Thursday, February 23, 2023

Anti-transgender legislation fight in Montana

fawn

January 2024

"Over 10,000 Christians signed a petition that condemned the banning of Representative Zooey Zephyr, a Montana Democrat and the state's first transgender lawmaker, from the state's House floor on Wednesday after she reportedly breached decorum.
* * *
'If you vote yes on this bill [Senate Bill 99, which banned gender-affirming care for minors], I hope the next time you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,' Zephyr said. In response, Republican House Speaker Matt Regier deemed her statements as a breach of decorum. As a result, she was barred from the House floor in a 68-32 vote, meaning that she will not be allowed to debate or speak on legislation for the remainder of session, which ends next week." — Thousands of Christians Condemn GOP's 'Fascist' Silencing of Trans Lawmaker, Fatma Khaled, Newsweek, April 30, 2023

Breached decorum? What?

Who makes a "blood on your hands" comment? Senator Lindsey Graham (R–SC) on January 31, 2024. You will hear zero Republicans tell him that he breached decorum.

CSPAN tweets on January 31, 2024 that Sen. LindseyGrahamSC said: 'Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us, I know you don't mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands. You have a product that's killing people.'

What the Republicans don't like is dissent. Especially when a trans person does it.

June 2024

News:

"A judge on Tuesday [June 25, 2024] struck down a Montana law that defined 'sex' in state law as only male or female, finding that it was unconstitutional.
District Court Judge Shane Vannatta in Missoula ruled the law, passed last year, violated the state constitution because the description of the legislation did not clearly state its purpose."
— "Judge strikes down Montana law defining sex as only male or female for procedural reasons," AP, June 25, 2024

See also: Montana Judge Overturns Law Erasing Transgender Legal Recognition: Senate Bill 458 ended legal recognition for transgender people in the state. A Montana judge has ruled that the bill's title is unconstitutionally vague. Erin Reed, June 26, 2024

"On Feb. 18, [2025,] a Montana judge struck down, for the second time, a bill [SB 458] seeking to unconstitutionally define sex and gender under state law. ... The Montana Attorney General’s office, under Republican Governor Greg Gianforte, functionally argued that, because non-cisgender people are a minority of the population, the law was inconsequential. The courts denounced this assertion. “It has never been the law in this state that a rare few, even if they are ‘despised,’ should lack protection under the law,” the ruling reads."
— S. Baum, "Intellectually and Morally Indefensible": Montana Court Blocks Trans-Exclusionary Law Defining Sex “It is the right decision, not only for us Plaintiffs but for every Montanan’s right to privacy.”, Erin in the Morning, Feb 19, 2025

December 2024

Look at the connection to climate. A couple of recent pro-trans rulings out of Montana, and now this:

Whoa—the Montana Supreme Court holds that its state constitution protects the right to "a stable climate system," and strikes down a law that barred consideration of greenhouse gas emissions when permitting new fossil fuel projects. juddocumentservice.mt.gov/getDocByCTra...

[image or embed]

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) December 18, 2024 at 1:17 PM

May 2025

"A state judge in Montana has permanently struck down SB 99, a law which sought to ban gender-affirming care for Montana youth under age 18.
* * *
...[but] permitted such treatments to remain readily available for children deemed “cisgender” by doctors, and for intersex children whose parents are often coerced into consenting to irreversible, life-altering genital surgeries for their infant children.
It also defined sex in binary and immutable terms.
* * *
As the court ruling declared, “the State’s interest is actually a political and ideological one: ensuring minors in Montana are never provided treatment to address” their gender dysphoria.
“In other words, the State’s interest is actually blocking transgender expression.”
— Montana Court Issues Final Blow to Anti-Trans Health Care Law: A judge found that the law's premise is not scientific, but “political and ideological.” s. baum, Erin in the Morning, May 14, 2025

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Monday, February 20, 2023

Global Early Modern Trans Studies: Symposium at Folger

Empress Theodora
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Sunday, February 19, 2023

From Jimmy Carter's biography

Observations from The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter by Kai Bird, Crown Publishing Group, 2022.

James Earl Carter, Jr. was born Oct 1, 1924 and grew up in a small town with fewer than 500 people. His father, who held segregationist beliefs, was a farmer, “growing peanuts, corn, and cotton and drawing ‘rents’ from his Black tenants.” The family lived in “a three-bedroom single-story house assembled from a Sears, Roebuck kit. The structure lacked electricity and insulation and had no running water until 1935, when Carter’s father bought a small windmill to pump water from the backyard well into a water tank.” And: “Although electricity came to Atlanta in 1884, it took more than a half century to reach [the small town of] Archery in 1938.”

At age 21, he graduated from the Naval Academy and married Rosalynn Smith.

Carter, though “a southern white man,” was “the first president to feel entirely comfortable worshipping and speaking in a Black church.”

“Many in the Washington pundit class ridiculed his soft Georgian twang and peanut farmer persona.”

“He personally disapproved of abortion, but he always defended a woman’s right to choose and lobbied for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. He criticized busing as a tool of integration but ardently supported affirmative action.”

“…he was willing to sacrifice some social programs—but not the defense budget—in an effort to control what he thought were inflationary budget deficits. … Liberals complained that he could have spent more on social programs to stimulate job creation and less on a defense budget still premised on Cold War assumptions.”

“His self-confidence bordered on arrogance. As a Southern Baptist he was painfully self-aware that his pride was the deepest of sins.”

“He put solar panels on the roof of the White House before they were economical. He talked about climate change before it was ever fashionable.”

“As a white boy growing up in South Georgia, Jimmy Carter lived a childhood steeped in segregation and a culture of white supremacy. And yet his childhood playmates were mostly African Americans. His only neighbors were Black tenants. He experienced from the ground the great chasm between America’s beliefs about itself and the reality of inequality, poverty, and racism.”

In 1955,

“a dozen of Carter’s peanut warehouse customers paid him a visit and suggested that he join the White Citizens’ council—basically the Klan in business suits. When he politely declined, they offered to pay on his behalf the $5 annual membership fee. At this, Carter lost patience, angrily took out his own $5 bill, and announced that he’d sooner ‘flush it down the toilet’ than give it to the White Citizens’ Council.”

As governor of Georgia, Carter worked to reform the judiciary and prisons, but “reluctantly signed a bill that reinstated the death penalty” (which his wife opposed); “no one was executed during his four-year tenure.” He appointed liberal judges, “including the first Jewish judge to the Georgia Court of Appeals.”

Books that influenced him

"He read books by theologians and philosophers, including Paul Tillich, Soren Kierkegaard, and the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. He took to quoting Tillich on how ‘religion is a search.’ From Karl Barth he accepted the notion that the Bible could not be read literally. He read the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. In 1965, his good friend William Gunter lent him a copy of Reinhold Niebuhr: On Politics—essays that ratified what he already believed: that he could be both a successful politician and a good Christian. ... ‘One of my greatest regrets,’ Carter later said, ‘was not meeting Niebuhr before he died [in 1971].’"

"...when [James] Fallows had first met Carter in August 1976, the presidential candidate had made a point of saying that he had read Fallows’s 1971 book The Water Lords, a Nader study-group report on water pollution in Savannah."

crocus
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What was wrong with Emily Bazelon's NYT article in 2022?

Here's a brief summary from Erin Reed on Substack:

"The allegations against The New York Times' coverage of transgender issues were numerous. Current and former contributors pointed out that the publication has used derogatory terms for transgender people. For instance, in Emily Bazelon's story, "The Battle Over Gender Therapy," one of the first trans youth who received puberty blockers was referred to as "patient zero” — extremely dehumanizing language that compares trans people to an infection. Multiple experts featured in the article have since noted that their work was misrepresented. I recently pointed out that organizations like Genspect are presented with no context as "an international group" without noting that they are explicitly campaigning for an end to gender-affirming care up to the age of 25 and that they are not a medical or professional organization. Upon investigating the journalists covering these stories, it was found that they tend to follow almost exclusively anti-trans sources and groups that call for an outright elimination of transgender people from society. It is clear that the reporters' media diet comes from people who oppose transgender individuals."
— "I Signed A Critical NYT Trans Letter. Their Response Is Insulting." Erin Reed, Substack, Feb 17, 2023. Consider subscribing to Erin's work to support her.

Lots of people have written about the Bazelon article and the Baker article that followed.

Here's another NYT article in 2022

Parker Molloy refers to "a Times article ["They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?" November 14, 2022], co-written by Megan Twohey [with Christina Jewett], who seems set on torching the positive reputation she earned after reporting on Harvey Weinstein, that wildly played up concerns about bone density."

Molloy continues:

"And in response, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) released a statement calling out factual inaccuracies and undue speculation in its piece. Naturally, the Times ignored this criticism, with anti-trans activists inside and outside of the company brushing it off as coming from an advocacy group.

But WPATH isn’t an 'advocacy group;' it’s a group of medical professionals that help set the standards of care for transition-related health care. The group’s goal isn’t to expand trans rights, but simply to set the guidelines trans people have to follow. And they are pretty thorough, often restrictive guidelines, at that."

Later, a study found not quite so profound effects on bone density. So the newspaper had just been "picking up the topic of trans teens and essentially deciding that there are too many trans people out there and something should be done about that."

See also

See also my breakdown of Pamela Paul's four most recent op-eds in the NYT: "How to Argue Transphobically That You’re Not Transphobic". It's a 10-minute read on Medium.

trees
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Sunday, February 12, 2023

Jared Yates Sexton's 'Midnight Kingdom'

In The Midnight Kingdom (2023), Jared Yates Sexton recalls

"tabloids from the grocery store checkout detailing an invisible world where monsters walked among us and a secret machinery whirred just under the surface of the material realm. She [my grandmother] died still believing this conspiracy theory, still desperate to understand why her life had played out as it had. She needed a story to explain it, to make sense of why she had suffered so terribly in the Great Depression, why she had lost friends and family in battles fought in lands she would never see, and why, having won the peace and then war with Satan’s empire, the heavenly kingdom promised to her by preachers and televangelists had failed to materialize."

"It was in 2015 that I first realized this affliction that troubled my family had become a pressing, existential threat." As a journalist at MAGA rallies, he found that people only wanted to talk about "conspiracies and evil plots."

A bit of what's discussed in the book:

History

Christianity began as "a persecuted cult on the fringes of society" that was fascinated by acts of martyrdom. Christianity aspired to "a homogenous society ordered by its own tenets and beliefs," and Christians "portray[ed] themselves as holders of an unconquerable divine truth so potent and so undeniable that even the leaders of the Roman Empire were desperate to snuff it out." It became "the official religion of Rome, and eventually the mythology through which the modern world was formed." That story, he says, "is the story of how systems of domination are constructed, solidified, and weaponized."

A difference between Judaism and Christianity:

"While Jewish thought tended to view Satan as 'a symbol of the tendency to evil within humanity,' the Christians believed they were engaged in an active and dire war against the literal personification of evil. This battle defined Christian mythology and was a worldview based on 'transcendent reality' divorced from empirical evidence and based on 'visions' and faith."

Unfortunately, "the church was still under attack by evil forces as long as there remained a single nonbeliever."

The "Great Chain of Being," was "an ordered hierarchy beginning with God, traveling down," and the feudal system justified itself by that idea, joining kings and churches.

How does one know if one is saved? Whether salvation is under a person's control (as in Lutheranism) or preordained (as in Calvinism), their wealth is considered an indicator of God's favor.

Even when religious arguments gave way to scientific arguments in the Enlightenment: "It was unthinkable to many white Enlightenment figures that people of color should be treated equally, let alone that they should rise up, displace their oppressors, and attempt self-rule."

In colonial America, secret societies of rich white men like the Sons of Liberty "effectively merged their economic concerns with the apocalypticism of scripture, charging that 'monsters in the shape of men' were doing the business of Satan, and that 'touching any paper' with the derided official stamp meant that one would 'receive the mark of the beast' as forewarned in the Book of Revelation."

21st century

Though "Obama was a moderate neoliberal president who idolized Ronald Reagan and touted policies designed by Republicans in coordination with corporations," Republicans portrayed him as the evil socialist of their conspiracy theories. Donald Trump repeatedly went on Fox News "to further the racist conspiracy theory that Obama had not been born in the United States, making him ineligible for the presidency, and claiming that somebody told him that Obama was secretly a Muslim. The national conversation was effectively hijacked," and

"Millions of Americans were shoved into an alternate reality populated by white supremacist paranoid fantasies, leftover demons of the War on Terror, and Christian fears of persecution and apocalypse, set within the frame of the New World Order narrative that diverted blame from neoliberalism to shadowy, evil forces lurking behind every corner. By the spring of 2010, the consequences were already becoming apparent. Nearly a quarter of Republicans believed Obama was the Antichrist and an overwhelming majority were confident he was a secret Muslim socialist with plans to take their guns before handing America over to a one-world government."

Trump "won the vote of roughly 80 percent of all white evangelicals, owing a debt to their sense of cultural and political persecution, not to mention their leaders’ praising Trump as being heaven-sent." Like Obama, Trump upheld neoliberal policies.

soldier gives something to small children
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The CIA under Allen Dulles

Jared Yates Sexton begins his book, The Midnight Kingdom, talking about his grandmother's beliefs in the 1980s: "The center of evil in the world, she had been assured by those same preachers and a bevy of politicians, rested in Moscow; it wasn’t even debatable whether the Kremlin was in league with Satan. The Soviet Union was the kingdom of the Antichrist, she believed."

Where did that belief come from?

Decades ago, there was "Allen Dulles, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services and the longest-serving and arguably most influential director of the CIA." When he took over: "The CIA became a force unto itself that acted upon the affairs of the rest of the world, engaging in secret activities that were unknown to its victims, the people of the United States, and even government officials as high-ranking as the president, all of it created, directed, and implemented by individuals who had never been elected and faced no possibility of electoral consequences."

He goes on:

"Under Dulles, the CIA carried out coups and subversive actions, traded in psychological operations that both skewed and obliterated truth, illegally experimented on and surveilled American citizens, orchestrated assassinations, and fought an undeclared secret war in pursuit of strengthening America’s political and economic interests, most often in assistance of the aims of wealthy individuals and the nation’s corporations. The battle against Soviet Russia, predicated on false and biased information and in service of the political and economic interests of a privileged few, meant deploying any measures imaginable, including overthrowing democratically elected leaders, carrying out coordinated assassinations, sacrificing entire populations of civilians, and creating wars out of thin air. The CIA was dedicated to achieving its objectives at any cost, all while obfuscating its methods and intentionally casting doubt on the very notion of objective truth. It’s hardly any wonder that, in this environment and in these times, paranoia as a cultural state and a political weapon became so omnipresent and so significant."

That's part of how the Soviet Union got linked to conspiracy theories and the idea of evil.

"As the Soviet Union was cast as the embodiment of Satan in the modern world," Sexton writes, "once more Americans saw evil spirits conspiring in the darkness and plotting the nation’s destruction."

You may also be interested to read about Christiana Spens's book, The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media. See: "On the Ritual of Political Scapegoating". It's a 10-minute read on Medium.

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Books that influenced Chelsea Manning

In her memoir README.txt, Chelsea Manning shares some books she read during her political awakening. She was influenced by Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States; David Carter's Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution; Susan Stryker's Transgender History; Rob Epstein's documentary The Times of Harvey Milk; and she learned about Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and the Compton's Cafeteria uprising. She read Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America. Then there was trans history—Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Some Assembly Required: The Not-So-Secret Life of a Transgender Teen, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and issues of Transgender Studies Quarterly.

I wrote more about Chelsea Manning's memoir. See: "A Queer Life Before WikiLeaks". It's a 6-minute read on Medium.

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