NATIONAL HARBOR, Md – Thousands of conservatives, including prominent Republican legislators and presidential hopefuls, flocked to the suburbs of Washington, DC, a convention center this week to discuss child sex.
He was at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2023, the main annual meeting of the American conservative movement, where speaker after speaker expressed the urgent need for the Republican Party – an institution that is actually dedicated to limited government – to criminalize the act. from doctors and parents who provide care for young children.
Sebastian Gorka, an alleged member of the Nazi-collaborating political order in Hungary who is an adviser to former President Donald Trump, began proceedings Friday morning from the main stage at the Gaylord Convention Center. Democrats, he warned the crowd, are “destroying boys and girls” and “sacrificing them on the altar of transgender insanity.”
A short time later, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) – featured speaker at the white supremacist conference last year, where her fellow speakers praised Adolf Hitler and cheered on the Russian invasion of Ukraine – took to the stage to make a big announcement.
SARAH SILBIGER via Reuters
“So the last Congress, I did something radical and extreme because, as Marjorie Taylor Greene remembers, ‘she was extreme,'” he joked. “I introduced a bill called the Protect Children’s Innocence Act. And I’m telling you good news this morning, folks: It couldn’t pass the last Congress because Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House. She doesn’t believe in gender at all, but we have new speaker in our Republican majority… and I will reintroduce my bill… that would make it a crime to do anything related to gender!”
The crowd was in an uproar. Greene’s cruel law — based on so many lies — would bar transgender Americans under the age of 18 from receiving essential health services long approved by American Medical Associationat American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)at American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatryat Endocrine Societyat American Psychological Association with American Psychiatric Association.
Those supporters weren’t worried at CPAC, where politicians and right-wing influencers are perfecting the anti-trans messaging that will be a staple of next year’s presidential campaign news cycle — the Republican Party has clearly decided that trans kids are eligible. from the wedge issue to win back the White House.
But it also became clear at CPAC that the Republican campaign against trans kids isn’t just a ploy to galvanize their base — it could be the start of an insurgent fascist campaign to erase trans people from public life.
Michael Knowles, host”Michael Knowles Show” on The Daily Wire, gave a speech at CPAC that, at times, sounded genocidal. “The problem with transgenderism is not that it’s not appropriate for children under the age of 9,” he said. “The problem with transgenderism is that it’s not true.”
There are approximately 1.6 million trans people in the United States. Knowles told the CPAC crowd that these people have no right to be there.
“If [transgenderism] it is false, then for the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life,” he said.
Discarded. The crowd roared again.
Another speaker, Tom Fitton, president of the right-wing website Judicial Watch, called gender-affirming treatment for minors “a satanic attack on innocent children.”
And there’s also a panel on the main stage called “A Time for Courage” featuring panelists Riley Gaines, a former college athlete who made a name for herself complaining about competing with transgender swimmers, and Chloe Cole, a woman who identified as transgender as a child. small but later “detransitioned”.
Cole’s story has been featured in the right-wing media to demonstrate the real dangers of allowing children to receive gender-affirming treatment. But stories like his are rare. Just about 1 to 3% of people who initiate gender transition later express regret for doing so and then “regress or travel elsewhere across the gender identity landscape,” as Slate once explained.
But for CPAC attendees, stories like Cole’s prove that gendered treatment of minors is inherently bad.
Donald Ruthig, a 73-year-old retiree from Onancock, Virginia, told HuffPost he recently left the Episcopal Church because of its decision to support transgender youth. He drove three hours to CPAC to “meet people who think like I do” who “are for restoring the lost Judeo-Christian morality.”
Part of this restoration, he explained, is to “stop torturing our children with gender transition, to stop all this LBGTQ nonsense, and start treating people like God’s people made in God’s image. We are all equal. We are not it is necessary to separate everyone with a small talisman.
Christopher Mathias for HuffPost
Tim Roberts, 57, traveled to CPAC from East Lansing, Michigan, with his two daughters, who were recently kicked out of public school “because of all the crazy stuff that’s going on there.”
He echoed a sentiment that echoed many at CPAC — that simply admitting transgender people in the classroom is tantamount to indoctrination.
“I have passed [high school] in 1985, and it’s just not about, and now [my daughters] say that the better part of the class has a lot of trans kids or kids who think they’re trans,” he said. “Like the first one [school administrators] what when they come to school say, ‘Hey, write down the pronouns, and what we will do.’ He encouraged this.
James Clark, 37, a political public relations consultant from Kansas City, Missouri, expressed enthusiastic support for Greene’s bill. Gender-affirming treatment of minors, he says, is “child abuse.”
“It also leads to human trafficking, sex trafficking, pedophilia, and so on,” he began before HuffPost asked if it had anything to do with pedophilia.
“It has a lot to do with it,” he replied. “If you have adults grooming children to be trans…” HuffPost interjected again, asking what evidence they are being groomed.
“Well, you know, I’m just speculating,” Clark admitted before asserting that there’s plenty of science to “support” conservative arguments against providing transgender youth with gender-affirming treatment — they just don’t know. it is direct.
He simply added, “I’m not a psychologist.”