Good Asian Drivers

Kit and I have decided that transphobia thursday would be an opportunity to write and comment about all current events related to trans issues.

Today’s inaugural blog of Transphobia Thursday is dedicated to the wonderful town of Silverton, OR. Which I’ve never even heard of until now.

On November 4, while America celebrated Obama’s victory, Silverton celebrated the victory of the first openly transgender mayor in the history of the United States, Stu Rasmussen. According to the Free Speech Radio News, Rasmussen’s gender expression is female, although he goes by his male pronoun. He won by a comfortable margin - it seems the people of Silverton had spoken.

This Monday, however, members of the radical anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church (from Kansas) went all the way to Oregon to protest. You’ve probably heard of these guys before. Headed by Fred Phelps, who’s like a gazillion years old, the church made famous the phrase “God Hates Fags”. In fact, that’s their website. They have a history of picketing the funerals of dead gay people, as well as dead soldiers (they claim that the war in Iraq is God’s way of punishing America for tolerating gay people). They are not actually affiliated with any known Baptist associations. It pretty much seems like they just made up their own religion out of nowhere.

So it’s not really a surprise that they came all the way to protest Silverton’s new mayor. Their homophobic, transphobic, and racist rhetoric has been getting old and predictable for some time now. The only thing to really do was to ignore them, or mock them in parodies, or get Michael Moore to harass them.

But what the city of Silverton did was pretty damn awesome too. They staged a counter protest, outnumbered the folks from Westboro, and essentially, told them to get the hell out of their city and mind their own business. Over a hundred people showed up to march for the support of their newly elected mayor. According to the Associated Press, some men even marched in dresses to show support. Stu himself acknowledged that Silverton was the best town in the world.

He’s probably right.