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Notes -
Prelude: The Nashville school shooting is definitely peak toxoplasma, a day later: people cheering everyone who entered that school with a gun, both the shooter and the police. Aidan/Audrey’s acts are a near-perfect scissor statement.
The statement on the shooting by the Trans Resistance Network is particularly toxically tribal. It hearkens back to the days of trying to sympathize with the Columbine shooters, where the narrative is shaped solely by early reporting and people were asking “What made them do it?”
Tangent: drag shows. But the use of the word “genocide” in the TRN’s statement made me stop and ponder: the modern term “genocide” includes not only the actual killing of group X, but also the halting of cultural practices as a lead-in to the eventual rounding up and killing.
Here’s an odd little dynamic: halting drag activities in children's spaces is trans genocide for both sides, but in different ways!
For pro-trans activists, halting them is halting a ritual cultural activity, and hints at a wider cultural desire for eventual trans elimination through murders of the outed and the suicides of the closeted. It also removes an avenue for trans youths to discover their true gender and thus leaves them in a spiral of depression heading toward suicide.
For social-contagion theorists, halting the drag activities in children’s spaces is useful for preventing cis children from being memetically contaminated, and thus memetically sterilizing the trans community. Reasoning: since full transition includes sterilization (thus committing traditional genocide upon themselves rather effectively), trans people don’t breed genetically, but memetically.
Drag =/= transgender. Not even close.
To steelman, a lot of the trans community's objections to 'drag show' bans is that they seldom can cleanly distinguish between non-drag trans stuff (and seldom recognize non-prurient drag as a thing period). And, to be fair, the complexities of legal cases, pressures toward plea bargaining, and threats of prosecution without intent to follow through are all serious issues even if a statute was perfectly well-drafted, and most of them aren't.
In most cases, I don't think the statutes are that unclear : contrast here vs here, where like some of the Florida bare bookshelf stuff a lot of this is pretty clearly intentional showboating rather than just drawing a thick line around the law. But in turn there's been a number of bills that had to be revised pretty late in their readings (eg Texas) to keep to actual obscenity-or-harmful-to-minors stuff, and others that are poorly worded and depending on the courts to handle.
Yeah, they're definitely making a slippery slope argument, but elements of the conservative movement loudly proclaim how much they'd love to slide down that slope.
It'd be nice to have a term for this sort of recurring phenomenon where maybe you agree with your opponents about the first step in a certain direction, but elements of their movement keep proclaiming they want to take thirty, so then you refuse to take even one because you don't trust that you can stop the momentum once it starts.
Kind of the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt's thoughts on he matter, then.
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