The rights of transgender people, and in some cases, their physical safety, have eroded over the past few years, and today, legislators across America are beginning to enact Draconian laws designed to make the lives of transgender people more difficult.
It’s a damn tragedy.
This isn’t to say we can’t have disagreements over issues like transgender women in sports or the comfort level of people regarding transgender use of spaces like locker rooms. These are areas where differences of opinion are at least understandable, and work must be done to educate the public and reach compromise and consensus on these and other issues.
But the laws being imposed by some states are cruel, degrading, and evil.
Also stupid.
Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville said this on Sunday on Fox News:
“We have entire men’s teams across this country now that are turning trans. Women’s teams, they’re turning trans.”
This is, of course, a lie. Nothing of the kind is happening, but Tuberville knows that Fox News viewers have drunk the Kool-Aid and will believe anything they hear.
The show’s host replied, “That’s right,” because she is not a journalist but a propagandist.
Tuberville continued:
“That’s going to be a situation where it’s going to pick up speed because these woke globalists are pushing these kids to say if you can’t compete in men’s sports, let’s just transition and say you’re a woman and participate in women’s sports.”
None of this is happening or will happen, but politicians like Tuberville speak with impunity because they avoid networks and journalists who will question their lies.
Most of the commentary around transgender issues is uninformed and deliberately deceptive.
When Trump, for example, issues an Executive Order declaring that the United States only recognizes two genders, he fails to acknowledge (or perhaps even realize) that not every human being possesses an XX or XY chromosome.
Some humans have XYY, XXX, or XYY chromosomes or a single X chromosome. Each of these chromosomal differences produces different physical characteristics in a person.
There is also:
- Mosaicism, wherein a person can possess characteristics of more than one sex.
- Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, wherein a person appears female externally but also has internal testes.
- Alpha-Reductase Deficiency, wherein a person is born with female-appearing genitals but may develop more male traits during puberty.
Others, too.
Biologically speaking, the idea that everyone is a man or woman is simply, objectively, and scientifically wrong, and this doesn’t even address the differences in how a person’s brain perceives their own gender and whether that perception matches the reality of their body.
Many people don’t like to hear about this kind of fact-based science because it pushes against their simple, convenient black-and-white world. As a result, legislation is being passed to strip legal protections from transgender people, and they live under constant threats to their physical safety.
It’s all hideous and disastrous.
But I think it’s always important to remember this:
The people who threaten the safety of transgender people or denigrate them based solely on their gender are afraid.
They are small, frightened, frail people.
They see difference as a threat and change as an impediment to their understanding and management of the world. Their capacity to see beyond black and white is limited, so they become unsettled and afraid when the world seems confusing to them.
This doesn’t make them right or just. They are still soulless monsters.
But it also makes them cowards.
Or in the case of Tommy Tuberville and his Fox News propagandists, liars and cowards.
