Allie Cat
Polysaturated Trans Fat
One of my friends posted this on her facebook earlier today and has given permission for it to be shared. Given the controversial nature of my existence to some people on this forum, I felt it was appropriate to share it here.
tl;dr: don't be a jerkface to trans people.
“Why?”
“WHY?!”
“What did we do to you? We're not telling you how to live your life and be. Why do you feel it necessary to hate? We've done nothing.”
A friend of mine posted this yesterday online as part of the Transgender Day of Remembrance. There is not a trans-person out there who has not asked themselves this question. She’s right: we don’t offer a threat to anyone as an impoverished, persecuted minority representing about .3% of the general population. So why on earth would people spend so much time and effort hating us? Particularly by those who self identify as fundamentalist or conservative Christians? Even the Austin Powers series mocked hating tiny, effect-less groups of people, by highlighting a character’s irrational and all-consuming hatred of the Dutch.
I have asked this a thousand times too, and even dove headfirst into the swamp of Christian-right dogma to try and answer this question. My own memories of high school in the inner city offer some insight, as do recent headlines. Still worse, though, are possibilities that hatred is primal, instinctual, and evolutionarily ingrained into human psychology.
When I started thinking about “why”, I went first to the most obvious group: conservative Christians, and where their animosity comes from. So, I looked at what the Bible had to say about the subject. Deuteronomy 22:5 states that “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” However, defining what clothes belong to whom is as much a matter of culture, and time period as it is gender.
To whit: black leather shoes, plaid pleated skirt, white blouse, and hair in braids. Japanese school girl, or Scotsman at the highland games? For some reason, the Christian right isn’t declaring a crusade on either of these groups, though one of them logically deserves it according to the Bible. Lace, tights, and ruffles? It could be a Shakespearean acting troupe, or my daughters having a tea party. The religious right isn’t having a conniption about Renaissance festivals, for some reason. Nor do they have a heart attack when movies are made about men intentionally dressing like women. Where was the uproar over “Tootsie”, “Mrs. Doubtfire,”, and “White Chicks”?
Similarly, Deuteronomy 23:1 says that anyone who has lost their testes or penis may not enter the assembly (place of worship or congregation). Yet, for some reason, men who have lost their testes to cancer, or to wounds in Iraq or Afghanistan, are still welcomed into churches. Ditto those born with an intersex condition. The Bible even gives blessing in the New Testament to those who would get rid of their dirty, wicked, sinful urges by way of castration to be closer to Godliness. So choosing to have genital surgery isn’t even enough to keep you out. It is also worth noting that FTMs aren’t mentioned, and the presence of ovaries isn’t a requisite to salvation.
So, Christians aren’t exactly going by the letter of the law when it comes to applying the rules that they use to justify transphobia. However, it also puts paid to the notion that the Bible explicitly justifies transphobia. However, people choose to interpret it this way. Religious and “moral” leaders hold up transgender people as paragons of immorality, sin, and sickness, and even devote their most prominent, powerful proclamations towards fighting the transgender scourge. They rally the faithful with claims that they are coming to convert your children, will molest them, and make them into transsexuals too. On the surface, this seems ridiculous at every level, but it is happening. We are too few, too weak, too powerless, to conduct such a ridiculous Grade Z horror movie plot. Even though the Bible has very little to say on the subject, and what there is is vague and even contradictory, they beat the war drums of this perceived menace with regularity. So, again, why?
When I was in high school I remember watching a swarm of gang affiliated students swarm under another kid who wasn’t part of their pack. They caught him alone, held him down, and proceeded to take turns stomping on his chest. The cops showed up, but by then the damage was done. His ribcage was crushed, and the internal bleeding was massive. He was still in a coma when I graduated a year and a half later, and I don’t know if he ever came around.
Why did the pack do this? It wasn’t religion telling them to do it. I doubt that any of them had read the Bible, in any language. The kid that got beaten into a coma was simply a part of a hated group (namely, some other gang), he was alone, he was vulnerable, and the individuals in pack all felt justified because the others in their pack were going after him too. It made them feel powerful and unified. The comatose kid was other, he was different, and he was defeated.
It is easy for someone reading this in the safety of their office, home, or library to dismiss this brutal attack as something that only thuggish, young, stupid, amoral, Godless inner city kids would do. Except, I was recently told a very similar story by a retired air force officer with PhD in aerospace engineering. He grew up in rural Texas and was expected to learn his Bible cover to cover from an early age. When he was in high school he, and his friends, often went out hunting for the kids they suspected of being gay. The gay kids got the same treatment as the lone gangster I witnessed. It was random, it was senseless, it was light entertainment, and they considered it justified. Totally different perpetrators, but the victims had the same misfortune: alone, isolated, hated, and targeted.
The act of finding the weakest members of society, singling them out, and dragging them down like a wounded animal isn’t even limited to men. How many times in the past few years have we heard stories of cliques of teenage girls who have bullied, harangued, and mentally abused another girl until she commits suicide? Usually, she is singled out for being different in some trivial way, or is guilty of some real or imaginary slight against someone more popular. The reason doesn’t matter. The end result isn’t any different than the first two examples, except the victim suffers longer. In just the past few weeks, it came to light that a 10 year old girl hanged herself because she was accused of “being a boy” because of her short hair and stocky build.
If mindless hatred, and singling victims out is part of our basic human nature, why did it develop as a part of our evolution in the first place?
Because it was a successful evolutionary tactic. When it was tribe against tribe, clan against clan, your genetic survival depended on banding together for the common defense. The capability to recognize those who were different, and the ability to use hate and anger to unite your group, made the defense of your family, your clan, your tribe, and your genetics more likely to be successful. Picking off the weak and singling out easy targets just meant one less enemy down the road. It also meant one less outsider’s genetics to compete with. Feeling conflicted about caving someone’s skull in with the jawbone of an ass didn’t really contribute to the common defense, or enhance your chances of passing along your DNA. Intellectually or emotionally humanizing your enemy isn’t a successful evolutionary strategy.
In modern times, being transgendered or intersex is probably the most visible way a person can be quickly identified as different. It does not help that the human brain is very finely calibrated to evaluate faces, and categorize them based on very subtle cues as male or female. People are also very sensitive to body shape. We recognize, though often not consciously, when someone doesn’t fit the paradigms of the gender binary. When people don’t fall neatly into one of those groups it causes a visceral reaction ranging from discomfort to disgust and anger.
One might ask, though, why aren’t African Americans, or Asians, or Caucasians for that matter, getting similar visceral reactions for being different? If we hate those who are different, why is there a difference between the amount of animosity towards minority groups, and transgender people? Why isn’t our evolutionary tendency to unite against those who are different kicking in at the same level?
To me, the most obvious answer is culpable deniability for ones actions and feelings. For other minority groups, and even for women, there is a strong societal pressure to recognize them as human beings, and to have empathy for them. The tendency to marry within your own group is well documented and explored, but it serves as evidence of the lingering power of our evolutionary tendencies. Still, that societal narrative which emphasizes empathy is sufficient to reduce how hatred of another group can coalesce.
For transgender people, particularly MTFs, there is no such cultural narrative of humanization or empathy. Religious leaders single us out as objects of deepest immorality and danger. Figures in the media with medical and psychiatric credentials (as well as an agenda), use their bone fides to lend credence to the outlandish claims of religious leaders. In movies, and television, transgender people are no more than punch-lines for jokes about discomfort with homosexual feelings. Referring to transgender people as “it”, something stripped of status as a living being, much less a sentient one, can be found on most any comment section on mainstream media news article relating to transgender issues on the web.
The Milgram experiment in 1961 showed how low average Americans would sink when they thought authority figures gave them permission. 65% of the volunteers kept going all the way to the maximum voltage, despite the screams of agony and pleas for mercy they heard coming from the other side of the divider. In this case, the authority figure was simply an anonymous researcher running the experiment. In real life the authority figure people believe are telling them it is ok to hate, dehumanize, and hurt transgender people are religious figures, who carry with them gravitas of God.
The hatred of transgender people, in my opinion, is a perfect storm of factors, but scripture isn’t actually one of them. Our evolutionary predilection to use hate and differentiation to unify a group creates an opportunity. Transgender people are often easily identifiable as being different. Their appearance, which does not conform to paradigms, often causes discomfort. That discomfort is then exploited as an opportunity by religious groups who rally around that hatred to build stronger bonds through a shared sense of purpose and survival. This narrative of disapproval from the ultimate authority gives people culpable deniability for their actions and feelings, and allows the cognitive dissonance required for dehumanization and atrocities.
The only way to break this chain in the US is by interrupting the narrative that hatred and dehumanization are morally and legally justified. The only entity capable of doing this is the government, and using the government to do so is not without precedent. Consider how the government forcibly integrated the military in 1947, schools in the 50’s and 60’s, how it made racial discrimination illegal, and very punishable. Eventually, the tide of public opinion turned, and even religions were forced to acknowledge they we fighting the tide with sand castle walls. Even the Mormon Church, whose views on Africans were that they were cursed by God, allowed them to become full members in 1978 under heavy public (and some government) pressure.
Now, tell me why we don’t need laws protecting transgender people.
tl;dr: don't be a jerkface to trans people.
