The Quiet Part

I know how to solve the homeless problem in Florida. Simply have homeless people sue schools for gender instruction and earn $10,000 a day! You see, every picture book in which the little girl wears a dress and the little boy wears pants is, in reality, explicit gender instruction and something Florida republicans have outlawed. Every bathroom labeled “boys” or “girls” instructs children that the world is divided by gender and you had better not get it wrong. How will they know which gender is correct? Why, we instruct them every day.

So too, every picture book where the characters are white is a very profound racial instruction: What republicans erroneously call CRT, and also by their calculation against the law. Any school caught with books that have only white characters could be interpreted as racial instruction showing children who deserve to be paid attention to and who do not.

Conservatives continue to get away with this outrageous guilelessness because we’ve all learned that it is “the quiet part.” We even say, “Oh my god! So & so just said the quiet part out loud, can you believe it.” Sometimes it's even a headline on Huffpost, as if we cannot believe that someone said out loud what we all know. We know that outlawing “gender instruction” means outlawing any gender instruction that goes against traditional conservative gender instruction. They cannot write a law that way, but luckily, they do not have to. It is the quiet part, and even the most outspoken progressives don’t say the quiet part. Why are Florida courts not clogged to breaking with lawsuits pointing out real, explicit, illegal gender instruction such as only allowing boys in the boy’s room? Because it is the quiet part.

Conservatives do not see themselves. McConnell said the quiet part aloud when he made a distinction between African Americans and “Real Americans.” They see themselves as “real” people without category or distinction, just as they see trans people or gay people as somehow “gendered” when everyone else, it seems to them, is just people. But, we all quietly accept the quiet part when we walk into any public restroom making sure that we go into the one labeled with the appropriate gender.

We must all start saying the quiet part out loud. When we refuse to talk about trans people but will talk about boys and girls, we are in fact instructing what genders are acceptable and which are not. Pretending to ignore race is not actually ignoring race, but it is explicit racial instruction teaching everyone who deserves and does not deserve attention, respect, and dignity. We must hold a mirror up to people like Governor Desantis and force them to see and say the quiet part. You are white. You are straight. You are cis gendered. Not everyone is like you. And the fact that you don’t see that, or want to see it, makes you a bigot.