“I can’t wait until I’m legally able to hunt you down.”
This curse was said to an American trans women in the streets of Oklahoma last year. It’s far from the only murderous threat in the US. Preachers and politicians are discussing ways to make being LGBTQI+ – and gender diverse in particular – punishable by death. YouTube and social media influencers spew it in angry vernacular. The right-wing media sphere echoes the same trans (and LGBTQI+) exterminationist rhetoric, but in voices dangerous precisely because they sound intelligent and authoritative.
It’s probable that Victorian Liberal politician Moira Deeming and JK Rowling do not understand the forces for which they provide a polite facade. When a young woman was murdered by other teens in an English park earlier this year, almost certainly for being trans, it is hard to say if Rowling had any influence or whether it was mostly the impact of vile misogynist and homophobic influencer Andrew Tate (currently locked in a Romanian prison awaiting trial for human trafficking). The point is that it doesn’t really matter. Together, women like Deeming, Rowling and the tomato-souped Posie Parker have given a faux-respectable face to the movement that would rip the rights and equality from women born as women too. It will kill trans people outright.
Deeming and Rowling make it apparent in different ways that they don’t seem to care what damage is done to straight women alongside trans people. Deeming is an abortion abolitionist and deeply religious: she combines American religious right beliefs on sex-based divisions with the British faux-feminist fear-mongering about trans people. Rowling endorsed the work of American pundit Matt Walsh who is one of the most extreme trans exterminationist – and misogynist – figures on the American media’s right. For the right, the two hatreds are combined: feminism is the gateway, apparently, to the destruction of sex difference, family and the nation. LGBTQI+ rights are the extension of this asserted toxic divorce from tradition. It’s also intertwined with racism.
Matt Walsh currently works for Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire as a content producer. The Daily Wire is the home of widespread trans demonisation in 2023, and its hysteria levels are escalating every month. Shapiro has been a social media influencer of young Australian men for a decade now, so it is not wise to disregard this as an American problem.
Walsh depicts trans people, wrongly, as an overwhelming threat to the nation: he rages at “what these people have done to our country, the devastation they have wrought on a generation of children and adults alike, the bleakness and ugliness of their worldview, the moral and intellectual chaos they leave in their wake.”
The Wire’s hyperbole is of the dehumanising kind that aims to breed fear and loathing. It is the kind that precedes genocide: the Lemkin Institute, named for the man who invented the term genocide, and working to combat genocide around the world, calls this propagandist and legal movement in the US genocidal: it “believes that the so-called “gender critical movement” that is behind these laws is a fascist movement furthering a specifically genocidal ideology that seeks the complete eradication of trans identity from the world.”
The Lemkin statement notes the soft-soaping of this in mainstream articulation as eradicating the ability to be trans, or the right’s invention of a thing called “transgenderism”, as akin to “following a genocidal logic similar to the US, Canadian, and Australian boarding schools that sought to ‘kill the Indian, [and] save the man’.”
One of Walsh’s colleagues, Michael Knowles, declared in complete contradiction of science, history and anthropological knowledge that gender diverse people do not exist: “nobody’s calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category. It’s not a legitimate category of being. There are people who think that they’re the wrong sex, but they’re mistaken. They’re laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.”
Walsh and his ilk can be less careful to skirt the line of calling for mass murder: “But is a word like eradicate over the top? Does it have a needlessly militant tone? No, definitely not. The tone may be militant, but not needlessly so. We are, after all, in a war and lives are at stake. We are in a war against the most deranged ideology ever invented by the human race, plain and simple. We are fighting to eradicate the ideological equivalent of a parasitic infestation. And the parasite, gender ideology, seeks to not only brainwash a generation of children, not only degrade and appropriate womanhood, and manhood by the way, but also and most fundamentally, it seeks to eat away at truth itself or if it cannot devour the truth, then at least it will destroy our ability to recognize the truth for what it is.”
Walsh also – wrongly and dangerously – portrays trans people as “coming after” children, and implies that violence is demanded: “when it comes to my children, the children that I cherish more than my own life, if you think mean words go too far, then you would be very shocked to hear how far I would really go to protect them. Trust me, words are the least of it. So, yes, my words reflect anger because I am angry. But the problem is not that I’m angry, the problem is that you aren’t nearly angry enough.” There are few better ways to incite violence than to foster the idea that children are in danger from (mythical) “pedophiles” or murderers; the Nazis used the Blood Libel to dire effect against Jewish millions.
Both Knowles and his more famous colleague Candace Owens depict trans people as a demonic crisis. This is not new: extreme homophobia in the US (similarly to Putin’s Russia) is depicted as a battle against the demon Jezebel. In American radicalised right discourse, this description has literal intent.
The Daily Wire is a small and radical organisation. These voices on the right are funnelled into relative respectable and mainstream territory by Fox News. Tucker Carlson, its current star performer, has been channelling anti-trans vitriol for years, apparently having inherited a loathing of trans people, alongside his misogyny, at home. Not content to dehumanise and demonise trans people, Carlson encourages fathers to beat up LGBTQI+ teachers.
Tucker Carlson is reported by the New York Times to report directly to the Murdochs. He is also apparently required viewing for News Corp’s Australian editors for insights into the Murdoch line.
We cannot ignore the language that precedes genocide in our AUKUS partner. It is not just US social media that pervades here, but ultimately its political economy bleeds over too. The threat to hunt down trans people is not just a cruel intimidation. The Speaker of the Texas House intends to introduce a bill to create a combined civilian and professional militia with legal immunity to hunt down (and theoretically deport) “illegal” immigrants. America is its own dystopian horror film.
If we don’t pay attention to the fascist politics that literally target this minuscule group of people, then we don’t see the context for Moira Deeming’s political posturing. If we miss that, we don’t see the context for the Neo Nazis and “Christian Lives Matter” thugs channelling fascist American and European homophobic and misogynist violence onto our streets.
Bad men remain the true threat to women, children, and trans people.[1] Women spreading disinformation asserting that trans people are the threat are (unknowingly?) sanitising the fascist politics destroying America and fostering violence and hate in the UK.
[1] The two cases of shootings that allege gender diverse perpetrators are complex and unclear. Of the 172 shootings in America that killed more than 4 people over the last 55 years, 168 shooters were men. Two of the four women acted alongside men. NYT 28/3/2023.
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