A rainbow of bullshit

It happens all the time, but nobody knows where or when

The rainbow of bullshit about sexual threats to children didn’t start with the “rainbow party” on Oprah. That’s just the best example.

Supposedly, teenage girls would gather together with one or more boys, put on different shades or colors of lipstick, form their mouths into an O as in oral, and see who could leave the furthest lipstick on the dipstick. The moral panic ensued, and lasted until someone pointed out that nobody could find an example anywhere of an actual rainbow party. There are also no snakes in the ball pit and no prospective rapists leaving C-notes on women’s windshields. That’s how urban legends work, and that’s how moral panics start.

They should end when somebody asks for an example. They don’t. Where did this happen? My cousin heard about it. How many times did it happen? It happens all the time. These replies, with more certainty than clarity, are voiced by the same folks who say you’re always hearing about this or that. The answer is that you may be, but I’m not, until you mention it on Facebook.

The repression being practiced by Christian Nationalist school boards is of the same ilk. A trans bathroom issue in Loudoun County turned out to be fabricated. A trans bathroom issue in Rockingham County turned out to be fabricated. But you have to read a newspaper to find out they were fabricated. If you get your news from your cousin, then it happens all the time, and you’re always hearing about it.

But not all of the fears and moral panics are built around things that didn’t happen. More are built around things that will happen if something isn’t done. So you ban 57 books and call it a temporary removal. (Linguistic clue: When a government body replaces one syllable with seven, there’s bullshit involved.) Now something has been done, and the thing that would have happened won’t. I guess.

But it is worth asking. What is that thing that would have happened and did it happen anyway? I ask with the understanding that if we don’t know what that thing is, then we don’t have any way to know if it happened. Generally, the fear among the Fahrenheit 451 crowd is that reading will corrupt our youth. Socrates was executed for that 2,500 years ago, so it might be time to admit that youth are going to be corrupted. It may not be the books. It may be the natural order of things that people grow up and learn things and get smarter, and that parents, preachers, censors, and scolds can’t do anything about that. We all know they can’t. The problem is they keep trying.

Just as they are trying to out kids who are uncertain about their identity. At what cost? Most parents whose kids want to use a different name or a non-binary pronoun probably already know about it. So outing kids is aimed at the “parental rights” of those whose kids can’t talk to them for whatever reason. Are those parents likely to be the least supportive or most abusive? That’s a cost.

But cost to others simply means dollars. If 1,600 Rockingham County teachers spend ten minutes each filling out a form saying whose pronoun or name doesn’t match their birth certificate, that’s 266 hours spent filling out the outing form. That’s an eighth of a work year, so let’s say $45,000 in salary and $10,000 in benefits, you’re looking at $7,000 in teacher time to fill out the forms. If the percentage of non-binary people in the RCPS student body matches the national average, that 7K is how much it costs to out 75 kids. And if two out of three of those kids can talk to their parents about their identity and sexuality, that leaves 25 kids possibly being outed to non-supportive or abusive parents at a cost of $280 each in county taxes.

Of course these numbers are bullshit for a couple of reasons. The cost of the time implies the teachers take it out of something else. They won’t. Extra duties mean extra time until the bullshit duties cause them to realize they can make twice as much as corporate trainers. Also, teachers won’t out those 25 kids if they can help it. They know there are school children who only eat a hot meal at school, who are only warm at school, and who get their only real emotional support at school. Malicious compliance and moral integrity will protect a lot of those kids.

But the Christian Nationalist school boards aren’t trying to protect kids. They’re trying to protect parental rights. Whatever those are. The people instituting these policies should give examples of what bad thing has happened before these policies were in place. What harm was done to the parent whose kid wasn’t outed? What harm was done by a book? Any book? How did the book banning and pronoun outing repair that harm?

Where in the repressed, authoritarian, morally blind world views of the censors and bigots did the harm occur that they are driven to repair? We know it happened in their minds. It’s harder to find it anywhere else.