TWIBS: Betrayed by Booty Judge
Prevaricating politicians are nothing new, but when your elected officials are part of your community and start getting mealymouthed? That’s a whole other problem.
Humor by Aly Gibbs
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.
Pete Buttigieg, formerly the U.S. Transportation Secretary under the Biden-Harris administration (and mayor of South Bend, Indiana, from 2012 to 2020, earning him the quaint sobriquet Mayor Pete), is catching serious internet flak after he said some goofy shit when quizzed about trans people in sports during a July 28 interview on NPR’s Morning Edition.
With allies like these, who needs enemies?
As is often the case with ostensibly liberal politicians in America, I find myself nodding along to what Buttigieg says throughout parts of the interview… and then groaning loudly the second he’s prompted to express a single opinion about the trans community. The problem, you see, is that the subtle science of politicking often precludes taking a firm stance one way or the other on any overtly controversial topic.
When Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep brought up Rahm Emanuel’s recent bout of transphobia, Buttigieg needlessly copped to a typical gross transphobic talking point, that we should show “empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them,” i.e., people wondering, “Is [my daughter] going to be competing with boys right now?”
He went on to say, “[There] are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women’s sports,” stupidly.
Do I even need to hit you with the facts anymore? This is a topic we’ve covered so much, and the fact that people like Buttigieg keep being loudly and obnoxiously wrong about it suggests that they aren’t reading Assigned. That’s hurtful. To be clear, a study funded by the International Olympic Committee made it clear that transgender women, given some period of time taking estrogen (likely a year or longer), perform similarly to cisgender women in competitive sports. Key conclusions include the fact that typical transphobic arguments about lung size and bone density hold no water, and that social elements like nutrition and accessibility are far more likely to play a role in a young person’s athletic prowess.
Consider also that you can count the number of trans Olympic competitors ever on one hand.
What reasonable concerns, then, do these parents have? The conservative bigot’s fantasy of a yoked adult man pile driving children on a middle school soccer field is pure fiction. It has never happened, and it will never happen… outside of some extremely specific post-apocalyptic scenarios that include zombified youngsters.
Buttigieg tried to buttihedge his bets by talking a lot about compassion when he started discussing trans people, but it’s hard to believe that prattle when, during a Tuesday Substack Live broadcast with Aaron Parnas, he said, “In order to bring people together on this, we also have to take everybody seriously, including parents who have questions.”
Mayor Pete is flatly wrong. Worse, his espousing transphobic talking points is so much worse than the usual suspects spewing this sort of vitriol. Because he’s a famously gay man, Buttigieg’s word on queer issues is akin to law, in the eyes of many well intentioned cis/het voters who see liberals like him as inherently noble and honest in their words and deeds. Buttigieg is, at least in terms of who he chooses to love, part of our community… and that means his whitewashing of anti-trans activists’ ideas has a whole ass damage multiplier applied to it.
I would like to bravely say, eat shit Mayor Pete! You can take your reasonable questions and shove ‘em, because it’s just like my pappy used to say: Never trust a gay cisgender man who was once the mayor of a city in Indiana and a consultant for McKinsey & Company.
Aly Gibbs (She/They), formerly Alyssa Steinsiek, is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
