The Transphobia of the Clinton Email Scandal

Any person reading this who is in any way gleeful or joyous about the FBI refusing to prosecute Hillary Clinton over the e-mail scandal is a transphobic hypocrite of the highest order. Please quit pretending otherwise and respect me enough not to talk to me anymore because I frankly find this whole thing revolting.

It is simple Cartesian logic combined with kindergartener decency at this point.

In January 2010, a trans woman named Private Chelsea Manning gave a series of documentary materials in electronic format to the journalism organization WikiLeaks. Her reasons were based under the logic of the various whistleblower laws. The National Whistleblowers Center tells us:

The underlying purpose of whistleblower protection laws is to allow employees to stop, report, or testify about employer actions that are illegal, unhealthy, or violate specific public policies. However, one of the most hotly contested issues in whistleblower law is the exact definition of protected whistleblower activity. Some states have very narrow definitions while others have definitions that are very broad. An employee or his or her attorney should thoroughly research the state law regarding the definition for his or her state.

The materials Manning released exposed American crimes in Iraq, which itself was a totally criminal enterprise from the outset. Manning was furthermore mandated by international laws and treaties to promptly report such crimes irregardless of superior officers. Men were hung by the Allies at Nuremberg for failing to do so. Obama and his crooked hoodlum flunkies just showed a massive double-standard and a massive dose of transphobia. This is plain as the nose on your face. If you are a trans woman, go to jail. If you are a Clinton, go to the White House.

Now I get why a lot of well-intentioned LGBTQQI liberals are clucking at this victory for the Clintons, I actually do get that. I was a scared, lonesome, depressed teenager during the reign of Bush the Dumber and had the living hell scared out of me by his antics. When he would go before the nation on television and say we needed to amend the Constitution to “protect the sanctity of marriage”, it made me want to die. Those song-and-dance routines made me ashamed of myself for having the feelings I did about certain classmates in the extremely conservative all-guys Catholic prep school I went to. I still, for some damned reason, get a bit uncomfortable thinking about that part of high school. Even writing about it makes me feel like garbage, like I want to take a baseball bat to my television. And maybe a car windshield for good measure. Every queer person has that dimension to their identity and history, it is part of what makes us queer.

But we are not supposed to be throwing our most vulnerable brothers and sisters under the bus like this. We are not supposed to engage in transphobia so that we feel good about who we vote for. We are not supposed to be having gay Congressmen like my Rep. David Cicilline use the shooting last month at a gay bar in Orlando to push through a racist, anti-Muslim ethnic profiling bill dressed up as gun control legislation (Cicilline is a pro-Israel Jewish Democrat, so his Islamophobia makes sense, but if John Lewis avoids the fires of hell for that little stunt when he damned well knows the name of Malcolm X it will prove to me once and for all there is no God).

Since I am a queer red of that unaffiliated variety, meaning I have no allegiance to any state or party, maybe I have the unique privilege to say it here and finally get it out in the open, we queers need to have a good old-fashioned purge of the ranks, maybe throw in a show trial or two just to prove that this is about liberation instead of neoliberalism. Just get rid of the pink-washing Israel apologists, the subtly white supremacist twinkie boys who make disgusted faces when a black man flirts with them, the drama queens who gentrify black neighborhoods and pick on the homeless and giggle at how cute they think their sadism is, all those human dumpsters. Just excommunicate the lot of them to the Roy Cohn Republican Party Gulag and be done with it. Let’s start fresh with some principles based in anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and anti-capitalism. I’d feel safer among activists form Black Lives Matter than half the monsters at gay bars these days.

I’m reading the transcript of James Comey’s comments about the investigation:

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.

Underlying that entire paragraph are the names of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden. It demonstrates just how fake the Democratic Party is towards queers, towards whistle-blowing patriots, towards the First Amendment.

From what I have read here and there, Alexander Cockburn used to ask “Is your hate pure?” You bet your ass, right now it is like a white-hot star, not a single impurity within a million light-years. But I think what I want to say to that statement was said best by someone else:

America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb

Andrew Stewart is a documentary film maker and reporter who lives outside Providence.  His film, AARON BRIGGS AND THE HMS GASPEE, about the historical role of Brown University in the slave trade, is available for purchase on Amazon Instant Video or on DVD.