NOTES FROM AN EMPTY TABLE
ESSAYS, POEMS, AND STORIES (BUT MOSTLY ESSAYS)
ON CULTURE, CALAMITY, AND CREATING
BY TOM GUZZIO
ON CULTURE, CALAMITY, AND CREATING
BY TOM GUZZIO
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How can anyone interested in drawing a valid conclusion about anything, anything at all these days, do so when time is scarce, media is polarized, and the truth is often secondary to “owning the libs” or stupid-shaming the “MAGAts?” My social media feed is clogged with more shit than a Golden Corral toilet on Taco Bowl Tuesday, and I can’t seem to find a kernel of truth in it. Take a complex, high stakes issue like the gender of rodents, for instance. Recently, President Trump revealed to the world that our government spent 8 million dollars to make mice transgender. “This is real!” he said. Only it’s not. It turns out he was confusing “transgender” with “transgenic,” which are two totally different things! The leftwing mediasphere roared at his stupidity only to walk back the laugh-track a few days later when it was confirmed that, while no one was making mice transgender, government money was indeed being used to fund studies investigating the impact a lot of things might have on transgender people. And sometimes even mice were involved (though I don’t believe any of them used bathrooms that did not align with their sex assigned at birth). See! The Telegraph crowed, Trump was right. Only he wasn’t. At least not completely. But CNN was wrong, too. Kinda. Trying to see the forest through the fake plastic trees in our post-truth world is complicated. We’re surrounded by “zombie facts;” assertions that live on as truth even after their veracity has been debunked. It’s a term coined, as far as I can tell, by Leslie Patton in an article she wrote for Bloomberg News about the impact an oft-quoted study had on the kitchen utensil industry. In late October The Atlantic told its readers to “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula” because such utensils contain dangerously high levels of harmful chemicals. Only they don’t. The researchers who conducted the study The Atlantic (and many other news organizations) cited made a crucial mathematical error that overstated the levels of these chemicals. Even after this error became public, Patton reported, consumers still turned towards other materials. This obviously hurt the black plastic spatula business, and companies like OXO, one of the largest purveyors of these products. That’s because all that initial reportage continued to proliferate, even as the original study’s revised figures led some to question its conclusions. As recently as February 7th, Wirecutter was encouraging people to find other ways to flip their pancakes. So how can a consumer keep zombie facts from eating their valuable brain space when it comes to kitchenware, and what does kitchenware have to do with making mice gender dysphoric? Answers: err on the side of caution (there are some really nice silicon utensils out there), and everything. Sorta.  Illustration by Abby V. Most conservatives (and even a few liberals) are really worried — like black plastic spatula worried — that trans people will ruin women’s sports. Some feminists even feel that “transgender” is a lie spread by an “anti-woman hate movement” created by narcissistic men colluding with “Big Media, Big Tech, and Big Pharma.” So hide your wives and daughters, because trans people are, apparently, coming for them. It’s not just trans women, either. I mean, what about the poor bro who lost his spot to Iszac Henig, the trans man who beat Lia Thomas, a trans woman at Penn’s last home meet, before Iszac transitioned and began swimming for the Yale men’s team? Back to the mice — if anything, Trump underestimated the amount of taxpayer dollars being spent on gender affirming care. There have been NIH studies about how stress causes hair loss. The organization has used taxpayer dollars to study menopause. There are active on studies on erectile dysfunction looking for participants. These are bad! Right? No. They aren’t. Why would a man who once spent $70,000 on hairstyling in order to appear more virile call out money spent studying gender affirming care? It’s because it was spent on trans people. I doubt Trump thought about trans people at all until he saw how polarizing they could be; how he could manipulate their presence; and, by extension, their wellbeing, to further his own aims. Just as Hitler managed to rally an unreasonably large portion of the German public against a group of their fellow citizens — a group that, like transgender Americans today — comprised less than one percent of the total population, Trump recognizes the amount of mileage he can get out of demonizing as distraction. Perhaps the most impressive thing he’s done since returning to office is uniting people on both sides of the aisle against Caitlyn Jenner, who is hated by the right for being transgender and loathed by the left for being a Trump supporter. While some on the left, like potential 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsome, are open to exploring the impact the minuscule number of trans athletes may have on the podium prospects of their non-trans competitors (NCAA President Charlie Baker recently testified that only 10 of the 500,000 college athletes are trans), the zombie facts masquerading as truths about trans Americans have two undeniable consequences. They take our eyes off more potentially impactful policies that deal with real threats, like how Trump’s administration stands to weaken gun laws, despite there being far more guns in this country (400-500 million) than trans people (1.6 million). If you truly believe “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” rest assured that not many of those people pulling triggers are trans, regardless of how triggering their presence in the next stall over may be to you. Plus, I’m pretty certain that more high school athletes have had their careers ended by bullets than by volleyballs. Just to be sure, I did try Googling a few variations of “trans people committing crimes” and only got results on how trans people are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than their cis-gendered peers. That’s the real danger of letting aspersions about transgender mice stand. Cisgender people like me are far more dangerous to trans people than they are to us. And trans people are us. Trans Americans are Americans, full stop, whose bodies are entitled to the same level of affirmation as Meghan Trainor’s boobs, Kristi Noem’s nose, David Beckham’s hair, Matt Gaetz’s eyebrows, and Donald Trump’s complexion. All of the medical procedures and products these people may or may not have had and used went through numerous tests and trials (some involving mice, and some getting government funding) to determine their safety so that people — no matter their pronoun preference — could see someone in the mirror who more closely aligned with the best version of themselves. That’s all trans people want. Now, either because of indifference, cynicism, or outright hatred, that’s becoming more and more difficult. They stand to be even less safe than they already aren’t. And that’s the truth. Transgender people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Hear and support trans voices here: 
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