Don’t You Dare Say Kevin Sorbo’s Children’s Book is Anti Trans
Sorbo’s bible-quoting book about males being strong and providing for their families, which he explicitly told the Christian Post was intended to counter egalitarian ideas about gender and reinforce traditional gender roles, is not anti-trans… because he says so.
As a public service, we at Assigned Media would like to assure you that Kevin Sorbo’s new children’s book, which includes quotes from the Bible about god’s design vis a vis gender roles, is not anti-trans. To call it anti-trans would be absurd, “another example of the left doing whatever it takes to score clicks while bashing Christian conservatives,” according to Sorbo, who pivoted to culture war grifting after his opportunities as an actor dried up. Sorbo made it clear how not anti-trans he is in a post on Twitter.com yesterday after blogger Joe Jervis of Joe My God aggregated a Christian Post story, one based on an interview with Sorbo that explicitly touted the anti-trans messages in his book.
In the very first paragraph of the Christian Post piece it says Sorbo wrote the book to “expose the dangers of ‘woke’ ideology and its agenda that’s bluring the lines of God’s creation and what it means to be male and female.”
screenshot from the Christian Post
This is perhaps belaboring the obvious, but the claim that there’s such a thing as “woke ideology,” that it carries with it an agenda that is against god, and that it involves blurring what it means to be male and female, is anti-trans. It’s a smear against trans people, positioning the trans community as a scary agenda-driven ideological threat as opposed to a collection of ordindary people who seek understanding, compassion, and tolerance in an increasingly hostile social millieu.
In addition to the Christian Post reporting that Sorbo’s motivation for writing the book was totally anti-trans, Sorbo was also directly quoted repeating outraeous anti-trans lies.
“But to sit there and try to tell kids in third grade, at 6 years old, ‘Let's change your sex.’ You know what, that's just insane to me,” Sorbo said, repeating the false claim that people are performing sex changes on 6-year-olds. (In reality, the first medical interventions for youth who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria are only considered at the onset of puberty, and initially include reversible measures which might seek to stop a youth’s period using birth control or pause the irreversible changes of puberty.)
Sorbo’s book comes free when parents sign up for a book-of-the-month club, one that features titles like “Paws Off My Canon” to teach children the importance of the Second Amendment. The first book in the series? Why, it teaches children about traditional gender identity. The second is anti-abortion. The third is anti-communist. And so on.
screenshot from Brave Books
This is, of course, America. In America a failed actor is free to make a living hawking the extreme right’s ideology to young children. However dangerous or unwise it might be to teach children the importance of the Second Amendment in a time of mass shootings, the First Amendment protects Sorbo’s right to promote this stupid, dangerous bs. However, it is infuriating for someone who has said the purpose of his children’s book is to indoctrinate children into an anti-trans worldview turns around and acts as if it’s out of bounds for anyone to point that out or take issue with it. Sorbo is promoting a far right ideological agenda to children. Just… look at the titles and descriptions of thee books his book is being used as a free gift to promote!
Conservatives constantly make this move on trans issues, claiming to not be anti-trans in the thinnest and most disingenuous ways, while pushing the most incendiary lines about who trans people are, what the trans community wants, and why. No matter what Sorbo says, treating the very existence of trans people as a disgusting perverse secret that must be hidden from children at all costs is anti-trans. Believing that trans people are pushing a covert agenda to harm children is anti-trans. If Sorbo believes what he’s saying about who trans people are and what motivates them surely he should be proud to say how anti-trans he is.
Allowing the far-right to keep making this move, however transparent and obvious and and bad faith it is, is genuinely dangerous. Because, unfortunately, most people won’t dig into the details. They won’t read Sorbo’s viciously anti-trans remarks to the Christian Post. They won’t go to the Brave Books website and see that his book is part of a promotion deal for a series of children’s books pushing far right ideas. They’ll see Sorbo complaining he’s being unfairly maligned and assume all this is much less ugly and explicitly anti-trans than it is. After all, aren’t we supposed to believe that both sides of the issues are coming from good faith, honest concerns? Aren’t we supposed to believe both sides go a bit too far sometimes?
Ideologues like Sorbo know people really want to believe conservatives are reasonable people with sincerely held beliefs, and they prey on that decency, that desire to think the best of everyone, to mislead. Sorbo’s beliefs may be sincere, but his book, and the book-of-the-month club it’s attached to are both anti-trans. Sorbo knows it. Joe My God knows it. You know it. But for the wider public it joins a cacaphony of misleading information on trans issues, where the truth about anti-trans activism is concealed to further the myth of the good Christian conservative who can never, ever, ever, actually be anti-trans.