The Gulf of Mexico story is more insidious than it may superficially seem.
In the aftermath of the 9/11/01 attack, the US government got annoyed enough with the French that it changed the name of julienned deep-fried potato sticks to “Freedom Fries”. This name change primarily affected the cafeterias in the Federal buildings, and was widely mocked elsewhere.
That was an act of petulance by a system that felt otherwise powerless to impel another country to do its bidding, and on the most obvious level, renaming the Gulf of Mexico is the same thing. It will cause some minor chaos in communications, but other than that, it was eyeroll-worthy nonsense.
Until the AP was banned from the White House Press Briefing. For “lying”.
Part one: In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard famously refuses the Cardassian demand to change the number of lights he sees. This story arc, meanwhile, is rooted in George Orwell’s 1984 and the way in which the Ministry of Truth manufactures reality.
This is about power and the limits of how far the press, and people in general, are willing to go to appease that power. The entire point here is that it’s trivial: How many times in the last five years have most people really even referred to the Gulf, at all? Certainly people in the South do it fairly routinely, but in even many of those cases, it’s just “the Gulf”.
But the AP’s thus-far refusal to change its conventions, and the White House’s petulant response, is part of a disturbing (and yet somehow comically impotent) power play.
This is not (yet) press forces strapped to chairs, being tortured in order to print what the government wants printed. As with DJT’s first term, there’s a pathetic element to these attempts.
At the same time, though, the First Amendment is crucial to our social identity, and already the Administration has gone after several key elements of it, one at a time.
Part two: The trans community has spotted an aspect to this immediately. If the Gulf can be renamed, to the point that people are punished for using its former name, why can’t our own names be respected?
Flip that around, mkay? If we refuse to call it anything other than the Gulf of Mexico, then we’re engaged in deadnaming, and that justifies them doing that to us.
Except: The Gulf is not a sentient being whose feelings will be affected by what we call it. The Gulf doesn’t honestly care what we call it; for thousands of years, it certainly went by whatever names the people who were here before the Europeans called it. It. Doesn’t. Care.
This isn’t necessarily a focal part of DJT’s own game. For him, it’s just the part one part: Power. How much can he distort reality in trivial ways and still be appeased?
However, it’s certainly part of the game for many of his anti-trans supporters. And, as always, in so doing they’re showing a basic misunderstanding of the core issue. They’re also showing that they don’t see transgender people as sentient beings with worthwhile feelings.
And that is the gulf between us.