TWIBS: Transition, You Coward!
The Department of Health and Human Services is trying to genocide trans children, and Jim O’Neill needs to come out of the closet.
Humor by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs 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.
Two things caught my attention yesterday, one of them pathetic and wormy, the other incredibly funny.
First: A press conference at the Department of Health and Human Services HQ, during which real life Fallout ghoul RFK, Jr., alongside whatever the opposite of Turkish Delight is, Dr. Mehmet Oz, announced that a de facto ban on lifesaving healthcare for trans people under 18 would be enacted at the federal level. The tl;dr here is that Medicaid (poor people’s federal healthcare coverage) reimbursement will be denied to any doctors and hospitals providing lifesaving healthcare for trans people under 18, and Medicaid and Medicare (old people’s federal healthcare coverage) funding will be denied to any services that provide lifesaving healthcare for trans people under 18.
Because most hospitals rely heavily on federal funds from the Medicaid and Medicare programs to provide affordable treatment to at-risk patients, the HHS is now telling them to abandon young trans people to their deaths or receive no money to treat anybody else. It’s an unenviable position. Trans healthcare may not be able to survive in these hospitals if this goes into effect, which it may not, since it’s incredibly illegal.
That’s the pathetic, wormy bit. Now for the lighter side of the government war on trans kids: Jim O’Neill, Deputy Secretary of HHS, stumbling on stage and delivering the most hollow, soulless party line I’ve ever heard in my fucking life. After shuffling his papers a few times, pushing his glasses up, adjusting his microphone, casting about in despair and sighing quietly, O’Neill declared, “Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men.”
The crowd erupts into excited applause like a gaggle of smoothbrained jackasses.
“Children are innocent, and they need our protection,” O’Neill adds, though he doesn’t mean transgender children, of course, because he and his boss—a former daytime TV personality who Oprah Winfrey is personally responsible for inflicting on our benighted planet—have just decided to carry out explicit genocide against them.
Katie Tightpussy (be cool everybody) put it best, I think, when she described O’Neill as a “guy who has hollowed eyes devoid of love and is a broken shell of a man propelled through life by an unplaceable sense of vague obligation despite never once experiencing even a glimpse of happiness,” in a thread filled with comments from trans women calling O’Neill a “repper,” meaning a closeted trans person who’s too scared to come out because of societal pressure to be cisgender.
I see the vision. I do. The delicate cut of O’Neill’s frame. The soft tone of his voice. The sad emptiness behind his eyes, in which there remains no light. Could estrogen have saved her? We’ll never find out, because Jim O’Neill and his compatriots have locked us into an interminable culture war, a waking nightmare where complex science must be denied and any cultural mores that aren’t cisgender, heterosexual, white, nuclear and toxically masculine must be firebombed from orbit. Must be cut out like a cancer or crushed underfoot like a detestable bug.
Like the sort of bug that died in Kennedy's grey matter, maybe.
I don’t actually know or care if Jim O’Neill or any other cretin in this administration is secretly trans. Obviously that doesn’t matter. It never really mattered that so many conservative politicians and pundits who supported DOMA were engaging in secret gay trysts in airport bathrooms… although isn’t it interesting that gay dating apps are flooded with users when the Republican National Convention comes to town?
The fact of the matter is that Kennedy and Oz and O’Neill and Trump and everybody else involved in this horrific crusade against trans people has blood on their hands. They have already killed many trans kids, and now they are poised to kill countless more. If I believed there was a biblical Hell, I would take some solace in knowing that one day they’ll all burn there. Instead, I can only hope they’ll face some sort of justice while they’re still alive to suffer, and regrettably, I won’t be holding my breath.
Aly Gibbs (She/They), formerly Alyssa Steinsiek, is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
