Imagine if the only thing that anyone ever wanted to know about you is what sports team you were going to play with.
Would you feel like some kind of GAA prodigy? Or would you quickly start to resent other people's interference in your own personal decisions?
Now imagine if the only thing that people ever wanted to know about you is what bathroom you're going to use today. Even on an airline flight, where bathrooms are unisex.
Would this prying into your personal life start to weigh you down? Would a public inquisition every time you needed to spend a penny start to get on your nerves?
I imagine it would. We don't think about the hostility we create for transgender people, we don't even see it. Instead of treating them like people we treat them like they're a controversial national debate.
We even treat them like they're a three-ring circus, instead of ordinary people like ourselves trying to get through their day with as much dignity as they can muster.
Take the recent brouhaha over Dylan Mulvaney, the trans star with the Irish name who sent some conservatives into an internet meltdown when she was paid to promote Budweiser Light in a recent advertising spot.
If you're angry about a company hiring a trans star to promote cheap beer, sports bras, or whatever she's shilling for this week, instead of being angry about the unfettered sale of AR-15s that are being used almost every week to kill our children, then you might want to have a wee word with yourself about your personal priorities and the things you're getting worked up about.
If you're on the internet with a sinister, threatening baseball bat message or an AR-15 shooting up cans of beer we already know much more about you than you intended.
America's been buying beer from a company that doesn't even know which restroom to use.
There's a new beer in town! pic.twitter.com/JHm4BspZwB
— SETH WEATHERS (@sethweathers) April 12, 2023
No one has spoken about the faded performer Kid Rock since the 1990s, so the sight of the now 52-year-old blasting up crates of Bud with his AR-15 (to protest the company's decision to hire trans star Mulvaney as a brand ambassador) may have escaped your notice.
I wouldn't blame you if you haven't heard about it, because no one I know has heard from this thug in decades. But the sheer ugliness, the anti-LGBT insanity, of his decision to badly shoot up a half dozen crates of Bud Light beer with an assault weapon was an attempt to send a message to the country about what kind of people are allowed to exist and what kind of people are not.
It was one of the most openly Neo-Nazi things I have ever seen in this country. The message was as hateful as it was murderous. And some idiots will act on that message. And when they do remember how easily people like Kid Rock sent the get-them message. And then Donald Trump invited him to be his guest at a prize fight.
— KidRock (@KidRock) April 4, 2023
Meanwhile, on his increasingly unhinged conspiracy festival of a nightly show, Fox News hate inciter Tucker Carlson called trans people “the most dangerous extremist movement in America.” This is also Nazi-level propaganda. For Carlson, the mere existence of trans people is a dangerous political movement, not a millennia-long globally documented variation within gender.
Tucker's only job is to get your grandparents' generation angry about some issue they will never actually encounter whilst the party he shills for – the GOP – drafts policies to further impoverish them and strip them of their rights and health care.
Fox News has been the ultimate form of bait and switch this nation has ever seen. Owned and controlled by billionaires, it's a nightly Three Card Monty that makes you focus on idiotic distractions whilst you're being fleeced. That it works as well as it does prove there's a market for rage and hatred that will always outsell insight and thought.
I know many trans people. I am related to one. I don't think they are “the most dangerous extremist movement in America.” In fact, they have more to fear from Fox News viewers with AR-15s than the other way around.
Statistics show that about every ten days from the New Year, 2023 a trans person has been murdered in the United States. They were not murdered by fellow trans people, but I am guessing you know that already.
As Irish commentator Joe Brolly remarked recently, reducing trans people to two questions – sports and loos – diminishes their humanity and is a pretense that permits you to loathe them publicly. Would it kill you to mind your own business and treat them with some basic respect instead? Because your refusal to grant them respect is contagious and is quite literally killing them.
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