Last night, I watched a segment of the Majority Report with Sam Seder which featured a video of Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow for the Heritage Foundation. For context, a quick search found that the Heritage Foundation two weeks ago published an article by Perry entitled, “The Trans Mind-Virus Is Mutating.”
In the video, Perry is shopping in the LGBTQ+ section of Target and making comments for the camera (so this is a curated video, not someone chancing upon Perry incidentally and capturing what she’s saying). This clearly occurs in the backdrop of the current Target decision to remove or relocate that section of clothing to an obscure part of their stores, a policy move taken in the wake of threats made to their employees. Perry has decided to take a field trip to examine conditions on the ground herself.
At first, she criticizes the creators of the clothing items, then the stitched-on (positive) messages, then critiques the designs of the clothes. She does this as though the clothes are a 1:1 stand-in for a hypothetical transgender person.
The video subtly shifts from warning the audience of secularized danger (for example, Perry points out displays of rainbow-themed gingerbread houses, complaining that it had been her understanding that gingerbread houses were for “celebrating the birth of Christ—what do I know?”) to explicitly snide put-downs.
That’s the gradient; that’s the shift. Perry takes the audience from a feeling of fear and of being scandalized to that of being superior and disdainful. She’s training her audience on how to derogate and to consciously place someone—a generic someone who, incidentally, represents an entire group—beneath themselves. “I have better taste / fashion sense than this imaginary construct of a trans person I just dreamt up, therefore I am inherently better than all trans people who actually exist.” That’s the attitude being packaged and sold here.
Some lowlights:
“Does this look like an adult swimsuit? No, it doesn’t.”
“That’s interesting. It’s right next to a child mannequin.” (So what? The mannequin is not a child. The clothes are inanimate. These are displays for someone who ostensibly is shopping for clothes. There is no ideology playing out with these display materials. The only person superimposing an ideology in that space is Sarah Perry. She’s importing a sense of danger just by what she’s implying. This really is bigotry in action.)
“Some really, really little kid stuff over here.” (More moral panic.)
“This [handbag] is designed by an artist in the United Kingdom who actually identifies as a trans-Satanist. Did you know that was a movement? Because I didn’t.” (Note that she doesn’t actually say it is a movement, which I’m pretty sure is Not a ThingTM. But she implies that it is, and thus it shows the great power that is satanism, reaching across the Pond to enter Target stores to sell items to adults and to lure children. By the by, ‘trans-Satanist’ recalls Robert Welch’s neologism of ‘ComSymp’ to designate sympathizers of communism as though they were absolutely alien beings.)
“My favorite Pride parade gingerbread float! So many rainbows, it’s hard to say. I thought these were only for Christmas. Celebrating the birth of Christ, but what do I know?” (She’s talking about a completely innocuous display of gingerbread houses as crafts.)
“Ooof, that’s just plain bad design.” (It’s here that the video shifts into put-down mode. She’s inviting the audience to join her in insulting the theoretical transgender shopper’s taste in fashion.)
“‘Multiple body type, fit, and gender expressions.’ Which is just another way of saying, ‘Completely shapeless.’” (She’s firmly out of the realm of highlighting supposed danger and has moved into that of making purely derogatory comments about a generic transgender person. She is teaching the audience to envision all transgender people as shapeless, and it goes without saying that all real flesh-and-blood people have shape and form. In this way, what Perry is saying can be taken as another method of dehumanizing and creating an Other.)
“‘You can be anything.’ You can be a potato or a cabbage! Where’s that section?” She says this while making a gesture of roundness in front of her body.
“So now we have a subsection of a subsection. ‘Be proud’ [on a small child’s shirt] but it’s specifically for Latinx communities who are not really… gender normative.” (Just that statement divides people into categories and reaffirms the norm which, in her estimation, should conform to cisgender presentations.)
“And for babies: ‘Ask me about my pronouns.’ Well, look at me. What do you think my pronouns are?” (Babies are literally just learning pronouns, the actual parts of speech. The saying itself is a play on words for the adults who already can read and interpret the saying. No one in their right mind would read that on a baby’s shirt and apply that saying to themselves and then take offense at the application. Perry is the one who just applied it to herself! She has no one else at which to be upset but herself.)
“If any doubting is transpiring, you want to break the mold. And, ‘Your story matters.’ My story matters, too. Where’s my section?” (Sam Seder breaks in at this point and clarifies that her section is the rest of the store.)
“Once again, the ugliest design I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“‘All-day, everyday.’ And that’s okay, but not for me, because that again is hideous.”
“I would never shop in this section, even if I was queer, because it’s ugly.”
“Just because something is all-rainbow doesn’t make it attractive.” (Each of these last four are value judgments that are meant to map onto transgender people in a 1:1 relationship. By putting down the design of the items, Perry is insulting by proxy the physical features of these imaginary shoppers.)
“‘Not a phase.’ Lest we believe that our children will grow out of their gender confusion, Target’s here to tell you that they’re going to groom you into really being convinced that you’re going to be this way forever.” (She says the tail end of the sentence is a fading whisper, using what’s known as pragmatics or prosody to convey her disdain and ridicule of the message as she’s interpreting it. As it stands, her interpretation is a bad-faith, deliberate misinterpretation. This mention is her attempt at telling a joke.)
This is identity management. It’s also training in social dominance. Talk about “grooming”—this whole video instructs the receptive viewer how to feel socially superior to someone based merely on an arbitrary group characteristic.
Perry and the Heritage Foundation are not just creating snobs, they’re creating supremacists. This is a crash course in classifying The Other.
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