In response to recent anti-trans action and its sympathizers
Holding LGBTQIA+ resources back does not prevent queer individuals from existing
April 7, 2022
I was assigned female at birth, but I am gender nonconforming. My pronouns are they/them. And, I am living proof that sexual repression and inaccessibility to resources and education surrounding LGBTQIA+ subjects doesn’t actually prevent gay people from existing.
Before I knew myself as trans, I had the language and the circumstances to know myself as a girl and as a woman. I was deprived of the ability to recognize myself as queer because I was raised up in a small, white, Reagan-loving, suburban town full of nuclear family units and in conservative Christian spaces where queer topics and people were stigmatized or outright rejected.
It was only through meeting people like myself upon moving to a new city as an adult that I was able to realize that I am not a complete anomaly, and that the conditions blockading access to LGBTQIA+ resources and information are still far too prevalent. Had I been able to access the language and resources to learn about myself as a child and an adolescent, I likely would have been spared a great deal of the heartbreak, trauma, confusion and loneliness that has led up to my present existence.
Policing behaviors, bodies and identities is fascist, and for a myriad of reasons — religious, political or otherwise — plenty of folks today are content living under it. To that I say: people’s identities and self expression are not up for debate. Abolish the binary. Protect trans kids.
Cis-heteronormativity is only naturalized because it reinforces white patriarchal power structures. If you are unaware of the legislation being passed across the country permeating blatant homophobia and transphobia, go read up on it. Texas is labeling parental approval of gender-affirming care for minors as child abuse. Florida is preventing gay topics from being discussed in public schools and are requiring that faculty members out gay and trans students to their parents. I hope it aggravates you. It sure aggravates me. Then, come back to this article and read on.
The gender binary manifests itself in dominant social codes through a stigma which makes the mere public existence and expression of queer and gender nonconforming folks into a problem. The ruling codes produce discourse which categorizes LGBTQIA+ identities as unnatural, creating a world where it is still so scrutinized, unsafe and made into such a spectacular incident to exist outside of the dominant binary code and/or heteronormativity.
Folks who exist between and beyond the binary structure of gender and heterosexuality are infringed upon by both surveillance and the ruling ideas of a society. From the masquerade laws implemented across the country in the 1940’s — which essentially prohibited people from presenting in a way at all contrary to their sex assigned at birth by requiring that a person wore (or did not wear) three gender specific articles of clothing when in public — to the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill (aka the “Parental Rights in Education Act”) that was passed in Florida just last week, our country is rooted in the criminalization of culturally contrary forms of gender expression and sexuality. Namely, we comprehend cisgender, heterosexuality to be the default for ourselves and for our children, and if one is to diverge from such identifiers, they are made immoral, unnatural, enemy.
Gay and transgender rights are not a struggle of the past. We are still fighting. The United States government actively participates in orchestrated attempts to eradicate gay and gender nonconforming people. From January 1st of 2015 to April 15th of 2021, there were nearly 350 anti-transgender bills introduced into legislation in the United States and, as is evident by recent actions in states like Florida, Texas and Idaho, the numbers continue to rise.
This is the very regulation of behavior and of bodies that Michel Foucault, a French philosopher and historian of ideas, cautioned us about. In his work, “Truth and Power” (1979), Foucault noted that “sexuality is far more a product of power than power was ever repression of sexuality.” Namely, diversion from cisgender, heterosexual behavior and identity is oppositional to the status quo and its very threat to hegemonic systems makes it even more powerful than the repression of such.
The regulation of bodies stems from the very threat of their resistance. The existence of gay and gender-nonconforming people is an act of resistance in and of itself, and therefore a threat to systems of power. They create ways of living, looking and loving outside the bounds of what they’ve been told they should be. They prove that it is possible to thrive outside of the systemic, the traditional, the naturalized.
We indoctrinate children into heterosexuality from day one — from the media consumed, to the forms of entertainment indulged in, to the clothes and colors that they wear — and nobody bats an eye. We reinforce the heterosexual lifestyle prescribed as ‘normal.’
But, gay kids will be gay, regardless of whether or not they are allowed to talk about it in school, in church or in the general public. I know this because I was never taught about anything LGBTQIA+ related in school. I was told it was punishable to be gay in religious spaces. I experienced strictly cisgender, heterosexual people and relationships in film, and in music and in story.
Yet here I am, despite it all, queer as hell.
Demosthenes • Apr 8, 2022 at 1:42 pm
If gender is a social construct, then it is also unnatural. So called “Cis-heteronormativity” is thereby default because it is the the closest to nature, that is, based on primary and secondary sex characteristics, not because it enforces any real or perceived “White patriarchal power structure.” Rather, it is normal because, prior to the development of culture, it was impossible for an organism to identify as trans or any other of the manifold and ever growing social identities which arose as a consequence of the creation and maturation of culture.
In your article you state: “Before I knew myself as trans, I had the language and the circumstances to know myself as a girl and as a woman. I was deprived of the ability to recognize myself as queer…”
It seems odd in the extreme, then, that you would oppose the anti-grooming bill proposed by Florida lawmakers and others. This bill prevents teachers and child-care providers from discussing or promoting socially constructed relationships of all sorts, not just relationships which exist as a consequence of cultural development, the “LGBTQA+” polity.
Considering you attribute your mental anguish to the enforcement of culturally derived gender identities, you ought to support this legislation, which will go lengths to alleviate the same challenges for children who as vulnerable to trans and Gay/Lesbian, etc. etc. propagandizing, as they are to heterosexual “normative” influence.
If enforcing so called “heteronormative” identities and views on children is immoral, so to is enforcing those non-normal identities onto those them. If you oppose the regulation of behaviors and bodies, then you should stand beside the legislators of Florida, Idaho and Texas and soon others, which have passed bills that do just that.
The Parental Rights and Education Bill is designed specifically to seek the outcomes you lament being deprived of in your own youth. Contrariwise, your support of enforcement of the countervailing narrative only serves to actualize the possibility of another level of “indoctrination” onto the already extant system of the assumed repressive social influences.
If you experienced repressive treatment in regards to your identity, that is regrettable. However, you substantiate in your own article that this did not prevent you from adopting these identities later in life.
This being the case, it cannot logically follow that it is necessary or beneficial to add to the sequence of extant gender indoctrination, a layer of equally ideologically informed, anti-normal propaganda. If “sexuality is … a product of power…”, then you should applaud and support a bill that removes that capacity from those in the positions of power over children who, like you were, are vulnerable to the influence of those who are trusted with the formative education of their minds.
Such an outcome clearly represents no threat to non-normal identities since, as you have already expressed; here you are, queer as hell. If membership to a non-normative gender identity is inherent and can only be repressed, not extinguished by social conditioning, then the absence of such social conditioning on young minds in the direction of the aforementioned identities, cannot result in the destruction of those identities and the absence of the promulgation of the so called “Cis heteronormative” views, which is as extant a mechanism of the anti-grooming bill, will only benefit those students who’s inherent identities lie outside the normative structures of human gender identity.