Our historical memories are woefully short. Don't be a TERF.
I mulled the first post of this site for a long time. Should I start with my favorite 1986 Soviet cartoon about a vulture trying to teach an ostrich to fly? No, but there will likely be a routine round up and breakdown of Soviet cartoons. This particular cartoon called "Wings, Feet, and Tails" (Крылья, ноги и хвосты) will likely be the first one. Another option was to think through the delightful Evil- an NBC turned Paramount+ supernatural/drama/procedural from the people who made The Good Wife. This show has everything: demons, cannibalism, the evil of incels and racist medical providers, scenes shot throughout Queens (!), nuns who call out "man who make their lives on sand," and so much more. This will likely happen once I finish the series. I considered diving into a place of interconnected grief given my grandfather's passing in late November and his recent resemblance to Oded Lifshitz. Given work deadlines, this too will wait, but if you've been feeling grief in your body over the state of the world we're living in, I suggest (as a highly secular Jew who will eat pulled pork any day of the week) reading Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg's work for some really humane, insightful, and inspiring ideas.
It is difficult to write a public facing blog while working two jobs and parenting an almost 3.5 year old. This draft has been sitting as a draft for months. By April alone, at least 300 international students have had their visas revoked as punishment for Palestinian solidarity organizing. Student organizers without citizenship status have been grabbed off the street and shuffled off to Louisiana, where deportation appeals are much more likely to be approved than the Northeast. This is not the "we are living in Stalinist times post"--but that is precisely where we are when the federal government decides that constitutionally protected speech must adhere to "national interests." Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the Republican party at-large, is hell bent on pretending that transgender people are a threat to the fabric of American life. It is not difficult to imagine how trans advocates will be politically persecuted once a precedent is set up through targeting Palestinian organizing. And this brings me to my first post.
The first thing I'm putting out into the world has to do with a contemporary prophecy, dehumanization, trans people, and gender.
Four years ago in an interview with The Guardian, Judith Butler, the philosopher who introduced the idea of gender as performance rather than something that is just inherently there, argued that tran-exclusionary-radical-feminists are adjacent to fascism and will enable it. The Guardian edited the interview and removed the section where Butler, in a true Cassandra move, called out the alliance between transphobes and fascists. Here is the excerpt from the original interview.
Butler’s clear-eyed connection between the anti-trans movement and authoritarianism is playing out currently after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency– for a second time. The word "gender" is now on a list of no no words that, if included in research, forecloses federal funding to anyone who considers this factually existing phenomenon. The rightwing move to turn the real existence of very real trans people into something that could be debated, relies on reframing gender as an "ideology"--something that one chooses to espouse as a matter of principle or belief. Gender, in fact, exists regardless of what principles or beliefs you hold. This year alone, 49 states have introduced 886 legislative bills targeting transgender people. 97 of these bills have passed and are making the lives of an already marginalized population hellish. The State Department has been directed to stop issuing passports with a gender marker of “x” and must instead issue documents that revert an individual’s gender to match the sex they were assigned at birth. One the many (AI written gobbledygook) executive orders signed by Trump, equates being trans with moral corruption, while another tests the waters for legislation that will limit the rights of trans adults by targeting gender affirming care for individuals under 19– effectively disenfranchising legal adults who are 18+. While the rollback of civil rights for transgender people is being publicly framed as an an “inconvenience” to trans people by some publications, Paisely Currah, a professor of political science and women's and gender studies at the City University of New York has a much more accurate description for what is happening here: “Full-throated explicit dehumanization.” You can read his article for N+1 here: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/full-throated-explicit-dehumanization/
Issuing legal documents that refuse to acknowledge existing essential aspects of people’s identities equates to a negation of those people’s identities. While nobody can be forced to recognize the dignity of their fellow humans regardless of their gender identity, what is most galling to me in the manufactured trans-panic is that trans people are, falsely and illogically, presented as threats to women.
This grossly misrepresents the real dangers that women face from intimate partner violence, state disinvestment in maternal health, and the curbing of reproductive choice. Sepsis is presently a greater threat to American women than any trans person who hopes to pee without fear of being harassed or hurt.
American women who, without a shred of self-awareness, pronounce their support for "The LGB but not the T" prop up the political project of the same people who are very excited to eliminate no fault divorce. Historically, women do not do well in circumstances where the diversity of gender expression is squashed. Failure to remember this is why Ballerina Farm has an audience of over 20 million. More on this later.
While I was writing my dissertation I spent more time than I thought I would looking at the letters of Magnus Hirschfeld and cycling through feelings of rage, awe, and sadness. Hirschfeld was a Jewish sexologist living and practicing in Germany in the early 1900s (do you see where I’m going here?). Hirschfeld's activist work included advocating for the decriminalization of homosexuality in the German Penal Code, and he worked with transgender men and women whose cases he documented extensively. Ahead of his time, Hirschfeld wrote that androgynous appearance and behavior was not necessarily connected to same sex desire at all, suggesting that men and women of all sexual and gender identities could play with gender presentation. Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was the first and only institute devoted to the study of gender and sexuality in Europe at the time and Hirschfield was routinely and violently targeted for his research, his Jewishness, and his gayness. Most of his work was destroyed by the Nazis.
What we see throughout history, is that a deep reverence of biological determinism and rigid gender roles are a hallmark of oppression and authoritarianism. The Nazis are, of course, the easiest example given their goals of eliminating queer people and the role that mothers were assigned in the Nazi project. The Soviet Union is perhaps a less likely culprit given that gains in workplace equality for men and women predated those in the United States by decades. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union leaned heavily on biological essentialism. Pat Simpson's research on Soviet visual culture points out that in the early years of the Soviet Union, women were charged with the literal production of a new human race that would help to usher in a new socialist reality. While women were given this "honorable" role, early Soviet maternal health campaign posters implied that women could not be completely trusted to use their bodies responsibly, and therefore had to be watched over by the medical establishment. Posters aggressively advocated for a "breast is best" campaign by straight up suggesting that mothers who did not breastfeed were seven times more likely to kill their infants. The seven graves on the left-hand panel are really a superb touch.
The bend toward biological essentialism has been euphemistically termed as “gender conservatism.” But if conservatism looks back to recreating a bygone ideal past, it is woefully misinformed to imagine a past where there was no deviation from masculine or feminine gender roles and gender non-conforming individuals didn't exist. Anyone who cares to crack open a search engine will find a long record of trans and nonbinary people across cultures and time periods. Next time someone tells you that the kids are turning trans because of social contagion, or Tumblr, ask where the social contagion came from in Weimar Germany or the Delhi Sultanate. You will then very quickly identify if you're speaking to a Nazi if that person mutters something about Soros or the Marxists.
Thank you so much for staying with me. I hope you'll come back. Hang in there, wherever you are.
Notes
You can read more about the of the editorial history around this interview from Jules Gleeson, Butler's interviewer. If you're interested in the extent of editorial censorship around trans issues in The Guardian and elsewhere, you can start here. There is also an excellent episode of You're Wrong About on the New York Times and its woefully inadequate approach to trans issues that you can listen to.
Resources
Below are some resources from organizations that support trans people.
Trans-Legislation Tracker: https://ko-fi.com/transbills
Sylvia Rivera Law Project: https://srlp.org/
The Trevor Project: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
Advocates for Trans Equality: https://donate.ncteactionfund.org/a/a4te
