Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Today in small-minded pettiness...

Citing a dangerous uptick in the number of transgender students not being discriminated against, the Trump administration just rescinded President Obama's guidelines for schools that allow kids to use the restroom facilities appropriate to their gender identity rather than their sex at birth. For those keeping score, Trump's enemies list now includes Saturday Night Live, the media and kids who just want to use the bathroom.
Did you bring a birth certificate? No?
Then I guess you're going to have to hold it.
"I didn't say white Jesus, but c'mon,
I mean, he was totally white."
According to inexplicably still the Press Secretary Sean Spicer, the President is a firm believer in state's rights and if a particular state wants to shame and humiliate school children for no reason other than gross ignorance and intolerance on the part of the gullible people who ushered Trump into office on a wave of transphobia and, I assume, meth, then by white Jesus, they should be able to do so. Ok, Spicer didn't say all that, but it was clearly implied.

Pictured: Noted tyrant Barack Obama,
architect of the oppressive guidelines
that asked schools to please stop being
 assholes to trans kids. What a monster.
So yeah, we're back on the bathroom thing. Obama issued the guidelines back in May of last year and while it was a huge win for transgender students, the red states kind of flipped out, mostly because they don't know what transgender means and the unfamiliar frightens them. Since May, was there an outbreak of straight, cis-gendered boys claiming to identify as female so they could be creepy in the girls' room? No, of course there goddamn wasn't, that's ridiculous. But having strong feelings about a thing has always been more important than valid reason and so, here we are.

Infuriating isn't it? Well infuriated is the new...uh, I don't know, breathing? Progressives are angry that the administration is lurching drunkenly from one outrageously discriminatory action to another and the Right is angry that the rest of us are angry at them and nobody's happy. Who's right? Who's to blame? Well, obviously us and then them in that order.
Biased? Moi? Sure I am, but biased opinions are at the very core
of what the internet is for along with porn and discussing Star Trek.
"Russia? What? No, the real threat
is kids' bathroom assignments."

-The Right
I don't think we're asking for the moon when we expect the President to remember that he works for all of us, regardless of political party, but the last month has been an unceasing shitshow where the majority of us who didn't vote for this guy have watched in horror as he undoes all the things Obama-whom most of us did vote for-did. This sucks is what I'm saying, and this move to let schools treat transgender kids, who are all ready at enormous risk for depression and suicide, like outcasts is another reason we can't go on like this.

And again, we're not talking about some crazy liberal thing like eliminating all military spending or mandatory reiki, this is the bathroom debate. Again. The administration is about to make life even harder for trans kids because an insecure gameshow host is feeling beholden to the fringey, unfocused and ignorant rage of the people who put him in office.
"Stop calling me a bigot! I am angry and white and I will have
my opinion heard and enacted as policy, no matter how irrational!"

-a man with unfocused ignorant rage

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