TWIBS: Sorry, No News This Week!
I really wanted to bring you guys the news this week, but unfortunately… I just couldn’t find any news to report!
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Well, folks, the inauguration has come and gone. Donald Trump is the 47th President of the United States of America, having entered into his second term in that auspicious and venerated position held by war criminal statesmen and thieving conmen. I regret to inform you—and I say this now hat in hand, begging for your forgiveness—that I simply have no news to report this week.
Thankfully, Trump definitely didn’t repeal Joe Biden’s Executive Order that banned discrimination based on gender identity for military personnel, paving the way for a reissue of the transgender troop ban from his first term. Considering there are 14,000 or more key personnel in the United States military who are transgender, that would be a very unwise and vile thing to do.
Trump certainly didn’t demand that the bishop who led prayers at his inauguration apologize to him for pleading that he show mercy to scared immigrants and trans children. It would be truly bizarre for him to post an unhinged rant to social media accusing Bishop Mariann Budde of being a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” who is “not compelling or smart.”
And perish the very thought of Trump penning an Executive Order that states the United States federal government only acknowledges two genders, Steven Crowder style: male and female. Defining sex by reproductive organs, or “the large reproductive cell, the small reproductive cell, working together in a binary function in order to perpetuate the species,” would be absolutely buffoonish! Think of how much time and energy, not to mention limited resources, would be wasted by demanding that federal agencies remove any policies or communications that “promote gender ideology.”
Of course, there’s no way Trump signed a sweeping Executive Order that bars federal agencies from using federally appropriated funds “to promote gender ideology,” forces federal prisons to house transgender women alongside cisgender men, and explicitly denied transgender women protection under the Prison Rape Eliminate Act. That would be unspeakably evil. The sort of loathsome behavior that you might expect from a man designed in a government lab to harm as many people as possible, even.
I can’t even conceive of Trump signing yet another Executive Order (or over one hundred, even) that repeals a decades old, foundational civil rights order from Lyndon B. Johnson just to own the libs and abolish evil woke DEI policies. I mean, for a start, surely he would have to be able to define the concept of a DEI initiative to outlaw them nationwide… right?
Most importantly, it’s simply not possible that the majority of Trump’s actions since taking office on Monday have fallen in lockstep with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a roadmap designed by evil people to guide America into a new dark age by openly puppeteering a hapless moron who has never made a good decision in his entire life, and who has the emotional and intellectual wavelength of a goldfish. A man as proud as Trump would never allow himself to be led around on a lead held by smarter men, ceding the highest power in the land to any sociopathic bastard who knows how to make him feel like a smart boy.
That would be too strange even for fiction, I’m afraid.
Rest easy, folks… I’m sure we’ll find some news next week.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
