The attack on trans existence demands our solidarity
Pauline Hanson's disgraceful nonsense about a "transgender insurgency" would be funny if it wasn't so dangerous. For the rest of us, these are the historic moments where we expose who we are.
Make no mistake: there is a West-wide effort to exterminate trans people. You need to decide if you are going to be one of those throwing other people into the far right’s threshing machine of hate. Or are you going to stand up for other people’s safety?
And far more than their existence is at stake.
There has never been a society across the globe or history that hasn’t had trans and gender diverse humanity as an aspect. Sometimes societies enforce hiding; in many societies the public embrace of this truth has taken different forms. It is an intrinsic component of the ways human nature manifests. Both biology and psychology join the studies which recognise that gender is far more complicated than a secondary school education would have people believe. Anyone who says chromosomes only come in XX and XY is purely ignorant.
Fearful people see difference as a threat rather than a fact. Multiculturalism scares people like Pauline Hanson. Skin colour, religion, diet, language: it’s all a threat to her if people live in their own skins and their own ways. The blending of a fascistic Christianity with the illiberal Right’s politics allows the fearful the dubious advantage of calling people whose gender and sexuality they find frightening “sinners.”
High heels, dresses, earrings, sexy boots: there were so many ways to be peak Man in The West.
Trans people in particular are being made victim. Partly it is because they are such an infinitesimally small percentage of the population that they’re an easy target for bullying politics. Many people don’t know a trans person and get caught up in the Right’s perverted obsession with genitals. (Get a life.)
What we do know is that the high murder and suicide rate for trans people both reflect a neurotic society that can’t let people live in their truth.
For years, nobody much thought about what trans people were up to, letting them get on with their lives. The Catholic Church was not ready to let that stand and invented “gender ideology” as a mythic bit of nonsense to make Queerness “unnatural.” A fringe few feminists thought defining women by our biology would be useful, despite millennia of miserable evidence to the contrary. The white supremacists try to impose their terror of difference on the rest of us.
Trying to recruit average, inclusive people into far-right oppressive politics required a gateway, and trans people were selected. People who had never thought of women’s sport but to spit on it, or perv at women’s bodies, suddenly became “arch defenders of women’s sport.” The kind of men who bash women suddenly wanted to “protect” women from the trans people who were never actually a danger.
Statistically, the main danger to every demographic is cis men. One in three Australian men have reported using violence against the women in their homes. It’s always possible to find bad outliers in any demographic, but bad cis men are the overwhelming risk to all of us. That isn’t an outlier phenomenon.
All this is at the moment when men are doing more gender-affirming care than any gender performance in the history of the universe. Young cis men are apparently bashing themselves with hammers to be More Man. Some cis men teach that sex trafficking is Manly. Cis male influencers spend hours creating content over the exact angle of handshake that is Manly. The exact way to drink bottled water to be Manly. Whether bottom wiping is Manly. Whether making a woman orgasm is gay. For the love of god, guys, enough.
Our hearts should break for the young men thrust into a tumble drier of nonsense on how to perform the person they were born to be. Our hearts should break for the women stuck in a world with them. We should be terrified for the gender diverse people trapped in a moment of artificial, massively exaggerated binaries.
Reports are flooding out from the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit where professional women pretend they’d give up their vote to their Manly Husbands.
Fascism has been thoroughly embedded in borders and boundaries and breeding. Any of us who reject fascism should reject any temptation to embrace their nonsense.
Cis women are being hounded out of bathrooms because they won’t or can’t perform femininity the way the fascistic demand. Too tall? Too muscular? Short hair? Jeans? You might not be allowed to pee without someone staring at your groin and jaw to be sure you aren’t trans. For cis women, our vote, our educational and professional choices, our clothing: all of it is up for regulation in Trump’s world. Enforced breeding is absolutely in the mix. Abortion access is the first of the Trumpist attacks on cis+ women’s rights being imported into Australia. The rest will follow.
And the links between fascism and fossil fuel have long been documented. The two have gone hand in hand in Europe. Meet fossil fascism. This study tracks the way fossil fuel has funded the front groups driving the extermination of trans and other LGB people. American oil is intricately bound with Fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christianity with their associated bigotries. A strong strain of neoliberalism thought cis women’s homemaking role was obligatory for successful capitalism. Attacks on Queer (and cishet women’s) rights are not just a distraction from fossil fuel destroying the habitability of the planet. They are entwined. The combination must be opposed together.
We’re at a moment of crisis. The level of gender neurosis is off the charts on the Right. They’re only more neurotic about how one must perform Man and Woman than they are about how to perform The West. Their borders are penetrated and their terror radiates.
The only binary here is the one where you show whether you number amongst the decent people who stand up for others’ safety, or whether you are the kind to pick on society’s most vulnerable.
PS. I hope every man who has demonised trans people loses his girlfriend to a trans man forced into her public bathroom. Imagine her delight suddenly finding a man who doesn’t have to contort masculinity into some bizarre abusive performance, and (bonus) who knows how women’s bodies work.
Meet Laith Ashley:
In another place and time (sadly not this one) Hanson would be a caricature of idiocy and beneath contempt. How on earth did we get to this place that such a woman - a hateful, nasty and thoroughly corrupt one who deals only in grievances and is without constructive policies - commands such support?
The transgender population is a very small population. Its profile is raised by well-wishers and the prejudiced alike. For me there are some social issues to resolve in regard societies general difficulty to keep women as a whole, safe. Or rather, to keep men’s monkey brains around women’s safety, assuaged. This is not resolvable by dismissing how a large population of men and women work. Indeed, the sooner transgender advocates can establish social behaviour agreements that soften the safety radar for the larger population, the sooner we can all raise the political stakes for the largest assaulted group in our communities and carrying a weekly fatality rate: heterosexual women. Without addressing this, transgender scapegoats have got buckleys.