No, Trans People Are Not Coming to Eat Your Children

We live in a time of unapologetic hate.

I loathe the MAGA movement as much as many members of it would want to "own" me. My belief in a democracy where the person who gets the most electoral votes actually wins the election seems to really, really upset them.

But some right-wing beliefs are forcing me to reevaluate my own actions—or lack thereof. The relentless attack on the LGBTQ community—especially transgender people—that has been such a central part of this election's culture wars, has finally opened my eyes to how it must feel to live on sufferance.

There are approximately 1.7 million trans people in the United States. That leaves about 340 million of us who are not trans.

Feel threatened?

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) does. I mean he really does.

"They indoctrinate children and try to turn boys into girls," he said, with great sincerity—and cynicism—in a campaign ad currently online. "They," of course, are the always terrifying liberals.

We need a word for this prejudice against trans people that encapsulates more than fear. A phobia is something that makes you refuse to get on an elevator or just say no to balconies. It doesn't become a focus of your political campaign. This avowed mortal terror mixed with anger is something else.

Rubio, as always, is a follower of trends, not a setter of them. He's as worthy of condemnation as anyone, but hardly the loudest or worst offender in the Republican field. There are many practitioners of this virulent strain of hostility toward people who have sex with the "wrong" people, or who express their sex or gender in the "wrong" way.

It's not that I was unaware of "don't say gay" laws and the battles over transgender athletes. I have a vague sense of how serious violence against transgender people is. And it is serious.

Recently I came across an op-ed submission that shook me. This was trans hatred in the open, without shame, and in almost by-the-way, throwaway sentences. This was beyond saying the quiet part out loud. This was just out loud. And it was proud of itself and preened—and it sat there like a lox. And it had a lot of friends.

The article wasn't even about trans people. It was part of the background stuff that "we all" agree on before getting to the meat of the argument. The author assumed that antipathy towards trans people was a given, and that the reader would naturally share it.

The lesson I got from the piece wasn't the one the author was trying to convey, but it was an education, nonetheless.

All I can do is offer my apologies for the decades I've been missing from the fight. I was wrong.

And it's not that I'm a big deal, or uncommon—it's that I'm not. I'm just another straight, middle-aged white guy, living a societally approved lifestyle—one of many millions who haven't seen this hatred as their problem.

And that's in spite of the fact that I have many friends with trans and non-binary kids. Their parents are feeling their way, struggling to support young people who feel unseen, lost, marginalized.

Me, too.

Practical questions come up, like who should sleep in which bunks at summer camp. Gossipy adults wonder privately whose children are just trying on an identity, who will tread this difficult path into adulthood. It's a part of regular conversation in this small, largely liberal, white clique in Washington, DC. But everybody agrees those involved are people.

Tucker Carlson would hate it.

Living where I do, and with the friends and neighbors that I have, I thought that the right had moved on to mere dislike of LGBTQ people. I thought because the NCAA pulled out of North Carolina over a transgender bathroom bill—which was changed—and gay marriage passed a Supreme Court test, it was just a Boebert or two, maybe a Greene...

I watched state after state codify gay marriage, with Iowa—Iowa!—at the forefront. It seemed clear that national protection of gay rights was inevitable. And then, after Congress, the president and the Supreme Court all spoke, love became the law of the land.

Now I wonder if it isn't hate that's the law and love the violation.

And this fearful sense of aggrieved outrage is everywhere on the right. And it is as central to these fanatics as their loathing of women—and especially a woman's right to own her own body.

I don't know why I thought that we'd learned anything from the AIDS crisis and what I thought was occasional violence by deranged men.

I guess I knew that people were dying, in an abstract way. But it took two seconds on Google to make the victims of trans hate more than statistics, to restore some of their humanity:

Lexi, memorialized by Human Rights Campaign. She was 33, lived in Harlem, in New York City, and was stabbed to death in a park.

And Monika Diamond, who owned her own business in Charlotte, North Carolina, who was shot several times while being loaded into an ambulance. She was being treated for shortness of breath when it happened.

And Kimberly Fial, who worked helping others in a homeless shelter in San Jose, California, and who was stabbed to death there.

The arc of history bends toward justice, hunh?

Unlike Black people, LGBTQ Americans were always technically allowed to vote, mainly because they hid who they were. People who didn't hide were punished by sodomy laws that crawled into their bedrooms like a prurient Big Brother.

Now, we're rolling back and picking up speed. The six conservative members of the Supreme Court are part of a conspiracy of injustice, looking to narrow the definition of peoplehood itself.

And according to laws and policies being promulgated around the country, trans people aren't fully people either, unable to get the health care they need—and there's a huge outcry over who gets to play where in which sport. (In case you were wondering, this comes up almost never.)

A last word here on cynicism. There's a great belief among many on the left that all this hate is merely a tool for the MAGA-elite—those with Harvard and Yale educations. They use this hate the way hate's always been used, for power and the abuses thereof.

Yep.

But it hardly matters what Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), or the wonderfully calculating Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are thinking behind their jaundiced eyes. And we'll never know what former—and probably again—President Donald Trump thinks about trans people. His genius for being able to tell a crowd what it wants to hear is never about what he believes.

Parents have always been easy to scare. We want to protect our children and we want them to match our expectations. That makes this hate central to the Republican message. This bigotry laced with paranoia—the terror that transsexuals are somehow coming to "get" everyone's children—is in ads, columns, TV segments, and swallows whole networks. If you live in a liberal echo chamber—if you hate the right so much that you tune them out—let this poke a hole in your bubble.

Look, if you thought all of this was behind us and we could stop paying attention, tick the box, as it were, you were wrong. I was wrong. Raising our eyebrows and gently patting our evolving children on the head isn't enough. Tolerance and allyship are not the same thing.

March, vote, shout down the bigot next door, but don't think that the battle is over and that the libs have won. If Republicans take over Congress, it looks like we're going to be pushing a lot of old rocks up the same old hills, over and over again. Let's make sure this is one of them.

Jason Fields is a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.