solarbird | Cultural Warfare Update for February 28, 2023

There is no end point; there is no position too extreme. In this case, it’s Republicans introducing a bill in South Carolina GOP to subject those obtaining abortions to death.

Pregnancy as a death sentence and abortion as a capital crime. That’s where today’s GOP lives.

And since we’re talking about no end point: Kansas Republicans are ramping up to ban all trans people outright – not even just health care, but legally defining trans people out of existence. The Daily Wire‘s Michael Knowles is all for it, calling it a model law. It will be a full no-go state for trans and intersex people, meaning I – as someone born IS – will have to reactivate my “no travel” list that I threw out in 2003 when Lawrence v. Texas (2003) said states couldn’t make queer people illegal anymore.

They’ll make all of us illegal again if they can.

Texas is trying to join Tennessee in making all trans health care either illegal or impossible to obtain, going in this case the “not technically illegal for adults but impossible to get” route with SB 1029. Governor Abbott – who earlier made youth trans health care cause to take children from parents – has made anti-trans law a priority this year.

XTRA wants to know exactly what pushed The New York Times into a full-bore anti-trans-activist paper, complete with unquestioned repetition of objectively false far-right anti-trans propaganda? They don’t have good answers, but they point at some people they think are responsible. The Nation is asking similar questions, trying to figure out what the hell is going on and why.

Shit I didn’t know: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has a Medium. He’s using it for good, particularly the bit about the Times’s decision to go in on the anti-trans culture wars.

Conference organisers need to go back to paying attention to what states have made who illegal now – between anti-trans and Don’t Say Gay laws, it’s a real danger for a lot of would-be attendees. But the history is not good, and some will definitely see it as an opportunity.

Despite the rightist talking points and memes, transition regret is literally the lowest-regret-rate of any form of health care, including medically necessary heart surgery. (Cue new study going around today showing a 0.3% regret rate.) But even within that tiny minority of people who detransition, vast majority of people who do actually detransition don’t regret trying and oppose the attempts to ban trans health care. By vast majority, I mean two-thirds; I think that counts.

Culture Warriors are big mad that ChatGPT doesn’t want to utter racial slurs or oppose trans rights, going into the usual screams about wokeness, tying it into President Biden’s commentary that AI system’s shouldn’t implement algorithmic bias. Right-wing harassment campaigns started up against three employees of OpenAI, none of whom actually work on ChatGPT, but, well, they’re all women or minorities of one kind or another, so that means they’re guilty of something, said every racist and misogynist shitheel ever.

Anti-vaccination activists trying to bring back massive epidemics are using anti-COVID-mitigation efforts as a wedge to introduce bills banning all vaccination requirements for schooling. Cutting back on COVID prevention definitely took a lot of the wind out of their sails – at tremendous public-health cost – but they’re still going. Don’t sleep on this, it’s still a thing.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.