I am a cis male. I was not, am not, and shall not be anything else. I am happy with my foreskin. I have no experience with non-cis people. The only people whom I know to have varied sexually from the statistical norm are a bisexual mother, a lesbian sister, and a number of gay or lesbian friends of theirs or mine. I have lived a pretty sheltered life when it comes to matters of diverse sexual proclivities and relationships.
To listen to any number of politicians or political pundits on the Right, perhaps I should be terrified. Apparently, transgender people are a clear and present danger to the American people and their way of life.
Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, famous for her efforts to ban the first transgender congresswoman Sarah McBride of Delaware from the bathroom in Congress, quickly called for the institutionalization of transgender people….[R]epresentative Ronny Jackson of Texas advocated for the same, saying: ‘We have to treat these people … we have to get them off the streets and we have to get them off the internet and we can’t let them communicate with one another. I’m all about free speech, but this is a virus. This is a cancer that is spreading across this country’ (Erin Reed, “Transgender Americans are seeing a wave of hate unleashed by Charlie Kirk’s killing,” The Guardian, 25 Sep 2025, 7:00 EDT).
[Charlie] Kirk opposed transgender rights and his organization sponsored rallies against transgender medical care. In April 2024, he likened doctors who perform gender-affirming care to Nazis committing atrocities. [¶] ‘One issue I think that is so against our senses, so against the natural law and dare I say a throbbing middle finger to God, is the transgender thing happening in America right now,’ he said during a speech posted in 2023 by Right Wing Watch. [¶] In the same speech, he cited a Bible verse [Deuteronomy 22:5] saying that a woman who puts on men’s clothes or a man who puts on a woman’s garment is an ‘abomination.’ (Helen Coster and Maria Tsvetkova, Reuters, “Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric inspired supporters, enraged foes,” Reuters, 13 Sep 2025, 4:06 MDT; updated 15 Sep)
Despite my naïveté, I am puzzled by Kirk’s mingling of transgenderism and crossdressing. I am even more puzzled by what is it about transgender people which prompts such violent ravings. I can think of no reason for institutionalizing transgender people, and Mace, Jackson, and Kirk offer none. The medical profession—I still believe that trained personnel are more knowledgeable and more sensible in their field than elected officials or partisan orators—knows no reason for institutionalizing or isolating transgender people (Mace, Jackson) or denying them medical care (Kirk). I quote from Wikipedia:
The major medical opinion of transgender people from prominent health organizations is that being transgender is a normal human variation, and gender-affirming care (including hormones and surgery) is medically necessary to improve physical and mental well-being. While transgender people share many health needs with the general population, they often experience disproportionately high rates of mental health issues, substance use, and chronic conditions due to the chronic stress of stigma, discrimination, and violence they face. Therefore, access to safe, evidence-based, comprehensive care is crucial to their health.
In other words, transgender people are people with an internal mismatch between their sex and their gender. Ironically, Kirk’s “natural law” is against what nature itself creates, namely, some people who are biologically, physiologically, and psychologically misaligned. Hormones, surgery, and therapy are medical means to realign them. Kirk’s equating Nazi atrocities with medical relief is an obscenity revealing his moral obtuseness or rhetorical malpractice. Nazis acted on people against their will; American doctors operate on people requesting their services.
And the “chronic conditions” which transgender people suffer, people like Mace, Jackson, and Kirk have caused. Their means: insulting, stigmatizing, snubbing, shunning, threatening, bullying, and violence. Jackson’s approach promises, not appropriate treatment, but cruel punishment. He would “treat” transgender people by isolating them from all others—“off the streets,” “off the internet,” and incommunicado even from other transgender people. Jackson favors “free speech, but.” His metaphors—to him, the transgender condition is a “virus” or a “cancer”; non-metaphorically, it is none of the above—reveals that his ignorance fuels his fear of contagion and that his fear of contagion fuels his vitriol. Such are the primitive responses to the unfamiliar by pre- or non-scientific people. Such is the way people used to treat “lunatics” or lepers until science learned how to deal with their conditions. A notable exception is Jesus, famous for showing compassion to lepers, and touching and curing them. Like “free speech but,” Mace, Jackson, Kirk, and many like them profess a “Christian faith, but,” one devoid of compassion for transgender people who face both personal struggles and social pressures.
Their fear of a medically unfamiliar condition—unfamiliarity probably resulting from self-repression—leads to these metaphors of diseases and fears of contagion. Such is their paranoia. It seems strange. I assume that transgender people look so much like people that it is hard to tell the difference. I quip, of course, but to make a point. Every transgender person is a person and, if born or naturalized in the United States, a citizen thereof. So there is no basis whatsoever for treating them otherwise, particularly depriving them of the rights enjoyed by others. I suppose the response by transgender paranoids is to claim a belief in “due process, but.”
The exploitation of this widespread paranoia makes for divisive and dangerous politics. Of course, Trump takes the lead in denigrating transgender people and depriving them of their constitutional rights. A successful attack on this group might lead to attacks on other groups. That threat is heightened by his attack on birthright citizenship. If his challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment were successful, Trump might be able to jeopardize the rights of any disfavored group because alternative definitions of citizenship would require the stipulation of approved or disapproved characteristics of race, sex, gender, religion, ethnicity, ancestry, or geographic origins. By paring off first this, then that, minority group, he would be able to purify America of the groups of people who he deems pollute its white Christian population. Thus, the attack on transgender people is more than an assault on a disfavored group; it is also a part of a campaign in a larger war by Christian nationalists against constitutional democracy.
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