The Gender War Is A Forever War
Do gay; Be crime.
In this instance and this instance only, let’s take Michael Knowles at his word. Shortly after telling a roaring crowd he’d like to “eradicate transgenderism from public life entirely,” he began threatening legal action against media outlets that characterized his demand as aimed at transgender people.
The immediate reaction by many to this hair-splitting by Knowles was to label it a distinction without a difference, frequently characterizing his rhetoric as “genocidal.” And true—he and his Daily Wire co-hosts routinely target transgender people, pushing for bans on medical transition for anyone of any age and making appearances alongside governors as they sign laws aimed at doing so for trans youth. They’ve called for teachers and doctors that support trans youth to face the death penalty, have referred to having a trans child as “a fate worse than death.” Taken as a whole, it’s not a huge reach to frame their anti-trans politics as eliminationist at best.
But what if, for the sake of argument, we take Knowles's word for it? What would it mean to “eradicate transgenderism from public life entirely”?
The concept that trans people are not a people but a sort of postmodern invention pushed by ideologues is hardly new—Julia Serrano traced the origins of “transgenderism” in UK anti-trans circles back in 2015, and even that neologism has a much older cousin in “gender ideology.” Originally coined by the Vatican, “gender ideology” is used as an epithet against all manner of post-sexual revolution legal and cultural movements, from feminists and gay rights to the dreaded transgender activist, and deployed by “anti-gender” movement leaders from Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro to Donald Trump.
Trump unveiled last month a sweeping plan to “end left-wing gender insanity,” ranging from bans on gender-affirming care, a Constitutional amendment legally defining “sex” and implicitly defining “transgender” out of existence, and the establishment of an accreditation agency that will require teachers to provide students a “positive education about the nuclear family” and threaten prosecution against any who refuse. Combined with the 2023 state legislative session thus far, defeating this “transgenderism” is no slight project, requiring a lot of persecution, censorship, and punishment aimed at controlling behavior and speech which flouts the anti-gender right’s standards for how good boys and girls are supposed to conduct themselves.
In truth, however, even this totalizing approach to gender nonconformity is still too narrow. As Knowles himself has acknowledged, the focus of conservatism’s construction of cisgender, heterosexual gender identities must be far more ambitious than simply taking the country back to the relatively recent time period when a frequently bipartisan consensus enforced transgender people’s absence from public life; the first mistake was, in his telling, failing to sufficiently oppose second wave feminism.
Taken from this perspective, the ideological belief in self-determination and legal equality regardless of sex could likewise be characterized as “transgenderism.” The unmarried woman or abortion patient, after all, is likewise rejecting the gender assignment Knowles and his compatriots would like to force on you. The project to eliminate this ideology from public life, then, must expand much further than censoring mere mentions of fluid gender identities and banning medical transitions. It must also criminalize abortion and birth control, impose dress codes, abolish no-fault divorce, and establish an economic and political regime that incentivizes heterosexual marriage, childrearing, and complimentary caregiver-breadwinner gender roles above all others—not to mention punish anyone who defies this taming.
The vagueness and ubiquity of gender norms leaves this project with no certain end point or rubric for victory. While transgender people flout more of these rules than cisgender people—revealing them for the construct they are—most people break them in one way or another, and even our elimination (were such a thing even possible) wouldn’t suffice. We are all gender non-conforming in ways big or small, ranging from our relationship to reproductive labor and capitalism to how we present ourselves to the world. A campaign enforcing gender conformity, then, will expand well past the relatively small fraction of the population that calls themselves “transgender.” Labeling the anti-gender right as genocidal against trans people is, believe it or not, letting them off too easy.
Whether he knows it or not, Knowles effort to separate “transgenderism” from “transgender people” has sat at the middle of queer theory and legal advocacy for the past century. In the realm of law, this is the divide between “status” and “conduct”—did, for example, laws barring sodomy target homosexual “status” or did they merely regulate homosexual “conduct?” While noting they aren’t mutually exclusive, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick famously framed this divide between “minoritizing” approaches that regarded a certain subset of the population as queer and “universalizing” ones which recognized the potential all people have to defy sexual and gender norms.
Sedgewick refined this dichotomy in her classic 1990 collection Epistemology of the Closet, written at the peak of HIV infection rates and amid a smoldering political debate over how, or even whether, the spread of AIDS should be opposed. For the conservative movement, AIDS was viewed as quite literally a gift from God, offering the fantasy of total erasure of non-normative sexual lifestyles and requiring nothing more than passive forms of violence—denying medical care to AIDS patients, defunding AIDS research, and censoring classroom discussions of AIDS lest it “promote” homosexuality. As Sedgewick writes:
The lineaments of openly genocidal malice behind this fantasy appear only occasionally in the respectable media, though they can be glimpsed even there behind the poker-face mask of our national experiment in laissez-faire medicine. A better, if still deodorized, whiff of that malice comes from the famous pronouncement of Pat Robertson: "AIDS is God's way of weeding his garden."
One sees the DNA of this approach in the push to eliminate “transgenderism” taking place in statehouses across the country by withholding the support systems, storytelling, and health care that help make trans life possible, threatening punishment against those who support it and censoring speech that dares to praise it.
But, as Sedgewick notes, the potential of every person to defy the sexual regime they seek to enforce means an actual “gay genocide” is impossible, queerness being not just born into every generation and demographic group but residing within each and every person:
Unlike genocide directed against Jews, Native Americans, Africans, or other groups, then, gay genocide, the once-and-for-all eradication of populations, however potent and sustained as a project or fantasy of modern Western culture, is not possible short of the eradication of the whole human species.
“The impulse of the species toward its own eradication must not either,” Sedgewick warns, “be underestimated.”
The anti-trans right got a slight taste of that this week when an old photo of Tennessee Governor Bill Lee showing him wearing a dress and pearls surfaced just days before he would sign a restriction on drag performances. One of dozens of bills introduced around the country and the first to become law, the law Lee signed placed restrictions on “male and female impersonators,” leaving intentionally vague what constitutes impersonation of a “male” or “female”—who gets to determine what a man or woman looks like? Even within their laws, then, the opponents of “transgenderism” are betraying the full scope of their crosshairs.
The experience of defying gender norms for amusement, convenience, or survival is a universal one even as specific populations are forced to do so more frequently and punished more harshly for it. Thus, a war against gender nonconformity holds all the promise for the authoritarian personality as a “war on terror,” a “war on drugs,” or a “war on crime”—an endless excuse for policing, surveillance, censorship, and violence.
Given how much of the ire invoked by Knowles and his ilk is targeting transgender people specifically, it may seem dismissive to widen our understanding of what this project is aiming to do. But when I hear the slogan “trans rights are human rights,” it feels disappointing to infer little more from it than “trans people are human people.” Trans rights are human rights because they are rooted in the rights all people should have to self-determination, bodily autonomy, and a dignified life free from persecution and violence. Dangerous are the lies of separatism and essentialism which would reduce trans rights to the mere demand for sovereignty over our lives alone, especially when trans people’s rights are braided within the broader right to live free from gendered enforcement for everyone.
As Sedgewick writes:
As gay community and the solidarity and visibility of gays as a minority population are being consolidated and tempered in the forge of this specularized terror and suffering, how can it fail to be all the more necessary that the avenues of recognition, desire, and thought between minority potentials and universalizing ones be opened and opened and opened?
Great article! And just to add, they do seem to be going after the whole ship in terms of trying to force women into more subservient roles and return us to a more male-centric society/culture (“men today are too weak because they let their women tell them what to do”)
Excellent analysis.