“The stakes right now are really high when it comes to queer and trans life. I can say in terms of my own lifetime, I haven’t felt like it has been this dangerous ever.”
“The stakes right now are really high when it comes to queer and trans life. I can say in terms of my own lifetime, I haven’t felt like it has been this dangerous ever,” says journalist Melissa Gira Grant. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with Gira Grant about right-wing attacks on trans people, Republican school board takeovers, and how the right’s “groomer” discourse has expanded to include queer people, drag performers and public school teachers.
When you hear rhetoric about “grooming” or all of this more mainstream rhetoric about trans women in sports and trans girls in sports, it might seem like a backlash or a regression and I think it’s something more than that. I think we’re seeing an expression of ideas that I think could accurately be labeled fascist that go further than just a cultural pendulum swing from rights to repression.
So, there’s two really scary things going on right there. She’s drawing an equivalency that doesn’t exist between the far right and the far left and she’s also claiming that we should be concerned with this more abstract idea that we can’t use the word “women” anymore when we’re debating. So, it drags what’s going on into the realm of debate and talk and op-eds, and it conveniently leaves the people whose lives are actually being put under threat right now.
The other kinds of things that they do are encourage parents and others to submit public records requests to schools to try to get any educational materials related to gender and sexuality, to then share those on that account without context and put whole school districts on blast. So, now educators are operating in an environment where any email that they send could potentially end up on Libs of TikTok putting a target on them.
This was actually a response to the fact that that legislation couldn’t even get through the Texas state legislature as conservative as it is and as dominated by an America first, Trumpian expression of conservatism. So, when they couldn’t pass a law, they just did it anyway and created chaos and let the chips fall where they may.
The Arizona Republican Primary Is Ground Zero for America’s Hysteria Over Critical Race Theory and Drag Queens In California about half of the state’s 5,000 school board seats are up for election this year. In the San Francisco Bay area, at least 100 candidates are running unopposed. One of those candidates is known anti-gay extremist Dennis Delisle,that descendants of slaves “are so much better off” than they would have been if their ancestors had been left in Africa.
And I feel like I just have to sidebar for a second and say, who cares if it was, right? The problem isn’t like whether or not this is being taught. The problem is this is being weaponized by people who don’t even understand it and are tweeting about any discussion of race and racism in the classroom as something that they have the right to censor their children’s exposure to and all children in the school district’s exposure to.
It’s like, “How do you disrupt this?” Because it isn’t happening in reality and yet it is, because it’s their kids and the educators who have to show up every day in this environment and the pressure that comes with that, feeling these groups are actually the one surveilling them. I don’t know. I don’t know where that ends. I’m still doing a lot of reporting on that. And I think what’s going on in Scottsdale is happening in a lot of other school districts as well.
This is the state that Anita Bryant is from, the orange juice lady who went on a nationwide homophobic campaign in the ’70s. These aren’t necessarily new tactics, but with DeSantis, we also see that we have openly far right and fascist groupings coming out to support him with him refusing to condemn them. When you have a governor who speaks at a convention, in this case, it was the Turning Point USA Student Convention in Florida.
So, for example, setting policies at the level of the State Board of Education that say that we don’t have to follow the Biden’s administration’s Title IX guidance, which is queer inclusive and trans inclusive or using the State Department of Business and Professional regulation, right, boring, to go after an LGBTQ venue that had an all ages drag event, to just openly use that state agency to target a community venue.
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