Pro Publica has it half right.

When it comes to trans folk, people consistently forget their history.

ProPublica has an article up about a deceptive campaign to defeat the Missouri abortion-rights measure by pretending it’s about trans rights. Indeed some billboards just say, “Stop child gender surgery, No on 3.” Of course, your vote on 3 won’t stop OR start any surgeries on anyone at all, unless they happen to be surgical abortions.

It’s a fine article, nothing revelatory, but you should read it if you haven’t been keeping up on how bigots have been using the existence of trans people to muster support for their efforts to curtail everyone’s reproductive rights (especially but not only the right to abortion which now only exists in scattered parts of the country).

That said, even this good outlet — one which I value very much — falls into the trap of portraying “hostility to trans people as an electoral strategy” as something new. To wit:

The anti-transgender messaging in Missouri is part of a national trend, where Republicans are leveraging cultural issues like transgender rights to rally conservative voters in the 2024 campaigns.

Of course this is no “trend.” This is the standard operating procedure of a Republican Party that has been “leveraging cultural issues like transgender rights to rally conservative voters” since the 50s, when the most frightening thing conservative voters could imagine was sitting next to a Black person on a bus.

The use of the phrase “cultural issues” combined with the amnesiac reporting ultimately presents this as a new tactic and not what the GOP has been doing consistently since 1964 and inconsistently before that.

There is something about trans folks that causes others to forget everything they once knew. We are seen as so strange, so freaky, that far too many folks seem unable to connect past attacks on others with current attacks on trans people.

I once wrote a paper and then toured a bit giving speeches about queer marriage. When I was originally invited to do so, I thought that I was going to insist that governments shouldn’t recognize any marriages at all, and churches (and queer haters) could consider anyone they liked married or unmarried by their own definitions.

But I fell down a rabbit hole looking for historical parallels. Quaker marriages had gone without government recognition in the UK in the 1600s. Popular democratic movements sought to declare illegitimate the marriages among the royal families of Europe as part of the general rebellion against monarchism during the 18th and 19th centuries. Interracial marriages went (inconsistently) unrecognized for hundreds of years in many places. And post-Galton there were active political efforts to ban or invalidate marriages involving people considered genetically inferior and poor candidates for breeding.

What was remarkable about all this was that in each case the people seeking to block some marriages argued that such marriages were anti-god, anti-family, sexually perverted or debauched, prone to illness and encouraging of drug or alcohol abuse.

The anti-god was easy enough: sinners displease god so sinners’ marriages displease god. Likewise anti-family was easily justifiable. In every case you could find family members unhappy with someone’s choice of spouse, which led to family conflicts. Instead of blaming this on bigotry against those marriages, just blame the marriages themselves and that argument prong is proven. When, say in the case of the Quakers, a population did not have an independent reputation for sexual debauchery, opponents needed only to argue that sexual seduction was responsible for breaking with the Church of England. Given how obviously correct all of the Anglican Church’s positions are, people who married into Quakerism must obviously have had their wits thoroughly addled by the enticing sexual allure of a Lothario or Jezebel. Illness and substance use don’t seem like they should be always present, and yet they were as well.

This matched up so well with the rhetoric used to oppose queer marriage in the 80s, 90s, and 00s that I found myself unable to continue with my original argument. I gave it up because while it might have been acceptable for me to argue that I don’t care if the government recognizes my (then-future) marriage, there was clearly a repetitive force at play, and giving in to this force in the present would seem to concede that Mildred and Richard Loving’s marriage did not deserve recognition in its own historical moment.

I had tried to come up with a unique argument for my unique times only to find that the times were not so unique after all. But when I changed my intended thesis a great many people were shocked, not so much that I might change my mind, which justified no more than mild surprise, but that Quakers, of all people, could have been seen as the queers of their day. There was no appreciation of the history of these arguments, not even an awareness of the history of these arguments. That provided me with some relief, knowing that my ignorance was excusable when no one else seemed to know anything about historical anti-marriage arguments. But it is also concerning.

The Goldwater campaign is not ancient history. Though it occurred before I was born, there are plenty still alive who remember it. Bussing to desegregate schools, the fight against racism in unions and then by unions against racism on the job, feminist opposition to de jure second class citizenship, the Vietnam War, abortion, women in the military (including eligibility for the draft), the HIV crisis, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue, DOMA, ENDA, Obergefell — over and over and over the GOP has placed these issues in the forefront of their political arguments while the substance of their legislation has been entirely different.

The Pro Publica article does a fine job identifying the dynamics of today, but a poor job providing the context necessary to understand the politics this otherwise fine outlet has reduced to being for or against child gender surgeries and how that motivates voters over the next three weeks.

Republicans want you to forget. Republicans want an ahistorical, amnesiac politics. They don’t want anyone to notice that being asked to vote against reproductive rights and for massive corporate giveaways because scary trans people are doing scary trans things is exactly the same as being asked to vote against reproductive rights and for massive corporate giveaways because Lily Ledbetter wanted a fair pay check and gay folks wanted to serve their country for the same GI benefits that others receive: low pay and hard work combined with guaranteed medical care, college scholarships, and assistance buying a first home.

In just the past year, I’ve noticed that many national outlets’ coverage of trans people have improved, sometimes drastically. But even where issues of the moment are covered well, the attacks from trans people are treated as having the same distance from queer activism of 20 years ago as queer marriage activism then had from the Quaker struggle for just treatment under the British crown 350 years before that.

It’s not as sexy as highway billboards, but we won’t have an informed electorate if every Republican pivot is treated as a complete break with everything the party has ever done before.

Crip Dyke also writes for the delightfully cussmouthed Wonkette!