General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe anti-trans rhetoric on the "bathroom bills" is a blood libel-and a threat to all of us.
I won't describe the original blood libel in this OP...if you don't know of it you can look it up on Wikipedia. Suffice it to say, it was the basis for over a millennium of murderous European Christian antisemitism culminating in Hitler's death camps.
Like the current paranoid accusations that trans women are simply men putting on dresses to sneak into women's restrooms to commit sexual assaults, the original blood libel was a devastating use of the tactic most likely to make one group of people develop a homicidal level of hatred towards another: the accusation that people in the second group are devoted to harming the children of the first group.
Those who are pushing for the "bathroom bills" know that the accusations they are making about trans people are lies. They also know, based on European history, that those accusations, like the accusation made in the original blood libel, are going to effectively incite insane, unjustified anger towards trans people and that, if those accusations are left unchallenged, that that irrational, paranoid rage can be channeled into support for a program of repression, retribution, and violent persecution against not only the trans community, but the rest of the gay and sexually alternative community, and their allies-and that that kind of climate is perfect for putting a tyrant into power.
We must stand with the trans community now and defeat this hate and rage campaign in its early stages...because not only is the anti-trans movement a threat to the rights and the physical safety of people in the trans community, if it leads to modern-day pogroms against that community, and then confinement to certain neighborhoods, and then what happened after that(as it easily could), it could eventually leave all of us in the position of the Pastor Niemuller...with no one left to speak out when they come for us.