Fox freaks out over transgender or gender non-conforming kids



You don't often see history in the making. You don't always realize that it's being made even as you speak.

I don't for a second on imagine that Michelle Malkin or the crew of entitled grinning spambots who interviewed her this week over at Fox and Friends considered that they were starring in a sizzle reel of blinkered bigoted bumptiousness that will be screened to people not yet born as an example of exactly how hateful people in the 21 century could be toward others they had made no effort to understand.

But that was what was happening here, mark my words.

Dressed like they were taking a breather from the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange, the not at all fab four were making their fear and loathing of transgendered children the subject of today's four-alarm freakout.

How dare transgender or gender non-conforming kids use the rest room of their choice, they groused. That's shocking. That's social engineering run amuck.

The panel were referring to California Governor Jerry Brown's groundbreaking bill which will allow transgender youth to use whatever bathroom and participate on whichever sports team they believe matches their gender identity.

That's simple enough, isn't it? That's giving transgendered kids the same rights to prosper and succeed as any other kid. Who could possibly object? Fox News, apparently.

It's worth remembering that right wingers throughout the media still speak about the transgendered, even transgendered kids, as though they were everywhere and always, at every age, subhuman sex-crazed freaks and rapists aiming to seduce and convert your unsuspecting little Johnny or little Susey. Their own 'normal' gender identity might dissolve in the face of all that 'confusion' and 'weirdness' they speculated. At Fox and Friends, to make the 'lock up your kids' subtext text, the screen filled with police sirens and charging police cars. Subtle it was not.

But the fact is in every school in every nation in the world there's at least one kid who identifies with the opposite sex and has a transgendered identity. In my school in County Donegal I knew some. Some boys want to be girls, some girls want to be boys. It's worldwide. Those kids ought to be able to relive themselves at school without the threat of discrimination, public ridicule or violence.

If you actually knew a transgendered girl or boy, and what they go though on their journey to self-acceptance, as they transition from the body they have into the life and body they feel they were born to have, you couldn't treat them with the high-handed unthinking contempt that they most commonly encounter.

It's very dangerous to be transgendered in many nations, including our own, and it's occasionally lethal. So if you're choice is between maintaining a climate of judgmental and sometimes murderous hostility or a climate of compassion and engagement why is Michele Malkin making common cause with the worst people in America?

On Fox and Friends the implications of the issue were obvious. Transgendered kids ought to be ASHAMED of their gender identity: at the very least they should be hesitant before asking us decent people to honor the basic fact of their gender identity; and for good measure we'll have 'debates' like this to remind them that there is probably something deeply wrong with them.

You'll be surprised to hear it but Michelle Malkin and her Fox and Friends buddies weren't actually thinking about the reality of transgendered kids lives, she was thinking about PC Gone Mad, and about protecting her own kids from the unintended consequences of humoring the little weirdos.

Malkin and company have apparently decided that the best way to understand this issue of transgendered kids is to project our adult sexual anxieties onto children. Because that's the ONLY way we can talk about this, right?

Frankly no other community is spoken on in the same tones of unvarnished hysteria and contempt in the media. The elementary school freak-outs that we read about nationwide are odious examples of adult bigotry and panic infecting childhood arrangements. Most kids instinctively reject bullying and harassment, too bad their parents don't always get the memo.

Since Michelle Malkin has no intention of thinking about his issue, you'll have to educate yourself. Allow me to make a starting suggestion. If a child is transgendered and needs to go to the bathroom here's what you should 'do.' Let him or her go to the bathroom. And maybe take a deep breath yourself. The get on with your busy day.