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Im looking at society today, and its like Im watching an X-Men movie.

A Florida Republican named Webster Barnaby said this at a committee hearing about the ceaseless march of Republican lawmakers seeking to make it impossible for trans people to so much as use a public washroom safely. He was speaking directly to trans people in the room with him, who had gathered there to speak their peace and plead for some sanity in a fraught and terrible time for trans lives. Choice words that firmly root Republicans in their comical super-villain era.

The rub of it: Hes not wrong.

Hes not wrong that when looking out at a sea of trans people, he is seeing the X-Men. He is seeing people who look different than the pressed suits on his side of the line, slamming gavels and pointing fingers and remarking at the demonic appearance of the congregated masses. The X-Men are indeed a group hated and feared by a society that sees itself as normal and mutants as counter to that norm. Whats telling is that Barnaby, in labeling the people he despises as demons, imps, and mutants, sees his heroes in villainy. Hes entering his Robert Kelly era.

Robert Kelly, apologies, SENATOR Robert Kelly is a longtime anti-mutant politician and X-Men enemy in Marvel comics who was tricked into believing the mutant hero Cyclops had fired his optic blasts into a crowd of innocent bystanders. With no real evidence to go on, he swiftly and decisively makes up his mind about an entire group of people and begins campaigning against the scourge of mutants living among the other human detritus he surrounded himself with.

Robert Kelly was a primary backer of programs like the Mutant Control Act and Project Wideawake, loosely defined anti-mutant laws requiring all mutants to register with the state to make their identities known and, by extension, tracked. When that law was shot down by the senate for being unconstitutional, Kelly aided the funding of AI-powered robots called Sentinels that were designed to track, counter, and detain/destroy mutants wherever they might be found. The ultimate goal was to remove mutants from society.

As you can imagine, AI-powered robots designed to track and detain certain kinds of folk as their primary function spiraled out of control pretty quickly.

Robert Kelly is a direct analogue to the kind of real life politicians who love nothing more than to keep a fire of hatred burning hot and bright.

The issue with someone like Barnaby saying he looks out and sees trans people as the X-Men and also demons and imps, his other colorful words for real live people in the room with him is that he sees himself as a Robert Kelly-type, and that he is okay with that comparison being drawn. Like watching Star Wars and only rooting for the Empire, thinking it sure would be nice to be that Palpatine fella.

His words cut hard enough that even fellow republicans distanced themselves from his rhetoric, without enough self-awareness that this road was always going to lead to this point.

In the fictional world of the X-Men, the constant fear of mutants leads to the invention and mass production of literal mutant-hunting robots. Robert Kelly, eventually, sees the error of his ways, begins to listen to their pleas, and starts to understand them as worthy of rights and freedoms the same as anyone else. His anti-mutant crusade well and truly ends when his life is saved by a queer mutant named Pyro, a mutant stricken with the Legacy Virus (the in-world analogue to AIDS). And he is, of course, eventually assassinated at a rally where he was speaking about his reformed worldview.

But, this isnt comics.

Shortly after his speech, Barnaby expressed regrets for his choice of words toward trans people. He said he considers himself a christian and it is unlike people of his faith to dehumanize others the way that he did. But this bears too little responsibility, too little consideration of just how he and others get to this point where they are calling trans people demons in public committee hearings with little forethought.

Barnaby apologized but also said he stands by his statement, which is a really professional way of saying well Im sorry that you feel this way. And unless politicians start to push back on their peers who have become so emboldened in their bigotry that they are drawing these comparisons to real life people in settings such as this, we can only surmise that the situation which is already fraught and terrifying will get worse. We know indeed where this path leads, and it travels a short distance to a terrifying place.

Gutter Talkis a biweekly series by Niko Stratis that looks at comic books from a queer and trans perspective.

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