NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – Thousands of conservatives, including prominent Republican lawmakers and presidential hopefuls, flocked to a convention center in suburban Washington, DC this week to discuss child genitalia.
They were there for the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the preeminent annual gathering of America’s conservative movement, where speaker after speaker insisted on the urgent need for the Republican Party — an institution ostensibly dedicated to limited government — to criminalize the actions of doctors and parents who provide minors with gender-affirming care.
Sebastian Gorka, a alleged member of a Nazi-collaborating political order in Hungary who served as an adviser to former President Donald Trump, began proceedings Friday morning from the main stage inside the Gaylord Convention Center. Democrats, he warned the crowd, are “mutilating boys and girls” and “sacrificing them on the altar of their transgender insanity.”
A short time later, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) – a featured speaker at a white supremacy conference last year, when her fellow speakers praised Adolf Hitler and cheered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — took the stage to make a big announcement.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 3, 2023.
“So last convention I did something radical and extreme because remember Marjorie Taylor Greene, ‘she’s so extreme,'” she joked. “I introduced a bill called the Protection of Children’s Innocence Act. And let me tell you my big news this morning, ladies and gentlemen: It couldn’t pass last Congress because Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House. She doesn’t believe at all on gender, but we have one new speaking in our Republican majority … and I will reintroduce my bill … which will make it a crime to perform anything related to gender!”
The crowd roared. Greene’s cruel legislation — based on a litany of lies — would bar transgender Americans under the age of 18 from receiving essential health care services that have long been approved by American Medical Associationthat American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)that American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrythat Endocrine Societythat American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association.
Such endorsements were of little concern at CPAC, where politicians and right-wing influencers fine-tuned anti-trans messages that are likely to be a staple of next year’s presidential campaign news cycle — the Republican Party has clearly decided that trans kids are worthy enough of a wedge issue for to win back the White House.
But it also became clear at CPAC that the Republican campaign against trans children is not just a ploy to energize its base — it could also be the beginning of an insurgent fascist campaign to erase trans people from public life entirely.
Michael Knowles, host of “Michael Knowles Show” on The Daily Wire, gave a speech at CPAC that at times sounded genocidal. “The problem with transgenderism is not that it’s inappropriate for children under the age of 9,” he said. “The problem with transgenderism is that it’s not is true.”
There is one an estimated 1.6 million transgender people in USA. Knowles told the CPAC crowd that these people should have no right to exist.
“If [transgenderism] is false, so for the benefit of society…transgenderism must be completely eradicated from public life,” he said.
Extinguished. The crowd roared again.
Another speaker, Tom Fitton, president of the right-wing website Judicial Watch, called gender-affirming care for minors “a demonic assault on the innocence of our children.”
And there was also a panel on the main stage called “A Time for Courage” with panelists Riley Gaines, a former collegiate athlete who rose to prominence and complained about competing against a transgender swimmer, and Chloe Cole, a woman who identified as a transgender man as a minor, but later “detransitioned”.
Cole’s story has featured prominently in right-wing media to demonstrate the apparent dangers of allowing children to receive gender-affirming care. But stories like hers are very rare. Only approx 1 to 3% of people who initiate a gender transition, later express regret for doing so, and then “retrace or travel elsewhere across the landscape of gender identity,” as Slate once explained.
But to CPAC attendees, stories like Cole’s show that gender-affirming care for minors is always evil.
Donald Ruthig, a 73-year-old retiree from Onancock, Virginia, told HuffPost that he recently left the Episcopal Church because of its decision to support transgender youth. He drove three hours to CPAC to “meet people who think like I think” who are “dedicated to restoring the Judeo-Christian morality that we are losing.”
Part of that restoration, he explained, is to “stop torturing our children with gender transitions, to stop this whole LBGTQ alphabet nonsense and start treating people as God’s people created in God’s image. We are all the same. We no need to divide everyone according to their little fetishes.”
Donald Ruthing, 74, attends the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland on March 3, 2023.
Tim Roberts, 57, traveled to CPAC from East Lansing, Michigan, with his two daughters, whom he recently removed from elementary school “because of all the woke stuff going on in there.”
He echoed a sentiment widely expressed at CPAC — that the mere acknowledgment of transgender people in the classroom is tantamount to indoctrination.
“I passed [high school] in 1985, and it just wasn’t a thing, and now [my daughters] said that a better portion of their classes have a lot of trans kids or kids who think they’re trans,” he said. “First of all [school administrators] do when they come to school is to say, ‘Hey, write down your pronouns and that’s what we’re going for.’ They encourage this.”
James Clark, 37, a political PR consultant from Kansas City, Missouri, expressed enthusiastic support for Greene’s bill. Gender-affirming care for minors, he said, was “child abuse.”
“It also leads into human trafficking, sex trafficking, pedophilia and things like that,” he began, before HuffPost asked him what gender-affirming care had to do with pedophilia.
“It has a lot to do with it,” he replied. “If you have an adult grooming a child to become trans…” HuffPost interjected again, asking what evidence there is that they are being groomed.
“Well, you know, I’m just speculating,” Clark admitted, before insisting that there’s probably a lot of science to “support” the conservative argument against providing transgender youth with gender-affirming care — he just didn’t know. it directly.
He simply added, “I’m not a psychologist.”
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