Benny Briolly beams as she strides through the concrete favela alleyway of Brazil’s city of Niteroi in a snow-white ball gown, onlookers proudly wave campaign flags emblazoned with her face. The city councilwoman and nearly 1,000 other transgender politicians are running Sunday in every one of Brazil’s 26 states, where the number of transgender politicians has tripled since the last elections four years ago.
Full confession; this is an article from Sojourners Magazine. I subscribe, and I brought the whole piece here, for those who may wish to read it but don’t want to go on a Christian site. I did not see anything besides that to warn about; there is discussion of church but not of bad happenings. However, if I missed something, I am so sorry; if you would be able to let me know in comments, that helps me learn what I should look for. This article struck me as something that should be at Scottie’s Playtime.
This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
Flamy Grant called in to her morning interview after participating in a day-long silent retreat. Well, not a silent retreat exactly — it was a vocal rest.
After spending the last year touring the U.S. off the success of her album, Grant, who prefers to use her stage name in interviews, needed to rest her voice. Since her rise to Christian music stardom — or infamy, depending on how one feels about a drag queen topping the Christian charts — she has performed in bars, clubs, and churches spreading the good news in glitter.
Since then, Grant has collaborated with artists like Semler, Derek Webb, and Jennifer Knapp. And she has spoken out for LGBTQ+ rights, joining a lawsuit against the state of Tennessee in 2023.
A few weeks before the release of her second album, CHURCH, Grant and I spoke about her time touring the country, writing songs in drag, leaving the church but still going to churches weekly, and more.
Coincidentally, as the interview ended, Amy Grant’s “Lucky One” began playing over the hotel lobby’s speakers.
[Editor’s note: This interview was performed before Hurricane Helene devastated many regions in the South, including Flamy Grant’s hometown of Asheville, N.C. Grant and her team canceled shows in North Carolina, but continue touring in Georgia and Nashville this week before touring the West Coast.]
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio: How is touring? What have you heard from folks while on the road?
Flamy Grant: I feel like I’ve been on tour pretty much nonstop for the past year. A year ago I quit my day job and moved back to Asheville, N.C., where I was born and raised. And honestly, this is not even an exaggeration, I’ve spent more time on the road than I have in my bedroom at home.
This [tour], though, is very different. I’m on a tour with two other acts and a full band. Mostly, I’ve just been solo on the road, which I love in a lot of ways because I’m actually very much an introvert.
We’re only in our second week right now of the “No More Trauma” tour, and the response has been amazing so far. Now that I’m a year in, there have been people who’ve come up to me to say hello afterwards, and [they say], “This is our third or fourth time seeing you!” And I’m like, I’ve really only been doing this full-time for a year. What do you mean the third or fourth time? It is really cool to know that there’s this community and fan loyalty.
My favorite moment on tour so far was in St. Louis. We were getting ready, there was no green room at the venue, so I was literally just painting my face in front of the windows, right outside where the line was forming to get in. There was this family — a mother and a little girl, around 7-9 years old. She had a sign, painted in full rainbow lettering, that said, “This is my first concert!” And she was just holding it up to the window. So I popped out to say hello, and they had driven two hours to St. Louis to come to this show. Her name was Claire, and I’m her favorite artist, and I’m her first concert.
That was wild because it just threw me back to when I was that age and excited about music and wanting to go to concerts for the first time. Everybody always asks that question, “What was your first concert?” throughout your entire life. And now Claire is always going to say, “I saw a drag queen in St. Louis.”
Now I’m curious what your first concert was.
Clay Crosse. He had quite a big hit with that song “I Surrender All” in the ’90s. I just loved him. I probably had a crush on him, if we’re being honest. He had that classic jawline, that beautiful blonde hair, and yeah, I was obsessed with him. My parents couldn’t take me, so I roped one of my friends from church and got his dad to drive us down to this show. What I remember most about it was that Jaci Velasquez opened and she was so good. She was phenomenal.
Mine, for fairness, was the Newsboys back when Peter Furler was still leading them. Speaking of touring, I noticed you have a different booking process for churches and for “traditional venues” like bars and clubs. Why is that?
That’s been interesting to navigate. I feel like I’m definitely straddling two worlds. I very much want to be taken seriously as a musician and songwriter. The drag can sometimes be a little bit of a barrier to that, because people tend to see drag and think it’s a gimmick or, they just immediately associate it with Sunday drag brunch or weekend clubs.
I have done a fair bit of that, especially early on, but I’m a singer-songwriter and I write my own original music, and I happen to perform in drag. It’s been a challenge to convey that as we’re booking and marketing shows. My booking agent is fantastic, and she’s been really good at helping people understand that they’re booking a singer-songwriter who needs an extra hour in the green room to get ready.
What happened last year, with “Good Day” hitting number one, so many churches reached out and the first question was, “Can we do ‘Good Day’ in Sunday worship?” And I’m like, of course you can, just make sure they know it’s written by a drag queen. The next question was, “How do we get you to come?” Either on a Sunday morning or to do a special concert on an evening.
Because I know the church world and was a worship leader for 22 years, it just makes more sense for me to book those myself. I don’t generally go out seeking church bookings, those really do come to me, and that’s a gift in so many ways.
I’ve played in over 50 churches in the last year. Some want to integrate me into their Sunday morning service, I’ll be part of the service planning, and we’ll have a song during communion or the offertory. Others want to bring me in on a Saturday night and have me come sing to their congregation and community.
I have officially left the church myself. The last church I was involved in was in San Diego, I was a worship leader there for 8-and-a-half years and it closed down after the pandemic. I have not sought out a new church home since then, but I’m still in churches a lot.
You’re in churches about once a week — that’s more than many church members. What makes writing music as Flamy Grant feel different? How does one write songs in drag?
In some ways, there’s no difference at all. At the end of the day, I’m just writing about my experiences. Derek Webb says the artist’s role is just to look at the world and speak about it. That’s so much of what I’ve done since I was 9 years old when I wrote my first song. That process of songwriting doesn’t necessarily feel all that different.
And yet, there is this shift in the tone and subject matter of what I write about, because my life has changed so dramatically. And drag is a huge part of that change.
Flamy Grant poses for a photo. Photo by Ash Perlberg/Courtesy Flamy Grant
It’s been really fun to feel like I’m excavating parts of myself that have been dormant or suppressed for so long. [Drag] definitely changes the subject matter of what I’m writing about.
And it’s been there all along, I just haven’t allowed myself the pleasure and joy of exploring the range of my own gender identity, even the range of my physical voice. Being able to play with how I sing a song or a lyric, it’s opened up a world of songwriting to me. There are times now, when I’m writing, where I do think about what this is going to look and feel like on stage, in drag, in a big wig with sequins and glitter on my face and all of this.
I still love to write a gut-punch ballad; that’s one of my specialties. And I love doing that because that’s not really a thing you tend to associate with drag too much. That tends to be a more surprising moment for people in my concerts, when I get serious. People expect the fierceness and sass and qualities of drag that they’re used to.
Mostly it’s just a lot of fun. I really enjoy the opportunity to play with music in new ways.
It sounds like part of what you’re saying is that it offers an added element of creativity to a songwriting process, even in the “constraint” of writing as Flamy Grant.
That’s absolutely right, there is a constraining piece to it. Whatever music I put out, it’s going to be out under that name, Flamy Grant, and I know it’s going to be associated with drag.
In some ways it’s obviously pushing the boundaries of Christian music, but it’s also pushing the boundaries of what people might consider drag to be.
What has the response been like from the drag community?
I just got a message from a drag queen back in San Diego. Her drag name is Nadya Symone. I love this queen. She’s just one of the people I look up to. She’s a Southern queen who lives in San Diego now. She was there at my very first drag show; I was nervous, and she could tell. And she just said, “Baby, whatever happens, the show goes on. You make a mistake, you forget a lyric, you forget a line, your wig falls off, whatever — the show goes on.”
I just felt so taken in, included, and welcomed. And that’s never changed. The people who get [Flamy] the quickest are other drag performers. I don’t have to explain much to them. They’re like, “Oh you’re just bringing yourself to drag, which is what we all do.”
Anyway, the message that Symone sent me just yesterday was just, “I’m so proud of you, baby.” I don’t know what she had seen, but she’s still there and cheering me on. I had a lot of anxiety coming into this and a lot of imposter syndrome. Am I a real drag queen? Do I really belong in this community if what I want to do is write my own folk songs and sing them? And that has all been laid to rest by interacting with other performers.
Is there anything that you wanted to do differently between your first album, Bible Belt Baby, and your second album, CHURCH?
I’m so proud of Bible Belt Baby, but it did come together circumstantially and without a lot of intention. My initial conversation with my producer, Ben, who was my housemate in San Diego at the time, was, I think I want to sing in drag. And we were going to put together a five-song EP. I ran a Kickstarter, and we raised more than I expected. And it just continued to blossom and grow until it was a full album.
And in order to make it a full album, I was pulling from songs that predated Flamy. What was really cool about that was discovering that Flamy has been there all along, right?
But with CHURCH, I had the opportunity to really, for the first time, think about crafting a complete narrative. Thinking about themes that would all be contained on one record and writing, for the first time, a full album in Flamy’s voice intentionally.
The second thing was having the resources to go to Nashville and make a Nashville record with Nashville players. That was a really exciting prospect for me.
We sent them all the demos in advance. I, [pauses] I don’t know that they listened to them, but they didn’t need to. They heard the song one time, took a couple notes, went to their instruments, and five, six, seven takes later we had what we needed. It was wild to watch how, at the skill level of those musicians, they brought the songs to life in ways I could have only hoped for.
I really wanted a sound that was in this Nashville vein, but we also talked about how to make it still a drag record. How do we pull in some of this country disco feel? How do we make sure it stands on par with anything coming out of Nashville, but also uniquely Flamy. They did a phenomenal job.
[Lastly], with Bible Belt Baby, I didn’t know, up until a couple months before releasing it, whether I would even put it out as a Christian record. It wasn’t until we finished it that I was like, yeah, this absolutely belongs in the Christian genre.
Now, Christian music is largely worship music, which I personally don’t care for. I like music that tells someone’s story. I want to hear what an individual person has gone through in their life and how they got to where they are.
And that’s why I loved artists like Margaret Becker, or Jennifer Knapp, Caedmon’s Call, and folks famous for writing really personal. What’s that thing people say? We find the universal in the specific — that’s what I love about singer songwriters. I don’t know if I’ll continue to make Christian music forever or what the next album will look like yet, but for this album, I [wanted] to be really intentional with the messaging. I think the tagline for the Kickstarter was “Flamy Grant’s Big Gay Christian Record.”
Sep 23, 2024 Orion Rummler Originally published by The 19th
In 2020, the Supreme Court found that gay and transgender workers are protected from workplace discrimination in the landmark case Bostock v. Clayton County. Despite those federal protections, LGBTQ+ people across the country — especially transgender and nonbinary people — continue to face rampant discrimination at work and don’t feel safe being out, according to research from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
In a 2023 study of 1,902 LGBTQ+ adults in the workforce, released in August, 17 percent said they had experienced discrimination or harassment on the job in the past year. Trans and nonbinary employees were more than twice as likely as cisgender queer employees to face discrimination and harassment: Twenty-two percent of trans and nonbinary people experienced discrimination in the past year, and 26 percent experienced harassment.
“You would hope things have gotten better,” said Brad Sears, founding executive director of the Williams Institute and coauthor of the report.
Sears believes the high rate of recent discrimination is an indication that change has been slow after Bostock, even after the Biden administration implemented additional nondiscrimination policies. Shortly after Biden was inaugurated in 2021, he issued an executive order based on Bostock that mandated the protection of gay and transgender Americans in the workplace, as well as in schools and doctor’s offices. And as of this spring, extra protections were put in place to guard against employers who consistently misgender employees or deny them access to sex-segregated spaces.
Still, the study found that many LGBTQ+ Americans are not out in the workplace to avoid facing discrimination and harassment. Nearly half of LGBTQ+ employees said that they are not open about their identity to their current supervisor, and one-fifth are not out to any of their coworkers. Staying in the closet actually did protect them: LGBTQ+ employees who were out to at least a few coworkers, or just their supervisor, were three times as likely to report discrimination as employees who were not out.
“A lot of people, even if they are out, they’re kind of downplaying their identities in the workplace,” Sears said. “Maybe they use a different voice or different mannerisms at work, or they don’t dress exactly how they would otherwise dress when they’re not at work, or they use a bathroom that they would prefer not to be using at work.”
To avoid discrimination, transgender and nonbinary people are significantly more likely to hide their identities than cisgender queer people. In a new breakout analysis of the Williams Institute’s survey, the experiences of nonbinary people are found to be especially fraught.
Nonbinary people in the study described being ostracized and subjected to violence, harassment or threatsat work due to their physical appearance either not being “feminine” enough or “masculine” enough. Their gender expression made them a target and was used as a justification for their treatment by their bosses, coworkers and customers. Frequently, nonbinary people said they were passed over for raises and promotions, called slurs, and forced to work alone.
The nonbinary people surveyed were largely young, urban, and racially and ethnically diverse. To the survey authors, such data is a call for employers to take action — especially If they want to retain young employees.
About 87 percent of nonbinary adults in the workforce are under 35 years old, compared with 71 percent of transgender adults and 51 percent of cisgender queer adults, according to the study. That research aligns with other findings from KFF that Americans under 35 are more likely to identify as nonbinary than older Americans, and research from the Pew Research Center that found adults under 30 are more likely than older adults to be out as trans or nonbinary.
About 3 in 5 nonbinary people have experienced discrimination or harassment at work at some point in their lives, like being fired, not hired, not promoted, or verbally, sexually or physically harassed.
About 1 in 5 nonbinary people reported physical harassment at work because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, with some survey respondents reporting being “assaulted,” “attacked” and “strangled.”
For some, unfair treatment looked like having their hours reduced, being isolated from other employees or customers, or being excluded from company events or socializing.
“Oftentimes, I was passed up for a promotion because I wasn’t ‘manly’ enough, and they doubted my ability to lead a team,” a Latinx nonbinary person from California said in the survey. A Latinx nonbinary participant from Colorado shared: “A co-worker strangled me at a counter and said he was trying to ‘give a girl a massage.’” In Connecticut, a Black nonbinary person said they heard their manager talking “disparagingly” about them to the rest of their bosses because of their gender expression.
One in 4 nonbinary employees said they are currently experiencing adverse treatment at their job because of their LGBTQ+ identity. For many nonbinary people, the worst experiences of discrimination and harassment that they face at work are linked to their multiple marginalized identities. In particular, they were targeted for their disability or being bisexual in addition to being nonbinary.
This research shows that company-level policies, as well as state and federal nondiscrimination regulations, need to be specific so that they protect nonbinary employees, Sears said.
The Williams Institute plans to release more breakout analyses from its survey, including reports on the experiences of transgender, Black, Latinx and Asian-American employees. Breaking down the unique experiences of each demographic is key to understanding and addressing the issues that they’re facing at work, Sears said — for example, nonbinary people face rigid and gendered expectations at work, while bisexual women face high rates of sexual harassment.
“LGBTQ+ people are not monolithic. They’re different, they have intersecting identities … and those are leading to differences that are important in the workplace,” he said.
Will Ferrell made his dad cry with his new Netflix documentary. “Will & Harper” tracks Ferrell’s road trip with longtime friend Harper Steele, a trans woman.
It’s a short little video that is also so sweet. I read something about this docu somewhere earlier in the week, but I don’t recall where. If I see it, I’ll bring it back. I hope everyone’s first day of Fall has been really nice~
I’ve been thinking this week about some of the absolutely stupid garbage conservative, culture-war-obsessed MAGA people believe, or claim to believe, for the purposes of demonizing people and making people hate the same people they hate. The most glaring current example is obviously Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and their media mouthpieces attacking innocent Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, with lies about them stealing and eating family pets.
But there are a bunch more.
There are the abortion lies Trump and Republicans love to tell — which many of them truly believe — about how Democrats love to let babies be born, at which point they lay them on the table and decide whether or not they’re going to execute them. Trump is sure it’s happening, because he saw on TV that the previous governor of Virginia (or is it West Virginia? Trump is never sure) totally said that, and if it’s on TV, it’s true.
Every election cycle lately, there’s a crop of the country’s stupidest Republican politicians babbling out loud that they have a friend whose pastor told them at the local elementary school there are children who identify as “furries” and demand to poop in litterboxes. It’s amazing watching them tell that one with a straight face.
Of course, Republican lies, blood libels and conspiracy theories often have a tiny element of 0.2 percent truth in them, something they can use to insist that the ridiculously stupid thing they say is happening really is happening. In the Virginia abortion story Trump tells, the nugget of truth was former Governor Ralph Northam talking about palliative care in grievously tragic situations where a newborn infant has no chance of surviving.
There actually have been litterboxes in classrooms. It’s so that if there’s a mass shooter in the school and classrooms are locked down for hours, poor little kids who can’t hold it might not have to be humiliated by wetting their pants.
(Did I ever mention that white conservative MAGA Republican politicians, pundits and influencers are extremely sick, evil liars?)
And then there’s the right-wing Christian Republican war on LGBTQ+ kids.
This week, Fox News tweeted a video featuring failed swimmer/anti-trans hatemonger Riley Gaines — remember her from my post about the Paris Olympics? — on “Fox & Friends,” spreading some the vile lies she so loves to tell. The clip caught my attention and pissed me the fuck off, and that’s why I’m talking about that this week instead of Mark Robinson. (I’ll get to him in due time, I’m sure.)
Here’s the video: (embedded on the page.)
Fox explained in its tweet that Gaines was “react[ing] to a California judge banning a school district from imposing a policy that would have required teachers and staff to notify parents if their student declares they want to change their name or pronouns.”
In the video Gaines bellyaches that such rulings are the government saying “they know your children better than you do. They don’t believe that these are your kids. They believe that these are the government’s kids.”
To which I reply, oh, go fuck yourself, Elon. Same message goes for Riley Gaines.
I want to talk about the California law in question and what it really does, and how that ties into how Donald Trump and Republicans are demonizing LGBTQ+ kids as part of their hate campaign against America, but I also want to tell y’all a story, so I’m going to try to do both.
Storytime!
Two nights before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, I was standing in line in the wee hours in the lobby of a prominent hotel in downtown Atlanta, with a bunch of fellow weary travelers. It was Friday, the first day of the CrowdStrike update that borked the entire global internet, and all our Delta flights had been canceled.
I struck up a conversation with the guy in front of me, a handsome young guy from El Paso. His wife and small children were somewhere in the expansive lobby, exhausted, while Dad tried to get hotel rooms sorted. They were coming from Disney. I was on my way back from the Republican convention in Milwaukee. We made small talk.
But we were in line for over an hour, so the conversation actually got surprisingly deep. He was a second-generation immigrant from Mexico, with parents who only speak Spanish. We talked about what life is really like along the border these days for people who actually literally live right on it. He described himself as a conservative, but not extreme, and not super-political. He freely offered that he couldn’t stand Donald Trump, but probably would vote for him, not that he was enthused about it.
But one thing that was bothering him, big time, was this law that had just been signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in California, to protect gay and trans kids from rogue school personnel who would out them to their parents without their consent. I was a bit surprised this Texas guy, who again didn’t seem that political, was so in tune with something California’s governor had done five days prior. But there we were.
He made extra-clear from the beginning that he doesn’t consider himself anti-gay or anti-trans. But it was immediately clear to me that this very kind-seeming guy was getting all his information on this issue filtered through the Christian nationalist bullshit machine of right-wing media.
The California law was passed directly in response to school districts in red areas of the state enacting policiesforcing schools to notify parents if a child asked to be referred to with a different name or pronouns. The legislature acted to protect those kids.
But to this dad, it sounded like California was trying to put one over on parents, to usurp their parental role, stealing and indoctrinating their kids. (Hey, Riley Gaines! How did your shitty, vile hate get in this nice man’s brain?)
It was 1:00 a.m., so I wasn’t about to start bickering, and also y’all would be amazed how gentle and diplomatic I am in person. But I did try to get on this dad’s side and maybe help him see it from a different perspective. He had gathered that I was gay, or maybe I told him.
“You obviously love your kids,” I said, “and you wouldn’t reject them for any reason, no way, no how.” He agreed.
“That law isn’t about hiding things from good, loving parents like you,” I told him. “It’s about protecting kids who don’t have parents like you, kids who are frightened of what would happen if their parents knew who they were, kids who don’t feel safe, kids who come from of abusive homes.” It could be the religious kind of abuse, and/or the non-religious kind of abuse.
He understood what I was talking about and several times reiterated how very not-anti-gay and not-anti-trans he was.
There have been memes going around lately along the lines of, if your child is gay or trans and they don’t want you to know, there’s probably a good reason for that, and likely it’s you. The problem is you.
I was trying to help this dad see, though, that he was not the problem. But he was still uncomfortable with it. He felt he would want the school to tell him. He grudgingly agreed that if one of his kids thought they were trans, he would absolutely want to make sure they had the best medical care and guidance they could get, that he would want to do whatever was best for his child.
But he wasn’t convinced this law wasn’t out to get people like him. You don’t fix the constant lava flow of conservative Christian right-wing fascist propaganda and lies in one sleepy night when all anybody wants to do is get a fucking hotel room and then fly the hell out of Atlanta the next day.
That dad is a good example of why Trump and Vance and Fox News and the rest of the Republican machinery are so committed to demonizing all LGBTQ+ people, but especially trans people, this election season.
This is a strategy, and it works on a whole bunch of people.
‘Think about it, your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.’
(Trump also memorably screamed at the debate that Kamala Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison!” He gets confused about his conspiracy theories sometimes.)
Reality check: there is no school nurse in the country doling out top surgeries or bottom surgeries, either for trans-identifying kids, or for kids who come in after they skin their knees on the playground. (That would be real fucked up!)
Schools aren’t going gender-affirmation surgeries and kids aren’t demanding litterboxes because they say they’re “furries.” The baby isn’t being born so they can put it on the table and decide to execute it, and Haitians in Springfield aren’t eating Whiskers. Not even the best Obamacare money can buy has a plan where kids can walk in to the school nurse, without their parents’ consent, sign up for surgery, and then reappear at their parents’ house days later with a brand new set of genitals.
But Moms For Liberty got so mad at CNN for debunking Trump’s dementia lies. It was very important to them that Trump be out there demonizing transgender people, in general, regardless of whether Trump’s babbling about children getting on the school bus and coming back “a few days later with an operation” was literally true.
They angrily sent CNN a bunch of examples of lawsuits filed in various states, all focused on “parental rights” and, in particular, schools letting kids transition socially — as in, come out as trans or non-binary, etc. — without running off to tattle to their parents. Letting kids use different pronouns if that’s what they’re feeling is right for them. Etc.
Of course, because it’s Moms For Liberty, their missive to CNN — and the pissy PR email they sent to tell everybody about it — was full of hallucinatory conspiracy theory babblings about schools “secret[ly] social-transitioning … minor children” and, quoting one lawsuit from Massachusetts, “encourag[ing] minor children to hide key components of who they are from their parents, while actively encouraging children to disobey and ignore their parents’ wishes, and while actively deceiving parents and hiding information about their own children from them.” Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice even suggested that schools are “legally allowed to assign a new pronoun without parental knowledge.”
As if it’s the schools initiating these actions. As if schools are handing out pronouns with seating charts. (“Aw fuck, bro! Did you get she/her? Bro that sucks!” — common elementary school conversation now.)
They also straight up lied and said Minnesota allows gender-affirmation surgeries for minors without parental consent. It does not.
(Again I ask, on what fuckin’ insurance plan? Have I mentioned lately that these people are delusional weirdos?)
But as I said, pretty much everything Moms For Liberty was mad about, even when they were totally misrepresenting things, was social transitioning. Because that’s the slippery slope to hormones and surgery, and they’re not telling their parents, AIIIIYEEEEEEEE!
So they were fine with Donald Trump straight-up lying and saying schools are doing transgender surgeries on kids, because sometimes you have to make up really fucked up lies to con people into hating the same people you hate. Isn’t that right, Republicans?
What did J.D. Vance just say about his and Trump’s blood libel lies about Haitian immigrants? “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” And by “suffering of the American people,” he meant things he’s a total Nazi about.
Lying for Jesus! It’s been around a long time, yet it’s never done by people who actually reflect the character of Jesus in any way, shape or form.
(One of these days I’m going to write y’all a full Bible study on Matthew 7:23, AKA Jesus’s personal candygram to conservative white Christians.)
MAGA Republicans are absolutely counting on conning enough people with these absurd, demonizing lies and libels, about trans people and immigrants and abortion and anything else they can think of that deserves a good Two Minutes Hate. In Texas, it was reported this week that congressional Republicans are spending millions targeting Democrats with anti-transgender ads.
It’s literally all they have to run on. And they know it works, at least on some people.
In summary and in conclusion, and back to what pissed me off so much in the first place.
Riley Gaines griped to “Fox & Friends” that “[t]hey don’t believe that these are your kids. They believe that these are the government’s kids.”
We’ve been over this before, how these MAGA Christian fascist creeps (and their ideological compatriots) think they literally own their children. They believe they own them until they transfer ownership of their daughters to their husbands, or in the case of their sons, when they become wife-owning patriarchs in their own right.
It offends them when it’s pointed out that actually, their kids are their own people, and they own themselves.
Now, when the kids are minors, sure, their parents have custody and responsibility for them, and the schools have a part to play in that, both as partners with the parents and just in general, in preparing them to be respectable, functioning adults. Schools have a responsibility to let parents know when their kids’ grades are slipping; if they’re getting in fights, or getting bullied; if they’re acting out in school; if they’re doing something illegal, or dangerous, to themselves or others. And so forth.
This shouldn’t have to be said, but coming out of the closet — as gay, as bi, or as somewhere on the gender spectrum other than that which they were assigned at birth — DOES NOT FALL UNDER ANY REASONABLE CATEGORY OF “MISBEHAVIOR” FOR WHICH A SCHOOL WOULD NEED TO NOTIFY PARENTS.
Being LGBTQ+ is not dangerous, it’s not immoral, and it’s not “I found meth in your kid’s backpack.” It’s simply a thing. If a child is excelling and getting along well socially and in grade seven they decide to try on some new pronouns, that doesn’t warrant a phone call home.
It doesn’t warrant tattling.
But that’s what these evil fascist creeps want. They want schools to be their abusive morality Gestapo when they’re not around, to shame and punish their children in their absence, and to call a parent-teacher conference if they suspect a child has come down with the Woke Mind Virus.
By the way, schools do have another responsibility when it comes to kids, and that’s to spot abuse and neglect, and to intervene for the welfare of the child if they suspect the child is in danger at home.
And that — dearly beloved MAGA fascist assholes — is the category under which this falls.
If a kid comes out as gay, or starts socially transitioning, but they say “Hey, my parents don’t know, and I need them not to,” then there’s a reason that kid — the actual owner of their own body, mind and soul — is saying that. Maybe they’re just not ready! Maybe they’re getting their sea legs with their friends before they go home to their parents. Maybe they’ll tell them next year.
But it’s also possible that they don’t feel safe with their parents, and fear their reaction. It might be a reasonable fear. Fundamentalist Christian homes are notoriously abusive to LGBTQ+ children, oftentimes disowning them or kicking them out, oftentimes subjecting them to physical, psychological and religious abuse. There’s a reason states all over the country have been passing bans on fully discredited, fully ineffective and uniformly harmful “ex-gay” and “ex-trans” religious torture for minors for over a decade now. (Congratulations, Kentucky! You have a good governor.)
They might be scared their parents will ship them off to “pray away the gay” or “pray away the trans.”
Laws like the one in California protect those kids.
The parents bitching about this and filing lawsuits and publicly demonizing LGBTQ+ people — including their own children — they are demonstrating precisely why these laws need to exist.
That’s what this is about.
It’s not about hiding things from good and loving parents. It’s about protecting kids from parents who are monsters.
In the next 46 days, you might encounter people who say they can’t vote for Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump for truly stupid reasons. This is one of them. (And the abortion thing and the Haitian immgirants thing and the litterboxes and oh God, so many more.)
Tell them their reasons are stupid reasons.
How loving and diplomatic you decide to be about it, that’s up to your own best judgment.
I thought this would be cute to post for a science article, and now that I’m getting it done, I’m thinking Scottie posted video about these little guys, a few months or so back. I hope this isn’t a boring duplicate. Earlier it didn’t hit me, but now at bedtime, the photo is ringing a vague bell. Still, it’s really cute for a Friday morning, so enjoy the side eye from the anole being called a chicken nugget.
September 18, 2024, Ariel Marcy
Researchers have found a type of lizard – referred to as the chicken nugget of the forest – that can hide underwater thanks to a special bubble they produce around their nostrils.
Details of the scuba-diving lizards are published in Biology Letters.
A water anole produces a special bubble over its nostrils to breathe underwater. Credit: Lindsey Swierk.
For animals that have adapted to live on land, air-based breathing limits the amount of time they can survive underwater.
Many invertebrates, including species of beetles and spiders, are known to use bubbles of air to extend the amount of time they can spend underwater. These bubbles allow air-breathing animals to inhale previously exhaled air and take in additional oxygen. This behaviour is called rebreathing, inspired by the scuba technology of the same name.
Until recently, there were no known examples of vertebrates using bubbles to rebreathe underwater. In 2021, Lindsey Swierk, an assistant research professor at Binghamton University in New York in the USA, and her colleagues documented rebreathing in several species of Anolis lizards.
One such species, the water anole (Anolis aquaticus), is a semi-aquatic lizard that lives near streams in the forests of southern Costa Rica.
“Anoles are kind of like the chicken nuggets of the forest. Birds eat them, snakes eat them. So, by jumping in the water, they can escape a lot of their predators,” says Swierk. “We know that they can stay underwater at least about 20 minutes, but probably longer.”
The question remains whether the bubble over the water anole’s nostril functionally extended the amount of time these lizards could hide underwater.
To test this, Swierk and coauthors applied a bubble-impairing substance to the skin of one group of lizards.
“Lizard skin is hydrophobic. Typically, that allows air to stick very tightly to the skin and permits this bubble to form,” said Swierk. “But when you cover the skin with an emollient, air no longer sticks to the skin surface, so the bubbles can’t form.”
Swierk’s team then measured how long the control group stayed underwater compared to the bubble-impaired group. They found that the control group stayed underwater 32% longer on average.
“This is significant because this is the first experiment that truly shows adaptive significance of bubbles. Rebreathing bubbles allow lizards to stay underwater longer. Before, we suspected it – we saw a pattern – but we didn’t actually test if it served a functional role.”
