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"...we will not have transgenders in our school system." [1]

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Date: 2023-05-10  

Kelly Craft, a prominent GOP candidate for the Kentucky governor’s primary resorted to the most disgusting type of language during a telephone town hall on Monday. When pushed on what she would do to “combat the transgender agenda” she talked about banning dangerous things like pronouns to protect the children and keeping dangerous ideas out of curricula. She ended this by saying “Under a Craft-Wise administration, we will not have transgenders in our school system.” This resulted in the typical waffling for when conservatives have a mask-off moment. Her campaign responded, “Of course Kelly was referring to the woke ideologies being pushed in our schools,” implying this was somehow less of an aggressive threat and more of a promise to continue “advocating for the best for all children this entire campaign.”

Let’s be clear about this. The children have always been a smoke screen. They want to “save” children from being trans according to the their words. We all know if the child insisted after a decade of being ”protected” that they were still trans than they would be rejected and not welcomed. There is no desire to help queer kids and certainly no desire to accept queer adults, there is no point at which they will admit maybe things they disagree with are very helpful to the wellbeing of some people if not all people. There is no point where it is no longer too soon to transition. All of this is an illusion. There is only a desire to make less queer kids and more straight kids. I say queer kids because although it is only people who are transgender being targeted in laws right now, anyone with a nontraditional appearance or relationship will be the next target.

The people pushing “traditional family values” never wanted to “save their kids from sin” (unless they were brainwashed by others). They wanted to bully kids into what they found acceptable. They wanted to save themselves from losing a child due to their own arbitrary standards while not listening to their children. If they moved out, experienced violence, or had other struggles due to a lack of support it was a sad result of “sinful lifestyle” and not that their family has abused and ostracized them. These people made being queer alternative by pushing it towards other alternative cultural moments. Now they use queerness’s proximity to other alternative subcultures such as sex work as evidence of degeneracy, when it was their ostracizing that pushed queer people towards nontraditional income and away from legal employment.

Consider this quote from John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Richard Nixon, regarding the war on drugs.

“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The GOP has not changed this playbook. Bathrooms, sports, medical care, pronouns, and education are all just ways to target a populations the base doesn’t like. The Republican base is simply uncomfortable with the existence of trans people, full stop. There is no science or evidence to bear out the supposed harms trans people cause. That is why they manufacture debate after debate to deny trans people rights. This is not because there is some concerning question science had not yet asked. It is because the GOP needs to motivate people, and they choose to do so by promising "...we will not have transgenders in our school system."

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/10/2168562/--we-will-not-have-transgenders-in-our-school-system

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