Edward Dowd, a shrewd and persistent critic of mRNA injections (among other things) makes this argument:
Meaning that discussion of transgender everything is a distraction and a waste of time, and stop talking about Dylan Mulvaney and the beer cans.
But the problem is, every crisis is the same crisis, and the trans crisis is the COVID-19 crisis: the same arguments from authority, the same gaslighting, the same strawmanning, the same bad faith, the same coercion, the same attack on family structure. Remember this, the argument from California legislators that it’s OK for children to go get the mRNA vaccines without parental knowledge or consent because they can already do the same with abortions and birth control?
Well, the California legislature just stealth-killed Assembly Bill 1314, a bill that would have required schools to promptly inform parents if their children identify at school as transgender:
At the very same time, AB 665 is advancing in the state legislature. When it’s signed into law, which is looking like a good bet, it would allow school counselors and other mental health professionals to send children to residential mental health facilities without parental consent. Critics of the bill have pointed out its usefulness in taking children who declare transgender identity from disapproving parents.
So the California legislature, which passed laws allowing children to get birth control and abortions and medical treatment for rape without parental knowledge or consent, also tried to pass a law allowing children to get mRNA vaccines without parental knowledge or consent, and is now making sure children can identify as transgender without parental knowledge—and receive “gender-affirming” care, including treatment at a residential facility, without parental consent. Maybe you can spot a consistent theme in all of that.
Meanwhile, the gaslighting and strawmanning are also the same:
And then:
That last piece, published just a few days ago, has to be read to be believed. “Authoritarianism is gospel to modern conservatives. Nowhere is that clearer than in their assaults on children,” it explains.
Why are parents demanding parents’ rights bills to protect their involvement in the lives of their children? Because the right-wingers want to preserve the basic Christian right to murder their kids, obviously:
The language of parental rights can become a license to torture, as it did in the case of 13-year-old Hana Grace-Rose Williams. In 2011, officials found her “face down, naked and emaciated in the backyard,” the New York Times reported. An investigation later reported malnutrition and hypothermia as her causes of death. Her adoptive parents, Larry and Carri Williams, were reportedly followers of Michael and Debi Pearl and their book, To Train Up a Child. The book, named for that verse in Proverbs, urges corporal punishment with a switch and says that “a little fasting is good training.” By the time of the Times report, three children, including Williams, had died in homes with the Pearls’ book on the shelves.
See, Christian parents don’t want their children to go trans behind their backs because it threatens their commitment to torturing their children to death. The agenda becomes so clear in the glare of that devastating new fact, right? Journalism explains the world to us.
The whole essay is loaded up with gems like this:
State laws passed by conservative Republicans have made LGBTQ children in particular more vulnerable to abuse at home by practically requiring schools to out them to their parents. The denial of gender-affirming care is another act of violence. Far-right activists invent tales of wanton surgeries on minors and irreversible hormonal treatments.
Yeah, about that. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
So you have to get the vaccine for your child, or you’re a murderer, because the experts say, and you have to get top surgery and hormones for your child, or you’re a murderer, because the experts say, and all objections are inescapably monstrous. The vaccines are safe and effective, and gender-affirming care is lifesaving medical treatment. Trust the science and comply. We can take bets on how many years it takes to see the first “we should have an amnesty for the proponents of transgender surgery for children” article.
The assault on the body is the assault on the body. The assault on the family is the assault on the family. The medicalization of social reality is stretching out to touch bigger and bigger pieces of your life. Take the pill, bigot, and we’ll shove the other one down your child’s throat for you. You know, for your health.
You can’t talk about one piece but not another piece. The crisis is the crisis. It’s a crisis of “reality debt,” of the increasingly absurd rule by experts, and of the endless recourse to narrative-making maneuvers that reconstruct reality on unsustainable ideological models. Above all, it’s a manufactured crisis that has instrumental force, suggesting over and over again that family is atavistic and an impediment to a healthy society. Consider the possibility that people who keep telling you how much they hate the family mean what they say.
Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at Chris Bray’s Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends.” Subscribe here.