Tulsi Gabbard in her new "anti-woke" persona at the Palmetto Family Council Summit in South Carolina demonstrating how easy it is to score for the dark side:
We just celebrated International Women's Day last week. I was scrolling through social media seeing, you know, what are people saying about it? And you saw a lot of nice flowery words coming from a lot of people in Washington, celebrating women and all that women have accomplished over the years, and all these great inspiring examples of women leaders throughout our time. We know the hypocrisy there. You ask them, what is a woman? and they can't answer the question. And one of the people they chose to honor in the White House on International Women's Day was not a woman at all. It was a biological male. There are two major points here. Number one is, There is no greater expression of hatred and hostility towards women than to try to erase our existence as a category of people and to minimize us to being a construct of anyone's imagination. And the second thing that doesn't get talked about often enough as we are looking at this insanity is that by rejecting the objective truth that there is such a thing as a woman, they are rejecting the existence of objective truth as a whole. And when we remove those boundaries of what is actually true and false, not my truth or your truth or their truth or whatever it is, that there is such a thing as objective truth, then we remove all the boundaries of our society and we end up in a position what we're seeing right now where what is declared as true is based on whatever those in power say that it is.
Gabbard's last point is frighteningly being made (although opposite from the way she is attempting to intimate) across the country as state legislature after state legislature in the red hinterlands is rushing in a mad dash to seize the reactionary moment (as if nothing else of import were going on in the country) to try to legislate trans and non-binary persons out of existence. The "biological male" that Gabbard is referring to without identifying or explaining herself is Alba Rueda, who as President Alberto Ferndandez's Undersecretary of Diversity Policies within the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity was Argentina's first transgender senior government official. She was among the 12 women from around the world receiving awards at a White House ceremony March 8 honoring "International Women of Courage" a celebration now in its 17th year. There's no question that by selecting a transgender woman for the award the State Department is ahead of the curve of cis-mainstream thought. And I'm not immune to some irritation at the symbolic and relatively low-stakes cultural battles that our neoliberal power elite assiduously attend to while they can be counted on to neglect and obstruct progress with the issues of the most critical global import that are actually in their purview. Democratic diversity posturing is the twisted mirror image of Republican diversity repression.
Does this bold affirmation on the part of an agency of the federal government do anything to protect the rights, health and safety of actual trans women and their trans brothers and others across the country as they face a barrage of reactionary hostile anti trans and "anti-woke" legislation? Probably not. Does it hurt? As a toothless provocation to the forces of repression, it arguably might-- as Tulsi Gabbard's cynically obtuse perversion of the significance of the symbolism attempts to demonstrate. Does this mean we shouldn't include trans people in symbolic gestures in the meantime? Absolutely not, but maybe we should strive to put teeth into these provocations in the future and in the meantime, perhaps some more muscular words if not action on the part of the executive would be helpful against the current onslaught of anti trans hysteria.
I'm going to come flat out and say I don't know anything at all about the lives, issues, rights of transgender people other than that, contrary to Gabbard’s counter-factual assertion about objective truth, they exist in the space time coordinate that I find myself in. What is it about humans that practically guarantees that the existence of a group among us is not sufficient for its acceptance and grounds for the recognition of its full human rights? Trans people exist among us. That's all I need to know. Everything else I say that does not acknowledge that reality is on me. I also know that the issue is complicated enough and personal and visceral enough that more is required from me than from transgender people in the affirmation of their right to be. Our trans brothers and sisters just are. If trans-self-affirmation were all that was necessary to end the current crisis, there would be no issue for the rest of us other than a struggle to not stand in the way of trans self-affirmation (and this is still a concern -- the least any of us can do is do what we can to not hinder trans self-affirmation). But important as that is, it's not enough, and the rash of anti-trans legislation being introduced across the country is proof positive of this. Anything I do that stands in the way of affirming the right of trans people just to be-- including anything from aggressive rejection of entreaties to accommodate my language, to passive acceptance of legislative hysteria-- is nasty stinginess on my part.
I'm an old sheltered person but I can attest to a sea change having happened since my childhood in the recognition of the simple right of persons of all gender identities and experiences merely to exist-- let alone to exist without insulting hindrances to their freedoms. As eager as a class as they now are to demonstrate their wokeness, liberals of the ruling classes in the 1960's were not yet prepared to acknowledge that gayness might not be a disease. That growth was still to come in their consciousness. At the time, they were still struggling to accept the notion that equality and the full rights of citizenship could no longer be postponed for people on the basis of their blackness. Few who sat like lumps on a log in the way of justice for blacks in apartheid America will now readily admit how malignantly lame they were-- how late to the game-- when it really counted.*
The long, ongoing struggle especially of the descendants of American slaves to overcome a history of oppression does not bode well for the trans struggle but if our current dark era of repression and reaction and denial is a nightmare from which we will one day awaken, perhaps one day we will re-emerge from this hellscape together. Will Tulsi Gabbard be around to have to live down her grandstanding against trans people for political points at the worst of times?
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| At 2.65% of the US population, the number of adults 18 and above whose identity is other than their birth gender is 6,841,541-- a number greater than the population of Indiana, the 17th most populous state. If legislation to abrogate the rights of people on the basis that they were from Indiana were to suddenly start sweeping the country- would that not be nuts? And also, what for? (Answer: Bigotry) |
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