Republicans are never happier than when they’re bashing something they don’t understand, so the party’s current genitals-obsessed transphobia is totally on-brand. The rapidly spreading epidemic of Republican “concern” over the function and appearance of transgender people’s genitals is just another way for them to attack the trans community and bully kids and people who strike them as different, which is their favorite pastime. This entirely manufactured panic also allows them to promote some of their other cherished activities like banning books and denying health care.
Attacking Our Children
And they are not only demanding to know what’s in transgender adults’ pants (before, say, allowing them to use the correct bathroom). Indeed, the same people who won’t hesitate to accuse anyone who disagrees with them of grooming and preying on children can’t seem to get the thought of children’s genitals out of their minds.
Just one year ago, even before Florida Governor and Fascist Prick Ron DeSantis’s passage of the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law, Florida Republicans attempted to ban transgender girls and women from joining women’s sports teams across the state. Fortunately, that bill failed, but an Idaho bill just like it did not fail. In the year before the attacks on transgender rights kicked into high gear across the country, Idaho Governor and Fascist Prick Brad Little was on the warpath against transgender rights in his state and signed into law a bill that probably served as the inspiration for Florida’s failed effort. These bills allow schools and institutions to demand that disputes regarding the assigned sexes of students be resolved by, among other possible measures, genital inspections of minors.
Get Out of Our Pants, You Creeps
You just can’t deny how creepy these bills are. Forcing women—whether cisgender or transgender—to submit to genital examinations to verify their gender before participating in a sporting event is humiliating and degrading. In addition to flatly denying transgender children the opportunity to participate in team sports, these bills would potentially out transgender children to classmates who have only ever known them by their true identity. No Republican who argues in favor of these bills seems to care even remotely about the serious mental and physical health concerns that might arise. All they seem to care about is the presence and functioning of their genitalia.
What May Be Next
The Idaho bill was crafted by the Alliance Defending Freedom, an ironically-named Christian Nationalist hate group that supports — among other things — the recriminalization of homosexuality across the world, the atrocity that is conversion therapy, and the idea that homosexuality is linked to pedophilia.
As if all of this weren’t bad enough, the always righteous Republicans seem to be coming after inter-racial and same-sex marriage next. Roused by the recent successes of bills undermining the constitutional right to a safe and legal abortion and the horrifying wave of anti-LGBT legislation, they’re now increasingly making noise about marriage equality. After the arch-conservative MAGA majority on the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, watch for the anti-LGBTQ mob to go after Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that prohibited the states from denying marriage equality.
Republican senator and Fascist Prick John Cornyn of Texas dove headfirst into that sewer during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, working himself into a lather about Obergefell and repeatedly stating that the high court wrongfully invented the right to same-sex marriage. Another Fascist Prick Republican senator, Mike Braun, also stated his conviction that decisions about marriage rights should be left to the states. When asked if held the same view about Loving v. Virginia, the case that made state-level bans on interracial marriages unconstitutional, he said he did.
We are in This Together
The moral of this story? All of our rights are inextricably connected. Conservatives are not going to focus only on trans people and leave cis gay people alone. They’re not going to focus their energies on undermining reproductive rights and ignore LGBT people. They’re coming for everyone who doesn’t look and think like them. We cannot draw lines between the struggle for trans rights or gay rights or women’s rights or racial justice: we are all in it together. The Republicans have made it very clear that if they haven’t come for your civil rights yet they will do so very soon. This is why we have to put up our best fight and get these people out of office.