Tucker Carlson is a proud gay basher and a right wing partisan. So who better to denigrate the transgender community and Pres. Obama on Fox News?! Yesterday, Carlson did both during a conversation with the Texas Attorney General about how Obama is "forcing" America to accept bathrooms for those who are clearly delusional.
Carlson, in reflecting the standards of America's white, Christian, and very heterosexual right wing, denies that there is any such thing as transgender which, he believes, is "a denial of biological reality." He has actually asserted that those who are transgender are "perverse and unhealthy." Transgender equality, for Carlson, "is a solution in search of a problem." Tucker, a devout Christian, wants Saturday Night Live to mock transgender bathrooms. He recently attacked Bruce Springsteen for canceling his North Carolina concert in protest of the state's anti-LGBT law.
So you can understand why Carlson would host Ken Paxton, the TX attorney-general who is joining other official bigots in condemning the White House's guidance on transgender access to student bathrooms. (BTW, Paxton is under indictment, but Carlson never mentioned that.)
Carlson: "I'm confused about these guidelines which are in effect an order because they don't specify or explain what transgendered means." Fact Check: the directive clearly states the following: Transgender describes those individuals whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth. A transgender male is someone who identifies as male but was assigned the sex of female at birth; a transgender female is someone who identifies as female but was assigned the sex of male at birth." He asked Paxton "why the White House hasn't been able to explain this central term in its order to the states." Paxton claimed that the policy is vague and unconstitutional because the President doesn't have the authority to "unilaterally change the law."
Carlson's "understanding" of the policy is that "the White House says your sex is whatever you say it is obviously ignoring science and common sense and thousands of years of precedent." He continued to denigrate those who are transgender: "But that's the new position, whatever you say your sex is, that's what it is." Fact Check - according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Gender Dysphoria is very real.
Paxton pimped the totally bogus right wing bathroom hysteria which asserts that gender neutral bathrooms are targets for predators. Carlson stated that the Administration's "position is that large numbers of transgendered children are committing suicide each year because of your intransigence" and asked if this is true. Fact Check: 60.5% of transgender people who'd been denied access to college campus bathrooms attempted suicide within their lifetime, compared to 43.2% of those who'd never been denied access to bathrooms." Paxton said that "it's a solution in search of a problem and whined about constitutional authority.
Tucker wrapped up the propaganda: "Does the order from the White House to force transgender bathrooms on American schools, does that speak to you, does that improve your life." When Paxton claimed that parents hadn't been involved in a TX school dept's decision to provide transgender bathroom access, Carlson worked in one more Obama diss: "Soliciting the opinion of parents, I guess that never occurred to the White House."
So if you are transgender, you full of you know what because Tucker Carlson, with "science" and "thousands of years of precedent says so." Nuff said.....
Fun Tucker Carlson fact - He met his future wife, Susan Andrews Carlson when he attended the prestigious St. George's prep school whose headmaster, at that time, was Susan's father, the Rev. George Andrews. The school is now embroiled in a sexual abuse scandal which includes the allegation that Rev. Andrews did not report an accused pedophile to child protective services.
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/09/us/2-days-after-election-coast-mayor-is-on-trial.html
NOTE TO TUCKY
You are welcome to use the ladies room in the News Corporation building. We won’t tell.
A right blight. No there there but hot air.
But not by the route they had promulgated.
Yep, Tucker, we need to keep bathrooms safe. So folk whose drivers license matches their gender identity can set up lounge chairs in boys showers. Just to keep an eye on them to ensure they’re safe. Like your GOP buddy Dennis Hastert. Yep, married conservatives like your buddy Dennis comfortable with the maleness they were born with are no risk whatsoever.
Meanwhile, lets profile transgender folks who have no record of assaulting kids (or anyone else) in bathrooms. Actually, it tends to be them getting assaulted by close-minded a—wipes like you.
Of course, FOX’s fear-mongering retort is perverts can pretend to be transgender to hang out in bathrooms of the opposite sex. Though there are laws against sexual harassment, etc. to prevent abuse.
If he actually understood anything about “science,” he’d know that “science” has documented some interesting cases where people have unusual chromosomal patterns (for his benefit, that’s “sciencey” talk) so that they don’t have the standard XX or XY patterns which determine sex and gender.
You can have cases of XXY or XYY or XXXY—all of which cause unusual development in terms of genitalia. (And those are just a handful of possibilities.)
In the past, whenever a baby was born with indeterminate genitalia, parents were advised to have “corrective” surgery which often turned out to be problematic when those children hit puberty. You’d have “little girls” suddenly sporting odd facial hair growth but not developing breasts or having any “monthly visitor” while a number of “little boys” would sprout breasts and “bleed from their crotches.” NOW, however—in fact, beginning in the 90s—doctors would advise parents to leave the genitalia alone and let the child develop naturally.
While the above is one explanation for transgender individuals, the other is a little harder to, well, put on display since it involves in utero development. Because fetal development is very tied into the mother’s health (and you’d think anti-abortion folks like Tuck-tuck would understand this—though it tends to show more about their real agenda), what a woman consumes during pregnancy to say nothing of the kinds of stresses that affect her hormonal levels and the ensuing effects on fetal development can cause some “crossed wires” in not only mental development but also physical development. If there are enough “crossed wires,” it can lead to a brain that registers one gender in a body that shows the other gender.
But, the real fun thing about “science” is that it’s constantly investigating why things happen the way they do—even when those things may be “fully” understood. (For instance, we understand how tornadoes form but we still can’t explain how they work the way they do, like why some tornadoes steamroll a path on the ground for miles at a time but some seem to prefer playing hopscotch, hitting a house here then bouncing back into the air only to come down a football field away and repeating.)