Can it be true? A Chick tract about transgender issues has been out for nearly two months now, and it’s only just caught my attention? I can remember a time when a new Chick tract on any subject was a hot topic in my online circles, but that seems to have changed. Oh well…
Snowflake? was put together by writer David W. Daniels and artist Fred Carter, the standard team behind the tracts since Jack himself entered eternity, and it opens with one of those weirdly garbled classroom scenes that tend to turn up in Chick tracts. The children are celebrating “Dress-Up Day” by dressing as storybook characters; the teacher explains that this makes them unique — like snowflakes.
Curious that almost all of the kids have dressed as characters from Where the Wild Things Are. Back when Jack was doing these things he’d insert wacky cameos into the crowd scenes, like when Gandalf, Blade and Osama bin Laden turned up in a gathering of Satanists, but Fred Carter is markedly less adventurous. Also, the teacher’s message of uniqueness is undercut by the fact that two children appear to have dressed as goats.
And so we come to the point. Snowflake? is a tract about selfishness, and to the creators, selfishness is best summed up by the transgender movement. I had to squint, but the note says “Plz xcuse Sam, he was sick — My Mom.” Credit where it’s due, “if we accept transgender people, then kids will pretend to be their own parents” is a scaremongering tactic I’ve not seen before.
For an added laugh, bear in mind that Chick Publications promotes the work of Bill Schnoebelen, a fundamentalist Christian who claims to have previously been a vampire. Not a dude-who-drinks-blood-as-a-fetish sort of vampire: an actual fangs-and-coffin vampire. He also says that he’s met real-life werewolves. All of that’s perfectly credible in Chickland, but trannies? Goodness, no.
This panel appears to be a reference to Stefonknee Wolscht, a middle-aged transgender person who made tabloid news in 2015 after coming to adopt a childlike persona in private as therapy for depression and anxiety. Possibly not the healthiest coping method, but the notion that a “transage” movement accompanies the transgender movement and that adults are transitioning into kindergarteners is a caricature, nothing more.
More irony: this comic was published by people who say that there are evil wizards with the power to curse people.
Here we have two men with a sign saying “love one another” being chased by a violent mob that claims to support free speech. Were this scenario to play out in real life, I have my suspicions as to which side Chick’s supporters would be on.
No Chick tract would be complete a Bible story, and this time around, we’re told that Satan’s pride made him the ultimate snowflake. Eve had a selfish streak to her, too, and it was triggered (geddit?) by the serpent.
I have to ask, do they seriously think this will win them any converts? Do the people of Chick Publications really think that people will read this and go “oh, yeah, turns out the transgender movement is a load of hooey, but this business about death and evil coming into the world around the same time a seprent’s legs dropped off makes perfect sense”?
I doubt it, somehow. I rather suspect that tracts like this are intended primarily for people who are already fundamentalists, but are facing doubts — doubts that can be temporarily quashed by joining together to laugh at some caricatured trannies. This isn’t piety — it’s bullying.
The theological portion of the tract spends time building up the notion that none of us are unique because we are all equally sinful… and then completey throws this argument in the bin by positioning the tract’s creators (along with the vanishingly small percentage of humanity that shares their views) into a spiritual elite that picked the right path in life, and so will be allowed to stand alongside God while everyone else is tortured for all eternity.
But hey, nobody expects self-awareness from a Chick tract.
Doris V. Sutherland 