WAR ON LGBTQ
Conservative Pundit Calls for Trans People to Be 'Eradicated'
Laura Bassett
Sat, 4 March 2023
Photo: Getty (Getty Images)
It’s long been clear that the subtext of Republican attacks on trans healthcare, drag story hours, books that even mention LGBTQ+ people, and “pronouns”—which really reached a fever pitch in state legislatures this week—is that trans people do not have a right to exist. But few have come out and said it in as chilling of terms as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Saturday morning.
“If [transgenderism] is false, then for the good of society, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” the rightwing commentator told a cheering crowd amid what HuffPost reporter Chris Mathias described on Twitter as a “straight-up eliminationist anti-trans tirade.”
Knowles has said before that this overtly genocidal rhetoric is not, in fact, calling for the murder of millions of people, because he doesn’t believe trans people actually exist in the first place. “There can’t be a genocide,” he said on his show last week, because “it’s not a legitimate category of being. They’re laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.”
Of course, Knowles is not some lone, unhinged extremist at CPAC or in the Republican Party writ large, which is collectively whipped up into an anti-trans frenzy lately that seems to preclude discussing any other issue. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) joked at CPAC this week that Biden spent “four or five days asking the Chinese spy balloon what pronouns it uses before we shot it down.” Former Donald Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka railed at the conference this week about “mutilating boys and girls” and “sacrificing them on the altar of their transgender insanity.” Former Vice President (and likely 2024 presidential candidate) Mike Pence made the nonsensical claim without any evidence this week that school nurses in Iowa require parental permission to give out aspirin, but just dole out “gender transition plans” to kids willy-nilly without telling anyone.
It’s pretty clear to me, after Republicans underperformed in the midterm elections due in large part to the fall of Roe v. Wade and their extremely unpopular views on abortion, that they needed to invent another culture war issue to whip up their base in lieu of abortion. And telling parents in red states that doctors are “mutilating” their kids, that Democrats and teachers are “grooming” them to be trans and just secretly doling out hormones at recess, is a pretty easy way to drive paranoid Fox News viewers out to the polls.
Unfortunately, like the war on abortion, this one also comes at the expense of people’s lives. The rhetoric is fascist and genocidal, and it’s being accompanied by actual laws that will kill people and/or destroy their lives. We can ignore the extremist talking heads at CPAC, but I would argue that we shouldn’t.
Jezebel
CPAC Speaker’s Trans Comments About ‘Eradication’ Sound Downright Genocidal
The conservative movement’s annual confab was creepily obsessed with trans kids and showcased the GOP’s alarming and intensifying anti-trans rhetoric.
By Christopher Mathias
Mar 5, 2023
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Thousands of conservatives, including prominent Republican lawmakers and presidential hopefuls, flocked to a suburban Washington, D.C., convention center this week to discuss children’s genitals.
They were there for the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the preeminent annual gathering of America’s conservative movement, where speaker after speaker held forth on the urgent need for the Republican Party — an institution ostensibly dedicated to limited government — to criminalize the act of doctors and parents providing minors with gender-affirming care.
Sebastian Gorka, an alleged member of a Nazi-collaborating political order in Hungary who served as an advisor to former President Donald Trump, kicked off proceedings Friday morning from the main stage inside the Gaylord Convention Center. Democrats, he warned the crowd, are “mutilating boys and girls” and “sacrificing them on the altar of their transgender insanity.”
A short time later, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — a featured speaker at a white supremacist conference last year, where her fellow speakers praised Adolf Hitler and cheered on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — took to the stage to make a big announcement.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at Gaylord National Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 3, 2023.
SARAH SILBIGER VIA REUTERS
“So last Congress, I did something radical and extreme because remember Marjorie Taylor Greene, ‘she’s so extreme,’” she joked. “I introduced a bill called the Protect Children’s Innocence Act. And let me tell you my great news this morning, ladies and gentlemen: It couldn’t pass last Congress because Nancy Pelosi was the speaker of the House. She doesn’t believe in gender at all, but we have a new speaker in our Republican majority… and I’m going to be re-introducing my bill… that will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender!”
The crowd roared. Greene’s cruel piece of legislation — based on a multitude of lies — would prohibit transgender Americans under 18 years old from receiving crucial health services that have long been endorsed by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Endocrine Society, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association.
Such endorsements were of little concern at CPAC, where politicians and right-wing influencers fine-tuned the anti-trans messaging that will likely be a staple of next year’s presidential campaign news cycle — the Republican Party clearly having decided that trans kids are worthy enough of a wedge issue to win back the White House.
But it also became clear at CPAC that the Republican campaign against trans kids isn’t just a mere ploy to energize its base — it could also be the beginning of an insurgent fascist campaign to erase trans people from public life altogether.
Michael Knowles, the host of ”The Michael Knowles Show” on The Daily Wire, gave a speech at CPAC that, at moments, sounded genocidal. “The problem with transgenderism is not that it’s inappropriate for children under the age of 9,” he said. “The problem with transgenderism is that it isn’t true.”
There are an estimated 1.6 million trans people in the United States. Knowles essentially told the CPAC crowd that these people should not have a right to exist.
“If [transgenderism] is false, then for the good of society... transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” he said.
Eradicated. The crowd roared again.
Another speaker, Tom Fitton, president of the right-wing website Judicial Watch, called gender-affirming care for minors “a demonic assault on the innocence of our children.”
And there was also a panel on the main stage called “A Time for Courage” featuring panelists Riley Gaines, a former collegiate athlete who made a name for herself complaining about competing against a transgender swimmer, and Chloe Cole, a woman who identified as a transgender male as a minor but later “detransitioned.”
Cole’s story has featured prominently in right-wing media to demonstrate the apparent dangers of allowing children to receive gender-affirming care. But stories like hers are very rare. Only about 1 to 3% of people who start a gender transition later express regret for doing so and then “backtrack or travel elsewhere across the landscape of gender identity,” as Slate once explained.
But for CPAC attendees, stories like Cole’s prove that gender-affirming care for minors is always evil.
Donald Ruthig, a 73-year-old retiree from Onancock, Virginia, told HuffPost he recently left the Episcopal Church over its decision to support transgender youth. He drove three hours to CPAC to “meet people that think the way I think” who are “dedicated to restoring the Judeo-Christian morality that we’re losing.”
Part of this restoration, he explained, is to “stop torturing our children with gender transitions, to stop this whole LBGTQ alphabet nonsense, and start treating people like God’s people created in God’s image. We are all alike. We don’t need to partition everybody by their little fetishes.”
Donald Ruthing, 74, attends the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland on March 3, 2023.
CHRISTOPHER MATHIAS FOR HUFFPOST
Tim Roberts, 57, traveled to CPAC from East Lansing, Michigan, with his two daughters, who he recently removed from public school “because of all the woke stuff that’s going on in there.”
He echoed a sentiment expressed a lot at CPAC — that the mere acknowledgment of transgender people in the classroom is tantamount to indoctrination.
“I graduated [high school] in 1985, and it just wasn’t a thing, and now [my daughters] said a better part of their classes have a lot of trans kids or kids that think they’re trans,” he said. “Like the first thing [school administrators] do when they come to school is say, ‘Hey, write down your pronouns, and that’s what we will go by.’ They’re encouraging this.”
James Clark, 37, a political public relations consultant from Kansas City, Missouri, expressed enthusiastic support for Greene’s bill. Gender-affirming care for minors, he said, was “child abuse.”
“It also leads into the human trafficking, sex trafficking, pedophilia, and different things like that,” he started before HuffPost asked him what gender-affirming care had to do with pedophilia.
“It has a lot to do with it,” he replied. “If you have an adult grooming a child to become trans...” HuffPost interjected again, asking what evidence is there that they’re being groomed.
“Well, you know, I’m just speculating,” Clark conceded before insisting that there is probably a lot of science that can “back up” the conservative argument against providing transgender youth with gender-affirming care — he just didn’t know it offhand.
He simply added, “I’m not a psychologist.”
Tim Roberts, 57, traveled to CPAC from East Lansing, Michigan, with his two daughters, who he recently removed from public school “because of all the woke stuff that’s going on in there.”
He echoed a sentiment expressed a lot at CPAC — that the mere acknowledgment of transgender people in the classroom is tantamount to indoctrination.
“I graduated [high school] in 1985, and it just wasn’t a thing, and now [my daughters] said a better part of their classes have a lot of trans kids or kids that think they’re trans,” he said. “Like the first thing [school administrators] do when they come to school is say, ‘Hey, write down your pronouns, and that’s what we will go by.’ They’re encouraging this.”
James Clark, 37, a political public relations consultant from Kansas City, Missouri, expressed enthusiastic support for Greene’s bill. Gender-affirming care for minors, he said, was “child abuse.”
“It also leads into the human trafficking, sex trafficking, pedophilia, and different things like that,” he started before HuffPost asked him what gender-affirming care had to do with pedophilia.
“It has a lot to do with it,” he replied. “If you have an adult grooming a child to become trans...” HuffPost interjected again, asking what evidence is there that they’re being groomed.
“Well, you know, I’m just speculating,” Clark conceded before insisting that there is probably a lot of science that can “back up” the conservative argument against providing transgender youth with gender-affirming care — he just didn’t know it offhand.
He simply added, “I’m not a psychologist.”
CPAC offers a platform for an avalanche of anti-trans attacks
Alex Woodward
Sat, 4 March 2023
In speech after speech and panel after panel, the guests on the stage at one of the biggest platforms for right-wing activists and Republican officials lobbed casual attacks against transgender Americans, made jokes at their expense, or threatened to strip them of their healthcare and remove them from public life.
The guests at 2023’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, revived familiar right-wing tropes aimed at “safe spaces” and “wokeness” and “socialist” Democratic lawmakers, but prominent GOP elected officials and right-wing media personalities repeatedly returned to their alarmist visions of children in danger from LGBT+ people and gender-affirming care.
Their claims run parallel to a wave of legislation targeting LGBT+ Americans, particularly young trans people, and proposed federal legislation that would restrict that care nationally under threat of felony prosecutions.
Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told the conference that she plans to introduce a bill she is calling the Protect Children’s Innocence Act that would make it a felony to perform “anything to do with gender-affirming care” for minors.
One panel on 3 March featured Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, among interest groups advancing legislation across the US to end gender-affirming care for trans youth and, ultimately, end affirming care for all trans people. He intentionally misgendered two prominent transgender women activists as men in his remarks on the panel.
That panel also heard from Chloe Cole, a “detransitioner” who has become a central figure in a right-wing campaign to restrict gender-affirming care, despite the vast majority of trans people maintaining their gender identity.
Riley Gaines, an American swimmer who repeatedly called trans swimmer Lia Thomas a “biological male”, also appeared on the panel to speak out against trans athletes; Ms Thomas has been routinely attacked by her former competitors, sports stars, politicians, activists, and even some of her teammates’ parents.
Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire sparked widespread alarm on 4 March with remarks derided as eliminationist and genocidal.
“If [transgenderism] is false, then for the good of society, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” he said.
Mr Knowles had previously claimed that he doesn’t believe his rhetoric is genocidal because he doesn’t believe trans people exist, Jezebel noted.
“There can’t be a genocide,” he said on his programme last week, adding that “it’s not a legitimate category of being. They’re labouring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion”.
A panel on 2 March rejected transgender Americans from team sports as well as honest classroom teachings on race, racism and LGBT+ people, with former college football turned Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville listing a string of right-wing targets in a series of baseless statements against trans athletes and US education.
“All this woke, transgender athletes, CRT, 1619, they don’t teach reading, writing or arithmetic,” the senator said, referencing “critical race theory” and The 1619 Project, an award-winning New York Times project that reframes the nation’s founding through the lens of slavery.
His remarks on a panel titled “Sacking the Woke Playbook” panel dismissed transgender girls and women as “biological boys”; sports, he said, must be “protected” because “sports have built this country”.
The senator also falsely claimed that “half the kids when they graduate they can’t read their diploma” as he condemned “the progressives, the crazies” who he baselessly claimed are “trying to change family, change things that are our moral values”.
At least 150 bills in 2023 would specifically restrict the rights of trans people, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Several proposed laws would specifically target trans healthcare for adults.
On the opening day of CPAC, Tennessee became the eighth state in the nation to ban gender-affirming care for youth, the fourth to do so this year. A similar measure was signed into law in Mississippi one day earlier.
Gender-affirming care can span several kinds of treatments, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and social transitioning support. Care standards from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and other leading medical groups do not recommend that affirming surgeries be performed on minors.
Such care is considered safe, effective and medically necessary by most medical organisatons. The American Medical Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians, among others, have established clear clinical guidelines for treating young trans people.
Dozens of bills introduced in state legislatures across the US to restrict such care are supported and in many cases drafted by influential right-wing legal groups, conservative Christian organisations and fringe medical groups that have aligned with right-wing public officials to advance their agenda.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the nation’s largest professional association of pediatricians, recommends a “gender-affirming” and “nonjudgmental approach that helps children feel safe in a society that too often marginalizes or stigmatizes those seen as different.”
“The gender-affirming model strengthens family resiliency and takes the emphasis off heightened concerns over gender while allowing children the freedom to focus on academics, relationship-building and other typical developmental tasks,” according to the organisation.
But remarks from elected officials and waves of legislation aimed at trans Americans, alongside what appears to be the makings of a newspaper crusade focused on trans rights, have insisted that something is dangerously wrong with the ways in which children and their families navigate a nuanced and personal process, similar to a concurrent battle for abortion rights against an avalanche of restrictions.
CPAC’s personalities, meanwhile, unjustly linked trans people to “grooming” and “pedophilia” or used “pronouns” as a punchline.
“There is no middle ground on transgenderism,” right-wing activist Candace Owens said in her remarks on 2 March. “If you don’t have the courage to say what needs to be said, we truly don’t need you.”
Speakers at the conference accused their political opponents of “targeting” children with “gender ideology” while within the same breath advancing legislation and proposals that would severely restrict care for young people.
“I don’t know about you,” congresswoman Greene said on 3 March, “but when it comes to kids, I think the Republican Party has a duty. We have a responsibility, and that is to be the party that protects children.”
Nearly one in five transgender and nonbinary youth attempted suicide in 2022, according to a nationwide survey from The Trevor Project. Fewer one in three trans and nonbinary youth reported living in a home that was gender-affirming.
Legislation and inflammatory political debates surrounding it have radically impacted the mental health of a majority of young trans and nonbinary people, according to polling from The Trevor Project and Morning Consult.
A vast majority of trans and nonbinary youth, 86 per cent, reported that debates and laws targeting LGBT+ people have negatively impacted their mental health, weighed down by “anger, sadness, stress, and fear,” with fear “most intensely felt” among trans and nonbinary young people, according to The Trevor Project.
With her Libs of TikTok accounts and attacks against LGBT+ people, teachers and doctors, Chaya Raichik has emerged as an influential right-wing media figure making appearances on Tucker Carlson’s programming and Newsmax, with millions of social media followers and a high-earning blog.
She made her debut at CPAC stage alongside several prominent right-wing media personalities on 2 March.
Libs of TikTok has been linked to harassment and threats against drag performers, LGBT+ people and their advocates, particularly teachers, and doctors and hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to young trans people. Hours after five people were killed and several others were wounded inside a mass shooting at a Colorado Springs LGBT+ nightclub, Libs of TikTok drew negative attention to a drag performance in the state.
At CPAC, she was hailed as a “hero” and “courageous”.
She called a recent VICE article previewing her CPAC appearance as an “insane hit piece”.
Ms Raichik also claimed that the term “stochastic terrorist” was invented because of her, though she also admitted she doesn’t know what it means; the term has been used to describe the leveraging of hateful rhetoric through large social media platforms to promote violence.
“Nothing I love more than to mock and clown the liberal media,” she said.
If you are based in the US and seek LGBT+ affirming mental health support, resources are available from Trans Lifeline (877-565-8860) and the LGBT Hotline (888-843-4564), as well as The Trevor Project (866-488-7386 or text START to 678-678).
Alex Woodward
Sat, 4 March 2023
In speech after speech and panel after panel, the guests on the stage at one of the biggest platforms for right-wing activists and Republican officials lobbed casual attacks against transgender Americans, made jokes at their expense, or threatened to strip them of their healthcare and remove them from public life.
The guests at 2023’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, revived familiar right-wing tropes aimed at “safe spaces” and “wokeness” and “socialist” Democratic lawmakers, but prominent GOP elected officials and right-wing media personalities repeatedly returned to their alarmist visions of children in danger from LGBT+ people and gender-affirming care.
Their claims run parallel to a wave of legislation targeting LGBT+ Americans, particularly young trans people, and proposed federal legislation that would restrict that care nationally under threat of felony prosecutions.
Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told the conference that she plans to introduce a bill she is calling the Protect Children’s Innocence Act that would make it a felony to perform “anything to do with gender-affirming care” for minors.
One panel on 3 March featured Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, among interest groups advancing legislation across the US to end gender-affirming care for trans youth and, ultimately, end affirming care for all trans people. He intentionally misgendered two prominent transgender women activists as men in his remarks on the panel.
That panel also heard from Chloe Cole, a “detransitioner” who has become a central figure in a right-wing campaign to restrict gender-affirming care, despite the vast majority of trans people maintaining their gender identity.
Riley Gaines, an American swimmer who repeatedly called trans swimmer Lia Thomas a “biological male”, also appeared on the panel to speak out against trans athletes; Ms Thomas has been routinely attacked by her former competitors, sports stars, politicians, activists, and even some of her teammates’ parents.
Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire sparked widespread alarm on 4 March with remarks derided as eliminationist and genocidal.
“If [transgenderism] is false, then for the good of society, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” he said.
Mr Knowles had previously claimed that he doesn’t believe his rhetoric is genocidal because he doesn’t believe trans people exist, Jezebel noted.
“There can’t be a genocide,” he said on his programme last week, adding that “it’s not a legitimate category of being. They’re labouring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion”.
A panel on 2 March rejected transgender Americans from team sports as well as honest classroom teachings on race, racism and LGBT+ people, with former college football turned Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville listing a string of right-wing targets in a series of baseless statements against trans athletes and US education.
“All this woke, transgender athletes, CRT, 1619, they don’t teach reading, writing or arithmetic,” the senator said, referencing “critical race theory” and The 1619 Project, an award-winning New York Times project that reframes the nation’s founding through the lens of slavery.
His remarks on a panel titled “Sacking the Woke Playbook” panel dismissed transgender girls and women as “biological boys”; sports, he said, must be “protected” because “sports have built this country”.
The senator also falsely claimed that “half the kids when they graduate they can’t read their diploma” as he condemned “the progressives, the crazies” who he baselessly claimed are “trying to change family, change things that are our moral values”.
At least 150 bills in 2023 would specifically restrict the rights of trans people, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Several proposed laws would specifically target trans healthcare for adults.
On the opening day of CPAC, Tennessee became the eighth state in the nation to ban gender-affirming care for youth, the fourth to do so this year. A similar measure was signed into law in Mississippi one day earlier.
Gender-affirming care can span several kinds of treatments, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and social transitioning support. Care standards from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and other leading medical groups do not recommend that affirming surgeries be performed on minors.
Such care is considered safe, effective and medically necessary by most medical organisatons. The American Medical Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians, among others, have established clear clinical guidelines for treating young trans people.
Dozens of bills introduced in state legislatures across the US to restrict such care are supported and in many cases drafted by influential right-wing legal groups, conservative Christian organisations and fringe medical groups that have aligned with right-wing public officials to advance their agenda.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the nation’s largest professional association of pediatricians, recommends a “gender-affirming” and “nonjudgmental approach that helps children feel safe in a society that too often marginalizes or stigmatizes those seen as different.”
“The gender-affirming model strengthens family resiliency and takes the emphasis off heightened concerns over gender while allowing children the freedom to focus on academics, relationship-building and other typical developmental tasks,” according to the organisation.
But remarks from elected officials and waves of legislation aimed at trans Americans, alongside what appears to be the makings of a newspaper crusade focused on trans rights, have insisted that something is dangerously wrong with the ways in which children and their families navigate a nuanced and personal process, similar to a concurrent battle for abortion rights against an avalanche of restrictions.
CPAC’s personalities, meanwhile, unjustly linked trans people to “grooming” and “pedophilia” or used “pronouns” as a punchline.
“There is no middle ground on transgenderism,” right-wing activist Candace Owens said in her remarks on 2 March. “If you don’t have the courage to say what needs to be said, we truly don’t need you.”
Speakers at the conference accused their political opponents of “targeting” children with “gender ideology” while within the same breath advancing legislation and proposals that would severely restrict care for young people.
“I don’t know about you,” congresswoman Greene said on 3 March, “but when it comes to kids, I think the Republican Party has a duty. We have a responsibility, and that is to be the party that protects children.”
Nearly one in five transgender and nonbinary youth attempted suicide in 2022, according to a nationwide survey from The Trevor Project. Fewer one in three trans and nonbinary youth reported living in a home that was gender-affirming.
Legislation and inflammatory political debates surrounding it have radically impacted the mental health of a majority of young trans and nonbinary people, according to polling from The Trevor Project and Morning Consult.
A vast majority of trans and nonbinary youth, 86 per cent, reported that debates and laws targeting LGBT+ people have negatively impacted their mental health, weighed down by “anger, sadness, stress, and fear,” with fear “most intensely felt” among trans and nonbinary young people, according to The Trevor Project.
With her Libs of TikTok accounts and attacks against LGBT+ people, teachers and doctors, Chaya Raichik has emerged as an influential right-wing media figure making appearances on Tucker Carlson’s programming and Newsmax, with millions of social media followers and a high-earning blog.
She made her debut at CPAC stage alongside several prominent right-wing media personalities on 2 March.
Libs of TikTok has been linked to harassment and threats against drag performers, LGBT+ people and their advocates, particularly teachers, and doctors and hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to young trans people. Hours after five people were killed and several others were wounded inside a mass shooting at a Colorado Springs LGBT+ nightclub, Libs of TikTok drew negative attention to a drag performance in the state.
At CPAC, she was hailed as a “hero” and “courageous”.
She called a recent VICE article previewing her CPAC appearance as an “insane hit piece”.
Ms Raichik also claimed that the term “stochastic terrorist” was invented because of her, though she also admitted she doesn’t know what it means; the term has been used to describe the leveraging of hateful rhetoric through large social media platforms to promote violence.
“Nothing I love more than to mock and clown the liberal media,” she said.
If you are based in the US and seek LGBT+ affirming mental health support, resources are available from Trans Lifeline (877-565-8860) and the LGBT Hotline (888-843-4564), as well as The Trevor Project (866-488-7386 or text START to 678-678).
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