By Gwendolyn Ann Smith
Michael Savage is, like any number of other right-wing talk-radio hosts, no stranger to courting controversy. He's made inflammatory statements from groups ranging from the Catholic Church to veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. This schtick has been very successful for him, leading his "Savage Nation" program to be one of the most listened to radio talk shows in the country
Savage took to the airwaves this month to discuss where he sees the United States going should Hillary Clinton be elected this November.
"She is an absolute dictator," said Savage. "She will seize guns and make them illegal in any way necessary." Of course, Savage has been saying the same thing about Obama for eight years or so, including jumping on the "Sandy Hook conspiracy" bandwagon. He had more to say about the Clinton presidency beyond the usual Second Amendment statements, and this is where it gets truly interesting.
"Socially (the country will be) a nightmare," said Savage. "There will be a transgender in your soup."
He broke to commercial right after this, not bothering to elaborate on how a transgender person would end up in one's minestrone, or what he was even trying to mean. Yet it's worth noting, in the world of far-right politics, he doesn't need to explain. Just throwing up a transgender boogeyman is enough. We've reached a point where simply using the word transgender is enough to get you in very hot water.
Transgender people being used this way is not necessarily new. I can recall the same sort of scaremongering around transgender teachers nearly two decades ago. Before that, gay and lesbian people were marginalized by the same style of hate mongers, who usually applied highly stereotyped cross-gender expressions on each. In the last few years, this sort of alarmist activity around transgender people has reached new levels.
With the end of the marriage rights battle — aside from the rise now of "Religious Freedom" bills — the right is looking for their new foe. TIME magazine's "Transgender Tipping Point" issue, as well as the coming out of Olympic gold medalist and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner, gave them a potential new target.
They also discovered a new way to fear monger with transgender people, revamping old arguments about gays and lesbians attacking kids in bathrooms. We've seen this attack for years now, with arguments that allowing transgender people to use restrooms of their preference will open the bathroom doors for all sorts of pedophiles and rapists. Indeed, in the fringe world that Michael Savage's core audience surely inhabits, there is no distinction between transgender people and these predators.
In 2014, a month before the aforementioned issue of TIME magazine, the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education issued guidelines that made it clear that transgender students were protected from discrimination under Title IX. It is Title IX that has required schools to allow transgender students to use facilities consistent with their gender identity and expression — and what has caused fights over restrooms at schools across the country, including the recently defeated vetoed HB 1008 in South Dakota.
As I indicated above, many of these fights are cleverly calculated by the same foes we saw in the marriage battles. Much of this is a cynical attempt to fill their coffers at the cost of transgender rights; in much the same way Michael Savage will apparently say anything for ratings.
But there is a fringe out there that eats these things up, who decide to gobble up the word salad of right-wing scaremongers. Presumably paired alongside their transgender soup.
Another well-known right-wing radio personality, Alex Jones of "InfoWars," has — amongst all his other conspiracy theories — claimed that the first lady, Michelle Obama, is transgender. Presumably, the story goes, the president is a gay man, and Michelle is actually male.
In the words of an insurance commercial, "This isn't how it works! This isn't how any of this works!" The whole notion is laughable, nonsensical and ludicrous. I'm not going to try to unpack how bad it is, nor do I suspect anyone literate enough to read this column will need me to do so.
I would also be remiss to not mention the Planned Parenthood shooter, Robert Lewis Dear. Dear was himself the very sort of audience member who might listen to Savage or Jones. He fell into the belief that Planned Parenthood was "selling baby parts" — another right-wing dog whistle in heavy rotation — and took matters into his own hands. He killed three people and injured nine others.
In the wake of the shooting, The Gateway Pundit, a self-described "right of center news website," declared that Dear was a transwoman due to a clerical error on his voter registration. The story was repeated often, even repeated by current Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz. Of course, Dear is not transgender, and even a cursory look at his history makes that plain to see.
People ask why transgender people are being murdered at such a high rate, especially as awareness has risen. Read above, and I think you can tell me the answer.
These are the times we live in. This is a raucous, unbelievable political season, where anti-transgender discrimination is — to one level or another — a part of one major party's plank, and where just using the term is enough to inflame passions. There is a fringe out there that listens to these talk shows, the rhetoric of these politicians, and even their own insecurities, and act on them.
This is the real societal nightmare, and it has very little to do with transgender people being in your soup.
