It’s 3:20 a.m. and Jocelyn Richards* and I are meeting for coffee in an abandoned shipyard — her choice. I’m nursing my cold-brew, wondering if she’s going to show, when there’s movement out of the corner of my eye, and there she is — hiding in the shadows.

Dressed casually in a tattered sweatshirt, the hood pulled up to match her hooded eyes, Jocelyn has made it apparent why she’s so successful in her field: you never see her coming. Her face is natural, her fingernails bare except for neat crescents of blood, blurring, as she nervously drums the splintered shipping container we sit on. She’s jittery, even though I’m the only one with coffee!

“Thanks so much for meeting me,” I say. “Can I just start by saying how refreshing it is to see a woman in this business?”

Jocelyn offers a terse reply. A grunt, actually. She’s not the chattiest, but, hey, it’s her actions, not her words, that brought me to our shipyard meeting this morning.

“When you’ve kidnapped your latest victim and you bring them home, tie them up, and pull the burlap sack off their head. Are they surprised to see a woman standing in front of them? Do you ever feel like they’re holding their breath, waiting for a man to enter the basement?”

“Maybe,” says Jocelyn, as she starts to file her incisors with a nail file. In a career like hers, looks are everything. Like most women in demanding positions, Jocelyn’s appearance determines how seriously people take her: it decides whether or not a victim will scream when they see her coming; whether or not she’ll get the leading role in someone’s nightmare; and whether or not her legacy will live on in campfire ghost stories and Lifetime dramas.

“In your position, the element of surprise is so important for your success. You have to surprise your victims, keep them on their toes, trick them into your van, but tell me: what do you do to surprise yourself? How do you surprise…you?”

I search her face, waiting for an answer. In a career so focused on other people, Jocelyn probably needs self-care more than anyone.

Jocelyn picks at the shipping box, wedging splinters of wood under her short nails. She stares at me with cold, hard eyes, probably impressed with how good of a question I just asked. “I surprise myself…with who I choose next.”

“I love it,” I say. And I really do. How great to have so much autonomy over where your job takes you.

I sat down with the most successful female serial killer in the business to talk clear skin, carbs, and creating success in a male-dominated field.
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“Do you ever think about taking a break from it all—the hours, the stress, the constant travel—to start a family? I can’t even imagine what it’s like dating in your field. I mean, where do you even meet someone?” I say. Family hasn’t come up yet, but it’s well-known that behind every successful woman is an overbearing mother asking for grandkids.

“I have kids. Or, I should say, had,” she growls, her breath sultry with the potent smell of meat. There’s a small red speck on Jocelyn’s chin, perhaps a droplet of blood from a long workday.

“You have something on your chin,” I say, pointing to the speck. She raises her fingers to wipe it away and, just like that, I feel like an old friend: one girlfriend helping another, like we’re drunk at the bathroom sinks together, saving each other from wardrobe emergencies. She licks the blood off her finger with a swipe of her tongue and a smile, her sharp incisors winking. A smile meant for me—her ally.

Now that we’re so close, I think it’s time to address the elephant in the room. I’ve been dying to ask, and it’s clear that Jocelyn has been dying to answer.

“How often do you think about the wage gap in your career? How do feel knowing that there’s a man out there doing the same thing as you, but still getting feared more from his victims?” I ask, my felt-point pen poised above my Moleskin. But the only answer I get is silence.

I look up from my pad and just like that, she’s gone. She’s disappeared into the shadows of the dockyard, leaving me with chills and a lingering disappointment that #MeToo didn’t come up more in the interview.

*the subject’s name has been changed to protect her identity

It’s October, the spookiest time of the year, and also the prime time for a resurgence in harmful stereotypes about disabled people in the media. I love Halloween, and like many people, I’ve been dutifully scaring myself silly this month with new shows like The Haunting of Hill House, and a re-exploration of Stephen King’s back-catalogue. But in nearly all of the terrifying films, books, and TV shows currently dominating our leisure time, it’s impossible to ignore one pervasive trend: the looming spectre of the “Evil Cripple.”

Quite frankly, we disabled people are everywhere right now, but not in the way many of us would like. If we’re not wielding chainsaws and going on murderous rampages, then we’re plotting world domination from our wheelchairs and reveling in a variety of gruesome deaths. The recurring tropes of disability = evil and disfigurement = morally bankrupt are stereotypes as old as culture itself, but what exactly is so scary about us? Well, come with me on a spine-tingling trip through history, that begins thousands of years ago, within the creeping mists of time…

Horror films and books play heavily on the idea that religious texts and arcane tomes are gateways to magic and evil, but the idea of disability as punishment is one found in almost all religious stories. In these parables, sinners are struck down with blindness, leprosy, or paralysis as a punishment for perceived sins, and healing is only offered when they repent and beg for forgiveness. In fact, early Puritan writings suggested that disabled people were innately driven towards evil, and that a child born with a disability was being punished for intrinsic impulses towards immorality.

In folktales and fairytales, too, limping crones lure children to their deaths, and disfigured characters like Rumplestiltskin use their cruelty and cunning to entrap the more moral characters of the story. Often, in these tales, disabled and disfigured people are fueled by jealousy and bitterness, and so turn their hatred onto the pure and blameless members of society. The over-arching message? Disabled people are inherently evil, and as such, we are scary.

Early Puritan writings suggested that disabled people were innately driven towards evil
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Unfortunately, this lazy trope, which positions disability as being caused by, or being the cause of, malicious wrong-doing, is one that repeats itself in popular culture, and feeds into the false idea that disability is inherently a bad thing. In Stephen King’s The Green Mile, callous jailer Percy is punished for his cruelty to the inmates by being rendered catatonic, while the sweet-hearted wife of the prison’s chief warden is saved from her brain tumor because, we’re meant to infer, she deserves to be.

In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface is a disfigured character who tortures people to death and tries to wear their faces, because of course, if you have a facial disfigurement you must be filled with self-loathing, as well as a burning hatred for those who don’t. We know that Freddy Krueger is evil because he’s disfigured; the Phantom of the Opera becomes a villain because he can’t possibly reveal his scars; and Jason Voorhees, with his disfigurement hidden behind a mask, demands your attention with murder.

But it isn’t just physical disabilities that history and, by extension, the entertainment industry, consider frightening.

One of the most famous horror tropes is the mentally ill and therefore murderous antagonist. Often a serial killer, like Hannibal Lecter, or occasionally possessed by demons, like Emily Rose, if there’s one things the horror genre has taught us, it’s that mentally ill people are to be feared. But there’s a particularly sad irony in this stereotype, since throughout history, mentally ill men and women have been the ones most frequently harmed by society.

Take Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam Asylum, for instance. Most of us know that Bedlam was a terrible place, where people were locked away in squalor, without treatment, and routinely abused by their gaolers. What many people don’t realize, however, is that before Bedlam, locking away patients with mental illness was considered to be a humane way of isolating them from their abled peers, for the very simple reason that mental illness was thought to be contagious.

As a result, many people suffering from mental health problems were subject to torture or murder, as it was feared they might infect others. Isolation was considered to be a more compassionate alternative to a variety of so-called therapies, from blood-letting, to starvation diets, to trepanning, an ancient practice in which a portion of the skull is removed. Yet despite this, the horror genre is rife with depictions of psychopaths committing mass murder, or people with multiple personalities slaughtering their families.

Perhaps, you might think, that these stereotypes are no big deal. But the fact is that the horror genre is the only genre in which disabled people are regularly represented at all. In 2015, a report by the Media, Diversity, and Social Change Initiative found that of the top 100 movies that year, only 2.4% of disabled characters spoke or had names, despite the fact that 1 in 5 people around the world are disabled.

The entertainment industry, in particular, regularly comes under fire for allowing abled actors to “crip up” and play disabled roles, thereby denying disabled actors the opportunity. The problem has become so bad, that the Ruderman Foundation recently reported that an incredible 95% of disabled characters on television are played by able-bodied actors.

The fact is that the horror genre is the only genre in which disabled people are regularly represented at all.
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Similarly, while most horror films depict mentally ill people as violent, cold-blooded killers, the reality is that they are far more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violent crime. The stigma around mental health issues also makes recovery harder, and according to the Mental Health Foundation, nine out of ten people with mental health problems believe the stigma around them has a negative impact on their lives.

While Halloween is a great excuse to terrify ourselves and indulge in dark stories, it’s worth remembering that while horror entertainment frequently depicts disabled people negatively, there’s essentially no other popular media to counter-act these depictions. While there are countless disabled and disfigured people portrayed as killers and villains, we rarely ever get to be the heroes, and frequent negative representation breeds ongoing stigma and prejudice.

Stories of disability as a moral punishment, in particular, feed into the idea that disabled people deserve suffering, or even that the lives of disabled people are nothing but suffering, and so we are either to be pitied or punished. Neither of these things is true, and isn’t it about time we stopped using disabled bodies as a short-cut to cheap scares? The chances are we’re probably not going to murder you or wear your face as a mask, but we are pretty tired of always being the bad guy. Really, the only thing frightening about disability is the archaic attitude the entertainment industry still has towards it – in both its depiction of us, and its refusal to offer us a chance at employment.

I almost hesitate to contribute to the flurry of commentary around the now infamous New York Times op-ed.

The Kavanaugh hearings demand the disinfecting sunlight of an O-type star—burning very hot and very bright—after all. But the subtext of the op-ed points to two of the most alarming things about Trumpism. First, the fact that most of its opponents—especially on the right—condemn Trump’s style rather than his substance; second, that as a result of this, the groundwork is already being laid for Trumpism sans Trump.

The op-ed is a not-so-subtle plea to do the very thing we must never do: blame Trump’s proto-fascism entirely on the personal failings and quirks of one man:

“We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”

The editorial is, in truth, the confession of an enabler and—despite its nearly unprecedented nature as a devastatingly public betrayal from within—a very traditionally Washington attempt by the author to position themselves for future jobs.

As scathing as the press has been about Trump and his omnishambolic government, there remain two glowing bright spots where even they must buckle and fawn in praise: American military strikes (let us recall Brian Williams’ woeful misunderstanding of Leonard Cohen’s music when the anchor said he was “guided by the beauty of our weapons”), and the mythic “adults in the room” of the Trump White House. These are the “men of honour,” mostly ex-military, who are supposedly sacrificing themselves to be close to Trump, and thus are able to restrain him.

The op-ed author made sure they eagerly claimed the “adult” title, and with good reason: Their audience was not ordinary Americans, but the country’s intelligentsia—political operatives, the non-profit world, academics, and journalists. It was a lullaby meant to reassure them that the “adults in the room” were real, implicitly noble conservatives who put “country first.” In that vein of media-friendly mythologizing, the coup de grace was shamelessly grabbing onto the coattails of the late John McCain’s newly sewn, saint-like hagiography.

The editorial is the confession of an enabler and a very traditionally Washington attempt by the author to position themselves for future jobs.
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Why? Remember that this administration has been uniquely radioactive for its employees and officials. Normally a White House stint is a golden ticket to plum jobs worldwide. That’s not proven true for Trump’s feckless adjutants, however. There’s a skin-deep stain of association with things like Trump’s Charlottesville remarks, where he praised neo-Nazis, insisting there were “good people on both sides” of a one-sided assault—acts which culminated in a terror attack that cost a young socialist counterprotester her life and injured many others.

“Out, damned spot!” cry Trump’s staffers and murderous ministers. They scrub feverishly in hopes of removing the mark that might keep them from a lifetime of corporate boards and preselection for safe seats. Painting themselves as the “adults in the room” media darlings—snatching the halo unworthily bestowed on Chief of Staff John Kelly or Defense Secretary Jim Mattis—is the only way they might cleanse themselves.

We shouldn’t allow this to work. The true thesis of the op-ed is “Trump is horrible, we know, but we’re good people, really.” The signal is sent up, particularly to other conservatives and the baleful number of credulous liberals who still desperately need to believe in the “compassionate conservative”:

“Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.”

Take them at their word. Don’t get them wrong. They’re right wing and fine with the continual looting of our country and its imperialist ambitions. They just don’t want to be as uncouth and “anti-trade” as Trump. But for malingering as they have, like a long lasting cold, they deserve no mercy or sympathy.

As this is the umpteen-thousandth take on the op-ed I’ll only delve into one more issue, which I feel hasn’t received its due attention. The op-ed is deliberately designed to instill complacency. The last section, which invokes the ghost of Senator McCain in an unintentionally apposite way, is a call to lay down arms.

“The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility. Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.”

The author blames us all for our fate. We allowed ourselves to sink low with Trump, and even our opposition to him is darkened by his long shadow. Aside from the fact that one should always beware anyone peddling “no labels” as a solution to social problems—even the Bible begins with a parable about the importance and power of naming things—this is the bit of the op-ed where you see the oil leaking.

The allegations in the op-ed are deadly serious, and yet that merely indicts the author further for their craven complicity. Even now Republicans are lamenting that the op-ed has backfired because it will make it harder to “contain” Trump. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) went so far as to validate the piece’s major claims about Trump, yet still laments its publication. They represent a perverse GOP consensus with the author: although Trump can be removed, they’d rather control him. No matter who gets hurt.

There’s something slick about it all; it’s all Trump’s fault, but it’s also the nation’s fault. Who’s not at fault? The author, and their cadre of “resistive” but polite proto-fascists.

This sly nonsense should be met with resistance worthy of that name; it is how we’ll deal with the immediate crisis of Trump and the aftermath of rebuilding a shattered society. Resistance must not be limited to opposing one man; it must address itself to the conditions that made him possible—such as the venality of operatives like this anonymous official. We must dispense with the comforting myth that these “adults in the room” are anything but efficient enablers.

In a word: fight. Treacly unity smothered by the flag is precisely the sort of sleepwalking that led us into Trump’s fever dream. To get out of it, we’ll have to dare to call things what they are, disobey—and horror of horrors—break decorum.

The author wants to tamp down on this as it might upend their plush boardroom chair. No more or less.

The author soft-pedals the “adults in the room” line as “cold comfort.” It’s no comfort at all to know that an administrative coup—with repercussions that will far outlast this presidency—is taking place and lies in the hands of such cowardly people that they’d sacrifice us all to Trump’s furies for a tax cut.

There is but one ice-bath of cold comfort in this mess: the knowledge that Trump himself is absolutely tormented by the question of who wrote the op-ed, and that its author is equally tormented by their tell-tale-heart beating beneath the White House floorboards.

When the two finally meet, each will see the other and find himself; they’ll know, silently, that they deserve each other.

Falling in love with Peter Kavinsky—right along with Lara Jean—shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. And not just because of his swoon-inducing smile, his ability to make a back-pocket spin in the middle of a cafeteria look downright sinful, or even his impressive emotional depth, either. Rather, I love him—as so many other grown-ass women now do—because I have spent my life falling in and out of love with Peter Kavinskys, just as I was trained to.

I should begin by saying that my now, maybe not-so-former infatuation with a seemingly never-ending list of white boys is my hidden shame. As a young black woman who came of age at a flashpoint in our nation’s relationship to and dialogue about race, it’s the dirty little secret I aimed to bury once I reached adulthood. I’d promised myself it would go the way of my heinous Aeropostale tee collection and my hot pink Samsung SEEK: matured past, grown out of.

My maybe not-so-former infatuation with a seemingly never-ending list of white boys is my hidden shame.
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While I was never the type of girl to pour her feelings out onto the page like Lara Jean—for fear of making them tangible would make them too real, perhaps—I was the type of girl who daydreamed. Who imagined herself tangled in all sorts of intricate, decidedly un-Indiana romances with the kinds of boys that populated all of my favorite stories: the sensitive nerdy musician type a la Nick O’Leary (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), the bad boy with a troubled past in John Bender (The Breakfast Club) and especially the, “It’s your dream dad, not mine!” star jock and secret poet of Austin Ames (A Cinderella Story). These characters, or what I thought these characters embodied, helped me formulate what would become The Perfect Boy.

The “White” following “Perfect” kind of just went without saying. (The “Boy” and not “Girl” or “Nonbinary Person,” on the other hand, was reiterated strongly and often.)

You should know that I’ve only ever dated people of color. Even in high school, my not-so-spectacular track record with almost-boyfriends is exclusively black. Somewhere deep, somewhere beyond the formula of book-and-movie boyfriends I’d concocted, I was still much more interested in finding kinship and solace and—I can’t believe I’m gonna say this about my high school “ex”, but here we go—passion with other people who looked like me than I was with finding my Kavinsky.

But the white boy thing was more than an embarrassing blip on the radar of my adolescence—my longing for these boys was the product of a sound indoctrination from years of white media consumption.

To All the Boys I Loved Before (both the book and the movie) subverted narratives in which the quirky white girl is the one deemed worthy enough to get the get The Perfect Boy—girls like the one I was relegated to background roles and left romance-less by the end of the story—in so many of the right ways. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before created, for me, a rich world of beautiful, smart young women that neither relied on men to uplift them not validate them. But, you know, it was sort of a perfect bonus when that happened too.

Even now, weeks after its release, my inbox still occasionally pings with messages from friends watching it for the first time. Today, for instance, one of my closest friends couldn’t even wait for the credits to roll before she texted me. She said she’d tried to get away from her love of romances, but this managed to draw her right back in. There were moments throughout where she worried she’d have to turn it off, abandon it once it followed the same trajectory of so many of its predecessors.

“I just knew [Peter Kavinsky] had to do something to ruin things. I just knew there was no way they could end up together,” she said. “The happy ending just felt impossible.”

So many of us were waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the catch. The first time I watched it, I just knew that the inevitable breakdown seen was right around the corner. The part of the story where the young bookish girl, or so often the woman of color, has what seems like a light at the end of the tunnel, extinguished. Where she encounters some sort of embarrassment, some unearthed trauma that precludes her from a happy ending without also enduring great suffering.

The perceived impossibility of To All the Boys, I realize, is at the heart of why I loved it—why I found myself clicking replay before we’d even reached the brief mid-credits scene. The image of a young, smart, bookish woman of color falling in love without grief (related to the relationship) or shame on screen felt too big to assign a name. Felt too close to a dream not to hold tight to it, to close my eyes and will myself back to a world in which those things still seemed attainable.

Half of the story is the fact I didn’t grow up with images of young girls of color falling in love on screen at all, let alone with a heartthrob like Kavinsky. But the other half—perhaps the half that’s even more harrowing—is that I certainly didn’t see us falling in love separate from trauma, or rarer still, with another person of color.

I watched and read hundreds of stories in which the luckiest girls fell in love and rode off into the sunset—often in a cool Jeep!—with their Prince Charming. And that Prince Charming always looked like Peter Kavinsky. Peter Kavinsky—and by extension, Peter and Lara Jean’s fauxlationship—was everything, but it was also precisely what I’ve been implicitly taught to desire. In this way, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before did what so many of its genre forebears had done before it.

And the thing is, I’m not asking this movie to be some wild break from the genre. I don’t even really want that of this particular film. What I do want, though, is thousands of different narratives about what it looks like for girls from all backgrounds to fall in love. We deserve every iteration of story in which young women of color get to fall in love with a sweet, emotionally-adept, whatever-trope-suits-your-fancy partner.

So much of what makes To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before an unbelievably awe-inspiring, tweet-worthy movie, particularly for adults like me, is the element of unconscious wish fulfillment. Like, of course I’m not a teenage girl in a hyper white space, yearning for a story about a bookworm woman of color who falls in love—period, let alone with the “it” guy—anymore. And of course I’m no longer relying on these images to help me feel worthy of love and affection in the way I once was. But I’ve been sitting with that same yearning since then. That girl, the me who needed those things so desperately when she was a kid, never went away, she just evolved.

But even in that evolution, there are moments of deeply troubling considerations about what my love of Peter Kavinsky and this story might mean. Is it him, this particular character and this particular actor, or does my desire speak to something greater?

I’m 24 years old and settled into a community of black folks—friends and found family alike—that not only affirm, but uplift me. Everyday I am reminded of the beauty and brilliance of our people. And I am reminded of my own beauty and brilliance, by extension. This is a far cry from my hometown in suburban Indiana, from an upbringing that was largely populated by people and spaces that could do neither of those things. But that juxtaposition only serves to ground me more firmly in what I know to be true: one of my greatest gifts is that I was born to this black body, and can love other people who share it.

Yet, knowing those things doesn’t automatically undo the years of isolation and forced assimilation I endured to get here. Knowing those things doesn’t automatically help me unlearn the lies I internalized about myself and any potential partners who looked like me.

One of my greatest gifts is that I was born to this black body, and can love other people who share it.
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What I’m saying is shaking this doesn’t happen for all of us overnight. I’m saying that the mechanisms of white supremacy are complex and, oftentimes, hidden in plain sight. If I spent a lifetime both abhorring and simultaneously craving the white male gaze, then it’s going to take some time—ruminating on my understandings of desire and shame and identity—to walk back the decades of deeply entrenched ideologies which taught me to aspire to finding my happy ever after in the arms of a white man.

In the excerpt from her forthcoming book, Autism Uncensored, that was recently published in The Washington Post, Whitney Ellenby tells us about the time she physically restrained and dragged her 5-year-old autistic son to see Elmo perform at a “Sesame Street Live!” show. She describes fighting off his fists, pinning him down, and inching — her son shrieking and flailing, trapped between her legs — toward the auditorium’s entrance, an effort, she claims, “to save him from a life entrapped by autistic phobias.”

While some parents of autistic children have celebrated the article for showing them that they are not alone, the response from autistic adults to the violent actions in the piece and her book more broadly, has been, deservedly, negative. As Eb, an autistic writer, tweeted, “Meltdowns like the one described in this article aren’t ‘problems to solve.’ They’re communication.” Through his, Ellenby’s son was communicating something important to his mother — and her response was to push him, literally, into doing something he didn’t want to do, completely disregarding his autonomy.

Sadly, this is merely the most recent high-profile example of an allistic (non-autistic) parent, disrespecting and dehumanizing their autistic child then exploiting them by publishing very private, personal details about their life. Judith Newman, author of To Siri with Love — a collection of supposedly humorous stories about her then-13-year-old autistic son — received similar backlash from actually autistic adults last year. Among her various repugnant views, she asserts that her son is unfit to become a parent because he is autistic, detailing her desire to have him sterilized. “I am still deeply worried about the idea that he could get someone pregnant and yet could never be a real father — which is why I will insist on having medical power of attorney, so that I will be able to make the decision about a vasectomy for him after he turns 18.”

As may already be clear, while these types of books and articles may be about autistic people (mostly children who cannot consent), they are not for them. Instead, they are authored by and for parents and other allistic adults — at the expense of the vulnerable and marginalized community they claim to be advocating for.

These books are authored by and for parents and other allistic adults — at the expense of the vulnerable and marginalized community they claim to be advocating for.
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And this trend keeps repeating. On smaller scales, as with Jill Escher, president of Autism Society San Francisco Bay Area, who wrote a cringe-worthy account of the financial and superficial costs her autistic son is causing her. Or larger ones like, Amy Lutz, author and outspoken critic of the neurodiversity movement who said that writing about her autistic son without his permission isn’t exploitation because he’s incapable of providing consent. There are “very few costs” to publicly writing about his life because he “will never go to college, seek competitive employment, or get married.”

Autistic writer Sarah Kurchak refers to this subgenre of writing as the “Autism Parent memoir,” which often overlaps with the realm of Autism Warrior Parents (AWPs) — a term that it is both embraced and rejected by parents of autistic children. AWPs, as Shannon Rosa wrote, “insist on supporting their autistic kids either by trying to cure them, or by imposing non-autistic-oriented goals on them — rather than by trying to understand how their kids are wired, and how that wiring affects their life experience.”

If that sounds like an exaggeration, take Marcia Hinds, whose author bio states that she and “her family survived their war against autism.” According to a review of her book, I Know You’re In There: Winning Our War Against Autism, “She openly writes what we have all felt at one time or another. We love our children, but we do not love the autism.”

Rather than unconditionally accepting her son and seeking to better understand his needs, Hinds believed an autism diagnosis meant “there was no hope” and, diving headfirst into the realm of pseudo-science and conspiracy theories, that “by treating hidden viruses and infection,” autism can be cured. For her, in order for there to be hope for her family and her autistic son, his autism needed to be destroyed.

How ‘Autism Warrior Parents’ Harm Autistic Kids

And Hinds isn’t the only parent latching onto harmful medically disproven theories linking vaccines to autism. Mary Cavanaugh, author and parent of an autistic child, states on her website, “I now know all three of my children have been vaccine injured.” She is a member of The Thinking Moms’ Revolution, an online community and book, where mothers share tales of fighting to rescue their children from autism. “Suspecting that some of the main causes may be overused medicines, vaccinations, environmental toxins, and processed foods,” the book’s synopsis states, “they began a mission to help reverse the effects.”

Terrifyingly, this is far from an obscure movement. Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy have helped bring these harmful conspiracies into the mainstream.

The cumulative result is that many, many autistic children grow up in environments rife with physical confrontations like the one that occurred in Ellenby’s article, or in homes that reject basic, peer-reviewed medical science, or with parents who demonstrate a complete and utter disregard for their autistic children’s autonomy — and all of it is framed as love.

But it is not love; it is abuse.

When I read Whitney Ellenby’s piece, the parallels between her and my psychologically abusive mother were too great to ignore. Just as Ellenby misinterpreted her son’s reluctance, disinterest, and outright refusal to engage in an activity as some sort of phobia to be overcome, my mother forced me into conquering my so-called fears — “for my own good.” She saw the way I interacted with the world as different from other children, and deemed that difference the enemy.

It has taken years to unravel and untie the clutter of psychological knots and trauma she left me with — and there are, no doubt, more waiting in the wings — but I can say with absolute certainty there’s a stark difference between a professed love and real, unconditional love. Failing to accept and trying to change or attempting to “fix” someone who is not broken — no matter the intent — is not the same as loving them. As writer and disability rights advocate Lydia Brown wrote to Judith Newman, “You may believe you love your son. But we, autistic people, hear what you have actually said, which is that you hate him. You love a version of him that does not exist.”

While I’ve not published a single piece of writing in almost a year due to hyper-empathy and burnout, I have been discovering and healing, coming to terms with the fact that I am autistic, and, contrary to the dangerous message AWPs continually insinuate, that it is nothing that should bring me shame or fear.

Memory and trauma are a mindfuck, but scenes flash before my mind’s eye — having my hands restrained at my desk in grade school, or instead having inside-out gym socks taped to my hands so I couldn’t fidget or distract others, but could still hold a pencil to do schoolwork. And now I’m angry, again, at my mother and all of her enablers for shaming and punishing me for things I couldn’t control or understand. I’m livid at her and my teachers for forcing me to put gross tasting things in my mouth whenever I did something that society deemed weird and unacceptable. I’m angry as fuck for crying and crying while telling the damn truth about not understanding something, not being able to stop doing something, or not being able to adequately articulate why I did something… And then being disciplined for my “rebellious attitude,” for disobedience, or for not trusting God enough because that asshole doesn’t give you any more than you can handle.

And I believed the lies, I believed it was my fault, I believed I was unworthy and failing God and my family every day — so I punished myself and stopped trusting those who professed their love for me and worked diligently to change myself.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

In the wake of Ellenby’s piece, Sarah Kurchak interviewed her allistic mother, Jane, to get her take on this spate of high-profile Autism Parent memoirs. The interview highlights a wholly different model of autism and parental love. Where Ellenby described her exploitative book as “one woman’s story, my truth and my love letter to my beloved son,” Jane focuses on her daughter’s well-being in a world that too often punishes neurodivergent people for being who they are, advocating that she not read Ellenby’s work: “I see you try to function in a pull-up-your-bootstraps neurotypical world. And I know if you read this book, it will crush you. … So it’s a selfish motive because I don’t want you to hurt.”

Later Jane says to her daughter, “I have always said to you, to anybody that will listen to me, I have learned more about life in the world from you than from anyone or anything else… Watch your child and learn from them. Take your cues from your child.” For her, the relationship she has with her daughter goes both ways. “Just because I’m your parent doesn’t make me right… My reality is that my life is a better life because of you. And I just want you to know that I’m proud.”

Reading Jane and Sarah’s conversation brought me to tears and offered up a glimmer of much-needed hope. Without ever saying the words “I love you,” Jane demonstrated how very much she respects, accepts, and loves her daughter merely in the way she talks about her — and how they’ve navigated their life together, as a team.

By contrast, the only “uncensored truth” Ellenby reveals in her writing is that she sincerely believes her abusive actions are loving ones. But how do things change if the abusers, their apologists, and the exploitive industry that profits off of them, refuse to stop — let alone acknowledge that they are harming others?

We need to be able to speak for ourselves, but instead, #ActuallyAutistic voices are too often shunned and silenced, while the voices of allistic parents raising autistic children are lifted up and praised. A common retort to the autistic adults who condemn this genre of writing and alleged advocacy is that our viewpoint is inconsequential because we aren’t autistic enough. Our needs don’t compare to the mountain of needs their children require because we are able to raise our voices and organize, and by doing so, we are making things harder for autistic people — like their children — who require more care.

Ellenby herself made this argument in response to the backlash her article caused, writing, “You adults with Autism who are reaching out to me in brilliantly worded protest, you who are capable of self-advocating, organizing, who have children of your own — you in no way resemble Zack.”

This is not a new argument. Amy Lutz wrote in 2013, “So what happens to neurodiversity if its lower-functioning supporters are discredited? The movement is exposed for what it is: a group of high-functioning individuals opposed to medical research that, as Singer puts it ‘they don’t need, but my daughter does. If she were able to function at their level, I would consider her cured.’”

When Allies Say Tragedy Is The Only ‘True’ Representation Of Autism

Dr. Jennifer Sarrett, Lecturer at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health, carelessly pontificated that broadening the definition of autism, “could divert attention and resources from the people who need it the most — the significantly disabled.” But this mindset only makes it harder for all autistic people, and further stigmatizes many of us as being not “autistic enough,” while doing nothing to counter the ableism we confront every day.

Whether we were diagnosed early and our guardians taught us how to hide our autistic traits (or force them out of us) through harmful applied behavioral analysis techniques, or we learned the concept of masking or practiced self-degradation on our own as a way to “appear normal” to everyone else — existing as an autistic person in a world that hates us is physically and emotionally debilitating.

And this is why the themes apparent within the ever-rising tide of Autism Memoirs are so infuriating. Autistic children are given little to no autonomy. Instead of being treated as living, breathing, beautiful, and complex human beings — they’re reduced to a plot device, a mechanism for their parents to exploit and profit from. And even worse, such memoirs frame autism as the thing that needs to be battled — rather than the unjust, ableist world we live in. These narratives center the parents, attempt to sever an important component of their child’s identity, and, instead of making the world a better place for them, force their children to change for the world.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Existing as an autistic person in a world that hates us is physically and emotionally debilitating.
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I believe that these allistic parents do love their children, just as I believe my parents loved me. But despite what they say, their actions are not those of love, which, by definition, requires respect and acknowledgment of another’s autonomy. I was told that I was loved every day, and yet I sincerely believed there were parts of me that I needed to destroy in order to be worthy of that love — and so I tried, and failed, and grew up traumatized, without ever understanding what healthy love looks like.

Now I’m almost 35 years-old and still recovering and unlearning the destructive messages I grew up with, as the effects of trauma don’t just disappear when you leave the traumatic environment. Those of us who have survived and are voicing our anger to these parents and their enablers aren’t “internet bullies.” We are survivors who don’t want autistic children of any age to be abused. Listen to us. Believe us. Your child does not need to be cured, they need to be respected, listened to, and above all, loved — truly loved.

By Malú Huacuja del Toro

October 12 is known in all the American continent, except the United States, as the “Day of the Race,” meaning an encounter of different races and worlds, not “Columbus Day.” The U.S. is the only country that celebrates the discovery of one continent by people from another one, as if the native peoples didn’t exist before being seen by the people coming inside three ships. It also celebrates the cult of personality. For all these reasons, the diverse people of the United States are considering renaming Columbus Day under different terms and a different understanding of history.

Words have meaning and history, usually from the conquerors’ point of view. Latin American countries speak Spanish because our native peoples were conquered by the Spanish Crown, while native peoples in the North were conquered by the British Crown. Ever since, our languages divide us. We need translations to build bridges between us.

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The U.S. is the only country that celebrates the discovery of one continent by people from another one.
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For good or bad, translators can change history. They are the anonymous ghostwriters of it. They can also create myths, or else, destroy them. Mexico City was built on top of, and because of many myths, but also, one translator — Malinche. Four-hundred ninety-eight years before the latest deadly earthquake, when Spaniard Conqueror Hernán Cortés took over the majestic city, Aztec mythology was certainly on his side, but a translator on the other one. Aztecs mistook him indeed for their Serpent God Quetzalcóatl who, according to prophecies, was supposed to return.

As written by the conquerors themselves, King Moctezuma welcomed Cortés most warmly inside the sacred city that was built over another myth (the eagle and serpent’s myth over the lake). He opened the doors of his palace and temple for him. He hosted him. He allowed him to scold the Indigenous people for having such horrible non-Christian gods. He gave Cortés access and time enough to figure out how he was going to steal Axayácatl’s treasure, but one always wonders if all that non-violent first part of the Conquest would have been possible without the Indigenous woman Malinche translating the summit.

When Moctezuma addressed to Cortés, he called him, Hernán Cortés, “Malinche,” because that was the person who spoke on behalf of the Spaniard Crown. She was the voice that the Indigenous invaded people heard in their heads. We will never know if she modified or suppressed some parts of the conversation that made history.

The Other Wall

Before Trump’s wall idea, another kind of wall has already been built between Mexico and the United States — the wall of disinformation. It is the wall that led to NAFTA, signed without the consensus of both U.S. and Mexican ordinary people, compromising our future for generations, and increasing immigration. It is not in the best interest of Mexican oligarchs, Mexican drug lords, U.S. plutocrats and U.S. politicians that a majority of ordinary people start communicating between each other. They would end up making a better deal for both countries. So, this is a wall that was built for a reason.

One would expect that Google translators and communication apps in the digital era can break language barriers among ordinary people, but a closer look to any election campaign in any country, and particularly last year’s presidential election in the U.S., would correct this interpretation. With the help of Facebook and Twitter farms of trolls, more U.S. people ended up insulting more Mexican people than ever, probably, and not wanting to learn any foreign language.

Better communication with the help of automatic translators might be certainly the case in private exchanges, but not in open forums where social and public interest issues are discussed, and definitely not with the interference of paid trolls with political purposes. They are trained to end any conversation before it starts.

It’s a hard wall to break without professional journalism informing the public about real issues across the continent, and the language barrier doesn’t help.

It was not until recently that one U.S. progressive network, Democracy Now!, started considering the need to “go South” and communicate not only to Mexico but also to all of Latin America and immigrants in the U.S., offering not just the leftovers made with “the guy who speaks Spanish at the office” but high quality translation services of their news. Their web page in Spanish made a tremendous difference. Not too long ago, the only TV channels available to Spanish speakers in the U.S. broadcasted old soap operas mostly produced by the Televisa network and talk shows publicizing Televisa stars, hosted by conservative people at an elementary-school level, and no interest in social issues, economy, and politics.

The rest of the press, radio, and TV news in Spanish was mostly a replica of Fox and Friends in English. Strangely enough, progressive media and leftist organizations in the U.S., led by people who acknowledged the existence of a very diverse working class in U.S. America — including immigrant workers as part of that workforce — didn’t think that such a massive attack on the immigrant workers’ mentality needed to be countered by a very professional, objective, smart radio, press or TV.

For years, conservative news shows in Spanish had no other relevant competition but the least qualified hosts who seemed to be picked by the policy of “the guy who speaks Spanish at the office.” No offense to the intern who is in the process of learning Spanish or the “guy next door” whose mother speaks Spanish because she was born in Latin America, but there is a double standard in the progressive U.S. media that needs to be addressed to break that wall.

If you were the CEO of a radio or TV network in English, would you hire a host with no experience and/or no grassroots representation whatsoever in his or her community, no traction, no leadership, not enough vocabulary to speak fluently on the microphone, no information, and no background in communications, not even in theory?

That’s exactly what an iconic progressive radio station in NYC has been doing over the last decades when it comes to most of their shows in Spanish. They apply a double standard to their hiring policies because they are progressive, but only in English. Judging by the results of their productions in the last decades, they don’t think their Spanish audience deserves the same level of information and professionalism, let alone grassroots representation.

With very little audience, in certain cases, their hosts are precisely some of the most isolated persons of their communities, be it because they have no social skills, charisma or any background in communications. You can see them trying to socialize in our public political events. They don’t even introduce themselves as reporters of this station (no one taught them to do so). I know at least one host who believes that the Illuminati are taking over the planet and OVNIS will rapture us. It doesn’t make his radio chain very different than InfoWars.

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This two-tier system for English and Spanish media produced so many bad shows that turned to be reason enough for the National Public Radio to eliminate its Spanish Division in the ’90s.
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This two-tier system for English and Spanish media produced so many bad shows that turned to be reason enough for the National Public Radio to eliminate its Spanish Division in the ’90s. The low-quality level was documented.

Such reduction of funding only hurt the smaller, truly grassroots and less-fancy (but with larger audiences) networks directed by and for immigrant workers like Radio Bilingüe, broadcasting in Spanish, Indian Mixteco, and English languages. Founded by Indigenous agricultural worker from the Mixteca Zone in Oaxaca and Harvard-graduate Hugo Morales, this listener-supported network produces the only daily national Spanish-language news and public affairs programs in the U.S. public broadcasting.

Even though most of their audience is made by workers living in low-income communities, Radio Bilingüe doesn’t treat them like second-class citizens who don’t deserve high-quality standards in information, vocabulary and fluency, only because they speak Spanish. Needless to say, they were directly benefited by Democracy Now! being professionally translated into Spanish, which Radio Bilingüe features on its home page as their top recommendation.

Spanish Versions Go South

It is a hard and tall wall to break between North and South, because it is made of several layers of cultural indifference.

“Democracy Now! has been really helpful by translating their key article of the week into Spanish and making some interviews to immigrant rights activists, for instance,” Rebelión Collective says.

“[Democracy Now! host] Amy Goodman is an excellent interviewer, allowing her guests to go deeper in their subject. Both her and Juan González and all their team are outstanding, in comparison to the rest of the U.S. media, because they give voice to grassroots, African American, Latin-American organizations, and people from across the world who have been affected by the US government policies. They give perspectives that have been systematically excluded from commercial media.”

With about 10,000 readers every day — half of them living in Latin America — Rebelión is one of the most diverse and professional online publications across Latin America and Spain. It is made by a group of editors, translators and writers from all Latin American countries, covering all the continents. They respond collectively to this interview, explaining that they cannot trust commercial U.S. media because “they don’t give an idea to the rest of the world of what is really happening in the U.S., since they are just broadcasting propaganda in favor of the 1% protected by a police state investing astronomical numbers of money in wars while denying health care and education to their people, in a country with the highest per-capita rate of prisoners in the world.”

“Our main sources of information are independent journalists,” Rebelión Collective continues.

“We voice Hispanic immigrants living in the U.S., including undocumented workers who are suffering in flesh the system’s discrimination and oppression. We publish texts by community groups fighting for a more just society, like Unión del Barrio, as well as thinkers and activists like Noam Chomsky and James Petras. It is basically from all of them, and other alternative media, that we present to our readers another view of reality in the United States.”

Rebelión is one of the few online publications that pays special attention to the work of translation from different languages, with specialized translators for various subjects or sections. “Why are they still interested in using human translators instead of Google robots?” I asked.

“Since its foundation, Rebelión has been lucky enough to count on a translators’ team who are militant and aware of the importance of making accessible into Spanish information that was written in other languages. Information needs to be really understandable so that the reader gets access to it. Automatic translation apps rarely get the context. A writer-author-thinker-human being deserves to be translated by an equally human, thinking translator. A ‘human translator’ will always strive to make an article’s content both most understandable to the reader and accurate to the original version. This is something that members of our team pay special attention to.”

‘U.S. Fights That Are Close to Our Heart’

Ke Huelga Radio in Mexico City reproduces Democracy Now! every day in Spanish. Created during the long but successful 1999 students’ strike opposing the privatization of public college — which gave the people of México two more decades of free public education at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, by its acronym in Spanish) — Ke Huelga Radio has become one of the most trusted alternative radio stations for grassroots movements in Mexico. They respond to my questionnaire for AlterNet after the quake, while running from one “Centro de Acopio Autónomo” (“Autonomous Rescue Collective Center”) to another one. They too don’t want to be quoted individually but as a collective.

Ke Huelga Radio find it “most important” that critical media in the U.S. is heard by Mexican people, and that’s why they broadcast Democracy Now! for the “Ciudad Monstruo” (a city of a monstrous size). “This news show reports about many fights that are close to our collective hearts, like Standing Rock and the fight of immigrant workers against xenophobic measures proposed by president Donald Trump.”

Ke Huelga talks very seriously against disinformation, especially after the earthquake. This collective of reporters and grassroots radio hosts considers that it is the duty of alternative media to keep people well informed about the autonomous rescue teams working right now in Mexico, the police attacks, the government’s hoarding of international donations and, last but not least, sorting out the information on social media to dismiss fake news.

“In contrast, Mexican commercial media has turned the quake into a circus of morbid curiosity, even making up nonexistent victims like Frida Sofía, while portraying the Mexican Army and Marines like heroes,” they say. However, the Army prevented independent organizations of professional rescue workers from doing their work.

Subversiones: Cracking the Media Siege

Founded in 2010, Subversiones is a non-commercial, online publication “seeking to champion the people’s collective memory and critical understanding of the context we live on.” To them, the context is as important as the event itself, so they rely on good translations as well. “We communicate in honesty and earnest from our recognized subjectivities, in order to crack the media siege and create a counterbalance to the commercial media and its massive manipulation.”

During the earthquake, they became a community service to connect people in need of help with people who want to help, not only in Mexico City but Oaxaca and Chiapas. They have been reporting the movement against the Mexican government’s corruption that caused so many new buildings collapsing. Their publication is mostly made by voluntary work and fundraising events, selling photographs and printed publications, as well as readers’ donations.

These are just a few examples of the many bridges that progressive media can build across the United States and Latin America while commercial media keeps echoing president Donald Trump’s tweets. Incidentally, it is the same mainstream media that helped to put him in the White House by publicizing everything he did and said during the primaries, while ignoring the fight for life that was taking place in Standing Rock.

This article originally appeared on AlterNet. Republished here with permission.

With FREE SPEECH Act, Trump Fights Hostile Press To Make America Great!

The momentous Act authorizes only the most truthful reports about the president’s words and activities, which are very impressive.

NEW YORK, JANUARY 8, 2021 — President Donald Trump, the humble but bold New Yorker who will be remembered for uniting a broken country in crisis, was inaugurated in front of record crowds on January 20, 2017. That much, of course, everyone knows — you don’t have to have passed the rigorous qualifying examination for the National Registry of Patriotic Citizens to know that Mr. Trump’s was the largest inauguration in American history.

But when future historians take a closer look at the remarkable 45th commander-in-chief, they may just rule that Trump’s presidency didn’t truly begin until the late fall of 2017, when the formidable leader of the crumbling American democratic experiment finally reigned in a hostile and derisive press that for decades had been allowed to publish nearly anything under the guise of “freedom of the press.”

Speaking in his beautifully appointed Trump Tower penthouse, from which he is anxious to begin a second term bringing peace and prosperity to the American people, President Trump looks, if anything, younger than he did those long four years ago when he first deployed his legendary business acumen to strike the historic deal that would secure America’s future, and wrest it away from the cold clutches of smug, liberal propagandists. Looking out on the shimmering skyscrapers of the nation’s new capitol — Mr. Trump has little patience for the Beltway elitism of the DC swamp — the president muses on the early beginnings of what would become known as the FREE SPEECH Act — Fundamental Right to Examine and Expel Specious Press Engaged in Excessive Criticism and Haters.

“You really have to give me credit,” Trump says, puttering around the room with the gameful grace of a man half his age. Before the president took decisive action to ensure that hard-working, patriotic American officials had a right to ensure the accuracy of press reports on the activities and interests of the government, he said, “[the press] were able to write whatever they wanted to write.”

The president muses on the early beginnings of what would become known as the FREE SPEECH Act — Fundamental Right to Examine and Expel Specious Press Engaged in Excessive Criticism and Haters.

“It’s frankly disgusting,” Trump says, shaking his head as he remembers the months of agonizing tete-a-tetes with unscrupulous reporters who lacked regard not only for the office of the president, but for the president himself, often publishing blatant lies meant to make the fierce new leader appear weak-willed and egotistical. In addition to their many appalling claims about “irreversible” climate change and “deadly” firearms, the press alarmingly insisted that President Trump’s inaugural crowd was not many times larger than that of his scandal-plagued predecessor, Hussein Obama, and that the now-disgraced television presenter Mika Brzezinski, a lying liar, had not once been bleeding badly from the face at a New Year’s Eve party.

Before the FREE SPEECH Act, the president was forced to resort to communicating directly with the people over “Twitter” — the social network that would later become part of a first-of-its-kind exclusive nationwide broadcasting platform allowing patriotic Americans to talk openly about their support for our great country and our beautiful anthem without fear of repercussions from liberal snowflakes. During those first heartbreaking months of his presidency, Mr. Trump found himself unable to release a statement to the fake news media without hearing his beautiful words twisted into false lies. It wasn’t long until President Trump realized, with heretofore unparalleled clarity, that the country’s communications licensing structure could be retooled to authorize only the most truthful reports of the president’s words and activities, which were very impressive and deserving of a great deal of respect — and yet, so often, received none at all.

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

It was this stroke of genius that started a nationwide, extremely bipartisan revolution against a wildly unregulated media landscape, with freedom-loving citizens crying out from coast to coast for better news about the real President Trump — not divisive coverage centering criticism from sad detractors desperate to distract the public from their own awful decisions to be impacted by hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters from which they would have been protected if they had not chosen to be so very poor.

It was a troubling time for the president, and he knew the American people deserved better than to witness these partisan attacks on his administration while at the same time seeing disturbing sports broadcasts showing kneeling football players disrespecting the brave American armed forces and the gorgeous American flag, attempting to hide under the cover of unsubstantiated claims about so-called “racism,” an awful scourge that our great Republican president Abraham Lincoln expunged from America more than 150 years ago.

Amid this terrifying manifestation of civil unrest, the then-vice president, Michael Pence, traveled to see his own hometown team play, only to be shocked and repulsed by sight of even more ungrateful, kneeling athletes with no class whatsoever.

Nazis, It’s Time For A Common Sense Approach To Not Getting Punched

In retrospect, Mr. Pence has said, that moment in Indiana was when he knew that the FREE SPEECH Act was a go. He knew, then, that the real American people, who worked too hard to have their Sundays briefly interrupted by the suggestion that racism exists, must be spared from this scene, in many cases broadcast into unsuspecting living rooms, in full view of impressionable children who could be exposed to this dangerous and anti-democratic demonstration of what some identity politics groups attempted to legitimize as “political dissent.”

“I think the president had the right idea,” says incoming Vice President Paul Ryan, who worked tirelessly with Constitutional advocates from the National Rifle Association, Focus on the Family, the Susan B. Anthony List, and others to educate initially skeptical left-leaning lawmakers on the tremendous benefits of a well-regulated media. After a few initial bumps and opposition from small cells of disorganized losers, the Act landed on the president’s desk within months. At the official signing, Trump beamed his signature smile, noting that the day was “huge.”

The rest, of course, is history — including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s historic tie-breaking ruling that cemented these common-sense restrictions on anti-government communications into the fabric of America’s strong legal protections for democracy. The FREE SPEECH Act ruling ushered in an era of unprecedented expansion of American freedoms, striking down the oppressive Voting Rights Act in its entirety and finally allowing the American people to demonstrate their citizenship before voting, as well as ending the long battle over “contraception” coverage that had required employer-citizens to fund the tiny but powerful baby-killing pills that had relegated American women to the workplace, where their failure to thrive nearly laid waste to the American family as we know it.

Trump, ever the coy dealmaker, is reluctant to share too much about his plans for his exciting second term, but he did hint that the signature legislation of the next four years will be about bringing the country together “even more,” in a “huge” way: once and for all ending the contentious party system that has been a source of dangerous ideological schisms since the country’s inception.

“We’re going to make America even greater,” says Trump, idly spinning a gold-plated paperweight in the shape of a truck emoji. “It’s going to be so great. You won’t even recognize it.”

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-medias-unfair-focus-on-trans-kids-moms-is-pure-misogyny-5ee3ff8136b3-2/ Thu, 29 Dec 2016 20:12:06 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=6342 Read more]]> When trans kids who are assigned male at birth (AMAB) socially transition, it is most often the mom that is demonized by the press and subsequently by society.

In October, a family court case out of England exploded into international media attention when a judge removed custody of a 7-year-old transgender girl from her mother and transferred her permanently to her father, who is not supportive of the child’s gender expression. This past spring a similar case in Canada resulted in a judge initially ruling that a trans child was not allowed to wear female clothes in public. These cases and others like them have become a hammer for conservative political operatives to attack the very idea of supporting transgender children — usually by attacking mothers for “confusing” their trans daughters.

When trans kids who are assigned male at birth (AMAB) socially transition, it is most often the mom that is demonized by the press and subsequently by society. Sometimes, other women come under attack; the right-wing tabloid Daily Mail used a similar case — a trans daughter, a supportive mother, an angry father — as an excuse to run a hit piece about Susie Green, the CEO of social services charity Mermaids, a U.K. organization with the mission of supporting children who are struggling with gender identity. But the paper also targeted Green’s transgender daughter, suggesting that its animus is just a larger-scale version of vilifying women for supporting their transgender kids. Mothers of trans kids now live in fear of losing their kids simply for supporting their children’s transitions.

Typical media interviews of trans kids’ parents feature the mother laying out how the family first noticed and dealt with cross-gender insistence, the initial reaction to allowing exploration of the child’s gender, and ultimately how the family has facilitated a social transition. After the mother’s take on the emotional labor of laying out why a social transition is truly necessary for their beloved child, the interviewer then turns to dad and asks “So how do you feel about all of this?” This type of coverage centers the father’s feelings in the transition for the entire family and we see it again, and again, and again.

Whether or not dad approves often signals how everyone else should feel about a child’s transition, specifically about the “loss” of a “son.” The roots for this are deeply steeped in misogyny, and established before the child is even born. Both times that my own ex-wife was pregnant, when I was still male-presenting, everyone would always ask if I wanted boys. Even when I replied that my child’s sex truly did not matter to me, I still got pushback: “yeah, but you REALLY want boys, right?” The expectation was that I would love any of my kids, but as a presumed man, I would REALLY love boys more. Interestingly, upon coming out as trans, more than one person has remarked “So THAT’S why you really wanted girls.”

The flip side of assuming that all fathers want boys is that when trans girls express a desire to transition and live as their true genders, those that oppose any child transitioning love to blame the mother. They argue, either explicitly or implicitly, that she must have groomed the “boy” to want to be feminine, as if mom really wanted a girl all along and so she projected her feelings so strongly onto her AMAB child that the kid finally took the hint. It’s true that fearing the loss of parental approval is often enough to keep a trans kid quiet — that was my experience, and the experience of most of my trans friends who waited until adulthood to transition. But can tacit parental pressure really force a cis child to pretend to be trans?

Children are sharper than we give them credit for, especially with social skills. They know at a very young age how a lot of the basic world works. They’re beginning to observe how gendered systems around them work. They have an understanding, deep down, of what society considers “normal”. When I was 8, I knew the feelings, thoughts and desires I was having were “wrong.” That boys weren’t supposed to tell anyone they were really girls. I understood the consequences, even then of what would happen if I did that. What are the consequences for a cis kid standing up for their own “natural” gender identity? At the end of the day, children understand when society has their backs. Parental approval is simply not a strong enough motivator to make children face the fear and shame of being trans. Implying that mothers “feminize” their AMAB children is just another way of overlaying misogyny on top of transphobia.

The tendency to see women as undermining masculinity and gender norms is common and dangerous, and it’s expressed especially vehemently in cases of young trans girls assigned male at birth. Trans boys children face terrible oppression as well, but I haven’t seen as many visceral reactions to international headlines; the rejection of masculinity outrages society in a way that the rejection of femininity does not. This dynamic is also in play when discussing how trans women are demonized in public access rights debates (like bathroom bills). Trans women tend to come more under fire, because of societal fear of emasculation, and concomitantly, trans men tend to be erased from discussions of trans issues. But in the few cases involving AFAB trans children — like one in Missouri about a trans boy who wanted to change his name — tend to focus inappropriately on mothers. In the Missouri case, a judge tried to cut Nathan’s mother out of the proceedings by assigning a court-appointed guardian, even though the mother was present and active in the case.

Criticism of parents of trans kids is centered in misogyny. When AMAB children transition, mom is assumed to be projecting her own desires onto her kid. When AFAB children transition, mom is failing to project a strong female presence as a role model. Both attitudes simultaneously overburden and pathologize the mother’s role as a child’s chief advocate. In fact, the mother is often at the forefront of transition efforts not because she’s the cause of the child’s gender dysphoria, but because she’s the child’s main caregiver and first defense. It’s the mother who most often puts in the emotional labor to research, consult experts, and ultimately initiate the conversation to help their child. It’s also the mother that becomes the target of hate, the biggest scapegoat.

This is part of a long-standing tradition of blaming mothers for any issues with their children. After all, it wasn’t really that long ago that “refrigerator moms” were blamed for causing autism. Supposedly, cold (hence the term “refrigerator”), unloving mothers caused children to withdraw into autism. It’s cultural gaslighting to blame a parenting style or a mother’s personality for their children’s traits that society doesn’t approve of. And it’s part and parcel of the way society blames women whether they do “too much” (the mothers of trans children) or “not enough” (the mothers of autistics).

Fathers that support transitioning children are subject to much less scrutiny, despite sometimes being their child’s strongest advocate. In the rare instances when fathers of trans kids are attacked, they’re often blamed for allowing their wives and partners to rule over them, a subtle attack on their very masculinity. Seizing the chance to criticize the mother of a child transitioner is really just about taking a free shot at women. It’s pure misogyny.

The media and courts need to stop demonizing the mothers of child transitioners and work to find ways to be more supportive of these vulnerable families.

In a matter of weeks, the most unprepared and openly bigoted president in modern U.S. history will take office. And with so many important rights at risk under Donald Trump (abortion, access to health care, and civil rights, to name only a few), now, perhaps more than ever, we need a Fourth Estate with a spine of steel that is prepared to do whatever it takes to protect the interests of the American people and those abroad who are impacted by U.S. policies. After all, the public interest is supposed to be at the very heart of the media’s mission.

And yet, chillingly, at this time when we need the media most — the media is most at risk.

Trump has bashed the press and repeatedly told his followers that the media is a dishonest bunch of liars whenever they do their job by reporting on his past, his policy plans, or his rhetoric. Trump is in fact the liar, but he has sold his millions of followers on the idea that they can’t believe trustworthy news sources; they can only trust him.

Trump’s anti-media views — which, frighteningly, echo those of his buddy and abetter Vladimir Putin — have manifested as a multi-thronged approach to undermining the press and dismantling its crucial influence.

He has attacked individual reporters — from Jorge Ramos with Univision, who Trump had kicked out of a campaign rally in August of 2015; to the New York Times’ Serge Kovaleski, whose disability Trump cruelly mocked at another rally in November; to Fox host Megyn Kelly, the target of his infamous “bimbo” and “blood coming out of her wherever” barbs.

More broadly, the president-elect has gone after virtually every major news source that doesn’t generate revenue solely by kissing his ass. He has nicknamed the New York Times the “failing” New York Times, and canceled a meeting with the publication in November before changing his mind and sitting down with key staff. He further called CNN the “Clinton network,” suggesting that any unfavorable coverage of him by the network was simply a bias for his Democratic opponent.

Beyond the reporters listed above and CNN and the New York Times, Trump has made a sport of maligning virtually every popular news source based in the U.S. He’s ripped apart Meet the Press, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Vanity Fair, among others, and blacklisted several outlets from covering his campaign events in person. Univision, Buzzfeed, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, and the Des Moines Register were all banned by the middle of June this year.

As if all of this weren’t enough cause for concern, the president-elect and his transition team still haven’t formally established a protective “press pool,” a rotating group of reporters that travels with the president and is kept apprised of his schedule, allowing the public relatively wide access to the president via the press. When a press pool has been allowed to travel with Trump, he’s been known to ditch them. This is an alarming breach of protocol, as it cuts the world off from what he’s up to.

And this is to say nothing of Trump’s vows to “open up” libel laws in an effort to legally challenge media outlets that deign to criticize his policies.

This behavior is unlike anything we’ve ever seen from a U.S. president in modern memory, and should scare anyone who has something to lose if a free press and free speech are compromised (note: We should all be uncomfortable with this).

So what now? As a businessman with no experience on any level of government or in the military, Trump is about as prepared for the responsibilities of the Oval Office as a parakeet who has Twitter, which means it’s of the utmost importance that members of the press thoroughly and boldly cover his presidency. But how is anyone supposed to accurately cover (much less investigate) someone who hates them and their profession, and resents and fears their ability to expose him?

If it all sounds hopeless, don’t worry, it’s not. The situation is serious, but it is possible to do good journalism under a president Trump; it’s just not going to be even a little bit easy.

Four experts on the media spoke to The Establishment about where we’ve been with Trump and what needs to be done going forward to protect the integrity of the industry and support the kind of journalists Trump doesn’t want: fearless ones.

Our illustrious panel includes:

Dr. Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communication at Merrimack University, where she teaches radio production, feminist media studies, and new media and digital communication, among other topics. Her list of fake, misleading, and satirical news sources recently went viral.

Anita Kumar, a White House correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.

Dr. Charlton McIlwain, a professor of Race, Media & Politics in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt, and the author of Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in U.S. Political Campaigns.

Jennifer Pozner, a media critic, public speaker, and founder and executive director of Women in Media and News. She is also the author of Reality Bites Back.

Trump was hostile toward the media from the outset of his campaign. In the last several weeks, we’ve seen reports of continued tough relations between the press and the president-elect. Should the media or the public be concerned about what kind of access to the president the media will have starting in 2017?

Melissa: The public, including those who work in media and news, should absolutely be concerned about what is happening. News organizations have long played an important watchdog role in terms of reporting on our government and public officials. If a president-elect or president limits access to certain media organizations, perhaps because one is being more critical of their actions, it could result in freedom of speech or freedom of the press being stifled. I worry an editor might think twice about publishing something if it means they will no longer have access to one of the most powerful people in the world.

Anita: Yes, I think the media — and more importantly the public — should be concerned. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump limited media access during the campaign, compared to previous nominees, and I think no matter who won we were going to be worried. For example, neither nominee allowed us to form a protective pool, a break from previous nominees in modern history. The president-elect still has not allowed reporters to travel with him and a couple weeks ago slipped out for dinner after telling us he was in for the night.

Charlton: Yes. The media and the public should both be concerned. The media, particularly journalists covering the White House and the president, serve a vital purpose of reporting, interpreting, verifying, and providing context for presidential and administration communications. They mediate public knowledge about politics and public policy. We should be worried about Trump’s penchant to bypass the press because in doing so he also bypasses this critical apparatus that provides, more or less, a sense of shared verifiable facts the public relies on for both information and political debate. Trump’s tendency and perhaps growing propensity to bypass the press by limiting access risks us all further being invited to constantly make political decisions in alternate realities that change from day to day and have no basis in truth, no matter how you define it.

Jennifer: It’s really important to talk about how to do accurate, impactful journalism when you have a person in power who is hostile to the very concept of a free press and who, not only that, is himself a master of manipulating false narratives, and spinning them in his favor. People in the press have been making snide remarks about the “reality TV president,” but people are not talking about what it means that we have a president who was in American living rooms every week for almost a decade, spinning a narrative about himself that presented somebody who has been multiply bankrupt and has stiffed contractors and is known for shoddy business deals as if he were the very model of wealth, success, and business acumen.

People think he’s stupid. He’s not stupid. He is incredibly savvy as a master manipulator of facts and narrative to get people to believe what he wants them to believe, and we can be damn sure he’s going to get people to believe what he wants them to believe about his administration.

It’s going to be extremely important for the media to resist normalizing Trump, a phenomenon that’s already fully in swing. What are the best ways journalists can refuse to normalize Trump in their work for the next four years?

Melissa: I think some of the normalizing we’ve seen is a coping mechanism or wishful thinking that his presidency won’t be as bad as people fear. I think we have to hope that’s the case, but we can’t act as if this is an ordinary situation. The main thing reporters and news organizations can do is continue to be vigilant in drawing distinctions between what he’s doing and who he’s appointing and what has been done in the past. That’s not to say we should look to the past with rose-colored glasses, but rather that we need to acknowledge that he is resisting traditional practices and setting questionable precedents.

Anita: I think we just need to do our job. That means we report what the president and his staff say and do, but we factcheck, hold accountable, and provide context to those actions and statements. It’s what we should be doing everyday.

Charlton: I think it is crucial that journalists don’t sacrifice their critical edge for access. I think journalists have to be willing to tenaciously call bullshit at every turn, when warranted. The more gross distortions go unchallenged — even the small ones — we take one step closer to normalizing Trump’s tendency to say that he is the sole arbiter of reality.

Jennifer: It’s important for the press to get used to being repetitive. We need to get very comfortable with saying “fascism,” and we need to get accustomed to saying it often. We have to get accustomed to calling things by their correct terms even if it’s uncomfortable for people in power or for readers. Instead of calling Stephen Bannon “a member of the ‘alt-right,’” we need to call Bannon and this administration “members of hate groups” and “white supremacists.” And we need to do this every time. Not just every once in awhile and not just in the op-ed pages. It is not opinion that some people in Trump’s administration are white supremacists, it’s a fact. And we need to be reporting that fact.

With the recent deluge of fake news — not to mention the widespread distrust of the media among Trump supporters and those who are disillusioned after the press failed to accurately predict the election — how can the press rebuild trust with the public?

Melissa: The press can start rebuilding trust with the public by examining many of its own practices, and acknowledging that those practices are contributing to the fake and misleading news problem. A recent story reported on by dozens of news outlets turned out to be a hoax based on a tweet. The story was that CNN accidentally aired porn instead of their regular programming. After one outlet reported on this, clearly without really digging into the claim (or contacting CNN!), it spread among media and news websites with no one really “hitting pause” and figuring out the veracity of the story until it was already spreading.

Equally as troubling as this kind of reporting of news like a game of telephone is the fact that when articles were updated to reflect changing information, Facebook descriptions and share attachments weren’t necessarily updated. For example, Vulture’s social media post about the story had the Facebook description “Shocking viewers who’d forgotten people watch porn on their TVs” with the headline “Boston CNN Channel Airs Porn Instead of Anthony Bourdain.” But when you click the article, the headline is totally different, as is the content of the story because it was updated several hours earlier.

Why wouldn’t they also update the now totally misleading social media post? I imagine it’s because such an update would probably generate less clickthroughs, but this is precisely the stuff that feeds distrust with the public.

Jennifer: That’s a complicated question now, after 30 or more years of right-wing organizing and financial investment in creating the myth of the liberal media, intentionally eroding trust on the part of the American people toward media outlets. Then at the same time we will have a president who tweets like a drunk 16-year-old about how the press is corrupt, and his rabid followers believe him.

Corporate journalism outlets have tried to twist themselves into pretzels to get the American public to believe they’re trustworthy when in the meantime, these same institutions have chosen profit over truth, accuracy, and standing up for the little guy. It’s difficult to imagine these corporate news outlets are suddenly going to grow a backbone under arguably the most anti-free speech, anti-media, anti-journalist president in modern times. But in order to protect the last gasps of American democracy, they have to grow that backbone.

Do you feel there’s a renewed importance for investigative journalism in the coming years under Trump?

Melissa: Definitely! My hope is that our current spotlight on fake news, misleading news, and traditional news will encourage and improve sustained and investigative coverage. I think the contemporary moment, which is one of distrust, also demonstrates the importance of alternative and nonprofit news organizations in reaching people. They can be an important place for breaking news and the debate of complex ideas, as well as for digging in deeper to the work of mainstream journalism, but we all need to be more careful with how news and information changes as it moves between these entities via secondary reporting.

Anita: I think there’s a renewed importance in accountability journalism, holding Trump and those in his administration responsible for what they say and do. I always think that’s important, but I think it’s even more so now.

Charlton: Investigative journalism is critical now more than ever. Trump and those he’s chosen to lead his administration have demonstrated they have little to gain by maximizing transparency. Investigative journalists must fill that gap. Investigative journalism may be our best hope — along with activists — for uncovering the implications and harms that will likely follow from the kinds of policies Trump and his administration are set to champion. Investigative journalism is one of our best checks on power and it has waned considerably in recent years. If we let it continue, we risk tyranny’s triumph.

Jennifer: Investigative journalism has always been extremely important. It’s why journalism is the only industry enshrined in the constitution. However, there’s been mass divestment on the part of corporate media from investigative journalism. So people who are still doing investigative journalism need to be equipped with the resources that they need to stand up to and fight the corruption, much of which will be hidden, of this administration. There needs to be more fellowships, grants, and foundations endowing independent news outlets and reporters with proven track records. There needs to be more news companies willing to take risks in what they will spend money on over the long term.

Investigative reporting isn’t going to give you clickbait, but do you want to live in a country that’s free or not? This might be our last stand.

How can the press try to bridge the readership gap between those who critically engage with a variety of news sources, and those who primarily read inside a biased and inflammatory echo chamber (on the left and right)?

Melissa: This is the perennial question among researchers, but I think we need to think more critically about what we mean by “echo chamber.” A lot of us seek out information that we may already agree with, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t exposed to a variety of viewpoints and political orientations during our daily lives. While filter bubbles are definitely a thing, as is the phenomenon of Red Facebook and Blue Facebook, a lot of people exist in a purple area and see content from across the political spectrum in their Facebook feeds. Ultimately, it’s not just up to the media to bridge this gap, although they can by rebuilding trust, it’s up to people exposing themselves to as many sources of information as possible. No one should only read Breitbart just as no one should only read The New York Times.

Anita: I wish that I knew the answer to this. I think an independent media that offers both sides of the story is more important than ever and yet I worry fewer and fewer people have any desire to look beyond their like-minded information sources. All we can do is keep doing what we do and do it well — inform, explain, and hold politicians accountable and hope for the best.

Charlton: I’m not optimistic that the media can do anything to bridge this gap. Perhaps it can, but years of evidence suggests that it may not only be not possible, but may not be desirable for media outlets. There’s lots to be gained financially from echo chambers where one does not have to compete with a wider array of news outlets with varying levels of credibility. Niche markets, even in media, are potentially profitable, and the sound of one’s own voice, bouncing off of every mirror, can be quite seductive.

Jennifer: We have a society that has been trained by Fox News and a poor educational environment (thanks to George W. Bush’s education policies) to be drawn away from critical thinking. Within this climate, we are faced with a conservative community that has decided facts don’t matter and that says wrong opinions are just as valid as facts. If as an industry we’re going to wrestle with how to bridge that divide, maybe we need multiple outlets writing service pieces about how news stories get reported and who our sources are.

We also need to be much better about eliminating false equivalencies. We can’t do a story that is 90% sources from the Trump administration and corporate America and 10% sources who say “they’re wrong,” and consider that a balance. Are we quoting sources from the public interest, or just government and corporate interests?

It’s a goofy feature, but also one that in many ways perfectly encapsulates what Us Weekly and other celebrity gossip publications like People, OK!, and Closer are all about. The mission of these pubs is simple: exalt celebrities while attempting to bring readers closer to them. And so, we’re treated not only to photos of A-listers paying the meter or catching their flight, but to “inside looks” at their private lives, and interviews in which they share their favorite movies, open up (clandestinely) about their love lives, or reveal how they mended a broken heart.

In many ways, this is a relatively innocuous mission, particularly when compared to more incendiary, lie-peddling tabloids like The National Enquirer or Star. But problematically, this approach has also been applied over the years to presidential candidates and sitting presidents. Cover stories about Obama have included “Exclusive Photos: The Obamas At Home” in People; “What She’s Really Like: Michelle’s Private World” in OK!; and “Barack Obama’s Girls: ‘I Think I’m A Pretty Cool Dad’” in Us Weekly. People magazine has taken us “inside” the ranch where George W. and Laura Bush live, and offered glowing coverage of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and George H.W. and Barbara Bush.

“Presidents,” the implicit message goes, “They’re just like us!”

And this, to some extent, has always been problematic. After all, there’s a marked difference between glorifying and sanitizing a movie star, and doing the same with a world leader who has influence over millions of peoples’ lives. But never has this mission raised more red flags than at this particular juncture in history. Because never in the history of these publications has there been a president as dangerous as Donald Trump.

It’s easy to underestimate the influence of celebrity magazines, but to do so would be a mistake: Us Weekly and People, for instance, each claim a monthly readership of around 50 million people. And while tabloids like Star or National Enquirer are known to be outrageous, these outlets are relatively trusted, boasting readers who turn to them for weekly escapism and, yes, news.

All of which is important to consider when assessing the unscrupulousness of these publications’ sanitizing coverage of Trump — who, it’s important to remember, launched his campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists,” has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault, has perhaps not paid taxes in two decades, has openly mocked a disabled person, and was officially endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

People magazine began rolling out “Hey, it’s just the Trumps, no biggie” propaganda while the rest of us were just starting to come to terms with what the next four years would hold. The magazine’s Babies vertical published a story on November 9 entitled, “27 Photos of Ivanka Trump and Her Family That are Way Too Cute” (emphasis in the original). The very first photo is one of Ivanka with her husband, Jared Kushner, and their oldest daughter Arabella on their way “to vote for [Arabella’s] grandfather for president.”

People also ran a Trump cover in April asking “Who Is The Real Donald Trump?” that, while it addressed issues with his character and record, also engaged in plenty of sugarcoating. In the article, Trump’s friends described him as “caring and kind” and “thoughtful and measured,” and Donald himself proclaimed, “I’m a much nicer person than people would think” — the quote the magazine highlighted in its online version of the story.

Most egregiously yet, People quickly rolled out a Trump cover after he was elected, presenting the world with a glamorous version of the president-elect. On the highly criticized cover, Trump is pictured in a navy suit, a red tie, and a white shirt, smiling softly into the camera, appearing to stride forward. If someone had been living under a rock for the last few decades, they might never know that this photo was of a person who maliciously targeted immigrants, people of color, women, and pretty much every other marginalized group at every possible opportunity.

In the days since, the softball anecdotes about him and his sweet family have continued, with headlines like “Inside Melania’s Decision to Stay in N.Y.C. Instead of the White House: ‘She Loves Her Independent Life‘” and “How Donald Trump Told PEOPLE That Son Barron Found a White House Move ‘a Little Scary.’”

People’s approach to Trump is all the more insidious when you consider the fact that one of the publication’s own reporters, Natasha Stoynoff, published a disturbing retelling of a time when she was “attacked” by Donald Trump. In an attempt to rationalize its cover, People’s editor-in-chief, Jess Cagle, wrote an internal memo to his staff, saying:

Of course, this is true — the media can’t pretend it didn’t happen. But it’s disingenuous to assert that a cover and story where Trump seems like someone Mr. Rogers might have been buddies with was the only way to go.

People, of course, is hardly alone in presenting our president-elect and his family in this sanitized way. Us Magazine’s recent stories include, “Ivanka Trump Posts Heartfelt Thanksgiving Message With Husband and Children: I Feel Incredibly Blessed.” And earlier this year, in lieu of actual reporting, the publication invited his wife, Melania, to write a gushing cover story entitled, “The Only Donald I Know.”

Certainly, we can expect this approach to continue; tabloid magazines will, in a serious breach of ethics, continue to try to sell the American public on the idea that the Trump family is “normal.” They will try to cute-ify Melania and Ivanka (who supported her father’s campaign and was in fact the one to introduce him before he gave his infamous campaign announcement speech). And they will try to sell us different kinds of Trump: grandpa Trump, husband and father Trump, underdog Trump, among myriad other false Trumps.

Tabloids will try to sell us different kinds of false Trumps.
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True, tabloids are unlikely to ever go so far as to make bold political statements on their covers — but they can mitigate the spread of the propagandist treatment of a white supremacist president-to-be. And one way they can do this is by taking cues from their more reputable counterparts.

Plenty of traditional, respected media sources, of course, have similarly, problematically airbrushed Trump and his policies — like, recently, the Associated Press and NPR’s Morning Edition. But others have been more pointed in taking on Trump and the dangers he poses to the democracy, offering an approach People or Us Weekly could emulate.

In the wake of Trump’s election, New York Magazine, for instance, ran a victory cover that was bold, grabbing, and most importantly, accurate. The cover used a close-up black and white photo of Trump looking hideous with the word “loser” sprawled across his face in all caps — appropriating a term Trump himself has hurled at anyone who opposes him, while making it clear that his policies do not align with the values of the American public. Compare this with the airbrushed, glorifying People cover, and the dangers of fluffy, sanitized reporting become chillingly clear.

It’s not difficult to discern why People, Us Weekly, and those like them have resorted to propagandizing Trump; in addition to a milquetoast ethos that seeks not to offend, there’s profit to consider. The issue with People‘s post-election Trump-celebratory cover story, for instance, sold 20% more copies than the same issue the year before. And as CBS head Les Moonves made painfully clear made painfully clear with his “It may not be good for America” quote, that kind of financial upside is hard to pass up . . . ethics be damned.

Much has been made about how reputable media outlets have a responsibility to, as Christine Amanpour recently put it, be “truthful, not neutral.” And certainly, examining the reporting of outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN is crucial, as such publications have played their own chilling role in normalizing Trump. But we mustn’t overlook the role celebrity-gossip publications can play in shaping public opinion as well, in more subtle but no less potent ways.

These tabloids may not be in the business of taking a political stand, but to treat a politician as dangerous as Trump like just another celebrity — replete with soft-focused images and heartwarming tales of familial bliss — is to play a significant role in normalizing him, making him seem relatable to the typical American. Who’s going to want to resist a man who loves his grandkids, whose wife cherishes him, who has such an adorable family?

But here’s the thing: Trump is not a celebrity (though “former reality TV star” is about the only successful line in his resume); he’s about to become one of the most powerful people in the country and the world. Treating him like a Kardashian seriously downplays the immense power he holds over millions of marginalized people all over the globe.

Put another way: We shouldn’t really care if he’s maybe a good grandpa; we should care about the families his policies will rip apart. We shouldn’t care if his wife thinks he’s great; we should care about the women whose reproductive rights may be stripped from them under his watch, and the normalization of sexual assault that he’s already engendered.

The consequences are simply too dire for People and Us Weekly and their ilk to glossify and glorify Donald Trump, even if it is their business to worship at the altar of celebrity, including presidents and presidential candidates. The nation faces a reality that while certainly not entirely new (racism, misogyny, and xenophobia have dominated colonial American society from the start), is in fact much grimmer than before November 8. It’s a reality that could have dire consequences for millions of the very Americans who eagerly await their weekly tabloid.

Any contribution to the idea that Trump is “business as usual” — or worse, palatable — is unethical and beneath the standards of what media should hold themselves to.

Sexist, racist authoritarians aren’t just like us. And we must never forget that.