We Hunted The Mammoth
It’s been a shit year for trans people and LGBTQ folks more generally, with a massive and violent backlash that has targeted everyone from drag queens to providers of trans healthcare; meanwhile, laws in numerous states have begun to chip away at fundamental trans rights.
WNBA star Brittney Griner is back on US soil again after being released from a Russian penal colony yesterday as part of a “prisoner swap” arranged between the US and Russian governments. Griner, imprisoned for the petty crime of having some hash oil in her luggage, was traded for a convicted arms dealer.
When the suspect in the Club Q mass shooting in Colorado Springs claimed, through his lawyers, that he was nonbinary, transphobes could barely contain their glee: No longer could those on the left accuse them of directly or indirectly inspiring the shooting with their hyperbolic transphobic rhetoric. The alleged shooter was trans — one of their own.
Vladimir Putin has just signed a draconian bill into law prohibiting so-called LGBTQ “propaganda” in Russia. The bill, a bulked-up version of a less sweeping 2013 law, is so broad in its scope it will effectively ban any and all discussion of gay or trans identities in Russia, a ban enforceable by fines of up to 4 million rubles (or $64,000). The bill also bans the advocacy of pedophilia, as if that is even remotely in the same category.
Conservative cultural criticism is beyond parody these days. Consider the following reflections on Disney and its “Gay Black Hole” from someone called S. D. Wells on NaturalNews.com, which is neither natural nor news but rather a lot of health disinfo and right-wing conspiracy theories.
Elon Musk’s so-called free speech crusade is making Twitter a more hateful place, reports from two watchdog groups charge.
Disney’s Strange World, a cartoon flick featuring a gay teenager, belly-flopped hard at the box office Thanksgiving weekend, doing so very poorly, and costing so very much to make, that it is now expected to lose something like $147 million when it’s all done.
Right-wing transphobes aren’t letting a little mass shooting get in the way of their continuing vilification of trans people as “groomers” and “mutilators” of children.
Just before midnight, hours before a scheduled drag brunch to honor the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a gunman opened fire in Club Q, a Colorado Springs LGBTQ club, killing five and wounding two dozen others. The alleged shooter, armed with an AR-15-style gun and wearing body armor, was reportedly tackled and subdued by bar patrons before he could kill more.
The rhetoric of the anti-trans movement — and Republican politicians — is getting more apocalyptic and eliminationist by the day. And anti-trans violence is getting worse. Last week, a man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, firebombed a donut shop after it held a drag event.