Musical Moment: "The Joke" by Brandi Carlile. Still a song for the times.

When the dust settles, will the joke be on them, or on us?

I’m afraid this Musical Moment is not intended to be a moment of diversion, but something pretty relevant to our current moment. I thought of it when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s law banning gender affirming care for transgender minors, and thought of it again last week when I read a guest essay in The New York Times by Jason Cherkis, a journalist who covers mental health issues.

In the court case, originally known as L.W. v. Skrmetti, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee initially ruled against a Tennessee law banning this kind of medical care, but it was overruled by a federal appeals court. The Biden administration had supported the anonymous plaintiff and the original ruling, but the Trump administration reversed course.

The original decision was an exercise not only in constitutional law but in compassion for children suffering from gender dysphoria (yes, that is a real thing), but these days compassion does not count for much, while cruelty counts for everything.

Cherkis’s Times essay took the SCOTUS decision as his starting point:

“The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors and the Trump administration’s decision to end funding for the specialized suicide hotline for L.G.B.T.Q.+ callers are not coincidental. They both speak to a fundamental failure to acknowledge the day-to-day reality of trans people in America.”

He went on to describe the kinds of calls the hotline received from trans youth and the desperation that led them to call.

Some had already tried self-harm or made more than one suicide attempt. Many on a daily basis contemplated killing themselves. Gender dysphoria, one explained to me, was like “being tortured in my body.”

But the Trump administration has decided to end this suicide hotline:

“My experience runs counter to what the Trump administration has asserted in its decision to end this line. The Office of Management and Budget falsely argued that the phone line was a conduit of indoctrination ‘where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by ‘counselors’ without consent or knowledge of their parents.’

My callers wished their parents weren’t in denial and didn’t echo right-wing talking points. They wished they didn’t feel so alone late at night. They called from Utah and Arizona and Iowa. That more calls came from rural red states than from urban blue states was not a mere gut feeling on my part. Published data by the Trevor Project links the dozens of recent anti-trans laws with increases in the rates of suicide attempts by transgender and nonbinary youth.”

That brings us back to Brandi Carlile’s song, “The Joke.” According to a very interesting article in The American Songwriter a few years ago, the 2017 song was inspired by Trump’s first victory and the license it gave to those who mocked people who were different in their many and diverse ways. The writer quotes an interview with Carlile about the song:

“There are so many people feeling misrepresented [today] … So many people feeling unloved. Boys feeling marginalized and forced into these kind of awkward shapes of masculinity that they do or don’t belong in … so many men and boys are trans or disabled or shy. Little girls who got so excited for the last election, and are dealing with the fallout. The song is just for people that feel under-represented, unloved, or illegal.”

The song expresses confidence that ultimately the joke will be on those who tried to marginalize those who don’t fit into the dominant mold, or as Bob Dylan sang in a much earlier song, “the first one now will later be last.”

I don’t have a lot of confidence right now that this will come to pass. It all depends on how hard we are willing to fight against what really must be seen as forces of evil and darkness. There are some good signs, but it’s way too early to know, and the fight will be a long one. Many times before we thought we had won it, only to find out that we were fooling ourselves. I hope the joke won’t be on us for believing that another world, another life, is possible.

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