Captured
Has Biden ever talked this way about women or Black people or workers or immigrants? Biden who chaired the all-male committee that blew off Anita Hill’s testimony about Clarence Thomas? Biden who loves to go all “bipartisan” on unions and feminists and racial justice activists?
2022 elections… Shellacking… WTF are you doing?
I keep having to remind myself that yay, Trump is gone. Between this and she/her Harris, I mean ffs…
“The epidemic of violence against transgender women of color and girls of color” – um, citation please?
The American right’s weaponized anti-trans politics — which genuinely is about generating and capitalizing on fear and hatred, not about protecting children, and even more clearly not about opposition to patriarchy and misogyny — practically guarantees that what passes for the left in the U.S. will embrace trans rights in the most knee-jerk and thought-free manner possible. And, I strongly suspect, there are some strategists on the right who fully realize this, and hope it will hurt the left with an American voting public that is, on average, distinctly uncomfortable with gender non-conformity in all forms.
This is part of an established historical pattern: When thoughtful feminist criticism of a social practice happens to align with what religious conservatives disapprove of on a completely different basis, the political left has turned on feminists — or worse, has insisted (with sadly high degrees of success) that feminism disfigure itself to embrace the oppression of women. (And, I should note, the ACLU has consistently been a leader in throwing feminists under the first passing bus in this way.) It happened with feminist criticism of pornography and the sex industry, which gave us various versions of “sex positive feminism” that is hardly recognizable as feminism at all. And it’s happening again with trans politics. The thought-stopping slogan “Sex work is work” even has exactly the same sentence structure as “Trans women are women” — and comes with the same assumption and insistence that anyone who dares disagree cannot have any actual reasonable concerns or objections (no matter how clearly they state them), but must be indistinguishable from a Bible-thumping bigot.
Biden, of course, is a center-right politician on any reasonable (non-American) political scale, not on the far left. But I suspect he’s been convinced by advisors that this is an easy and obvious “getting on the right side of history” matter like gay marriage. And it’s something he can do to appeal to progressives that doesn’t bear a high political cost, simply because the right’s anti-trans position and legislation does seem so transparently hate-and-fear-driven in exactly the same way their fight against gay rights was. I don’t think that analysis is correct, but I also don’t think that it’s *obviously* wrong.
[…] a comment by G on […]
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also launched this page of “Content created by Assistant Secretary for Health (ASH)” who is Rachel Levine:
http://www.hhs.gov/lgbtqi
The bottom of the page asks, “Was this page helpful?”. I entered “No” and I told them why.
The HHS page includes this 2-page PDF file titled “Gender-Affirming Care and Young People” that includes a table of “Affirming Care” and whether it is “Reversible” or not:
https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2022-03/gender-affirming-care-young-people-march-2022.pdf
It says that puberty blockers are reversible as gender-affirming care. We know that is untrue!
Oh god. The feds telling those lies.
During the early part of the pandemic, I had a lot of colleagues telling me they don’t trust the scientific experts in the government. Mostly because, well, government. I hate to think I may be joining them.
(The only reason they don’t say that now is that our school has dropped all pretense at pandemic protection and is hell-bent on returning to normality, no matter how many surges we have.)