TWIBS: Walz as VP Elect Spooks Trump
Kamala Harris, Democratic presidential nominee, has chosen governor of Minnesota Tim Walz as her running mate. Predictably, Donald Trump is UPSET.
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.
In an absolutely stunning display of good judgment and a willingness to push the liberal needle at least the tiniest bit forward, Democratic nominee for the upcoming presidential election, Kamala Harris, announced Tuesday that her VP Elect would be Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota. Though Walz is absolutely an old white guy, a genre of person we desperately need to see less of in American politics, he’s been a stunning force for good in Minnesota politics since 2006 when he was elected to the US House of Representatives.
As governor of Minnesota, Walz signed a 2023 executive order guaranteeing trans Minnesotans the right to gender-affirming healthcare. He also signed into law a statewide ban on conversion therapy, practices that seek to “cure” people of their queerness through harmful and abusive tactics; a “trans refuge” law that protects non-Minnesotan trans people and their families, who are seeking gender-affirming care in Minnesota, from prosecution in their home state via subpoenas, arrest warrants, and extradition requests; and the PRO Act, which codified abortion rights into Minnesota law.
Walz, a man with an impressive record of supporting trans Americans, is a huge get for Harris’ campaign, considering her own troubled history in that arena. In 2015, as California’s attorney general, Harris—or at least, her office—filed a request in federal court to halt Michelle-Lael Norsworthy’s request for gender-affirming surgery, arguing “there is no evidence that irreversible treatment is immediately necessary.” For trans women trapped in the barbaric American carceral system, sexual reassignment surgery can be the difference between placement in a women’s prison or being put at perpetual risk for sexual assault and physical abuse in a men’s prison. Though Harris’ office failed to stop Norsworthy’s surgery, and comments made by Harris suggest she did not personally sign off on the request to stop it, the fact that it happened on her watch has long troubled many trans voters.
Predictably, the opposition has already made extremely funny overtures against Walz as VP Elect.
Interviewed on Fox and Friends on Wednesday morning, Trump ran his mouth about Harris and Walz. He started off by describing Harris and Walz as “[radically] left,” which is absolutely hysterical to anybody whose politics are actually left of center, then described Walz as “a smarter version of [Harris].” He also suggested that Harris and Walz “would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner,” whatever the fuck that means.
Quickly moving into a classic dose of grandpa’s bigotry, Trump said of Walz, “He’s very heavy into transgender [sic]. Anything transgender he thinks is great.” It’s anybody’s guess why conservatives’ brains melt and they lose all access to the basic grammatical rules of English when trans people are the topic of conversation, but damned if you don’t see it again and again and again!
Trump also characterized Harris’ pick as “insulting to Jewish people,” likely because the other frontrunning contender for VP Elect was Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania and outspoken Zionist. Despite criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu, as any person with their wits about them should, Shapiro is staunchly pro-Israel, an absolutely terrible position for a potential VP Elect to take when the majority of Americans, including Republicans, support a permanent ceasefire between Israel and Palestine.
Just a month ago it seemed all but certain Biden’s failure to get Israel to stop openly, wantonly slaughtering and displacing Palestinians would cost him the election. It’s an important issue to almost every voter demographic in America, and the current administration has done absolutely nothing to curtail the IDF’s lust for murder, to say nothing of the staggering amount of military aid we provide Israel.
Mind you, Walz does support the state of Israel, even if he isn’t quite as open about it as Shapiro. He has, if nothing else, voiced a desire to see Israel stop murdering Palestinian civilians. Thanks for that, I guess.
Walz is probably the best choice in a lineup of mediocre options, and we can be hopeful that his normalcy towards trans people will help counterbalance Harris’s stained history where our community is concerned. At this point, basically any federal support for the LGBTQ+ community, in particular trans folks, would be a huge relief.
And if you don’t care much about Walz one way or the other, you can at least appreciate that he kicked off the recent trend of referring to MAGA people as, simply, “weird.” I have never seen anything upset those losers as much as being called “weird” has, and for that absolute joy, I must thank Tim Walz.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
