Sunday, March 27, 2022
The Real Problem When it Comes to Trans Kids and Althletics
Thursday, January 20, 2022
On Anti-Androgens and Covid-19
And among the factors we can blame for their death--along with MAGA intransigence and the rage for conspiracies and quack doctors profiteering--are magical beliefs people have, about testosterone in particular, and physical sex characteristics in general.
Sunday, May 9, 2021
Reconsidering Mother's Day
As a gestational parent, I am among many who have ambivalent feelings about Mother's Day.
The issue with this holiday is that it compounds so many things that need to be considered separately. So let's deconstruct Mother's Day!
First: the history. The contemporary Mother's Day holiday was actually established to celebrate feminist activism--specifically, women's advocacy of peace over war, and the movement for votes for women, which would give these peace advocates a political voice. It arose out of the volunteer work of Victorian women. The Victorians invented the idea of "separate spheres," where (white) men would work outside the home for pay, and (white) women be confined in the home, to raise children and do domestic labor without pay. Victorian feminists framed their activism as an extension of their vaunted maternal duties, and hence as right and proper. Antifeminists called their activism improper, unwomanly, and disordered. So the idea of making a holiday to celebrate mothers' volunteer labor was in fact quite political. It was feminist.
But within a few decades of its founding in 1907, the radicalism had been drained from Mother's Day. It was commercialized, and became a day for giving mothers floral arrangements, jewelry, restaurant meals, and other gifts. By the 1950s, it was a sentimental holiday celebrating stay-at-home motherhood--now something feminists were critiquing.
This remains the case today, but unlike the Victorian era or 1950s, we are not living in an era of separate-spheres binary gender arrangements. Heterosexuality is no longer compulsory. Fathers are now expected to participate in child care. The fact that women in mother/father coparenting couples still do a disproportionate amount of the domestic labor is something that many women have been tearing their hair over during the pandemic. And some parents are trans and/or nonbinary.
So let's deconstruct what gets celebrated on Mother's Day into its component parts.
There's being a gestational parent. Pregnancy is hard work that gets little accommodation in the U.S., and that's not fair. Giving birth remains dangerous, most especially for marginalized parents. In my home state, Black individuals giving birth are 5 times as likely to die as Anglo white individuals. Latine gestators are 3 times are likely to die giving birth than Anglo white individuals. Pregnant trans men and nonbinary individuals in my state are treated with disdain and incomprehension by medical care providers, which most certainly also increases their risk, although nobody has funded a study of this.
But we should not just focus on the danger of dying as a result of giving birth. Gestational parents make physical sacrifices when they endure pregnancy and labor. As the phrase goes in the world of sport, we "give up the body." Pelvises can separate, spines can be injured, sacroiliac joints are harmed--and these injuries often result in chronic pain, for years or for life. People endure genital tears, or major surgical wounds, and their healing can be complicated. Stress incontinence can be a lifelong issue.
But an ideology has developed in the contemporary U.S. that to demand recognition and accommodation of the work, exhaustion, pain, nausea, temporary disabilities, and permanent disabilities associated with pregnancy and delivery is a sign of being a bad employee who does not deserve respect, good pay, or promotion. Pregnancy and delivery are treated as private choices which must not impinge on employee duties. Parental leave is treated as a vacation, not as an entitlement to paid sick leave from employers.
In this context, it is important that we have an annual reminder that we should be honoring the risks and pain endured by gestational parents to bring new lives into the world (and not just with cards, but with laws ensuring accommodations). The problem is that some of those who are making sacrifices that go unaccommodated are not mothers. Gestational parents who are not women go largely unrecognized by the medical establishment and by government agencies. And by honoring gestational sacrifice under the rubric of "Mother's Day," celebrants validate and participate in this exclusion. Gestators who are men or nonbinary wind up either having our gender identities denied by people sending us "Mother's Day" cards, or get no recognition of what we have done at all.
Another problem is how honoring the work and the sacrifices of those who bear children gets conflated with so many other things in Mother's Day.
For example, there's domestic labor. In the 1950s reconception of Mother's Day, mothers are framed as "homemakers," and on this one day a year, father and the children cook the meals, do the grocery shopping, and wash the dishes, to give Mama one day of out 365 as a vacation day. That's an eyeroller of a number of vacation days for Mother. Now consider today, when the majority of mothers have paid jobs. Unlike their white middle-class counterparts in the 1950s, white middle-class fathers married to women today do a substantial amount of childcare today, changing diapers and giving kids their baths. But the wives of these men today remain responsible for the lion's share of other domestic chores, like washing and folding laundry, or cleaning the bathroom.
The unwillingness of cis men married to women in the U.S. today to step up and do more manifested during the pandemic in many women becoming unemployed, not because their workplaces shut down, but because schools did, and their husbands simply would not engage in childcare during work hours, or do more chores, even though, with entire families at home for months on end, the amount of dishes and mess went way up. Husbands and employers conceiving of childcare and domestic chores as optional for men and mandatory for women put great pressure on women whose husbands had jobs that paid enough that the family could survive for a time on just his income to leave the workforce and become fulltime housewives. Many were very unhappy about being pushed into a patriarchal family arrangement by husbands who would not step up and share the burden of increased domestic duties.
These gender politics deserve to be seen. And the value of doing domestic labor should be honored. But if we honor them under the rubric of "Mother's Day," we wind up naturalizing and supporting an unfair division of labor by binary gender, rather than critiquing this arrangement.
There are also people who are neither mothers nor women who have suffered greatly from this equation of mothering with doing the domestic work. For example, a primary caregiver and domestic laborer may be nonbinary. Or they could be a "standard" cisgender, endosex father who is a single parent. About 1 in 5 single parents today is a man.
Single parenting is always a struggle. During the pandemic, it was a terrible position to be in, as schools and childcare shut down, yet single parents had to work to support their children. And in this case, it was single fathers who were in a particularly poor position, because their status gets treated as incomprehensible by many employers, who refuse to make any accommodation at all for a man's parenting responsibilities.
Again, by honoring the performance of parenting and domestic labor under the rubric of "Mother's Day," we participate in the exclusion and nonrecognition of people like nonbinary parents and single dads.
So: the celebration of "Mother's Day" is really a celebration of three different things. One is the traditional meaning of the holiday, as a day to honor women's volunteering and feminist activism. The second is to show respect for the sacrifices made by gestators. And the third is to recognize the performance of childcare and domestic labor--the value of that unceasing work that receives neither pay nor employer deference.
My solution to this would be to get rid of Mother's Day, or that silly holiday, Father's Day, invented just because men were pouty about women getting a special day with no men's parallel, and consumer capitalists being in favor of more holidays and more spending.
I'd replace these holidays with a greater number of more specific ones. I'd have a Childbearer's Day that seeks greater social recognition of the labor performed and sacrifices made by gestators--especially recognition in the form of employer accommodations and paid leave. I'd have a Caregivers' Day, to recognize the labor of childrearing, and not act as if bringing children into the world marks the end of the sacrifices required to raise them. And I'd have a Domestic Labor Day, where we all march to call for the recognition of this work, and for it to be performed equitably. None of these holidays would be gendered, so that parents of all genders who gestate, raise children, and do domestic labor would be honored. And then I'd have one gendered holiday, to restore the original intent of the Victorian founders of "Mother's Day," which was to celebrate women's activism. I was thinking International Women's Day might serve, but it is evolving into another trite Mother's Day-style holiday of posting pictures of flowers. There's a Women's Equality Day that celebrates the day the 19th Amendment gave women in the U.S. the vote, but that is kind of narrow, and makes it seem like the need for feminism ended in 1920. So I suppose it's best to just be straightforward, and call it Feminism Day.
Instead of one holiday, I present you with four! Deconstruction is festive.
Saturday, April 10, 2021
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.
Saturday, March 6, 2021
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.
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):
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:
Wednesday, September 4, 2019
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.
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.
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Protecting Bigotry as "Sincere Religious Belief"
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.
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The Bob Jones University policy against interracial dating and marriage, repealed in 2000 |
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"
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.
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Christian women praying that a generic Houston antidiscrimination law will not pass, wearing transmisogynistic t-shirts reading "No Men in Women's Bathrooms" |
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.
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Christians at a Pride parade |
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.
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Richard and Mildred Loving |
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.