What’s Really Behind the GOP Anti -Trans Jihad

When one is gay, one becomes accustomed to being used as a bogeyman  and constantly demeaned and libeled by Christofascist, white Christian nationalists and Republicans who prostitute themselves to these hate merchants who wrap themselves in religion and feigned piety.  Hence, gays are labeled as "groomers" and predators even  though science and  the data do not support these claims - the vast majority of pedophiles are men who identify as heterosexual. .  Likewise, the right's obsession with drag queen story hours at libraries even though there are zero cases of drag queens being indicted for sexual abuse of minors even as each and every day sees church pastors, church youth group leaders and, on occasion, right wing Republicans, being arrested for sex crimes against minors. of both genders.  Indeed, if anywhere is dangerous for children it's churches and church youth groups.  But of late, nothing compares to the GOP's jihad against transgender individuals who make up a tiny percentage of the overall population, yet are demonized constantly by white Christian nationalists and their puppets within the .Republican Party.  The goal?   To stoke tribalism and loathing of those labeled as "other."  A piece in the New Yorker looks at this current GOP obsession:

What did people care about in the lead-up to the 2024 Presidential election? Last fall, Gallup ran a poll and asked. The economy was first on the list; most voters rated it as “extremely important.” Majorities of respondents also named a slew of other issues as either “extremely important” or “very important” to their vote: democracy in the U.S., terrorism and national security, picks for Supreme Court Justices, immigration, health care, gun policy, taxes, abortion, crime, income and wealth distribution, the federal budget deficit, foreign affairs, energy policy, race relations, and so on. In fact, only two issues on the list were not considered at least “very important” by a majority of voters. One was climate change, which half of those surveyed voted as “somewhat important” or “not important.” The other was transgender rights, which came last.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that transgender issues seemed less salient than the other topics. (As for climate change, tell that to a melting Greenland.) Only around one per cent of American adults identify as transgender, Gallup reported last year. . . . . “How many transgender athletes are you aware of?” Durbin continued. “Less than ten,” Baker said. That’s less than .002 per cent.

But the drive to ban transgender athletes from sports has never been about numbers. In 2023, Ohio’s House of Representatives passed a bill banning trans girls from competing in girls’ sports as early as kindergarten. It was called the Save Women’s Sports Act, conjuring an image of barbarians at the gate. But, when the journalist Pablo Torre went looking for these girls who were, purportedly, breaking all the records and stealing all the opportunities, he found that, when the efforts of the measure began, there was one trans varsity athlete in Ohio: a backup catcher. (She wasn’t very good.) When the governor of Mississippi signed a bill in 2021 barring trans athletes from competing in sports according to their gender, supporters of the bill didn’t present evidence of trans athletes at public schools in the state. . . . no one could cite any problematic instances of transgender participation. Many of the bills’ biggest advocates did not know whether there were any transgender athletes in their states at all.

And yet, as the election neared, Donald Trump’s campaign doubled down on attacking transgender rights and trans athletes. He started talking about them all the time, even when there was, in reality, not much to talk about. . . . ads for the Ohio Senate race that mentioned transgender issues in sports were aired almost twenty-seven thousand times by Election Day. Trump’s campaign went even further. AdImpact found that his campaign spent more than nineteen million dollars last fall on two television ads alone that centered on transgender-rights issues, and that the ads aired nearly fifty-five thousand times in a span of two weeks or so.

Given how vanishingly few transgender athletes there are, and how many voters pointed to other policy issues as greater priorities, a rational person might have been confused. . . . The ads were zero-sum, too—them versus you.

There are people who want to “save” women’s sports who don’t like women’s sports. A new study in the Sociology of Sport Journal reviewed survey data collected between 2018-19—before the issue was highly politicized—and found that opposition to transgender participation in sports was correlated with idealized views of female attractiveness and traditional gender norms. . . . But there are also people who want to narrowly define women’s sports on a natalist basis who care very much about women’s sports. Some of them are, or were, élite athletes themselves. They see the gains of women’s sports as hard-won and dependent on biological differences—differences that are real, however difficult to define.

But all these bills are not really about fairness. They do not distinguish between dodgeball and ice hockey, between Ultimate Frisbee and Division I shot put. They target kindergartners as well as Olympians. . . . people are tribal. We define ourselves in terms of our groups—the allegiances we are born into, and the allegiances we choose. Sports fandom can be a powerful experience of belonging to a group, and of loathing other groups, too.

It's all about fanning hatred and loathing and causing division.