There is a witch hunt going on in this country

The GOP pursuit of transgender people is shameful

One of the funny things about human nature, which most of us will recognize in ourselves, is our tendency to attack others for our own faults.

Psychology calls it projection — dealing with undesirable traits by projecting them onto others.

The all-purpose cry of “witch hunt!” we hear frequently from Republicans is an example of this phenomenon, as Republicans are themselves engaged in finding and persecuting transgender children and adults across the country.

One of the levers they use for this persecution is the desire of some trans girls and women to compete in sports.

At the highest level, such as the Olympics or NCAA championships, where athletes are drug-tested and any small difference can mean a competitive edge, an argument can be made against allowing transgender females who went through puberty as males to compete.

It’s ridiculous, however, and it’s cruel to disqualify transgender middle schoolers, but new laws in several states do just that. Some apply to kids as young as 5.

Cut their hair the same and dress them in the same clothes, and it’s difficult to distinguish pre-adolescent girls from boys. That is why several of the anti-trans laws Republicans are pushing include genital inspections to make sure of each child’s sex.

So a cause trumpeted as protection of children becomes, in the fever to root out offenders, an exercise in the physical humiliation of children.

Who gets harmed when someone uses a different name or wears different clothes?

Who is hurt when a person has surgery to change his or her appearance?

The harm on the other side of the equation, among transgender people reviled for who they are, is not in doubt. In the 2015 U.S. transgender survey (results from the 2022 survey will be released later this year), more than half of respondents had been harassed and 40 percent had attempted suicide. In the general population, the rate of attempted suicide is 4.6 percent.

The notion that ostracizing trans people and discriminating against them is worth it to prevent some trans child somewhere from helping her middle school track team win a ribbon is laughable.

Discrimination against school-age transgender athletes is, as a judge in West Virginia wrote, “a solution in search of a problem.”

“… not one child has been or is likely to be harmed by B.P.J.’s continued participation on her middle school’s cross country and track teams,” the judge wrote of a trans girl’s case against the state, which had banned her from competing.

New York is one of just four states with no anti-trans legislation — along with Illinois, Wisconsin and Alabama — according to a map put together by the ACLU. 

So if you’re feeling unwanted elsewhere, New York could be your safe haven — a sanctuary state for gender freedom. Perhaps our local legislators — Republicans Dan Stec and Matt Simpson and Democrat Carrie Woerner — could cooperate on legislation to make the sanctuary status official, as a celebration of personal liberty in New York.

Or, perhaps, we can simply acknowledge that, when you’re invited to join in the persecution of other people for harmless behaviors they don’t want to change, which reflect traits they couldn’t change, even if they wanted to, it’s best to say no.

Mascot

It was nice to see the Glens Falls community, guided by students, select the black bear as its new mascot. Hawks and knights actually came in first, but the students rejected hawks because Corinth is switching its mascot from tomahawks to river hawks, and knights because, when most of us hear “knight,” we think of a man. Hawks is also quite generic, since there are lots of types of hawks. Knights strikes me as wrong, for the same reason it did the students. I think of the knights of the round table, all of whom were men. Also, black bears live here, while knights don’t and never have, that I know of.