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.

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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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Toxically masculine men boycotting Bud Lite fear the Babadook, as so do many women...

Hal Brown's Blog

This is a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and other subjects. My posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky. I'm a retired MSW clinical social worker/psychotherapist and mental health center director who was also a cranberry farmer. Scroll archives on bottom of page to see previous blog stories. There are new ones added almost every day, although if I don't have anything original to say I try not to say anything at all.

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If it's a word or if it's in a look you can't get rid of the Babadook. Movie poster above in center.

The monster design for the Babadook movie poster was inspired by The Man in the Beaver Hat in
 London After Midnight (1927) above. Public domain 
"For some, trans people represent just the latest
 Babadook, a complex fear they cannot tolerate." Wash. Post essay

Glass on right added by Hal Click to read article (subscription

I knew there was a controversy involving Bud Lite somehow endorsing through their recent advertising the dreaded acceptance of members of the LQBTQ+ community as just being plain regular folks. Bud Lite became a target of the frothing at the mouth rabid woke warriors.

I wasn't following the story until I saw and read the opinion essay by Brian Broone, an author I wasn't familiar with, in this morning's Washington Post about toxic masculinity. The article focuses on men. There are, of course, many women, perhaps just as many as men, who buy into the woke fear mongering.

Here's an excerpt: 

Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer with more than 10 million followers, documented her transition over the course of a year. To celebrate Day 365 of her journey, Bud Light sent her some personalized cans of beer. She unveiled them on TikTok in a partnership with Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch.

This attempt on Bud Light’s part to be forward-thinking about how its customers live and love has been met with a backlash by one group of people who seem to believe that another group of people should not exist. Kid Rock used his gun to shoot several cases of the beer; another guy destroyed a can of Bud Light with a baseball bat in a typical digital tantrum.

For some, trans people represent just the latest Babadook, a complex fear they cannot tolerate.

A note to those folks who are upset that Anheuser-Busch relied on a trans woman as a quasi-spokesperson: Whether you like it or not, queer people have been drinking “your beer” for decades. In fact, as long as there’s been beer, queer people have been drinking it.

Mulvaney’s celebration for some reason threatened the very existence of a whole bunch of guys who aren’t ready for that reality. This will surprise no one who has ever been a small boy. Every boy knows the sting of being called a sissy. Boys are raised to believe that so-called feminine traits represent a danger they must avoid. Boys learn early that they can expect to be punished if they stray in any way into risky, weakening feminine behaviors. These lessons take root deep in our psyches as youngsters, and they stay there forever.

This is from Fox Business News:

We can thank one far-right extremist for what has come to be called the culture war and it, perhaps amazingly, isn't Donald Trump. 

When you come right down to it, the fact that Ron DeSantis, a deadly dull Florida stocky stick in the mud man, managed to demonize all things LGBTQ+ is dumbfounding.

I also like to depict the governor who thought it would prove how ballsy he was by going after Disney because of their LGBTQ+ supportive position this way:

I adapted an image posted by someone else.

Of course his floating the nudnik notion of building a prison next to Disney World or trying to find a corporation willing to invest in opening a competing amusement park when the Orlando Universal Resort is already nearby reeked of hot Floridian flop sweat.

He also has done after everything related to historic American racism as a dire and imminent threat to the very existence to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of everyone who really matters.

While Donald Trump makes fleeting references to how bad being woke is I doubt all that many of his supporters think he gives 1 ½ shits about this.

Yet across the country there are enough people who used to drink Bud Lite to heed the call to stop doing so and cause a decrease in sales. In fact, calling this a bloodbath as Fox Business News does, isn't far off if the plummeting orders in the bars they surveyed reflect a national trend.

The anti-woke movement has had incredible success in lumping together a group of fears many people have into one Babadock.

Who knew? 

This is from Wikipedia:

 LGBT community

In October 2016, a Tumblr user joked that the Babadook is openly gay; in December 2016, another Tumblr user posted a viral screenshot showing the movie classified by Netflix as an LGBT film.^[62][31] Despite the absence of overt references to LGBT culture in the film, fans and journalists generated interpretations of queer subtext in the film (dubbed "Babadiscourse"^[62]) that were often tongue-in-cheek, but occasionally more serious, highlighting the character's dramatic persona, grotesque costume, and chaotic effect within a traditional family structure. In June 2017, The Babadook trended on Twitter and was displayed as a symbol during that year's Pride Month.^[63][64] The social media response became so strong that theatres in Los Angeles took the opportunity to hold screenings of the film for charity.^[65] Michael Bronski said to the Los Angeles Times: "In this moment, who better than the Babadook to represent not only queer desire, but queer antagonism, queer in-your-faceness, queer queerness?", and drew comparisons to historic connections between queerness and horror fiction such as Frankenstein and Dracula.^[66]

Jennifer Kent said that she "loved" the meme, saying that "I think it's crazy and [the meme] just kept him alive. I thought ah, you bastard. He doesn't want to die so he's finding ways to become relevant."^[67]

Donald Trump legitimized the bigotry of a large swath of white Americans against people of color. He allowed people who kept their racism secret to be open about it. 

Trump may or may not be kicking himself for allowing DeSantis for  taking advantage of the homophobia in so many people and adding his turning the teaching about American racism into a war against the new Confederacy.

The good news, reported in a 2019 article, is that Americans Are Becoming Less Racist and Homophobic (link).

Excerpt:

The resurgence of openly racist attitudes in the Trump era has led many observers to question whether the apparent reduction in prejudice in recent years was an illusion. New research provides a reassuring answer.

Researchers find that both conscious and unconscious bias regarding race and sexual orientation declined significantly between 2007 and 2016. For racial attitudes, this change was largely generational, whereas the more relaxed attitudes toward sexuality were found in the population as a whole.

What this tells us is that Americans are less racist and homophobic than they used to be. Because of this, that only having a few policies like being Latino anti-immigration and enacting voter fraud laws to run on, far-right politicians like Trump and DeSantis are taking advantage of cultural issues, gut issues. They want to scare the bejesus out of their base telling them to be terrified of the Babadook.

Addendum:

A poem by DAMETRIAS, 2014

The Babadook

If it's in a word, or if it's in a book you can't get rid of the Babadook. He wears a hat he's tall and black but that's how they describe him in his book. A rumbling sound, than three sharp knocks you better run, or he'll hold you in his locks. ba-ba-ba-dook-dook-dook... Your closet opens and your honestly hopin' that he won't hear a sound but that's when you know that he's around. The book close you have an itch under your nose and that's just how the story goes. So close your eyes and count to ten better hope you don't wake up again. 'Cause if it's in a word, or if it's in a book you can't get rid of the Babadook .... you'll see him if you look

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