The Fascist War on Trans Rights
Lavin & Hobbes, Vol. II
Welcome back to Lavin & Hobbes, an occasional feature in which Talia talks to legendary podcaster, SubStacker, at-large cranky fact-checker of the mainstream press, and generally excellent conversationalist Michael Hobbes. This week, we’re discussing trans rights, and the gigantic, transatlantic tangle of bad media and worse hate groups at war against trans people.
TL: Cheery topic time: I thought we could chat about the assault on trans rights, which builds on our previous conversation in that part of the story is an unbelievable media failure. If you read the paper today, you’d think the biggest threat to American society was the fact that people—particularly young people—are embracing trans identities.
MH: Whenever a marginalized population starts to get a little bit more acceptance, society immediately says, “Wait—what if we’re too accepting? What if it’s gone too far?”
All this stuff about kids transitioning without proper assessment, kids getting puberty blockers after they see a single YouTube video—it just doesn’t make any sense if you think about it for five seconds. We don’t have that many gender clinics, so there’s a one- to two-year waiting period; therapy and hormones are egregiously expensive, and a lot of insurance plans won’t cover transition; and many parents are transphobic to begin with. So the idea that it’s too easy to transition is absurd. The decent studies that have been done on this all say the barriers to treatment are the problem, not that there’s a Slip-’n’-Slide pushing you into pills and surgery.
All of that is pretty obvious if someone invites you to take a step back and think about the big picture, but no one is telling people to do that right now.
Have you been following the wave of threats against the gender-affirming care providers of Children’s National Hospital?
It’s awful. That case was driven partly by an odious Twitter account, Libs of TikTok, which posted an out-of-context video about doing hysterectomies on young girls. Then the clinic gets flooded with threats, Libs of TikTok doubles down, it’s become this big ugly thing.
But what interests me most is that the narrative being peddled by Libs of TikTok is identical to the narrative that we’ve gotten in the Atlantic and The New York Times: “Kids are getting hormones and surgery without assessment.”
The far right is picking up on a story they could have read in a half-dozen establishment outlets over the last five years.
The person behind Libs of TikTok, Chaya Raichik, is an Orthodox Jew, and a personal credo of mine is that there’s nothing more contemptible than a Jewish fascist. I’m just like, “Come on! Do you have a historical memory of a gnat?” Not to invoke Godwin’s Law here, but it’s hard not to draw some Nuremberg parallels.
I think we’re allowed to make these parallels now. Because I live in Berlin, I have a lot of friends that are German historians. Now that I hear them saying, “Gee this looks a lot like the Nazis,” I think we have permission.
I see it like Germany in the ‘30s. Not the ‘40s—we’re not there yet. But I feel like we went through this debate endlessly in the Trump years: can you call “holding camps” “concentration camps”? I’m not trying to be flippant about historical memory, nor am I trying to say that until there are crematoria it doesn’t count as a human rights violation.
What I’m trying to say is that fascists hate trans people, just like fascists have historically hated Jews. And on the far right, the two hatreds are enmeshed—the fact that trans people exist is a Jewish plot, to make white people less fertile. It’s all connected to great replacement theory.
Did you see this obsessive transphobia when you were doing research for your book?
Oh, totally. The far right has obsessively hated trans people for years.
One of the first big Nazi book burnings was the archive of Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish man who was a huge pioneer in treating trans people and gender-affirming surgery. And the Nazis took his entire archive and burned it in the street. During the Weimar period there was, famously, some gender nonconformity. Think of Cabaret. And that was one of the first things the Nazis—as breeding-obsessed gender essentialists—wanted to destroy. That it was a Jew was the cherry on top. Like, of course this is a Jewish plot.
And in the U.S. today we have a Christian nationalist, gender-essentialist, breeding-obsessed power group that is fixated on destroying trans people. History rhymes sometimes.
There’s a finite number of arguments against marginalized groups, and they just repeat themselves. I’ve been reading about the debate over gay marriage in the 1990s, and you heard the same things then that you hear about trans people now: “They’re denying biology!” “They’re going after your children!” “They’re going to make you use new words!” Marriage was the foundation of Western civilization when they needed to deny rights to gay people; now gender is the foundation of Western civilization when they need to do it to trans people.
It’s pretty striking how generic these arguments are. There’s always some small, marginalized outgroup with no political power that’s right on the cusp of destroying the culture of the majority.
It turns out when you assert that a relatively powerless group is wielding extraordinary power behind the scenes—and at the same time you’re furthering laws about how you want to destroy this group—you’re probably the baddie.
One of the ways that Slobodan Milošević came to power was on the back of an anecdote in which a Serbian guy had been sodomized with a beer bottle by two Albanians. It was a huge news story; Milošević and other Serb nationalists invoked the incident as an example of the depravity of Albanians and the vulnerability of Serbs living in Kosovo.
It later turned out not to be true: The guy allegedly put the bottle in his own ass when he was masturbating, then made up the thing about the Albanians.
But to me it’s a fascinating case study of how reactionaries put incendiary anecdotes at the center of these moral panics. Because ultimately it doesn’t matter whether two Albanians assaulted a Serbian guy. Crimes happen all the time; 99.9% of them don’t become symbols. But the months Serbians spent debating this single case ended up papering over the much more important—and less disputable—issue of whether Albanians were a marginalized minority that deserved equal rights.
It’s the same thing that we see now with trans people. Every week there’s a new anecdote: They were mean to Dave Chappelle; they doxxed JK Rowling; they won’t let you say “pregnant women” anymore. There’s always some story, and when you get bogged down debating the details, you lose sight of the fact that discrimination against trans people is extremely well documented. What trans people are actually asking for is perfectly reasonable: Non-discrimination in employment, housing, and education. Basic civil rights stuff.
The bigots keep surfacing these low-stakes, mis-reported anecdotes to make it seem like there’s something to debate at the heart of this and there isn’t. There just isn’t.
It’s interesting to see who is obsessive about fixing gender in amber, and making sure that no one can deviate from gender norms.
With the Christian Right, you’re dealing with a religious ideology that, from birth, trains females to be submissive, pure and obedient, and men to be dominant and superior.
With the far right, they’re like, “we want to have submissive white women who will breed as many white babies as possible, and everyone else should be killed and/or prevented from breeding. And transgender existence is a Jewish plot to destroy white fertility.”
But then you have the Mumsnet crew or the JK Rowling crew—the TERFs—who come at it from this place of a sensible soccer-mom feminism, and they’re almost more bloodthirsty than anyone else.
As an actual feminist, what do you what do you think is behind that? The weird soccer mom TERFs?
It’s interesting that the TERF movement is centered in the U.K. I think that’s telling, because while the U.K. is a very conservative country, it does not have a fully formed religious right that is openly seeking to destroy women’s rights, in the way that the U.S. does.
There’s lots and lots of misogyny over there, of course. But in the U.S. a court of zealots just dismantled bodily autonomy for anyone with a uterus. It’s like, in Britain they almost have the leisure to obsess about trans people.
A lot of this is about parents asserting absolute property rights over their kids. And particularly, mothers saying, “I am a mother and this is core to my identity, this female motherhood, and anything that threatens it must be eliminated.”
I think the trans-kids panic is central to why this issue appeals to reactionary centrists and “feminists.” Because if you read these Just Asking Questions articles in the mainstream press, they’re almost all written from the point of view of parents. Trans identity is cast not as the identity of your child but as a foreign influence—something that happens to you, the parent.
The other day, I was hanging out with a non-binary friend who just got top surgery, and they said that they try to avoid bathrooms altogether when they’re in public. They get yelled at if they go into the men’s room, and they get yelled at if they go into the women’s room. It’s a nightmare. And then I think about how few articles and op-eds I’ve read about that compared to how many op-eds I’ve seen complaining about linguistic updates or some college sophomore asking their professor not to misgender them.
All of it reveals how much the trans “debate” has been framed around the consequences for cis people. Every week we get 15 articles about how hard it is to be “gender critical” in the workplace, the struggle to keep everyone’s pronouns straight, the fear of “losing” your kid to gender ideology in the schools. We rarely hear about how hard it is to be trans at work or at school, or how dangerous it can be for trans people to politely remind the folks around them of their correct pronouns. This entire issue is about the measurable, material impacts of transphobia, but we get article after article about the unbelievably minor impacts of trans acceptance.
And these fears are keeping people in the closet. “Will I be able to keep my job?” “Will I be able to pee?” “Will I face harassment from strangers?” “Will I face people who want to murder me?” “Will my parents kick me out into the street, or try to forcibly brainwash my identity out of me?”
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The closet is not a nice place. It’s a place that can drive you to the brink of suicide, or beyond it. And to be honest, I include myself in this: I’m in the closet about my gender in a pretty big way, and I think I will remain there for the foreseeable future. There are a lot of closeted people that might not have been closeted if it weren’t for the tidal wave of hate swamping every aspect of society.
Exactly. I was reading about Muslims after 9/11, and there was a wave of articles that were like, “Are All Muslims In America Terrorists?” Very few explicitly answered in the affirmative. If you bothered to read them, you’d be like, “Oh, all the surveys and historical data show this really isn’t an issue.” Of course most people didn’t, but the mere fact that the media kept posing the question made them think, Hey there’s a lot of smoke here, so there must be a fire.
I think it’s the same with trans people. We’re getting a wave of articles about the trans “debate” and people go, That must mean there’s something debatable here.
It’s a moment of profound peril for anyone outside a very narrow band of religiously-mediated heterosexuality, in the US and across the world. There’s an enormous surge of violent transphobia. This is all part of the same ugly reactionary impulse of: “I don’t understand it, I don’t want to be made to understand it, and therefore, I’m going to destroy it.”
The biggest thing happening in America right now is this ascendant, very dangerous, sometimes violent, right wing reactionary movement. It’s all the same fucking thing.
These are people I’ve studied for a long time, and they’re not going to stop. They have very explicit desires for Christian Dominionism. They want to bring Messiah back by making the U.S. a Christian nation. And then you have the neo-Nazi ancillaries who are like, “Yeah, great, cool, whatever. You want Christian rule—I don’t really necessarily agree, but if you want to eliminate all the Jews and the gays, I’m on board.” You know? You’re either a witting or unwitting dupe, or you stand and fight.
I really think we’re at a moment that demands moral clarity. And that’s why I particularly object to the entire genre of media that seemingly exists to obscure any possible moral clarity.
I think the first step to fighting back is to clearly describe what’s going on, and that’s why I’m so worried about how the media is covering trans people—and the movement that wants to disenfranchise them.
