It’s hard to say whether this year’s spate of anti-trans legislation is actually worse than in previous years or if, combined with the hell of COVID-induced isolation and right-wing political resurgence, it just feels worse than in years past. Thirty state legislatures have had anti-trans bills of some kind introduced this year, and they tend to fall in one of two categories: banning trans kids from participating in the sport of their gender rather than be categorized by “sex;” and banning trans kids – and their doctors – from participating in gender-reaffirming therapies or medical interventions, including gender reassignment surgery, until they are 18 (21 in some of these infuriating pieces of legislation).
Legislatures and the special interest groups feeding them this shit have tried nonsense like this before – notably, with “bathroom bills” absurdly preventing trans people from entering the bathroom of their gender. But… this time around really does kind of hit different.
Maybe it’s because we got to see a real acute spike of transphobia in the UK last year, with groups like LGB Alliance and high-profile individuals like JK Rowling bringing anti-trans rhetoric to the fore, and American groups like the Heritage Foundation had a hand in this shit’s proliferation overseas. Maybe it’s because transphobia has always been kind of a default attitude in the US, a vital part of a broader sensibility of anti-queerness, to the extent that in many states it is still legal to kill someone you slept with if you think they were – or if they were – trans and they “weren’t supposed to be,” though the trans panic defense is slowly going away.
What I feel is that the legislators introducing this bullshit into state houses are bringing a special brand of malice to the proceedings that has been missing in years past. It was patently ridiculous when a bunch of doddering old farts tried to ban people from using bathrooms in public, but under the guise of “protecting children” (whose children, and from what?) these same Molochian supplicants are trying to aim for the collective jugular vein of the trans community by making it difficult or impossible for kids who know they’re trans, who know it isn’t “just a fad,” to make their own decisions about their futures, their bodies and their lives. There is a bloodlust here that seems newly-introduced, and I just can’t shake this feeling.
I’ve talked about this before but my primary motivator in a lot of the things I do – from my political ideology to my writing – is anger. And this has been both good and bad at times, and often both at the same time. My anger is mostly abstract: anger at systems and institutions, anger at ideological currents, anger at the general sense that “this is just how things are and there’s no sense in improving them.” While this anger has been a constant in my life since I was a teenager I have tried to be careful about who I’m actually angry at. I try not to direct this sense of fury I have at individuals, especially not people who decidedly aren’t the movers and the shakers of the world. Feeling hatred towards individual people is only ever something I do during special occasions, like when I’m imagining pissing on Henry Kissinger’s still-open, languishing grave.1
I don’t understand how a person could come to a perspective like white supremacist racism, sexism and transphobia and feel not only like they’re ethically right, but actively take pleasure in the hatred these ideological positions presume. Even before I understood myself better and eventually came out as a nonbinary ace person, I just… felt, in the same way that we “feel” concepts like fairness, that the world was plenty big enough for everyone – cis, nonbinary and trans, queer and straight, etc. – to not just exist side by side each other but to be able to exist interdependently with each other, and that shit like homophobia and transphobia was a waste of time. Even as I got drawn into the weeds around a lot of the inside-baseball intra-queer “Discourse,” I felt that, fuck it, there are 8 billion people – why not have 8 billion different and unique permutations of gender and sexuality? Wouldn’t we all just feel better?
Look, I was naïve but I don’t think this position was, or is stupid. I find comfort in the explosion of gender and sexuality away from the “straight-queer” “cis-trans” binaries/spectra. But I am still unable to understand buying into hate ideologies and enjoying it.
Because, okay. There are 30 legislatures (29, really – Arkansas already disgraced the plains states by passing theirs after a gubernatorial veto) trying to snuff transness out by making it impossible for trans kids to start transitioning. And this translates, to me, into 30 states where men in positions of relative power are actively bullying kids and teenagers, on top of the bullying they’re possibly getting from their peers, their peers’ parents, and their teachers. And nobody in this fucking moral frenzy seems to have stopped and gone, “Hey wait isn’t this a shitty thing we’re doing? Do we run the risk of doing much more harm than any negligible good we want to do?” And again, this might be naïve of me, but it kind of feels like someone in these legislatures should have done that by now.
I don’t know. I’m genuinely unsure how to reckon with these legislators at this point. How do you argue with them? On what rational grounds will they ever listen? What even possible fuckin appeals can you make? They don’t even care if their bills hurt cis-het people – they are absolutely prepared to cut off their own noses to spite their faces.
And while I know the answer to my main question – what is there to do? – it just fuckin bowls me over, regardless.
1Just die already, you zombie motherfucker.