It’s Happening Here. It’s Happening Now.
Families are fleeing political persecution in the US. How did we get here?
by Evan Urquhart
The announcement that Katherine Sasser was resigning from her position on the Board of Education in Columbia, Missouri had the Board’s president in tears according to local reporting. Sasser, who has a trans daughter, explained that legislation targeting the LGBTQ+ community in Missouri has made it unsafe for her family to remain there.
screenshot from ABC17News
Desperate families fleeing persecution from the state is not new in America. During the great migration millions of Black families fled the violence and oppression of the Jim Crow south during the first half of the 20th century. In the 1840s, tens of thousands of Mormons fled violence and religious persecution, settling in Utah. In recent history, however, there are few analogues for the effort underway targeting families whose support for their transgender children has been smeared as child abuse on the right and subjected to false and misleading press coverage in mainstream news outlets.
How did this happen? The transgender community has been killed by inches: Column inches in major magazines and newspapers. From an Atantic article in 2018 which presented non-affirming parents as its anecdotal heroes, to the New York Times’ “plain old-fashioned newspaper crusade” against the current medical consensus, each step along the way was small, and probably defensible. Taken together they represent a moral-muddying of the waters, a mass-forgetting on the part of major journalistic institutions that transgender people in America are a small and vulnerable group, widely discriminated against in all areas of life, with huge barriers to accessing medical treatment. The more stories about trans issues presented trans peopleas perhaps a little bit too powerful the more confused people became over what the actual situation was, and what sorts of measures would be reasonable or necessary.
In 2016, an effort to ban trans people from using public restrooms in North Carolina provoked such widespread and sustained outrage that lawmakers were forced to repeal it. Today, bans on public restroom use, bans on gender transition for youth and adults, bans on books about LGBTQ+ life in public libraries, and even bans on drag performances are running unchecked through Republican dominated legislatures as families weigh the risks of remaining in states where the government is determined to eliminate them against the risks of uprooting and leaving everything behind in order to protect their children. We’re learning in real time how flimsy the protections against persecution are for vulnerable groups, how in the end our freedoms rest on a public understaning which is easily manipulated. It didn’t take much to confuse Americans to the point where they could no longer speak with a clear voice and say this isn’t who we are, we will not tolerate this. A drip, drip, drip of news stories “just asking questions” was all it took to destabilize things. Now families are fleeing state-sponsored discrimination and it’s largely local news. It may take generations to reverse the damage, which even as I write is worsening.