The malicious demonization of the transgender community
I’ve talked before about the phenomenon of what I call “othering,” where one group of people universally casts another as the evil, corrupt, depraved “other.”
It usually goes something like this:
Those people, both who they are and what they stand for, are immoral, dangerous, and disgusting. As a result, we have to stand strong and protect us against them.
We’re righteous; they’re sinful. We’re right; they’re wrong. We’re good; they’re bad. We’re wholesome; they’re perverse. We’re the victims; they’re the perpetrators.
In the debate over gay rights, opponents have long argued that allowing gay people to wed (or even have legal protections at all) would harm children.
Translation: Gay people are dangerous, and they might turn our kids gay, might inflict psychological damage on them, might raise them poorly as parents, or, worst of all, might take indecent liberties with them.
More recently, in the uproar over so-called “bathroom laws” in states like North Carolina, transgender people have become the target of a similar tactic in which they’ve essentially been equated with pedophiles and other sexual predators.
Translation: Transgender people are dangerous and might go into public restrooms just to prey on your children.
Of course, it’s no coincidence whatsoever that the same organizations that have vociferously opposed recognition of gay rights all along are the very ones now clamoring zealously for the passage of these reprehensible bathroom bills.
For instance, the American Family Association — the organization that launched a boycott against Target after Target announced that its customers and employees can use restrooms corresponding to the gender with which they identify — is every bit as virulently anti-gay as it is transphobic.
Ditto with the Family Research Council, which lays bare its true agenda with posts like this, implying that children can somehow be “conditioned” to accept gender dysphoria as “normal” (as though it is somehow deviant).
Indeed, contrary to the much more innocuous contention that “we just want to keep restrooms private and safe from men who might dress up as women,” opinion columns like this one elucidate the real impetus behind the so-called “bathroom bill” movement: to express and enshrine fear, disapproval, and prejudice against the transgender population. To cast them as the untouchable “other.”
We’re righteous; they’re sinful. We’re right; they’re wrong. We’re good; they’re bad. We’re wholesome; they’re perverse. We’re the victims; they’re the perpetrators.
As long as we’re at it, though, let’s take a look at that claim — that men will dress up as women solely for the purpose of entering a women’s restroom and sexually assaulting whoever happens to be inside. Is there any merit to it?
This is why I really like Chris Wallace. Though he’s on Fox News, he appears, by all accounts, to be a real journalist:
Meanwhile, a coalition of 250 organizations working with sexual assault and domestic violence survivors has released a statement confirming that the “bathroom predator” assertion is false.
The bathroom laws we hear being considered and enacted these days really aren’t about “privacy” or “safety” at all. Instead, they’re about exploiting primitive fears, hostilities, and prejudices against transgender people, who have already long existed at the margins of society.
The same contingent that tried so very long and hard to demonize and “other” the gay and lesbian population are realizing that they’ve largely lost that battle in the court of public opinion (and law), so they’re now waging this new one.
And fair-minded Americans shouldn’t stand for it.
