bathroom bill (12. 019)

The stupidities of American politics and culture wars is grindingly wearisome and beyond the bandwidth of most to follow—although that’s by design and the slights large and small cannot go unnoticed. Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary, a former wrestling executive officer, to dismantle the agency at a pivotal time when public school districts are underfunded and higher learning is facing an existential crisis with the prospect of artificial intelligence supplanting expertise is shocking enough, though the feeling is a little blunted given the fact the same individual headed the Small Business Administration during his first term. In the same news cycle, however, the Republic-controlled incoming Congress welcomed—on Transgender Day of Remembrance, memorialising victims of transphobia—the first openly member to identify as such by introducing a measure for the House of Representatives that would ban in the Capitol transgender women from using bathrooms designated for cisgendered women. Unclear if it will be brought to the floor to vote on house rules, the sponsor decrying an assault of women’s rights and safety with this ideology, which the target of the vitriol, newly elected member from Delaware, dismissed the proposal as a distraction from the job of governance and will make do, their platform and focus, telling of its poverty, being “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”