“… We are becoming so overwhelmed with the anti-transgender agenda that it’s hard to keep up in a time when not only do we have to keep up, but we have to hold the line and fight back with even more determination.”
MY PUBLIC IDAHO
Much of my news this month concerns bad things happening to our brothers and sisters in the transgender community, so much so that we can no longer list the individual attacks in a single column but can only offer a few spot checks.
In Ohio, the state legislature overrode the Governor’s veto and reinstated a complete ban on health care for transgender minors, as well as a ban on transgender girls participating in public school and college sports.
I’m not even sure whether or not that Ohio bill also keeps transgender boys off of various teams but I’ve stopped tracking that phenomenon. I’ve also stopped wondering in these pages what happens when a transboy or transman is forced by some law to use the ladies room or play on the softball team rather than the baseball team. No one else seems bothered by this obvious anomaly so I figure I must be missing something.
In Florida, the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles issued a unilateral decree forbidding transgender drivers from selecting their preferred gender marker on licenses under penalty of law. Wow.
Again, this means that transgender driver Joe Smith has to show an ID with an “F” on it. I assume he has to have a legitimate photo taken at the DMV, so what’s the point of this? And since when can the Florida DMV invent statewide policy on its own initiative? What’s next? No GLBT-themed reading materials on the Interstate? Tank tops not allowed in school zones?
I see that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has put a hold on Idaho’s transgender youth health ban which cannot be enforced while the American Civil Liberties Union challenges the law. When I first saw this headline I thought I had already covered this story. Well, there’s a good reason for that mis-impression. I ran a search for “Idaho transgender ninth circuit” and up popped a story from last August, when the Ninth Circuit blocked the Spud State’s transgender women’s sports ban, along with another one from last October when the same appellate court put a hold on Idaho’s anti-trans bathroom bill. You name it, Idaho has put it on the books, we’ve filed a lawsuit and the Ninth Circuit has put it on ice for now.
WE’RE GOING TO NEED A BIGGER BOAT
The situation in Russia is beyond comment. The country’s top court has ruled that gay and trans people are extremists, there is a national law against promoting GLBT rights and criminal charges have now been made against a 33-year-old woman who had a rainbow on her Instagram page. Inna Mosina, a resident of the southwestern city of Saratov, is accused of “displaying a symbol of an extremist organization,” and we bring you her case not because she faces great sanctions (she faces a couple of weeks in prison or a small fine), but because she is presumably one of many who will suffer this unbelievable state crackdown and because the notion that you can be tossed in the clink for 15 days because of a rainbow is extraordinary.
And also because this is the world that some in the United States would have us emulate. Make no mistake. It’s tempting to roll your eyes at antigay laws in Uganda or crazy rhetoric in Burundi (where the president called for GLBT people to be stoned to death), but some of the early Russian “don’t say gay” policies have come to pass in Florida, along with book bans around the country. Plus, we are becoming so overwhelmed with the anti-transgender agenda that it’s hard to keep up in a time when not only do we have to keep up, but we have to hold the line and fight back with even more determination.
Some of us who have lived through pervasive discrimination, sodomy laws, AIDS, marriage bans and universal social hostility— and who have reached a moment when marriage is legal and the majority of Americans seem to understand our humanity—might feel as if they’ve earned a break. But no! (Cue: “Theme from Jaws.”) Those were not the ultimate victories. Those were smaller sharks and the big one is just now circling back towards our little skiff.
COME SIN WITH ME
Meanwhile, did I mention we’re also all going to have to save American Democracy and reelect Joe Biden while we’re at it? Even though he’s over 80 and we all have to wince and hold our breaths when he walks and speaks? His presidency is actually quite something, but even his biggest admirers (like me) can’t help but worry.
Finally, I felt vindicated by a commentary written by University of Illinois Classics professor Richard Mohr, who points out in the Boston Review that the Pope’s “blessing” for gay couples was in fact a big nothing burger, particularly after the actual policy was published two weeks after the big announcement. Catholic doctrine remains intact, to wit, same-sex couples are sinning fools, violating church law by their very being.
“If the new gay blessing is a gift,” he writes cleverly, “it is a gift that keeps on taking.
“The gay blessing is a call for gays to recognize themselves as broken people: to sin no more, to avoid the near occasions of sin, and to understand their very existence as a gay person to be not a morally neutral state, but an ‘objectively disordered’ one inexorably bent toward ‘intrinsic evil.’ Taking the blessing requires giving up one’s gay identity. It is not a draught of weak tea; it is spiritual poison.”
So, um, thanks for nothing Your Popester!
