The Guardian just came out with a wonderful article about how the GOP are exploiting transgender children for political power. I'm of two minds about it. On one hand, it's easily the best article I've read thus far about the attacks on transgender children by the GOP and the religious right. But on the other hand, it embarrasses me. On the risk of sounding xenophobic, it's a shame that a foreign press (The Guardian is a British newspaper) does a better job talking about an issue in this country than the American press.
With the slow death of print media, too many pundits and just about all of them doing very little work for large salaries and generous book deals, outside groups pushing talking points disguised as facts, not to mention the right-wing propaganda factory known as Fox News and it's crew of slop artists, the American media model seems to be broken.
The Guardian is a good reminder that there are journalists who still exist to get the story accurate. There are so many good portions of the article, so I am just going to highlight a few. Feel free to read the entire thing and share it.
1. “They are acting like we aren’t humans, that we don’t deserve the same things as them,” said Kris Wilka, a 13-year-old football player and trans boy in South Dakota, where lawmakers have passed legislation that would prohibit trans students from playing on the sports teams that correspond with their gender.
“Trans rights have been turned into a wedge issue,” said Jules Gill-Peterson, professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the University of Pittsburgh, who has researched the history of trans children in the US.
“The Republican party is hardly interested in defending women’s sports. This is a purely calculated political play,” Gill-Peterson said. “And it’s really easy to use children as a political football, because we don’t grant children the privilege to speak for themselves and defend their own interests.”
2. “They’re telling parents of cisgender children that you’re losing something by allowing transgender youth to play in sports,” said Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an LGBTQ+ rights group. “We’ve seen this playbook before – you’re losing something if you allow same-sex couples to marry, if you protect racial minorities in the workplace, if immigration laws are respected. It’s us v them.”
But there is no research suggesting that trans girls have a competitive advantage. When the Associated Press recently contacted lawmakers behind the proposed bans, most couldn’t cite a single local example of a trans girl playing sports. Some pointed to a Connecticut case in which cisgender girls’ families sued, alleging that two trans female sprinters had an unfair advantage.
But two days after that lawsuit was filed, one of the cis girls beat her trans competitor in a state championship race, noted Dr Jack Turban, a child psychiatry fellow at Stanford . . .
3.For the trans kids targeted by these bills, the consequences could be harmful to their wellbeing and in some cases deadly, advocates said. Trans youth already attempt suicide at a rate more than three times greater than their cisgender peers.
Even the introduction of the bills was damaging youths’ mental health, said Turban: “All around the country, these kids are hearing these messages that powerful politicians want to take away their rights.”
Kris, the 13-year-old South Dakota boy, said football had transformed his life. After he joined his South Dakota school team last year, he made some of his closest friends and came to excel as a starting lineman.
His middle school teammates and coaches didn’t care that Kris was trans, a sharp contrast from his previous school where administrators told him he couldn’t play on boys’ teams: “They treated me as any other kid on the team, and that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to be the outcast. They gave me the position they thought I deserved.”
Now, Kris lives in fear that he could lose it all. . . .
This is how it's done. Talking to the people involved, particularly the folks who would be most affected - in this case trans children. And don't allow yourself to be a sounding board for talking points. Impart accurate information and fill in the holes.
