It’s been a banner year for anti-transgender hate in America, the result of a concerted effort by the right to alienate and attack trans people.
As a result of the mass shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville on Monday, conservatives have only ramped up their anti-trans rhetoric, misrepresenting the shooter’s alleged gender identity in what they say is a civilizing war by all trans people against Christianity, even as Republicans across the country have thrown their weight behind hundreds of bills that would strip trans people of their basic rights.
Police has said the shooter identified as transgender, a claim that trans activists and journalists They have criticized because it is not verified, but they also noted that the shooter was a former student of the school. Authorities have yet to identify a specific motive for the attack. The shooter was killed by police at the school.
However, right-wing commentators have declared that the shooting, which left three children and three adults dead, was nothing less than the beginning of a bloody battle.
On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson, the The most seen country cable news commentator, called “the trans movement”, the “natural enemy” of Christianity. Christianity and “transgender orthodoxy,” he said, were incompatible and “on a collision course with each other.”
“It’s likely that one side will draw blood before the other side,” Carlson said before referring to the shooting. “Yesterday morning, tragically, our fears were confirmed.”
On the right, major players are characterizing trans people not just as “groomers,” an attack that plays on centuries-old fears of children being targeted by LGBTQ+ people, but as violent actors.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), newly empowered due to his alliance with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), asked out loud on Monday, “How many hormones like testosterone and medication for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking?” (Police have not said anything about any medication the shooter may have been taking.) Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com who has spent millions of dollars casting doubt on Democrats’ electoral victories, he asked his Twitter followers on Wednesday, referring to trans people, “How many will they kill in schoolyards to get revenge? Why don’t people want them hanging around in lingerie with kids?
The data on mass shootings could not be clearer: the vast majority are committed by cisgender men. And trans people are much more likely than cisgender people to be the victims of violent crimes.
And yet, after the shooting, right-wing media personalities exaggerated the claim that there have been four trans or non-binary people accused of mass shootings in recent months. Among them is the accused attacker who killed five, including two trans people, at a Colorado Springs, Colorado, gay nightclub last year. Although the alleged shooter’s attorney has asserted in legal filings that the defendant uses they/them pronouns, some are skeptical: the police say the suspect ran a neo-Nazi website, used a slur for a gay person and posted an image of a rifle scope pointed at a gay pride parade. A former neighbor told NBC News: “I think it’s an insult to those people who are actually going through personal struggles with their own sexuality and their own personal identity.”
However, Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who has allowed the platform to become a haven for far-right voices and has been running the company while tweeting mentioning the “barber” narrative have increased by 119% — answered to a post about the four accused shooters with a “!” comment. donald trump jr. declared “a clear epidemic of trans/non-binary mass shooters,” prompting notes from Twitter users about the thousands of cisgender male shooters who didn’t receive the same scrutiny.
Even the terror felt by the trans community is weaponized against them: After NBC News reported about the fear permeating Nashville’s trans community following the school shooting, including a drag performer who noted that she had hired armed guards for an upcoming show, said far-right media personality Matt Walsh The report highlighted “trans privilege.” Walsh, whose Twitter bio boasts of being labeled “theocratic fascist” and “transphobic of the year,” added that “they,” collectively referring to trans people, had massacred children.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
“A Truly Scary Moment”
Rhetorical attacks on trans people have been accompanied this year by a spate of legislation targeting them.
Although there were fewer than 70 anti-trans bills introduced annually in state legislatures through 2020, there were 144 proposed in 2021, 174 proposed last year, and a whopping 490 proposed in the first three months of 2023 alone. according to Trans Legislation Trackera database of invoices.
Andrew Bales, who created the website, told HuffPost that states have already enacted 23 of the bills this year, nearly matching the 26 anti-trans bills passed across the country in all of 2022.
Bales said that while certain proposals continued from previous years, such as restrictions on bathroom use and school sports, state legislators have sponsored numerous bills in 2023 on gender non-conforming performance, creating legal definitions that could go much further. of drag shows, along with bills legislating the behavior of trans children in schools. Bales also noted a sharp increase in gender-affirming healthcare-targeted bills: 148 proposed so far in 2023, more than the last five years combined.
Some legislations would extend bans on trans health coverage to patients up to age 26. Other invoices classify this medical care as child maltreatment.
“This is a really scary time, and I hope a lot of people see this and understand the kind of attacks that are really happening against trans people and the level of threat that is out there,” Bales said.
The bills are part of a broader movement to hate LGBTQ+ people in the United States.
In November, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) said anti-LGBTQ+ mobilization had “rised to its highest levels” since the project began tracking US data. in 2020. A spokesperson for the group, Sam Jones, told HuffPost in an email that while the end of 2022 remains a high point (ACLED recorded 240 total anti-LGBTQ+ incidents last year), “the mobilization anti-LGBTQ+ continues at very high levels.”
“If you compare the first quarter of 2023 to the same period last year, for example, it is four times higher,” Jones said in an email. Recorded incidents this year include protests outside family-friendly venues Drag Queen Story Time events and at medical clinics that offer gender-affirming care to transgender people. Members of the Proud Boys, the far-right street gang that played an integral role in the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021, frequently attend these events.
On Thursday, a police department in Ohio recommended cancel a planned drag brunch at a community church due to a “realistic threat that organized protests and counter-protests could result in violence.” The previous Sunday, before the Nashville shooting, the church announced that Molotov cocktails had been thrown on the property and that a sign had been smashed with a sledgehammer, according to WJW-TV in Cleveland.
For Bales, who has been tracking the right-wing’s aggressive approach to the trans community for years, the recent attacks feel like an extension of years of bigotry, an “extreme backlash” that harkens back to a huge victory for the LGBTQ+ community. , the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.
“I think this year is really starting to kick in…the same bills are being introduced (in different states), the rhetoric is changing so unbelievably” at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), they said. “It’s a really scary thing to see.”
