An Evangelical Christian journalist named Mike Cosper has just produced “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” a six-part podcast about the Satanic panic that gripped the Evangelical community between 1981 and 1993. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I did hear an interview with Cosper and it feeds into a bunch of stuff that’s been on my mind since Donald Trump took office in January.

(Side note: Cosper previously produced “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” a podcast about an Evangelical megachurch whose pastor, Mark Driscoll, turned out to be a power-hungry sociopath. That podcast is worth a listen, although Cosper didn’t really address the factors innate in Evangelicalism that tend to enable the Driscolls of the world. He kind of treated it as a one-off instead of a sadly familiar story of charismatic religious leaders going off the rails and taking their followers along for the ride. So, grain of salt regarding Cosper’s new podcast.)

For those unfamiliar, many Americans were convinced that there was a widespread, secret, well-connected Satanic movement that was subjecting children to all kinds of unspeakable abuse. Cosper says the FBI received 12,000 complaints and conducted 11,000 investigations — and never found a single actionable case of Satanic activity. But in the process, many a life was ruined by baseless allegations.

When I was about two minutes into the interview, I thought to myself, “Wow, this sounds exactly like QAnon!” Well, QAnon but really the whole range of conservative moral panics fueling Trumpism, including the rage-induced policies targeting LGBTQ+ people. It is exactly the same thing. And the current panic is just as groundless as the Satanic panic of two generations ago.

With Trump taking active steps toward authoritarianism, this panic poses a real danger to the LGBTQ+ community. Especially transgender folk, who have been #2 on Trump’s shitlist behind only immigrants of color. Many trans people are in a state of fear. With Trump floating the idea of detaining and deporting American citizens, they see themselves in Orange Hitler’s on-deck circle of terror, eventually to get the same treatment as the Mohsen Mahdawis and Rümeysa Öztürks of the world.

This ain’t their first rodeo, either. I recently listened to an interview with Bob Mould, the living legend of noise rock who was a young adult in the 1980s. He wasn’t talking about the Satanic panic, but rather the Reagan administration’s callous response to the AIDS epidemic. People were dying, especially gay men, and Reagan didn’t give a damn. “I felt marginalized,” Mould said. “I felt like my government wanted me dead. Does any of this sound familiar to what we’re ramping up to now?”

Why yes, yes it does.

So there’s precedent. In recent American history. Let’s not go into the long, sordid history of Christians going nutso and targeting small groups of people, whether they be Jews or Roma or LGBTQ+ or whoever. The Inquisition, the Crusades, the Albigensian genocide… whenever Christians have the upper hand, they just go wild. (It’s happened with other religions as well, but it seems especially… ironic? … in followers of the guy who delivered the Sermon on the Mount.)

So yeah, seen this movie before.

Now let’s talk a few specific lies regarding trans folk.

First, they are not recruiting kids, any more than the alleged Satanists of the Reagan-Bush era were. They are not assaulting children. You know who’s doing that in quantity, statistically speaking? Pastors and youth ministers and coaches and scout leaders and fathers and stepfathers. A child is far more likely to be sexually abused in their own home by a family member than in any other place or by any other person.

Second, they are not taking over girls’ and women’s sports. There is a tiny number of trans girls and women who are competing or have competed in their gender-appropriate competitions. They do not take the place of “real women;” there’s almost always room for more participants to join. They are not a danger to “real women”; whatever strength advantage they possess is marginal. (In many sports, female athletes routinely practice against males. Would that happen if a male athlete posed a danger to female participants?) There are not large groups of men pretending to be women in order to dominate women’s sports. To sum up, TRANSGENDER PEOPLE POSE NO DANGER WHATSOEVER TO WOMEN’S SPORTS or men’s sports, for that matter.

Third, you cannot become transgender by sharing a locker room or a restroom with a trans person — and all of you have, at one time or another, without even realizing it. You cannot become trans or gay or anything else by being exposed to a teacher or librarian or youth worker who ‘s gender-nonconforming in some way. YOU CANNOT BECOME TRANS OR GAY BY READING A GODDAMN BOOK. Not even one called “Gender Queer.”

Fourth, the medical community is not forcing kids to change gender against their will. There is no gender-reassignment “industry” any more than there’s an abortion industry of medical professionals making bank by aborting fetuses.

Now let’s talk about regret. It’s true that there are people who undergo gender-affirming treatment and later come to regret it. But it’s a small percentage, smaller than the regret rate for knee surgeries or nose jobs or almost any other medical procedure. Do you know why that is? Because medical professionals are very careful, very deliberate about embarking on such treatments. Patients are thoroughly screened, often for years, before they are allowed to undergo any course of treatment, especially those not readily reversible.

Finally, the idea that there are only two genders is bullshit. Gender expression takes on a myriad of forms, not only among human beings but among animals as well. For reference, see Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagemihl, a chronicling of the evidence that all kinds of sexual and gender expression exist among all kinds of animals. Not that anyone who believes the lies is going to plow their way through a 750-page book that proves their beliefs are baseless, but there you go.

LGBTQ+ folk are under attack, by their own government and by people spouting dangerous nonsense. Some are well-meaning; some are grifters and charlatans making a buck off the fears and prejudices of believers. But they are all telling lies. And as long as Trump is in the White House, these lies are more impactful and more dangerous than anything said or done during the Satanic Panic.