The bill, brought by legislator Tom Oliverson, likely will not pass. However, it represents a new front in attacks on trans people, and connects with other attempts to label being trans as "fraud."
The obsession with us is, EVERY fascist government NEEDS a perceived defenseless enemy to be able to scapegoat. The Nazis had the Jews. Trump is using us. When they realize they can't legislate us out of existence they will revert to other means. It is going to get waaay worse before it gets better.
I've encountered a handful of people who were extremely uncomfortable when I came out because it made them question their sexuality. Guys that had been attracted to me still found themselves attracted to me but they identified as straight. It made a few of them angry, like violently angry.
It's sad how pervasive and damaging some of these religious ideas are, and it really sucks that we get to pay the price for others' homophobia and transphobia.
But I've been raped by straight White cisgender men many times, and they don't really seem to have a problem raping Trans women at all. The ones that raped and beat me didn't. I can't vouch for all of them but some of them I know raped and beat cisgender women, too, usually their own girlfriends, wives, or family members. There's a close link between male sexual violence, IPV, and domestic violence that absolutely encompasses Trans identities in a very harmful way.
Comes with the territory for being a woman who is Trans and queer. Men have a particular hatred for women who are Trans and lesbian. They enjoy beating and raping us. It's pretty amazing I'm not dead after multiple attacks, and I only have a left wrist that doesn't work and severe neuropathy in my left leg and a spinal injury that will kill me one day, but I can still walk with a cane and I'll probably get to live another four or six years if I'm not murdered before that. It's just how it is in America. I can type pretty well with just my right hand.
I'm so very lucky compared to a lot of Trans women. I can even drive a car on some days without the neuropathy making me unable, so I can get around sometimes. But my face still looks like my face and the cuts and punctures mostly healed up without too bad of scarring, except for a nasty scar in my hairline where a Jim Beam bottle was broken over my head while a guy was kicking me in the ribs.
So very sorry to hear all of that. I have full body small fiber neuropathy, so I absolutely understand the pain. It really really sucks.
And Orange Mussolini has really given a certain set of people permission and praise to be the awful humans they are. Stay strong, if for no other reason than to spite them. Hugs-
When my family asks why I don't want to visit them in TX, this type of shit is the reason why. Too many people operating under a "difference = deficiency" mindset.
It is deeply concerning that such an extreme proposal is even being put forth, no matter how slim the chances of passage. The reason, as Erin notes, is that it signals the direction Republicans want to go in the future, not what they expect to accomplish today. It’s a canary in a coal mine.
The problems with this extreme proposal are too numerous to list completely, but it runs contrary to the reasoning in Bostock, to the understanding of gender identity science, and to the constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.
Were such a policy adopted on a broader scale, I would like to think that blue protective states would be sanctuary areas and refuse to enforce it, setting up huge tensions between red vs. blue states that would be even thicker than those currently simmering over GAC and abortion.
This is what the MAGAs want. They wish to create a similar dichotomy to 1861 that will permit them to use history to justify federal troops invading blue states to enforce MAGA extremism.
This is how the Confederacy played a long game and WON.
It really was about anti-Black racism all along, and we transgender Americans are just being used as bait and cannon fodder.
This is how stupidity can use democracy to defeat science, rationality, and empiricism, all day long and twice on Sundays. Karl Popper was right and we have learned NOTHING FROM THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST.
My husband and I are a straight T4T couple who both work for the State of Texas. In addition to this news, we’re also being forced 100% back into the office with no more WFH. Yesterday, I was planning on going largely stealth while starting out my transition, but now in the best case my transition will be entirely public and in the worst case, criminal. My husband has been openly out as trans for his past 4 years employed with the State. Now we’re building go bags and preparing for the eventuality of having to flee for our very lives. I’m tired. This is just too much for anyone to bear.
I don’t think I’d be waiting for “eventually”. Recent history has shown that successful passage of these laws isn’t required for their intent to be enforced. If not by state authorities then by self-deputised rednecks. The open discussion of trans people in these terms in houses of government legitimises the violent desires of some transphobes in their own minds, emboldening them to commit violent acts against us in the service of “the silent majority” these bigot representatives claim to represent.
He already does. He suffers from neurological bowel damage from his cocaine years in the 70-80s (cocaine toxicity in THOSE quantities is no joke) and has lost control of his bowels, hence the baggy suits to conceal his undergarments. He also has frontotemporal dementia which aggravates the lack of bowel control.
This Texas circus clown is actually a medical doctor (anaesthesiologist). He has sworn a hypocratic oath to do no harm to his patients (past, present and future). Sponsoring this shocking bill which has no significant justification, which is simply meant to criminalize trans individuals and make them captive prisoners in their own homes, and eventually eliminate them entirely, must surely violate that Oath. This attempted crime against humanity should subject this doctor (who claims to be a Christian) to loss of his medical license in the State of Texas and with the AMA, at a minimum. He should be universally embarrassed and ridiculed. His proposed legislation fails to recognize the MANY intersex conditions that fetus's can be born with, caused by all sorts of reasons, like extra X or Y chromozones, glandular malfuctions, including, for one example, Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) - caused by a missing enzyme in the adrenal gland, causing female infants having male sex organs in addition to female sex organs. The dual organ situation is often, but not always, "repaired" at birth. Babies born with "ambiguous genetalia" have always existed, and doctors in the 80's, 90's, and now in the 21st century have worked with the loving, caring, and distraught parents, deciding what's the best approach to handle this unexpected and challenging condition. Making fun of, ridiculing, and abusing these well meaning parents and criminalizing the medical choices they and their medical doctors make for their INNOCENT children and their parents is cruel, evil and horific. Doing the same to adult trans citizens, who have never bothered anyone, is just as pointless, unnecessary and awful. This is clearly the first step on this Nazi loving fascist's slippery slope, which eventually leads to murdering people due to nothing more than the racist and discriminatory whim of those in power. When I inquired of the Congressman's office staff, none had any idea if this proposed act was meant to apply to and criminalize intersex babies, and if so, why? Or, what was the rationalization for such an outcome in Rep. Oliverson's (Christian) mind. They also had no idea these intersex conditions exist, and no idea they occur randomly at birth on a regular basis. For all we know, the representative himself may have been born with CAH and had his female sex organs removed shortly after birth. Is that any of my business Rep. Oliverson? Well if that's not ok when it comes to you or your three (3) children, why is it ok for everyone else's? Don't you see what a selective hypocrite that makes you? And what for ? Some temporary adulation from a bunch of red meat eating MAGA fanatics. As poet Alison Luterman's poem "PRAISE THE BROKEN PROMISE OF AMERICA" so aptly states" - Rep. Oliverson has "...sold (his) soul for a hot air ballon with a hole in it...."
I would urge every concerned citizen of the USA to call this man at his legislative office and tell him (if he's brave enough to answer his phone - which he wasn't with me) or his staff what you think of him, his proposed trans-persecuting bill, and what you think of his (anti) Christian values.
Please ACT! As Voltaire said "All men are guilty of the good they did not do."
I have to say things like this are really scary. Yes, it likely won't pass, this time, but what about the next or next or . . . As someone from a deeply "conservative" state (not Texas) I can't help but wonder when my state will pick up that kind of attack. Bad enough to be harassed on the street corner when in town at the pharmacy but to be criminalized for existing. It is a little scary.
Sadly it was originally said much earlier than the Wansee Conference of 1942. The idea of using the Jewish people as a scapegoat means to gain absolute political dominance in Germany for a regime far more extremist than the Kaiser's Reich goes back to the late teens, early 1920s. These concepts are a century old but might kill we Trans folk today, gentile and otherwise. Mimetic hatred is a weapon transcending literal and existential humanity. It will likely kill us all soon.
You are of course correct. Antisemitism goes back at least as far as Paul. I wasn't making an historic point but rather pointing out the fraud that is the Republican Anti-trans movement.
This would criminalize me for falsely claiming to be a cis man (aka a "biological" man) when in fact I'm a trans man, were I ever to make such an explicit claim.
I'm guessing that, in practice, it would also criminalize implicit claims. Though it lacks details, I assume that's its intent. It would criminalize *passing*. It would criminalize my *allowing* people to believe I'm a cis man.
By implication, it would require me to loudly announce everywhere I go that I'm a trans man — though I'm sure Texas would also disallow that kind of "hello, I'm trans today" speech as a form of "pornography."
Come to think of it, by referring to "biological sex" and "sex assigned at birth," it implies there are other kinds of sex and thus it isn't even using the hardline "sex realist" language that the Trump regime has prescribed. The Jan 20 "Defending Women" exec order says you can just say "sex," along with male/man/boy and female/woman/girl. If this politician had worked with others, someone would have workshopped the language.
But regardless of this bill's unclear wording, we know what it intends to do.
The goal is to turn our extant incarceral industrial complex into detransification machinery. By criminalizing our very identities and bodies in public, every one of us is subject to arrest and incarceration. Once incarcerated, we will be forcibly detransitioned and if we resist, raped and killed. The industrialized detransification machinery produces multiple products; terrified traumatized forcibly detransitioned obedient survivors and the corpses of murdered Trans Americans.
This is by design.
The GOPMAGAs don't need the tools of their beloved Nazis, the expensive SS, imagine the HR costs of building a new Gestapo (!), spendy new death camps, pricy industrial crematoria, they can just use the infrastructure built in red states in the form of privatized for profit prisons built for the war on drugs and war on terror and the war on Black Americans and the war on immigrants and the war on reality.
The only thing is, how many law enforcement and corrections officers will follow these orders in our new American Reich?
I'm guessing about 70% will say yes-to- the-swastika-dress.
Great that it's not going to pass and all, but really, really worrying that this is part of larger trend to officially label being trans as fraud. Unfortunately, this isn't going to be the last bill like this either. Republicans really do want to ban or criminalize everything to do with being transgender that they can, and if they feel they can get away with criminalizing being trans itself, they'll do it, and just because this bill won't pass doesn't mean others in the future won't.
I am a 75 year old transgender Veteran. I spent 30 years in the Air Force defending your right to be an asshole. Please don't exercise it, as you are doing with your bill.
Transgender people have always existed and will continue to exist. We are humans and are loved, supported and embraced by God.
Why can you not just let others be who they are and be grateful for your blithe cis-gender existence where you feel just fine being a guy! How are transgender people a threat to you or yours?
What are you doing to lower the cost and improve the quality of childcare for you constituents? And . . . and . . . and . . .
I am predicting the next bill from this ignoramus will open a bounty system and hunting season on anyone that they deem is "not like us". Organize and resist. The minorities and anyone else they don't like vastly outnumber the amoral folks.
What the hell is with this f*cking OBSESSION with us?
These people are all perverts.
That and they need a target, can't use the old ones 🤔
They're right wing Christians, thus they seek to control EVERYBODY.
The obsession with us is, EVERY fascist government NEEDS a perceived defenseless enemy to be able to scapegoat. The Nazis had the Jews. Trump is using us. When they realize they can't legislate us out of existence they will revert to other means. It is going to get waaay worse before it gets better.
OMG it's literally the opposite of fraud 😖
Yes. They loved us when we were lying and closeted, hate us now that we live as our genuine and authentic selves.
I wonder, do they even really hate US, or do they just hate the freedom and growth our existence represents?
I've encountered a handful of people who were extremely uncomfortable when I came out because it made them question their sexuality. Guys that had been attracted to me still found themselves attracted to me but they identified as straight. It made a few of them angry, like violently angry.
It's sad how pervasive and damaging some of these religious ideas are, and it really sucks that we get to pay the price for others' homophobia and transphobia.
Absolutely on the money!
That's an excellent way of putting it.
Lawd help these poor rapists, getting fooled into rapin' trans women instead of good Christian women they generally rape. "It's a fraud!"
Sadly true.
But I've been raped by straight White cisgender men many times, and they don't really seem to have a problem raping Trans women at all. The ones that raped and beat me didn't. I can't vouch for all of them but some of them I know raped and beat cisgender women, too, usually their own girlfriends, wives, or family members. There's a close link between male sexual violence, IPV, and domestic violence that absolutely encompasses Trans identities in a very harmful way.
I’m so sorry you’ve been thru such harrowing, traumatic experiences. You deserve better.
Comes with the territory for being a woman who is Trans and queer. Men have a particular hatred for women who are Trans and lesbian. They enjoy beating and raping us. It's pretty amazing I'm not dead after multiple attacks, and I only have a left wrist that doesn't work and severe neuropathy in my left leg and a spinal injury that will kill me one day, but I can still walk with a cane and I'll probably get to live another four or six years if I'm not murdered before that. It's just how it is in America. I can type pretty well with just my right hand.
I'm so very lucky compared to a lot of Trans women. I can even drive a car on some days without the neuropathy making me unable, so I can get around sometimes. But my face still looks like my face and the cuts and punctures mostly healed up without too bad of scarring, except for a nasty scar in my hairline where a Jim Beam bottle was broken over my head while a guy was kicking me in the ribs.
So very sorry to hear all of that. I have full body small fiber neuropathy, so I absolutely understand the pain. It really really sucks.
And Orange Mussolini has really given a certain set of people permission and praise to be the awful humans they are. Stay strong, if for no other reason than to spite them. Hugs-
For sure.
When my family asks why I don't want to visit them in TX, this type of shit is the reason why. Too many people operating under a "difference = deficiency" mindset.
It is deeply concerning that such an extreme proposal is even being put forth, no matter how slim the chances of passage. The reason, as Erin notes, is that it signals the direction Republicans want to go in the future, not what they expect to accomplish today. It’s a canary in a coal mine.
The problems with this extreme proposal are too numerous to list completely, but it runs contrary to the reasoning in Bostock, to the understanding of gender identity science, and to the constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.
Were such a policy adopted on a broader scale, I would like to think that blue protective states would be sanctuary areas and refuse to enforce it, setting up huge tensions between red vs. blue states that would be even thicker than those currently simmering over GAC and abortion.
This is what the MAGAs want. They wish to create a similar dichotomy to 1861 that will permit them to use history to justify federal troops invading blue states to enforce MAGA extremism.
This is how the Confederacy played a long game and WON.
It really was about anti-Black racism all along, and we transgender Americans are just being used as bait and cannon fodder.
This is how stupidity can use democracy to defeat science, rationality, and empiricism, all day long and twice on Sundays. Karl Popper was right and we have learned NOTHING FROM THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST.
This is my real concern, this feels like at best it’s a wish list for the GOP and at worst a dry run for an EO
My husband and I are a straight T4T couple who both work for the State of Texas. In addition to this news, we’re also being forced 100% back into the office with no more WFH. Yesterday, I was planning on going largely stealth while starting out my transition, but now in the best case my transition will be entirely public and in the worst case, criminal. My husband has been openly out as trans for his past 4 years employed with the State. Now we’re building go bags and preparing for the eventuality of having to flee for our very lives. I’m tired. This is just too much for anyone to bear.
I don’t think I’d be waiting for “eventually”. Recent history has shown that successful passage of these laws isn’t required for their intent to be enforced. If not by state authorities then by self-deputised rednecks. The open discussion of trans people in these terms in houses of government legitimises the violent desires of some transphobes in their own minds, emboldening them to commit violent acts against us in the service of “the silent majority” these bigot representatives claim to represent.
I want him to shit himself publicly every day for the rest of his life. What a Nazi ghoul.
He already does. He suffers from neurological bowel damage from his cocaine years in the 70-80s (cocaine toxicity in THOSE quantities is no joke) and has lost control of his bowels, hence the baggy suits to conceal his undergarments. He also has frontotemporal dementia which aggravates the lack of bowel control.
So...you get your wish.
Dear EITM:
This Texas circus clown is actually a medical doctor (anaesthesiologist). He has sworn a hypocratic oath to do no harm to his patients (past, present and future). Sponsoring this shocking bill which has no significant justification, which is simply meant to criminalize trans individuals and make them captive prisoners in their own homes, and eventually eliminate them entirely, must surely violate that Oath. This attempted crime against humanity should subject this doctor (who claims to be a Christian) to loss of his medical license in the State of Texas and with the AMA, at a minimum. He should be universally embarrassed and ridiculed. His proposed legislation fails to recognize the MANY intersex conditions that fetus's can be born with, caused by all sorts of reasons, like extra X or Y chromozones, glandular malfuctions, including, for one example, Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) - caused by a missing enzyme in the adrenal gland, causing female infants having male sex organs in addition to female sex organs. The dual organ situation is often, but not always, "repaired" at birth. Babies born with "ambiguous genetalia" have always existed, and doctors in the 80's, 90's, and now in the 21st century have worked with the loving, caring, and distraught parents, deciding what's the best approach to handle this unexpected and challenging condition. Making fun of, ridiculing, and abusing these well meaning parents and criminalizing the medical choices they and their medical doctors make for their INNOCENT children and their parents is cruel, evil and horific. Doing the same to adult trans citizens, who have never bothered anyone, is just as pointless, unnecessary and awful. This is clearly the first step on this Nazi loving fascist's slippery slope, which eventually leads to murdering people due to nothing more than the racist and discriminatory whim of those in power. When I inquired of the Congressman's office staff, none had any idea if this proposed act was meant to apply to and criminalize intersex babies, and if so, why? Or, what was the rationalization for such an outcome in Rep. Oliverson's (Christian) mind. They also had no idea these intersex conditions exist, and no idea they occur randomly at birth on a regular basis. For all we know, the representative himself may have been born with CAH and had his female sex organs removed shortly after birth. Is that any of my business Rep. Oliverson? Well if that's not ok when it comes to you or your three (3) children, why is it ok for everyone else's? Don't you see what a selective hypocrite that makes you? And what for ? Some temporary adulation from a bunch of red meat eating MAGA fanatics. As poet Alison Luterman's poem "PRAISE THE BROKEN PROMISE OF AMERICA" so aptly states" - Rep. Oliverson has "...sold (his) soul for a hot air ballon with a hole in it...."
I would urge every concerned citizen of the USA to call this man at his legislative office and tell him (if he's brave enough to answer his phone - which he wasn't with me) or his staff what you think of him, his proposed trans-persecuting bill, and what you think of his (anti) Christian values.
Please ACT! As Voltaire said "All men are guilty of the good they did not do."
Excellent letter!!! He’s not in my district, but I am a Texan, so I will definitely be calling!!!
I have to say things like this are really scary. Yes, it likely won't pass, this time, but what about the next or next or . . . As someone from a deeply "conservative" state (not Texas) I can't help but wonder when my state will pick up that kind of attack. Bad enough to be harassed on the street corner when in town at the pharmacy but to be criminalized for existing. It is a little scary.
As I'm sure some Nazi official said at the Wannasee Conference, "If the Jews didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent them."
Sadly it was originally said much earlier than the Wansee Conference of 1942. The idea of using the Jewish people as a scapegoat means to gain absolute political dominance in Germany for a regime far more extremist than the Kaiser's Reich goes back to the late teens, early 1920s. These concepts are a century old but might kill we Trans folk today, gentile and otherwise. Mimetic hatred is a weapon transcending literal and existential humanity. It will likely kill us all soon.
You are of course correct. Antisemitism goes back at least as far as Paul. I wasn't making an historic point but rather pointing out the fraud that is the Republican Anti-trans movement.
Is this retaliation to the judge blocking the trans care ban for anyone under 19?
Seems short enough to be written quick in response to that while being a grumpy old ass
This would criminalize me for falsely claiming to be a cis man (aka a "biological" man) when in fact I'm a trans man, were I ever to make such an explicit claim.
I'm guessing that, in practice, it would also criminalize implicit claims. Though it lacks details, I assume that's its intent. It would criminalize *passing*. It would criminalize my *allowing* people to believe I'm a cis man.
By implication, it would require me to loudly announce everywhere I go that I'm a trans man — though I'm sure Texas would also disallow that kind of "hello, I'm trans today" speech as a form of "pornography."
Come to think of it, by referring to "biological sex" and "sex assigned at birth," it implies there are other kinds of sex and thus it isn't even using the hardline "sex realist" language that the Trump regime has prescribed. The Jan 20 "Defending Women" exec order says you can just say "sex," along with male/man/boy and female/woman/girl. If this politician had worked with others, someone would have workshopped the language.
But regardless of this bill's unclear wording, we know what it intends to do.
The goal is to turn our extant incarceral industrial complex into detransification machinery. By criminalizing our very identities and bodies in public, every one of us is subject to arrest and incarceration. Once incarcerated, we will be forcibly detransitioned and if we resist, raped and killed. The industrialized detransification machinery produces multiple products; terrified traumatized forcibly detransitioned obedient survivors and the corpses of murdered Trans Americans.
This is by design.
The GOPMAGAs don't need the tools of their beloved Nazis, the expensive SS, imagine the HR costs of building a new Gestapo (!), spendy new death camps, pricy industrial crematoria, they can just use the infrastructure built in red states in the form of privatized for profit prisons built for the war on drugs and war on terror and the war on Black Americans and the war on immigrants and the war on reality.
The only thing is, how many law enforcement and corrections officers will follow these orders in our new American Reich?
I'm guessing about 70% will say yes-to- the-swastika-dress.
Great that it's not going to pass and all, but really, really worrying that this is part of larger trend to officially label being trans as fraud. Unfortunately, this isn't going to be the last bill like this either. Republicans really do want to ban or criminalize everything to do with being transgender that they can, and if they feel they can get away with criminalizing being trans itself, they'll do it, and just because this bill won't pass doesn't mean others in the future won't.
Also, this bill's sponsor and anyone who agrees with it is a despicable monster.
I went to his website and entered the following:
I am a 75 year old transgender Veteran. I spent 30 years in the Air Force defending your right to be an asshole. Please don't exercise it, as you are doing with your bill.
Transgender people have always existed and will continue to exist. We are humans and are loved, supported and embraced by God.
Why can you not just let others be who they are and be grateful for your blithe cis-gender existence where you feel just fine being a guy! How are transgender people a threat to you or yours?
What are you doing to lower the cost and improve the quality of childcare for you constituents? And . . . and . . . and . . .
Marcie
it really really disgusts me how much transphobic legislation seems to mirror transphobic fetishes and to guard against the tropes in those fetishes
I am predicting the next bill from this ignoramus will open a bounty system and hunting season on anyone that they deem is "not like us". Organize and resist. The minorities and anyone else they don't like vastly outnumber the amoral folks.