The Charlotte Observer today featured an article from Charlotte’s Dr. Clayton Alfonso, “I don’t get why some NC lawmakers want to ban life-saving care for my youngest LGBTQ patients”, in which he looks with incredulity at the bigoted actions of the NC State legislature, who seek to ban any gender affirming care for adolescents in the state.
“Why is our legislature trying to legislate against our adolescents?”, Dr. Alfonso asks, with an almost childlike innocence to his question. And he’s not alone. Caroline Morin, LGBTQ center head for North Carolina’s Cape Fear Coast, is likewise agape at actions against transgender student athletes, saying “[i]t’s difficult to understand why there’s such a conviction to exclude children from playing games.”
This isn’t hard to understand. Occam’s razor applies here.
They hate us.
It’s beyond wanting to kill or “get rid of us”, they’re trying to legislate as if we don’t exist. In the minds of the ignorant conservative NC legislator, there simply is no such thing as a queer kid. LGBTQ people’s childhoods simply did not exist.
Trans people all of a sudden “wake up trans” at some point after voting for a few years in this twisted mentality. Gay kids simply should guess their way through adolescence with no positive same-sex imagery. Hetero hegemony is absolute in their world, and they’re making sure of it.
(These are also the same people who advocate for abstinence education, so there is a sort of macabre consistency here.)
Why is this so hard to fathom? Why does there have to be some “reasoning” behind one of humanity’s basest emotions? Why is the bigotry, the discrimination, the hate so “hard to understand”? Yes, they hate trans parents. Yes, they hate pro-trans teachers. And they do it all in the name of “protecting the children” — and, since queer kids don’t exist in their minds, it’s not a problem to exclude, demean, and marginalize them through years of hetero-exclusive imagery.
(And let’s not forget, racism had an entire scientific community of “reasoning” behind it for generations. No one asked the “reasoning” behind the segregationist or the Jim Crow legislator to this extent. Did hate become complex all of a sudden?)
These people are not our friends, they are not our fellows, they are not our “neighbors”. Every attempt to humanize such an enemy will result in disappointment at a minimum. No, these are forces to be fought at every ballot box and on every protest front line. Because the next generation of LGBTQ Americans depends on it.
