#*transphobia

Bye, take care. 💌

Can you provide a definition for the word woman?”

Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn lobbed this query at Ketanji Brown Jackson during her 2022 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Blackburn was doing her bit for her party’s effort to enforce transphobic gender conformity, positioning herself as a defender of womanhood as something fixed and narrow. When Jackson declined to provide Blackburn with a definition, noting that she was not a biologist, the senator took the opportunity to dial it up a notch. “The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about,” Blackburn said with lip-smacking satisfaction.

Two years later, Republicans remain cruelly closed to the realities of gender fluidity and trans existence. But how the party understands — and represents — womanhood more broadly? Well … that’s getting weird. As we cruise toward November with two ancient white men on the presidential ticket and the rights of millions of people who are not white men in the balance, the public performance of Republican womanhood has become fractured, frenzied, and far less coherent than ever.

“A true conservative woman,” Valentina Gomez, one of several Republican candidates vying to be Missouri’s next secretary of state, told me in an email this spring, “speaks the truth, works hard, loves and knows how to use guns of multiple calibers, cares for the wellbeing of children and her family, doesn’t sleep with multiple men and most important, does not murder babies.”

That being said, you can also express your distaste. That’s how freedom of speech works! As long as you are appropriate about it. Death threats and suicide baiting are 100% inappropriate. No one deserves to die because they draw art you don’t like.

I personally find the art disgusting and transphobic. And if they were honest about their fetish, I would be a lot less critical. The biggest issue is them disguising their fetish as inclusivity and activism. There are too many red flags for it to be the product of just stylization, and I feel like it needs to absolutely be addressed.

But they don’t deserve to die because I think it’s gross and fetishistic. Criticism is fine as long as it remains criticism and doesn’t enter the realm of being threatening. And if you mock it, you’re free to do so too. Art is not above mockery. I make fun of contemporary abstract art all the time. I make fun of generic tumblr stylization (we all know the one) all the time. If people can’t handle that then I don’t know how they’ve gotten this far as an artist.