Welcome to new collaborator R. E. Ryan!
R. E. Ryan is a history and comics enthusiast from Portland, Oregon who makes both fiction and nonfiction comics. (Oddly, although he and I live in the same city, we’ve never met outside of email. For all I know he’s my next door neighbor.)
I’m very happy with how this comic looks; if we’re lucky, we’ll get to see more from R.E. sometime. (He says he’s willing, if and when his schedule opens up…)
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It’s a common trope, on the right, to complain that “trans activists are shoving their gender ideology down everyone’s throats!” (That the phrase is ugly and implies violence is presumably part of the appeal). And then if you talk to them further it turns out that they’re complaining about something entirely inoffensive, like someone having preferred pronouns or wearing a t-shirt or a trans actor doing a promotion for Bud Light. In effect, many of them are claiming that trans people are “forcing” their ideology onto them merely by existing.
The irony is that many of those transphobes (#NotAllTransphobes) are evangelical Christians – surely the most aggressive group in America for attempting to force their ideology onto other people.
I’ll be an atheist until God appears before me and pries my atheism out of my cold dead metaphor. But I’m not offended by proselytizing Christians doing any of the things shown in this cartoon (except the fliers do create a lot of litter). But the gall of any ideology that acts like that complaining about other people pushing beliefs is impressive.
I’ve often asked transphobes angry at incredibly inoffensive things – a city hall rewriting a form to be inclusive, an all-gender bathroom being made available, a trans actor having a small part in the Barbie movie – “how does this hurt you?” Generally they fumble around for a bit because, really, they’ve got nothing.
(It’s legally unimportant, but still telling, that in 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a website designer could refuse to design a website for a same-sex wedding, no same-sex couple had asked. They had to make up a conflict since no real one had happened.)
They say “trans activists are shoving their ideology down my throat” because they’re desperate to think of themselves as victims, when by any reasonable accounting they’re the aggressors.
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TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels. The storyline focuses on two women; one with curly brown hair falling down her back, rectangular glasses, and a purple t-shirt which says “Jesus Saves” in large letters. I’ll call her “Curly.” The other woman has straight brown hair, cross-shaped earrings, and is wearing an orange t-shirt which also says “Jesus Saves.” I’ll call her “Straight.”
PANEL 1
Straight and Curly are in a parking lot. Curly is cheerfully putting a yellow flier under a car’s windshield wiper, while Straight is holding a small pile of yellow fliers in her hands. We can read the top of a flier over Straight’s shoulder; it has a large heading which says “Jesus is the Answer.”
STRAIGHT: We’re gonna need more fliers!
PANEL 2
On a city sidewalk, a man wearing a hoodie walks stiffly past Curly and Straight, purposely not engaging with them. Straight is wearing a signboard, decorated with flames painted coming up from the bottom, which says “Only JESUS can save you from the Lake of Fire.” She’s holding a flier towards the man walking away from her. Curly is talking to Straight, looking excited and happy, and holding up her smartphone with the screen facing Straight.
STRAIGHT: Excuse me, have you accepted Jesus Christ into your heart?
CURLY: Hey, look what just went up!
PANEL 3
A close-up of the smartphone screen (we can also see a bit of Curly’s hand holding it). The screen shows a photo of a large billboard, with a central image of Jesus with a halo, and the words “JESUS is coming soon! Are YOU ready?”
STRAIGHT: Wow! Our new billboard looks AMAZING!
PANEL 4
Curly and Straight (straight is still wearing her signboard) are standing on the sidewalk, watching a pedestrian walk by. Curly leans to the side to whisper something to Straight.
The pedestrian has pink/purple hair shaved on one side, and is wearing a t-shirt that says “Trans Pride” over an image of a heart in trans flag colors.
CURLY: You know what I hate about trans people? The way they shove their ideology down everybody’s throats!
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Welcome R. E. Ryan!
Maybe legally important! The US Constitution, Article III, Section 2, Clause 1, sets forth the scope of judicial authority, and limits that authority to resolving a specified list of “cases” and “controversies.” If there was no actual dispute, then all federal courts should have declined to hear the case for lack of jurisdiction.
I’m intrigued by the “Trans Pride” t-shirt.
I conclude that people generally “perform” their gender role according to socially prescribed norms. The two trans people I know best do a more-than-credible job of performing their gender roles, and I don’t know that they’d prefer to be publicly labeled as trans. This may go along with norms against “dead-naming” or acknowledging that a person used to present themselves as a different gender. I have difficulty imagining the circumstances under which my friends would wear a “Trans Pride” t-shirt.
This seems akin to older norms about coming out as gay: Any individual could acknowledge being gay, but no one else was supposed to acknowledge this fact to others lest you “out” the person. As the stigma around being gay has diminished, I sense this anxiety about “outing” is diminishing. I wonder if, as the stigma around being trans diminishes, norms around acknowledging that a person is trans–and that the person presented themselves differently in the past–will also diminish.
Maybe, but maybe not. Perhaps some trans people–and perhaps especially the older vanguard–will always regard being identified as “trans” as undermining their effort to be regarded as male or female, and will therefore resist being identified as trans. And other trans people–and perhaps a younger generation–will be more comfortable with both sets of labels/identities, and have less anxiety about publicly acknowledging a past when they presented themselves in a different gender role.
nobody.really:
This is generational and situational, I think. In many settings, your ability to find work or buy the daily bread in peace is predicated almost completely on your ability to pass as cisgender. Go back in time and this becomes more true. So ability to pass-as-cis was (is) essential to survival, and most trans people for damn sure didn’t undermine ourselves by wearing pride items.
Add in unexamined internalized transphobia, where trans people reflexively held up seeming cis as inherently better than seeming trans, and you have powerful motivators acting together.
That said, it’s less true in less corporate settings (and other variables). Also, some people will never pass as cis no matter what, or not without monumental and consant effort and self-policing. So if you don’t think there’s any chance that you’re going to achieve it, or if you’re safe enough where you are, why put in all that effort?
Also, if you are younger and have not had your teeth fed to you, you have a different perception of the risks and are cognitively more able to make freer choices.
All of which adds up to this: the younger generations have networked and not been kicked in the teeth as much. They are better able to come out prior to producing children and buying houses (if THAT’S even possible, but that’s a different topic). So they are better able, practically and cognitively, to relocate and in other ways move in circles where it is safer to be perceived as nonheteronormative.
Result: I see a lot of young queer folks expressing openly that they are queer, and that includes trans people and enby people (overlapping sets, note). They do it so that they don’t have to check themselves constantly. They do it so that the bigots identify themselves faster and they can simply avoid forming friendships with them at all. They do it because they have social support and don’t need to kowtow to cis people’s constant requests to help them process the existence of queer people (of various stripes). They have received knowledge from elders two years older who teach them that the simple act of asking weird questions is a sign of nonacceptance and trouble, and so they don’t put up with it, or if they do, they flag the questioner as a likely problem, going forward.
So, it’s complicated. But that’s a quick summary.
Grace
From my experience (crisis counselor for LGBTQ youth), concerns about being outed as gay (or bi, ace, etc.) are still a really major issue for young people. This is especially true for teens and college students whose parents aren’t accepting, since being outed puts them at risk for everything from child abuse or homelessness to losing their parents’ financial support during college.
Yes, KellyK, absolutely, I agree. It’s a percentage game. The youth I described are more likely to be in their twenties and beyond their parents’ reach to some extent. Go younger and being outed is absolutely still much more likely to be a huge concern, for reasons of access to all the resources which will or won’t set you up for success in life if your parents choose or don’t to withhold them.
Grace
Apparently, a pre-enforcement challenge is a … thing.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26387897