Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz

Fear is a versatile tool in the hands of those willing to wield it.

• It can make otherwise sensible people irrational.
• It can separate them from reason and critical thinking.
• It can manipulate them into hating strangers.
• It can turn them into monsters, in the name of supposedly driving out something monstrous.

And there has never been a more vivid recent display of weaponized fear’s grotesque power, than in the Right’s persecution of the transgender community.

It is an empty, hollow culture war that defies reality, denies data, lacks common sense—and has worked precisely as it has been intended. Conservatives have mastered the art of inciting terror in the hearts of those whose votes they know they could not likely earn any other way. Knowing that no one is at their best when they are afraid, Republican politicians and Evangelical preachers have kindled unearned hysteria in their rank-and-file beautifully.

Transgender human beings make up less than one percent of the population, a minority community within a minority community; the least likely human beings to be embraced even within the queer population.

They comprise perhaps the most vulnerable, most marginalized, most mistreated people group in this nation; the object of the kind of ridicule and violence that ignorance so easily breeds.

Yet miraculously, over the recent election cycle, the Right has managed to fashion trans people into a threat so prevalent and powerful in the eyes of their perpetually-terrified base, that they have been convinced that somehow their own safety and security lies in silencing and eradicating them.

Project 2025, Republicans’ 900-page playbook for the coming Trump administration, includes precise and clearly-defined plans for targeting the trans community and their allies.

It reads:

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

In other words, Republicans want not only to erase trans people, but to criminalize trans advocacy and allyship of any kind, jailing people, destroying their livelihoods, and shutting down organizations and businesses for even supporting transgender human beings. There’s been a particularly sick irony in watching Conservative Christian voters attempt to claim some moral high ground against supposed sexual perversion—by embracing a serial predator and court-adjudicated rapist (but that kind of hypocrisy is commonplace).

And yet, when pressed for the great transgression that transgender human beings are actually guilty of, the Right really can’t offer any substantive answers, despite half-hearted straw man defenses of women’s sports, and religious zealot fever dreams about trans predators lurking in bathrooms.

Because the truth of the matter is, when you cut through the perverse fictions peddled by self-serving members of Congress and craven Evangelical preachers, the only offense that transgender people are guilty of—is existence.

The Right just will not tolerate these human beings, being.

For a people who so often claim to love their neighbors, those neighbors cannot be transgender. Their simple desire to be fully seen, to walk through this world in their most authentic form, to be afforded with the most basic and elemental respects—things every human being on the planet wants and deserves, this is all not only too much to ask, it is a justification for hatred, it is reason for expulsion.

And that’s the most tragic aspect of Conservatives’ public crucifixion of the transgender community. It is a baseless, senseless, wasteful campaign of dehumanization that leaves the world far more painful and angry a place than it would be if they were invited into compassion instead of coerced into hatred. If the Right wasn’t so fixated on rejecting pronouns and burdened to deny healthcare and obsessed with who’s peeing in the closed stall next to them, they might actually come to realize that they’re the real threat here.

The rest of us need to stand up to this wasteful hatred.

As with all public crucifixions, those driving the nails in are the ones we should really fear.