Contempt Is the Foundation for the War on Trans People, and America
Bred on social media platforms and legitimized by mainstream outlets, the language of contempt for fellow human beings endangers us all. Trans people have been the early targets.
Opinion, by Billie Jean Sweeney
The language of contempt has become deeply ingrained among anti-trans bigots on both sides of the Atlantic, their vitriolic rhetoric amplified by Elon Musk’s social media platform X and given legitimacy by big news outlets such as The New York Times.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s years-long stream of hate-inspired, personal invective was capped off by her last act in Congress, a bill criminalizing gender affirming care. Yet after making the decision to leave the House of Representatives and abandoning her support for Donald Trump, Greene has been portrayed, at least in part, as a redemptive figure in a number of credulous stories in the journalistic mainstream.
A woman who called gender affirming care “mutilation,” who viciously targeted a fellow congresswoman’s daughter on X, and who labeled her colleague Sarah McBride a “predator” among many dozens of incendiary comments was suddenly acceptable the moment her critiques of Trump began.
Perhaps the most egregious example of Greene’s normalization was a profile in The Times. In more than 8,000 words, reporter Robert Draper found virtually nothing to say about her contempt for trans people, other than noting Greene considered Donald Trump insufficiently supportive of her bill.
That’s an oddly revealing claim. The American president has been the leader in normalizing the language of contempt. In a purported “Christmas message” on his social media platform, Trump invoked the “Radical Left Scum” who support “Men in Women’s Sports, Transgender for Everyone.”
His unhinged vitrol has veered wildly across the US map, aimed at immigrants, a large cast of Democrats including former presidents Biden and Obama, racial minorities, women, people with disabilities and pro-democracy advocates, among others. When his gestapo force, ICE, gunned down a queer American in Minneapolis last night, ghoulish adherents like Laura Loomer mocked the victim’s use of pronouns on her social media profile. It’s far easier now to compile a list of Americans who escape his contempt than are his targets.
Trans people are Trump’shis enduring prey. His Day 1 executive order introduced “mutilation” into the official lexicon as it sought to impose far-reaching discrimination on trans Americans, including members of the military who served their country honorably. Trump’s contempt has been highly personal as well. In a meeting last year with the Canadian leader Mark Carney, who has a nonbinary child, he made a point of gratuitously saying, “We’re not going to take your child away and change the sex of your child.”
Truth is irrelevant in the mocking rhetoric of the right and its enablers in mainstream and social media.
Suzanne Moore, the UK columnist, demanded that this be the year “Britain finally kills off trans ideology” in a hate-filled column last week that called trans people a “cult,” a “mob” and “deranged.” The governing Labour Party, whose popularity has nosedived amid its broad embrace of bigotry, might ordinarily think twice about taking further advice from zealots. Prime Minister Keir Starmer seems paralyzed, though, unable to break free from this narrative of contempt.
Trump and his party’s popularity have plummeted as well, as Democrats won a string of special elections in late year that reflected a rejection of his policies and rhetoric. But Trump appears determined to escalate his hate-ridden language. Attacking the state of Minnesota and its governor Tim Walz this week, Trump resorted to his favorite tool: Repetition of an obvious lie about gender-affirming care, in mocking and contempt-filled language.
Corporate mainstream media seems increasingly in the right wing’s grip, as evidenced by Bari Weiss’s propagandistic changes at CBS. They often appear unable or unwilling to sufficiently challenge Trump, as both the norms and laws of American life repeatedly go from foundational to optional the moment Trump transgresses them. He has unilaterally unleashed an attack on Venezuela and seized its leader, threatened the sovereignty of America’s international allies and menaced domestic adversaries, enabled in large part by a compliant Supreme Court and an obsequious Republican-led Congress.
In response, much mainstream media retreats from values it once held dear. Of all these principles, human rights have been perhaps the frailest. Experts are now sounding the alarm about the right wing’s war on trans people’s lives and livelihoods, our medical care and our freedom of movement and association.
The assaults are beginning stages of an atrocity akin to genocide, as Walker Bragman reported this week in Important Context.
Gregory Stanton, founder and president of the group Genocide Watch, told Bragman that the attacks on transgender and nonbinary people in the U.S. represent a “genocidal” attempt “to destroy a gender group.”
“I think that the objective here is literally, physically to destroy this group,” Stanton said.
Experts are similarly sounding an alarm about the threat to democracy itself.
The Steady State, a nonprofit consisting of more 360 former US intelligence officers, warned in October that America is on a “trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism: a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control.”
It notes that partisan media figures aligned with the administration have been granted privileged access, while outlets that reject the administration’s demands to self-censor have been cut off.
One of Trump’s earliest media enablers was Elon Musk, who for a time led a shadowy government effort to improve “efficiency” all while conducting a broad invasion of Americans’ private data whose toll has yet to be fully known.
Musk has returned more or less to his social media platform X, where his contempt for trans people and women has never been clearer. Last week, as my colleague Aly Gibbs reported, Musk announced he would support a Texas lawmaker in a legal case over her tweeting of nonconsensual photos taken in a women’s restroom.
Days later, Musk’s machine, Grok, was found to be generating AI-imagined photos of real women, many of them underage and many of them trans, in various states of undress. His machine apologized. He did not.
One trans person described being targeted by a Trump supporter on X who used Grok to remove her clothes. “I know this because he showed me,” the person said in a powerful thread on Bluesky, where she has had a large following.
“Men have felt and will always feel entitled to control women’s bodies. We see this everywhere, from Twitter to the Supreme Court,” the person wrote. “Generative AI simply offers another vector for attempting to exert that control.”
Over the past 18 months, degrading treatment that reduces human beings to objects of scorn has moved from the far-right reaches of X into the narrative of mainstream media.
In a November 2024 piece, The New York Times legitimized this contempt and teed up for Trump the all-out war on trans people’s existence that he would soon wage.
The Times, having already spread disinformation and fomented bigotry in dozens of stories, had this to say in the first sentence of this purported news story: “To get on the wrong side of transgender activists is often to endure their unsparing criticism,” simultaneously classifying every trans person who speaks up for their rights as an “activist” and casting our every expression as unreasonable.
Contempt had gone mainstream.
Billie Jean Sweeney (she/her) is a freelance editor, reporter and advocate. She helped direct international news coverage for The New York Times and coverage of New York City for The Associated Press. She also served as editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she defended international press freedom. At The Hartford Courant she led an award-winning investigation into the deadly use of restraints in mental health institutions. For Assigned Media, she’s written about the right wing’s attacks on young trans athletes and how mainstream media adopted and spread anti-trans disinformation.