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.
Hey folks… do you remember that time the town of Odessa in Texas tried to institute a bounty on trans people using the correct bathrooms by allowing civil litigation against them (and anybody suspected to be using the “wrong” facilities) up to $10,000? Thankfully, that city ordinance was deemed unenforceable when the old city council was ousted by a new set of normal, sane human beings.
Unfortunately, the entire state of Arkansas is trying to copycat Odessa, Texas.
That’s right, the Arkansas state legislature wants to push through HB 1668 and create the “Vulnerable Youth Protection Act,” yet another disingenuously named piece of anti-trans legislation. What transgender horrors does this act protect vulnerable youth from, you ask? It isn’t just puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that Arkansas Republicans want to target (since they failed to do that in 2023); now they’re going after social transition.
Per the ACLU of Arkansas, “The bill weaponizes civil enforcement by permitting lawsuits against any person who supports trans young people by providing or helping to receive gender affirming care or by affirming young people in their transition.”
Those suits can range from $10,000 per defendant at a minimum, up to $10 million; they can be filed up to fifteen years after the event; and they apply extraterritorially, meaning they can target out-of-state providers and others who help Arkansas residents in accessing gender-affirming care. Since the bill defines social transition as “changes in clothing, pronouns, hairstyle, and name,” it’s entirely conceivable that a barber could be sued for cutting a transgender boy’s hair, or a teacher for using a student’s preferred pronouns and chosen name.
As the ACLU notes, the language of the bill is so far reaching that it’s almost guaranteed to result in countless frivolous lawsuits that won’t hold up in court, but will waste a lot of people’s time and resources, and intimidate allies who otherwise want to support the trans community. Like the Odessa bounty ordinance before it, HB 1668 cannot withstand scrutiny, as it is both impossible to enforce and blatantly unconstitutional.
Is it any wonder that Arkansas Republicans have so much free time to draft legislation meant to terrorize innocent people and those who would support them in their endeavors to be happy? Certainly, there are no other major issues Arkansas’s vulnerable youth need to be protected from. It’s not like the state of Arkansas has the second highest rate of teen pregnancy in the entire nation, right behind Mississippi. And of course nobody would suggest that nearly a quarter of the entire state’s population is illiterate.
No, without a doubt the greatest threat facing young people in Arkansas is the menace of gender as represented by haircuts and pronouns.
If you happen to live in Arkansas, I highly recommend you phone your representative and senators and leave them many strongly worded messages.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
The ununited states of America is certainly not the land of the free anymore. Unless you mean free to harassing anyone who wants to do stuff that you don’t like.
The Netherlands has recently seen a similar remark. At the 19th of February a law proposal was discussed that would make it easier to prosecute the people committing conversion therapy, which under current legislation is deemed harder to do.
Multiple extreme-right and fascist parties openly decided that the facts didn’t matter to them and went ahead to show just how much they hate trans children instead of ACTUALLY talking about the law up for debate.
One party (The FarmerCitizenMovement, in Dutch, BoerBurgerBeweging, a big-meat, big-agriculture lobbyparty created by a company specializing in ads for the agricultural sector…) had a former lawyer and former prosecuter openly advocate for doctors that needed to be capable of torturing trans children to suicide by spouting "watchful waiting."
Mind you: this is not the kind of watchful waiting that was once in the Dutch Model and has slowly been abandoned, it’s the kind of watchful waiting Hilary Cass wants to see.
This meaning: Endlessly delay a child’s request for care to force this child into the unwanted puberty. If death follows I suspect Cass get’s an earth shattering orgasm given the excessive hatred, homo- and transphobia that she has been spouting.
And now you might wonder, how does this recommendation end up in this debate? Well, the extreme-right parties were all drooling over the scientific judgement of the law proposal.
Three scientists looked at possible problems enforcing the law (nothing wrong with that type of advice) or the possibility that it might cause unforeseen problems. (An example we recently had was trying to ban a particular type of bicycle due to the high amount of deaths among under 16’s they are causing, which supposedly would be difficult to enforce because it would ban all those other electric bicycles as well because it supposedly was difficult to distinguish between them).
But it’s that last part where a particular key remark showed up. A remark that due to it’s transphobic nature was directly capable of being tied to one of the "scientists" (deliberately in quotes because if you ask me, he should not have had any chance to work on the judgement). One of the scientists involved is the notorious hardcore transphobe Jilles Smids who looooves Hilary Cass.
And gee, in the scientific judgement, watchful waiting was mentioned as something "under threat of becoming impossible by medical professionals to practice as a result of this law".
The former lawyer and public prosecuter said that "watchful waiting" has a broad scientific medical base supporting the treatment…
But then there was the hardcore religious extremists from the SGP: The State Reformed Party. A hardcore religious extremist Christian party that, to be clear, does not allow women to vote at their meetings!! Even worse, not that long a go, women weren’t even allowed to be members!
And what did they say? That social transition was dangerous. And thus, we basically heard them say that girls should not have short hair, boys should not have long hair. And obviously, without explicitly saying so: that his applies to cis gender children. Because after all, if socially transitioning is so harmful and dangerous, cis gender children are at risk as well.