Bonjour Meteor readers! I am feeling mildly upbeat today—despite, you know, everything—thanks to the good folks at The Dan Lebatard Show, who literally created an entire musical about the Super Bowl. I had my doubts at first, but the whole soundtrack is Rock of Ages meets Chicago meets Rent. Give it a spin, and thank me later for the serotonin boost.

And it’s a boost you will appreciate after today’s newsletter, which is a deep dive into the anti-trans legislation in Texas and how Republicans are using the bogeyman of forced sterilization to defend their stance. If you thought you were mad about it before, just wait until you get the full context from historians Dr. Lauren Jae Gutterman and Dr. Gillian Frank.

But first, let’s check in on the news.

 —Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

• The Biden administration announced on Friday the suspension of all normal trade with Russia, falling in step with several G7 nations hitting Russia with heavy tariffs and sanctions. What does this mean in the short term for Americans? Gas prices won’t be going down any time soon, and the import of Russian-made products into the US will likely slow if not halt altogether. Congress also approved a spending bill that includes $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine.

• Also in that new $1.5 trillion spending bill sliding across Biden’s desk this weekend: increases to the defense budget and $602 million going to the Capitol Police; not to be an annoying bill-splitter, but I did not order that and do not want to pay for it. There is also more money earmarked for child nutrition and care but the exact dollar amounts are still unclear.  Missing from this new budget is “$15 billion in additional COVID-related funding,” which Nancy Pelosi blamed on the Republicans. Nancy, girl, at some point we need to have a talk about accountability.

• The fuckery is already coming for Supreme Court Justice nominee Ketanji Jackson Brown. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are grasping for straws gearing up to cast doubt on Jackson’s Brown impartiality on an upcoming case about the role race plays in college admissions. The belief is that she should recuse herself from the case when she makes it to the Big Bench, and Republican committee members plan to grill her over her role on Harvard’s Board of Overseers should she not clearly state her intention to step back from the case. Funny how they have this energy for one woman’s professional affiliations but not another’s.

KETANJI BROWN JACKSON, BOOKED, BLESSED, AND UNBOTHERED (PHOTO BY ANNA MONEYMAKER VIA GETTY IMAGES)

• The ACLU announced Friday that its lawsuit against Texas’s six-week abortion ban cannot proceed after a ruling from the Supreme Court. People in Texas have now been living in a pre-Roe world since September. The English language does not have the words to express how big this loss feels.

  AND:

• Extremely famous and recognizable director Ryan Coogler was detained after entering Bank of America and trying to withdraw money from his own checking account. Coogler was “mistaken” for a bank robber after handing over a withdrawal slip with a note asking the teller to do the count discreetly.

• Disney employees are outing the Mouse House for “censoring same-sex affections” in Pixar films. Look, if you want to lose the revenue that comes from the very dedicated Disney Gays be my guest, but it’s y’all’s funeral not mine. Just let the cartoons kiss.

• A man who blamed feminism for low birth rates has just been voted president of South Korea. President-Elect Yoon Suk-yeol is also trying to abolish the government’s gender equality ministry.

• Local dumbass posts internet rant.

• One of the most beautiful places in the world is on the brink of destruction

• These women in Karachi “wish to see a feminist utopia” of their own

THE FIGHT FOR TRANS LIVES 

The Reproductive Ideology Behind Texas’s Attack On Trans Kids

Ken Paxton is abusing the history of forced sterilization

BY LAUREN JAE GUTTERMAN AND GILLIAN FRANK

KEN PAXTON, TERRORIZER OF CHILDREN. (PHOTO BY DREW ANGERER VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Over the past few weeks, the nation has witnessed an onslaught of attempts to ban gender-affirming treatment for minors. It’s been a competition to see who can go the furthest and be the cruelest: First, Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the state’s child welfare agency to categorize gender-affirming care as “child abuse.” Then, lawmakers in the Idaho House voted to make such treatment a felony, with medical providers and parents looking at life in prison. And in Alabama, a similar bill, House Bill 266, would also force teachers and school counselors to out trans students to their parents.

It’s all horrific. But as historians of sexuality, we are especially disturbed by lawmakers’ repeated invocation of the ugly history of forced sterilization to justify their anti-trans campaigns. It’s an attempt to cloak their cruelty in pseudo-feminist language—and it’s completely disingenuous.

The forced sterilization connection was made most explicit by indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his statement against gender-affirming care for minors. “Historically weaponized against minorities, sterilization procedures have harmed many vulnerable populations, such as African Americans, female minors, the disabled, and others,” Paxton’s opinion reads. Then he delivers the ideological punchline, poached from the language of the reproductive justice movement: “These violations,” he claims, “have been found to infringe upon the fundamental human right to procreate.”

These bans are about making reproductive anatomy into social destiny

Contrary to Paxton’s argument, irreversible surgical procedures are rarely, if ever, performed on youth under age 18. And the other, much more common gender-affirming medical treatments that these bans criminalize—such as puberty-blocking drugs and hormonal therapy—do not cause sterilization. They are also supported by the leading medical associations in the United States and proven to lower teens’ risk of suicide and depression.

In the arguments lawmakers have made against trans kids’ participation in sports, legislators have demonized trans girls in particular, alleging that they have an unfair advantage against their cisgender peers. Similar bans on trans student-athletes have been enacted in 10 other states. But when it comes to gender-affirming care, instead of portraying trans children as threatening, Republicans have cast them as victims of their caregivers and medical providers.

And in order to do it, they’re appropriating reproductive justice language—even though the actual history of reproductive justice affirms, rather than denies, the right to bodily autonomy for all people. The predominantly Black and brown women activists who have been drawing attention to forced sterilization in the United States since the 1960s haven’t simply been fighting for the freedom to reproduce. Rather, they’ve been fighting for the freedom to determine their own reproductive lives—to govern their own bodies. As the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse wrote in 1979, “Policies that restrict women’s right to have and raise children—through forced sterilization or the denial of adequate welfare benefits—are directly related to policies that compel women to have children, on the view that this is their primary human function. Both kinds of policies constitute reproduction control by the state.”

READ THE SIGN, LIVE THE SIGN (PHOTO BY DREW ANGERER VIA GETTY IMAGES)

In one well-known case of that era, Relf v. Weinberger (1974), the Southern Poverty Law Center filed suit on behalf of two Black sisters, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, aged 14 and 12, who had been sterilized at a federally-funded Family Planning Clinic in Montgomery, Alabama. The girls were operated on without their parents’ knowledge or consent; a nurse told their mother only that they were going to receive “some shots.” Minnie Lee, Mary Alice, and so many others were targeted for sterilization because state caseworkers and clinic staff deemed them, based on their race, class, and perceived mental ability, as undesirable citizens—“unfit.”

It is galling that Texas Attorney General Paxton cites Relf v. Weinberger as a precedent for his attack on trans teens, claiming that trans-affirming health care is equivalent to the compulsory sterilization of uninformed minors. However, the invocation of this history misses the main lessons of Relf: the need for informed consent and reproductive choice. The plaintiffs in Relf were not opposed to sterilization as a whole.

What they objected to was the authorization of “involuntary sterilizations, without statutory or constitutional justification,” at a moment when millions of Americans sought out sterilization as a form of birth control, and many women who begged doctors for the procedure were denied. Well into the 1970s, in fact, many physicians followed the “Rule of 120,” a recommendation of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, which withheld sterilizations from women whose number of children multiplied by her age was less than 120. Whether the case was coerced or refused sterilizations, at issue was a question of bodily autonomy.

So why is the Texas Attorney General deploying the language of sterilization, child protection, and reproductive freedom? Like Senate Bill 8, the state’s recent legislation banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, it’s all about making reproductive anatomy into social destiny; from this perspective, anything that threatens to medically interrupt procreation is viewed as harmful. In the name of making children one day have children, Republican leaders in Texas are willing to stomp on the health of trans kids and the reproductive freedom of abortion-seekers.

Right now, trans youth and those who love them are rightly terrified; multiple families are under state investigation. Using the legacy of human rights abuses against the Relf sisters and so many others to justify these human rights abuses is simply unconscionable. As 11-year-old Austin trans activist Kai Shappley has told the Texas leaders behind these recent attacks, “Just stop.”

BEFORE YOU GO

“Carbon Footprint” Was Bullshit This Entire Time???

BY JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

If you’ve ever wondered what your carbon footprint is, and how to reduce it, here’s some illuminating information that you may not already know. On this week’s edition of UNDISTRACTED, climate journalist Mary Annaïse Heglar told Brittany Packnett Cunningham that the idea of one’s individual “carbon footprint” is a big load of garbage invented by BP, the megalithic oil and gas corporation. More specifically, she explains: “BP created the concept of a carbon footprint to … shift the responsibility for the climate crisis to the consumer that they are selling the oil and gas to.” And when companies like BP calculate their own footprints, “they don’t count the oil they sell to everyone else…So their carbon footprint is so much bigger than they even take credit for.”

I echo Ms. Heglar’s sentiment that this is “some real evil shit.” To hear it with your own ears, as well as learn more about how the West’s dependence on Russian oil helped make that genocidal oligarchy so powerful, listen here. You’ll also learn about what you can do to keep the heat on the fossil fuel companies—and the governments who enable them.

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