Comparisons between Rome, 1930s Germany, and Contemporary America
In the contemporary American zeitgeist, transgender people are once again being framed as bad for the state of the nation.
I would suggest to you that an underlying rhetoric exists which frames transness as a transmissible moral sickness which produces or is produced by corruption. In contemporary rhetorics previous iterations of these rhetorics are evoked to further the impact of the contemporary one.
For instance, pundits like Dennis Prager and Tucker Carlson frequently make the claim that perceived gender defying decadence, not brutal economic war reparations, was what caused the Weimar Republic’s collapse and the resulting rise of the Nazi state. These claims are so well understood by their audience that Carlson can simply open a segment about drag queens with the phrase “Another day in the Weimar Republic”.
