This Pride, I want to get real with you about gender— specifically how powerful, rich white men have created a massive disinformation campaign, across all media platforms, to get you to hate your transgender neighbors. We have seen this in nonstop media that implies transgender people are a danger to women and children.
But here’s something we don’t question: why?
Trans people have been around as long as people have been on this planet. We not new here.
But circa 2018 or so, trans people suddenly became a popular target in every school board, in every clearly doctored video vilifying a trans woman, in every think piece that turned trans people into a talking point (without ever letting trans people speak for themselves). Instead, we have seen a massive campaign to get a whole lot of people who don’t even know trans people thinking way too much (and way less critically) about trans kids, trans women, and transgender people of all genders.
The drumbeat has always been the same: trans people are predators of women and a a danger to children. They even call us groomers.
If we return to the time period when these transphobic stories began to become ubiquitous, and take a step back, we will recognize that all of these stories started to pick up in the wake of the #MeToo movement—when all of us were holding filthy rich and/or powerful white men to account for their rampant sexual abuse of women, children, and gender expansive people.
In response, these powerful men do what most filthy rich white men do: they change the news cycle to dodge accountability. They pay millions for a massive disinfo campaign to tell you that it’s actually transgender people (a small and largely misunderstood social group) who’s the real danger to women and children.
How “interesting,” right?!?
Because just a second ago we were talking about Harvey Weinstein, the Epstein files, how Trump thinks brags about assaulting women, how ever other week there’s a new story about a white Christian extremist arrested for human trafficking and the sexual assault of children—or how every other month a news story surfaces about a group of “promising young men” who drugged and gang-raped their peer and video taped it.
This was the convo we were having.
And then we got “DARVOed1” by rich white men, who manufactured a pariah for the general public to hate so that they could, once again, escape accountability.
And who’d they choose? The people predatory men always choose to scapegoat: someone too vulnerable to fight back, someone on the margins of society because people don’t really understand them. This time, they chose our transgender people.
Neighbor, it’s time to take back the narrative.
This pride month, I want to encourage my neighbors to demonstrate solidarity with trans people by challenging the well-funded hate propaganda spoon-fed to us in the media— a manufactured crisis (kinda like the Guard in Los Angeles) so that you don’t talk about rich and/or powerful white men and their penchant for serially sexually abusing people with impunity (like how Trump is in the Epstein files).
It’s time to call out the bullshit as a way to hold space for our neighbors and resist the creep of fascism that keeps rich-ass white men in power and prevents them from ever being held accountable.
Enough.
Being allies means recognizing that solidarity keeps all of us safe from harm and taking the steps to hold the line so that bullies creep back into the shadows where they belong: relived, not celebrated for their depravity.
DARVO: deny/distract, attack, reverse, victim, and offender
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