Texas, Tennessee & Transphobia
Oh, The Temper Tantrums White Men Throw
Last week was Spring Break for our schools, so as soon as I posted the newsletter I hit the road for a college tour trip masquerading as a vacation. It did not include the beaches, relaxation, or frozen beverages with little umbrellas that we needed, but it was very informative and kind of fun.
We were only gone for a few days, and yet I feel like there are a ton of breaking stories, all of which involve white men throwing temper tantrums.
Here’s a fun one: Twitter stopped letting people like, retweet, or share Sex On Wednesday or any other Substack Newsletter. It seems that Elon Musk—who bought twitter as part of a $44 billion temper tantrum—is unhappy about a new Substack feature that allows writers (like me) and readers (like you) to share shortform content. He accused the company of “trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone,” but denied the obvious retaliation. I guess his free speech promises die with a little healthy competition?
Elon’s behavior shouldn’t surprise us. He has been losing his s**t regularly since taking over twitter: firing most of its staff (even those who would get massive payouts from leaving), selling off its office furniture, and deleting the ‘w’ from the sign on its San Francisco office building. This week, however, a bunch of other mediocre white men joined him.
Tennessee GOP Kicks Out Two Black Representatives, But It’s Not About Race, Really
I admit that the connection between this story and sex is tenuous, but I do believe that threats to our democracy are threats to our sexual and reproductive health and the mediocre-white-boy-temper-tantrum that the speaker of the Tennessee House threw last week is absolutely a threat to the way our government should work.
Starting this story from the beginning would mean mentioning that the KKK was founded in Tennessee and explaining how the state’s permit-less open carry gun laws were passed, but we won’t go back quite that far. Instead, we’ll start after the deadly school shooting in Nashville at the end of March that left six dead (three of whom were children). Hundreds of demonstrators packed the Capitol demanding the state take action to pass sensible gun laws. Three Democratic lawmakers—Representatives Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, and Gloria Johnson—joined them in chanting from the House floor, which apparently was against the legislature’s rules of decorum.
Rather than take any action on gun control, House Speaker Cameron Sexton set out to punish the three by calling a vote to expel them. Banishing an elected official is a drastic move that is usually the result of a bigger scandal in which a lawmaker engages in criminal or morally questionable actions. In this case, however, it was a way to punish those who dare disagree with the party in charge.
On Thursday, Tennessee Republicans voted to expel Jones and Pearson while Johnson survived by just one vote. It shouldn’t escape anyone’s notice that the two expelled lawmakers are Black while the one who survived is white. Tennessee Republicans say that race played no part in their decision but went on to say that Jones and Pearson (the two black men) were trying to incite a riot and Johnson (the white woman) was more subdued. Moreover, during discussions a GOP lawmaker told Jones to be less focused on race and more collegial, saying, “You have a lot to offer, but offer it in a vein where people are accepting of your ideas.” Tell me again how the GOP “literally didn’t look at ethnicity?”
The bit that’s tangentially related to sex comes up when we review the behavior of Tennessee lawmakers over the years who were not expelled for the illegal, immoral, racist, misogynistic, and stupid things they’ve said and done.
Rep. David Byrne (R) was accused of sexual misconduct by three women who had been on basketball teams he’d coached years earlier. He survived multiple attempts to expel him with Speaker Sexton voting to save him because you had to “balance overturning the will of the voters.”
The previous Republican speaker, Glen Casada (R) sent text messages that showed he “encouraged or approved of his chief of staff making disparaging and sexual comments about women, including interns and a lobbyist.” While he stepped down as speaker, he was not expelled then. Nor was he expelled a few years later when federal investigators charged him with money laundering, wire fraud, bribery, and kickbacks.
You know who else wasn’t expelled? Rep. Paul Sherrell (R) who asked during a committee hearing if the state should add “hanging by a tree” to its list of approved execution methods. (Did I mention that the KKK was started in TN?) His colleague who defended the three-fifth compromise in the Constitution was also not punished.
Nope. Just the Black men who joined their own constituents in protesting gun violence days after children were killed in school. Okay, fine, there have been a few other expulsions in Tennessee since the Civil War, like one for soliciting bribes, one for multiple counts of sexual assault, and six in 1866 for preventing the ratification of the 14th amendment. Still, this is the first one that seems to be based purely on political retribution with a sprinkling of old-fashioned racism thrown in for good measure.
The expulsion didn’t last long. On Monday, the Nashville City Council voted unanimously to send Justin Jones back to the state house and it looks like the Shelby County Board of Commissioners will do the same this week.
Let’s take our own vote: all who think we should make Speaker Sexton sit in the time out chair while he calms down and learns to use his words, say aye?
Texas Judge Bends Over Backwards to Get Rid of Mifepristone
We’ve been expecting Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling against Mifepristone for months now and it was finally handed down at the end of the day on Friday. What we hadn’t necessarily expected was that another judge in Washington would hand down the opposite ruling at the very same time, leaving the future of medication abortion truly up in the air.
A few things to remember before we go into these decisions:
Mifepristone is one of two drugs used for medication abortions. The other drug is misoprostol.
Mifepristone was granted FDA approval for this purpose in 2000. It has since also been approved for use in patients with Cushing Syndrome.
Medication abortions are more easily accessible than surgical abortions because they can be done from home. They now make up about half of all abortions in this country.
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is an ideologue appointed by Trump who used to work as a “religious liberty” lawyer. Conservative groups use administrative rules in Texas to handpick him for their causes. He has already voted that Title X clinics cannot prescribe birth control to minors without parental consent.
A group calling themselves Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine brought a case against the FDA arguing that the process used to approve the medication abortion regimen, and mifepristone in particular, was unlawful. They asked for an injunction against the 23-year-old approval.
The FDA argued that the approval was legitimate, that the regimen has been proven over-and-over again to be safe and effective, and that the courts messing with decades-old approval will send all drug safety protocols in this country into chaos.
As expected, Kacsmaryk agreed whole-heartedly with the Plaintiff. This might not qualify as a temper tantrum since it was his job to write a decision in the case. His rhetoric, however, takes it to another level with anti-abortion language including words like “abortionist,” “unborn baby,” and “chemical abortion.” He writes that mifepristone “ultimately starves the unborn human until death” and described medication abortion as “a two-step drug regimen: mifepristone to kill the unborn human, followed by misoprostol to induce cramping and contractions to expel the unborn human from the mother’s womb.” Not a description one would find in a medical journal or textbook for sure. He also downplayed the decades of research that say mifepristone is safe, and argued that the FDA was under political pressure by the Clinton administration to approve the drug.
What happens next is made even more confusing by another decision handed down on Friday by Judge Thomas O. Rice in Washington state. This case was brought by the Attorneys General of 17 states and the District of Columbia who argue that the FDA should make mifepristone easier to get. Mifepristone is one of just 60 drugs that are part of the FDA’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS), a safety program that adds extra steps to prescribing these drugs. The AGs in this case asked for the REMS to be removed to make access easier. Judge Rice did not agree to that but did order that the FDA do nothing to change the status quo of mifepristone availability while this case works its way through higher courts.
To recap: the FDA was basically told by one judge that it should revoke the drug’s approval and ordered not to change anything by another judge. This may have been the whole point of the second lawsuit—to force a showdown in the higher courts—because when lower courts with equal authority disagree, mommy and daddy usually have to step in. Kacsmaryk actually stayed his own decision for seven days to give the Biden administration time to appeal.
Interestingly, some legal experts say the FDA can essentially ignore Kacsmaryk’s decision without waiting for a higher court. They claim the agency could choose not to enforce the ruling either by saying it believes the drug to be safe and effective or arguing that it doesn’t have the resources to stop the drug from reaching people across the country. That does not seem to be the plan, however, as the Biden administration filed an appeal of the Texas decision on Monday.
It’s unclear how the Supreme Court will rule on the issue if it gets that far. While we know from the post-Dobbs hell we are living in that a majority of justices oppose abortion rights, the procedural issues in this case may take center stage, as the ruling could upend the process by which drugs are approved in this country. Executives at 250 pharmaceutical companies signed on to a letter condemning the decision on Monday, writing the ruling “has set a precedent for diminishing F.D.A.’s authority over drug approvals, and in so doing, creates uncertainty for the entire biopharma industry.”
Still, advocates are figuring out what to do if the ruling is upheld. Many are preparing for misoprostol-only abortions which are more difficult and have more side effects. Others are looking to organizations that provide mail order mifepristone from outside the country.
We are not there yet, however. Medication abortion remains available at least while we wait for the next court decision, and some states appear to be stockpiling mifepristone for the future.
Note: while I do talk about abortion and abortion rights frequently, there are many people writing about these issues who can do a much deeper dive on the legal, political, and practical implications of these two decisions and whatever comes next. For those who are interested, I suggest starting with Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day newsletter and the Boom Lawyered Podcast by Rewire Newsgroup editors Imani Grandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo.
Kid Rock Shoots Beer to Make Anti-Trans Statement
Another mediocre white man threw a temper tantrum this week, and this time he was armed with a machine gun. Luckily his target (much of which he missed) was three cases of Bud Light. Kid Rock—a 90s musician who has become more famous for his undying loyalty to Donald Trump than for his songs or his brief marriage to Pamela Anderson—is mad at Anheuser-Busch for acknowledging trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
Mulvaney has been documenting her transition on TikTok in a series called “Days of Girlhood.” To celebrate 365 days of her journey, Bud Light sent her a beer can with her picture on it. This can’t really be called a partnership; it’s a more of a nice gesture by a corporation looking for some goodwill publicity. It’s not a new campaign. In fact, it was a single can of beer that’s not available in stores. They gave an influencer a present and she thanked them in an Instagram post.
That might have been the end of it if Kid Rock and his fellow transphobic, anti-woke, posterchildren for toxic masculinity hadn’t started shooting off their mouths and their guns. But of course, they did.
Kid used a machine gun to shoot at three cases and managed to miss one entirely despite his overwhelming firepower and the beer’s general lack of mobility. Sebastian Gorka, a former deputy assistant to Donald Trump, threw an unopened six pack in the trash. And ]country music star Travis Tritt said he was deleting all Anheuser-Busch products from his hospitality rider. (I’m not entirely sure what a hospitality rider is, but I imagine it’s the kind of contract that allows famous people to insist on green M&Ms and Evian in their dressing room, and I don’t imagine the $33.4 billion beer company will feel the pinch.)
My favorite response comes from Vince Dao, who Rolling Stone describes as a Conservative Christian YouTuber. He insists that he didn’t drink light beer anyhow because it’s loaded with estrogen and gives you “man boobs.” Sorry, Vince, that’s not how it f**king works. As far as I can tell, light beer is mostly water, but it does have 145 calories, so drinking too much of it could, I suppose, contribute to weight gain, which could, I suppose, look like man boobs.
The MAGA twitterverse tried to say that they’d won this one with a tweet suggesting that this was a huge scandal and Bud had fired its whole marketing team because of the partnership with Mulvaney. Nope. A spokesperson for Anheuser-Busch said there was no truth to that and added that they work “with hundreds of influencers across our brand as one of the many ways to authentically connect with audiences across various demographics.”
This temper tantrum made me kind of happy. It’s not that the MAGA bros proved themselves to be asshats again, it’s that they proved once again that they are irrelevant to corporate America. Politically, they still have power and are doing damage every day that we must continue to fight. But it’s clear that brands have crunched the numbers and decided that pissing off these people will do nothing to their bottom line while allying with trans influencers will help them. That’s because society has made progress outside of politics and no matter how hard you try, you can’t put the cultural genie back in the beer bottle.