Creating Social Panics to Entrench Bias: A Brief History

Creating social panics about sexual problems that don't actually exist has been a favorite of reactionaries in the U.S. in response to civil rights movements.

In the 1950s, reactionaries claimed that ending racial discrimination would lead to white women getting sexually-transmitted infections from Black women in public bathrooms. If schools were racially integrated, they said, white schoolgirls would get syphilis from Black girls in shared school bathrooms.

 

These claims were racist and ridiculous. But many white people believed them, and this fear was harnessed to generate waves of resistance against racial integration.

In the 1970s, reactionaries claimed that prohibiting sex discrimination with the Equal Rights Amendment would mean that public restrooms could no longer be segregated by gender, which would lead to widespread rape of women by men.

 

The ERA would not have banned gendered restrooms--that was a lie. But bathroom panic was a main reason the ERA failed to pass.

In the 1980s, reactionaries claimed that protecting people from employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation would lead to gay and lesbian teachers and scout leaders sexually abusing children. Gay men were said to be pedophiles who would somehow be empowered to assault boys in bathrooms by employment nondiscrimination. A "crusade" against this was led by Anita Byrant, dramatically named "Save Our Children!".

 

This was homophobic nonsense. But masses of parents were filled with panic and hate, which slowed and reversed antidiscrimination efforts.

In the 2000s, reactionaries claimed that allowing same-gender marriage would destroy the American family and enable bestiality. Politicians equated same-gender marriage to claiming a right to marry a table--something only a society that had lost all sense could support. 

It was the reactionaries' assertions that were nonsensical. But between 1998 and 2012, 31 states passed state constitutional amendments banning same-gender marriage due to panic that the institutions of marriage and family would be destroyed by. . . marriages and families.

 

Now reactionaries claim that respecting trans students' lived genders will "destroy female sports," and laws that ban trans girls from playing sports with other girls have been introduced in over 30 states. You know what the real problems are? Sports for girls and women are underfunded and disrespected. And as for trans children and adults, we suffer poor health due to exclusion from gyms and athletic activity. Far from the mythic domination of sports, transfeminine girls and women are at particular risk from harassment and lack of a safe place to change or shower that keeps so many from being able to exercise where other people can see them at all, let alone compete in sports.

And then, somehow simultaneously with presenting trans girls as a threat to cis girls, reactionaries claim that their goal is to protect trans kids, who are said to be victims of terrible medical experiments, in which evil parents conspire with mad doctors to mutilate their bodies. Republican politicians are writing laws that hold no minor can understand what they are saying when they assert a trans identity--that it's like saying they want to be a dinosaur when they grow up. And they are pretending that evil doctors are pumping tots' bodies full of adult hormones and cutting up their genitals. None of this has any relation to reality. Nobody is doing genital reconstruction on kids (unless they are born intersex, and this is forced on them as infants, but that's another story). Nobody is giving adult hormones to elementary schoolers. 

The fact is that medical transition services for pre-pubertal kids consists of psychological support. Then, at adolescence, youths and their families are offered medication that simply postpones pubertal changes. This makes no permanent alteration to a youth's body--it just prevents bodily changes from taking place that cause despair. Some pubertal developments, like voice change in a transfeminine youth, are irreversible. Others, like breast growth in a transmasculine youth, can be surgically addressed, but that's much more invasive than simply postponing pubertal changes. That's why the American Medical Association supports puberty suppression for trans youth.

But if you look at commentary about these bills, there are masses of comments from enraged and panicked adults and fulminating politicians claiming that abusive parents are making monsters out of little children with scalpels and drugs. The reactionaries claim they are not motivated by bigotry, they just want to protect children. But  passing a law that states that a person's sex is "genetically encoded at the moment of conception" and "cannot be changed," as the law passed in Arkansas banning transition-related care for minors does, makes it clear that what this is really all about: enshrining the misgendering and rejection of trans people in law. The proposed law in North Carolina would even require schoolteachers to immediately inform a child's parents if they observe the minor exhibiting "gender nonconformity," making the policing of binary gender stereotypes a state employee duty.

Once again, we see a panic about sex and the cries of "what about the children!" being used to spread bigotry, dressed up in concern trolling. Anita Bryant claimed to be motivated by her "love of homosexuals" to be trying to save them by promoting homophobic discrimination. Transphobes today claim they are motived by care as well. But the fact that banning recognition and care for trans youth is likely to lead to increased despair and suicidality doesn't deter them at all, because "care" is not the real motivation here. Bigotry is, fanned into a firestorm by a social panic.

The thing you have to remember about sexual panics is that they are not spontaneous or random. They are purposefully generated by people with power to prevent social change.

We have to call out these manufactured panics they are. Putting current faux fears in the context of past ones can help make it obvious. So share these histories!

The 4chan "#SuperStraight" Troll Campaign

On March 6th, 2021, the hashtag #superstraight was one of the top trending topics on Twitter in the U.S. and Canada. There was a #SuperStraight Discord server bursting with activity. #SuperStraight TikToks were suddenly appearing. 

What is "SuperStraight," you might ask?

Supposedly, #superstraight people are a newly-recognized sexual orientation group who are only attracted to cis men or cis women. The claim is that anyone who defends LGBT rights must recognize, respect, and fight for the rights of SuperStraights. 

Soon, the #SuperStraight posts were joined by posts from people claiming to ally with, or have identities as, #supergay, #superlesbian, or #superbi, being also only attracted to cis people.

But let's be clear. The #SuperStraight campaign is really is a trolling attack hatched in the cesspit of the /pol board on 4chan. Here you can see it being discussed there on March 5th (warning: slurs galore):

Let's examine this post. At the top, you can see the trolling logo proposed for the #SuperStraight campaign. That's a Nazi SS flag, only tinted in the colors of the PornHub logo for lulz. 

Below the fascist troll-logo (which board members decided to replace with a plain orange and black graphic when actually taking the campaign "live" on social media), you see the overview of the goals of the troll campaign. The plan is to astroturf social media--that is, to claim to be an emerging grassroots campaign of people who feel they belong under the protective umbrella of the LGB community. The hope is that posts from 4chan "SS agents" will lead ordinary social media users to jump on the bandwagon. Everyday transphobes can reconceptualize themselves as "victims of trans violence," and instead of sitting silently, not wanting to show the world what bigots they are, be activated by pride, and speak up! This will, the 4channers believe, "redpill" zoomers (that is, it will reach members of Generation Z, currently the under-24-year-olds, and awaken them to the supposed evils of progressivism, setting them on the road to eventual misogynist white supremacy). Meanwhile, the 4chan trolls hope, cis lesbian, gay, and bisexual people will feel compelled to defend a fellow sexual orientation group, rejecting trans people as their enemies. Instead of an LGBT community, they'll speak of an LGBS sexual orientation community. This will allow transphobic cis LGB people to stop hiding their transphobia, since it will now be considered "woke!" Mwahahah.

How will this be accomplished? The claim is that the "SS agents" will "use the left's tactics against themselves." That's not actually accurate. The tactic being employed is that of the generic social media "gotcha" post. Such social media posts are popular among people of every conceivable political stripe today, in which a people seek to invalidate their enemies by portraying them as hypocritical. For the 4chan fascists, this means taking common rallying claims used by trans, LGBTQ+, or progressive communities, and deploying them against trans people.

The central conceit of the #SuperStraight campaign would be a twist on the transmisogynist classic: portraying trans women as sexual predators. The "superstraights" would be cast through a #MeToo lens, as well as that of the brave sexual minority coming out. The claim would be that trans people are trying to force cis people to have sex with them. For too long, the cries of cis straight men that they struggle every day with sexual harassment and coercion from trans women have been ignored, but now they are uniting and demanding to be heard!

Put that way, on its face, this seems a massive eyeroller. (Riiight, the trans ladies are forcing you to get all those boners, collect all that porn, and hoot at them on the streets!) But the goal would be not to state things that baldly. Instead, the plan was to exploit the fact that when transphoblic lesbians claim that they face sexual coercion and harassment from trans women, they get listened to, and cloak the #SuperStraight posts in this language.

Now, here is the thing. Many people, myself included, have written and advocated about how sexual orientation is based off of gender, not genitals. When you meet someone and find them attractive, the chances are very high that they are wearing clothing at the time. You do not see their genitals. And the central truth of trans experience is that it is our gender identities, not our genitals, that determine whether we are women, or men, or nonbinary people, or agender. When someone says, "I am only attracted to real men, not trans men," that is a transphobic statement (it calls trans men "fake" men). It's also almost certainly false, in that some trans men when dressed are indistinguishable from cisgender men, and as likely as they to be found attractive by a transphobe. On the other hand, many trans men are visibly transgender, and are not passed as cis people. But why should this be seen as "bad," and as making them unattractive? The only reason a person who is generally attracted to men would assert that they cannot be attracted to trans men is internalized transphobia.

It is indeed true that lots of people have internalized transphobia, and consider trans people gross. There is no doubt they really feel that way. But this is no different from the many other forms of social bias that strongly shape whom people are attracted to--ableism, fat phobia, racism and colorism, etc. These are potent, but they are not "sexual orientations." To define your identity around only being attracted to light-skinned blonde people is called "white supremacy," and is not some innate "Aryansexuality."  If a person says they only date non-Jews, they are not a "gentilesexual," and asserting this does not make me a "gentilephobe."

So, as a trans person, I object very strongly to people saying that they are proud of only being attracted to cisgender people. Crowing "people like you sexually repel me!" is cruel, and the sort of thing only a bigot would trumpet to others. People who are kind and opposed to bigotry are instead aware that all of us are socialized to have internal biases, and that we need to work on those, not take glee in them.

But you know what this does not mean? It does not mean I have the slightest interest in a relationship or hookup with a transphobe, least of all one standing in front of me saying, "People like you repel me."

Yet for years, TERFs have been attacking trans women and framing them as predators by making false claims that trans women objecting to transphobic disgust are somehow engaging in sexual harassment. A TERF spits that she is a lesbian, and that she would never date a trans woman because trans women are actually men. A trans woman responds that she is indeed a woman, not a man, and that her lesbian identity is no less valid than a cis woman's. The TERF then claims that the trans woman is demanding to have sex with her personally, revealing how "trans women are sexually predatory men."

This TERF attack is the tactic the "SS agents" seek to exploit. So we see:

Along with posts framing trans people as demanding that uninterested cis people have sex with them, there are posts making 100% unsubstantiated claims that people coming out as superstraight are being terrorized by rape threats by violent trans people:

Note the graphic, which seeks to twist the rallying cry that trans rights are human rights into a claim of a human right to be a bigot. 

Ostensible "superstraight" cis men argued for the need for safe spaces for (cis) women--not to protect them from cis men, but from vicious trans/nonbinary attackers:

The 4chan "gotcha" tactic unrolled as planned. There were saccharine allyship memes:

And there were humor memes, claiming allied empowerment in demanding recognition of  a shared "sexual orientation" of telling everyone how much trans people repel you, whether you were superstraight, superlesbian, supergay or superbi:

And indeed, the TERFs jumped right on the bandwagon with #superlesbian posts:

From both the 4chan astroturfed fake accounts, and from the TERFs who eagerly piled on, came claims that #SuperStraights were benefitting from male privilege in getting their "suffering" at the hands of trans people acknowledged where that of TERFs had been ignored:

These posts snuck in claims that cis lesbians and gay men have been crying out in vain for years about trans people trying to coerce them into sex--a TERF slander, weirdly and falsely being claimed to be shared by LGB people generally. These posts also followed the tropes employed in varied social media campaigns challenging privilege, seeking to use that to cloak the fact that cis people are the privileged group with respect to trans people. This is a classic DARVO move, reversing oppressor and victim. DARVO is the the long-favored technique of abusers--one that became way too familiar to all under the Trump administration, as turning every callout of his behavior on its head was Trump's daily occupation. That is why the /pol 4channers are so enamored of the man: he was their Troll in Chief.

So, many more social media posts by the 4chan "SS agents" and the various other transphobes who joined in followed other themes common in posts by trans advocates, LGBT allies, feminists, progressives, and the like. Using the DARVO tactic, they reversed victim and offender.

People who pushed back against this trolling attack, arguing that being sexually repulsed by trans people is a bad thing, a product of socialization, and something to seek to overcome rather than take pride in, were attacked as pushing "conversion therapy" on people with a superstraight orientation:

People who pushed back and called out #SuperStraight posts as obvious transphobia were insincerely labelled "SERFS"--"Straight Exclusionary Radical Feminists" who were oppressing brave SuperStraights--and critiques of TERF attacks mirrored back at trans allies.

People who rejected as ridiculous the claim that "SuperStraights" were an oppressed group who should be recognized and protected as LGBTQ+ were framed as biased gatekeepers:

Trans-allied critiques of transphobes who make outlandish claims about trans people, that ask if the bigot has ever actually spoken with a trans person, were also reflected back, DARVO-style:

The "SuperStraight movement" was claimed to have finally united LGB and straight people by revealing their shared dismissal of trans "bullshit", a cause for relief and celebration:

And in general, people who were trans/nonbinary or their allies who pushed back against the #SuperStraight trolling were attacked with "gotcha" posts, claiming that they were hypocrites for disrespecting someone based on their "sexual orientation":

Bonus points there for using a Harry Potter meme, now that JK Rowling is a central spokesperson for TERFism!

Whether this was a short viral flash in the social media pan, or if people will take up and actually identify with the terms superstraight, superlesbian, supergay, and superbi, only time will tell.

What I am hoping is that people will identify it from the start as a 4chan /pol troll. This campaign was initiated by literal fascists using an SS logo. "Superstraight pride" is 100% akin to the "straight pride" parade organized by Milo Yiannopoulis, or to "white pride" racist organizations. Just look at this "superstraight pride flag," modeled off of the Nazi war emblem:

 

 

 

Compare:

 

 

Or behold the profile of a Facebook spreader of #SuperStraight memes, overloaded with Nazi references:

The #SuperStraight campaign is a fascist trolling effort, as insincere as they come. Spread the word. 

Debunking Silly Claims about Testosterone

As someone who takes exogenous testosterone regularly, and is all too familiar with the fears and stereotypes people express about what will happen to the personalities of those who gender transition using testosterone, I feel zero surprise about the results of this study: testosterone does not make people less empathetic! Nor does it make people more likely to chose whatever course of action requires more... action.

From the article discussing the study, which looked at subjects making moral decisions about which lives to save in the famous Trolly Problem:

"'The results of the current study yielded no evidence in support of any of the four preregistered hypotheses,' write the authors. Those given testosterone were no more likely to prefer taking action than those given the placebo. It was predicted that they'd also be more prone to make utilitarian judgements that minimize total casualties; this wasn't true, either. Another hypothesis suggested that those given testosterone would be less sensitive to moral prohibitions, such as not choosing to kill someone. In fact, the results suggest the exact opposite is true."

That researchers thought having higher levels of testosterone would cause such consequences is the fact that makes my eyes roll.

Testosterone, like all hormones, has real biological effects! But our society is so invested in an essentialist, patriarchal, binary gender ideology that people believe testosterone causes a ridiculous range of gigantic, multicausal phenomena: power, competitiveness, strength, bravery, callousness, violence--everything people love and hate about our conception of masculinity. Those who love patriarchy want testosterone to define an eternal male power that must be deferred to. For essentialist feminists who see women as innately less problematic than men, testosterone is instead the cooties hormone that makes people abusive, impulsive, and smelly.

People naturalize a set of gender relations and stereotypes that are very historically and culturally specific and deem them eternal effects of a hormone. It's just silly. It makes as much sense as saying capitalism is caused by insulin or socialism by melatonin.

I can tell you that I personally am a much calmer and less angry person now than when I was full of progesterone and estrogen. I did not lose my empathy. I did not become more competitive; if anything, I because less so. I did not lose interest in complex moral reasoning. I did not become obsessed with beer. I did not lose the ability to coordinate colors. I did not decide feminism is a load of hooey.

I did get a lot hairier though.

Protecting Bigotry as "Sincere Religious Belief"

It has become so familiar today. Americans aching to discriminate cry out piteously that they are the real victims. Stopping them from discriminating is oppression! It's religious oppression--or, to be more specific, anti-Christian bias.

This week, the Trump administration's Department of Labor released a new proposed rule allowing corporations and groups that do business with the government wide latitude to discriminate on the basis of "sincere religious belief." Earlier this summer, the Trump Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule allowing employees of health care organizations to refuse to treat people based on their beliefs and "moral conscience."

Central in the public arguments for these and other similar policy rulings have been people who are trans, nonbinary and/or queer (with the usual transmisogynistic focus on transfeminine people). The specter is raised of businesses being forced to employ "men in dresses" who violate religious sensibilities and scare off clients. Clinic staff will be forced to respect and use patients' pronouns even if they believe their religion demands patients be mispronouned!

Administration spokespeople claim that the Trump administration rejects discrimination--yet it opposes passage of the Equality Act which would make discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity illegal. Why? Because the Equality Act "is filled with poison pills that threaten to undermine parental and conscience rights." In other words, the Equality Act is "poison" because it would prevent evangelical Christian parents from sending their queer and trans children to conversion therapy, and prevent white evangelical bakers from refusing to sell cakes to same-gender couples. Preventing discrimination would harm a "conscience right" to discriminate! Ah, the logic of these times.

But the phenomenon of justifying bigotry with religion was hardly invented in the Trump era, and has a long history, stretching back even before the Revolutionary War. Racial slavery was justified on religious grounds. There was the paternalistic lie that Africans torn from their homes and pressed into forced labor learned to embrace their enslavement because it replaced "heathen superstitions" with Christian salvation. There was the claim that dark skin was the "curse of Ham" or "mark of Cain," and that God intended the descendants of Ham or Cain to experience eternal suffering. And there were claims that various mentions of servants, bondservants and slaves in the Bible meant that God approved of slavery. (This ignored the facts that racial slavery in the Americas was very different from the typically temporary enslavement in ancient times, and that the Biblical story that does discuss an equivalent is that of Moses leading the Jewish people in a slave revolt, in which God punished the Egyptians with plagues for not giving the enslaved Jews their freedom).

Racial segregation was also justified on religious grounds. White evangelicals based this claim that the Bible required racial segregation on Acts 17:26, which reads in its entirety "And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation. . ." White evangelical racists claimed that these words meant that God created all humanity, but separated them by race, placing "bounds" around them, and that anyone arguing for desegregation was an agent of Satan opposing God's plan. Consider this photo of a pro-segregation rally from 1959:

In the middle, you will see a sign reading "Stop the Race Mixing March of the Anti-Christ." That marching "Anti-Christ," supposed enemy of all Christians, would be the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The fact that King was a Christian pastor brings up an important point. It is true that racial slavery and segregation were both justified by Christian arguments from the Bible. But the groups that fought for the abolition of slavery and for the civil rights movement that brought down segregation were both full of Christians (African American, white, and of many races) who based their positions on scripture as well. And today, the vast majority of white evangelical churches have abandoned former claims that the Bible justifies slavery or racial segregation. (The standard approach is to say that the former racist religious claims were never really made by many evangelicals, that most white evangelical churches and organizations were just going along with the common behavior of the time, and that the sin that they own as white evangelicals was going along with what everyone else was doing, instead of critiquing an un-Godly society.)

These histories show us a couple of things. One is that great evil has been justified in the name of Christianity throughout American history. (And we could list many more examples. Colonialism. The separation of indigenous children from their families and communities to "assimilate" them in mission schools. Framing Hitler as an agent of God sent to cause the nation of Israel to be refounded so that the End Times can come as predicted and the born again raptured into heaven while the Jews burn in hell.)

The other thing we can see is that each of these movements for evil have been opposed by Christians who base their opposition in scripture. Christian scholars today say, "[T]here’s a gaping chasm between saying that “Christianity provided the moral justification for slavery” and saying that slavery “was justified in the name of Christ.” It’s the difference between saying that a religion itself provides the justification for an action and saying that people claim the religion justifies the action. Just because people attribute their actions to Christianity or Islam doesn’t mean that the religious justification that they provide is actually authentic Christian (or Muslim) theology." In other words, Christian bigots get the Bible wrong.

But at the times of slavery and of Jim Crow segregation, racist Christians heard this argument from Christian abolitionists and civil rights supporters--and were supremely unpersuaded. The counterresponse of major 20th century white evangelical leader Bob Jones to Christian supporters of the civil rights movement? "These religious liberals are the worst infidels." Christians working towards racial justice and integration weren't just ignorantly misinterpreting the Bible, they were willful agents of evil rejecting religious truth, the sorts of sinners that churches used to burn at the stake. Christians who married outside their own race were like Judas, betraying Jesus.

The Bob Jones University policy against interracial dating and marriage, repealed in 2000

So: in every American conflict over the rights of the marginalized, there have been Christians on both sides, each claiming the other side is wrong about what the Bible says.

Disagreements about how religious doctrine should be applied to social life on earth are nothing new.

This is, after all, why the Constitution requires the separation of Church and State. The founders who drafted it had just fought a war of independence against Britain, in which the British saw the Americans as heretics. Americans lived in British colonies; the official religion of Britain was the Church of England; the head of the Church of England was King George. By rebelling against the King, Americans were told, they were traitors not just to Britain, but to God. It is due to this experience that the American Constitution was drafted to contain provisions for freedom of religion--and also against the establishment of religion as law.

This is why the longstanding religious exemption to the nondiscrimination policy for businesses working with the federal government has always been framed very narrowly.  Ordinarily, companies doing business with the government are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion. But under the traditional federal religious exemption, a Jewish charity working with a federal agency that has a kosher kitchen in their facility is allowed, as required by Jewish religious rules, to hire a rabbi to come inspect it to certify it is kosher, and not open the hire to people who are not rabbis. On the other hand, policy language and court decisions have stayed out of the business of trying to decide which religious belief is theologically correct. If there is substantial disagreement about what the religion requires, then the nondiscrimination exemption is not granted. Only widely recognized, codified tenets of a religion can be the basis of a request for an exemption.

The new rules written by Trump administration members are tossing that understanding out the window. The new federal contractor exemption policy allows for a vastly expanded right to discriminate. There are a bunch of ways in which it does this, but I will focus on two. Instead of just allowing businesses to restrict a job opening to a co-religionist, businesses are now allowed to require their employees to follow the claimed religious beliefs of the employer. In other words, they are allowed to fire you for being in a same-gender relationship, or embracing and supporting your trans child, or anything else they claim is counter to "adherence to religious tenets as understood by the employing contractor." That's true even if you share the same religion with the employer, but believe that you are acting in accordance with religious precepts, and your employer's interpretation of religious doctrine is wrong.

And that leads us to the most shocking element of the new policy. Instead of only allowing exemptions for officially recognized, little-disputed, codified religious practices, now contractors are allowed to discriminate based on any belief they personally sincerely hold. The old policy kept government out of battles over religious belief by refusing any claim based on a belief that is contentious. They new one keeps government out by accepting any and all beliefs, so long as they are "sincere."

And that is scary, because a lot of people sincerely believe all kinds of repellent and bigoted things.

Consider a 2014 (pre-Trump) survey by PPRI regarding Americans' opinions about whether businesses should have a right to refuse services to various sorts of people, based on the business owners' religious beliefs. While a large majority opposed the idea that businesses should have a right to discriminate against patrons, a disturbingly substantial minority spoke up for such a right. For example

• 21% of white evangelicals stated businesses should be able to deny service to atheists
• 16% of Midwesterners believed businesses should be allowed to discriminate against Jews
• 13% of Gen X respondents said businesses should be able to refuse to serve African Americans
• 26% of white evangelicals supported businesses being able to discriminate against "gays and lesbians"

While this seems disturbing enough, that was then, and this is now. By 2018, 51% of white evangelicals voiced support for businesses having a right to refuse to serve LGBT people based on "religious freedom." The percentage had nearly doubled. A comparison of total American support for a claimed religious entitlement to discriminate in 2019 is pictured in this graph:

Another troubling fact: in the 2018 survey, both Republicans and white evangelicals counterfactually asserted that Christians face substantially more discrimination in society that LGBT Americans. Over a few years that have felt very, very long, this pattern has gotten ever stronger. Victim and victimizer are reversed. Are white evangelicals being targeted by domestic terrorists, banned from the military, subjected to conversion therapies by their parents, beaten in the streets for being white evangelicals? It's the same DARVO tactic under which white supremacists frame families seeking asylum from violence as dangerous invaders, and "redpilled" men frame themselves as the pitiful victims of systemic oppression by women.

Christian women praying that a generic Houston antidiscrimination law will not pass, wearing transmisogynistic t-shirts reading "No Men in Women's Bathrooms"

There is something it is very important to recognize, though. And that is that while white evangelicals in the U.S. claim to speak for all Judeo-Christians, they very much do not. The percentage of Catholics in 2018, for example, who supported allowing businesses to discriminate against people identified as LGBT was 28%--still depressingly high, but not the 51% of white evangelicals. Many Christian denominations explicitly name discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity as sin, including Lutherans, Episcopals, Anglicans, and the Alliance of Baptists. So do the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist branches of American Judaism.

White evangelical leaders are in fact well aware that while they speak to the media and their flocks as representing all of Judeo-Christian belief in opposing LGBTQ+ rights, this is really not the case at all. A 2019 Pew study shows that same-gender marriage is supported today by 61% of Catholics, 66% of white mainline Protestants, and, in fact, 29% of white evangelicals. Another 2019 survey asked people their opinion on the position--supported by evangelical leaders and adopted by the Trump administration--that the law should not protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination. A large majority of Americans of all religious groups disagree. According to the 2019 PRRI survey, "Among major religious groups, the strongest supporters of LGBT nondiscrimination protections are Unitarian Universalists (90 percent), Jews (80 percent), Hindus (79 percent), Buddhists (75 percent), and religiously unaffiliated Americans (78 percent). Even majorities of faith traditions that have been historically more opposed to LGBT rights support these protections. Fully seven in 10 Mormons (70 percent), along with 65 percent of black Protestants, 60 percent of Muslims, 54 percent of white evangelical Protestants, and 53 percent of Jehovah’s Witnesses favor LGBT nondiscrimination laws." (The same study found that 55% of white evangelicals and 54% of Mormons favored allowing small business to deny services to LGBT people, showing inconsistency in some people's responses. But in any case, white evangelicals and Mormons were the only two out of all American religious groups in which a majority voiced support for a religious exemption to nondiscrimination laws for businessowners, and those majorities were not large ones.)

The beliefs of white evangelical Christians set them apart from the American religious norm.

In particular, many people have noted that American white evangelicals have become strangely obsessed with sex, gender and sexuality. Their political activism centers rejecting gender egalitarianism, premarital sexuality, contraception, abortion, same-gender relationships, nonbinary gender identities, and gender transition (except in the case of children born intersex, in which case seeking sex change surgery is made mandatory). This is formally codified in the Nashville Statement. Putting it less formally was the Modesto, CA "straight pride parade" organizer Don Grundmann, who said, there are "two religious views of the world. One is Christianity, which is represented by heterosexuality, a culture of life, and its opponent is the LGBT movement, which is represented by an opposing religion and an opposing view of life.” Having a egalitarian stance toward sex, gender and sexuality is a "religion," and evangelical Christianity is its inverse. A popular white evangelical approach to this today is to frame a demand for heterosexuality, cisgender identity, limiting sex to the marital and procreative, and requiring wifely submission to a husband as a sort of zero-th commandment: implicit, but the foundation of all Christianity.

A friend of mine who is an Anglican priest said bluntly that this should be understood as anti-Christian. Jesus says nothing in the New Testament about contraception, abortion, same-gender relationships, nonbinary gender identities, or gender transition. But he has a great deal to say about duties to feed the poor, visit the sick and imprisoned, care for migrant people, and love all of humanity. That's why my priest friend devotes herself to serving, without judgment, people who are suffering at society's margins--homeless, trans, addicted, undocumented, dying in hospice, survivors of sexual abuse. To spend one's energies judging, vilifying and seeking to exclude people is the exact opposite of what she reads Jesus telling people to do throughout the New Testament.

Also, she says making up a fundamental commandment that is nowhere in the Bible and calling it Biblical is heresy.

Christians at a Pride parade

As we have seen before, battles for freedom, justice and equality in America regularly have Christians on both sides, each claiming the Bible supports their position. Personally, I find my priest friend's theology vastly more convincing. But the problem is, there is no doubt that most religious bigots sincerely believe that God is on their side.

So, is opposition to queer, trans, nonbinary and intersex people the "religious position" in the U.S.? Clearly not. Is it the Christian position? Not according to a majority of Christians. But under the new Trump administration rules, medical practitioners and clinic staff can turn us away, and businesses fire us or refuse us service, so long as they claim being LGBTQIA+ is against their religious beliefs. And of course, they can do the same to any other marginalized group.

Consider, for example, these two other examples just this week:

In North Carolina, a sheriff's deputy was assigned to train a new co-worker. He refused to work with the new deputy because she was a woman. His supervisor told him training the new deputy was a job requirement, and he had to do it or he would be fired. He still refused, and he was fired, and now he is suing for religious discrimination. He claims to be following the "Billy Graham Rule"--that a man and woman who are not married must not be alone together. His lawsuit states that he “has a sincerely held religious belief against working alone in his patrol car in isolated areas with a female who is not his wife.”

Under the white evangelical position that Trump is happily allowing Mike Pence to promulgate, not only is the man who was fired in the right, but entire businesses can choose to hire only men, lest a man and woman who are not married wind up in a room alone together.

And then there's this example: a candidate for a City Council position in Marysville, Michigan stated during a candidates' forum that her aim would be, to "[k]eep Marysville a white community as much as possible" and to keep out the "foreign-born." After the forum, when speaking to the local newspaper, she explained that her position was based on her being a Christian. “What is the issue is the biracial marriages, that’s the big problem. And there are a lot of people who don’t know it’s in the Bible and so they’re going outside of that.”

Interracial marriage has been legal since the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case in 1967. Mildred and Richard Loving had been arrested after traveling from Virginia, where interracial marriage was banned, to Washington DC, where it was legal, to get married. The judge in the Virginia county criminal court that found them guilty wrote, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

I'm sure the judge in the Loving case was sincere in his religious belief, and that the Marysville candidate is, too.

Richard and Mildred Loving

Frankly, I can't imagine how one could see persecuting people by denying them the right to marry, refusing to work with them, torturing them in attempts to "convert" them, or refusing them access to lunch counters or bathrooms or medical services could be embraced as a "moral conscience." According to the religious precepts of my faith, all of these are acts of evil which I am required to oppose and seek to repair.

But while my religion is an important personal motivator for my secular actions, I completely oppose the idea that religious beliefs should determine what people are allowed to do in civic society. In a nation where people have very differing religious and ethical beliefs, this will render nondiscrimination laws useless. White supremacists' "conscience" tells them that racial discrimination is a great good. Eugenicists' "conscience" tells medical practitioners to withhold treatment from disabled people so that they will die rather than reproduce. Whatever form of evil and discrimination you can imagine, someone out there has a religious justification for it that makes sense in their mind and that they sincerely believe.

You would think white evangelical Christian leaders would see that the position they are pushing through dominionist activism can be used against them, just as it can against other groups. I am sure there are many people in the U.S. whose conscience tells them a business should to refuse to bake a cake for people who have refused to bake a cake for a same-gender couple.

Actually, however, I am sure white evangelical Christian leaders see this very clearly, and lust after it. Because in our weird historical moment, white evangelical Christians, other Trumpist Republicans, and the entire internet manosphere is in love with a victim narrative. Remember, that's where this post started: with piteous claims that antidiscrimination laws are persecuting Christians. We live in an era where a whole lot of white people see themselves as the "real victims" of racism, where "redpilled" men see themselves as victims of systemic oppression by women, etc. etc. etc. For white evangelical Christians, this takes the form of a faith-under-fire narrative, under which they can paint themselves as noble martyrs. The thing is, being a martyr in the "War on Christmas," where the wounds one suffers are receiving greeting cards that say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," lacks much gravitas and is kind of embarrassing. How much better it would be to face real discrimination, being denied service at a bakery and getting to have a sit-in!

The vision of opponents of social justice movements today is that being a member of an oppressed group is lucky and fun, something that will get you political power and social media fame and free government handouts. The privileged are oppressed because they lack this oppression!

As those of us who face actual marginalization know, the reality is vastly different. It looks like refugee children being ripped from their parents' arms and kept in cages. It looks like being bullied and beaten at school and rejected by parents, leading over 40% of all trans/nonbinary youth to attempt suicide. It looks like being stereotyped as dangerous, overpoliced, and treated unequally by courts so that one in three African American boys can expect to grow up to spend time in prison, as opposed to one in 17 white boys. Oppression isn't fun, it doesn't make you famous, and you don't get to laze around on mythic lakes of "free government handouts for minorities." If white evangelical Christians were to really experience systematic oppression in the U.S., they'd learn that.

But that lesson has not been learned, so here we are.

And that is why everyone who wants discrimination in the U.S. to be illegal must fight the "sincere religious belief" and "moral conscience" exception policies being enacted by the Trump administration tooth and nail. And while white evangelical Christian leaders aren't concerned, and are in fact psyched by the idea that these exemptions will mean people like them actually get discriminated against, too, I suggest we make it clear we are fighting on everyone's behalf, including that of their followers. Because while it might very well be satisfying to give people a taste of their own medicine, a nation where every person is free to spit on their neighbor is a dystopic nightmare.

It's also hardly what I believe the words "love your neighbor as yourself" mean. But since oppression and cruelty have a long history of being supported by religious justifications, we have to step outside of religion into the laws of civic society to end discrimination--and religious exemptions defeat that purpose.

American Attitudes Towards Trans People Are Not Great

Americans seem to have the impression that LGBT people in the U.S. have more rights and get more respect than in most places. In particular, I've run into many Americans who think that trans rights have been advancing here at mach speed. If they're transphobic, of course, they frame this as some horrible threat to society that must be undone. But I've encountered a lot of cisgender Americans who understand themselves as generally supportive of the LGBT community who still say that the pace of change when it comes to trans issues has been so fast it's hard for them to keep up, so let's just slow down. The U.S. may be the most socially advanced country, but we don't need to get crazy.

Well, this fall an international study was conducted in 27 countries on attitudes towards trans people. And what it shows is that rather than being the most "advanced" in its acceptance of trans people, the U.S. population has a much more negative attitude towards trans people than the norm.

Consider these findings:

1. Americans are the most likely to say they would intentionally misgender trans people (call a trans woman "he," a trans man "she," and refuse to use any gender-neutral pronoun). For example, there are almost twice as many Americans who say they would intentionally misgender trans people than there are Australians or Canadians who say this.

2. Americans are three times more likely to say being trans is a mental illness than are citizens of Italy, Spain, Argentina or France.

3. Americans are more likely than study participants in any of the other surveyed countries to frame being trans as "sinful."

4. "Americans are the most likely to say that society has gone too far in allowing people to dress and live as one sex even though they were born another (36%), while people in Japan are least likely to agree with this sentiment (9%)."

So, you may hear people telling you that America is "way out there" when it comes to trans rights, and needs to slow down. In fact, the U.S. is dragging way behind the international community when it comes to accepting and supporting trans people.
Americans need to know that, step up, and do better.

When #MeToo Celebrities Fail Trans Women

If celebrities are going to profit off of being the figureheads for our collective traumas, then we have the right to demand they do it right.

Trans people are sexually victimized at a sadly high rate. All victims of sexual harms deserve to be respected and represented by those treated as the spokespeople of the #MeToo movement. Unfortunately, that's not the case. I want to speak out about a nasty case of ally fail that took place this week, when a presumed spokesperson for abuse victims shouted down a trans woman.

This is Rose McGowan. You probably know who she is, but if you don't, she's best known as an actor playing one of the attractive witch sisters on the aughties show Charmed. Recently, what she's been famous for is being one of the victims of sexual assaults by Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein kept the story of his assault of McGowan quiet for a decade through a combination of paying her settlement money and hiring agents to keep the story out of the press. That McGowan was sexually assaulted was horrible. That Weinstein could get away with it, appalling. McGowan was victimized and she has my complete empathy for that.

When the news that Weinstein had assaulted and sexually harassed at least 8 women finally broke last October, McGowan initially refused to comment. But after a few days, she became part of the breaking wave of celebrity women speaking out about having been sexually assaulted or harassed by powerful Hollywood men. This was the start of the #MeToo movement. Rose McGowan became a hero of the movement on Twitter, when her account was suspended for 12 hours for allegedly violating Twitter's privacy policy, in the midst of her sending a flurry of tweets about Weinstein. This led to mass outrage about the silencing of victims of sexual abuse. McGowan's actions were one element triggering the birth of #MeToo, and I respect that.

The #MeToo movement detonated by the Weinstein news coverage quickly swelled and spread. Celebrities and scientists and political aides and grad students and masses of ordinary people--a majority of them women, but including men and others--joined in calling out their abusers. People told their stories, to reporters, on social media, in classrooms and face to face. It was an important moment of mass disclosure and mass confrontation.

The #MeToo movement continues to have social influence, and as one of the innumerable victims of sexual assault, that is very important to me. But there is an issue that arises in our contemporary world dominated by media, for-profit and social, and that is the issue of representation. Whose voices get amplified? Who is the face of the movement, and how is that person chosen? Who gets to profit off of their victimization, and who instead pays a steep price for speaking out? Will the person who gets to speak for us represent us well? Represent us all? Or will they actually kick some of us in the teeth while being celebrated as heroes?

Rose McGowan has become a key face of the #MeToo movement. She just published a memoir, Brave, about her experiences with Harvey Weinstein. A five-part E! documentary about her experience has also just started to screen. She's doing the full tour of news and entertainment shows to promote her book and talk about what happened to her and what she did about it.

McGowan is a victim, but she's also someone who is getting a whole lot of profit out of telling her story--both in the direct form of the money she's being paid for her book, documentary, etc., and in the form of revived and amplified celebrity. I don't have a problem with that, in principle. Imagine a world in which every one of us who has been abused received karmic retribution in our own lifetimes, and became rich and powerful, while those who harmed us made to apologize on national media. That would be cool.

That's not going to happen, unfortunately. A sadly small percentage of the victims of sexual harassment or assault will ever see any justice. Just a tiny handful will become rich and famous as the media faces of our collective suffering. Ideally, those fortunate few would be selected for a good reason. Perhaps they suffered the ghastliest abuse. Maybe they worked for years to directly aid abuse victims. Perhaps they are excellent spokespeople who have put in years studying people's experiences, and know how power and marginalization and abuse work, how they play out differently according to class, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and the full range of social statuses--and can explain this to people.

This being America, though, usually the people selected to profit by being spokespeople are celebrities. Like Rose McGowan. That's not fair, but that's the way our culture currently works. We ordinary people will rarely become the media face of a movement. But we can at least demand that the celebrities chosen to represent us do that: represent us.

The problem, of course, is that celebrity relates to social privilege. One of the earliest aims of the #MeToo movement was to call out men's dominance of the entertainment industry and abuse of that power. We live in a world of #OscarsSoWhite. The underrepresentation of people from marginalized groups among our media figures is pervasive. And so we wind up with spokespeople like Rose McGowan: a white cisgender woman who this week shouted down a trans woman, in the process making transphobic comments and spewing out colorblind racism.

Here's how that went down. McGowan was speaking at a book release party for her memoir, Brave. People from the audience were asking her questions. And a trans woman pointed out that trans women suffer extreme rates of sexual and physical violence, and asked McGowan to speak to that. Her motivation for asking McGowan this undoubtedly came out of statements McGowan made in an interview by RuPaul last summer, in which McGowan framed trans women as really men who have no idea what real women go through.

McGowan's response was to deny that trans women face more victimization than cis women, then to put a happy face on that by calling the trans woman "sister" and saying "we're the same"--a gesture, I take it, of McGowan's positioning herself as a good spokesperson for trans women victims of sexual violence.

The woman who asked the question was not happy with the response, and she and McGowan spoke and then yelled over one another. The trans woman was removed by security, chanting "white cis feminism" all the while. And then McGowan proceeded to yell and rant at the audience. She was outraged at being called cisgender and at having her whiteness pointed out. She screamed,

"Don’t label me, sister. Don’t put your labels on me. Don’t you fucking do that. Do not put your labels on me. I don’t come from your planet. Leave me alone. I do not subscribe to your rules. I do not subscribe to your language.

"You will not put labels on me or anybody. Step the fuck back. What I do for the fucking world and you should be fucking grateful. Shut the fuck up. Get off my back. . . I didn’t agree to your cis fucking world. Ok? Fuck off. . .

"I’m fucking mad with the lies. I’m mad that you put shit on me because I have a fucking vagina and I’m white or I’m black or I’m yellow or I’m purple. Fuck off. All of us want to say it. I just do. . .

"There’s not a network here devoted to your fucking death. There’s not advertisers advertising tampons with a camera lovingly going up a girl’s body as she’s being lovingly raped and strangled. Piss off. And until you can collect that fucking check, back up. My name is Rose McGowan and I am obviously fucking brave.”

What this rant presents is in fact a Top Hits of white feminist colorblind racism, trans-exclusionary feminism, and self-aggrandizing bad allyship. Shut up and be grateful, trans woman. Terrible things happen to cis white girls! I don't experience cis privilege or white privilege. You're attacking me because I have a vagina and for the color of my skin. I don't care if people are black or white or purple, and by bringing up my whiteness you are the real racist. (But I do care about what genitals people have, oh yes, and make presumptions about what is in your pants! And I refuse to call myself a cis woman, because that's a trans imposition, more proof that trans women are really men trying to control the real women.) I'm so brave I'm willing to shout down a trans woman, something everyone wishes they could do, but is too afraid!

Ugh.

Herein lies the main problem of the spokespeople of contemporary social movements being, not the most qualified person, but the most famous one. You wind up with somebody who has little awareness of their own privileges. You wind up with someone who is below the 101-level of understanding how privilege works. They still see it as an on/off switch. "I've been victimized, so I am not an oppressor." They haven't yet learned to see that all of us have dozens of social statuses, and enjoy privilege along some and endure marginalization along others. They haven't yet done the work to examine how they themselves are benefitting from the marginalization of others. You get people speaking for a social justice movement who are themselves bigots. You get transmisogynists who paint trans women as a sexual threat rather than as sexual victims. You get the familiar, specious argument that as victims of sexual assault by cis men, because they frame their bias against trans women in terms of fear of assault, cis women's transmisogyny should be validated rather than decried.

You get people who frame as personal attacks on them calls for them to recognize how being a person of color or trans or otherwise socially marginalized makes victimization worse. You get people who present those who critique their inadequate spokespersonship as the supposed problem with progressives today. You know: the complaint of a "circular firing squad."

Attacking one's allies because their choice of terms is anything other than 100% perfect is bad, to be sure. But this is something else. This is calling out transmisogyny and colorblind racism on the part of someone who is supposed to be the public voice of #MeToo. You cannot be the voice of people who deal with so much worse crap than you do, as a white cis celebrity, if you are in denial about your privileges, or worse, actively voicing bigotry.

This was #MeToo fail. And we all have the right, and the responsibility, to call on our media spokespeople to stop failing us.

Rose McGowan, you have my complete sympathy and solidarity with regard to your having been sexually assaulted. But you are harming my family, my communitymembers who are not cis white women, and I demand you do better in exchange for your profiting as our figurehead.