By D’Anne Witkowski, TGP Senior Copywriter
I have a public service announcement: transgender/gender queer/nonbinary people are human beings and the concerted extremist attack on the right for transgender people to exit is deeply, deeply sick.
As of April 3, 2023, at “least 417 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the United States since the start of the year,” according to CNN.
That’s… a lot. And, yes, not all of them have passed. Not all of them will pass. But the sheer number of these bills is clear evidence that there is an outsized focus by state legislatures on legislating transgender people out of existence.
I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a transgender person in Mississippi right now, or the parent of a transgender child in Texas. Or Florida. Or Oklahoma. Or Missouri. Or the many other states that have had a dozen or more pieces of anti-trans legislation introduced.
And all under the guise of “protecting children.” Meanwhile guns are the number one killer of children, teens, and young adults in the United States, according to Moms Demand Action. Yet the states laser focused on transgender people and families are doing nothing to try to curb gun violence.
Texas, which has 63 anti-trans bills in the works, is a good example. According to Every Town, Texas has seriously lax gun laws. The state has seen horrific mass shootings. We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the mass murder at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde where 21 people were shot and killed (19 of them children) and over 15 people were wounded. And earlier this month 8 people were shot and killed at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas.
Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), a right-wing extremist in Congress, tweeted that the cause of the Allen mall shooting was “mental illness, drugs, and evil forces.” Not, you know, the easy availability of guns.
“The federal government must partner with states for mental hospitals and drug rehab centers for the good of our society,” Greene continued. “We must fund and support police officers and prosecutors must put criminals behind bars. We need to study SSRI’s and other factors that cause mass shootings. Our nation is plagued with mental illness, drug addiction, homelessness, and out of control crime. We have to fix it.”
And she’s right. We do need to seriously address mental illness, drug addiction, homelessness, and crime. Though the only policy Republicans are willing to offer to address any of these problems is to put people in jail.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, which makes Greene blaming mass shootings on SSRIs especially disgusting. Of course, this idea did not originate with her. There is a concerted right-wing effort to blame mass shootings on SSRIs and mental illness. And, yes, our knowledge about anti-depressants is ever evolving as we learn more about the drugs and more about mental illness writ large. And by “we” I mean scientists and psychologists, not right-wing extremists who have already made their contempt for science very clear. I’m not a SSRI expert, but I can tell you I’m definitely going to trust a psychiatrist over Greene or Tucker Carlson on this matter.
There is NOT, however, a concerted effort on the right to fund mental illness treatment and care or studies of mental illness. Or homelessness. Or drug addiction. Again, all of these things are treated like crimes, not the public health emergencies they are. Their only solution is to lock ‘em all up.
To think that instead of addressing these very serious and real issues right-wing extremists are instead focused on transgender people who are just trying to live their lives shows how unserious Greene and her ilk are about any substantial policies to address mental health care in the U.S. Or to do anything that actually helps people, to be honest.
The right rants about mental illness after every mass shooting, but only to pull the focus from the obvious problem (guns. It’s the guns) and not because they actually care about people suffering from mental illness. Their obsession with hurting transgender people, a population that already had an elevated risk of depression and anxiety even before being demonized by right-wing elected officials at every level, proves this point. Suicide rates in the trans community are already higher than average. The folks who are passing laws to hurt trans people perversely claim that these laws actually help trans people by steering them away from a transgender identity and into a cisgender identity. That’s not how gender identity works. Laws that perpetuate the stigmatization of trans people make their mental health outcomes worse.
Furthermore, the easy availability of guns is tied to deaths by suicide. Someone having a mental health crisis is far more likely to harm themselves than others. And if they have a gun they are far more likely to die from that harm. The vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent to themselves or others, of course.
When it comes to transgender rights, we’re not just talking about policy disagreements. We’re talking about fundamental differences about who counts as a human being and who does not. Republicans have made it very clear that they want more guns and less transgender people. They want teachers to carry guns but not be allowed to use preferred pronouns. They want to make it easier to carry a concealed weapon and harder for a transgender teenager to play sports.
So when a lawmaker says that in order to protect the public we need to ban transgender people, not guns, what they are saying to anyone with critical thinking skills or, you know, a heart, is, “I do not deserve this job and am really bad at it.”
At The Guerrilla Politic, we work with candidates and organizations that love and respect trans people, care about mental health and want everyone to have access to care, and who want to make meaningful change when it comes to gun violence. The majority of Americans are on the right side of these issues. We need to elect leaders who are, too.
If you share these values and are considering running for office we’d love to help you get your message out. If you’re a trans advocacy organization, a gun violence prevention group, or a mental health and addiction treatment nonprofit, we’d love to help you reach the donors and volunteers you need. Thank you for the important work you do. We see you, we appreciate you, and we can’t wait to talk.