came from, it’s that some schools have started keeping buckets containing sand the closet in case of a potty emergency during a disaster or an active shooter lockdown. Also there have been at least a few schools which have decided that cat-ear headbands don’t violate their dress code. The two things aren’t connected.
Everything he’s saying is bad enough, but I think it’s very important not to lose focus on the fact that Trump himself is not the issue here. He’s just one asshole who will say and promise whatever he needs to in order to stir up his followers and stay in the headlines. I don’t think Trump even knew or cared that trans folks existed outside of the occasional punchline to a dirty joke before the right wing started foaming at the mouth about them.
But his followers… that entire a-bit-less-than-half of the country who would vote him into power… those are the real threat. They’re the ones who rabidly, fervently, unceasingly hate transgender people. They’re the ones pushing for laws to make it illegal to exist as a transgender person. Trump is only saying this to keep their loyalty. Him losing won’t change the way his followers feel.
@Teagan Jeanne Andrews:
!!
They’ll just fly away in helicopters while millions of poor people, POC, and the like are left to drown and some giant insurance company is left holding the financial-catastrophe bag.
Handy scapegoat. Like Jews in 1930s Germany, there are few enough of them not to put up a huge fight, either at the ballot box or elsewhere; they’re fairly visible, these days; and there are some convenient preexisting myths and conspiracy theories about them. So, you can stir up hate of them to distract the people while you’re picking their pocket, and then use that hate to catapult you into higher office … very useful for the ruling class and their puppet politicians.
@Nilsine:
Comments policy.
@Fraser, FMO:
Let’s also not forget poverty, police violence, excessive criminalization of their parents potentially wrecking their families, and of course the ever-present threat of a school shooting.
@Pipster:
But it will at least keep the powers of the federal government out of their hands for four more years.
@Surplus to Requirements, Teagan Jeanne Andrews:
Some of that has already been happening, of course. Downtown Miami? The part that’s only a couple of meters above sea level and built on porous limestone so any sea level rise can just seep through the rock and flood the city core? Guess who has long since moved out of there and into gated suburb communities on higher ground?
There are already parts of Florida and other places where ‘flood insurance’ is impossible to get if you aren’t rich. Because the insurance companies do believe in climate change and have already been trying to make sure they aren’t the ones left holding the financial-catastrophe bag. Because figuring out the probabilities of disasters and money handling is part of what they do.
@ Surplus
Its OK, the ruling class never survives collapse of empire. Sooner or later their helicopter pilots and PAs will leave them stranded on the helipad as they fly off with all their stuff.
I’m connecting the dots now. Florida was blindsided by the recent government takeover of New College in Sarasota. DeSantis sacked the board of trustees and planted anti-CRT troll Chris Rufo and the Dean of conservative christian Hillsdale College, Matthew Spalding (who opposes public education), therein. New College is a public college so expect it to privatize shortly. So basically Trump and DeSantis are trying to one-up each other in who can be more “based” in appealing to the base. While these two are in a pissing match for the rest of the year I hope someone fantastic emerges from the Democrat Party otherwise we will be looking at a DeSantis regime for sure.
Aaand we have a flag on the field …
Trump
’s new anti-trans crusadeis cruel and dangerousFTFY. But yes, particularly evil to trans people.
@.45: Hey, he might… we don’t know everything about what he likes to do in private. Although I feel we know too much.
@Teagan: Klinefelter’s and androgen insensitivity both (which occurs in up to 1 out of 20,000 people with a Y chromosome). Their beloved XY binary breaks down there.
These are persons with a Y chromosome.
@Jenora: I remember seeing a video of an octopus flopping around a parking garage in Florida. And it wasn’t even beachside.
@Surplus: I’ve reviewed the play and agree with you; let’s ask the head referee.
@GSS
Also XX male syndrome, aka De La Chappelle syndrome exists. Along with tons of other genetic intersex situations that most people will never be aware they have. Since people generally don’t know to even look and get tested, unless there’s a fertility issue. Which emerging evidence suggests, isn’t guaranteed. Because the assumption is that finding an intersex genetic condition explained infertility. Since that’s largely how we found them the assumption was that it caused the infertility universally. Which may not be the case. As a result genetic intersex conditions might be statistically more common(to a scientifically significant, but functionally small degree) than we had assumed.
@gss:
one of the first things that ISNA did when they broke the silence around shame and compulsory surgery/sterilization of intersex kids was to point out that the medical field had thoroughly dehumanized them. The too most mentioned surrounding the shaming and dehumanization (rather than the surgeries and other physical tortures) was the use of headless photos of intersex persons with their sexualized body parts exposed to the camera.
I don’t question for a second that your heart is in the right place, but is there not a happy, smiling, clothed person with an intersex condition you could have used?
ISNA = Intersex Society of North America ( https://isna.org/ ) not the Islamic one.
@Teagan Jeanne Andrews
I certainly don’t want that to happen, considering that a close friend, a POC trans woman I know, lives in coastal NY with her family and cats. They are poor. Losing their house would be a giant financial burden on them. Plus, as others said, most people in the threatened areas are the poor, not the rich.
You know, if the ‘phobes of various stripes ever managed to get what they claimed to want – a strict binary separation by genetics and anatomy – the one silver lining would be that we’d have a much better grasp on how common certain forms of intersex, chimerism, and chromosomal variation are, as well as how much overlap exists between those things. It would also be “interesting” (for a certain value of “interesting”) to see how they ultimately resolved how to handle the existence of people who don’t neatly fall into that binary, given that most people who claim to want such a thing don’t really have much concept of sex and gender beyond “penis + XY = man, vagina + XX = woman” and there isn’t a single universal gender ideology among those who go a bit deeper than that.
It also doesn’t help with the “problem” of gays/lesbians – while some of them, TERFs/GCs in particular, don’t have an issue with LGBA people (just the QTI+), others, especially religious fundamentalists, do. Any alliance which could bring about such a thing would be extremely delicate and collapse soon after.
This being said, it doesn’t appear that the vast majority of them actually want to force everyone to go through the multiple forms of invasive testing that this would require, even if it’s just on infants – that’s too dystopian even for them. Rather they want it available as an option to force testing on other people when their group/community feels sufficiently suspicious and/or threatened, with the expectation that they themselves will not be subject to it.
@Snowberry:
Oh, and let’s not forget folk gender-testing criteria. Such as, “No real girl can surpass a certain level of competence at sports. Especially if she’s of color and/or flatter-chested and/or more muscular than considered conventionally attractive and/or it’s traditionally a White People Sport.”
This link seems apropos:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pervertjustice/2022/08/18/that-female-athlete-doesnt-look-feminine-enough/
Wonder what these Log Cabin Republicans think about Trump supposedly being such a pro-LGBT president. Will they finally admit they are unwanted?
@Dave: aren’t the log cabin republicans consistently banned from events like CPAC? lack of welcome has never been as an issue for them.