Excerpt: Unsportsmanlike: The Right-Wing Attack on Transgender Women and Children

People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch just published the first part of a informative piece which needs to be required reading and sharing for anyone fighting the anti-LGBTQ industry's attack on the transgender community. 

Unsportsmanlike: The Right-Wing Attack on Transgender Women and Children is an intensive report which spotlights tactics religious right and conservative groups have undertaken to demonize transgender women and children under the guise of protecting women in general and "saving children" from harm. 

An excerpt from the chapter  The Message Is Fear pinpoints how certain ugly and untrue narratives about trans women and children are created and spread to invoke fear that trans female athletes are attempting to "cheat" victories and records from cis female athletes:

To experts and activists watching these attacks, the implications are clear—and the portrayal that fundamentally misunderstands who trans people are, purposeful.

“It’s a very tactical argument, right? It’s fearmongering, because what it does is it takes people’s wants to protect their daughters, and it says, ‘This will protect your daughter, here’s all the ways that we trans people are going to hurt your daughters,’” said Schuyler Bailar, an LGBTQ activist, swimmer, and the first trans athlete to compete for a Division I men’s team. “It’s a way to fearmonger people so that they think that trans people are actually just men trying to hurt their daughters.”

The narrative is reminiscent of that used by right-wing groups pushing for the bathroom bills, which were successful for a while with “public conversations start[ing] from a place of fear,” said Arli Christian of the ACLU. “The narrative from the other side was not about trans women, and it never is. It’s about men in dresses, right? Because they don’t understand who trans women are,” she said. “So when we have a narrative that’s based on men joining women’s teams, no one is understanding the issue. When we have a narrative based on men entering women’s bathrooms, no one is understanding the issue.” 

The obfuscation of the issue clears the path to make fungible the public restroom fears with that of trans girls and women in locker rooms with their cisgender teammates. During the bathroom-bill saga, social conservatives alleged that perverts and pedophiles would abuse women and children if transgender individuals were allowed to use the restroom corresponding to their gender identity. But by 2017, a majority of the American public opposed anti-trans bathroom bills, perhaps realizing that they had all used the restroom next to a trans person and lived to tell the tale—they just may have not known it. Such manufactured fears, however, persist—as does the narrative that kids can be “turned” transgender, (much like the gays-are-recruiting-your children scaremongering during the 1990s), especially if the nature of transgender people is misrepresented, (trans activist Charlotte) Clymer said, as if kids could “catch” being trans, she added. 

 Added to those fears is one more acceptable to the broader public: that girls will be beaten by boys in sports and that girls’ athletics are under attack from this unknown transgender entity. It’s a smart strategy: Americans of all political stripes support notions of fairness.

Check out the rest of Unsportsmanlike here.