How a few comments to a HUFFPOST article comparing Trump to Hitler is a snapshot of divided America, By Hal M. Brown (The article is about Trump's anti-trans rants, but comments may show that a lot of men suffer from castration anxiety.

 

I read The Nazis Made A Horrifying Move In 1933. I'm Terrified Trump Is Now Doing The Exact Same Thing.

“Until recently, the question remained theoretical. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that President Trump is running plays straight out of Hitler’s playbook.”

The author, Ali Moss has a Substack where she also published this article.

I made this comment on HUFFPOST:

Then I looked over the comments and got the idea for today’s Susbtack.

The comments section of HUFFPOST continues to be an accurate representation of the dichotomy of viewpoints between Americans. On the one side we have those who condemn the author of this article and the entire idea that transgender children actually are born that way. These posts are sometimes crude and angry. They sometime say any comparison of Turmp with Hitler is, not always in these words, Trump derangement syndrome.

On the other side we have people who agree with the author that what Trump is doing has horrifying similarities to what Hitler did. These commenters tend to be both well thought out and respectful.

I looked at the comments and found a thread in response to what Roberta Powell posted. She was responding to a comment I can’t see because it was removed:

You can read it below. There are several typos.

• Roberta Powell

  We are there. He has labeled the same people as criminals, nonexistent or enemies. LGBTQ, DEI, foreign born, the press, the universities, libraries and liberals are lunatics destroying the American dream. And just like 1933 Germany he found a violent minority who agree. He oiks very elserlyfound more that join him for their own gain. Hitler was not 80 years old. Trump is. Trump's Reich ls led by the elderly but enforced by the middle aged. They have no limits. What laws they do not remove they break. This is a far right lunatic political party with an opposition that sits back to let the right do damage and lose support. We know we are not represented in Congress by either party. Unless we join the right wingers we are alone. We are there. It is 1930 Germany here in the U.S.A. and a depression is being set up. It's going to get very bad here.

  • LAXMAN FIVE

    So you like males on female sports teams and in their locker rooms right liberal? Only a Nazi would be against that. Right.

    • Two term Papaw

      All three of them!!!!

      Meanwhile MAGA can’t afford groceries without a second low wage job

    • Roberta Powell

      It's sports. I see huge muscular "born girls" and dainty, feminine "born boys" being used as an excuse to destroy every freedom our ancestors fought for. It's insane. I don't see the point. Why force girls to compete with transgender boys? It's not fair. Any athlete born female could take hormones and go through surgeries and compete against girls according to Trump. And they are? Just to win a high school trophy? That's nuts. And when girls compete with boys the girls still win sometimes. I think that is your real objection. Get over it and try harder.

  • undefined undefined

    DEI is racist and a man can't be a woman princess.

    • Roberta Powell

      But they can! DEI and transgenders can do their jobs.

• Susan Ortiz

  Some how her trans 11 year old had the freedom of speech intact to address the crowd under this nazi regime. How does that work?

  • Trump's Fascist Regime

    Ask the Columbia university protesters...

• Daniel Pedraza

  30 minutes ago

  Of course he is. His own daughter said he sleeps with copy of mine kempf by his bed. The entire DEI fraud that is a major Republican talking point is just a clever way to move towards white supremacy That's all it is.

  • Halle Piño

    You think that's "clever"?!

    Seems pretty transparent to me.

• Beef Supreme

  Another woman emotionally manipulated by the Big Media Propaganda Machine into feeling terrified. How sad.

Roberta Powell replied to something I added to the comments:

Ha! How is Trump different than Hitler?

• Hal Brown

  The similarities outweigh the differences. Hitler was a stable psychopath. Trump is an unstable psychopath. I am writing my Substack and knowing if you are the person I think you are will add more to it.

Just added:

Trump has had so many big lies beside the one about him really having won the 2020 election that led to his re-election that there’s no one lie we can pick out as the biggest of the big lies. My choice is that the biggest election outcome defining big lie was that the reason he servived the assassination attempt was that God ordained this. When I saw the photo of him with his fist raised I knew he couldn’t lose. 

There were other big lies such as that the MAGA thugs who assaulted the Capitol were patriots. Trump has also managed to make the entire trans issue into a big lie. In the inconvenient fact don’t mater MAGA-sphere it is a big lie that there are only two genders. What the hell does the Mayo Clinic know?

As a psychoanalytically informed psychotherapist I see things like this through a Freudian lens. My analysis of why Trump’s anti-trans fear-mongering resonates with so many men is that they are insecure about their own masculinity. They have a deeply buried unconscious fear of castration. I would venture to speculate that this manifests itself in symbolism in their dreams.

This is how Wikipedia defines castration anxiety:

Castration anxiety is an overwhelming fear of damage to, or loss of, the penis—a derivative of Sigmund Freud's theory of the castration complex, one of his earliest psychoanalytic theories.The term refers to the fear of emasculation in both a literal and metaphorical sense.

Freud regarded castration anxiety as a universal human experience. It is thought to begin between the ages of 3 and 5, during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. In Freud's theory, it is the child's perception of anatomical difference (the possession of a penis) that induces castration anxiety as a result of an assumed paternal threat made in response to their sexual proclivities. Although typically associated with males, castration anxiety is thought to be experienced, in differing ways, by both sexes.

In the literal sense, castration anxiety refers to a child's fear of having their genitalia disfigured or removed as punishment for Oedipal desire

I wonder whether if there was the research into gender identity and gender reassignment surgery in Freud’s lifetime whether he would have considered how he interpreted dreams about castration.

It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to come up with a Freudian explanation about someone’s unconscious fears when they lied and obsessed about the size of crowds that came to hear them speak. Likewise, if someone depicted themselves in computer generated images as muscular superheros sometimes carrying big guns, you don’t have to be Freud to speculate about their unconscious fears. Fake pro-wrestling crap, and the very worst, his need to sexually dominate women… I could go on but I will spare you.

Read my recent Substacks.

Thank you Sarah McBride and Leigh Finke, you are among our best people to lead the charge to stop the GOP's anti-trans vituperative juggernaut. By Hal M. Brown, MSW

Sarah McBride, the first openly trans person elected to Congress. She will serve in the House representing  Delaware's at-large congressional district.

Update Dec. 4th:

Leigh Finke is also a spokeperson for the trans community. She is the first trans person elected to be a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives. She was interviewed on CNN this morning as part of the coverage about the Supreme Court dealing with the decision on gender affirmng care for minors. The more people like her who can make the case for acceptance of members of the trans community the better.

This is a congressional district that includes the entire state of Delaware.

The photo above is from the Wikipedia page on the  Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) which was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. As far as Trump and his minions go, science be damned. They are loath to learn the facts about why people end up being trans or any of the other colors on the Pride flag. While he won't send actual storm troopers to destroy data I doubt any research into sexuality will be funded by the federal government under Trump.

I was a therapist for 40 years and I don't know why some children feel they aren't the gender some think they are or ought to be. When I refer here to gender I mean male or female, the designation that goes with being born with a penis or a vagina and all the assumptions made by society that assume male and female babies will grow up to be heterosexual. Remember that old term?

At 80 I am old enough to remember when there were no letters at all. People who weren't what was often called "straight" (progressives don't use that term anymore) were called gay or lesbian. Before that the term gay was frequently used to refer to men and women. Here's a history of how the designation with all the letters came to be.

In the 1990's when more and more letters were being added to LGBT the term cisgender was coined to differentiate these people from those who were transgender.

Now the letter list stands at LGBTQIAP+ or  LGBTQQIAAP. One can be forgiven for having to look up what each letter stands for (here for example).

I never gave much thought as to research into reasons why some people realized at various ages they weren't heterosexual and/or cisgender. I assumed it was biological. If they were clients I just accepted them for who they were and tried to help them with the problems that brought them to therapy. This wasn't the kind of political issue that could make the difference between electing a president who believed in American democracy and one who planned to become a dictator.

As a therapist I knew about, and was appalled by, the conversion therapy movement which was peaking in the 1970's when I recieved my MSW degree and went to work in community mental health. This was debunked and deemed harmful by the vast majority of the mental health community including people who were Freudians who, like me, saw that this was one of the things Freud was wrong about. He thought it was caused by something that went amiss in early childhood. He thought the same thing about schizophrenia which we now know has a biological cause.

I assumed that we didn't know absolutely positively for sure what led to various kinds of sexual identities but I knew that most experts strongly leaned towards a genetic and biological explanation. Below is what they say.

Here's the Google search.

Most people know about the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany (see Wikipedia). I suppose that we can say that we've come a long way in the United States in that homosexuals are not actively persecuted. Still, until 2003 homosexual activity was illegal (read article).

We've even come a long way since I was a child and the grownups probably speculated behind closed doors about Liberace, Boy George and Pee-wee Herman. Today gays and lesbians simply have been too well intergrated into our society and culture. Now we have Elton John, Ellen DeGeneres, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, and Pete Buttigieg. 

We're a celebrity culture. Trump would never have been elected president the first time if it wasn't for "The Apprentice" and his movie cameos. Of course many of his picks for high positions in his administration gained prominence on Fox News.

Unfortunately, of all the known trans celebrities until now none have achieved the celebrity status of people who are garden variety gay or lesbian. Here's a list of 70 trans celebrities.  I know who Laverne Cox (who was in Orange is the New Black)is and Chaz Bono (Sonny and Cher's son) and they have been outspoken advocates for trans rights. How many of the other 70 do you recognize?

Finally we have a trans person, newly elected member of the House, Sarah McBride, to lead the charge for trans acceptance and trans rights. Thanks to the ignorant bigot Nancy Mace with her large dangling crucifix earrings she is getting far more attention in the media than she otherwise would have.

Nothing says "I'm holier than thou" than giant crucifixes hanging from your ear.

McBride has been catapulted to being a major  spokesperson for trans rights. Here's a Google News search for her. She comes across not only as articulate but as, dare I say, completely normal. Yes, normal.... a normal smart woman. How normal is she? This is from her X page:

The latest poll indicates that there are 92,329 binary and nonbinary transgender people ages 16 and older living in the US. This has beeen made to seem like an extraordinary number even though it is out of 335,893,238 people living in the country. Read: Largest survey of transgender people in the US reveals key insights at a time when trans rights are under attack.

Consider the Gallop poll shown here and below (click to enlarge):

It should be a no-brainer to see why Trump and the far right selected transgender people as the group out of all of these to use to scare people. Simply put with an illustration (below) they are the only colors on the rainbow flag that involve medical treatment and ultimately surgery.

Of all the letters or Pride flag colors all of them involve, in addition to one's identity, actual behavior. 

Trans is different. Even the word "trans" in chemistry means the "molecular structure in which two particular atoms or groups lie on opposite sides of a given plane in the molecule." With a person, in order to get to the other side of the "plane" gender affirming surgery is necessary.

Someone can live a life as any of the other letters or colors and never have to be treated by medical specialists in this area. While to varying degrees all of the other letters, or the colors in the Pride flag, have been used as ammunition against so-called "woke," Republicans have had the most success with the colors representing trans.

Because children often realize that they don't belong in the body they were born with before they are old enough to get medical treatment on their own this has helped the Republicans with their campaign of lies about progressive schools allowing children to have a gender reassignment operation against the parents will.

I'd rank Trump's anti-trans rhetoric right up there with his anti-immigrant scare rants with swaying the election his way.

We need Sarah McBride and more transgender people to tell their stories about their experiences growing up knowing that their body gender didn't correspond with the gender they knew they really were. They need to humanize the experience.

As someone who represents the most demonized and fright-inducing member of the LGBTQ+++ community she is well postioned to be an advocate for all the other people and their loved ones and friends who are fighting the measures being taken in states and school systems across the country to remove LGBTQ+++ education fro the curriculum.

While Trump and many of his inner circle aren't capable of empathy, hopefully some of those who voted for him are, and they will get to know Sarah McBride and admit to the errors of their ways.

Listen to Sarah McBride here.

Update:

It must be noted that perhaps in most instances, parents and their teenaged children are the ones to seek medical help with gender transition such as hormone treatment. This is case about to go to the Supreme Court.

Excerpt:

NASHVILLE — The Supreme Court on Wednesday will consider for the first time whether states can ban certain gender transition medical treatments for young people — a closely watched case brought by three transgender teens, their parents and a doctor, all seeking to ensure health care access they say is critical.

At issue is a Tennessee law barring transgender minors from using puberty blockers and hormones, treatments the state characterizes as risky and unproven. Lawmakers said the state should instead encourage adolescents to “appreciate their sex, particularly as they undergo puberty.”

The court’s ruling might have implications for the more than 100,000 transgender adolescents living in Tennessee or one of the 23 other statesthat has banned using the drugs to treat minors with gender dysphoria. The question of whether and how to medically treat young people whose gender identity is different than their sex assigned at birth has become a polarizing issue, one President-elect Donald Trump seized on in advertisements targeting transgender people during his campaign.

Previous list of blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

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It is like fleeing an obsessive and brutal regime in another country: She was trans in Texas and her family moved to Oregon

 By Hal Brown

This story was covered on Portland's KOIN TV:

Fearing for their trans daughter’s safety, a Texas family flees to Oregon

This is a poignant story. It has a happy ending.

It is a tale that reminded me of how people fled from persecution in brutal dictatorships where they rightly feared for their safety and in some instances where their lives were in jeopardy.

I won't attempt to wax poetic about Oregon and how, if you are a progressive, it is weird and wonderful. I've done this before, for example recently in my blog "Stop calling the GOP anti-woke hysteria weird. Weird is wonderful. Call it wiggy instead."

I also won't excerpt the KOIN-TV article which describes how the Texas family whose daughter, born physically male, realized at the age of three that she was a girl. 

Time went on and living in Texas became more and more stressful for the family described in the article living under Gov. Greg Abbott's anti-trans policies.

Being a member of an oppressed minority in a state or country is bad enough, but being a member of a group which is targeted for persecution or even prosecution in another matter.

Ultimately fears that Texas children's service could investigate them and even legally remove the child, then 10 years old, from the parental custody they decided to move to Pride proud Portland.

The child, now 11, and her parents, are now living safe and happily in Portland.

I urge that you read either the article or, better yet, watch the 7:41 minute video. 

There are well-known historic examples of how people fled home countries, from NAZI Germany to Cuba to North Africa to Venezuela. Now here in the divided United States (which I wrote about yesterday in "The 2024 Election will be like the new Battle of Fort Sumpter") we have the tragic spectacle of people feeling that to be safe they have to leave, or we could use the word "flee", their home states.

Women are having to temporarily leave the states where they live to get abortions. Students having to consider transferring from a college they love because the governor has decided it's was too "woke" (as in the case of New College in Florida). 

Across the country we have an uncounted number of people who may be seriously considering moving to a state where they feel they will be free from living under the boot of a dictatorship which has targeted them and their beliefs. The graphic below is from this website.

The states shown above, like Oregon, Washington, and New York, which aren't deep blue like California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have sections with more conservative residents. Here in Oregon there is even a movement in the eastern rural part of the state to secede and become a part of Idaho.

Click image below to enlarge. The most liberal states are on the top and the most conservative on the bottom.

Whether someone is or has a loved one who is a member of the LQBTQ+ community or who has lost their job like the teachers in Florida who have been suspended for teaching "woke" there are millions of people living in states the government and the majority of residents  would be pleased if they moved. The majority may consider you to be a pervert or groomer. They may think you are a baby killer. They may think you are a communist or socialist. They may think you are merely an elitist. For whatever reason they don't think you belong in their state.

Each person with the means to move who feels attacked for their choices and beliefs has to consider whether it makes sense to stay and fight for their beliefs or chose to move to a progressive state. There are some states where so many residents have their beliefs so entrenched that change in the foreseeable future is just about impossible. 

Of course some people who may want to flee their state are just are unable to move. Aside from not having the money, this may be because of their employment (the family who moved to Oregon was lucky in that the husband's employer was able to transfer him), or having a network of family and friends where they live, or for other reasons. Living where I do in a Portland suburb and having moved from a suburb of Boston I feel lucky. I also feel for everyone who feels trapped in a state where they feel oppressed.

Both in the past and in the present people risked or are risking their lives to escape authoritarian intolerant regimes. People found ways to cross national borders from Germany in the late 1930's, they tried to climb a wall in Berlin, in recent times they are embarking on perilous sea journeys, or trekking thousands of miles from Central American to the Mexico-America border. 

For example:

Click above to read article

The logistics for Americans are easier. People can rent a U-Haul and a car hitch and without the danger of getting shot or drowning they can relocate. Unfortunately for those who want to move, it isn't really that easy.

Boebert promoting anti-trans hate and assault rifles at same time is proof our country has made Satan smile and many are standing at the Gates of Hell

 By Hal Brown

All of these self-righteous Christians who believe they are the godly ones and progressives like us are satanic heathens would, if there really was an all loving all-powerful god inclined to mete out Old Testament justice, would be about to enter through the Gates of Hell where, if they were deemed really worthy of Satan's smile, might actually be greeted by the horned one himself grinning like all get out.

Above: Rodin's Gates of Hell (see enlarged image here) and illustration of the Devil on folio 290 recto of the Codex Gigas, dating to the early thirteenth century (enlarged image here), both public domain. 

I read and was inspired to make the comment (image of my comment here) and copied below:

Greg Abbott Says Focus Is ‘Mental Health Problems,’ Not Gun Reform, After Texas Shooting

How about doing two things? Address mental health problems by 1) increasing MH services and 2) stop politicians and right-wing media from using inflammatory rhetoric and demonizing minorities with hate speech, encouraging violence (this means you Donald Trump), and glorifying assault rifles. That's you Greene and Boebert...

After this is done of course it would be too much to ask Abbott and politicians pandering to the gun fanatics to pass firearm legislation which tiresome as it is to call it is common sense and which most of the county thinks is needed.

Click to enlarge image. HUFFPOST allows pictures in the comments. 
This is what I included in mine.

The most incendiary image above is Boebert holding the t-shirt. Here's a version in black with the direction of the gun reversed from Etsy. Not enough to have an assault rifle, this adds eight bullets. It is pictured with a pair of jeans and significantly with white Converse sneakers. I wonder what Converse thinks about this. 

This is supposedly as normal as American pie... right? No, make that far-right.

The t-shirt being available on Etsy and elsewhere is another matter since it is actually hate speech suggesting, perhaps obscurely, that shooting trans people is fair game.

This slogan has become popular enough for it to be sold by different companies. Click the images below to enlarge them.

Not all pro-gun merchandise targets the LGBTQ+ community... one exception below:

Click image to enlarge

I have no way of knowing how many of the people who buy the pronoun shirts know that the "redefining" part refers to the hate for the LGBTQ+ community and not just support of their view of the 2nd Amendment and it being a pro-gun statement.

There is no doubt that the slogan is anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ in general. It is part of what is called the war on pronouns. For example:

Click above to read article.

Click above to read article

Excerpt:

Florida Republicans on Wednesday approved bills to ban diversity programs in colleges and prevent students and teachers from being required to use pronouns that don’t correspond to someone’s biological sex, building on top priorities of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

If this was merely lunacy calculated to gin up support among the far-right base whose vote is needed for Republicans like DeSantis to win it would be bad enough. It is far worse. It is dangerous fear-mongering that can lead to violence, and not to mince words, to death.

Related:

Click above to read column

Excerpt:

It was another bloody weekend in America's sick and twisted shooting gallery. This time, a man dressed in full tactical gear and carrying an assault rifle got out of his car at a shopping mall in Allen, Texas, and started randomly shooting people on the sidewalk. A police officer who was coincidentally on the scene for another call took down the shooter after he had shot 16 people, killing at least 8 and possibly more. (Several people are reportedly still in critical condition.) This is seen as a huge success story among gun fetishists because it shows that a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun — with only a dozen and a half casualties. It's what we call "good news" these days.

From the column, listen to Rep. Keith Reid's idiotic and delusional solution:

Addendum: You have to subscribe to The Washington Post to read these articles but from the titles and illustrations you get the idea:

Click above to enlarge image

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