The Missouri State Legislature is currently passing as many laws as they can think up to show how much they don’t like transsexual people. For some legislators this is only a posture assumed to please the “Christian vote,” but some legislators want to persecute LGBTQ people because, they say, that is what Jesus wants.

Never mind about Jesus, the United States Catholic bishops, in a pronouncement entitled, “Moral Limits to the Technological Manipulation of the Human Body,” have jumped onto the bandwagon and forbidden Catholic hospitals to provide gender transition care or to do research in this field. I’m not surprised. The bishops are pre-occupied with sexuality and are always quick to forbid anything that in their view might be a threat to “the Family,” i.e., patriarchy. 

What these self-righteous people fear is a destabilizing of the male/female binary. They cannot do without binaries, good/bad, black/white, up/down, right/left, good/bad, and, especially, the stark binary male/female, the bedrock of patriarchy. Therefore they react with fear and anger at anything that might blur distinctions between their contrived notions of male and female. They are dog-whistling fear of transsexuals to their reactionary dupes. Whatever are parents to think of their daughter if she falls in love with a young man who is transsexual? Far worse, what are they to say if their son falls in love with a young woman who is transsexual?