John Oliver: Some Common Sense About Transgender Youth

At least 30 states are trying establish transgender youth sports bans

John Oliver, the host of Last Week Tonight, dedicated a segment of a recent show to how far-right extremists “have truly lost their minds about trans rights” and transgender youths.

As for the rapid rise in kids identifying as trans, as the writer Julia Serano has pointed out, when you look at a chart of left-handedness among Americans in the 20th century, you see a massive spike when we stopped forcing kids to write with their right hand, and then a plateau. That doesn’t mean everyone became left-handed, or that there was a rapid onset southpaw dysphoria. It means people were free to be who they fucking were.

And, to the extent that some young people are just exploring their gender identity, how exactly is that a bad thing? Who the fuck are they hurting? Watching the conversation around this, it is hard not to feel like, to the extent that there is any social contagion here, it is among adults who have whipped themselves into such a frenzy that they can find themselves repeating some humiliating nonsense.

At one point, several tweens and teens call out adults and school boards for their boundless ignorance, unfounded fears, and general stupidity. Watch here.

Meera Navlakha, Mashable:

Oliver paints a much larger picture, expanding beyond those public figures “stoking fear” around trans rights (part of the constantly discriminatory, negative press coverage trans people endure) and examining the country’s current trajectory: This year, America will pass a record amount of anti-transgender bills.

“So much of the fear of and the arguments against transgender people seems to flow from misinformation and misunderstanding,” Oliver explains. The host shared clips from VICE documentary Transgender in Texas and Hulu’s Changing the Game, the latter of which centered trans kids fighting to participate in sports.

“When supported, trans kids can experience full, vibrant lives,” Oliver says. “Trans people are not by default unhappier or more prone to suffering than everyone else. That is something that we are putting on them.”

Oliver also looked into what he deems is the center of most conspiracies from conservatives: gender-affirming care, or care that is designed to affirm a person’s gender identity — which, according to Columbia University "greatly improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse, transgender, and nonbinary children and adolescents.” Oliver also examines hoaxes such as false claims about kids identifying as cats, saying, “The fact that you seem to genuinely think that that’s happening is just heartbreakingly stupid.”

Also: Further to that last sentence, folkore researcher Lynn McNeill states that the hoax goes back to “at least the early 2000s”, though it seems to have surged in the last four years and been accepted as fact by many right-wing morons. In 2022 alone, 20 Republicans have announced publicly that the story is true.

The urban legend gets debunked every single time it resurfaces — yeah, it actually has to be debunked, kind of like how Lysol actually had to release a statement in April 2020 urging Americans NOT to guzzle their product or inject it into their veins or lungs — but it still keeps getting trotted out. Here is a report from three days ago.