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.

A Hope for the Transgender Day of Remembrance

On this Transgender Day of Remembrance, let's remember honestly and with open eyes. Here in the USA, the names and faces of those murdered each year reveal that we are not just talking about the evil of transphobia. We are seeing a terrible and terribly clear example of intersectionality, of intersecting biases--transphobia, misogyny, racism, classism, ableism, etc.

The people who are being remembered today do not look like me. Their deaths are deeply relevant to me because they are my siblings, but as I am not a trans woman of color living on the economic margins of society it is important that I acknowledge my privileges, including the vastly lower chance that I will be murdered in an outburst of (always intersectional) transphobia. I do not wish to appropriate others' experiences to paint myself as a martyr by proxy.

People who are cis gender, or male, or white, or middle-class, or living without disabilities should mourn our fallen trans siblings. But if we do so without focusing on our duty to the living, our memorials mean little. Treating murdered trans women of color as pitiful martyrs at ceremonies where living, breathing trans women of color feel unwelcome, or nervously tolerated, or denied agency to be lead partners in directing the event, or are in fact totally absent because "nobody knows any". . . that illustrates the extent to which the participants are part of the problem.

Because the problem is not just "out there" in the cis, straight community. The problem of transmisogyny, especially as it intersects with racism, classism, ableism and other biases, is alive and well in LGBTQ+ communities. It's easy to revile the evil of those who murder the most marginalized among us. It's much harder to own our own privileges and take responsibility for our participation in perpetuating marginalization. All of us--every single one--has some sort of privilege. It's easy for us to focus on the ways in which we are ourselves marginalized, but it's when we examine and own our privileges, and take action based upon that, that the truly transformative things happen.

I hope that this TDOR, we all reflect, not just on the lives of the fallen, but on what we personally can do to reduce the marginalization of the living.

Transphobia, Racism, and Segregation

I want to talk about some contemporary issues, and how they relate to American history. The exclusion of trans people from facilities and organizations is not often framed as segregation, but that is exactly what it is, and I want to illustrate that. This will be a rather “heavy” post, but it's important to talk about recurrent patterns in American social history, so that we can learn lessons from our collective past. I'll be discussing patterns and parallels, not equivalences. Racial segregation in the U.S. came into being in the aftermath of racial slavery, the most extreme form of oppression our nation has seen, and one that, as a white man, I cannot claim fully to comprehend. Transphobic segregation does not have this terrible history directly behind it, for which I am grateful. That said, trans people suffer from segregation every day, and to understand the problem, and gain insight into solutions, we have to examine patterns of the justification of segregation across history.

Sometimes, as a trans person, it seems like every day brings another news story about some transphobic incident or initiative. At times there's a ray of light, but often it's followed by a dark cloud of backlash. I have two situations of this sort on my mind right now, both having to do with segregation. These situations illuminate a common thread in American history: the enactment of bigotry through segregation policies that are justified as somehow “protecting the innocent” by oppressing a minority group.

The first of these situations relates to an incident in which a trans woman was shopping at Macy's. When she took some items to a dressing room to try them on, she was denied access by a sales clerk. The customer went to the manager, who told the clerk to let her in to try on her items. The clerk refused, shouting that God doesn't recognize “transgendereds” and that the customer was thus just a man in a dress, about to violate a private women's space. Embarrassed by the scene and by the employee's noncompliance, the manager fired her. The clerk soon acquired a circle of religious advocates demanding her reinstatement, but Macy's actually quietly refused. (See here.)

The day that I read about Macy's asserting a nondiscrimination policy, I was pleasantly surprised. The store would not put up a symbolic “Cis Women Only” sign above the changing room. But, sadly and predictably, a lot of backlash followed. In just one of the actions taken in retaliation, Rep. Richard Floyd, a Tennessee republican, introduced a state measure prohibiting transgender people from using public bathrooms or dressing rooms that conflict with the sex listed on their birth certificates. (Tennessee, by the way, does not permit people to change the sex on their birth certificates when they gender transition.) What uproar this would have led to when bearded Tennessee-born trans men dutifully entered ladies' rooms, one fortunately has only to imagine, as the state sponsor of the bill chose to withdraw it as distracting the legislature from pressing economic issues. While the withdrawal brought me a sigh of relief, I keep hearing the words that Rep. Floyd spoke when introducing the bill:

“I believe if I was standing at a dressing room and my wife or one of my daughters was in the dressing room and a man tried to go in there — I don’t care if he thinks he’s a woman and tries on clothes with them in there — I’d just try to stomp a mudhole in him and then stomp him dry. Don’t ask me to adjust to their perverted way of thinking and put my family at risk. We cannot continue to let these people dominate how society acts and reacts.” (See here.)

Floyd's words follow a time-worn groove in the politics of bigotry in America. A minority group is framed as posing some imaginary threat to privileged innocents, and segregation and violence against that minority are thus framed as justified. The U.S. saw such violent “logic” on a vast scale after the end of the Civil War and the manumission of all who were enslaved. Here are the words of Sen. Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, speaking on the U.S. Senate floor in March of 1900 in favor of racial segregation and against voting by African Americans: “As to the Negro's 'rights,'— I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.” (See here.)

The wave of racist violence against African Americans in the wake of Reconstruction took place on an appalling scale. Between 1889 and 1940, 3800 lynchings of African American men and women were reported—and doubtless, many more went unreported. There was a claim that most of these were in retaliation for black men raping white women in what was termed the “New Crime,” supposedly caused by black men reverting to a “savage type” once the “civilizing influence” of slavery was removed. In fact, as activist and author Ida B. Wells found in her research on 728 lynchings, the majority of lynching victims were not even accused of rape, but of crimes such as “quarreling with Whites” and “incendiarism.”

There is a difference of scale in the level of violence faced by African Americans after Reconstruction and by trans people today. But contemporary transphobic policies and violence follow this historic pattern of blaming the true victim. Rather than owning their bigotry, legislators, street thugs and shop clerks claim that the trans people they exclude or assault “started it.” We don't enter a restroom to use the toilet, they claim: we come in to sexually assault those in the women's room or challenge those in the men's room, so segregating us and/or assaulting us is justified. Any violence against us is framed as merely self-defense, or as defending the honor of women and children. The fact, of course, is that trans people are the victims, and our “offense” is not attacking the “helpless,” but challenging the worldview of an angry, privileged, insecure group.

And so we see our first theme: the projection of violence onto the victims of bigotry.

Justifications for both racial segregation and the segregation of cis and trans people are unfortunately often based on religious worldviews—as the sales clerk justified her actions at Macy's. Many religious organizations are firmly in favor of trans people's rights. But in the U.S., transphobes often present their ideologies as dictated by the Bible. The standard claim of contemporary transphobic Christians is that gender transition violates God's plan:

“Most basic to our understanding оf sex іѕ that God created twо (and оnly two) genders: “male аnd female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). All the modern-day speculation abоut numerous genders—or еven а gender “continuum” wіth unlimited genders—is unbiblical. . . God’s creation оf еаch individual muѕt surely include His designation оf gender/sex. His wonderful work leaves no room for mistakes; nо оnе іѕ born with the 'wrong body'. . . In the Law, transvestism / transvestitism wаѕ specifically forbidden: 'A woman muѕt not wear men’s clothing, nor а man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests аnyone whо dоes this' (Deuteronomy 22:5). . . Transgenderism іs not genetically based, аnd іt is nоt simply a psychological disorder; it iѕ rebellion аgainѕt God’s plan.” (See here.)

(The fact that sex is indeed a spectrum, which is something that as an intersex person I am aware of every day, raises a problem for this worldview. I once asked an evangelical leader how he could reconcile his claim of divinely-created gender dyadism with my intersex birth status, and the prevalence of intersexuality in all species. He responded that God did not intend for me to be intersex, but that in a world of sin birth defects occurred, and that in the world to come there would be no “errors” like me. . . which conflicts with the simultaneous claim that “His wonderful work leaves no room for mistakes; nо оnе іѕ born with the 'wrong body'.” There is a great illogic in claiming that people born with intersex bodies that bother the majority have defects that must be medically corrected, but nonintersex trans people cannot seek these same medical services because God makes no mistakes.)

Transphobic Christians see in gender transition more than a case of “individual sin;” they see a danger to society as a whole. The entire LGBT community is framed as sexually perverse, polluting society with the belief that sexuality need not be limited to the confines of a marriage between one person who was assigned male at birth and one person who was assigned female. Trans visibility is seen as carrying a further seductive and contagious danger: the idea that both physical sex and gender roles are mutable, which will spread to children and confuse them about their “true” sexes, making them rebellious. In questioning their sexes, they believe, their children will question God's plan as manifested in human bodies since the creation of Adam, and Eve from Adam's rib. Children who question their sex also question Adam's superiority and Eve's submission to him. Thus, trans people threaten the “proper” order of all gender relations in society.

This framing of a persecuted minority as posing a threat to the plan God made manifest in the body also has a long history in the U.S.. Consider this editorial published in a Madison, Wisconsin newspaper, the Daily Argus and Democrat, on September 11, 1857. The editorial advocates in favor of racial segregation, and bases its argument on the idea that segregation will prevent interracial relationships, which are against God's plan:

“Our Creator clearly never intended these two widely dissimilar races to fraternize; if he had wanted them to be one, he would have so made them—but he has placed, with his own finger, a mark , in color, intellect, physiognomy, and other strongly marked characteristics. Whenever these lines of demarkation are endeavored to be obliterated by amalgamation, the white race has been degenerated, enfeebled, and degraded, as a natural consequence.”

Though written a century later, the 1959 order of the trial court in the case of Loving vs. Virginia uses quite similar language. (It would eventually be overturned by the Supreme Court, putting an end to bans on interracial marriage in the U.S.) In sentencing Mildred and Richard Loving to jail under Virgina's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 for having married out of state and returned to Virginia, the trial court 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."

So we see another recurrent theme: a claim that bigoted civil policies follow God's plan as made clear in the color and shape of the flesh.

I want to examine one more theme—the way that gender and sexuality play out in enforcing marginalization. To do this, I want to turn to another story in the news: that of a 7-year-old Colorado trans girl, whose application to a Girl Scout troop was first denied, then accepted, leading again to lots of backlash. I've already noted that LGBT communities are framed as sexually perverse by bigots. Now, trans people are a gender minority, not a sexual minority. Gender transition does affect sexuality (a person who had been perceived as a straight man is categorized as a lesbian after transitioning, for example), but this is epiphenomenal rather than the cause of gender transition. We gender transition based on our gender identity, not for sexual reasons. Still, gender transgression is so linked in the popular imagination with “homosexuality” that it may seem inevitable that trans people would be viewed by bigots through a sexual lens. But the evocation of sexuality in American bigotry predates LGBT rights movements, and plays out even when sexuality should be deemed a nonissue.

Trans women have been slandered as men costuming themselves as women in order to gain access to women's private spaces to peep upon and sexually assault them by all sorts of groups. Excluding trans women from women's bathrooms, locker rooms, and other “safe spaces” is justified through a familiar Western system of sex/gender ideologies which frames “good women” as fragile sexual victims, to be put on a pedestal in a gilded cage. This same belief system frames even good men as sexual aggressors, able to control themselves around chaste good women, but naturally and excusably provoked by the actions of bad women to take sexual advantage of what is “offered.” Trans women suffer the doubly-negative fate of being framed as sexually aggressive men when in a woman's space, and as bad women who are “asking for it” in a men's space.

But Bobbie Montoya, Girl Scout aspirant, is seven years old. We contemporary Americans should see her as asexual, an innocent child. And yet the rhetoric deployed against her is remarkably unaltered from that directed at adult trans women. First of all, she's trying to enter a girl's space, so she's constantly being framed as a boy. The large majority of news reports blare “Boy Wants to be a Girl Scout,” or something similar. (See, e.g., this.) More importantly, she's framed as posing some sort of ominous threat by transphobic organizations. Three Louisiana Girl Scout troops that disbanded to protest the Colorado troop's action described the admission of trans gender children as not only “extremely confusing” for “normal” children, but as posing a danger to girls. (Here.) In a viral video calling for people to boycott Girl Scout cookies over the trans girl's admission, a 14-year-old Girl Scout says not only that the “radical homosexual agenda” of gender transition can't be permitted and that the trans girl is a boy, but that her presence endangers the other girls' safety. (Here.)

Bobbie Montoya is a button-eyed tot, not even four feet tall, living under extreme scrutiny. She poses no risk to anyone. And yet those fighting against allowing her to desegregate a cis gender Girl Scout troop continually evoke some sexual risk, some nameless dread. What this makes clear is that the justification of segregation as self-defense against a sexual risk has no relation to reality. It is a strategic claim, a trope. The fact that it emerges in the case of trans kids just makes this more obvious.

The gendered nature of the claim of sexual risk means that the bigotry faced by trans people differs a lot by gender. Trans women get the short end of the stick, attacked as victimizers when framed by the prejudiced as men, and sexually victimized when framed as women. Trans men suffer too, but not quite as dramatically. When framed as men, we can be attacked as victimizers, but when framed as women (as we often are by transphobes), though sometimes we are sexually victimized as “bad girls” who are “asking for it,” often we are put in the less physically dangerous (if unpleasant) position of being treated by bigots as pitiful and ugly self-mutilators who must be protected from ourselves.

This pattern of gender differences echoes the dangers faced by African American women and men after Reconstruction. Black men faced a great risk of being physically attacked by racists because they were framed as the most dangerous of male sexual aggressors. White fantasies about black male size and sexual violence were quite potent. For example, one white man who joined a mob of people flocking to look at the body of a lynching victim wrote that “the crowds from here that went over to see [the victim] for themselves said he was so large he could not assault her until he took his knife and cut her, and also had either cut or bit one of her breast off.” (Here.) In fact, stories like these were urban (or rural) legends, fantasies with no relationship to the actual cause of the lynchings, which were usually retaliation against the victim acting in a nondeferent manner, challenging a white man, rather than some accusation of rape. But these violent stories allowed white mobs to feel justified in torturing victims before lynching them, and in mutilating their bodies afterwards.

African American women in the period after the Civil War were the group that actually suffered from an epidemic of transracial rape, in a reality that was an inversion of the myth of the “New Crime.” Evidence of this lies in the marked increase in the proportion of mixed-race children born to African American mothers in the period after the war.

What we see in the case of racial violence after the Civil War is a series of projections, in which a bigoted white majority reversed the positions of victim and attacker. This pattern is echoed by transphobic assaults today in the “trans panic” defense. A cis man who encounters a trans woman and finds her sexually attractive is viewed by bigots as justified in assaulting her for “tricking him” into finding her alluring, her very status as trans woman inviting violence. A cis man who kills a trans woman and claims she initiated a sexual encounter with him, after which he discovered her trans status, routinely walks away with little or no jail time—even if that claim seems patently implausible (see, e.g., this). Conversely, trans men are at risk of becoming victims of “corrective rape” by transphobic straight cis men who find them attractive, their trans status being seen as a provocation, with the chances of prosecution being slim.

It becomes clear when examining the way that gender and sexuality are filtered through bias that those who are the victims of segregation are also the victims of sexual assaults and sexual myths. And yet segregation is justified in the name of protecting the “innocent” majority from a supposedly dangerous, deviant minority group.

What lessons can we draw from the parallels we've seen? In enacting segregationist policies, whether in the case of race or gender identity, there are two bases commonly drawn upon. The first is a claim that the marginalized group represents a sexualized threat to the majority—a claim that is inversely related to actual victimization. The second is a religious claim that God has written an intent that the minority be discriminated against in the flesh—in the color of the skin, or the shape of the body—and that religious order demands enforcement of discriminatory policies. The first claim can be opposed by marshalling the facts to point out empirical reality. The second can be countered by noting both the diversity of religious opinion and the constitutional separation of church and state in America.

The lessons of history show that fighting segregationist policies requires social movements, not just logical arguments. It took many marches and sit-ins and protests to bring about racial desegregation. Furthermore, ending segregation at law doesn't end it in practice. The results of racial desegregation in the U.S. have included the gradual defunding of integrated public transportation, white flight from integrated neighborhoods, and the ongoing de facto segregation of schools by neighborhood. Today, I live in the most racially segregated major metropolitan area in the U.S., so this reality is clear to me. The suburb next door, a former segregated “sundown town,” is now under 2% African American, while African Americans make up about 35% of the total area population. (Map.) So I don't want to come across as implying that ending formal segregation is a sufficient solution to the problem. It isn't. But we live in a time of great flux for the rights of trans people, with nondiscrimination policies and discriminatory policies both being added to the books around the country. I do believe that if advocates for trans people can make clear the continuity between regulations excluding us from facilities and organizations, and the laws that enacted racial segregation in the U.S., it would affect the way some people see us. It's not a panacea, a magical solution, any more than ending legal racial segregation has solved the problem of racial inequality—but it is something worth doing.

So, please, if you have a discussion about discrimination against trans people, use the term “segregation” to refer to our exclusion from schools, public facilities, and organizations. Because segregation is exactly what it is. And point out that the supposed sexual risk posed by integration is a myth—as is abundantly clear in the case of letting a little trans girl into the Girl Scouts. We're not out to “get” cis people. We just want to be able to use the bathroom like anyone else.