Kathleen Parker Normalizes Extremism for the Washington Post

The columnist wants you to believe that forcing trans people out of public life is not only acceptable, but inevitable.

by Evan Urquhart

With some bad puns and a jaunty air of nonchalance, conservative columnist Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post sought to further normalize the bomb threats against Bud Light bottlers and the harassment campaign that has forced Dylan Mulvaney to flee the country. Mulvaney, once again, is an entirely blameless trans woman who invoked conservative’s ire by asking Joe Biden a question.

Parker’s argument, the opinion she is advancing in the mainstream press, is as simple as it is noxious. She believes that Bud Light ought to have known better than to treat a transgender woman like any other popular influencer because the existence of trans people is unacceptable to conservatives.

This is made completely clear in Parker’s essay. She doesn’t claim Mulvaney behaved inappropriately, apart from her trans identity. She doesn’t argue that Bud Light did anything wrong, except for working with Mulvaney. She justifies conservative outrage by objecting to trans people. Not to trans people doing anything, she objects to the fact of their being. Here’s some of flavor:

screenshot from the Washington Post

In this, Parker admits that there’s no conservative case that Mulvaney is an inappropriate person for Bud Light to have worked with, except that she is trans. That is the beginning, middle, and end of their issue. Conservatives do not want trans people to be treated like other people, for instance by leveraging their popularity into brand sponsorships. They believe that brands should be targeted with bomb threats, and trans people hounded out of the country, if any executive VP dares to treat trans people normally, like a demographic of people to sell beer to.

This central fact is being continually left out of every mainstream article which calls this a “controversy” or a “backlash.” The subject of the controversial backlash is Mulvaney’s existence, and they object to her existence because they object to the existence of trans people in public.

Now, this of course is what trans people have been saying is the case for quite some time. But Parker’s essay stands out because it isn’t hidden or sugar coated: Parker says, in the pages of the Washington Post, that trans people pose a nebulous, unspecified danger to children. Not by actually harming children, but by existing. She uses very ugly language to describe this, an idea which is the epitome of what’s meant by the term “transphobia," describing longstanding, evidence-based treatments for gender dysphoria as alien “chemical and surgical alteration.” Parker goes so far as to accuse the entire trans community of perpetrating crimes against innocence, merely by existing.

screenshot by the Washington Post

If this level of naked hate for a group of people seems inappropriate for a mainstream op-ed page, that’s because it is. While open, dripping contempt for trans people has been normalized in right-wing media for years, and while the hatred has continued to intensify, conservatives writing in mainstream papers have tended to moderate their vitriol rather than openly taking the side of hate-mongers. In a normal article of this type, for instance, Parker might have briefly mentioned the bomb threats against Anheuser-Busch facilities, or the harassment campaign that resulted in Mulvaney fleeing the country to feel safe. In this column, Parker doesn’t take a sentence to condemn the violence. By eschewing the niceties of condemning violence she is openly making common cause with those on the far right who are using threats and harrassment to attempt to drive trans people out of public life. Juxtaposed with this tacit approval of terror tactics is Parker’s dripping contempt for Mulvaney, a human being whose greatest known flaw is being a tad bit chirpy and overly positive.

screenshot from the Washington Post

As the hatred and fear of trans people is normalized, the boundaries of what is acceptable will move repeatedly. Parker’s ugly screed for WaPo is not the first time, and it will not be the last. However, each new assault on the norms of public discourse by conseravtives ought to be marked and taken in somberly by those whose humanity still makes them capable of normal human empathy for trans people. Kathleen Parker has pushed the envelope this weekend on what is acceptable in terms of dehumanizing and vilifying a group of people just for being different. She is seeking, openly, to validate a campaign of violence and terror and presumably to encourage new and deeper depths of inhumanity from the far right of this country. The very existence of trans people, not their transgressions, not their behavior, is being presented to mainstream news readers as polarizing, up for debate, which if conservatives’ position wins will mean transgender people’s elimination. Trans people ourselves are being pushed to the margins of the conversation even as it becomes more all-consuming, more central to the GOP’s platform. It’s all happening, here, and now. If this outright hatred, these demands for trans people to be cast out from participating in ordinary public life as equal citizens, is now acceptable rhetoric for the pages of the Washington Post, that’s horrifying. We should not allow ourselves to become inured to it, even if there’s ultimately very little we can do beyond bear witness.