In the morning thread, valued commenter Scout211 recommended a lengthy HuffPo piece authored by Christopher Mathlas:
He’s The Trans Son Of An Anti-Trans Influencer. It’s His Turn To Speak.
Renton Sinclair’s mother is a former Miss Illinois who wants to force trans people out of public life. That’s exactly what makes her a rising star in MAGA World.
It’s long but very much worth your time, and there’s no paywall. A few brief excerpts:
Renton doesn’t talk to Tania [the shitty mom] anymore. But Tania is always talking about Renton these days, on podcasts and livestreams and stages across the country, from California to South Dakota to Pennsylvania. She often tells the story of how God appeared to her in a dream before her first child was born, telling her what to name her child, a name with Biblical origins…
Tania joined this scrum of fledgling moral panic capitalists sometime during the pandemic. By January 2022, she’d lost her day job — a firing Tania has said stemmed not from her opposition to trans people but from statements she’d made against vaccine mandates and about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol…
The mom is a religious fanatic, but Mathlas is right to call her a “moral panic capitalist” because she has avidly monetized her estrangement from her own child. Thank dog he escaped that cruel, money-grubbing weirdo, who sounds like a cross between Kari Lake and the mother from “Carrie.”
What makes [Renton] angry is that the pain in these pages [his childhood journal] — their chronicles of depression and confusion, an overdose, and wanting deeply every day to die — is what so many politicians across the country want to inflict on trans people. To codify that cruelty he experienced, that sheer unkindness, into law. Like his mom, these legislators are uninterested in listening to trans people like Renton. To listen to them would mean seeing them as something besides a convenient wedge issue — the latest scapegoat to be sacrificed in a cynical ploy for votes and clout. To listen to them would mean to know the people they’re trying to disappear.
It’s all so vulgar and cynical, the Repub cultivation of this “wedge issue.” Mathlas goes into that a bit, recounting an idiotic public appearance by Trump in which he marveled delightedly at the crowd’s enthusiasm for his remarks denouncing “transgender insanity:”
“It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, if I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that,” Trump said, imitating a polite golf clap. “I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was.”
It is amazing that the Repub base are programmable meat-sacks that people like Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo, Chaya Raichik, etc., can wind up and aim at a small and vulnerable community. And of course that repulsive bag of liposuction clinic medical waste Trump is happy to jump on the hate bandwagon — any hate bandwagon — if there are votes and dollars in it.
Anyhoo, Renton sounds heroically well-adjusted considering the upbringing he had from his deranged nightmare of a mother. Check the story out if you get a chance.
Open thread.
BruceFromOhio
To codify the cruelty is exactly the point, the purpose of it all.
sdhays
Trump is such a cynical, disingenuous bullshitter, but stupidly transparent, that’s it’s quite a view into how these things happen – he clearly doesn’t give a shit one way or the other about transgender people (or gay people, for that matter), but he’s like, “well, it’s a good applause line, so hating on T is where I’ll go”.
I’m reminded of the ugly quote from George Wallace – he lost an election because his opponent ran on segregation and he determined he “would never be “out-<racist epithet> again”.
They’re all such pieces of shit.
BeautifulPlumage
OT someone using Renton as a name is very weird to me. Renton is the city I grew up in & live in now. This is the first time I’ve seen it as a person’s name.
Betty Cracker
@BeautifulPlumage: I wonder how he chose it? It doesn’t say in the HuffPo story. I don’t think I’ve heard of it as a person or place name until today.
Michael Bersin
The continuing saga of unhoused/homeless in Warrensburg, Missouri – the current “controversy” came to an agitated boil when someone complained about homeless people in the Warrensburg branch of the regional library system. Bear in mind that unhoused/homeless people do not have access to 24 hour shelters – the two local shelters only offer limited overnight accommodations – mostly due to a lack of resources.
Last night a panel consisting of shelter staff, service agencies, a staffer from the library, and a church pastor held an open town hall at the library branch. About 35 people attended, including a few downtown business owners.
The views expressed by some in the audience were, for the most part, compassionate. There were, however, appallingly inhumane remarks from a distinct minority – dehumanizing the homeless.
Toward the end of the over hour and a half long town hall a community member spoke from the audience:
“…And I really want to emphasize that then folks who are unhoused have a huge, huge just wide variety of reasons for being unhoused. Some of them are working, some of them are looking for work, domestic violence victims, there’s a lot of reasons that people become unhoused. Some of them are mentally ill. We don’t have any cure for persistent mental illness, except to take care of them the best that we can.
And trying to lump all of these situations, because we’re talking people that have jobs, they are, they’re living in their car, they’ve got kids that are going to school, they’re trying to do all the right things and they can’t afford housing.
So we can’t allow ourselves to lump them in to this cattle car situation and say all of the homeless can’t come here, we’re gonna ship ’em south of town, we’re gonna ship ’em to some other place. That is a huge, huge danger sign. That is cattle cars. And you should be, we should never go there.
People who are unhoused are human beings and they are citizens of this place. It may not be the most recent place, but they are citizens here. And yes, they pay taxes every time they buy something, every time they have to put gas in their car, every time they have to fix a busted car, yes, they’re paying taxes.
I’m over, over the demonization of people because they fell into the hole that we have been lucky enough not to fall in yet. I’m really over it.
I have worked with the severely mentally challenged. I have had people on moving…try to shove heads through windows. They don’t ask to be that mentally ill. And it’s a minority, but because we don’t have mentally, mental health services at the scale that we need these people get lost.
Warrensburg is a great little town. It cannot become that gated community where we cattle car people out because they don’t look nice.
Nobody’s got a scarlet H on their forehead that tells you that they’re homeless. I’m over it.
These folks [on the panel] are doing an incredible job and there’s more. And they have half the Warrensburg cat ladies here tonight [laughter] and I admire the work that they do, but they know that, that homeless people, sometimes the only thing they have that loves them back is their animal, and yes, they will stay out in the woods to protect that animal. I don’t care if it’s a cat, or a dog, or [inaudible] possum.
I’m over it. We can do better than this. And we do not have to get ugly about it.
These folks deserve our compassion and our attention and help because most people that are homeless aren’t homeless permanently. It’s very short term…”
Town Hall on Homelessness/Unhoused – Warrensburg, Missouri – June 29, 2023
cain
@BruceFromOhio:
The thing is – they also want acceptance from the wider audience that these beliefs be normalized. They demand it. Fuck that.
They are a minority – and it’s going to be fun watching these people lose their businesses because they out themselves as people who hate LBGTQ+ – because if they hate those folks they probably hate other minorities.
You can bet that the FTFNYT is going to do some expose on these businesses about how it’s sad they are losing their businesses because of their “strong religious beliefs”
You can probably easily generate these articles from chatGPT honestly.
Frankensteinbeck
For the vast majority of Republican officials, I don’t think this is true. Trans people are the minority Republicans currently have the most effective ability to hurt, so they are hurting trans people and loving it. With an added kick that they truly do hate trans women*, seeing them as a violation of their fundamental beliefs about differences between sexes. Also an in-their-face sign they’ve lost the culture war, as the public no longer laughs with them at a minority they used to be able to mock and abuse with mainstream support. Oh, and for the men a risk they’ll be caught having traces of homosexual desire and be violently ostracized by their peers.
Trump doesn’t have that timeline far wrong. Public acceptance of trans people is insanely recent. Conservatives didn’t need laws. Society forced trans people into the closet for them.
*They have trouble grasping trans men exist.
Baud
@cain:
“In this bankrupt Ohio diner,….”
West of the Rockies
As I’ve said here before, I’m just flummoxed at how much effort people put into bring angry, aggrieved, afraid… what wretched, miserable lives they must lead.
jonas
This was a great piece — Renton is far away from his disgusting mother and living his best life. So while she seethes with bile and bigotry, we see right in front of us what can happen when trans kids are supported and loved by people like his business partner. They thrive.
trollhattan
Guess every generation gets their very own Anita Bryant.
Why we gotta have a hundred?
Butch
Strange for me – my niece is now my nephew and when I thought about it there was nothing for me to “accept” about the transition because it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It doesn’t affect me. He’s much happier and his relationship with his spouse is strong and that’s what matters.
trollhattan
Who names their kid after a Seattle area industrial town?
Jackie
@BeautifulPlumage: My sister lives in Renton. At least they didn’t choose Tukwila! ;)
twbrandt
@BeautifulPlumage: I’ve known a couple of Rentons. One was a boy, the other a girl.
Martin
So, it’s worth noting that what we’re really experiencing with all of this is a kind of hacking of social systems.
Musk’s anti-trans position are impossible to evaluate whether they are earnest or whether they are the product of his trans daughter writing him out of her life – and the only reason we have to hear about it is because he’s a billionaire that can buy the space where we interact.
Thomas’s crusade against affirmative action is because Yale gave him an opportunity for a law degree, but law firms discriminated against him based on his race, and he wants to take it out on the institution that gave him the opportunity. And the only reason we have to hear about it is because we gave him this awesome power which we cannot take back.
The 303 Creative case is entirely fabricated in order to get a specific outcome from the court. The affirmative action case was also largely fabricated, as was the NC independent legislature case.
This is all nothing but trolling – and in the court cases, successful trolling because even if the court ruled against, them, they were still taken seriously and still produced a ruling, and simply being taken seriously is a victory. And about 99% of what the GOP is doing these days is just openly trolling either their own voters, the courts, or the nation as a whole. And so long as it can consume the limited bandwidth of our institutions without being punished, it will choke out all other real issues. That’s what Trump does with the media. That’s what the various GOP legal non-profits do with the courts. That’s what happens on social media. That’s what parents are doing to school boards, and on and on.
And we better learn to recognize it and kill it off or it will continue to consume everything, because it’s working great. That’s all Tania is. Tania isn’t even worth being outraged over for her views. The only thing that should be focused on is her ability to command an audience. The meta here is interesting, but Tania is not.
Scout211
@trollhattan: The way I read the article, Renton is not his dead name. It’s his name now.
From the story:
sixthdoctor
Link for the President’s statement on student debt (Youtube).
They will begin shortly.
Maxim
@Michael Bersin: Good for them.
LesGS
@trollhattan: Renton named himself. I don’t think that’s the biblically inspired name his mother gave him at birth. Why he chose Renton, the article doesn’t say.
Dan B
@Michael Bersin: That’s a righteous rant. Thanks for posting it!
MomSense
@Michael Bersin:
I love hearing about your civic engagement and organizing efforts even when I don’t like what you are up against.
Maybe we could ask Watergirl to set up a zoom for us to hear about your process and what your local groups are doing.
Dan B
Clarence Thomas wants to revisit Griswold (right to privacy), Lawrence, and Obergefel. He wants LGBTQ people in prison.
Another Scott
@sixthdoctor: Biden’s started.
Cheers,
Scott.
Lyrebird
@Michael Bersin: Bless them and bless you!
I’ve only ever been through the train station.
And rock on Renton!!
I’ll admit, when some of my kids came to a place of “oh yuck!” about the names I pondered and prayed over for them, I did not like it. It hurts. It hurts like .000001% of the hurt of what that man had to go through, though (ETA: growing up in this world and with that family of origin). And about .001% of the usual nose bent out of joint pains that come with parenting.
OzarkHillbilly
I had to stop reading the piece, I was getting way too pissed off and my blood pressure was going thru the roof.
JPL
@Michael Bersin: The Atlanta Journal had a story called The Dancer about Gerard Alexander who was also homeless. He was a ballet dancer that at one time was called the black Baryshnikov. A case worker found him an apartment but at the time, he had a dog who was homeless also and he had his friends. A friend who was dumpster diving, once heard him singing and turned around and saw him leaping into the air. Although it ends in tragedy, it’s a story about a human being who did the best he could.
It probably is behind a paywall, but I’ll link anyway. Gerard Alexander
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
I took a quick look at the Social Security information on baby names, and it looks like “Renton” has been a rare but sometimes used name, with a fairly steady 5-10 boys per year getting that name. It probably started as a variant on “Trenton” and “Brenton”, both of which were top 1000 names for a few decades.
Alison Rose
[oops, new thread]
UncleEbeneezer
@OzarkHillbilly: I’ve almost entirely stopped using the misogynist b-word slur, but wow, reading about Tania is seriously testing my resolve…
UncleEbeneezer
UncleEbeneezer
Only half-way through but the irony that Tania herself had gender-affirming care in the form of breast implants is well…something…
prostratedragon
@Betty Cracker: Renton WA was named for a lumber baron. There’s also a town by that name in England.
@Michael Bersin: That is an outstanding statement.
MattF
But, you see, now all those little third-grade boys who really wanted to sneak into the girl’s bathroom and
redactedcan now get back at anyone who made fun of them.Captain C
@Baud:
Don and Cindy, owners for 25 years, don’t understand why their business is way down in this tolerant, mixed-race town, but don’t think the swastikas, anti-LGBTQ slogans, and framed vintage lynching postcards that they’ve recently decorated their diner with have anything to do with it.
“It’s the woke mob,” says Cindy immediately when asked.
“They’re just so intolerant!” Don added. “Just because we think certain people are subhumans doesn’t mean they should go elsewhere with their business. We like their money just fine!”
Roger Moore
@cain:
They don’t just want their beliefs to be normalized; they want their beliefs to be dominant. I’m sure they’d be happiest if everyone else accepted those beliefs willingly, but they’re more than happy to enforce them at gunpoint if that’s what it takes. Today, they want the right to discriminate, but they won’t leave it there. Tomorrow they’ll come back and claim everyone else has to discriminate the same way or they’re being discriminated against.
Bear in mind this was precisely the issue with Plessy v. Ferguson and related decisions. They weren’t about enshrining the right to private discrimination; they were about the right of the state to enforce discrimination on everyone. Homer Plessy didn’t get in trouble because the train he was on had a company policy of having racially segregated cars. Louisiana had a law that required train companies to keep their cars segregated.
JML
@Dan B: Thomas & Alito are perfectly comfortable with theocracy…so long as it’s their theocracy. It’s very much the modern GOP: note Nikki Haley with her “turn back the clock” speech. They want to go back to an era when women needed their husband’s permission to open a checking account, get a loan, or travel out of the country. Outlawing birth control, or any sexual act they don’t approve of. (I’m guessing there’s a lot of republicans telling on themselves whenever they want to outlaw sexual activity) School prayer is a-comin’!
Alito, Thomas, and Comey Barrett are locked in, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are fine with it so long as it doesn’t impact them personally, and Roberts goes along to get along and wants to be in the majority at all times. The cabal has been formed and the extremists are running the show.
(Great dissents from Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. It’s small comfort at times, but it’s worth seeking them out to reaffirm what justice looks like)
OzarkHillbilly
@UncleEbeneezer: My tolerance has limits, and in such moments I often find myself using words in private I would not now in public. And I was a union carpenter who used all the words.
cmorenc
I’m fine with and supportive of LGBT and transgender folks, but with one small favor to ask of you. Just don’t expect me to say “cisgender” in reference to myself instead of heterosexual, and I’m 100% good with y’all, and whatever other terminology you prefer to use with regard to your gender/sexuality.
BeautifulPlumage
@Jackie: are you referencing “going to Tukwila” by any chance? Ha!
BeautifulPlumage
@Baud: OK, that got a good chuckle.
Anyway
@BeautifulPlumage:
I first came across Renton as a character in Trainspotting…
UncleEbeneezer
@cmorenc: If you aren’t Transgender then you are Cisgender. That’s literally what it means: your gender identity matches what you were assigned at birth. Your sexual preference (heterosexual, homo, bi etc.) is neither here nor there.
Dan B
@JML: I grew up having nightmares about being chased that were based on Joe McCarthy and J Edgar Hoover then a year in Jim Crow Arkansas. As an old gay I’m not the first target but I didn’t get HIV and it was still horrifying losing 40 friends and acquaintances. It doesn’t need to be direct harm for the psychological toll to be extreme.
LesGS
@cmorenc: Y’know, a Trans person can be heterosexual, too. Many are.
Matt McIrvin
@cmorenc:
You don’t have to use the term, but those aren’t the same thing. That’s like me saying “don’t expect me to say ‘atheist’ in reference to myself instead of ‘right-handed’.”
Gin & Tonic
In my third day of a fever that ranges between 100 and 102. No other symptoms – no joint pain, no digestive issues, no respiratory issues. Wen to see my PCP on Wednesday, because I had an insect bite on my lower back that I don’t think was from a tick, but I couldn’t be sure. Inspection under a magnifier showed no insect parts. Ran a panel for tick-borne diseases, but some results take time. Lyme came back negative, but I’ve had both babesiosis and ehrlichia in the past, and those tests take several days. No antibiotics were prescribed because different diseases require different treatments. But boy, this is annoying.
Scout211
Gender is an identity. Not always decided at birth.
I think you forgot gender queer and nonbinary as other gender identities.
Steeplejack
@Gin & Tonic:
Good luck on the outcome! 🤞
OzarkHillbilly
@Scout211: My head hurts, I’m glad I’ll soon be dead and I won’t have to worry about it anymore.
Wait a minute… I’m a 65 yo married man, I don’t have to worry about it now. If they just tell me how they want me to refer to them, I will. I can do that.
Until I fuck up and forget and then beg their forgiveness.
Scout211
@Gin & Tonic: Ugh. How awful. If my temp is over 99, I can’t function. I hope they figure it out soon and you feel better.
Scout211
@OzarkHillbilly: I get it.
But you can always just call people by their name.
Scout211
@Scout211: @OzarkHillbilly:
Added:
My sister’s adult child is gender queer. I work hard to use “they, them, their” but I sometimes have to correct myself and apologize. But in most cases, using their name instead of they, them, their works. They are fine with that because they know I love them.
Roger Moore
@cmorenc:
But those are separate issues. Cis- is the opposite of trans-, while hetero- is the opposite of homo-. So you can be heterosexual or homosexual (or bisexual or asexual) regardless of whether you’re cisgender or transgender.
UncleEbeneezer
@Scout211: I believe both NB and GQ fall under the Transgender umbrella. I know a few NB people and they seem to identify both as Non-Binary and Trans. But not all do. It’s complex. My point though was that treating Hetero and Cisgender as opposites is an obvious category error.
Scout211
Transgender umbrella makes sense. Thanks.
waspuppet
Like I keep saying: It’s a grift, but that doesn’t mean they won’t kill you over it.
Splitting Image
@UncleEbeneezer:
This is somewhat iffy. There are a lot of older women out there who have been feminists all of their lives, never once considered themselves trans, but would laugh at the idea that their gender identity was the same one they were assigned back in the 1950s or 60s. The whole concept of womanhood and femininity has changed a lot in the meantime.
By the same token, manhood and masculinity have changed a good deal as well. In fact, a man who identifies as “the same gender he was assigned at birth” is a lot closer to being Jordan Peterson than he is to simply being “not trans”, since the whole project of toxic maculinity is to define manhood as what it was back when John Wayne was making movies and to reject even the possibility of change.
I think that the idea which “cis” is trying to get across is closer to privilege than it is to identity. People who aren’t overly bothered or inconvenienced by gender roles are actually pretty lucky, since they can be debilitating if you don’t fit neatly within them. But I don’t think it’s true that everyone who doesn’t transition fits neatly into a specific gender role. Most people just work around them in different ways.
To be honest, I avoid using the word “cis” altogether. It’s useful in a few situations, but mostly just creates a binary where one doesn’t really exist. Gender is complicated and transient.
Roger Moore
@Splitting Image:
You’re way overthinking this. When someone says they’re the same gender they were assigned at birth, they just mean they’ve always been male or female. It doesn’t mean the gender role for that gender has remained immutable over time, just that they continue to identify with that gender.
SenyorDave
I believe strongly that all people will answer for their time on earth. Call it hell, karma, judgment day, whatever. It does make me feel better that I am sure people like Christopher Rufo, Ron DeSantis, this creature from Illinois, and most people who identify as Republicans will have some serious splaining to do after they leave this earth.
I have to hand it the Republicans, they found a group so small and I guess different that they can get a significant portion of Americans to hate them just for existing. Could be worse, we could be like England, because apparently trans people are the biggest threat to the UK since the nazis.
Fuck JK Rowling, she could be a voice of reason and tolerance, she chose to ally herself with people who either deny the existence of trans people or actively want them to disappear.
Ruckus
@BruceFromOhio:
To codify the cruelty is exactly the point, the purpose of it all.
This.
The cruelty is power. Her son is no longer in her power so she has to shut him down. In her mind he isn’t the bot she wanted to raise, to be the owner of, and that can not stand.
A lot of parents think they created their kids, so they are their’s to do with what they deem important. What the kids want or who/what they are can be absolutely immaterial. It really can be difficult to be the child of someone with this concept of parenthood. And there are levels of the ownership of the children.
Ruckus
@Gin & Tonic:
I once had a fever of 105, for 9 days. Hospitalized for 8 days and nights. Mine had a known cause – 8 or 9 vaccinations in boot camp in about 2 minutes. Good times. I hope you feel better soon.
Ruckus
@UncleEbeneezer:
My default is to never worry about anyone else’s sexuality and that seems to go a long way. I figure that it’s none of my business and that seems to work fine. As a brother of a gay woman, I had to deal with this for decades. I was friends with her gay partner for about 40 yrs and several of her gay friends, both men and women. I found that I could still be the person I wanted and they could be the persons they wanted to be and there really wasn’t an issue, as long as I didn’t make it one, which of course is none of my business so that was easy.
Ruckus
@Splitting Image:
Gender is complicated and can be transient.
I believe this works better as it often is and often isn’t.
Tehanu
That was a great article. Thanks for posting the link.