Donald Trump had recently finished a familiar riff about banning gender transition surgery for children when the former president, speaking to an audience of Evangelical voters, moved on to something new: a policy that would affect transgender adults.
“I will ban all taxpayer funding for sex or gender transitions at any age,” said Trump, receiving thunderous applause at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington last month. The Republican leader, who moments earlier had also pledged to reinstate a ban on transgender men and women serving in the military, paused for several seconds to soak in the crowd’s adulation.
It’s the kind of moment — and the type of policy — increasingly common on the GOP presidential campaign trail this year.
It was never about the children.
Not just it never was, it never is. Anytime you hear anyone saying something should be done to protect the children, they’re almost certainly not being honest. It’s the oldest play in the book, and it still works.
I think they are thinking of protecting the children.
They think they’re protecting the (straight cis) children from trans people. I.e. the only children they actually care about. (And maybe that excludes non-white children, too).
But that’s the issue, they only care about specifically “protecting” their kids from the scary crossdressers and penis scissors, but give a free pass for those same kids to be fetishized at a beauty pageant, molested by a church youth group leader, turned into Swiss cheese by a gunman, or exploited left and right by corrupt businesses withholding essential goods or re-instituting child labor.
The hypocrisy is that they claim they want to protect children while letting them suffer from all these other problems, which are entirely unaddressed and sometimes directly promoted by the RWNJ governments they vote for. Because it’s not really about protecting their kids; it’s about hurting strangers they’re instructed to hate.