Twit Awards for the Week 4/24/23
As we mentioned in the news, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. This bill bans transgender females from competing in athletics as females. The U.S. is facing a debt crisis which could cause trouble for the entire economy, and all that the U.S. House can do is pass a bill to punish transgender athletes. For ignoring real problems to concentrate on something stupid which appeals to their base, the members of the U.S. House of Representatives who voted for this bill get a Twit Award. ABC News has this story.
Twitter removed its policy prohibiting deadnaming transgender people. While it still says that it prohibits “targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category,” the policy no longer includes a sentence that specifies this includes deadnaming transgender people. For weakening protections for a vulnerable group, precisely at a time when their civil rights are under attack, Twitter gets a Twit Award. The Associated Press has this story.
The Daily Mail reports that a high school volleyball player in North Carolina got injured when a spike by a transgender player hit her in the face. Opponents of transgender athletes are using this incident as a call for legislation, as is the injured athlete. The athlete is hardly an expert on whether this injury could have been inflicted by a cisgender female opponent. For using someone as an expert witness whose expertise is questionable at best, opponents of transgender athletes get a Twit Award.
The Advocate notes that legislators in Kentucky were willing to ban transgender minors from getting gender-affirming care, they were unwilling to ban religious counselors from practicing conversion therapy. For banning the therapy which peer-review studies show works, while not banning the therapy which studies show backfires, Kentucky legislators get a Twit Award.
Brian Gilton was employed by Intuit, until he posted some very silly anti-LGBTQ material to Instagram. The material included the statement, “You’re not a bigot if you don’t want your three-year-old getting dry humped by a crossdresser.” In context, the term “crossdresser” is a reference to a drag queen. Mr. Gilton never gave any evidence that such a thing would happen if one were to take one’s child to a drag show, but that did not stop him from suing. He tried claiming free speech, but that does not apply in this case. He is now claiming that believing harm that never occurs is a protected political belief. For believing outrageous misinformation is protected as political opinion, Brian Gilton gets a Twit Award. This story comes from LGBTQ Nation.
In Montana, the GOP majority in the state legislature has called for silencing member Zooey Zephyr for comments made during a debate on a bill to ban transgender youth from receiving gender-affirming care. Some of the conservatives supporting the bill deliberately misgendered Representative Zephyr. While Representative Zephyr did get quite passionate during the speech, the language used seems to be in line with the content of the proposed legislation. For picking on a transgender person for defending transgender people, and for not noticing how bad such behavior makes themselves look, the members of the Freedom Caucus of the Montana state legislature get a Twit Award. This story comes from The Hill.
Category: Transgender Community News, Transgender Opinion
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Every week Cecilia Barzyk diligently scans the internet to assemble as much trans-related information from the weekly news as possible.Subscribe
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