Illustration by Max Fleishman

Banana bread memes are never transphobic, unlike garlic bread memes

These are wholesome memes for the whole gender spectrum.

 

Miles Klee

Internet Culture

Published Jun 10, 2016   Updated Feb 29, 2020, 5:32 am CST

As the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and many other media outlets have exhaustively reported, Facebook‘s 240,000-strong garlic bread memes community has been torn asunder by—no surprise here—a controversial garlic bread meme. And here it is:

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We could get into how this meme is adapted from conservative arguments against LGBT rights (as the Post noted), or how one of the page admins professes to believe that gender is a binary (as BuzzFeed discovered), or how the garlic bread memes group is laughing their asses off as the media struggles to explain its drama.

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I’ll be honest, though: I don’t give a shit what these edgy 15-year-olds think garlic bread can or can’t tell us about the fluidity of human experience. Garlic bread may be delicious, but garlic bread memes have always been garbage, and their reactionary turn has only shed light on this ugly fact.

I submit that instead of dissecting or fighting about garlic bread memes, we should be celebrating their sworn enemy: banana bread memes.

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Make no mistake: Banana bread is fucking disgusting. It’s exactly as gross as garlic bread is addictive. I can barely stand to imagine a warm loaf of banana bread stinking up my oven. But because I am a mature adult, I can separate the bread from the meme. And banana bread memes are dank.

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The power of banana bread memes is so great that I can relate to them despite hating banana bread. Garlic bread memes just piggybacked on a popular and savory carb-delivery system in order to amass a legion of unwittingly transphobic weenies. Banana bread memes would never do that. They can’t do that. Because, again, banana bread is gross.

So don’t give garlic bread memes the attention and influence they crave. You don’t owe them that. There is a better world out there—a world of memes that doesn’t judge and doesn’t discriminate. A world, yes, of banana bread memes. The choice is yours, my friends. It’s time to taste justice.

Miles Klee

Miles Klee is a novelist and web culture reporter. The former editor of the Daily Dot’s Unclick section, Klee’s essays, satire, and fiction have appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, Vanity Fair, 3:AM, Salon, the Awl, the New York Observer, the Millions,  and the Village Voice. He's the author of two odd books of fiction, 'Ivyland' and 'True False.'