Bigmouth Strikes Again

In the early 20th Century, there was a moral panic: the number of people saying they were left-handed rose from 2% of the population to 11%. Left-handed people were routinely demonised, with entire books being published about the newly discovered sickness of left-handedness. The word sinister, which means malicious or devious, is derived from the Latin word for left.

The number of left-handed people in the world has stayed at around 11% ever since. It’s not that there were suddenly more left-handed people. It’s that over a relatively short period of time we stopped forcing left-handed people to pretend they were right-handed and punishing them if they didn’t comply.

It turns out that when you make the world less dangerous for a particular group of people, those people are more likely to reveal who they are instead of staying hidden for fear of consequences.

There’s a new study doing the rounds that shows that the number of gay, lesbian and transgender people is significantly higher among  Generation Z than it is among the preceding generation, the millennials – and the proportion among millennials is higher than it was in Generation Y, which in turn was higher than my generation, Generation X, which in turn was… you get the idea. If you graph the numbers of people comfortably admitting to be gay, bi, pan, lesbian or trans, it’s a steady upwards slope.

It also gives the lie to the idea that trans people are somehow erasing lesbians or forcing lesbians to say they’re trans men instead; the number of people who say they’re lesbian is up from 0.8% in the previous generation to 1.4% now.

Here’s the US version. The UK polling data is very similar and shows the same pattern. 

The fact that there are more LGBT+ people coming out doesn’t mean that there are suddenly more LGBT+ people. It means that fewer LGBT+ people are forced to stay in the closet.

I think many cisgender, straight people are unaware of just how recent the improvements in LGBT+ rights are. The same “gross indecency” law used to persecute gay man, wartime hero and computer pioneer Alan Turing in the 1950s didn’t leave the statute books in Scotland until 2013. Until last year, New York had a “walking while trans” law that saw trans women arrested simply because they were trans in public. Being trans was still classified as a mental illness (as were homosexuality and female hysteria in previous decades) as recently as 2019. Equal marriage didn’t reach Northern Ireland until last year.

We were always here. But for many of us, it wasn’t safe to say so. And in many parts of the world, it still isn’t.

An excellent piece in The New Republic about the women trying to remove trans girls from sports.

It’s no coincidence that so many Christian Right groups and other anti-LGBT+ groups use “mums” or “mothers” in their statements: we associate motherhood with kindness, not bigotry and cruelty. But of course mothers can be just as bigoted, just as vicious and just as cruel as anybody else.

Somehow, cisgender mothers of cisgender girls have positioned themselves as having a stake in the fight for trans rights. They follow from a cadre of mothers in American civil rights history who have at times successfully repackaged discriminatory policies as necessary in order to protect the children—their children and children of people like them. In the late 1970s, there was Anita Bryant, the conservative orange juice pitchwoman who lobbied against gay rights on the false premise that gay and lesbian teachers were a danger to their (presumed straight) students. Before that, but throughout the post–Brown v. Board of Education era, women in their role as mothers organized to block school integration. Maternalism is a handy shield against being accurately identified as fueling homophobia and racism. Here, the tactic has found a new face in the fight against trans rights. It is one that will be especially pernicious as anti-trans groups on the right scramble for influence in the post-Trump era in which they will have to reconnect their politics to something less obviously bigoted yet no less damaging.

…Alliance Defending Freedom is at the forefront of religious-right groups, who, after losing their war on same-sex marriage, tried to redirect their attack to trans people. Women and children have figured prominently in their campaigns—like those they say would be endangered unless lawsare passed to segregate bathrooms based on sex as assigned at birth, a means of excluding trans and nonbinary people from public accomodations. Historian Gillian Frank has noted the parallels between the myths about trans women making bathrooms unsafe for cis women and girls, which ADF and others have deployed in such campaigns across the United States, and the racist myths pushed by segregationists stoking fears about integration’s purported threat to white women’s virtue and purity. The idea of protecting girls is meant to win, and with it, they can fuel a stigmatizing moral panic about trans people.

ADF is linked to many of the anti-trans efforts in the UK too.

The spectre of trans women (as ever, it’s always women) dominating women’s sports has been invoked since Renée Richards played in the 1970s. Yet not one trans athlete has ever qualified for the Olympics, and the number of trans athletes across all sports is so few I think most people would struggle to name a single one. The few trans people who do participate in athletics are routinely beaten by their cisgender rivals; and the number of trans kids playing competitive sports in schools is microscopic.

But these campaigns are not about facts. They’re about stoking fear.

Justin Myers, aka The Guyliner, has written a really good post about LGBT+ History Month. Like him, I feel that there are big gaps in my knowledge of LGBT+ and feminist history. So it’s nice to be reminded that:

Nobody will judge you for not being exactly sure who threw the first chunks of masonry at Stonewall: all you have to do is show you’re open to discovery, respectful of the achievements made, and that you recognise the lessons available to be learned from those milestones, and the people who made them happen. Facts and feelings matter.

I’ve written before about the period immediately after I came out when I wanted to be seen as one of “the good ones”. I wasn’t one of the difficult ones, the angry ones, the ones who’ll make a fuss. I didn’t realise at the time that if it weren’t for those people, I’d never have been able to come out at all. That’s why I think it’s important to go back: to understand how we got here, and to understand how fragile progress can be.

It’s not uncommon for the newly out to push away what we see as stereotypes or anything that would make straight people turn against us… [but] You can only ignore the politics of being LGBTQ+ for so long before it becomes impossible. Your existence – as a gay person, a trans person, as a bi person, or if you’re non-binary – is political. Men and women – mainly those who are nothing like us and do not understand our lives – sit in wood-panelled rooms making decisions about you. When you can have sex, who you can marry and where, how you can express your gender, your access to health services, how the world learns about you – your freedom to be who you are is one of the most political acts you’ll ever encounter.

This is very useful: a selection of peer-reviewed scholarship about trans and non-binary people.

It is absolutely crucial that media outlets and universities begin to recognise that like climate denial, trans denial is based on unscientific views that are wildly out of step with peer-reviewed scholarship. When GC activists suggest that trans rights ought to be “debated” on the basis of “free speech”, they set the terms of a highly uneven debate between their ideological perspectives vs. actual scholarship. If we focus on the actual scholarship, we see that there are many debates to be had in trans studies around identity, embodiment, race, decolonisation, the relation to non-binary identity, research methods, and more, but those discussions are completely annihilated by GC feminists suggesting that the debate should be about the very legitimacy of trans people in the first place.