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There's a "protect trans kids" poster on Gwen Stacy's bedroom wall in Across the Spider-Verse. This is the second time I've seen this exact phrase, after Don Cheadle wore it on his shirt when appearing on Saturday Night Live.
Okay, my curiosity is piqued. What does this phrase mean?
I assume this message is in reference to a specific threat that exclusively, or at least disproportionately, impacts trans children. Specifically, my assumption is that it relates to bathroom bills and/or gender affirming care, but I have a close friend who insists that it refers to hate crimes, and he says that I'm "living in a bubble" if I don't think it refers to hate crimes. But I really haven't heard anything about a hate crime surge against transgender children, real or exaggerated. I heard plenty about the supposed hate crime surge against Asians three years ago, so if there was a similar narrative going on with trans kids, I figure I'd hear about that too.
Which isn't to say that I never hear people complain about hate crimes against trans people! But when I do, the discussion is about transgender people of all ages, not specifically children. The only activist movement I hear about that specifically relates to trans children is their supposed right to medically transition, but my friend says I'm being uncharitable if I assume that that's what is being referred to.
I'd appreciate it if you guys help clear this up for me.
Edit: When I told him about this post, my friend clarified that he thinks the ignorance is that I think it implies exclusively to these issues and not to violence.
This case got a lot of attention in the UK and Ireland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brianna_Ghey
The fact that zero evidence has been presented suggesting that the murder was motivated by transphobia (aside from the fact that the victim was trans, which is widely assumed to be dispositive in its own right, as tends to be the way with these things) makes me extremely suspicious, and I'm far more inclined to believe it was a typical teenage row that got out of hand in which the victim incidentally happened to be trans, as opposed to a hate crime. But I'm open to correction: the trial starts next month, perhaps new evidence will be presented.
Note that the slogan "protect trans kids" predates this case by years. Give Helen Lovejoy a nose piercing and blue hair and that pretty much encapsulates my attitude about the slogan's rhetorical stance.
This is most likely correct. One of the attackers was trans too.
Of course, the fact that one of the men who murdered Matthew Shepard had previously been in a sexual relationship with him didn't stop Obama naming a piece of anti-gay hate crime legislation after Shepard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Matt
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Reminds me of how much violence done to black people is perpetuated by black people themselves.
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At first I was going to say that this is simply a prominent example of emotivism, but really it’s not even that. The “hurrah trans kids” isn’t disguised as a proposition, it’s disguised as a command. “Protect trans kids”, is an imperative sentence, exactly the same as, “Workers of the World Unite.” It’s the Greengrocer’s Sign. What it means is, "I, the movie studio Sony Pictures work here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace."
I think you overestimate how much trepidation the average scriptwriter feels before progressives, as opposed to support.
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As others have indicated it's something of a floating signifier which, in the same vein as 'Black Lives Matter' is very useful for shutting down opposition without having to lay out a fully articulated position of your own.
If you raise any sort of critique or resistance you're clearly okay with trans children being harmed! Shame on you! Or we could say "protect all kids" which will probably be received about as well as "all lives matter." I kinda favor the term "protect kids" myself, but in that context the rhetoric loses most force because it's a completely unremarkable sentiment.
I do have my questions about how 'trans kids' are defined, since the whole debate these days seems to center around whether one's gender identity can be reliably ascertained at an early age. The use of the term 'kids' definitely implies that prepubescents are included in this group.
And of course what are they being protected from? Abuse? And if it's abuse, does that include from parents who are skeptical that their kids are actually gender dysphoric? Or maybe it's more a generalized 'protect their right to express their preferred identity (i.e. their right to transition).'
At which point, the statement 'protect trans kids' roughly translates to "ensure that children of all ages are permitted to have gender reassignment surgery on demand and without apology." And "over the objections of their parents, if necessary" is implied in there too.
Which I think is pretty damned controversial in mainstream discourse, so it remains more palatable to collapse it to "Protect Trans Kids" and let the onlookers guess at what you actually mean.
I ultimately think the goal is to have this particular rhetoric stretch to it's logical conclusion where children can be removed from their parents' care and undergo gender reassignment surgery without parental consent or even knowledge if some 'expert' is able to ascertain that the child is gender dysphoric, as this is the only true way to 'protect' trans children to the fullest extent possible. You have to be able to identify them all as early as possible and enable them to medically transition at the earliest opportunity and thus remove any social or legal barriers that might prevent these kids from transitioning.
The actual implications of how that might all work in practice I will leave unexamined for the moment.
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A couple quick thoughts:
I'm not sure if bullying exactly fits under the category of "hate crimes", but I definitely have seen people talking about moving away from trans-unfriendly states has greatly reduced or even eliminated the anti-trans bullying they / their children have encountered. These laws are seen as the government condoning that bullying, so the two aren't really considered separable. My understanding is that the danger to trans children is mainly suicide, and both bullying and the government denying them recognition of their identity or appropriate medical care contributes to that.
"These laws are seen as the government condoning that bullying"
Wait, really? You mean by the bullies (who I assume will use any justification they can to do bullying), or by adults?
See here for an example of the logic.
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This is one interpretation I see proposed in left-leaning comment spaces. But it also makes sense to me: children take cues from the adults around them, and adults are talking about these laws and the culture war around them.
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Here’s a possibility: When a school has a problem where students with characteristic X are being bullied, one of the tactics administrators might use is to hold assemblies and hang up posters about how cool characteristic X is. If characteristic X is “being trans”, and the state has a law saying that schools cannot encourage kids to be trans, then that cuts off that avenue of solving the bullying problem.
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Just fine Jimmy's parents on a curve per every infraction.
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It doesn’t. Or more specifically, it’s a political slogan that can mean any of 20+ things, few of which are specific to trans kids. It could mean ‘I’m a good blue triber’, it could mean ‘the lgbt+ community can do no wrong, literally’, etc, etc. political slogans don’t always have a specific meaning.
This makes me angry because it's so vague and cannot be inferred, but my pattern recognition tells me this is a problem I have because I'm autistic, and that neurotypicals either find context clues or don't care. Probably the latter.
You try to understand it as an individual entity, it is a wrong way to treat it. It is part of the network of relationships, and in this network it has a symbolic meaning, and that's how most people see it - as a sigil that marks the place of this person in the network of cultural relationships. Signs often have relational meanings - i.e. the sign "A" has meaning within English language when it is combined with others, but by itself it's just a weird geometric shape, there's nothing inherent in it. Most people pick (and sometimes over-pick) the relational and contextual clues and use them all the time, though I know autistic people often have trouble with doing this automatically.
That makes sense, but it's also infuriating, because as far as I'm concerned, it means nothing, but I'm supposed to be able to tell what it means.
I support all trans rights except the right to receive hormones prior to the age of consent, and I hate their language policing and intolerance of comedy that pokes fun of them (which is a problem with leftists in general, but especially trans people as of late). Does that mean I should say I support trans rights, or that I want to protect trans kids? I don't know! From what you're saying, it sounds like, in doing so, I'd be performing a shibboleth for the wrong clique. This concept really does remind me of how high school is depicted in movies and TV.
My K-12 education didn't have cliques. It had friend groups, but nothing like the hierarchies and allegiance tests you'd see in Glee, Heathers, Mean Girls, High School Musical, etc. But my adult life has been full of them. I wonder why my school life didn't have them. Did they go dormant for a couple decades after the 90's before resurfacing? Were Hollywood writers projecting adult experiences onto teenagers all along? Were they always there, but I just didn't notice because nobody cared about politics until I finished high school?
You should. They are not owners of your expression, and they have the same ownership claim on the language as you and every other person on the planet. You should recognize their relationships are not the only possible (despite them pretending it is the case), and their language use is not the only correct one, and support the usage that agrees with your beliefs. At the same time, you should not be blind to what is happening in the world around, and be aware that there are forces that work hard at usurping control over the language and make "protect the kids" mean only agreeing with their ideology. Recognizing such attempts and calling them out (even if only inside your own head) is part of maintaining the habit of independent thought and mental hygiene.
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As much as unsolicited advice might be rude, I'd recommend learning not to be infuriated by such stuff, because such stuff constitutes roughly 99.99% of all communication in politics, and I'm not sure about the other 0.01%. It's not good for your blood pressure or your mental health.
I wonder about this too. My middle school had some clique-ish behavior, but nothing like the tropes you see in films, and my high school had basically none. In my 20s right after college, I noticed adults around me behaving in cliquish ways that seemed ripped straight out of films. My schooling was mostly late 90s and early 00s. Perhaps it was real in the 80s and early 90s, and filmmakers were drawing from their experience from those eras, with concerted effort by educators to break up the cliquish behavior succeeding by the time we were in school. But then why did such behavior return with a vengeance in my adult life? Particularly with such cliquish behavior being pushed as the obviously morally correct thing to follow (as long as it's right cliques, of course)?
Could just be random dumb luck from the schools we went to, of course. That's probably the correct presumption to have by default.
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It’s definitely the latter. Do you think ‘groomer’ has a terribly specific meaning? How about ‘America first’?
A groomer is someone who subtly leads children or similarly vulnerable to make decisions that they otherwise wouldn't make. In recent years, its connotation with sex has overshadowed all other meanings. The people accusing trans activists of being groomers weren't, to my knowledge, accusing them of sexual grooming when the meme took off, but it's devolved into that because dumb social conservatives are conflating this very real problem with the gay agenda they tried to warn about a decade ago.
America First means putting the needs of one's nation above the other needs of other nations, and American citizens over the needs of foreigners.
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That you are woke and not a deplorable thoughtcriminal and want everybody to know it. That you are fully in sync with the latest agenda updates, and will execute whatever instructions are going to be uploaded next.
The current release (as far as I know) of the agenda specifies that any child that expresses any interest or ideation about himself being transgender, should be immediately medically, socially and surgically transitioned, parents have no legitimate way to react to it except fully supporting and enabling it, and in case they do anything else, they should be immediately and irreversibly striped of all parental rights. Failing to do this will inevitably and imminently be leading to the child in question killing himself, and it would be the fault of everyone who did not do enough to enable it. That's what "protect" operationally means right now. But for somebody who has such a poster, it usually doesn't mean they reflected on all of that, considered all advantages and costs of such approach, and their own personal opinion, after deep reflection, is that this is what must happen. More likely, it means they are signaling their non-dissent from the agenda and willingness to lend their support to whatever is declared to be the right thing.
I'm not sure this even rises to the level of a weak man, though maybe you could point me to someone actually espousing precisely this position. My suspicion, though, is that this is a full fledged strawman. Please work harder to portray your outgroup's views in a way they would be likely to recognize and agree to, or barring that, at least in a way that brings strong argument/evidence that this is what they actually believe in spite of their protestations to the contrary.
Here's one case: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10612285/California-mom-claims-LA-school-encouraged-daughter-transition-blame-suicide.html
Let's check:
A kid having depression and confusion in puberty - check
Government workers insisting on transition as the only way - check
Exclusion of the parent - check
Using suicide as the weapon to justify taking over - check
Ideological zeal reinforced by governmental coercion - check
The kid is getting worse and ultimately dies - unfortunately, check
Everybody in the system driving the kid to suicide patting themselves on the back and thinking they did everything right - check
Is this enough to prove my point that there are people that are believing and doing all the above? Because if not, unfortunately, this is in no way a unique outlier.
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To be clear, I think a fair read of v7 and v8 requires at least some graduated timeline from social presentation and hormone therapy to (some) surgical interventions (albeit 'suggested' as six months for adults in v8), rather than "immediately", and that in practice hormone therapy for now does tend to have a short delay after initial diagnosis. These standards do still leave the possibility that some people will either discontinue or stop at only social or social/hormonal therapy without surgical intervention (not explicitly stated as a non-binary thing, but it's sometimes a non-binary thing), though v8 does look to largely preclude a efforts to mitigate dysphoria without at least social transition.
It's a little messy because "[if] you spend a lot of time wondering if you might be trans, those are all pretty good signs that you are in fact trans" and "I had a gender crisis and end up back where I started" are things that absolutely common and compatible positions for a lot of the modern progressive movement. I think this is more a matter of failures of communication than a true or deep paradox, but in turn I'm not sure the social conservative complaints to an integrated syzygy of those two statements would look terribly different.
For parental rights... the situation depends a lot on jursidiction. Most cases tend to involve general Bad Parenting in addition to gender stuff, though it's hard to tell whether that's a legal principle or hard cases making messy law or simply divorce courts and child services taking the better part of valor.
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Pretty much every "yeet the teets" doctor and their support teams. I've just last month read a number of stories where parents turned for help to doctors like that and were pressed into doing hard meds at the explicit threat of imminent suicide (and probably surgeries too, I just didn't read a specific example of it lately). In fact, this specific threat was just quoted in this same topic, I did not invent it at all (I wish that wasn't the case, but it is).
They are already agreeing to it. Moreover, they are already doing it. Moreover, they are already calling people that object to it hateful bigots. How far along it should be going before I'm allowed to notice it?
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It'd be weird if Gwen Stacy was someone who followed orders blindly and this was portrayed as a good thing, because in the previous movie, we saw Uncle Aaron turn into a monster because he did whatever his boss said.
Would it be? Marvel is woke, Sony is woke, whoever they hired to do this is undoubtedly woke. Being woke is assumed to be an obviously right thing that is not up to reflection. A thing where you instinctively know on which side (the right side) you are. So, a Spider Woman (!), of course, is woke too, as as a woke, she would have all the appropriate attributes, including this kind of poster. It just confirms to you that yes, this is the right side. Just as a red flag with hammer and sickle would tell one communist that she's in the company of another fellow communist. You don't need to deeply reflect on what the sickle actually means for you personally - it's part of the package.
But was his boss woke? Did he give him the right kind of orders? Probably not. I might now know the details (I am not deeply knowledgeable in Marvel universe anyway, and given the direction it all took, it waned almost completely) but in general the whole concept of something being morally right vs morally wrong in the woke world hinges of whether or not it serves the right agenda. Real world example: is segregation bad? It was bad when it served the KKK agenda. It is good now, when it serves the equity agenda. The goals justify the means. If you are told the right thing by the right people, it is right for you to accept it and put in on a poster.
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Yeah, but the difference is that his boss was doing wrong and unethical things, and so doing whatever he said was a bad thing.
And honestly, on the meta level I don't even disagree with the sentiment that working to further the aims of a group can be good if the group is doing good things and bad if the group is doing bad things. It's not an incoherent position to hold. The people who are saying things like "protect trans children" do not see themselves as bad people who are bent on tearing apart the social fabric, that's how their opponents see them.
Besides, chanting slogans of your side isn't the same as blindly following orders.
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