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'Bigoted Folks' Love Trans Sports Ban, Says AOC—And So Do CEOs for the Diversion It Creates
"Los Angeles is on fire right now, and this is the number one priority this majority has," said the congresswoman.
Jan 14, 2025
While Republicans claimed a bill restricting transgender girls' participation in school sports was aimed at protecting "our culture and civilization" on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the legislation benefits the corporate class as it distracts from true life-threatening emergencies faced by communities across the country.
"Thank you for your concern about women for the first time that I've seen," said the New York Democrat on the House floor, noting that Republicans have consistently voted against the Violence Against Women Act and backed abortion bans that have stripped women of the ability to control their own bodies proven deadly.
But contrary to the GOP's claims that barring transgender girls and women from playing on sports teams that align with their gender will protect girls from assault, Ocasio-Cortez suggested, the biggest beneficiaries of the legislation include corporate executives whose companies do far more harm to American families than transgender athletes.
"I know who loves this bill," said the congresswoman. "Yes, bigoted folks love this bill. Assaulters love this bill. But also, CEOs love this bill. Because Los Angeles is on fire right now, and this is the number one priority this majority has."
The bill passed 218-206, with the entire Republican caucus supporting it and all but two Democrats voting no. If the legislation is signed into law, schools that receive federal funding would be barred from allowing transgender girls from playing on girls' sports teams.
Republicans have poured $111 million on political ads regarding the issue in the past year, as communities in the Southeast have suffered catastrophic hurricane damage and homelessness has soared by 18%.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) agreed with Ocasio-Cortez's comments about the distraction caused by the transgender sports bill.
"Republicans fearmonger about the trans community to divert attention from the fact they have no real solutions to help everyday Americans," said Bonamici. "Transgender students, like all students, they deserve the same opportunity as their peers to learn teamwork, to find belonging and to grow into well-rounded adults through sports."
Ocasio-Cortez added that the bill, which lacks an enforcement mechanism, would open the door to "genital examinations" of student athletes as it would force schools to confirm the sex assigned at birth of each member of a school sports team.
"What this also opens the door for is for women to try to perform a very specific kind of femininity for the very kind of men who are drafting this bill, and to open up questioning of who is a woman because of how we look, how we present ourselves, and yes, what we choose to do with our bodies," said Ocasio-Cortez.
The so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act was the subject of a letter signed by more than 400 civil society groups on Monday, who urged members of Congress to reject the "discriminatory proposal."
"Although the authors of the legislation represent themselves as serving the interests of cisgender girls and women, this legislation does not address the longstanding barriers all girls and women have faced in their pursuit of athletics," said the groups, led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "We firmly believe that an attack on transgender youth is an attack on civil rights."
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Zuckerberg Extols 'Masculine Energy' in Corporate America as Meta Kills DEI Programs
"Remember, Zuckerberg built Facebook not for social connection but to rate the hotness of his female college mates," noted one critic.
Jan 11, 2025
As numerous U.S. corporations bend to the right with the political winds swirling around Republican President-elect Donald Trump's imminent return to power, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is following up on his company's termination of its fact-checking program by ending its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and praising "masculine energy" in corporate America.
"I think a lot of the corporate world is, like, pretty culturally neutered," Zuckerberg said during an interview with the eponymous host of "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast on Friday. Meta is the parent company of social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Explaining that he has "three sisters, no brothers" and "three daughters, no sons," Zuckerberg continued: "So I'm, like, surrounded by girls and women, like, my whole life. And it's like...I don't know, there's something, the kind of masculine energy, I think, is good."
"And obviously, you know, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really like trying to get away from it," he said. "And I do think that... all these forms of energy are good. And I think having a culture that, like, celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive."
The tech industry is built on 'masculine energy', a bro--no girls allowed--culture. Remember Zuckerberg built Facebook not for social connection but to rate the hotness of his female college mates. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
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— Amy Diehl, Ph.D. (@amydiehl.bsky.social) January 11, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Zuckerberg elaborated:
I do think that if you're a a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it's too masculine. Right? And it's like there isn't enough of the kind of the energy that you may naturally have. And it probably feels like there are all these things that are set up that are biased against you. And that's not good either, 'cause you want women to be able to succeed.
But I think these things can... go a little far. And I think it's one thing to say we want to be kind of, like, welcoming and make a good environment for everyone. And I think it's another to basically say that masculinity is bad. And I, I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the... spectrum where, you know, it's all like, okay, masculinity is toxic. We have to, like, get rid of it completely.
No... Both of these things are good, right? It's like, you want, like, feminine energy, you want masculine energy... I think that that's all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing. And I didn't really feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a more, much more masculine culture.
While some social media observers attributed Zuckerberg's shift to factors like "the power of gym bro masculinity," others noted the rightward shift in corporate America accompanying Trump's White House return and Republicans' control of both houses of Congress.
"Zuck is a Cuck": Meta's Billionaire Bends The Knee to MAGA Mark Zuckerberg joins a rogue's gallery of billionaires capitulating to Donald Trump's threats and promoting MAGA's agenda against truth, democracy, and diversity for the sake of self-preservation. thelefthook.substack.com/p/zuck-is-a-...
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— Wajahat Ali (@wajali.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 6:47 PM
Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the wave of companies ending or dialing back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. The growing list includes McDonald's, Walmart, Boeing, Molson Coors, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Amazon, and—as of Friday—Meta.
According to an internal memo from Meta vice president of human resources Janelle Gale viewed by several media outlets, Meta is immediately ending DEI programs in hiring, training, and supplier selection because the "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing."
"The term 'DEI' has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others," Gale explained.
Meta's move follows Tuesday's announcement that the company is ending its third-party fact-checking program because it is "too politically biased" and replacing it with community notes à la X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and owned by Elon Musk, who will co-chair the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency.
The announcement also said Meta "will be moving the trust and safety teams that write our content policies and review content out of California to Texas and other U.S. locations."
As part of its broad new "free expression" policy, Meta will also permit certain speech widely considered hateful by human rights defenders.
According to training materials
viewed byThe Intercept and other media outlets, Meta users will be able to say things like "immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit," "Black people are more violent than whites," "Italians are dickheads," women are "household objects" or "property," and transgender people are mentally ill. Calling trans people "trannies" or "it" is now also acceptable on Meta sites.
I got a warning for posting "you are an evil man" to Zuck but not for posting "you are a degenerate tranny." Real nice system they have at Meta.
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— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) January 10, 2025 at 7:50 PM
The New York Timesreported Friday that Meta has ordered its offices in Silicon Valley, New York, and Texas to remove the tampons which had been offered to transgender and nonbinary employees who use men's restrooms. The report also said that Meta has removed trans and nonbinary themes from its Messenger chat app.
Zuckerberg has also appointed UFC CEO Dana White, a friend and supporter of Trump, to Meta's board of directors,
explaining, "I've admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand."
These moves followed a November meeting between Trump and Zuckerberg at the former's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, after which Meta reportedly also gave $1 million to the president-elect's inauguration fund.
Zuckerberg's alignment with key elements of Trumpism represents a stark departure from just a few months ago, when, in a new book, Trump accused him of inimical "plotting" during the 2020 election and said he threatened to imprison the tech billionaire for life if he did so again in 2024.
Now, Zuckerberg's blasting outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden. He told Rogan Friday that during the coronavirus pandemic, Biden administration officials would "call up and, like, scream... and curse" at Meta leaders over Covid-19 misinformation.
Some internet users poked fun at Meta's new policies, with one popular meme satirically claiming that Zuckerberg "died of coronavirus and complications from syphilis."
Who needs dumb old facts anyways?
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— JonZoidberg ( @jonzoidberg.bsky.social) January 7, 2025 at 8:42 PM
But others took a more serious view of Zuckerberg's about-face, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asserting this week that "these changes reveal that Meta seems less interested in freedom of expression as a principle and more focused on appeasing the incoming U.S. administration."
"Meta has long been criticized by the global digital rights community, as well as by artists, sex worker advocacy groups, LGBTQ+ advocates, Palestine advocates, and political groups, among others," EFF added. "A corporation with a history of biased and harmful moderation like Meta [needs] a careful, well-thought-out, and sincere fix that will not undermine broader freedom of expression goals."
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Defending Trans Rights Is Good Politics
The Democrats' problem isn't "wokeness," but rather their failure to counter the Republicans' cruel anti-trans narrative.
Dec 23, 2024
In the wake of the Democrats' devastating loss last month, there has been no shortage of arguments and analyses about what went wrong and how the party should move forward. It has been deeply concerning to see some of these arguments taking Republican fearmongering and propaganda as a basis, particularly on the subject of transgender rights. Falling for Republican propaganda will not only bring terrible harm to the most vulnerable members of society; I believe it is also a losing political strategy for Democrats. Instead, the Democratic Party must be vigilant against Republican propaganda, and must proactively counter it.
The Democrats' failures in messaging on transgender rights were evident throughout the campaign. Despite the Biden-Harris administration's progress - such as signing executive orders aimed at curbing discrimination, expanding health care access, and raising awareness of the societal barriers and violence that transgender people regularly experience - the Harris campaign appeared to studiously avoid discussing transgender people at all.
Democrats must make clear to the public that while Republicans cynically claim to be "protecting children," they are in fact doing the opposite.
One of the few exceptions, and thus the most visible mention of trans people by Kamala Harris during the campaign, was in her October 16 interview on Fox News. When the host, Bret Baier, challenged the Biden-Harris administration's policy supporting gender-affirming medical care for prisoners, Harris had an opportunity to make a defense on moral grounds. Instead, she counterattacked by pointing out that the Trump administration followed the same laws, and thus the argument was "throwing...stones when you're living in a glass house." By doing so, she implicitly condoned the narrative that gender-affirming care is a luxury rather than a necessity, or, worse, somehow wrong or shameful, rather than a fundamental human right that should be afforded to all, including incarcerated people.
Setting aside for a moment the moral aspect, try to coldly consider the political message this phrasing sent to voters. After the provision of gender-affirming care was presented as though it were a problem, the Democrats seemed to be saying, 'it is a problem that both we and the Trump administration failed to deal with.' Meanwhile, the Republicans were promising to 'solve' it in the next administration. So why would an uninformed voter, after hearing both parties apparently acknowledge a 'problem' but only one party offer to 'solve' it, be expected to support the Democrats?
If Democrats want to be seen as competent, then they must stop catering to the Republicans' fearmongering and dehumanizing narrative and instead proactively counter it. Democrats must stand up and say yes, our policy is to support the provision of gender-affirming care, and we are proud of this policy. It is not a problem, but a protection of our citizens' basic human rights. The Democrats already campaigned on messages of freedom, self-determination, and bodily autonomy; these are precisely the values that must be applied not only to cis Americans, but to trans Americans as well. It is indeed somewhat astonishing that the Democrats failed to consistently articulate as simple a concept as: our platform of freedom and bodily autonomy also applies to trans people.
Of course, Harris was not the only high-ranking Democrat to weaken their own political position by failing to stand up for trans rights. Senate candidates Colin Allred and Sherrod Brown both ran television ads legitimizing Republican fearmongering about trans kids playing in school sports. After the election, Representative Seth Moulton went farther, portraying trans children as a physical danger to cis children, saying he didn't want his daughters to be "run over on a playing field" by trans students. Trans kids already suffer from bullying, abuse, and depression at significantly higher rates than their cis counterparts, and it's not hard to see why, when even Democratic lawmakers are demonizing them.
Democrats... appear to implicitly accept the premise of the supposed 'problem,' but do not offer a solution. Again, how is a rational but uninformed voter supposed to respond?
Again, let us try to dispassionately consider the potential political effect of such messaging (absurd as it is to set aside the ethical aspects of politicians attacking already marginalized children). The Republicans claim that trans kids are some sort of malign threat, and advertise policies to neutralize this 'threat' by denying them legal protections, further isolating them, and trying to erase the very existence of their identities. In other words, Republicans have presented a (manufactured) 'problem' and a (monstrous) 'solution.' Democrats, meanwhile, appear to implicitly accept the premise of the supposed 'problem,' but do not offer a solution. Again, how is a rational but uninformed voter supposed to respond?
The only logical path forward is for Democrats to explicitly renounce the Republicans' false premises. Trans children are not a threat to cis children, whether on the playground or in the bathroom, and bullying of trans kids not only by other students but by adult politicians is an outrage. Democrats must make clear to the public that while Republicans cynically claim to be "protecting children," they are in fact doing the opposite.
Unfortunately, there is no time to lose. Trump has announced a stream of extremist anti-trans appointees to key administration roles, including Secretary of Education (Linda McMahon), Secretary of Health and Human Services (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), Secretary of Defense (Pete Hegseth), and Secretary of State (Marco Rubio), among many others, who will enable the Republicans to make good on their promises to destroy protections for trans students, prevent access to healthcare and housing, purge transgender servicepeople from the military, promote anti-trans bigotry abroad, and deny transgender people the ability to openly exist in society. Not to mention the possibility of using the military to go after Trump's "enemy from within," which presumably includes trans people and their allies, whom Trump described as representing "a great evil."
The Democrats must unify to counter the Republicans' anti-trans propaganda and impending anti-trans agenda, not only to prevent the further oppression of millions of transgender Americans, but also to maintain credibility as a political movement.
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