By Ann Rostow–
We’re Going Back
After the election, our household went through a week or so of drinking and binge-watching British dramas and detective shows. After a couple of years, we watch the good shows over again from Episode One because we have only the dimmest recollection of what happened. This allows us to dive into the new season, if there is one, and also secures an endless inventory for our viewing pleasure.
We’ve also distracted ourselves with college and pro football, and college basketball is getting into gear as I write. The rest of our appalled family is filling our message board with commentary, essays, and horrific headlines. I continue to ignore these, while my wife punctuates our days with unbelievable announcements about Trump plans. My position is that I will not read this stuff or comment on any prospective news of this sort. Instead, I will wait until he does something and react at that time. Not only will this buy me another month and a half of emotional freedom from American politics, but I’m hoping it also means that I will never have to react to many or at least some of these stupendously unconstitutional prospects. We will see.
Bully for You
For about nine months in the late 1980s, I worked for Robert Maxwell, the tyrannical and corrupt British media baron who later drowned after falling off his yacht in the Canary Islands. I was only involved in a minor project, but for various reasons I wound up in a handful of small meetings with the man himself, including two one-on-ones. Maxwell was huge and intimidating and a bully. His group owned several hundred companies and he ran them in a quixotic fashion, much as I imagine Trump operates now.
Maxwell once made a phone call to one of my colleagues, put the phone to my ear and asked my unknowing colleague all sorts of questions about my performance. He pit people against each other. He was cruel. In another of the meetings, he called a man who was starting to barbecue for family and friends an hour outside of London on a Saturday and demanded answers to obscure questions concerning a deal from five or ten years earlier that had triggered an unexpected rage. The man was flustered and couldn’t answer. Maxwell ordered him to report to the office at once.
That said, Maxwell could also wave his fingers, authorize millions for a new project or acquisition without any preliminary presentation, and then move on to the next thing without looking back. I think it was that prospect—of cutting to the chase and accessing that kind of money and power—that made people put up with him, and I think it’s the same with Trump.
As for me, I finished my consulting job quickly, but the firebrand head of mergers and acquisitions, a small woman who brandished a riding crop on the executive floor, developed a big crush on me and kept giving me random assignments. Towards the end of my stint, she was doing so much cocaine that nothing was making sense and the adventure came to an end. I had no idea Maxwell was using his newspaper workers’ pension funds as a personal ATM, or pledging the same shares as collateral over and over again, but I wasn’t surprised a few years later when the business collapsed in scandal and Maxwell went under the waves off the Spanish coast.
That whole tangent was just to say that I briefly witnessed the context that I believe has seduced so many who are hoping to leverage their loyalty to Trump into a vehicle for personal advancement. No, they don’t like him. But he represents a shortcut to glorious and unanticipated success that they find irresistible.
Keep On Keeping On
I’m avoiding GLBT news only because it’s a dismal time. Anti-transgender cray cray flooded the airwaves, and you all heard Trump himself bemoan the commonplace dilemma for parents of school-aged boys, who send their son off to sixth grade where he is castrated without their consent and sent home as their daughter.
I mean, you can’t even argue with stuff like this! What do you say? Um, no. Schools aren’t arranging secret penile amputations behind everyone’s back. Haitians in Springfield aren’t eating dogs and cats. Cities aren’t in flames. Crime isn’t up, it’s down. The economy isn’t in shambles. It’s the best in the world.
I know I wasn’t going to go down this path, but can I just say that I’m tired of reading how Harris and/or “Democrats” in general made this mistake or that mistake when much of our electorate was simply living in an alternate universe?
And now, what can we say about the anti-trans lawsuits flooding the courts and rising inevitably to the highest in the land? As you may remember, the Supremes will hear arguments December 4 on whether or not to uphold Tennessee’s ban on youth transgender health care, including hormones and puberty blockers.
I’m thinking that since the Biden Justice Department filed this particular challenge to Tennessee’s bill, the Court will eventually just drop it, right? Because the Trump Justice Department will abandon the suit?
But maybe the justices are looking forward to taking a stand, and, of course, if they rule in favor of Tennessee on Equal Protection, they effectively uphold similar laws in half the other states. That said, there is also a parental rights argument that is not developed for the High Court in this case, and there are other challenges from parents of transgender kids that could be pursued around the country.
I feel depressed about this case, and all the other transgender legal challenges; girls’ sports, transgender discrimination in schools, and in the workplace. Book bannings, drag show bans. The whole ball of wax, if you will. Are we going to learn the ins and outs of all sorts of litigation, only to wind up with a 6–3 anti-GLBT majority, or maybe 5–4? Will we spend many future columns wringing our hands and parsing some well-written dissent by Jackson or Sotomayor? I can’t wait.
Meanwhile, here’s what depresses me the most. It’s that we cannot have a thoughtful national debate about gender identity in this country, even though it’s nuanced and complicated. It’s not a simple question of “civil rights for all.” What if some parents think their pre-teen daughter is going through a phase rather than becoming a transboy? Are they being cautious? Are they trying to figure it out? Or are they transphobic, the trans version of the anti-gay parents of the last century who sent their kids out into the cold on the basis of antiquated religious argle-bargle?
Who knows? But this is not like being gay, and we have basically zero long-term studies of growing up trans in the U.S.. Because we just started studying! Yet, just as Western Europe begins to recognize that we need more information, America retrenches and digs deeper into intractable mud. I refer you back to Trump’s warning about schools sending your son back as your daughter.
Keep in mind as well that even with the growth we’ve seen in transgender youth over the last decade or so (particularly among trans boys), the number of trans kids remains a tiny fraction. I’m not arguing that trans civil rights are somehow less important because the community is small. I’m saying the subject has been inflated into a national emergency through a confluence of factors: fear, lack of understanding, and the political seduction of tapping into an American majority for fundraising and rhetoric. No one thinks gender is a whimsical construct to switch on and off at will. So, it doesn’t take much exaggeration to trigger qualms across a wide range of the country.
Finally, someone wrote a great essay questioning why we are all so obsessed with making sure no one accidentally transitions. I was taken aback by this essay at first, because I think it’s pretty important not to transition without being sure of yourself. I don’t think kids should have transition surgery as a rule.
But the essay got me thinking. Young people make decisions all the time: tattoos, piercings, college major, getting married. Some get pregnant and decide to keep the baby. Some of these are good decisions. In retrospect, some may not have been. If we assume that 90 percent of people who transition are happy with their choice (I’m guessing), then we’re talking about one tenth of the aforementioned tiny fraction, and some of them might change their minds again! Is this risk so momentous that we need to ask the Supreme Court for dozens of rulings and send our lawmakers back to enact new laws every session? I don’t think so.
Yet that is where America is going.
Let’s Join the ACLU
Here’s one thing that might help. Pay the damned money that the ACLU keeps hounding us for. I got mad at the ACLU at one point because I was either a member, or I had given money, and suddenly I got targeted for donations to an annoying degree.
Just as most of us recently suffered through months of the barrage of daily texts begging for cash, it feels as if we’re being punished for contributing to a campaign or an organization. Anyway, for years I refused to give money to the ACLU and switched to some other worthy cause. But now, I’m coming back.
If you can afford it, now’s the time. I’ve given money to the GLBT groups in the past, thinking that Gay Law is even more closely attuned to my goals than the fantastic ACLU. But we don’t just need a champion for gay and trans rights now. We need a champion for the Constitution, and that’s the ACLU. Hang on, I’m going to sign up now.
Done. I asked my wife how much we should give per month and she had just signed up herself, so I added $10 a month. That’s one cocktail! We have never needed these guys more than we do now.
Death Down Under
Did you know it’s mating season for the deadly funnel-web spider in Australia? This means they’re running around looking for action, and that action might be you. One bite from this dreadful creature and you could be dead in fifteen minutes, we learn. Alternatively, if you put pressure on the bite, make a tourniquet, and get medical attention quickly (presumably within fifteen minutes), you can get an antidote and survive.
Unfortunately, it takes 150 male spiders to produce a single dose of antidote, so regular people are being asked to catch spiders when possible, and put them into a wide-mouthed plastic jar with some dirt. The male spiders don’t live very long, so you have to catch them and turn them in as fast as you can. Are you kidding me?
My source for this information is “Headline News,” one of the mysterious information providers that has lately appeared on my email, hawking clickbait stories about people falling from cruise ships, murdering neighbors, and learning to talk to monkeys.
I’m not at all confident in “Headline News” as a source. This spider story, for example, has a few logistical holes. The anti-venom was developed in 1981, they say. And there have been no reported deaths from funnel-web spider bites since then.
Really? Are we supposed to believe that, for over forty years, everyone who has faced the deadly consequences of the funnel’s fangs has made it to a medical clinic and gotten the rare anti-venom within fifteen minutes? In Australia? I’m guessing this spider is not creeping around the city streets, a ten-minute Uber away from the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s ER. It’s looking for sex in the outback waiting to pounce, a thousand miles from civilization.
The recent warnings have come from the Australian Reptile Park, a horrifying place to visit, I’m thinking. The park advised everyone “to be alert for spiders in cool, dark areas, such as shoes, laundry piles, pools, and yard debris,” and they asked people to “look for egg sacs” when they find a spider.
Um, no. I’m planning to avoid Australia during funnel-web spider mating season and possibly at other times as well.
arostow@aol.com
GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on November 21, 2024
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