What Do You See?

 

The Alameda County Sheriff's office is investigating a group of men who disrupted a drag queen storytelling event at the San Lorenzo Library Saturday with homophobic slurs. https://t.co/46G1IDQzVB

— KPIX 5 (@KPIXtv) June 12, 2022

So consider the scene--people in costume are reading books to children in a calm and unprovocative setting, and then weird violent guys show up and say horrible things with language that has no business being said in front of children. It was not weird until these people decided to come on in and make it weird. It was the Proud Boys--you know, the ones who have nothing to be proud about, accept for being accepted by the Miami-Dade GOP and being affiliated with the insurrectionists. Maybe they haven't decided to be as entirely domestic terrorist as Patriot Front this Pride month, but they definitely decided to make an impact. 

Just as a necessary follow-on to what I posted about yesterday--this movement is aiming increasingly harsh public harassment at gender-nonconforming people in what looks to me like a way to "disappear" LGBT people. Like Gov. DeSantis (who was protested today at Chelsea Piers by Chelsea queers) whose "Don't say Gay" law tries to put people back in the closet and jeopardize the employment of LGBT teachers by focusing attention on whether they mention a basic facet of their personal lives, a lot of the legislation that pretends to "spare the children" from adult topics is really aimed at just making it publicly difficult to be any kind of queer. 

Take bathroom bills--you know who gets pinged as not being their assigned gender? People who just don't look (pick that gender) enough. I think of women with short hair or who had mastectomies (or maybe just not a lot of breast to start with for any reason)  or hirsutism, who don't necessarily dress feminine enough. Should you have to live feminine drag as a woman to just go and pee? And when applied to school settings, it really feels like singling kids out for bullying on the basis of their gender presentation or sexuality--

Look, I remember vividly that bullying when I was a teen took on a sexual aspect. Adults should know better than to add fuel to that. 

And then there's laws like the Ohio law that would mandate genital inspections for suspected trans kids in school sports. If you've ever seen the competitiveness of some of these nasty parents, you know this isn't going to be about just gender presentation, but will just be used to bully kids who are that kid. The ones who are too good. They will wreck girls sports (boys will be boys, I don't doubt) not because they fear one trans girl in the whole lot, but because--

maybe there is just something about women's sports in general they can't put a finger on. 

Just like the moral panics over CRT and masking in the classroom erupting in asshole protests, this shit looks like public harassment to me, and is taking on a more violent and sinister tack. When I talk about it being about mandatory heteronormativity, I'm not joking, I think that just like manly McMannersons with guns (incels who think violence is a path to getting laid) and whatnot are supposed to signify some kind of patriarchal bullshit, they want women to ultimately get their tradwife on. 

And women in general came a long way to say no to that (I fail to understand the TERF movement and deliberately never will, because trans women gave queer women so much of our life). I am using my time to say we are not doing compulsory heterosexuality, and we are definitely not going to accept its codification in the law, and if Stonewall was a riot, hunty, these fashes do not understand that fairies have had boots on the ground for a long damn time. 

The movement against LGBT people is ugly and it has nothing to do with saving kids. TPUSA has some asshole who is a Kyle Rittenhouse stan out there taking photos of kids at Pride parades without permission--they aren't about protecting kids, and militia twits invading Drag Story time isn't about sparing kids at all either. It's about threatening people into not being themselves. When in the end, all we have is who we are. And I would rather be someone who respected others and wanted people to live their truth. And I would not rather be a bullying asshole.