I thought this was going to be a happy story about a small town in Minnesota.
Chris and Kelsey’s younger child was always the extrovert in the family.
Assigned male at birth, they were into more traditionally feminine things — if there was a truck being played with, it was likely being driven by a Disney princess — so the couple took it in stride when their child asked for a Kit Kittredge American Girl doll for a fourth birthday present. Kelsey wondered about the future but Chris just thought it was his child responding to living with a mother and sister while he was deployed overseas with the Navy Reserve.
“So we got this doll and Kit’s eyes just lit up. And Kit was so happy and so excited to get this doll,” Kelsey said.
“About a week later, when dad was in Japan, and I was standing right there in the kitchen, Kit walks up to me and goes, ’Mom, can you call me Kit?’ And my stomach dropped a little bit. Because all of a sudden, maybe things were making a little more sense. Click. And I said, ’Sure. Still my little … boy?” And Kit goes, ’No, your little girl.’
“I was like, ’Absolutely, sweetie, you got it.’ And then I ran into the other room with a panic attack and called Daddy in Japan and said, ’What the heck just happened?'”
Chris Waits said his first thought was that Kit might be going through a phase. Like his wife, he had to learn about trans kids.
Neither parent said they knew much about trans kids, and decided to let Kit be Kit while they figured things out.
See? An accepting family who were concerned about doing what was right for their child. This is going to be a good story, right? I can tell you the parents continued to be supportive and accepting, but as you might predict, small town America is small minded America.
But after one parent posted a long complaint about a whole host of things involving Kelsey, another parent went uglier.
“She should be locked up for child abuse,” the parent wrote. “Her younger ‘daughter’ is actually a boy.”
Others jumped in, attacking the Waits as “woke parents” who had pushed their views onto their child.
Kelsey soon found out what was being written.
“This was my most precious secret. The thing I protected most and the thing I was most afraid of ever being used in a political way because for me, this isn’t political. This is my family, this is my child,” she said. “I dropped to the floor, and I cried.”
Yeah, it just got worse and worse. The family eventually decided to leave the community altogether, because the asshole parents have decided to target a vulnerable child.
So the Waits are moving from the dream house they designed, the one where Kelsey spent hours hand painting murals. They are seeking more privacy, and they believe safety, in a new address that has not been publicized.
“That’s where we’re at right now. There are people that we know, that are not safe for our kids in our neighborhood,” Chris said. ”We can’t trust our kids alone at the bus stop waiting for the bus, not because of the kids necessarily, but because of the parents.”
Goddamn TERFs. These are people who probably wouldn’t identify as any kind of feminist, though — they’re just hatemongers. And they’re everywhere.
It’s terrible, but it’s better than my childhood. Loving parents who have resources to educate themselves is a big step up from a world where every trans child was an isolated child. Good for Kit that they have parents who listen.
I wish this was an isolated incident, but it’s not. My news feeds are heaving on transgender-related news, and this comes up time and again. Children outed at schools, attacked, and parents were hounded for being supportive seems to be the type of behavior these people are capable of. It’s almost like they are gleeful to have a “publically acceptable target” and the cruelty is the point. I firmly believe if it wasn’t us, it would be another minority group with these people.
Naw. No way.
These people never, ever let go of their old hate targets.
They just keep adding new ones, over and over again.
The old hate targets are the ones we grew up with. Nonwhites, Yankees, nonxians, gays, uppity women, commies, evolution, Heliocentrism, etc.
The latest ones are…scientists, trans, progressives, Democrats.
The up and coming hate targets these days are, of all things, MDs and other health care workers, hospitals, Remdesivir (the anti-Covid 19 drug), and vaccines.
I’m sure I’m leaving some of their hate targets out.
And, I’m in several of their categories.
Who’s truly guilty of of child abuse? The parents who are supportive, or the neighbors who targeted a child?
Minor nit: TERF means trans-exclusionary Radical Feminist
We have no reason to believe they are feminists of any kind, least of all radical ones. They’re just plain transphobes. People who need somebody to hate.
Thanks to Fox NoNews and Deathbook, during this pandemic, MD’s and other health care workers are being attacked verbally and sometimes physically on a daily basis now. Accused of killing Covid-19 patients for money or of being crisis actors pretending to treat a nonexistent viral disease. Or whatever, the accusations change and morph often, since they have nothing to do with reality.
Health care workers are now quitting their jobs all the time now, which means the hospitals are short of staff. Just what you need in a raging pandemic.
Even the hospital security workers are now starting to quit. They are being called to confront and remove family members who are acting out and threatening the staff quite often, and sometimes these family members get violent.
The one saving feature here is that a lot of right wingnut Covid-19 virus patients are now avoiding the hospitals and staying home, eating horse dewormer paste, and then dying. Some days in my local area, a quarter to a half of all dead Covid-19 virus patients, die at home.
If you follow the YouTuber TellTale at all you know he and his whole family had to move because of death threats leveled at him by his community because his daughter recorded her health “teacher” preaching abstinence only. She was fired but the entire town turned on his family to the point they had to move out of state. Human beings suck.
Raven @ 3
With the growth of flat-Eartherism, they may add us round-Earthers to the list. At that point, even Ken Ham with his goddamn bogus ark will become a target for believing the “round Earth propaganda”.
Allison @5
“Goddamn TERFs.
Minor nit: TERF means trans-exclusionary Radical Feminist
We have no reason to believe they are feminists of any kind, least of all radical ones. They’re just plain transphobes. People who need somebody to hate.”
I really want to just drop the TERF thing all together. It is a slander to feminism. A feminist would NOT exclude a woman, regardless of sex assigned at birth. “radical Feminist” just screams of misogyny in general.
@6 Last year over here in stupid central ,I mean GB, for a few weeks every Thursday night at 8 pm ,people were encouraged to stand on their doorsteps and clap for the NHS staff fighting the pandemic .
Now just like your examples Medical staff are being abused for trying to do their jobs .
Only good thing ,we don’t have gun nuts over here .
Yeah, given the location I’d say that these are these your average “GAWD CREATED TWO SEXES” Bible-humpers rather than “feminists” who behave like cartoonish, right-wing stereotypes of feminism–complete with the “man-hating.”
@#9, skeletaldropkick:
As I understand it, Radical Feminism was genuinely an extremist form of second-wave (IIRC) feminist theory. It’s basically what the likes of Rush Limbaugh were trying to paint all feminists, ever, as being — they embraced gender essentialism, which you would think would make the right wing happy, but did it in the opposite way that right wingers do: they took it as axioms that all men are violent, masculinity is bad, and women cannot interact with men at all without being victimized. If you ever see the term “political lesbian”, meaning a woman who is heterosexual but refuses to have sex with men on principle, that’s A Thing from radical feminism. But of course if you decide to accept gender essentialism, then being anti-trans just flows naturally from that, so most radfems are TERFs automatically. Even at the time, there were feminists who emphatically disagreed with the whole position, but it really did exist.
Bits and pieces of the whole thing remained here and there anyway. (If you’ve read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, you will remember the bit with the witch and moon in A Game Of You, where the trans woman is excluded from participating in the spell — which exclusion eventually ends up killing her — because she’s not a “real” woman. That is, or at least was, a very common attitude in pagan circles which considered themselves feminist.) And so people who want to be anti-trans but don’t want it to seem regressive tend to discover radical feminism and then they have a whole fund of feminist theory to draw from. Like the way people who want to justify being a greedy asshole discover big-L Libertarianism and suddenly get a bunch of pseudo-respectable academic sources they can cite.
@9
It’s what they call themselves (or did before they decided it was a slur), and is arguably a very accurate action of their ideology
Description, not action
Then you understand wrong.
The word “radical” means “at the root,” and the basic idea of radical feminism is to question society’s most basic assumptions about sex and gender — the “you can’t possibly question that!!” ones. This is as opposed to more mainstream feminism, which is more about improving conditions for women without making fundamental changes in society. This doesn’t say that they all come up with the same answers. But most of the radical feminists I’m familiar with take that to include challenging gender essentialism, and consider the existence of trans people as a counter-example to gender essentialism. (There’s even a “trans radical feminism.”) However, some radical feminists (IMHO a minority) consider trans people an abomination, and the term TERF was invented to distinguish them from the trans inclusive radical feminists.
(BTW, people being people, there are certainly people who call themselves radical feminists who would disagree with my idea of what the basic idea of radical feminism is.)
It doesn’t surprise me that you have this picture, however. The mainstream media, being part of the patriarchal power structure, have from the beginning tried to portray feminism as kooky ideas from crazy ladies and thus only shows the most extreme views and implies that all feminists subscribe to them. (Because all women are clones of one another \end{sarcasm}) Since radical feminism is an even greater challenge to Teh Patriarchy, they try extra-hard to make everyone think every radical feminist believes the most extreme fringe views that anyone anywhere has called “radical feminism,” or even just “feminism.”
Don’t tell me. Let me guess: these people would take a bullet for a fetus because they’re soooooooooooooooooooooooo pro-life. Unless that fetus is gay or transgender. 🙄🙄🙄
Oh, and Meta stoked this bullshit? Zuckerberg needs to go before the Hague for crimes against humanity. Immediately. Guillotine is too good for him.
In other news, Richard Dawkins *sigh* is calling on people in the UK to sign the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights. For those who don’t know this is an extreme anti-trans manifesto from a transphobic hate group, described by one author here:
This group calls for the removal of all transition related health care, being trans to be considered a mental illness that needs to be fixed, trans people to be banned from all gender segregated spaces appropriate to their gender, no legal protections for trans people to live as their gender, etc. It flies in the face of existing UK legislation such as the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equality Act 2010 which protects trans people.
So that’s nice.
(/snark)
These days, I prefer the term FART: Feminism Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe, since the majority of them have no actual association with feminism (radical or otherwise) beyond couching their arguments in feminist language.
@davidc1 #10:
Oh yes we do, but fortunately most of them aren’t armed. They just have to settle for lobbing one off over their imported ‘Guns & Ammo’ or concentrate on building up their swords and knives collection instead.
That’s what happened to another small town YouTube atheist. they targeted his child because iirc he ran for the school board and ended up moving to NYC. I cringed because even though he’s welcome here NYC is hella expensive.
@20 I admit I have got two books about military small arms .And a boyhood friend invited me to the gun club he and his dad belonged to .He took some photos of me firing a copy of a smooth bore black powder musket ,and also a Sharps Carbine .
Can’t see what the big whoop is regarding shooting .
As a reminder, the individual retrospectively credited with the term “TERF”, Viv Smythe, wrote I’m credited with having coined the word ‘Terf’. Here’s how it happened (apparently at the same time):
@2: I can do you performative outrage and cruelty without bigotry, and I can do you bigotry and cruelty without performative outrage, and I can do you all three consecutive or concurrent, but I can’t do you performative outrage and bigotry without cruelty. Cruelty is compulsory.
+++
+++
At least as of 2 1/2 years ago, Natalie Wynn was unsympathetic
to requests to stop using “TERF”.
+++++
Gender Critical | ContraPoints
Mar 30, 2019
ContraPoints
+++++
24:54 (“Concern Eight: TERF is a slur”)
“[TERF is] a derogatory term for beliefs and behaviors
that deserve to be derogated. The term “gender critical”
is really a euphemism recently created to replace
“TERF” with a phrase that doesn’t have such negative
connotations. It’s perfectly analogous to the phrase
“race realist”, which was invented by racists wanting
a more flattering a respectable description of their
beliefs. I’ve used the term “gender critical” in this
video to be inviting to fence-sitters, but I refuse
to cooperate with racists who want me to use their
euphemisms, and I generally do the same with TERFs. . .
I have especially little patience for TERF requests
for linguistic decorum, since most of the language used
by TERFs is specifically designed to be maximally
hurtful, harmful, and insulting to trans people. . .”