TransGriot (via Womanist Musings, who calls this “cisgender privilege on crack”) quotes from a vicious attack on trans children, broadcast on May 28th on the “Rob, Arnie & Dawn in the Morning” show, on KRXQ in Sacramento, California and also KDOT in Reno.
ROB WILLIAMS [11:12]: This is a weird person who is demanding attention. And when it’s a child, all it takes is a hug, maybe some tough love or anything in between. When your little boy said, ‘Mommy, I want to walk around in a dress.’ You tell them no cause that’s not what boys do. But that’s not what we’re doing in this culture.
ARNIE STATES [13:27]: If my son, God forbid, if my son put on a pair of high heels, I would probably hit him with one of my shoes. I would throw a shoe at him. Because you know what? Boys don’t wear high heels. And in my house, they definitely don’t wear high heels.
ROB WILLIAMS [17:45]: Dawn, they are freaks. They are abnormal. Not because they’re girls trapped in boys bodies but because they have a mental disorder that needs to be somehow gotten out of them. That’s where therapy could help them.
ROB WILLIAMS [18:15]: Or because they were molested. You know a lot of times these transgenders were molested. And you need to work with them on that. The point is you don’t allow the behaviour. You cure the cause!
ARNIE STATES [21:30]: You got a boy saying, ‘I wanna wear dresses.’ I’m going to look at him and go, ‘You know what? You’re a little idiot! You little dumbass! Look, you are a boy! Boys don’t wear dresses.’
ARNIE STATES [29:22]: You know, my favourite part about hearing these stories about the kids in high school, who the entire high school caters around, lets the boy wear the dress. I look forward to when they go out into society and society beats them down. And they end up in therapy.
As many people have pointed out, there are countless real-life cases of transphobic violence, including murder. In schools, kids targeted for allegedly wrong gender expression have sometimes committed suicide. This sort of attack on kids would be wrong in any context, but in the context of real-life violence and bullying, it’s particularly disgusting and irresponsible and sick, sick, sick.
The radio station and hosts have refused to apologize, unless you consider “I’m sorry that you might not find it funny” an apology. (The third co-host, Dawn Rossi, has reportedly been quite decent, and apologized for her co-hosts behavior.)
Lisa at Questioning Transphobia writes:
I’m also disturbed at the commenters at HuffPo who feel it is immediately important to rush forward and defend Arnie and Rob from criticism of their words by characterizing such criticism as an attempt to rob them of their free speech. Seriously, criticism is also an exercise of free speech. Also, inciting violence is not an exercise of free speech. It’s an attempt to foster an environment in which the target group (in this case, trans people, specifically trans children) are made to feel unsafe just for existing. Apparently, it’s just fine to use public intimidation against some people, but it’s not okay to object to that intimidation.
Lisa thinks that further letter-writing to the radio station and the show hosts is probably futile. Instead, as Lisa suggests, I’ll be writing a polite email to some of the radio station’s advertisers, asking them to ask the radio station to make restitution. Snapple and Chipotle have already pulled their ads; a list of advertisers is available here.
See also: Blog of the Moderate Left (hi Jeff!), Pam’s House Blend, Andrew Sullivan, and The Huffington Post.
Where I work, our main obstacle to finding people to recycle our plastic is contamination by paper labels.