Over this last weekend, the latest American CPAC convention took place in Maryland. This one did not host the autocrat Viktor Orban, CPAC’s poster fascist. Instead it gave an anti-electoral integrity microphone to Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s defeated autocrat in the making. And two long hours were dominated by aspiring-autocrat Donald Trump.
Maryland featured a series of speakers attacking trans existence in lurid terms. The worst propaganda is the lie that trans people (and LGBTQI+ people in general) are intrinsically child predators. The ugliest such speaker pontificated that transgenderism must be eliminated. To make that clear, he was speaking of the elimination – or extermination – of trans people.
This was just the clearest statement of an agenda by the Religious Right in America to return “traditional” sex roles as part of returning America to purity and greatness. No LGBTQI+ existence will be tolerated. Currently it is only outlier preachers calling for the death penalty or lynching of LGBTQI+ people, but the threats are made on the street: “I can’t wait til I’m legally able to hunt you down.”
Note the overlap with Putin’s grotesque homophobic rhetoric about his motivations for invading Ukraine. Eastern European “traditionalists” have been working with regressive “family values” activists from the American Religious Right since the end of the Cold War, and disinformation sources on the internet promote these prejudices.
The religious objection to LGBTQI+ existence which has largely overwhelmed the American Right is met and matched in the UK by a normalising of ghastly rhetoric about trans existence. “Gender critical” (GC) thinkers, styling themselves as feminists, declaim variations on the idea that there are only two sexes and they must stay put. In denial of the history of humanity, cultural variety and scientific evidence that these binaries are culturally created and imposed, “feminists” claim that women must be women in the manifestations these bigots designate. One ugly result is women-born who reject feminine trappings being chased out of women’s public bathrooms, just in case. These ideologues believe they can call themselves feminists despite this patriarchal outcome.
According to these “thought” leaders, people born as women who transition are mentally ill. In this disinformation, men who reject their birth designation are predators or deceivers and intolerable.
It has just been revealed that the Australian “Let Women Speak” tour, featuring a leading GC propagandist from the UK is being part funded by Australian CPAC. This tour is largely an effort by Feminism-Appropriating Radical Transphobes (FARTs) to spread the toxic British message that to be pro-woman is to be virulently anti-trans.
The fact that CPAC Australia is willing to fund the tour underlines the fact that, while many GC thinkers believe themselves to be progressive, they are actually no more progressive than the fascist ecological movement. Both have, incidentally, roots in fascist Europe from the mid-20th century.
It is a classic strategy of the deeply racist and generally bigoted far right movement to use previously more progressive people to assist in disguising the minority nature of their hateful position. These including journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, and women (as with Pastel QAnon) to make their talking points acceptable to a broader coalition of the public.
Australians might be tempted to think that British FARTism is the only threat to our LGBTQI+ community. We already have FARTs here in the Greens, as well as the Victorian Liberal Party cohort, as well as in academia. We also tend to think of ourselves as more laissez faire and secular than America.
Over this last weekend, however, a bunch of thugs in black hoodies rather than brown shirts marched through Newtown to disturb World Pride celebrations, intimidating LGBTQI+ people, all the while incongruously waving their rosaries around. The man credited with promoting it is a Maronite Christian, but it is uncertain which denominations accompanied him.
Non-denominational Christians (whom we deride as happy-clappers) tend to be firmly in the LGBTQI-exterminationist contingent, promoting the eradication of “non-traditional” roles as an impediment to the return of Christ in End Times. Your personal immoralities prevent their religious rapture. This cult-offshoot of Christianity is arguably taking over the world, including Australia.
This weekend’s “prayerful” intimidation of LGBTQI+ Australians compounds several Neo-Nazi intimidations of Queer events in Australia already.
In America, the minority is imposing its harsh morality on the majority. The majority is struggling to protect its freedoms, rights, universities and schools, its very existence from the militant Christian fascists. It is barely worth debating whether British “feminists” spouting anti-trans bile were more responsible than manosphere influencer Andrew Tate and his various bigotries, for the murder of 15 year old trans girl Brianna Ghey in the UK.
There is no separating the risk posed by the various factions of the radical Right in Australia, as well as internationally. Whether they are cynical culture war mouthpieces, dupes, or messianic preachers of the existential threat of (ostensibly) non-traditional roles, they are here. Brought through the internet to echo America’s groypers, or on speaking tours, they are here.
We cannot ignore them: they are here and coming for people you know.
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