The cruelty isn’t the point

The point is power.

When confronted with Texas’s cruel, vicious trans bill — which allows the state to take children away from their parents if they allow their kids to get life-saving, gender-affirming medical treatments — it’s easy to think that “the cruelty is the point.”

But as Jamie Gardner writes in Jacobin, “they’re just assholes” doesn’t have much explanatory power. Neither assholes nor trans people are modern innovations, so why is it that this law was introduced now?

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/03/gop-republicans-texas-transgender-rights-culture-war/

To understand why “they’re just assholes” isn’t enough, consider the same argument from the other side of the aisle. Back in 2011, racialized and working class people in east London staged an uprising that included arson and looting. Then-PM David Cameron announced that any discussion of social factors contributing to the event was forbidden. The only explanation he would entertain was “Criminality, pure and simple.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2011/aug/09/david-cameron-riots-criminality-video

But even if you accept this explanation, it still falls short. If the uprising was sparked by pure, simple criminality, then why didn’t it happen the year before or the year after? Did the quantum…