Arkansas GOP Is Making Headway Toward Criminalizing Trans People Just Trying To Use a Bathroom

By Cammy PedrojaMar 10th, 2023, 1:55 pm

Arkansas GOP state senators, I have a question for you: who hurt you to make you this hateful? Republican-led states all across the U.S. have been joining together in a concerted effort to make life harder for transgender people. These bills have attacked trans people’s access to things like medical care, sports teams, and simply going to work and school. There have been lots of efforts at every level to try to prevent trans people from going to the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity. But Arkansas’ latest anti-trans bill, which passed its first round of voting in the state senate this week, goes so far as to actually criminalize going to the bathroom for trans people.

The evil twist of this so-called bathroom bill is that its sponsors have framed it as an amendment to existing laws regarding “the criminal offense of sexual indecency with a child.” So what the bill would do is make a trans person guilty of sexual indecency with a child if the trans person simply goes in their chosen public bathroom or locker room, and a person under 18 is in there too. The trans person doesn’t need to actually do anything indecent to be charged. They just need to exist in a bathroom with a minor and bam! They’re guilty of sexual indecency with a child. WTF.

“It’s not going to stop transgender people from going to the bathroom,” GOP State Senator John Payton argued before the vote, adding he was “just asking that they don’t expose my kids and grandkids and your kids and grandkids to it because we’re trying to teach them a different standard.” First of all, I don’t see any evidence it’s not going to stop trans people from going to the bathroom because every time they do, they’ll either be dangerously close to being accused of a crime or possibly dangerously close to being the victim of one if they go in the bathroom opposite their gender identity.

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But I think that there’s also something more going on here. As I mentioned in my companion essay, members of dominant/majority groups (in this case, cisgender people) tend to view stigmatized minorities as “contaminated” and capable of “corrupting” supposedly “pure” ingroup members. This unconscious “contamination” mindset drives fears that marginalized groups may be contagious (e.g., “turning people gay,” “transgender social contagion”) as well as sexually corrupting (e.g., “sexual deceivers,” “restroom predators,” “groomers”). [I discuss this mindset in more depth in this essay and in Chapters 7 & 8 of my book Sexed Up.]

The greater the disparity one can create between the supposedly “contaminated, corrupting, dangerous outgroup” and the “pure, innocent, vulnerable ingroup,” the more atrocious the imagined threat will seem. This is why moral panics (including this latest anti-trans rendition) are almost always centered on “protecting women and children,” especially those who are white, middle-class, and otherwise unmarked (read: “uncontaminated” and therefore “pure”).

Anti-trans campaigners have increasingly played into this mindset by portraying trans activists as “adult males” who supposedly “prey” (whether ideologically or sexually) on innocent and vulnerable “young girls.” Depicting said “girls” as mentally incompetent (due to supposed feminine fragility, neurodivergence, mental health issues, etc.) serves to further amplify their imagined innocence and vulnerability.

Perhaps the best illustration of this mindset can be found in Abigail Shrier’s recent book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. The book focuses almost exclusively on how “social contagion” is ravaging “our girls,” with a brief diversion (via interviews with Ray Blanchard and J. Michael Bailey) to depict trans adults as “sexually deviant men.” While the book doesn’t explicitly discuss “grooming,” it’s suggested in the subtitle (“seducing our daughters”) along with the phrase “transgender craze” (implying that these kids’ trans identities are caused or enabled by mental illness). Oh, did I mention that the cover image is a cartoon of a young girl with a hole cut out where her reproductive parts would be (read: she has been “defiled”).

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Trans kids could be legally kidnapped by parents under proposed Florida law: report

“Parents would be allowed to kidnap their children and take them out of state if they are receiving gender-affirming care or are considered “at risk” of receiving such care under a proposed Florida law, Vice News reports.

Under the bill Republican state Sen. Clay Yarborough introduced Friday, any court could intervene if a child is receiving gender-affirming care, the report said.

The bill is part of a package of so-called “parental empowerment and child safety legislation” that includes a ban on instruction of sexual orientation or gender identity for students through Grade 8, and requiring licensed health care facilities to attest that they do not provide sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures to patients under 18 years of age, the State Senate’s office announced in a news release.

The package also includes a provision authorizing the state to ‘fine, suspend, or revoke the license of any public lodging establishment or public food service establishment if the establishment admits a child to a live adult performance that depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, or lewd exposure.’”

NYT Trans Letter a Fight for Media Democracy

In a letter to New York Times leadership (2/15/23), more than 180 of the paper’s contributors (later swelling to more than 1,000) raised “serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary and gender nonconforming people.” What started as a conversation about a paper’s coverage exploded into a battle between media workers who see a problem at one of the most powerful media outlets on earth, and a media management that simply won’t listen.

“Some of us are trans, non⁠-⁠binary, or gender nonconforming, and we resent the fact that our work, but not our person, is good enough for the paper of record,” the letter declared:

Some of us are cis, and we have seen those we love discover and fight for their true selves, often swimming upstream against currents of bigotry and pseudoscience fomented by the kind of coverage we here protest.
The letter was organized by the Freelance Solidarity Project, a part of the National Writers Union.

A similar letter from LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD (2/15/23) and over a hundred other LGBTQ groups and leaders made three demands (summarized in a press release):

Stop printing biased anti-trans stories, immediately.
Listen to trans people: hold a meeting with trans community leaders within two months.
Hire at least four trans writers and editors within three months.
As FAIR (1/6/23) and many other progressive outlets and groups have noted, there is a campaign in state legislatures, in the courts, in the streets and in the media to roll back rights for transgender people, fomenting a moral panic about teachers and drag queens coming for America’s children. States like Florida are already banning certain types of medical care for trans people (Tampa Bay Times, 2/10/23), and other states have enacted similar laws (NBC, 2/14/23). States are even looking to restrict drag performances (Washington Post, 2/14/23).

Antisemitism Meets Transphobia
White nationalists and anti-trans feminists use the same conspiracies to target trans and Jewish folks.
BY BEN LORBER, HERON GREENESMITH APRIL 28, 2021 9:30 AM

We live in an age of conspiracy theories. In the wake of the January 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, and with movements like QAnon on the rise, it’s clear that millions across the United States subscribe to theories that a diabolical cabal of elites is secretly controlling society, and that they are willing to take violent action against these imagined enemies.

These types of conspiracy theories have long been a cornerstone of antisemitism—which insists that this cabal is Jewish—and today, they’re seeping into antitransgender activism as well. Now, more than ever, antisemitism and transphobia are becoming deeply connected, making it vital for progressives to fight both together.

On the radical right, white nationalists are obsessed with fears of “white genocide”—the imagined fast-approaching biological extinction of the “white race”—and are convinced that Jewish activism is the prime mover of this existential threat. One of the main ways they believe Jews advance “white genocide”—in addition to engineering increased immigration of Black and brown people, orchestrating racial justice movements, controlling the government and giant corporations, using space lasers to start California wildfires, and other dastardly schemes—is by liberalizing societal attitudes around gender and sexuality in colleges and universities, media, and other cultural institutions.

In order to “secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” as their slogan goes, white nationalists believe they must defend a status quo rooted in patriarchal violence—undergirded by cis-heteronormative gender roles, straight white nuclear families, a culture of warrior masculinity, and more—from Jews, who foster feminism, LGBTQ+ liberation movements, and multiculturalism to undermine this “natural order.” Movements for transgender justice, white nationalists believe, represent a key cultural front of Jewish-backed “white genocide.”