Thursday, June 16, 2022

The 'Rainbow Scare' is a cruel falsepanic, and it is upon us

Keep the concept of a "moral panic" in mind:

"For right-wing and far-right politicians, the anti-gender movement offers a way to stir up what is known as a 'moral panic.' A moral panic is a widespread but exaggerated fear that a group, person, or concept poses a threat to society."
— Kate Walton "Opposition to gender equality around the world is connected, well funded and spreading. Here’s what you need to know about the anti-gender movement," CNN, March 2024

I also share the term "Rainbow Scare".

From Allison Hope's opinion essay in CNN today: "Americans are facing a Rainbow Scare — and it may get worse before it gets better" (June 16, 2022)

We have entered the era of the Rainbow Scare.

The Rainbow Scare has haunting echoes of the Red Scare and related Lavender Scare (as historian David K. Johnson coined it) from the mid-20th century, when fears about the spread of communism during the Cold War emboldened Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and others in the US government to persecute and ostracize people who were deemed to be "communist sympathizers," cavorting with the Soviet enemy. LGBTQ+ people were among them — fired from their jobs, forced to undergo psychiatric treatment and institutionalization, including electric shock treatment, and prosecuted as security threats to the nation.

This was the era when then-President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which helped fuel a national witch-hunt to purge queer Americans from the federal government. Around 5,000 federal agency employees lost their jobs on the basis of their sexual orientation. McCarthy and other leaders used LGBTQ+ people as a wedge issue and scare tactic to justify state-sponsored discrimination, just as right-wing leaders are trying to today.

See also: "Comparing the 'Lavender Scare' With the Current 'Trans Scare': The so-called “Red Scare” was said to have been saturated with lavender: the color associated with homosexuality at the time." 9 min read, by The Good Men Project, published in Equality Includes You, May 18, 2023

5 June 2023 tweet by Alejandra Caraballo @Esqueer_: 'We didn't care about Pride until you started going after kids.' You have literally said LGBTQ people have been going after children for decades. This is Anita Bryant in 1977. This level of gaslighting is insane. (showing a black-and-white photo of Anita Bryant in front of 'Save our children....' posters)

Update, later in 2022

Please read: Libs of TikTok and Bomb Threat on Boston Children's Hospital: Libs of TikTok has gone too far. Now a children's hospital has been threatened with a bomb. All platforms need to drop Chaya Raichik and Libs of TikTok. Erin Reed, August 31, 2022

On December 27, 2022, Raichik gave this one-hour interview on Fox. By doing so, she "revealed her face for the first time," Erin Reed points out; Raichik used "dehumanizing language such as calling LGBTQ+ people and allies 'cockroaches' and a 'poison,' and revealed her role in anti-trans legislation via Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida. She even revealed that Gov. DeSantis offered her the governor’s mansion guest room for 'as long as she needed it.'"

This 1:45 video clip was shared on X. I transcribed it:

T. Carlson: How— What is going on here? Do you have any theories?
Chaya Raichik: I think there’s— there’s something so unique about the LGBTQ community has become this cult, and it’s so captivating, and it pulls people in so strongly unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And they brainwash people to join, and they convince them of all of these things, and it’s really, really hard to get out of it. It’s really difficult. And there are studies on this. Like, there’s been a lot of reporting on this, about people— Parents who are like, you know, my child is starting to say, you know, that they’re nonbinary or transgender or whatever and: What do I do? How do I stop this? And it’s really, really difficult. It’s, it’s, it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen, I think. It’s extremely poisonous.
Carlson: Do you see a spiritual component to any of this?
Raichik: Um. (laughs)
Carlson: You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want.
Raichik: Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know.
Carlson: Well, I do, I do. I don’t think this makes sense at all.
Raichik: No, it doesn’t make any sense. And I think, I think they’re just— I think they’re evil. And sometimes we try to, we try to‚ to break it down a lot and we discuss like why this is happening, what’s happening, and whatever and I think sometimes, like, the simplest answer is: They’re just evil. They’re bad people. They’re just evil people, and they want to— And they want to groom kids. They’re recruiting.

Alejandra Caraballo: Chaya Raichik went on Tucker Carlson and said the 'LGBTQ community has become this cult... It's extremely poisonous.' She later says 'They're just evil people, and they're out to groom kids. They're recruiting.' This is one of the most bigoted interviews I've ever heard.

The word "desistance" to describe kids who stop identifying as trans implies that trans identity is criminal.

The term "falsepanic" is mine, coined for the sake of this blog post's title. It's not a real, diagnosable anxiety. It's a falsehood. The people who express anxiety about queer/trans people may indeed feel some kind of fear, but they also likely know it's on a false basis.

Brynn Tannehill:

"The basic operating definition [of a moral panic] is 'public mass movement, based on false or exaggerated perceptions or information that exceeds the actual threat society is facing. Moral panic is a widespread fear and often an irrational threat to society's values, interests, and safety.' One of the seminal piece's of research into the taxonomy of moral panics was Stanley Cohen's "Folk Devils and Moral Panics." He defined it as "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests." The impetus for this book was the UK media taking a short series of tit-for-tat acts of petty vandalism between (drunk) mods and rockers in the early, and convincing the public this was an out of control gang war, and over-policing over-reaction ensued. Cohen saw 3 characteristics of a moral panic:

1. Media singles out a group of people and makes them "devils": something all good people should despise
2. The actual threat is somewhere between little and none
3. Concern about the group explodes seemingly overnight.

* * *

Similarly, later scholars listed the characteristics of a moral panic as:
1. Volatility: Sudden identification of a group of people as threatening deviants
2. Hostility: the "deviants" are regarded with intense hostility, and labeled as an existential threat to society.
3. Measurable Concern: can be measured w/ polls
4. Consensus: Significant portion of the public believes the threat is real and serious
5. Disproportionate: Reaction is disproportionate to the size of the group and the little or no danger they pose"

* * *

...the worst possible outcome is when an authoritarian government comes to (permanent) power on the basis of some sort of moral panic. This one of the times when conditions are ripe for genocide.

Which is why the timing of a massive moral panic over trans people couldn't come at a worse freaking time. It's zero coincidence that the same people calling for turning the US into a Christian Republic are also flogging the trans panic.

* * *

And you have the GOP that made this one of their top talking points during the 2022 election. They dumped truckloads of cash into ads about trans people. They hammered away at us on the stump. They win primaries with moral panic

* * *

One could make the argument that the Holocaust was the result of a confluence of a moral panic stoked by a political party which simultaneously managed to seize permanent dictatorial power.

As it is, we're dealing with a moral panic, stochastic violence, modern Sturmabteilung, mass shootings, Twitter boosting those responsible for both the stochastic violence and the moral panic, and people are already starting to sell everything and flee red states.

— Brynn Tannehill, Twitter, Dec. 11, 2022

See also this tweet

Thing is, if they know they know you, they tend to think you have a right to exist.

"In 1985, only 24 per cent of respondents admitted personally knowing someone who had come out as gay or lesbian. Today, the figure has risen to 72 per cent...And, whereas in the past 72 per cent said sexual relations between adults of the same sex were always or almost always wrong, that figure has now dropped to 28 per cent." (Pink News, 2024)

For the past several days, I've been writing about this...

Anti-Trans Bills Encourage Far-Right Violence
That may be the intent. It sure looks like the outcome.
Jun 15 — 3 min read

Why is the Far-Right Ever More Intensely Anti-Trans?
Because they’re bored by finally winning against abortion rights
Jun 14 — 3 min read

How the Far-Right Comes for Trans People
Violent far-right U.S. groups are ‘hugely and deeply’ anti-transgender
Jun 13 — 4 min read

In response to Owen Jones, Scott Long said:
"When I was coming out (back in what feels like the Axial Age), it was axiomatic even in more conservative parts of the LGBT movement that parental authority was a wellspring of oppressive abuse. It wasn't neutral or apolitical. Curtailing it was where politics began. ... When we were finalizing the Yogyakarta Principles, the leader of one international LGBT group questioned whether the Principles should condemn intersex surgeries performed on children. "As a parent," she said, "I would always want the power to make that decision for my child." ...what interests me about that statement isn't "as a parent." It's "I want the power." ... When gays like Bari Weiss (prospective parent) or Andrew Sullivan (not a parent, but it won't stop him talking) praise parents' power to control or detrans transgender children, they are laying claim to abusive power that could easily have been used against them. Weiss and Sullivan must have feared power once, in their bones. Which is why they identify so completely now with the power to oppress. LGBT liberation is about resisting power, not grabbing some for yourself." — Scott Long, Twitter, 6 April 2023

incredible to write an entire profile of bari weiss and expound at length on her allegedly noble intentions and all the rich idiots who love her, yet not once mention the substance of any of the things she says. if she's such an allegedly compelling talker, lets hear www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/b...

[image or embed]

— Casey Johnston (@caseyjohnston.bsky.social) Aug 11, 2024 at 1:08 PM

i shouldn't be surprised the way that closed-box horse-race political journalism persists, never engaging with what people say and only what other people think about it. and yet

— Casey Johnston (@caseyjohnston.bsky.social) Aug 11, 2024 at 1:08 PM

she's allegedly so good at defeating her opponents in debate, yet not a single mention of her speaking to anyone who even remotely disagrees with her

— Casey Johnston (@caseyjohnston.bsky.social) Aug 11, 2024 at 1:11 PM
Zinnia Jones tweets: This exact type of attack on minorities keeps happening because these groups follow a moral panic-to-fascism playbook that can be used against any group in society, over and over again, until there's enough panic to move on to fascism. You might hate trans people. You might hate queer people. You might hate furries. Do you hate yourself enough to volunteer to be some politician's dupe, now that you know they're just using you?

Noting that her 2022 sarcastic tweet "I won’t rest until every American child has been trans’d" was taken seriously by KLA TV (religious transphobes), Natalie Wynn gives a 2023 update: "We should not rest till we’ve trans’d God."

A 2022 tweet by Natalie Wynn: “It’s time to go on the offensive. I won’t rest until every American child has been trans’d.” KLA TV (religious transphobes) takes it seriously. Natalie Wynn gives a 2023 update: The tweet didn’t go far enough. We should not rest till we’ve trans’d God.
Alex DiFrancesco on Twitter: At this time every day, my dog freaks out about the mailman, and I have learned that if I try to calm her it doesn't work, but if I yell, 'OMG, the mailman! Do you think he's coming in! WHAT SHOULD WE DO?' she's like, 'Finally, someone is taking this very real threat seriously!'
a young person, smiling
Image by Tammy McGary from Sulphur Springs, Texas © Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Wikimedia Commons.

A trans person existed & thereby ruined your day? It did not happen to you

One of the major transphobic tropes is that hypothetical trans people run around causing fictional chaos and thus all actual trans people must be banned.

The chaos isn't real. It's a falsepanic. The harm to cis people is invented.

June 6, 2023 celia tweets: Not a single one of you cis women transphobe bigots can provide me an actual example THAT HAPPENED TO YOU of a trans woman being 'innapropriate' in a 'woman's space.' I don't want a link to the same article we've seen before from your shitty websites. I don't want random video.
John Leavitt June 2, 2023 tweets: I’m sure there’s some sociological term for “a society that is becoming hysterical about unreal threats they made up because actually addressing real threats would upset the power structure too much so they’d rather die” but all I know is that it sucks

Leavitt adds that it's "an accumulation cycle," perhaps the end of one, "but never before has the cycle been this global, with nowhere else to expand into, with actual civilization ending threats looming."

See also my article: "Transphobia, the Interrupting Cow". It's a 12-minute read on Medium. To read it, buy a paid membership on the platform.

Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong blasts anti-trans moral panic, LGBTQ Nation, January 2024

"To be trans in the United States today is to live with a preternaturally high tolerance for the absurd. It was just a few years ago that conservative lawmakers in Ohio were faced with the mortal and economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and chose to turn the state’s legislative focus to the 'issue' of five transgender girls, out of some 400,000 high school athletes, competing in youth sports." — Wren Sanders, introduction to Judith Butler Knows What Makes Transphobes Tick, interview by Wren Sanders, Them, April 5, 2024

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