Written by Ella Fortine, Editor
The conservative outrage over fraudulent, purposefully inflammatory pamphlets supporting trans youth illustrates the mindset behind this aspect of the culture war.
Two years ago, last election season, I was (unwillingly) at a donor meeting for Corona-Norco school board candidate Jami Merchant, where Chad Bianco spoke. He praised Merchant, expounding upon the importance of protecting our children from the evils of wokeism ever present in California schools. He gave fictionalized examples of Democrats trying to institute sex-reassignment surgery centers on high school campuses and banning campus police officers due to nonsensical claims of “racial discrimination”.
The panic around transgender students that is so prevalent on the right has not ceased, and is pathetically easy to stoke. That panic came in handy when, in the three weeks before the midterm elections, Democrats were heightening their hopes of flipping a senate seat in Texas, a hope that has now been fulfilled.
Texas senate candidate James Talarico was making strides as election day neared, while his opponent Ken Paxton was trailing by around five points in the most recent polls before Talarico’s historic victory. This came amidst Paxton’s criminal and civil allegations, in the form of twenty articles of impeachment filed during his position as Texas’ attorney general.
Now, of course, the key strategy for Republicans down on their luck is the culture war. The culture war is a never ending, infinitely expendable resource for rage, attention, and votes. Sexually and ethnically diverse people will always exist, and thus, conservatives will always have a place to turn when the polls aren’t going their way.
The ploy in this race was to create fake flyers aimed at transgender children, specifically with the intention of outraging conservative parents, regardless of whether or not their children were actually trans. These flyers offered resources to trans youth, including information on how to legally emancipate themselves, but the organization behind the flyers was found to be a fictitious company registered in Wyoming. This did not stop the flyers from going viral throughout right-wing spaces, as many conservatives expressed outrage over the idea of the left “brainwashing” and “stealing” their children.
An especially exploitable facet of the culture war is transgender youth, even when the panic is completely manufactured. This is, in its entirety, due to core conservative principles regarding children and the family.
The right has always pushed the nuclear family and heteroconformity, so continued outrage over the existence of transgender people is nothing new. What the pamphlets illustrate, however, is the specific possessiveness conservatism pushes over children.
Fearmongering threats to children is always a successful tactic; children are dear to the adults in their lives and the most vulnerable in a society. However, the argument against the existence of trans children is rooted in a toxic ownership over children, not simply parental love.
The information on how a child can legally emancipate themselves from their parents if their identity is not supported was met with exaggerated outrage, this legal right made into the harbinger of the death of the family. Emancipation is a process that the child would have to begin themselves, and conservatives never seem to ask what would push a child to start that process, or why it exists in the first place.
Legal emancipation is incredibly difficult, both emotionally and bureaucratically. It requires that a child desire to entirely separate themselves from the people that raised them, and that child would probably need resources and support to bring this process to completion.
Many children are not met with support for their queer identities, but often choose to wait until adulthood to go “no contact” with their parents and come out. Emancipation reflects a child who cannot, for any reason, wait until their eighteen years is up. It speaks to a child who feels so unsupported, targeted, and abused that they would choose to have a court free them from their home life.
This is an expression of that child’s legal rights to their own bodily autonomy and wellbeing. That is what the conservative mind cannot comprehend.
The reason conservatives are so easily outraged by the existence of trans children is because they view children—and women—as property. Property ownership is essential to conservatism, it is what puts it at fundamental odds with any semblances of Marxist ideas, but also what pushes the patriarchal nuclear family that removes rights and autonomy from women and children alike, who are under the “man of the house.” Trans children, the existence of them, their rights, their healthcare, and their emancipation, deny the patriarch the right to property that he is owed under conservatism, and instead, confirms the humanity of his children.
The flyers went viral because of the never ending culture war, yes, but that culture war is only possible because conservatism places women and children into property boxes to be maintained and ruled tyrannically. Transness inherently defies those bounds, and slaps conservatives in the face with the fact that they cannot control their children as they do property, they cannot control gender as they do land, and they cannot deny humanity to the humans they produced.
These flyers did not give Ken Paxton the victory Republicans so desperately wanted; instead, as much as conservatives hate it, transgender people in Texas now have a senator who will fight for them in James Talarico.