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      The Education of Ron DeSantis: 5 Takeaways

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      Mr. DeSantis, the Republican governor and presidential candidate, leaned heavily on his Ivy League schooling before using it as fodder in the culture wars. Here are key findings from a Times examination.As Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida seeks the Republican presidential nomination, he has molded his campaign and political persona around a war on the country’s supposed ruling class: an incompetent, unaccountable elite of bureaucrats, journalists, educators and other “experts” whose pernicious and unearned authority the governor has vowed to vanquish. Despite his struggles on the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis has become captain of a new conservative vanguard that views public schools and universities as the chief battleground of the culture wars — and his Florida education policies as a model for red states around the nation.Yet Mr. DeSantis is both a member of the ruling class and a critic of it. Educated at Yale and Harvard Law, he spent his early adulthood energetically climbing into the American elite. An examination by The New York Times reveals how Mr. DeSantis, genuinely embittered by his experiences at elite institutions, also astutely grasped how they could be useful to him. He now offers voters a revisionist history of his own encounters with the ruling class to buttress his arguments for razing it — and for remaking public education itself.Here are five takeaways from the Times article.He reaped the benefits of an elite education.On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis often describes his years at Yale and Harvard Law as a period behind enemy lines, painting both institutions as places where students and teachers were anti-American. But his overall experience was more mixed than he acknowledges.At Yale, he joined St. Elmo, one of the school’s “secret societies,” long known as breeding grounds of future senators and presidents. Though he says Harvard was gripped by left-wing “critical legal studies,” the doctrine was long on the wane by the time he arrived, and the school provided entree to the power brokers of the conservative Federalist Society.When he went into politics, his elite résumé helped him court wealthy donors, raise money and garner introductions to prominent Republicans. As he acknowledged in a panel discussion back in Cambridge, Mass., shortly before he first ran for governor, “Harvard opens a lot of doors” for aspiring politicians.His fraternity brothers recalled hazing rituals and an early comfort with power.Echoing Mr. DeSantis’s own account of culture shock at Yale, former classmates recounted the future governor, who hailed from the middle-class, suburban Gulf Coast city of Dunedin, as bewildered and soon alienated by the more cosmopolitan, diverse Yale campus.He found his tribe on the baseball team and in the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, where he participated in the frat’s brutal hazing rituals — an early illustration, in the view of some former frat brothers, of his comfort with power and bullying.On one occasion, Mr. DeSantis and other brothers played a prank that involved turning on a blender between the legs of a blindfolded pledge. During the frat’s wintertime “hell week,” Mr. DeSantis required a pledge to wear a pair of baseball pants with the back and thighs cut out, exposing his buttocks and genitals, former brothers and pledges said. Mr. DeSantis denied these accounts through his spokesman, who called them “ridiculous assertions and completely false.”He was a latecomer to the culture wars.Mr. DeSantis is now indelibly associated with policies that take on what he considers left-wing ideology in Florida’s public schools and universities: his takeover of the liberal arts school New College; efforts that make it easier for parents to challenge books available in elementary and high schools; a law prohibiting classroom discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity that are not viewed as “age appropriate”; and bans against teaching ideas like “systemic racism” in core classes at public universities.Yet his emergence as his party’s chief culture warrior was anything but preordained, The Times found. For much of his political career, including his early years as Florida governor, he was neither closely identified with education policy nor deeply engaged in the debates over race and gender. (When a Florida lawmaker first proposed abolishing New College entirely, Mr. DeSantis replied, “What is New College?”)It took the coronavirus pandemic — and the intertwined backlashes against mask mandates, school lockdowns and the spread of “anti-racist” and “equity” curriculums — to both awaken Mr. DeSantis to the political power of education issues and cement his suspicions of academic and scientific experts.He’s found common cause with a new crop of conservative academics.As he battled against critical race theory and bureaucratic elites, Mr. DeSantis became entwined with a rising movement of conservative academics and activists outside Florida, notably at Hillsdale College in Michigan and the Claremont Institute in California.At a recent donor retreat, Mr. DeSantis featured a Claremont panel intended to “define the ‘Regime’ which illegitimately rules us” and lay out a strategy to “make states more autonomous from the woke regime by ridding themselves of leftist interests,” according to planning emails obtained by The Times.In a report calling for Florida to abolish diversity programs, one of the experts — who argued in a 2021 speech that feminism makes women “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” — urged Mr. DeSantis to “order civil rights investigations of all university units in which women vastly outnumber men” and root out “any anti-male elements of curriculum.”His policies have changed course on academic freedom.In Florida, Mr. DeSantis has turned sharply away from an earlier commitment to academic freedom. Even as he calls to dismantle “woke” orthodoxy, he has imposed another, with a sweeping ban on the teaching of “identity politics” in required classes at Florida’s public colleges and universities. In the name of “parental rights,” DeSantis-backed policies have given conservative Floridians a veto over books and curriculums favored by their more liberal neighbors.One DeSantis appointee, the conservative activist Chris Rufo, has argued that “the goal of the university is not free inquiry.” In court, lawyers for the DeSantis administration have argued that the concept of academic freedom does not apply to public university teachers, whose instruction is merely “government speech,” controllable by duly elected officials. More

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      Conservative attacks on abortion and trans healthcare come from the same place | Moira Donegan

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      On Monday, Jim Pillen, the Republican governor of Nebraska, signed a law that bans abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy and restricts gender-affirming care for anyone under 19. The ban on trans medical care takes effect in October and the abortion ban goes into effect immediately. And so Nebraska has become the latest state to determine through law what might have once been determined by the more pliable tools of custom or imagination: the way that the sexed body a person is born with shapes the kind of life they can live.Be it through forced pregnancy or prohibited transition, the state of Nebraska now claims the right to determine what its citizens will do with their sexed bodies – what those bodies will look like, how they will function and what they will mean. It is a part of the right’s ongoing project to roll back the victories of the feminist and gay rights movements, to re-establish the dominance of men in public life, to narrow possibilities for difference and expression and to inscribe in law a firm definition and hierarchy of gender: that people are either men or women and that men are better.They’re not alone. Abortion bans have been proliferating wildly in the year since the US supreme court eliminated the right in their Dobbs decision, declaring that any state can compel women to remain pregnant, and creating different, lesser entitlements to bodily freedom and self-determination based on sex. But as the abortion bans have spread like an infection across the American south, midwest, and mountain west, they have been accompanied by a related political disease: laws seeking to prohibit minors and sometimes adults, from accessing medical treatments that facilitate gender transitions.Twenty-five states have enacted pre-viability abortion bans since Roe was overturned last summer, although in some states, like Iowa and Montana, abortion has remained legal pending judicial stays. Meanwhile, 20 states now ban gender-affirming care for minors, with a rush of bills being introduced over the past months. In addition to Nebraska, a slew of states have passed transition-care bans in 2023, including Utah, Mississippi, South Dakota, Iowa, Tennessee and Florida. Texas is soon to join them.It is not a coincidence that the states which have the most punitive and draconian bans on abortion have also adopted the most aggressive targeting of transgender people and medical care. The bills are part of the same project by conservatives, who have been emboldened in their campaign of gender revanchism in the wake of Dobbs. Both abortion bans and transition care bans further the same goal: to transform the social category of gender into an enforceable legal status, linked to the sexed body at birth and to prescribe a narrow and claustrophobic view of what that gender status must mean.It is no accident that the states that would forbid a teenager from transitioning are the same that would compel that teenager to give birth; it is no accident that the states with the greatest control over what women do with their reproductive organs are the ones where women’s restrooms have become sites of surveillance and control, with patrons, cis and trans alike, subjected to invasive and degrading inquisitions as to whether they are conforming sufficiently to the demands of femininity. That Nebraska combined these two projects into one bill, then, is less inventive than it is a dropping of pretense: the anti-feminist movement is anti-trans, and the anti-trans panic is at its core anti-feminist.The attacks on gender freedom from the right are not only united in their ideology, but increasingly in their rhetoric. Abortion and trans rights activists have long insisted that both abortion and transition are healthcare. It’s an apt and worthy argument, considering that both involve the interventions of medical professionals, both facilitate the wellbeing and happiness of those who receive them, and both result in horrific health complications when denied, from the high rates of mental distress and horrific, needless pregnancy complications that have been ushered in by Dobbs, to the dramatic rates of suicidal ideation and mental health problems in trans people who are denied the ability to transition. But increasingly, the right has begun to attack the notion of abortion and trans rights as healthcare, arguing that neither pregnancy nor non-transition constitute “illness”.At a recent oral argument over the fate of the abortion drug mifepristone, Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee on the fifth circuit court of appeals whose rabidly conservative opinions and trollish affect suggest supreme court ambitions, argued that the drug should be removed from the market in part because “pregnancy is not a serious illness”. “When we celebrate Mother’s Day,” Ho asked, his voice dripping with contempt, “are we celebrating a serious illness?” In that moment, Ho sounded uncannily like anti-trans activists seeking to ban care for young people, who argue, ad nauseam, that “puberty is not a disorder”.The rhetoric suggests a narrow and myopic view of “health”, the notion that bodies have destinies and should be made to fulfill them regardless of the desires of the people involved. A healthy body, we’re told, is one that conforms to socially imposed gender hierarchies, regardless of how miserable that conformity and imposition makes the people who inhabit those bodies.But while these practices of abortion and transition care constitute medicine and while their outcomes encourage health, it would be a mistake to fight the political battle for these services only on the ground of what counts as “healthcare”. Because the truth is that conservatives do not care about health – they don’t care about the integrity of the medical profession, or about patient outcomes, or about bodies, not really. They care about people, and about making sure that those people stay in line. In the grand tradition of feminists and queers alike, we should refuse to.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      It’s not just trans kids: Republicans are coming after trans adults like me, too | Alex Myers

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      On Thursday 13 April, Missouri’s attorney general issued an emergency ruling that restricts access to gender-affirming care for both minors and adults, under the guise that hormone therapy is an “experimental use” rather than an FDA-approved treatment. For the past year, transgender youth have been a football for conservative politicians, with their access to gender-affirming care restricted or outlawed in 14 states. But this move by Missouri’s attorney general is the first attack on gender-affirming care for transgender adults; assuredly, it won’t be the last.The first time I tried to get access to gender-affirming care was in 2003. I was 24 years old and lived in Rhode Island. I’d been out as transgender for eight years by then, eight years spent looking (on a good day) like a 14-year-old boy, until finally the me I saw in the mirror and the me I saw in my head didn’t match any more. Only testosterone would make me feel like myself.I told my doctor, who was kind and sympathetic and said she had no idea about the protocols for administration of testosterone to a transgender person. She did find me a list of all the practitioners in Rhode Island who offered such care. There were three names on the list. True, Rhode Island is not a large state, but still: three names. I called them all. Only one would see me, and only after I had gone to therapy and had a psychologist certify that I was ready to transition.That was the standard back then – and that’s what the Missouri attorney general wants to require of adult transgender individuals now, only more extensive. In 2003 in Rhode Island, I needed to see a therapist for at least three visits. The Missouri AG wants documentation of least three years of “medically documented, long-lasting, persistent and intense pattern of gender dysphoria” before an adult can be approved to get hormones. Three years of therapy is lengthy, time-consuming and expensive; three years is a very long time to suffer before being allowed to get medical attention.Moreover, back in 2003, “gender identity disorder” was in the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual (DSM) as a mental disorder. Doctors required transgender individuals to visit a psychologist so that there was a “legitimate” diagnosis to accompany the prescription of hormones – even though, back then and still today, the use of hormones for gender reassignment is an “off-label” use. But that diagnosis was removed from the DSM in 2013, replaced with “gender dysphoria”.That’s the term Missouri’s AG uses in his emergency ruling and, in doing so, trying to return to the idea that being transgender is synonymous with being mentally ill, a narrative that the right has used at several historical moments to marginalize LGBTQ+ individuals. The narrative here isn’t really about a diagnosis or medical legitimacy – it certainly isn’t about the health of the transgender person. The subtext clearly is that transgender people are mentally ill and delusional, and they need a medical authority to help them figure out who they are.The therapist that I saw in 2003 was a gay man who had a lot of compassion for the situation I was in. He knew it was a hoop I had to jump through, and he also knew he had to do his job. He asked me questions, took notes, and eventually wrote a letter certifying that I fit the diagnosis of “gender identity disorder” and that hormone therapy would help treat this disorder.I felt uncomfortable with the process; it seemed to me then and it seems to me now that there isn’t anything wrong with my gender identity. I know very well who I am; it’s how I feel about my body that needed to be addressed in a medical way. That’s the shift that was made in the DSM – away from “gender identity” and towards “dysphoria”. That’s the shift that the Missouri AG is trying to undo and rewrite.But that diagnosis and that therapist’s letter got me a prescription for testosterone in Rhode Island, a medical intervention that was absolutely transformative and life-saving for me.And then I moved to south-west Florida. I called endocrinologist after endocrinologist, asking if they would see me, look at the paperwork from my Rhode Island doctor, look at the letter from the therapist. A dozen said no – one receptionist told me curtly that the doctor didn’t see “transgendereds”. Another hung up on me. A third said, “Are you kidding me?” Eventually, I found a doctor in the Miami area, a three-hour drive away, who agreed to see me.This was typical for transgender care back then and, sadly, now. Unless you live in or near a major metropolitan area, getting a doctor who is trained, comfortable and willing to provide gender-affirming care is not easy. I was a person with a lot of privilege: health insurance from my employer, a good income, the language and education and time to persist in finding a therapist and a doctor who would treat me. For many transgender individuals, this would be too much, especially to maintain for three years. Missouri is trying to pile more work on to an already significant burden.But more than the details of this particular attack, I hope people will see the mounting pattern here. The first wave of legislation came for transgender youth. This next wave is coming for transgender adults. Put these restrictions next to the rulings against abortion and you can see a larger picture of bodily control. Who gets to make medical decisions about their bodies? Not pregnant women. Not transgender people.Back in 2003, I was so frustrated by my own experience that I vowed to work for improvements. I’ve fought for transgender civil rights and worked in particular for transgender students. There were years when we were making headway, when a conversation between a transgender individual and their doctor was sufficient basis to prescribe hormones. Now, it seems like we are at an inflection point. It’s time to strip away the rhetoric and recognize what’s at stake: our rights to control our bodies, our rights to control our identities. And I’m not just talking about transgender people.
      Alex Myers is a novelist and teacher who lives in Vermont More

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      What’s ‘Woke’ and Why It Matters

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      A marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years.Gov. Ron DeSantis after signing HB7, dubbed the “stop woke” bill, during a news conference in Hialeah Gardens, Fla., last April.Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald, via Associated PressBelieve it or not, the term woke wasn’t uttered even once in the Republican debates back in 2015 and 2016.Now, I’d be surprised if we make it out of the opening statements of the first primary debate without hearing the term.Whatever you think of the phrase, the rise of “woke” to ubiquity is a helpful marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years.There’s a new set of issues poised to loom over the coming campaign, from critical race theory and nonbinary pronouns to “cancel culture” and the fate of university courses. Fifteen years ago, I would have said these topics could divide a small liberal arts campus, not American politics. I would have been wrong.This change in American politics is hard to analyze. It is hard to craft clear and incisive questions on these complex and emerging topics, especially since the phrase “woke” is notoriously ill-defined. Last week, the conservative writer Bethany Mandel became the subject of considerable ridicule on social media after she was unable to concisely define the term in an interview. She’s not the only one. Apparently, there’s a “woke” part of the federal budget. “Wokeness” was even faulted for the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.But while the definition of “woke” may be up for debate, there’s no doubt that the term is trying to describe something about the politics of today’s highly educated, young “new” left, especially on cultural and social issues like race, sex and gender.As with the original New Left in the 1960s, the emergence of this new left has helped spark a reactionary moment on the right. It has split many liberals from their usual progressive allies. And it has helped power the rise of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has done more to associate himself with fighting “woke” than any other politician. Like it or not, “woke” will shape this year’s Republican primary.What’s woke?The new left emerged in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012. At the time, liberalism seemed utterly triumphant. Yet for young progressives, “hope” and “change” had given way to the realization that Mr. Obama’s presidency hadn’t cured income inequality, racial inequality or climate change. These dynamics opened a space for a new left, as young progressives started to reach for more ambitious politics, just as the triumph of the Obama coalition gave progressives the confidence to embrace ideas that would have been unimaginable in the Bush era.A decade later, this new left is everywhere. On economic issues, there has been the Bernie Sanders campaign and calls for Medicare for all; democratic socialism; and the Green New Deal. On race, there has been the Black Lives Matter movement; kneeling in protest during the national anthem; and defund the police. On gender and sex, there has been the Me Too movement and the sharing of preferred pronouns and more.On class and economics, it’s easy to delineate the new left. Mr. Sanders helpfully embraced the democratic socialism label to distinguish himself from those who would incrementally smooth out the rough edges of capitalism. It’s harder to distinguish the new left from Obama-era liberals on race, gender and sexuality. There is no widely shared ideological term like democratic socialism to make it easy.And yet the differences between Obama-era liberals and the new left on race, sexuality and gender are extremely significant, with big consequences for American politics.Here are just a few of those differences:The new left speaks with righteousness, urgency and moral clarity. While liberals always held strong beliefs, their righteousness was tempered by the need to accommodate a more conservative electorate. Mr. Obama generally emphasized compromise, commonality and respect for conservatives, “even when he disagreed.”As Obama-era liberalism became dominant, a more righteous progressive discourse emerged — one that didn’t accommodate and even “called out” its opposition. This was partly a reflection of what played well on social media, but it also reflected that progressive values had become uncontested in many highly educated communities.The new left is very conscious of identity. Obama-era liberals tended to emphasize the commonalities between groups and downplayed longstanding racial, religious and partisan divisions. Mr. Obama was even characterized as “post-racial.”Today’s new left consciously strives to include, protect and promote marginalized groups. In everyday life, this means prioritizing, trusting and affirming the voices and experiences of marginalized groups, encouraging people to share their pronouns, listing identities on social media profiles, and more. This extension of politics to everyday life is a difference from Obama-era liberalism in its own right. While the Obama-era liberals mostly focused on policy, the new left emphasizes the personal as political.Today’s new left is conscious of identity in policymaking as well, whether it’s arguing against race-neutral policies that entrench racial disparities or advocating race-conscious remedies. Obama-era liberals rarely implemented race-conscious policies or mentioned the racial consequences of racially neutral policies.The new left sees society as a web of overlapping power structures or systems of oppression, constituted by language and norms as much as law and policy. This view is substantially informed by modern academic scholarship that explains how power, domination and oppression persist in liberal societies.Indeed, almost everything debated recently — critical race theory, the distinction between sex and gender, we can go on — originated in academia over the last half-century. Academic jargon like “intersectional” has become commonplace. It can be hard to understand what’s going on if you didn’t read Judith Butler, Paulo Freire or Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in college.Academic scholarship is also the source of the expanded, academic meanings of “trauma,” “violence,” “safety” and “erasure,” which implicitly equate the psychological harm experienced by marginalized groups with the physical harms of traditional illiberal oppression.This does not readily lend itself to a “politics of hope,” as virtually everything about America might have to change to end systemic racism. No law will do it. No candidate can promise it. But it does imbue individual actions that subvert oppressive hierarchies with liberatory and emancipatory implications, helping explain the urgency of activists to critique language and challenge norms in everyday life.The new left view that racism, sexism and other oppressive hierarchies are deeply embedded in American society all but ensures a pessimistic view of America. This is quite different from Obama-era liberalism. Indeed, Mr. Obama himself was cast as a redeeming figure whose ascent proved American greatness.When in conflict, the new left prioritizes the pursuit of a more equitable society over enlightenment-era liberal values. Many of the academic theories, including critical race theory, critique liberalism as an obstacle to progressive change.In this view, equal rights are a veneer that conceal and justify structural inequality, while some liberal beliefs impede efforts to challenge oppression. The liberal value of equal treatment prevents identity-conscious remedies to injustice; the liberal goal of equal opportunity accepts unequal outcomes; even freedom of speech allows voices that would offend and thus could exclude marginalized communities.Is this a definition of woke? No. But it covers much of what woke is grasping toward: a word to describe a new brand of righteous, identity-conscious, new left activists eager to tackle oppression, including in everyday life and even at the expense of some liberal values.A protester during a gathering of trans, queer and Black Lives Matter activists in New York in June 2020.Demetrius Freeman for The New York TimesWhy woke matters for Republicans The rise of the new left on race and gender is already reshuffling conservative politics.For this year’s Republican primary, one of the most important things about this rise is that it has helped bridge the usual divide between the conservative base and the establishment.At least for now, the establishment and the base share the fight against “woke,” for two reasons:The new left is far enough left that there’s room to side with the right while keeping one or both feet in the center. Whether it’s a MAGA fan or a zombie-Reaganite, there’s a path for an enterprising politician to bash “woke” and get on Fox News without alienating donors. Anyone can be a conservative hero, even a private equity magnate who would have been seen as an establishment squish in 2015, like Gov. Glenn Youngkin.Anti-woke politics seems to animate elite conservatives as much as the activist, populist base. After all, the new left is most prevalent in highly educated liberal bastions like New York or Washington, and among the young in highly educated industries like the news media and higher education. Its rise has probably been felt most acutely by highly educated conservatives as well.Whether this dynamic changes is an important question as the primary heats up.Over the last few months, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have staked out farther-right positions that might put this question to the test. Mr. Trump, for instance, said he would pass a federal law recognizing only two genders and would punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care for minors. Mr. DeSantis, for example, would ban gender studies. As the campaign gets underway, they may go further. We will learn whether other candidates match their positions, and whether there’s a cost if they do not. There is even a chance conservatives go too far.Another big question is whether anti-woke politics can supplant older culture war fights, like abortion or immigration. Most anti-new-left conservatives still vigorously oppose the old liberals on immigration, secularism, feminism and more. It remains to be seen whether attacking D.E.I., Disney and university professors, as Mr. DeSantis did in a recent trip to Iowa, is the red meat for rank-and-file conservatives that it is for conservatives in big cities who feel under siege by an increasingly assertive left.Unfortunately, there is almost no survey data that helps answer these questions at this stage. The behavior of Fox News producers and the rise of DeSantis suggest that there’s some kind of mass constituency for this politics, but whether it amounts to 30 percent or 60 percent of the Republican base and whether it’s compelling enough to carry a primary bid is entirely unclear.In the most extreme case for Democrats, the backlash against the new left could end in a repeat of how New Left politics in the 1960s facilitated the marriage of neoconservatives and the religious right in the 1970s. Back then, opposition to the counterculture helped unify Republicans against a new class of highly educated liberals, allowing Southern opponents of civil rights to join old-school liberal intellectuals who opposed Communism and grew skeptical of the Great Society. The parallels are imperfect, but striking.On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the possibility that a populist, working-class conservative base perceives little distinction between “woke” and “liberal,” and would rather hear the old classics on illegal immigration, crime and coarse language about women and Mexicans than fight new battles against “woke capital,” critical race theorists and transgender teenagers. The range of possibilities for the general election are similarly wide. We’ll save the general election for another time. More

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      The Relentless Attack on Trans People Is an Attack on All of Us

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      Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care.In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even gone as far as to introduce bans on “drag” performance that are so broad as to threaten the ability of gender nonconforming people simply to exist in public.Some of the most powerful Republicans in the country want to go even further. Donald Trump has promised to radically limit transgender rights if he is returned to the White House in 2024. In a special video address to supporters, he said he would push Congress to pass a national ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth and restrict Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals and medical professionals providing that care.He wants to target transgender adults as well. “I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” Trump said. “I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”There is plenty to say about the reasoning and motivation for this attack — whether it comes from Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida or Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas — but the important thing to note, for now, is that it is a direct threat to the lives and livelihoods of transgender people. It’s the same for other L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, who once again find themselves in the cross-hairs of an aggressive movement of social conservatives who have become all the more emboldened in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.This is no accident. The attacks on transgender people and L.G.B.T.Q. rights are of a piece with the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender.Politicians and those of us in the media alike tend to frame these conflicts as part of a “culture war,” which downplays their significance to our lives — not just as people living in the world, but as presumably equal citizens in a democracy.Democracy, remember, is not just a set of rules and institutions, but a way of life. In the democratic ideal, we meet each other in the public sphere as political and social equals, imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges.I have referred to dignity twice now. That is intentional. Outside of certain select phrases (“the dignity of labor”), we don’t talk much about dignity in American politics, despite the fact that the demands of many different groups for dignity and respect in public life has been a driving force in American history since the beginning. To that point, one of the great theorists of dignity and democracy in the United States was none other than Frederick Douglass, whose experience in bondage gave him a lifelong preoccupation with the ways that dignity is either cultivated or denied.“Douglass observed,” the historian Nicholas Knowles Bromell writes in “The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass,” “that although dignity seems to be woven into human nature, it is also something one possesses to the degree that one is conscious of having it; and one’s own consciousness of having it depends in part on making others conscious of it. Others’ recognition of it then flows back and confirms one’s belief in having it, but conversely their refusal to recognize it has the opposite effect of weakening one’s confidence in one’s own dignity.”It is easy to see how this relates to chattel slavery, a totalizing system in which enslaved Black Americans struggled to assert their dignity and self-respect in the face of a political, social and economic order that sought to rob them of both. But Douglass explored this idea in other contexts as well.Writing after the Civil War on women’s suffrage, Douglass asked his readers to see the “plain” fact that “women themselves are divested of a large measure of their natural dignity by their exclusion from and participation in Government.” To “deny women her vote,” Douglass continued, “is to abridge her natural and social power, and to deprive her of a certain measure of respect.” A woman, he concluded, “loses in her own estimation by her enforced exclusion from the elective franchise just as slaves doubted their own fitness for freedom, from the fact of being looked down upon as fit only for slaves.”Similarly, in her analysis of Douglass’s political thought — published in the volume “African-American Political Thought: A Collected History” — the political theorist Sharon R. Krause shows how Douglass “clearly believed that slavery and prejudice can degrade an individual against his will” and generate, in his words, “poverty, ignorance and degradation.”Although Douglass never wrote a systematic account of his vision of democracy, Bromell contends that we can extrapolate such an account from the totality of his writing and activism. “A democracy,” Douglass’s work suggests, “is a polity that prizes human dignity,” Bromell writes. “It comes into existence when a group of persons agrees to acknowledge each other’s dignity, both informally, through mutually respectful comportment, and formally, through the establishment of political rights.” All of our freedoms, in Bromell’s account of Douglass, “are means toward the end of maintaining a political community in which all persons collaboratively produce their dignity.”The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all. This was true for Douglass and his time — it inspired his support for women’s suffrage and his opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act — and it is true for us and ours as well. To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Paul Pelosi, el marido que se ocupa de las tareas mundanas

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      La pareja de Nancy Pelosi fundó una firma de inversión en capital de riesgo, pero desde que la presidenta de la Cámara de Representantes optó por la política, es quien compra las toallas de cocina y el guardarropa de ella.WASHINGTON — La presidenta de la Cámara de Representantes, Nancy Pelosi, estaba pegada a la transmisión de CNN la noche que siguió a las elecciones de 2020, mientras su esposo, Paul Pelosi, sentado cerca de ella, abría un paquete.“¿Qué es eso?”, le pregunta a su marido en una escena del nuevo documental de HBO, Pelosi in the House, dirigido por su hija Alexandra Pelosi.“Toallas de cocina”, le responde el hombre con un ápice de ironía mientras revienta el papel burbuja del embalaje. Nancy Pelosi sonríe y luego vuelve a concentrarse en la cobertura electoral.Este es solo un ejemplo de una dinámica que se observa a lo largo de todo el filme: Paul Pelosi, quien fue brutalmente agredido en la residencia de la pareja en San Francisco por un atacante cuyo objetivo, según se dijo, era la presidenta de la Cámara Baja, se ocupa de lo que su familia denomina el “negocio de vivir”. Esto le da a su esposa, quien dejará su cargo el 3 de enero cuando los republicanos asuman la mayoría de la Cámara de Representantes, la libertad de enfocarse en su trabajo político.Es el tipo de relación que las mujeres que se dedican a la política rara vez mencionan, pero que a veces puede marcar la diferencia entre el éxito y el fracaso: una pareja dispuesta a ocuparse de las tareas mundanas y del rol de apoyo que tradicionalmente recaía en las esposas de los políticos. Y aunque los Pelosi tienen una buena posición económica y pueden contratar toda la ayuda que necesitan en su hogar, el documental muestra que ser cónyuge de una figura política puede significar simplemente estar presente y luego hacerse a un lado.En el transcurso de la película, mientras Nancy Pelosi atiende asuntos por teléfono con el exvicepresidente Mike Pence, el senador Chuck Schumer o Joe Biden, quien entonces era candidato a la presidencia, Paul Pelosi, de 82 años, un empresario multimillonario que fundó una firma de inversión en capital de riesgo, a menudo está en el mismo espacio atendiendo las necesidades cotidianas de la vida en común.En una escena, la dirigente está en pijama elaborando estrategias en una llamada con el representante demócrata de Nueva York Jerrold Nadler, sobre el primer juicio político al presidente Donald Trump mientras Paul Pelosi, sentado frente a ella, habla por celular con un contratista que está intentando entrar a su casa en San Francisco para reparar una ducha averiada.“No sé qué le pasó a esa llave”, dice Paul Pelosi, usando una palabrota.La pareja se conoció cuando eran estudiantes universitarios en un curso de verano en la Universidad de Georgetown en 1961. Se casaron dos años después y tuvieron cinco hijos en seis años. Nancy Pelosi dedicó los primeros años de su matrimonio a ser madre y ama de casa en San Francisco y no se postuló al Congreso sino hasta cumplir más de 40 años. Lo que sucedió después fue algo que Paul Pelosi jamás pudo haber imaginado para su esposa ni para su familia, según su hija.“Creo que esto no era lo que él tenía en mente en 1987”, dijo Alexandra Pelosi en una entrevista, en referencia al año en que su madre fue elegida por primera vez al Congreso. “Él solo tuvo que aceptarlo”.La pareja tuvo cinco hijos en seis añosPeter DaSilva para The New York TimesSegún su hija, a Paul Pelosi nunca le picó el bicho de la política. Le prohíbe a su familia hablar del tema en la mesa durante la cena. Pero con el correr de los años, ha estado al lado de su esposa en sus momentos políticos más importantes y ha asumido muchos de los deberes domésticos. Lava los platos, lidia con contratistas, paga las facturas y compra la ropa de Nancy Pelosi.“Ella nunca ha ordenado toallas de cocina en su vida”, dijo Alexandra Pelosi. “Eso es algo que él siempre ha hecho. Él hace las compras, desde las toallas de cocina hasta el vestido Armani”.“Tiene a Armani guardado en sus números de marcado rápido”, añadió, en referencia al diseñador italiano Giorgio Armani, uno de los favoritos de su madre. “Es esposo a tiempo completo”.Alexandra Pelosi compartió más detalles: “El vestido que usó para la cena de Estado, lo mandó pedir él y se lo envió a mi hermana para que se lo probara”. (Se refería al vestido de noche dorado de lentejuelas de otro diseñador italiano, Giambattista Valli, que su madre lució en diciembre en una cena de Estado en la Casa Blanca para recibir al presidente de Francia, Emmanuel Macron).El documental, que se centra en el ascenso y los logros profesionales de Nancy Pelosi, deja entrever cómo estar casada con una pareja comprensiva ayuda a crear un espacio laboral para una mujer que, durante años, fue la fuerza política más poderosa del Partido Demócrata en los tiempos recientes.Con excepción de Hillary Clinton, pocas mujeres en la política han alcanzado la estatura de Pelosi y no hay muchos esposos como el suyo. El expresidente Bill Clinton fungió un papel de pareja de apoyo durante las dos campañas presidenciales de Clinton, pero luego de haber tenido él su turno.Doug Emhoff ha asumido el papel de reparto como pareja de la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris, pero eso ha significado que él mismo se ha convertido en figura pública por derecho propio. Pelosi nunca ambicionó nada como eso.“Él es una persona privada con una vida privada y una colección muy interesante de amigos, algunos de los cuales son republicanos”, dijo Alexandra Pelosi. “Él no buscaba este estilo de vida”.Sin embargo, se adaptó, aseguró su hija. “Toda mujer necesita a un Paul Pelosi”.Los Pelosi se conocieron en 1961 durante un curso de verano en la Universidad de Georgetown.Doug Mills/The New York TimesEn una escena del documental, Pelosi estaba limpiando los platos de desayuno en bata mientras su esposa hablaba con Pence. En un momento, ella se puso en mute y le mandó besos volados a su marido.En una escena filmada en la campaña presidencial de 2020, Nancy Pelosi estaba al teléfono con Biden aconsejándole “no te vayas mucho a la izquierda”. Paul Pelosi estaba sentado junto a ella, leyendo su iPad y medio poniendo atención a la conversación de su esposa.Él parecía cómodo con su papel de reparto.“¿Estás haciendo fila para tomarte una foto con la presidenta de la Cámara?”, le gritó detrás de la cámara su hija a Paul Pelosi en una reunión en el Capitolio de Estados Unidos antes de uno de los discursos de Trump, mientras Nancy Pelosi estaba haciéndose fotos con gente que quería retratarse con ella.“Ay, sí”, bromeó él.El año siguiente, ahí estaba una vez más, sentado y botaneando mientras Pelosi trabajaba.“Me enteré que Paul Pelosi andaba aquí”, bromeó su hija.“Solo vine por los pistachos”, dijo él.Cuando ella se preparaba para ingresar al recinto de la Cámara —donde al final rompería el discurso de Trump y lo desestimaría como un “manifiesto de falsedades”— su esposo estuvo con ella en el despacho ofreciéndole apoyo moral.“Te ves fabulosa, cariño”, le dijo Pelosi.Pese a sus apariciones en el documental, Paul Pelosi no siempre está al lado de su esposa, como sucedió en mayo, cuando sufrió un accidente automovilístico en el condado de Napa, California, y después se declaró culpable de un cargo de conducir bajo el efecto del alcohol. Nancy Pelosi estaba al otro lado del país, preparándose para dar un discurso de graduación en la Universidad de Brown.“Está presente en los días importantes”, dijo Alexandra Pelosi. “En realidad solo lo hace porque ella le dice que tiene que ir. Las personas de este ámbito necesitan una familia que las apoye en los días importantes”.En octubre, Paul Pelosi fue atacado con un martillo en la residencia de la pareja en San Francisco por un hombre que más tarde se dijo que buscaba agredir a la presidenta de la Cámara de Representantes. Aunque sufrió lesiones graves en la cabeza, en los últimos días se le ha visto acompañando a su esposa en diversos eventos, como la ceremonia de develación de su retrato en el Capitolio y la celebración de los Kennedy Center Honors.Sin embargo, la cineasta afirmó que su padre aún debe enfrentar un largo camino para su recuperación. “Tiene días buenos y días malos”, explicó y comentó que tiene estrés postraumático y se agota con facilidad.El ataque contra el hombre que ha sido el pilar silencioso de la vida de la familia Pelosi ha ocasionado estragos en todos sus integrantes. En una entrevista reciente con Anderson Cooper de CNN, la presidenta de la Cámara Baja dijo: “Para mí, esta es la parte realmente difícil, porque Paul no era el objetivo y él es quien está pagando el precio”.“No buscaba a Paul, sino que iba por mí”, agregó.Su hija expresó que uno de los aspectos más incómodos de esta terrible experiencia ha sido la atención pública que se ha centrado en una persona que siempre ha intentado eludirla.“Él ha evitado el protagonismo todo lo que ha podido”, afirmó. “Casi llegó al final sin que nadie supiera quién es”.Annie Karni es corresponsal de la Casa Blanca. Anteriormente cubrió la Casa Blanca y la campaña presidencial de 2016 de Hillary Clinton para Politico, y cubrió noticias locales y política en Nueva York para el New York Post y el New York Daily News. @AnnieKarni More

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      in Elections

      Advice From Pelosi’s Daughter: ‘Every Woman Needs a Paul Pelosi'

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      Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, a multimillionaire venture capitalist recovering from a brutal attack, has long taken care of the couple’s “business of living,” including shopping for the speaker’s clothes.WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was glued to CNN the night after the 2020 election, while her husband, Paul Pelosi, sat nearby unwrapping a package.“What is that?” she asked him in a scene from the new HBO documentary, “Pelosi in the House,” directed by their daughter Alexandra Pelosi.“Dish towels,” Mr. Pelosi responded with a hint of irony as he popped the bubble packing. Ms. Pelosi smiled and then turned her attention back to the election coverage.It was just one instance of a dynamic on display throughout the film: Mr. Pelosi, who was brutally attacked at the couple’s San Francisco home by an assailant who was said to have been targeting the speaker, takes care of what their family refers to as the “business of living.” That leaves his wife, who will step down as speaker when Republicans assume the House majority on Jan. 3, free to focus on her work.It is the kind of relationship that women in politics rarely talk about, but can sometimes help make the difference between success and failure: a partner willing to take on the mundane tasks and supportive role that traditionally fell to political wives. And although the Pelosis are wealthy and can get all the household help they need, the documentary captures that being a political spouse can mean simply showing up, and then standing off to the side.Throughout the film, as Ms. Pelosi does business on the phone with Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Chuck Schumer or Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was then a presidential candidate, Mr. Pelosi, 82, a multimillionaire businessman who founded a venture capital investment firm, is often in the same room dealing with the day-to-day necessities of their lives.In one scene, Ms. Pelosi was in her pajamas strategizing on a call with Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, about the first impeachment of President Donald J. Trump while Mr. Pelosi, sitting across from her, was on his cellphone dealing with a contractor trying to access their San Francisco home to fix a broken shower.A New U.S. Congress Takes ShapeFollowing the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats maintained control of the Senate while Republicans flipped the House.Who Is George Santos?: The G.O.P. congressman-elect from New York says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But his résumé appears to be mostly fiction.McCarthy’s Fraught Speaker Bid: Representative Kevin McCarthy has so far been unable to quash a mini-revolt on the right that threatens to imperil his effort to secure the top House job.The G.O.P.’s Fringe: Three incoming congressmen attended a gala that drew white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, raising questions about the influence of extremists on the new Republican-led House.Kyrsten Sinema: The Arizona senator said that she would leave the Democratic Party and register as an independent, just days after the Democrats secured an expanded majority in the Senate.“I don’t know what happened to that key,” Mr. Pelosi said, using an expletive.Paul and Nancy Pelosi met as college students while taking a summer class at Georgetown University in 1961. They married two years later and had five children in six years. Ms. Pelosi spent her early years in the marriage as a stay-at-home San Francisco mother and did not run for Congress until she was in her 40s. What followed was nothing that Mr. Pelosi ever pictured for his wife, or his family, according to his daughter.“I don’t think this is what he signed up for in 1987,” Alexandra Pelosi said in an interview, referring to the year Ms. Pelosi was first elected to Congress. “He just had to get over it.”The couple had five children in six years.Peter DaSilva for The New York TimesMr. Pelosi, according to his daughter, never caught the political bug. He forbids political talk at the dinner table. But over the years he has been at his wife’s side at her big political moments, and has taken on many of the duties of the homemaker. He does the dishes, deals with contractors, pays the bills and shops for Ms. Pelosi’s clothes.“She’s never ordered dish towels in her life,” Alexandra Pelosi said. “That’s what he’s been doing forever. He does the shopping for her, from the dish towels to the Armani dress.”“He’s got Armani on speed dial,” she added, referring to the Italian designer Giorgio Armani, one of the speaker’s favorites. “He’s the full-service husband.”Ms. Pelosi had more to say: “The dress she wore to the state dinner; he ordered it for her, and he sent my sister to go try it on.” (Ms. Pelosi was referring to a gold sequin gown by another Italian designer, Giambattista Valli, that her mother wore to a White House state dinner early this month for President Emmanuel Macron of France.)The documentary, focused on Ms. Pelosi’s rise and professional accomplishments, offers glimpses into how a marriage to a supportive spouse helps create the space for a woman’s work — in her case, operating years as the most powerful political force in the Democratic Party in recent years.Other than Hillary Clinton, few women in politics have risen to Ms. Pelosi’s stature, and there are not many male spouses like her husband. Former President Bill Clinton played the role of supportive spouse during Mrs. Clinton’s two presidential campaigns, but after he had already had his turn.Doug Emhoff has assumed a supporting role to Vice President Kamala Harris, but that has also meant becoming a public figure in his own right. Mr. Pelosi never wanted anything close to that.“He’s a private person with a private life with a very interesting collection of friends, including Republicans,” Alexandra Pelosi said. “He didn’t sign up for this life.”But, she said, he has made it work. “Every woman needs a Paul Pelosi.”The Pelosis met in 1961, while taking a summer class at Georgetown University. Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn one scene in the documentary, Mr. Pelosi was scraping breakfast dishes in a robe while his wife spoke on the phone to Mr. Pence. At one point, she put herself on mute and blew kisses at her husband.In a scene shot during the 2020 presidential campaign, Ms. Pelosi was on the phone with Mr. Biden advising him “don’t go too far to the left.” Mr. Pelosi was sitting next to her, reading his iPad, only half paying attention to his wife’s conversation.Mr. Pelosi appeared at ease in his supporting character role.“Are you in line to get a picture with the speaker?” his daughter shouted at him from behind the camera at a gathering at the U.S. Capitol ahead of one of Mr. Trump’s State of the Union addresses, while Ms. Pelosi was working a photo line.“Oh I am,” he joked.The following year, there he was again, sitting and snacking while Ms. Pelosi worked the room.“I heard Paul Pelosi was here,” his daughter joked.“I just came for the pistachios,” he said.As Ms. Pelosi prepared to enter the House chamber — where she would eventually tear up Mr. Trump’s speech and dismiss it as a “manifesto of mistruths” — her husband was with her in her office offering moral support.“You look great, hon,” Mr. Pelosi told her.Despite his appearances in the documentary, Mr. Pelosi is not always at the speaker’s side, including in May, when he was in a car accident in Napa County, Calif., and afterward pleaded guilty to a single count of driving under the influence of alcohol. Ms. Pelosi was across the country, preparing to deliver a commencement address at Brown University.“He’s there for the days that matter,” Alexandra Pelosi said. “It’s really just because she says you have to come. These kinds of people need a family to be there for support on days that matter.”In October, Mr. Pelosi was beaten with a hammer at the couple’s San Francisco home by an assailant who was said to have been targeting the speaker. He suffered major head injuries, but has appeared in recent days by Ms. Pelosi’s side, including her portrait unveiling at the Capitol and at the Kennedy Center Honors celebration.Still, his daughter said he was on a long road to recovery. “He has good days and bad days,” she said, noting that he has post-traumatic stress and tires quickly.The attack on the man who has been a quiet pillar of the Pelosi family life has taken a toll on all of them. The speaker told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in a recent interview that “for me this is really the hard part because Paul was not the target, and he’s the one who is paying the price.”“He was not looking for Paul, he was looking for me,” she added.His daughter said one of the most uncomfortable parts of the ordeal has been the glare of the public spotlight on a person who has tried to avoid it.“He’s remained out of the limelight as much as he could,” she said. “He almost got to the end without anyone knowing who he was.” More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Rogan admits schools don’t have litter boxes for kids who ‘identify’ as furries

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      Joe Rogan admits schools don’t have litter boxes for kids who ‘identify’ as furriesPodcast host had amplified debunked claim about furries spread by Republican politicians Joe Rogan has acknowledged spreading misinformation after he suggested that elementary schools were installing litter boxes for students who “identify” as furries.The sensationalist urban legend was rooted in the right’s continued attacks on trans and gender non-conforming youth.Rogan, the Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, and the Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen all swore they had heard stories of schools across the US changing their bathroom policies to accommodate wannabe felines. But an NBC News investigation determined this was untrue. The furries-in-kindergarten myth was repeated by at least 20 candidates and officials this year, the report found, but none of the school districts mentioned actually offered litter boxes for student use. (Though officials in Colorado’s Jefferson county school district said in 2017 they did keep litter in closets as an “emergency go bucket”, in the event that a student needed to relieve themselves while in emergency lockdown.)But the story still spread. Ericka Menchen-Trevino, a professor at American University’s School of Communication, explained to the Guardian why she believed these rumors were catnip to some parents. “This story put together a few things that some people already believe are true: that people’s assertions of identity, especially [for] children, are out of control, and that our schools are out of control for allowing it,” she said. “It fits very well with some people’s prior beliefs, and they don’t need to fact-check [because] it’s right in line with what they believe.”Can Joe Rogan change?Read moreJoan Donovan, research director for Harvard Kennedy’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, added that the fake story gained traction “because it allows [politicians] to dog-whistle their transphobia without having to say the quiet part out loud.“What was once a transphobic joke about ‘what’s next, kids identifying as cats?’ became a soft target for hoaxers who knew audiences were already primed to believe outrageous things,” she added.Rogan originally referenced the story on-air to the former Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard as a blind item revealed to him by a “friend’s wife”. This woman was supposedly a teacher at a school that offered litter boxes in the girls’ restroom alongside toilets.Then came the backtrack: “The kitty litter boxes is a weird one,” the ex-Fear Factor host admitted on his wildly popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. “I fed into that and let me – I should probably clarify that a bit.” Rogan explained that the “friend’s wife” now taught at a “another school” and he could not verify that her previous job now had litter boxes. “I don’t think they actually did it,” he said.Michelle A Amazeen, an associate professor who studies misinformation and director of Boston University’s Communication Research Center, said that these types of bogus rumors typically trickled up from fringe sites that lack credibility. “This story exemplifies the intertwined nature of digital, social and mainstream news media,” she said. “The fact that mainstream news outlets are covering this preposterous story – even if only to debunk wacko political candidates who are stating it as fact – gives the story reinforcement and seeming credibility.”And Amazeen is not optimistic that Rogan’s disavowal of his words – plus factcheckers who reveal it’s totally false – will do much to stop its spread. “Fake news spreads farther and faster than retractions,” she said. “The story advances [conservative] fears about gender non-conformity and lack of control over what’s happening in our schools.”Even as Rogan walked his statements back, the Senate candidate Don Bolduc of New Hampshire continued to peddle the trope this week, describing the “furries and fuzzies’’ peeing in litter boxes at the state’s private Pinkerton Academy.Pinkerton Academy denied his claims that they use litter boxes in school or allow children to lick themselves and each other. “We want to assure our community that Mr Bolduc’s statements are entirely untrue,” representatives for the school, which costs $14,238 a year, said on social media.While the hysteria over litter boxes in grade school may seem comical at first, it deeply disturbed Yotam Ophir, an assistant professor of communication at the University at Buffalo.“My concern here is that throughout history when dangerous political leaders wanted to promote propaganda at the expense of vulnerable populations, a key strategy was to compare populations to animals,” he said. “Even if Joe Rogan doesn’t say it explicitly, what I hear as someone who studies propaganda is that he’s suggesting that [members of] the LGBTQ+ community are unnatural, almost non-human. We know from the past that people feel much more comfortable attacking humans when they don’t see them as humans any more.”Dr Sharon Roberts is the co-founder of FurScience.com, a group of academics who study the furry community. She had not heard that Joe Rogan had retracted his statement until reached by the Guardian but said: “That’s great news. I hope this positive action – his correcting the record – gets as much attention as the misinformation and leads to more public interest in the examination of evidence-based research on the furry fandom.”This misinformation, Roberts says, stems from a misunderstanding of what furries are. “Furries identify with animals, not as animals; most don’t have fursuits, they’re into artwork, cosplaying, going to conventions and interacting online with like-minded people,” she said. “Perhaps surprising to outsiders who may not understand the nuances of the community, the furry fandom is typically a safe place –sometimes the only safe place – for people of all genders, sexual orientations and those who are neurodiverse to be accepted by peers who celebrate their best, most authentic selves.”According to CNN, between 100,000 and 1 million people are part of the furry fandom. A FurScience.com study found that most furries “create for themselves an anthropomorphized animal character (fursona) with whom they identify and can function as an avatar”, and some, though not all, dress up in “elaborate costumes”. More than 75% of furries are under the age of 25, the group reported, and 60% “agree that they felt prejudice against furries from society”.As she previously told NBC News, Dr Roberts noted one crucial fact; she has never “seen or heard of” furries using litterboxes – anywhere. “While I can’t say for certain that no one has ever asked for a litter box, I can say that the aggregate data and the underlying logic of what a furry is don’t support the suggestion,” Roberts added. “Furries are human.”TopicsJoe RoganUS politicsGendernewsReuse this content More