A lot to unpack here.

Let me begin by stating outright that if you have never had to fight to have “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” apply to you and those like you, then you are in no position to tell those who have had to, and those who are still doing so, that they should just keep quiet about that and accept things as they are or explain to them what their real experiences have been.

It was thought that 2020 was the worst year for the murders of Trans people with 45 Trans-people having been killed with transgender women of color disproportionately impacted by the violence, and that would be the peak.

But then along came 2021 and, so far, 41 trans people have been killed with, once again, the majority being Trans women of color, and we still have 2.5 months to go.

The same old “Gay panic” defense has been dusted off to be the “Trans-panic” defense. In both cases murders were excuse or the punishment light because the defense claimed it was the victim’s fault for not being the gender the killer assumed they were.

I know of one such case where the killer had picked someone up in a Gay bar, took him home, and then killed the victim because he, who would imagine, was Gay, and this was a total surprise. The killer was so shocked by this revelation that the panic took the form of gauged out eyes and the body being burned on a pile of tires.

Considering the anti-Trans jokes included in Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix foray, the Trans community has expressed in word and deed that this is unacceptable and Netflix should have been a little more understanding of the damage such freely thrown out jokes can cause with his anti-Trans routine.

However, Bill Maher and other comedians are defending the jokes as free speech while the reality is free speech is limited if the speech causes harm.

And, in this case, it does.

Maher began his show informing the audience,

“You can’t be afraid to speak in America,”

while ignoring that you shouldn’t be afraid to live in America as yourself either.

He isn’t afraid.

He is “Team Dave”.

He had two panelists on the other night- Andrew Yang, an Asian, and John McWhorter, a Black man- who, along with Maher dismissed the concerns of Trans-people as merely politics and wokeness, with Transgender and all related to it being merely a component of “Cancel Culture”.

While the concerns of the Asian and Black community are legitimate and must be addressed, Trans concerns are reduced to a political thing that divides Right from Left with “Transgender” being a buzzword that is employed merely for creating division.

This was the same tactic used in the past to dismiss the needs of GLBT students in school where what was relevant to other students like Black, Hispanic, and Asian was considered a concern to be addressed while the same, relevant to GLBT students, was merely a political thing and, so, could be easily dismissed.

A teacher putting up a list of GLBT role models of all races along with a list of Straight role models covering the same racial groups has been considered militancy, while straight teachers putting up lists that exclude any GLBT people is a positive thing for students.

Maher attempted to defend Netflix and claim it is a victim of wokeness with the ridiculous and revealing statement that the woke crowd is ignoring that there were a lot of Transgender people who walked out in protest of Netflix, so obviously, with that many Trans employees, Netflix is not anti-Trans because of all the Trans people who walked out.

There are two problems with this– the facts of which he totally overlooked or couldn’t be bothered to find out.

First, Trans people and their allies walked out, so it was employees from all categories of people who walked out many in support of their Trans fellow employees. He misrepresented the make up of the walk out to fit his purposes.

Second, his lack of understanding of the GLBT experience was exposed as, because of fear of discriminatory treatment, just like with Gays and Lesbians in the past, one’s sexual orientation is shoved in the closet so that narrow minded people will not subject them to ill and demeaning treatment like losing their jobs, housing, professional certification, and lives.

He actually claimed,

“Isn’t that a story in itself? You know, doesn’t that say this company is pretty enlightened to begin with?  I mean, sometimes you can ask for too much, even if you’re a minority.” 

Because being equal to all other citizens and enjoying the rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is somehow asking too much.

Quite a judgement from someone who never had to fight for those rights.

I worked in the Los Angeles Unified School District in the middle 80s to the opening years of the 90s. One day, to make a strong statement about GLBT people, especially the presence of Gay students in the district’s schools, as many GLBT teachers as were willing to gathered for a press conference at the administration building. It was televised and the main reaction to us all stepping forward and saying our names and the school at which we taught, was that the district and public did not see people who should not be denied employment, but teachers they had known for years as good and effective teachers who had been being judged by their job performance rather than their sexual orientation. What surprised people from the district was how many GLBT teachers had been in the system for years, and parents were surprised how many of their own and their children’s teachers had been Gay with no negative effects from that.

Maher was raised Roman Catholic, the religion of his Irish-American father and only found out in his teens that his own mother was a Jewish woman whose family came from Hungary. She was born on March 3, 1919 in New York City.

Maher was born in 1956.

Why did she wait at least 16 years to tell her son her true heritage?

Perhaps, there were tangible reasons?

He should know that someone can be a member of something, like his own family, without other members of it knowing an important fact about them.

It is the same in the workplace.

What amazed me most was that his panel on this anti-Trans/Pro-Chappelle show were an Asian man and a Black man, both lamenting how wokeness actually meant that Trans-people and their allies were just too sensitive and should learn that is only a joke and should keep silent and grow up.

McWhorter opposition to the proper treatment of Trans citizens as fully franchised  was that one has to challenge the idea of “power differentials” and this meant anyone who doesn’t toe the line is deemed a “moral pervert and you must be defenestrated and be chased out of the public square.”

Hello?

Isn’t that what is being done to Trans people with more extreme actions against them than the term defenestration, a metaphor for most, but an actual reality for Trans people would imply?

And he went further by saying,

“That’s what we’re up against. So that’s why there are some people who believe there’s one truth. They think they found the final solution. They think they are Kant. They aren’t.”

Who is this “we” who are in some battle to oppose Trans people while allowing them to be victims of another person’s bigotry tht should not be corrected, merely accepted?

There is only one truth when it comes to what Transgender actually means, but apparently misinformation and carefully tooled false arguments are equal to that.

Maher was quick to add,

“One of the reactions from someone who worked at Netflix said, ‘This is not an argument with two sides.’ Well, right away you lost me. ‘ It is an argument with trans people who want to be alive and people who don’t want us to be.’ Well, that’s just ridiculous. Dave Chappelle does not want you to not be alive.”

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As if humor cannot be misapplied by those already predisposed to an uninformed opinion and just need a nudge to act on that.

His show, humor and all, is one in which he attempts to mold his audience’s opinion to be more in line with his way of thinking, usually through satire and sarcasm. So, he does know the coercive nature of humor.

If his above words are true, what is the purpose of his show?

Andrew Yang lamented on the show where the host promotes ideas and ways of thinking,

“Being a comedian seems like a really, really tough job. I think we can agree that comedians’ primary role is to entertain, and it’s sometimes to make us think. But no one thinks it’s a comedian’s role to tell us how to think, or what to think and attributing that role to Dave or any other comedian doesn’t serve art, the artist or society at all.” 

Again, why does Maher have his program?

Bill further showed his lack of information when he said,

“This idea that we’re not any gender when we’re born is very new and very radical that you’re born, it’s just jump ball! … That’s a very new idea and I’m not sure if I’m down with all of it and I don’t have to be.”

This is not a “very new idea”. It might be new to him, but that is because attitudes like his had made it important and safer to keep Transgender further into the closet than Gay people, and with his pulpit, before he says anything, he should talk to Trans-people and the medical community who know the facts.

He was around when Christine Jorgensen and Rene Richards were in the headlines. He claims to be informed, yet also claims that what he should have known about in his position of comic and social commentator, is new.

He dug into his ignorance deeper by claiming,

“You know, you’re not automatically right if you’re trans. You’re completely equal, you’re just not automatically right and it doesn’t behoove everybody to get their mind around very new changes, I mean, we were boys and girls for a very long time. It’s only been ten years since – how long have we had gay marriage, you know? I mean, talk about the Democratic voter, I’m sure there’s a guy in Ohio going, ‘I just got on board with gay marriage, could you give me a minute?’”

“You are completely equal”?

Where does this man live?

As far as his panelists, they claimed that treating Trans people as humans and citizens with all the rights with which we were endowed by our Creator is a bad thing and is just troublemaking based solely on people who have hurt feelings and who should just accept the jokes and suck up the aftermath.

One has to ask if McWhorter and Wang thought banning Blackface and minstrel shows, Europeans playing Charlie Chan or Micky Rooney being a caricature of a Chinese man in Breakfast at Tiffani’s, and the stereotype cartoons of round glasses, bucked teeth, and Pidgeon English was incorrect wokeness and we should be able to return to these being acceptable.

Andrew Wang may not think so since he did point out on the panel that there was something wrong with anti-Asian attitudes and attacks.

Previously, as a candidate for Mayor of New York in spring 2021 he had said,

“I’ve been Asian all my life, and I remember vividly growing up with this constant sense of invisibility, mockery, and disdain, a sense that you cannot be American if you have an Asian face. But this has metastasized into something new and deadly and virulent and hateful.”

He also explained,

“The Black Community has suffered from something that I believe many Asians are experiencing for the first time: The sense of our place in America has always been questioned, but now it’s something different. It is dehumanizing.”

Laugh it off and move on, then. Don ‘t be so woke.

Although Maher had admitted in his monologue that the Chappelle situation would be covered by the panel, the panel lacked anyone who disapproved of Netflix’s program, most notably any Trans-person who could have actually explained what the problem is.

While the three of them found fault with a Netflix employee who, when asked about the walkout had stated,

“One of the reactions from someone who worked at Netflix said, ‘This is not an argument with two sides,’ “

Bill Maher, a straight, cisgender, white male, told his panelists, both straight cisgender males,

“That’s what bothers me to begin with, that there is … what I call the one true opinion … and there isn’t. There isn’t just one true opinion. I’m a free speech guy.”

If this were true, where was someone from or for the Trans people explaining the other side as opposed his presenting carefully chosen quotes and news reports as fodder for his dismissive jokes.

His attitude and acceptance of Trans people were, to me, summed up in his joke in defense of Chappelle, and against those who recognize that derogatory humor and that that repeats false information as if true was,

“Larry? Not a real cable guy.”

Clever jab, bill?

With Halloween coming up, will anyone object if a Trans person uses Blackface or dresses up as Mickey Rooney’s character, or will they grasp what McWhorter says and accept the nuance and symbolism of Blackface and the return of Mr. I. Y. Yunioshi that the new York Times critic claimed in 1961,

“Mickey Rooney’s bucktoothed, myopic Japanese is broadly exotic.”

To do so would be woke.

And for bigots, that’s a bad thing.

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