America is Obsessed With Gender

On today's WOKF I am actually going to be running an episode of The Daniel Moody Show, my YouTube show that I did earlier this week, and the reason for that is that currently, as I've mentioned here on this show, the Supreme Court heard opening arguments this week on the US versus Scrimmetti case, which is a case that is based on the right of a state, the state of Tennessee, to deny transgender youth access to life saving medical treatment.

And where we are is is in a country that nine unelected black robes get to decide whether or not people live or die, get to decide who is human and who is not, who is worthy of dignity and

respect and who is not. And this week on The Danielle Moody Show, I made the connection between America's current gender obsession, where trans people make up one percent of the population, and yet if you were to look at the messaging that has come out of the Republican Party and the Trump campaign, you would think that they made up eighty percent of the population. With how much they

have been targeted. Then you look at the ways in which the Republican MAGA Party is now embracing toxic masculinity and elevating the wife and redefining gender roles in this country at the same time that they are pushing back against those who do not subscribe to the binary. And I talk about it at length in this episode because it's a connection that is worth making, and one that isn't about whether or not you know somebody that is

trans or whether you are trans yourself. It is about basic human rights and also for a party that cares so much about parental rights, apparently when it pertains to that of trans youth, parents and doctors don't know what is best, but your politicians do. When will it end? And that's the question that I pose on the Danielle Moody Show, And it was such an important episode and I received so much feedback on it that I wanted

to run it here as well. Take a listen. I'm not going to be using this show to follow all of the ins and outs of what is happening over in Trump's bizarre world. When it affects us genuinely, then I will delve into those conversations, but on this show, I want us to have broader conversations really ask ourselves some questions that we may not have the answers to at this time, but it's important to ask the questions.

And so the US Supreme Court heard the opening arguments in the US v. Scrimmeti case, which is challenging the States ban Tennessee's ban on treatments for transmnors. And this case is going to have a massive ripple effect across the country as it pertains to transgender rights. And you know, there are lots of folks who will tell you that, well, I don't know a trans person, or this doesn't affect me,

or you know, I'm not concerned. And I will tell you that whenever you hear about a case that is going to decide the future health and well being and safety of another community that you may not be a part of, you should pay attention because, like we've been saying, first they come for right the Martinia molar poem. First, they come for the low hanging fruit, the people that they think that no one cares about or that they will have common discrimination with, and that is trans people

in this country. Because whether you speak with people in the black community, white folks, working class, Muslims, Christians, what have you. What there seems to be consensus around is transgender identity. So I want to provide a little bit of insight into this case. Why it matters so deeply to me, and what came up as I was reading and kind of putting together today's show is that America is obsessed with gender and gender roles and trans people.

The reason why, folks, before I get into the case, the reason why there is all of this pushback and angst and discrimination and policies and weaponization of bathrooms is because I recognize, I believe that transgender people pose a threat to conservatives because if gender roles and gender see

stereotypes no longer apply, then they lose their power. Then all of a sudden, we start talking about people as actual people and the roles that we want them to play in our partnerships, in our households and our families based on who that person is, not what their identity is. And what this all boils down to, folks, is about power,

power over rather than power with. And if now you have young people coming home and saying that they identify as LGBTQ, largely because for them, for Generation Z and Alpha, presenting as LGBTQ or calling themselves queer is more aligned with their political identity than it is with their gender identity.

It's to showcase the fluidity with regard to their thinking and the fact that they recognize that we don't live or have to live and operate inside of a binary and so who would we all be if we were not prescribed our roles literally from the womb the moment that a baby comes out, blue hat or pink hat, now it's blue, pink, and white. You go down any children's toy aisle, you see very clearly based on the pastelles versus the primary colors, who you're supposed to get

a gift for the boy or the girl. And what we have realized over times is that all of this has been prescribed to us, and it all has its foundation in religious doctrinization. So what does it mean then for people to exist free in their own skin, in their own body and say that if my gender that was provided to me at birth does not match how I feel and who I am, and I'm saying to you, I'm telling you this is who I am. Why does

anyone get to tell them? No? If I say my name is Danielle, refer to me as such, and then you turn around and tell me, well, you look like a Mary, so I'm gonna call you Mary. How does it the person that has decided to change my name? How do they have more power to identify me than I do to identify myself? This is basic shit, folks, like this is basic things. If I am telling you who I am, who are you to tell me who you think I am? And to me, that's what this

case is. That's what this is about. You can run it down whatever legal lines you want to right, whether it violates equal protection, whether it violates parental consent, whether

this that or the other thing. But when you drill down to the fundamentals of what is at stake in this case, it is who gets to dictate their personhood the person who is telling you this is how I feel, this is who I am, or the other person living outside of that body that gets to tell you what you can and can't do with that body and how that body will be identified. It doesn't make any sense

when it's said very plainly like that. The case was broad discrammatic case was brought by three trans youth and their parents last year, and they argue that the law violates the equal Protection clause of the fourteenth Amendment because of sex based discrimination. The decision in the case, which is expected in June, could have sweeping implications for trans

youth across the country. According to the Human Rights Campaign, twenty six states have passed bans on gender affirming care, affecting thirty nine point four percent of trans youth in this country. So I want to unpack for a moment why this case is important and I want this is its very small print, but I want to offer it

up to you also I will read it. This is about transgender or non binary youth having access to medically necessary care, services and treatments commonly provided to cisgender youth that their doctors have prescribed to them to treat their gender dysphoria and improve their physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. Not having this care results in devastating consequences for their

health and well being. This life saving care has been approved by the major medical associations and has been scientifically proven to be safe and effective. So, once again, friends, once again we have politicians playing doctor and telling us that those that actually went to medical school, those who actually have a degree in medicine, and are telling you that the care that is being issued for young trans

youth is medically necessary and safe. Who are these politicians to come in and now say these doctors are wrong? So take it again, Roe v. Wade, nine unelected black robes got to DECI that women in this country, people with uteruses in this country no longer have bodily autonomy. For fifty years, abortion had been the law of the land, had been certified and safe because abortions are not just used for quote unquote unwanted pregnancies, they are also used

as a part of reproductive care, full stop. And we are watching right now as women across the country that are in these red states are dying, are miscarrying, are bleeding out, are being forced to carry non viable pregnancies, and then listen as those babies gasp for air for hours before they die. When we said my body, my choice, it does not matter whether you are cisgender or transgender. It matters that you are and that you should have

a say in your own goddamn life. And I just I woke up today and I said, my god, when will there come a time when humans are not being dictated to about who is human and who is not, who is deserving of dignity and who is not, Who should have life saving treatment and who shouldn't. Why is this something that is up for debate? And frankly, friends, if your life write it. If you don't know what it is like to wait with baited breath for nine unelected judges to decide your future, then you are a

part of the oppressive class. You are the mainstream. Because my god, folks, from the fucking constitutional convention that decided that black people were only three fifths of human to the dread Scott decision to Plusy versus Ferguson, to Brown versus Board, to Roe v. Wade, to now the scrematic case, it is all the same. It is about the majority getting to dictate to the minority who is deserving and

who is not. So all of a sudden, folks, the same conservatives that want to talk to you about parental rights and oh, your parents should have a right to say who gets to read what book and who gets to be in what curriculum, and parents writes, parents writes, Well, these parents of transgender youth are saying, we're listening to our kids, and our kids want the care, and our doctors say that the care is necessary because guess what

they would rather their child be trans than dead. But politicians are telling you what you should be doing with your child. So conservatives want to have it multiple ways, not just two ways. They want to have it multiple ways. It's parents' rights so long as it is about taking

other people's rights away and access away. But when it is about granting rights and listening to people and extending kindness and decency, then all of a sudden, politicians must intervene on your behalf because now parents don't know any better. This is the shit that is driving me crazy, and frankly,

it should be driving all of us crazy. And you should not need to know somebody that is trans to give a damn about what the Supreme Court is doing and will decide with their six to three MAGA majority because it won't stop with trans folks. What will be next? And so here I want to read what would be the imp locations of this case and its decision. There are a range of different outcomes that are foreseeable in

a final ruling. A ruling in favor of the families would return the case to the lower courts to apply the appropriate standard of review for improper sex based classifications. If the court upholds the ban, the Tennessee law would remain in effect, depriving transminers from receiving hormone therapy, green lighting similar bands already enacted in other states twenty six and potentially emboldening even more states to pass similarly restrictive

laws and perhaps even more draconian bands. However, this case is decided, it is likely to have significant impact on how much deference courts give to bands on medical care to treat gender dysphoria. Folks. Then, what's next, I'll tell you what comes next. What comes next will be birth control. It'll start with youth. Oh, women, girls under a certain age can't receive birth control, right, which already happens in some states. I'm sure of it. You need parental consent.

Da Da Da da da. Then they'll say, well, no, now you don't need parental consent. We're saying that no one under the age of say, seventeen eighteen will be able to access birth control. You'll let these things enter. When do they end it's transgender youth today, it's SIS youth tomorrow, and then it's all of us. It really

is terrifying. And when you look at the numbers, folks, because this is something that is also incredibly important, transgender youth report its significantly increased rates of depression and victimization compared to their cisgender peers. Notably, in the past year, one in three transgender youth reported attempted suicide. Folks, listen

to this. Let me say that again. Notably, in the past year, one in three transgender youth reported attempting suicide, almost one third reported being a victim of sexual violence, and more than half reported a two week period of depression. Folks, how is this okay? Seriously considering suicide in the past year, sixteen percent of cisgender youth, while forty four percent of trans youth felt sad or hopeless for two weeks or more. In the past year, thirty percent of cisgender kids, fifty

three percent of trans kids. This should not be acceptable.

And so when you hear that this case is happening, and I will tell you that Chase Strangio, who is the lawyer for ACLU, who is also on the team presiding over this case is the first openly transperson to argue before the Supreme Court and use his own life and the life saving hormones and therapy and medical intervention that he received that allows him to be standing before the Supreme Court to argue for the ability of trans youth to have a future, because that is what this

is about. We do not know what it is like to exist inside of a body that you feel like is betraying you on a day to day basis, to be victimized, to be her rest. Just this week, Model of the Year was given to a trans model. You see folks like Laverne Cox, transactress. You see people in prominent positions and you want to believe that we are headed in the right direction. But folks, we are not. Those people are the exception, not the rule. After the election,

the Trevor Project where I got this data from. The Trevor Project is an LGBTQ organization that works to decrease suicide and mental health issues that regularly plague the LGBTQ community. They have a hotline and that hotline folks had a six hour wait following the election because the youth, the queer youth of this country watched as America voted against them. They are watching as folks like Nancy Mace put into effect bathroom bands for a duly elected member of Congress

to embarrass her. Our children are watching, and what we are showing them is that their lives do not matter.

I remember and I participated in that It Gets Better campaign in the early two thousands because there had been a rash of high profile suicides of young queer kids who were being bullied to death and who were going home and they were hanging themselves, they were cutting themselves, and a bunch of queer adults, celebrities, advocates, activists started that it Gets Better project to show them that life

gets better. To hang in there. School. Maybe Top high school may be rough, but like you will make it to the other side. You can get married, you can be successful, you can find love even if it is not in your home. And now, years later, can we honestly tell them that things get better when half of this country, half of the states, have voted to ensure that they will never receive the care that they need, the interventions that they need to live a full, complete

and abundant life. That half of this country said that they are undeserving of life, which is why not only are suicide rates high for the trans community, but murder rates as well. It is this obsession with gender and a binary that has us here rules that were made up in order to control people and to keep them

in their place. It is not an accident that at a time when we are talking about and having arguments about and debates about the existence of trans people, that you also are watching this unfold on social media, this return of the traditional wife, now with a hot new handle as a trad wife taken over TikTok. You think you're watching a video about a woman baking bread from scratch, like many people did during the pandemic, and then you find out, oh no, there's a whole maga, fucking white

Christian nationalist agenda all under it. So again, at a time when youth are seeing the opportunity to break outside of these binaries, where they are seeing women in positions of power and people and positions of power right, and people being able to own their personhood, this is what the pushback looks like, folks. It looks like reminding women of their roles, reminding men that your job is to provide and get the bacon and be strong and do this,

that this is what you're seeing. The pushback to inclusive gender identity and acceptance is toxic masculinity and this shit. And so you know, I bring this to folks' attention because I don't think that people make these connections on

a regular basis. Right between what is happening with the pushback and the weaponization of identity and then this miraculous creation of the triad wife and celebration of them, Hannah Nielman, eight kids, more men, living on a three hundred and fifty eight acre farm, the Ballerina Farm, because she was once in Juliad and Juilliard until you know, she found her husband, whose father, by the way, owns Jet Blue, so they're not poor by any stretch of the imagination,

and she uses her I think it's twenty two million people follow her. Twenty two million people. Some follow her because they like her, some follow her because they hate her, while she tends to her eight children and bakes bread and milks the cows, showing you, you know that you don't need to be all concerned and worried about what feminism is. Just tend to your man, and this is

what they say. The traad wives online lives are a pleasant parade of floaty dresses and appealingly rustic accompanied by voiceover monologues about home simplicity, God and of course husbands who protect and provide and lead the household by example are the tradwives. Okay, wonder some onlookers, while others consume video after video wistful for a quiet life of butter churning. Now,

don't get it twisted. I too have fantasies of leaving New York City and going up state and making fucking jam and like you know, live in a slower life.

But it is. It is based on the fact that New York is filled with prenetic energy, and I don't want to burn out and drop dead, right, But there is a difference between a life of quiet and jam and being told that you need to have a football team sized family and that the man is the head of the household and whatever he says goes, and all you have to do is push out children and churn butter.

There's a big difference between those things. And so I am thankful for Tia Levings, who wrote an incredibly important memoir entitled The Well Trained Wife and the Howering memoir about the trad wife that she says fans need to know here's a little insight into it. Levings decided to write A Well Trained Wife in the late twenty tens in response to the politically motivated way extreme Christian views

were going mainstream. When she recognized that the members of her fundamentalist Christian community wanted to quote to run our country the way they run their homes, she writes, quote, I suddenly realize why it mattered so much that I talk about what it's like in those households. I could tell the public what it's really like and guess what, folks, it wasn't, you know, like the voiceover monologues of the pretty thin white women mother of seventy five who is

milking cows and carrying eggs. No, it was filled with abuse and battery. A Well Trained Wife effectively establishes how extreme religions so wholly indoctrinate their followers by isolating them. Early born in the mid nineteen seventies and brought up attending a Baptist church in Jacksonville, Florida, Levings was taught to mistrust the outside world with its abundance of information and technology. Cancer church leaders told her was a punishment

for the sins of huge humans. The nineteen eighty six Challenger space shuttle explosion was the natural consequences of quote scientists playing god. The United Nations was already plotting a future one world government that would arrest and torture people left behind in the rapture folks. What her book laid out, and I had the opportunity to interview her a couple of months ago was terrifying because she was like from a young age, from birth, she was taught the roles

that women have you. When you're young, your father is in charge, then when you get older, your husband is in charge. And above all that the church is in charge. And she talked about the beatings, she talked about the sexual assault, but all of this being sanitized and filtered through the lens of the tradwife telling young women, you shouldn't want to go and get that degree, You shouldn't

aspire to do anything other then be a mother. What did they say at the turning point one of those conservative conferences, a young woman stood up and said that she was trying to decide whether or not she should follow her dreams of being a surgeon or you know, being a mother, because she doesn't feel like she has the ability to do both. And what did the men tell her? To go hold a baby and then come back And if that doesn't move you, then by all means,

go be a surgeon. So how does this tie into the fight for trans writes because all of this, fundamentally, dear friends, is about control and creating a society where freedom of thought, freedom of body doesn't exist, where you are dictated to and your life is not your own. And what that sounds like to me is another form of slavery. Because if I don't have the ability to have self determination, then what am I? Self determination is the basis of being human, the ability to decide who, when,

where and how you live. And if we are telling women now we're taking that power away from you. We're telling people, young people, no, you don't get to tell us who you are and how to treat you. We're telling you who you are and how we're going to treat you. How do we call ourselves? And continue to even muse on this idea that we live inside of a free democracy that has freedom of expression and thought and that we have the ability to pursue our own happiness.

Those are what is given to us inside of the Constitution, and what this Maga Supreme Court is doing is taking away our rights, one decision at a time, redefining who we get to be and how we get to show up. So, folks, again, you do not need to know somebody that is trans in order to stand for trans rights, because at the end of the day, it is about our right to be human, to exist on our own terms, to have self determination, to have the ability to pursue our happiness,

to live full, free and abundant lives. That's what these cases are about. And no one should have the ability to decide that other than you. So when we decide to divide ourselves off to cists over here and trans over here, black over there, and Latino over there, Muslim over here and Christian over here, able bodied over here and disability over here, we fracture ourselves from our humanity.

And then we trick ourselves into believing that, oh, since they didn't call out my group this time, I'm safe. Your number is coming. Trust and believe. So do not sit oddly and quietly by hoping and praying that your number isn't called. Make your voices heard, make them loud and determined, regardless of whether or not you that day are on the chopping block, because your day and your number will come. We need to fight for each other. We need to fight for everyone's right to exist, free

from oppression, free from discrimination. Right now, trans people, the trans community is under attack. There have been hundreds, hundreds of policies that have been introduced to ban them from existence. Sure it starts with bathrooms, and then it's sports, and then it's workplaces, and then it's movie theaters, and then it's stay home. Then it's they're dangerous. We cannot let this happen. So I implore all of you, if you have resources, think about donating to places like the Trevor Project.

Think about donating to places like the ACLU who are literally fighting for our civil liberties. Think about donating to places like the Transgender Law Center to Family Equality. These are organizations who work tirelessly to make sure that LGBTQ folks live in a country free from discrimination and are safe and able to live their lives. Think about joining a group as an ally because we need more like minded people that are willing to stand up for all people.

I will say this. When it is Muslims that are being attacked, I will say it, and I said it when it was Haitian immigrants that are being attacked, right when it is women and people with uteruses under attack. We have power in our voice and our collective action. You can contact your representatives to make sure that they haven't signed on to these bullshit bathroom bills that Nancy

Mace and Johnson are pushing in the House. You can call up these senators and your representatives and ask them where do you stand on transgender rights and the rights of humanity. These are your representatives. They answer to you. We are all connected because we are all human and regardless of how we live, how we look, whom we love, we all want fundamentally the same things. To be healthy,

to be safe, to be happy. How we go about those different ways, so long as it doesn't hurt or harm other people, as Tim Wall said, is none of our goddamn business. Freedom is our business, and not freedom too, but freedom with that is it for me today. Dear friends on WOKF as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck,