We're Gonna Need a Bigger Gaslight

in which social conservatives invent transgender rights as a fake issue

The memo has gone out, and the pivot has arrived.

Ten days ago, you may remember, the suddenly high-profile Nebraska Senator Machaela Cavanaugh went on NPR to play make-believe, expressing consternation over this weird new focus on transgender issues over on the political right: “I don't know why, as a nation, as policymakers, there is this newfound focus on trans children… And all of the sudden, there is a decision by policymakers that we need to do something about them. It doesn't make any sense to me.” It’s the why are you guys so obsessed with this DARVO maneuver, spun with bald-faced shamelessness by people who’ve been talking for years about the thing that they suddenly want you to know it’s creepy to talk about.

Now the New York Times explains the same thing in a similar way, writing that transgender issues have suddenly become a big deal in America because scheming right-wingers decided to cook it up as a fake wedge issue:

“The religious right went searching for an issue.” To get donors to write some checks, see. They just made it up, in a cynical act of invention. A bunch of social conservatives were sitting around the office, lamenting how no one gives them money anymore because everybody stopped hating the gays, so they decided, tactically, to pretend that transgender rights was a thing, now, so that they could trick people into giving them money again. Completely out of left field! Trans rights was just sitting there watching some Netflix with a tub of Cherry Garcia when suddenly the doorbell rang.

There’s no pouncing, but you’ve heard this descriptive maneuver before:

Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, a group that fights discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people, said there was a direct line from the right’s focus on transgender children to other issues it has seized on in the name of “parents’ rights” — such as banning books and curriculums that teach about racism.

“Seized on.” The story also says that the issue of men participating in women’s sports “was accelerated by a few influential Republican governors who seized on the issue early.” There’s a lot of seizing on, and it’s all mysterious. Why did the seizers seize the seized thing? Dunno. They just suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, seized on the issue of women’s sports. Weird. Similarly, that paragraph about “banning books” and forbidding “curriculums that teach about racism” is presented as a given, not as a thing that requires explanation or illustration. It’s tactical murk: half-accusations as smoke and chaff, designed to leave you with the general outlines of a thing that it’s convenient to have you believe. The right-wingers are something something something, and it’s scary.

Remember, too, that a remarkably stupid essay in New York magazine recently pretended that conservative state legislators and activists “invent tales of wanton surgeries on minors and irreversible hormonal treatments.” We stand proudly for gender-affirming medical ca— Wait, what I meant is, why are you guys making up these stories about all this medical stuff? People who pivot this quickly need to make sure their pants are securely buckled.

We’re watching the awkward birth of a new prevailing narrative in politics and the news media: Trans stuff? Like, what are you even talking about? Give ‘em another week, and they’ll squint in confusion when you say the word “transgender.” I think I might have heard it somewhere, is it a thing from evangelical churches?

When everyone is suddenly trying out a new narrative that shifts the motive force for a years-long national obsession to the other side — don’t blame us, we didn’t think up any of this stuff — what does that suggest to you about the trajectory of the social project?

But anyway, remember to be very angry that the political right suddenly decided for no reason to make transgender stuff a big deal. That’s the only reason anyone has ever said anything about it, we swear. “All vessels, make smoke!”

To be continued.