From TheIntercept.com….
CONSERVATIVES ARE OBSESSED with nonexisting children. This is nothing new: The paranoia is a central tenet of the modern American right. They worry about a zygote or embryo as if it were already a child (it is not). Then there was the whole generation of nonexistent children whose brains turned to fried eggs on marijuana. The murderous Satanic children. The Black “superpredator” children were a powerful racist fantasy.
More recently, the right has taken up the cause of another sort of nonexisting child: the children who are coerced into becoming trans; the so-called biological male children who pretend to be girls to play sports, and the other little girls on the team who are devastated by this; the children getting gender-affirming surgery or other irreversible medical interventions; and several variants on these nonexisting kids.
None of these categories of children actually exist, even if a number of children are wrongly described in these terms by conservatives and their anti-trans allies. People who don’t exist are far better suited to cynical political manipulation and prurient psychological projection than are living, breathing children with lives that should get to richly matter. Great harm has been done, and continues to be done, to existing children in the name of the figurative child — who is almost always white, cis, and under threat.
“This year, over 100 bills have been introduced across the country targeting trans people, mostly youth. In my years of doing this work, I have never seen anything like this.”
The current, unprecedented attacks on trans children in statehouses across the country are existential in scope: Very-much-existing children are being sacrificed to the white supremacist, patriarchal Republican agenda and its mythic child in need of protection.
