Does Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just sit around his office and think of new ways to be cruel? Sure seems like it.
The churchgoing Southern Baptist, who was impeached by the Texas House but spared conviction by Trump loyalists in the Texas Senate, ought to be subject to the law, not trying to make laws.
Yet once again, here he is promulgating edicts that not only are wrongheaded but incredibly cruel. I cannot emphasize this word enough: Ken Paxton is cruel. And every Republican in the Texas Senate knew that when they let him off the hook for his earlier misdeeds and lies.
Paxton’s latest target is transgender people — as though they weren’t already fighting enough uphill battles.
Mark Wingfield
The high-profile member of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano now says transgender citizens of Texas cannot change the gender marker on their driver’s licenses and — get this — anyone who previously had a gender marker changed has to get it reversed. He has declared unlawful and void any court orders granting changes to driver’s licenses or birth certificates.
“State agencies must immediately correct any unlawfully altered driver’s licenses or birth certificates that were changed pursuant to such orders,” Paxton wrote.
Paxton is among the condescending conservatives who smirk while putting the word “gender” in quotations to dig in on their view that all this transgender business is made-up nonsense. They are judge and jury with their language. And they are dead wrong.
Here’s what Brad Pritchett, interim CEO of Equality Texas, said about Paxton’s latest: “Ken Paxton is the lawyer for the state. His job is to interpret law, not to make it. So, it’s important to point out that his opinion is just that — an opinion. But if state agencies follow this directive, it will jeopardize the safety of the nearly 100,000 trans people in the state.”
“You don’t have to understand the biology of transgender identity to allow people to live into their true selves.”
As I’ve written over and over and over, you don’t have to understand the biology of transgender identity to allow people to live into their true selves. It’s not your business. Let them be and go about your life.
Transgender folks are not predators, are not freaks and are not mentally ill. They are our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and cousins and aunts and uncles and teachers and pastors and neighbors and civic leaders. They are among us, and they are fine.
We’ve got to wonder what motivates the kind of hatred Paxton and his allies have toward transgender people. Why are they so worked up over this? What real threat is any transgender person to them? What are they hiding?
Every transgender person I know who lives in Texas is considering moving out of state. I’m sure Paxton and his cronies would love that. Just like the county judge over in Tarrant County, they want to rid the state of anyone who doesn’t think just like them or look just like them.
One more time: This is cruel.
Not only is this cruel, it is causing other people to jump on the bandwagon and condemn things they don’t understand and don’t want to understand.
The fear campaign is working. As I have said, it is harder to be a transgender person today than it was eight years ago.
“More transgender people face real danger today because of the fear stoked against them than they pose a threat to anyone else.”
More transgender people face real danger today because of the fear stoked against them than they pose a threat to anyone else. The real problem is the reverse of what it appears to be.
Look, I understand you all get weary of me advocating for transgender folks all the time. But please bear with me. This has more to do with you than you realize.
What is happening to transgender Americans can happen to you. That’s not a trite threat; it’s the reality of history.
Look at any fear-based purification movement that has happened in modern history and you always will find identification of the “other” to be feared spreads. Today, transgender people are simply the easiest target because they are distinct minority and few people take the time to educate themselves. “That’s not my issue,” you quickly assume.
But it should be your issue because it is an issue of humanity. And what is happening to transgender folks right now could happen to any of us tomorrow. It all depends on who the empire decides to gang up on.
Evangelicals and those who have bought into the political side of evangelicalism without the actual Bible have made transgender people the boogeyman they must fight when there is no actual threat to them or their children. No threat except for a child or adult to have the freedom to live as they believe they should.
This is about quashing the rights of others in order to build a hedge of protection around your own fears. And according to the latest data from Pew Research, that fear strategy is working. More people are afraid of transfolk today than before.
“What is happening to transgender folks right now could happen to any of us tomorrow. It all depends on who the empire decides to gang up on.”
Did you know the Jews were not the first victims of the horrific eugenics agenda of the Third Reich in Germany? That honor falls to disabled people. The Nazis first went after those with physical and mental differences and used them to test ways of cleansing society of the unwanted.
Our own county has not been immune to this reality in the past either, with the cruelty of the Tuskegee Experiments and “ugly laws” passed in many states beginning in the late 1860s, that made it illegal for anyone deemed “unsightly or unseemly” to appear in public. The last of these laws was not repealed until 1974.
And in the United States in 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” as part of his opinion in Buck v. Bell, in which the court ruled compulsory sterilization of the “unfit” was constitutional.
It’s a short trip from these atrocities to Elon Musk cutting your Medicare or Medicaid benefits because your life is not deemed “essential” or important enough to save.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson explains it this way:
Lately, political writers have called attention to the tendency of billionaire Elon Musk to refer to his political opponents as “NPCs.” This term comes from the gaming world and refers to a nonplayer character, a character that follows a scripted path and cannot think or act on its own and is there only to populate the world of the game for the actual players. Amanda Marcotte of Salon notes that Musk calls anyone with whom he disagrees an NPC, but that construction comes from the larger environment of the online right wing, whose members refer to anyone who opposes Donald Trump’s agenda as an NPC.
In The Cross Section, Paul Waldman notes that the point of the right wing’s dehumanization of political opponents is to dismiss the pain they are inflicting. If the majority of Americans are not really human, toying with their lives isn’t important — maybe it’s even LOL funny to pretend to take a chainsaw to the programs on which people depend. “We are ants, or even less,” Waldman writes, “bits of programming to be moved around at Elon’s whim. Only he and the people who aspire to be like him are actors, decision-makers, molding the world to conform to their bold interplanetary vision.”
Already, transgender Americans have been made into NPCs. Someone else will be next. It could be you.
Related articles:
I will not hide | Opinion by Chelsea Hopkins
Disney, Christianity and the erasure of transgender people | Analysis by Mara Richards Bim
What will it take for you to care about transgender people? | Opinion by Mark Wingfield
Study finds very few U.S. adolescents are prescribed puberty blockers or hormones
Republicans seek votes with ad campaign warning of ‘radical trans agenda’