LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back
I want to start this post with a list of the unreasonable demands made by trans people. They were printed on November 26 in the New York Times, in an article with the headline “Transgender Activists Question the Movement’s Confrontational Approach.” The thrust of the article, by Jeremy W. Peters, was that “transgender activists” had committed to unwinnably extreme positions, and that this was alienating would-be allies and causing the Democrats to lose elections. Here are the extreme demands:
Attempts to police language, such as excising the words “male” and “female” from discussions of pregnancy and abortion; decrying the misidentification of a transgender person as violence; insisting that everyone declare whether they prefer to be referred to as he, she or other pronouns.
There are all sorts of unreasonable demands that trans people could be making: HRT vending machines, or the destruction of all gendered bathrooms (to be replaced with those single-occupancy, locked-door “family” bathrooms you find in the mall, which are honestly much nicer), or for all children under the age of seven to be known by the single gender-neutral name “Chungle,” or for the Walt Disney Corporation to distribute all income generated by the Wizarding World of Harry Potter(TM) theme park directly into trans people’s bank accounts.
We could be demanding all that, and maybe some of us are. Yet after generations of organizing, decades of public trans discourse on the World Wide Web, after God knows how many books and movies and TV shows and podcasts, here’s what is still considered a crazy and aggressive overreach for trans people:
The right to call a tampon a menstrual product instead of a feminine hygiene product. The right to put pronouns in our email signature. The right to object when somebody calls us by the wrong name.
Identity politics get blamed a lot, when Democrats lose elections, and in analyses of Kamala Harris’ loss, they have taken quite a beating. I’ve more or less stopped fighting with people who hate identity politics, for the same reason that I don’t fight with small children — you cannot convince a five-year-old that Blastoise isn’t the best Pokemon, and if you try, all you’ll do is inspire a tantrum you could avoid by just letting him have his way. There is, after all, no official listing of Best Pokemon to which one can refer. (Charizard is better.) Nod, smile, save your energy for a conflict that really matters, like getting him to brush his teeth.
Identity politics, likewise, is impossible to argue about, because it means whatever the person saying it wants it to mean, but each person will defend their definition with overwhelming vehemence. Some leftists who object to identity politics mean (quoting Gillian Branstetter, summing up Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò) “the Democratic move toward an identity-based coalition that adopted the rhetoric of social justice while rarely its material demands.” Other leftists — like Mark Fisher, whose 2013 essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle” laid much of the groundwork for the anti-idpol sect we now call the “dirtbag left” — mean that people on Twitter are too mean to comedian Russell Brand.
I’m not kidding. That’s what the essay was about. Specifically, some people on the Internet had said that Russell Brand — “one of the few big-name comedians on the current scene to come from a working class background” and an enemy of the “gradual but remorseless embourgeoisement of television comedy,” which was apparently a pressing issue — was kind of sexist.
“In the febrile McCarthyite atmosphere fermented by the moralising left, remarks that could be construed as sexist mean that Brand is a sexist, which also meant that he is a misogynist. Cut and dried, finished, condemned,” Fisher writes. This merciless, shrewish judgment of Brand’s rugged working-man’s soul only went to show that the left had become ruthlessly “identitarian,” and could not appreciate Brand’s “great love of proletariat linguistics,” nor his embrace of “communism as something cool, sexy and proletarian, instead of a finger-wagging sermon.”
Russell Brand has been credibly accused of sexual assault by four women. He also runs a far-right YouTube channel where he hawks “magical amulets,” spreads COVID conspiracies, cites Tucker Carlson, and (of course) claims that “evolving gender norms are causing a ‘crisis in masculinity’ and declines in fertility.”
Which is to say, if you were calling Russell Brand a misogynist back in 2013, you were right, and you were also correctly identifying the right-wing sympathies that would come to dominate his politics — but that was “identitarianism," identity politics, and identity politics were bad. This is the magic of the anti-identitarian thinker: A white male multi-millionaire movie star who has been married to Katy Perry becomes a vulnerable member of the proletariat, who must be defended from powerful elites such as… women, I guess, and also annoying college students on social media.
“To get on the wrong side of transgender activists is often to endure their unsparing criticism,” writes Jeremy W. Peters, in his article on unreasonable trans activists. “Here we are calling Republicans weird, and we’re the party that makes people put pronouns in their email signature,” says Congressman Seth Moulton, who is making a habit of this kind of thing.
Neither Peters nor Moulton is what you’d call a staunch leftist. Yet they, too, are under the impression that white men with tremendous social and institutional power are under threat from mouthy eighteen-year-olds with Bluesky profiles and statement haircuts. Whether they come from the left or the center, all these arguments against “identity politics” are objecting to the same thing: Criticism, feedback, the ability for marginalized people to ask for certain polite concessions, such as being called by our own names rather than someone else’s. All of these arguments rest on the assumption that white men with power should not have to suffer the inconvenience of being criticized by their inferiors. As with the apparently controversial sexism of Russell Brand, it does not matter whether the criticism is correct, or whether it identifies a real problem. All that matters is that it is critical, and that it causes the person receiving it to feel bad.
All these complaints convey the same sentiment: My life was easier when I didn’t have to think of you as a person. My life was easier when I didn’t know you were alive. There is the wish that we (queer people, trans people, women, take your pick) will go back to being quiet, to being submissive, to being hidden, to answering to any name you want to call us, when you even bother calling us by name. If we can simply return to that earlier, easier time, everything will go back to normal — at least, it will for the guys making these arguments. “Normal” was not tremendously livable for queer and trans people the first time around.
So, from the center, and sometimes from the left, comes the request that queer people simply pretend we don’t exist, so that we won’t be inconvenient. From the right – and this is still, somehow, not "confrontational" or unreasonable – there comes the demand for us to stop existing.
Taking aim at veiled or subtle transphobia (or queerphobia, or sexism, or racism, or) on the left and center seems somewhat beside the point now. So, for that matter, do discussions of “what Democrats can do to win elections.” Those discussions all assume that we will have real elections in the future, or Democrats to run in them; I don’t think we can take either of those things for granted.
Donald Trump’s rise to power has been explicitly — and intentionally — Hitlerian, and calls to mind some of the darkest chapters of the 20th century. Horrific human rights abuses are now on the table, possibly already on the way. The leadership of this country was elected explicitly because they vowed to treat trans and queer people as subhuman and strip us of what rights we have. The men Trump is appointing to his administration are all overt misogynists, and several of them have histories of sexual assault.
I don’t have to complain about allies who fail to Check Their Privilege or examine their biases. I don’t have to look for hidden bigotry or covert aggression. Extremely overt aggression and degradation and hatred are now the order of the day.
But if that degradation begins — as I think it might — with criminalizing trans and queer people’s speech on social media, to push us out of the public eye and make us easier to victimize, then the Peterses and Moultons and Fishers of the world will have largely gotten what they wanted. You can only pick a fight on social media if you’re allowed to use social media. No-one can correct your pronoun usage when they’re forbidden to speak.
It is hard to fight for your right to exist when even your “allies” are pushing for you to be silent and invisible. The most silent person, the least visible person, is a dead person — the excision from public life that Democrats are willing to confine to language is one that Republicans are willing to make a tangible and physical reality.
We are afraid of losing our jobs. We are afraid of losing our rights. We are afraid of losing our lives. And the people with the op-ed columns and public platforms and Congressional seats are worried that we might say actually, my name is Steve now. They are afraid that one day, they will go to the drugstore, and the tampon boxes won’t be pink any more, and that will be all our fault.
A name; a pronoun; a product label; an email signature. These are tiny, marginal, largely symbolic demands. They are nothing like the demands we could and should be making. If trans people could ever focus on moving forward, instead of just not going back, we could make the world infinitely better — not just for us, but for everyone, because no-one actually benefits from the unquestioned reign of the cisgender patriarchal binary.
Actually, I take that back: Russell Brand benefits from the cisgender patriarchal binary. Everyone else would be better off without it.
Yet even trans people’s tiniest and least radical and most symbolic gains are cast as threatening, as illiberal, as confrontational, as just too much — and the gears of the world shift, not to make these tiny little accommodations in daily life and speech, but to eliminate trans people from the conversation, so that it can continue on old, bad terms.
I will speak as long as I can speak, and write as long as I can write. It’s basically all I’m good for. There may come a time when my ability to speak is constrained, and at that point, I am going to be dependent — trans people, as a whole, will be be dependent — on cisgender people’s ability to make noise for and about us, to care, to stand up, to not let the worsening conditions of our lives pass without notice.
I am asking you, the cis reader of this piece, to take up that mantle of being an inconvenience. I am asking you not to let the public conversation flatten out into a train of unquestioned white and cis and male and non-immigrant and straight voices, having debates with each other about how to stay in charge of the world. I am asking you to interrupt and make a scene and say no, that’s not right, actually, to make sure the conversation belongs to all of us for as long as we can keep it.
And, like all of the participants in this action, I am also asking you – for just one unreasonable start, one little favor in a world of good you might do – to contact your elected officials, particularly the Democratic ones, and tell them that your support is contingent on their willingness to vocally defend queer and trans people. That, if they decide pivoting to bigotry is the way to win votes, they will lose yours. It might not do much more than give them a headache, but even the right to give your Senator a headache is imperiled right now, so let's use it while we can.
If I have learned one thing, from all this, it's that our speech is tremendously threatening to those who hate us. I hope they're right to be afraid of it. I hope our words have more power than we know.
Many thanks to Julia Serano for designing this action and inviting me to take part.
Over at my other job: I wrote about the censorship of trans and queer writing under the Trump administration, and what you can do about it.