Even before 2025, trans people have had the displeasure of dealing with ignorant, bigoted politicians trying to make our lives worse.
But in a bill reading from 2023 that’s freshly making the rounds on BlueSky, one of them decided to go full Bolivar Trask.
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Not sure how to feel
On April 11th, 2023, Florida House Rep. Webster Baranby attended a hearing on the Safety in Private Spaces Act, a bill that attempted to ban gender-affirming care for minors and criminalize trans people using public restrooms.
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Barnaby offered his support for the bill at the time, stating: “I’m looking at society today, and it’s like I’m watching an X-Men movie,” he said. “It’s like we have mutants living among us on planet Earth.”
Hmm.. okay, maybe he’s on to something. After all, X-Men has long served as an allegory for marginalized communities surviving in the face of bigotry, and he could be talking about how trans people like mutants fight every day for a place to be accepted in society.
But nope..Barnaby was fully identifying with the villains, and in that same meeting, he went on to call trans people “demons” and “imps”.
Disappointingly, this isn’t the first time people have completely misinterpreted X-Men in a brain-fryingly stupid way.
When X-Men introduced the character Escapade in 2022, I thought she was very cool. I loved her design. I thought her powers were dope, they were like a combination of Nightcrawler and Rogue, two of my favorite X-Men. It was also rather sweet that she was a trans woman; it made other trans people feel seen and have a character they could project on to.
However, people were mad that X-Men introduced a trans character and claimed the series had gone “woke”. But the reality is that X-Men has always been woke. In the comic, mutants are used as a stand-in for groups that are discriminated against in society for their ethnicity, sexuality, gender, or disability status. You don’t need a scholarly level of media literacy to know that the core messaging of X-Men is that we should promote diversity in society and fight discrimination and bigotry. But I digress.
People on social media are rediscovering this story and coming to the heartwarming conclusion that Magneto was right! Which we knew, but it bears repeating.
MAGNETO WAS RIGHT
— jordan (@jordantyranny.bsky.social) April 16, 2025 at 6:48 AM
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MAGNETO WAS RIGHT!
— Brakka Quilltusk (@brakkaquilltusk.bsky.social) April 16, 2025 at 8:35 AM
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It’s always funny when old out-of-touch Republicans try to make transgender people sound deplorable, but end up only making us seem way cooler than we are. Comparing us to X-Men is a confidence booster in my book.
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