A Love Note To Our Trans Friends And Babies, From Yr Wonkette

Who loves you, baby?

Yr Wonkette wants to take a moment, in the face of this ungodly tide of anti-LGBTQ legislation and threats, to say to our trans friends and lovers and children that we love you, and that we are committed as a mommyblog, recipe hub, and fart joke emporium to doing whatever we can to fight against all this hate. While Republicans cynically pursue their hate agenda as wedge politics on steroids, a way to rile up the base and feed its rage addiction, you are being hurt.

One of many motivators for this letter to you: Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr explained yesterday why she said that if her colleagues voted to prohibit gender-affirming care for transgender minors, she hoped that "the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands."

She said she has lost friends to suicide because of anti-trans hatred, and noted that among the many calls she'd received from Montana families of trans youth, she'd heard from "one family whose trans teenager attempted to take her life while watching a hearing on one of the anti-trans bills." So no, she added, she was not being hyperbolic.

At a time when flat out eliminationist rhetoric is being mainstreamed by the Right, we are hugging you to our bosoms, whether those bosoms are man-, lady-, both, or neither.

We hate bullies here. We're still mad 13 years later, that Andrew Breitbart managed to use a deceptively edited video to get Shirley Sherrod fired from her job at the USDA. We're disgusted that any number of rightwing media figures can call down an army of hateful ragemonkeys just by naming someone an enemy on TV, from teachers who said that racism is real to election workers who fear for their lives. And we know that as the current target of the rightwing fear factory, you have it especially bad, because this time it's not just that the Right is trying to win elections or restrict voting. We aren't even going to quote the awful things they are saying to you; you have already heard it, and don't need to hear it again.

As Evan has explained several times, the reason for the increasing panic about trans people goes back to a central fact: The "Christian" Right knows it lost the Culture Wars years ago, and is desperate to hold on to the illusion that they have all the answers and really deserve to control everything, including the lives and identities of their own children. They should know better. As Evan put it recently, conservative Christians

brainwashed themselves into believing that if they raised their kids in a certain way, if they homeschooled them, if they didn't expose them to secular culture, and so on, their kids wouldn't grow up to be gay. They hid from reality with spooky campfire stories about how kids had to be "recruited" into homosexuality, or "exposed" to it, or worse, sexually abused. They soothed themselves with lies that if their kids did say they were gay, they were merely being tempted by Satan, they were "struggling" with their sexuality, and they could change if they just loved Jesus enough. They could pray it away.

None of it's true, and LGBTQ people stubbornly keep existing, which drives the bigots crazy.

And it makes us mad when they try to bully their children, and other people's children, and when they decide that other people have to disappear (or at least be memory holed from the public library) to "protect" their kids, it makes us mad. It makes us mean mad, Ma. Because we really are with Tom Joad on this one: Maybe Preacher Casy was right, and we're all part of one big soul. If that's right, then when someone else is being beaten up for who they are, that hurts us too. When trans kids realize they can move more easily through the world by being their authentic selves, it's a victory for all of us.

I've lately been following on Twitter a trans woman who is just a couple months into transitioning, and it's such an amazing roller coaster of emotions, particularly as she wrestled early on, seesawing between denial (in 2023, it would be a lot easier if she could just keep living as a male) and absolute joy at discovering her real self, to say nothing of the euphoria she experienced after just a week of taking estrogen. It's been freaking hard, too, since some of her close family members are certain she's out of her mind. But by Crom there are a lot of people, from other trans folks to a 60-year-old cisgender, mostly straight old fart in Boise, Idaho, cheering her on every step of the way, even while navigating the weird culture and political currents that make the journey so needlessly difficult.

Let's also take as a positive note this new Fox News poll — yes really — finding that large majorities of Americans consider book banning a "major problem" in schools (60 percent), and that a supermajority consider "political attacks on families with transgender children" a problem as well. For fake "balance," Fox News online points to 54 percent of respondents who think that "trans women in women's sports" is also a very serious issue. By golly, it's almost as if the attempts to demonize trans people might be backfiring.

And so. We love you and are absolutely horrified at what's happening in this stupid but also sometimes wonderful country. We want our trans readers, our LGBTQ readers, and our straight cisgender readers too to know that Wonkette is an ally and a collaborator, and possibly if you're in Texas or Florida, an unindicted coconspirator. Who loves you, baby?

Telly Savalas - Who loves ya baby 1975  

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