Baffled European

Category: Trans

  • Live by the gun

    I’d never heard of Charlie Kirk until last week. His last words before he was murdered were a racial slur as he worked himself up to some transphobia.

    He lived as he died. He had clear views on the possibility of being shot by a gunman:

    “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

    It’s pretty clear he intends other people to take the bullets for him, but he can’t complain too much if he turns out to be one of the expendable ones.

    His trade was a mish-mash of racism, sexism, homophobia and especially transphobia. Mainly, he was loyal to his president. A president who, raging at his death, promised revenge on the left for what they had done.

    The left. All of them.

    Meanwhile, the FBI was trying to find out who did it. The agency has been gutted, with many sacked for being “woke” to the extent that nothing works. So the FBI looked busy while doing nothing, but basically waited until the parents of the shooter handed him in to police.

    Another right-wing gun nut, as it turns out. Like the one who shot the Republican candidate last year.

    Doesn’t matter. Full purge of “the left” anyway. And extra, they are trying to connect the murder to transes. They’ve gone insane, all of them.

  • Niemöller

    Everybody has heard the poem or something like it attributed to Martin Niemöller.

    First they came for the transes, but I wasn’t trans, and in any case I’d been bombarded with nazi garbage for years and lost both my humanity and ability to think critically for myself and they deserve it anyway toilets are the last safe haven for any woman.

    Something like that. Far-right nutters used to solemnly quote the poem a few years ago. Every time one of their number was martyred by Twitter for repeatedly breaking the terms and conditions they had agreed to when signing up for the account. Sometimes they had to rely on columns in national newspapers to get their message across. Fortunately for their plight, they were rescued by a billionaire who does nazi salutes.

    Trans was just the starter anyway. There is a bigger prize. The Supreme Court is going to have another look at the question of gay marriage, in order to see if it is still commensurate with the modern world and its values.

    The far-right are already designing vectors to blame transes for what is going to happen, rather than the people who are in charge and making the decisions. It’s always somebody else’s fault, that’s what it means when you take personal responsibility so seriously.

    It’s all going to end very badly, obviously, but who is next? Or at what point will it stop?

  • A white house in a red square

    This might be counted as good news, but for the fact that it is simply undoing an obvious wrong by the government. There was in edict that trans people must have their birth name and gender on their passports. This has been overturned. It is now once again possible for trans people to get a passport with their legal, chosen name, rather than a government mandated name.

    All this name stuff highlights a few inconsistencies. The birth name of the Vice President is “James Donald Bowman”, but he changed this to “James David Vance”. Should he be forced to readopt his birth name? I guess not.

    More concerning is the case of Sergio Gor, the man in charge of appointing and vetting all White House personnel. His birth name is Sergio Gorokhovsky. He claims to be from Malta, but was definitely not born there. His keeps his actual birthplace a secret, but he does confirm it is not Russia. OK. However, being born in 1986, the big happy family that was the USSR still existed. Could that be the “not Russia” that he is talking about?

    At any rate, he has not been vetted for his position and refuses to cooperate with security checks. An imposition, considering all the money he paid over the years to get the job. At the same time, thousands of trans soldiers are being discharged with a black mark on their record, implying they are a security risk.

    There is something very wrong here.

  • The most powerful minority ever

    For a fleeting moment, it looked like a sliver of sense was about to insert itself into the immigration mania in the USA. A proclamation announced that farm and hotel workers would not be targeted for deportation. Both these sectors are being hit hard by the ICE raids and they are desperate at this time of the year.

    I’m guessing Brooke Rollins, the SoS for Agriculture, managed to get the president’s ear for long enough to get relief of some kind in the matter. The affected employers are typically Republican and they don’t want to antagonise their own voters too much.

    With all the conflicting interests in the White House, this could not last long. A long missive on Truth Social soon appeared, ordering the entire federal government, including the Pentagon, to begin mass deportations in cities. Although from the president’s account, this was almost certainly written by Stephen Miller. He tried to copy his master’s rambling incoherence, but it’s difficult to do. And I’ve tried.

    There’s no secret to this anymore. They are explicitly targeting “Democrat Power Centers”. That is, cities controlled by Democrats. All with black mayors, coincidentally. This policy has already caused such a reaction that the regime finds it necessary to call in the military. So now they escalate the situation further. It is tantamount to declaring civil war.

    Their justification for this? Trans. Nothing these people say makes any sense at all anymore.

  • No pride

    The FBI is officially ignoring white collar crime. Prosecutions for various forms of fraud – including consumer scams, identity theft and insurance fraud – have dropped by a half, tendency still falling.

    Only natural. The administration has been disbanding anti-corruption units and directing all its resources to immigration. Ignoring actual real crime in order to criminalise people who have done nothing wrong. It’s the way things work in the modern USA.

    It’s not just immigration though. The administration attempted to ban gender affirming treatment for trans people and withdraw all funding. The usual. This was slapped down by the courts as being illegal, like everything else this government does. As a result, the FBI is now charged with investigating “abuse” or “mutilation” concerning trans people and their treatment. There is nothing to investigate of course – this is a means to harass doctors and patients, nothing to do with crime.

    There has been a surge in violent crime against trans people, a result of the increasingly hysterical hatred of maga. This is not to mention the cases of cis women being attacked when trying to use the toilet. Maga has done a really good job of stirring up mindless hatred, you have to hand it to them.

    They are only getting warmed up with their persecution. It’s Pride this month, so they have closed the Dupont Circle park in DC to stop the party. There will be more of this sort of thing.

  • Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar

    I have a problem with the Supreme Court of the USA. This is unlikely to bother the justices there, but I’m going to complain anyway.

    The issue this time is lifting the protections that 300000 Venezuelans had against deportation. The Supreme Court has decided that they shouldn’t receive the protection of the law as a group, but rather fight each case on an individual basis. This is the same solution that they found with the purge of trans soldiers from the military.

    Laws control and limit human behaviour. They allow society to function by discouraging a range of destructive impulses. At the same time, they protect us and promote acceptable behaviour. Most of all, the law should be viewed as a system created by humans in order to serve humans.

    There is a breed of judge which regards the law as a clever logic puzzle. It is an enclosed, (fairly) consistent system, which can produce very unexpected results, if you set your mind to it.

    This approach enslaves humans to the law. So what if hundreds of thousands of people have their lives ruined? So what if it leaves them at the mercy of an over-powerful and vengeful executive? It fits in with their interpretation of the law, fine.

    Germany doesn’t get everything right, but emphasising human dignity in the first line of the constitution sets a good example. It tells judges exactly where their priorities lie. The US judges are failing at their job.

  • Shameful

    The trans military ban is back. This was one of the first actions of Pete Hegseth. He wanted to sack all trans soldiers – over ten thousand of them – because trans people are incapable of “an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life”.

    That this is obvious nonsense was pointed out by two judges when they overturned the order. You can’t punish a group of people just because of political or ideological reasons.

    Obviously, the administration escalated this to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has suspended the injunction against the ban. They did not offer any explanation for their decision. Nor are there any names attached to the ruling, but the 6–3 division leaves no doubt that it is on entirely doctrinal lines.

    The ruling allows two things. First, the government can do as it pleases. Second, litigation can continue in parallel. This can take years and will not prevent thousands of people from having their lives ruined by this capricious government.

    The Supreme Court did exceptionally give a strong ruling about returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which the administration is obstructing. However, this case looks to be a more typical example of their approach. They will allow the government to do anything it wants on fine procedural grounds, ignoring the real issue. The administration can salami-slice the constitution with the full blessing of the Supreme Court, regardless of what lower courts say.

    The protections offered by the constitution are effectively gone.

  • Trans obsession

    Maine has distinguished itself by not implementing a set of illegal orange orders intended to persecute transes. The astonishingly thin-skinned president has reacted by withdrawing money for school dinners. Classy. And illegal. He is also now illegally withholding money for the Maine prison system for the same reason.

    Southern states are taking the initiative. Florida has just sacked a teacher for calling a student by their preferred name, not as recorded on their birth certificate. This is a new law that they are zealously enforcing. Mississippi is banning all books about trans from public and research libraries on the grounds of “obscenity”.

    RFK is putting the NIH over to studying transition “regret” as part of his effort to destroy science and punish scientists. He’s got the best worm-eaten brains working on a report to say trans doesn’t exist.

    Trans people exist because they say they exist. Maga, on the other hand insists that transes don’t exist. This isn’t a difference of opinion, “both siding”. On the one hand, transes are an observable pattern of human behaviour which is consistent across the world; on the other, maga makes a blunt assertion forced through by the power of the state. Maga is telling people what they must feel or believe, and how they must lead their lives. They don’t listen to anybody: they order people what to think. Or else.

    It is rank, irrational prejudice. This is after only three months.

  • Academic freedom

    I saw a scatter graph recently, showing how many Nobel prizes each country had won over the years. Germany was the clear Weltmeister until 1933, when the number of awards suddenly dropped, never to recover. The USA, followed by the UK, have been dominant since 1945.

    There’s a good chance this will change. The USAians are happily destroying their university system. Some reasons are transparently ridiculous, such as withholding $175million from Penn because they had a trans swimmer in their team. Florida has sacked a professor because he is a Chinese refugee. Harvard and Columbia are both knuckling down to suppress unwanted opinions or disband departments that the government doesn’t like.

    These elite universities have collected literally billions in endowments over the years. I get that there might be a tight spot in the short term, but they don’t need government money. Instead of compromising their charter and sacrificing academic freedom, they are genuinely in a position to say no. For whatever reason, they don’t do this.

    The exodus is starting, with academics seeking new positions in Canada and Europe. This is indeed a good opportunity to attract the brightest and best, if the USA doesn’t want talent anymore. Not to mention that many foreign scholars are too scared to enter the country even for conferences, let alone for permanent positions.

    We won’t see the effects of this for a few years, but it’s pre-programmed.

  • They know better

    A great success of Maga has been the normalisation of transphobia. They’ve been preparing this for a long time.

    Their message was simple. Transes are deviants, perverts, mentally ill, weirdos and you don’t want them anywhere near your children mark my words you’ll regret it if you do. Easy to understand, as this was essentially exactly the same set of slurs aimed at the gays since forever, even though they all turned out to be completely wrong.

    Now they are in power so they can start their persecution. Like everything else they do, this involves ignoring or denying what others say, while using the full power of the state to enforce their own baseless prejudice.

    The most prominent case is the sacking of all serving trans soldiers in the military. This has gone to court and the government doesn’t know its own policy, has provided false and misleading evidence in support, and has attempted to undermine the legal procedure.

    No surprises there. The policy is based on an irrational hatred of trans people, nothing more. All this is part of a grind to dehumanise transes, to push them out of mainstream society, to “other” them.

    Rather than deal with reality, they want to live in a world where transes don’t exist. So they are implementing policies that yet again explicitly deny reality. Do they really think that denying the existence of something means it actually doesn’t exist?