Let us be clear here. In no world does the fact that a tiny handful of trans kids play high school sports — no literally, it’s like somewhere between five and 15 nationwide — and want to compete accordingly with their gender identities have anything to do with teenage girls considering suicide. Nothing. Nikki Haley knows that. Or if she doesn’t, she’s a dumber, more fucking useless bigot than we gave her credit for. But we’re going to assume she knows that.
But for today’s Republican Nazis, trans people are one of the primary targets, so Nikki Haley said at her CNN town hall (of course) last night that there was a connection.
The question was how do you define “woke.” Instead of even trying to give an answer that would sound reasonable to Americans who are not lunatics, she just started argle-bargling about pronouns and said the thing about “our teenage girls” contemplating suicide.
Haley was initially asked to define the word “woke,” but subsequently went into a diatribe about gender identity and pronouns, claiming it is “too much.” “How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms?” she asked. “And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year.”
On top of how that’s literally eliminationist rhetoric of the kind Nazis used to incite hatred and violence against Jewish people and others, it tells you how little Nikki Haley cares about “our teenage girls,” that she would use suicide statistics to bolster her attack on transgender kids.
She complained about “gender pronoun classes in the military,” which we hear is a very tough part of boot camp these days. She said this is the “women’s issue of our time,” which would probably be surprising to a lot of voters who think the fact that they’re no longer allowed to decide in many states if they’d like to remain pregnant is the women’s issue of our time.
She complained about “kids undergoing critical race theory,” which in the diseased conservative brain Haley says entails telling kindergartners, “If she’s white, you’re telling her she’s bad, if she’s brown or Black, you’re telling her she’s never going to be good enough and she’s always going to be a victim.” That sure does sound like kindergarten to us, if you’re a halfwit MAGA voter.
To Jake Tapper’s credit, he noted some real statistics from the Trevor Project on actual suicide rates for LGBTQ+ kids, but he didn’t say anything like “Hey, you’re a full of shit liar and you know it,” so we’re not awarding many points. (Not awarding him a lot of points lately, TBH.)
Another highlight of the town hall was when Haley said we should all be able to agree that people who have abortions shouldn’t go to jail or be murdered by the state. “Can’t we start there?”
If you really want a whole thread of highlights of the Nikki Haley town hall, you are in luck, because Aaron Rupar watched.
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