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.

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 for what 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.