Essay
In my previous post on Trump’s fascism, I described how fascists leverage the freedom of speech to gain power before hypocritically pulling the plug on speech and enacting censorship. Well, it was prophetic. The Pentagon has begun banning books in military schools in order to carry out Donald Trump’s executive orders. This will supposedly effect 67,000 children worldwide, according to the Guardian piece on the subject. The executive orders on show:
Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling
Books targeted include a book about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, books that reference queer or transgender people, and even an innocuous book by Julianne Moore about a girl and her freckles. Alongside banning books, military schools are now being directed to ban gay pride clubs as well as general women’s groups (Women in STEM). Black History month has also been “canceled.” Because a month celebrating the contribution of the people we literally chained up, enslaved, and sold like cattle is somehow out of taste to the current Republican administration.
The Department of Education Website, whose front page proudly declares that it has cut programs related to the discussion of racism, ableism, gender-based discrimination, homophobia, and ageism in the workplace, released a memo in January about the firing of the department’s “book ban coordinator.” This person’s job under the Biden administration was to identify instances of book banning in school districts across the country (not a bad idea IMO). Not only has this role been eliminated, but the memo goes further to counter even the conception that books are being “banned” at all. In an amazing display of double speak by our elected officials, the memo describes the book bannings merely as “alleged,” and re-frames the bans as “established commonsense processes by which to evaluate and remove age-inappropriate materials.” The books are being removed from libraries– that is banning regardless of the legal language concocted to explain it.
Bannings are occurring, especially in Republican states. For example, Florida has banned over 4000 books in the past few years. Among the books in question are Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Morrison’s novel is about a slave woman that murders her own baby rather than turning her over to slave hunters. The decision haunts the mother for the rest of her life. Vonnegut’s book is about a man’s severe trauma after witnessing and being trapped in the fire bombing of Dresden during WWII, the horror of which need only be implied. These are rich novels that tackle extremely painful moments in American history (Slavery and WWII). They define the very character of our country and give insight into how messy it is to be a human in a tough world. High schoolers and anyone with the capacity and interest to read these challenging books should do so! But evidently Florida’s government disagrees with me there.
The language used by the Trump administration in its gender and sexuality directive attempts to enforce what it calls “biological truth” or “reality.” The so called “erasure of sex” apparently has damning implications for the “validity of the entire American system.” Personally, I don’t think trans people are going to destroy the American system simply by existing. And I also think that we as Americans have a God given, constitutional right to wear whatever the hell we want and call ourselves whatever the hell we want. Trump’s executive order argues that the modern conception of gender as fluid/changeable poses a threat to women’s safety.
The implication here is that allowing trans women into women’s bathrooms endangers women. I don’t think this is the case in practice, and Trump isn’t giving any evidence either (he doesn’t have any). Someone willing to go through the immense effort of changing themselves to look like another gender (including potentially significantly re-sculpting their body and genitals) is having a difficult enough time as it is. Giving them a hard time about where they get to shit in public is ridiculous in my opinion. I will leave the rest of that debate to the experts, but Trump’s directive goes deeper than the bathroom policy. Later sections specifically attack the idea that gender can transcend a fixed male-female binary at all.
Trump is making war on what he calls “gender ideology.” The implications of this order is that citizens may be policed by the federal government on the basis of their own chosen gender or sexual identity, and that one’s sex (based on producing a particular type of reproductive cell) must explicitly be categorized for the purposes of identification. But why? Are we not in a post DEI era where racial and sexual discrimination (even for the purposes of improving diversity within institutions) is illegal? And how do we enforce these sexual identifiers? Will a woman have to provide some of her eggs to an officer if she is suspected of being trans upon entering a bathroom? Will the driver’s license test come with a gamete verification process (please jizz in this cup) in order to acquire an ID? It is unenforceable. Trans people have been successfully shitting in bathrooms for decades without causing societal collapse, and the modern Republican attempt to politicize and criminalize trans people is nothing short of a power grab.
The fascist parallels are frightening. When the Nazis came to power, the first place they went was the Institute of Sex Research in Berlin to plunder its contents of sexual literature and artifacts.
Any materials deemed obscene or subversive were sent to the bonfires. It appears as though sexual research has been vilified and targeted by authoritarian regimes for at least a century.
The Nazis banned Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, and Helen Keller too. We do not know how far the Republicans are willing to go in their own banning spree, but no government should have the right to tell its people what they can or cannot read, or what they can or cannot think. Given that sex is an integral aspect of human society, I believe firmly that it must be studied and discussed freely. It must be observed with an open mind. We must be comfortable talking about sex academically, instead of relegating it to taboo or witchcraft. We have to be able to talk about sex with our children. Kids are certainly mature enough to think about this stuff–its the adults that seem to project their own inherited fears on them. By depriving young people of an honest sexual education, we leave the task to Pornhub or other even more dubious online actors. Worse, some may not learn how to have healthy sexual relationships at all and enter realms of criminality or abuse–thus bringing about the very horrors of sexual harassment and assault in public spaces that Trump claims to want to defend against in his executive order.
Finally, I resent this government’s assertion that it is fighting for an incontrovertible truth. This very same government that calls to question the polio vaccine or the carbon cycle wants to impose biological truths about gender on its population. Ha. Ha.
