Bullies want a safe space
Well, here it is, y’all. a rare photo of me in adolescence! Bask in the glory of Morgan in the early 1990s.
“Are you a girl or a boy?"
When I was asked that question in middle school for the first time, I hesitated and my hesitation came from confusion.
I didn't understand why I was being asked this question. I took the question at face value, which was my big mistake.
The question wasn't asked in good faith.
When asked, I flashed back and thought about how my mother told me she thought it would be so much easier to raise me if I were a boy. Her saying that made me feel, in the moment, that I was an inconvenience as a girl.
I remember that happening around the same time as when I was in a fourth grade sex ed class and feeling very insecure when skinny girls pointed at me and laughed for having a developed chest already. The next summer, I'd had my first period. Apparently, I was becoming a woman...at 11 years old.
My hesitation was wholly due to not understanding that the question was their attempt at bullying me.
The question wasn't about whether I was female.
The question was whether I was feminine enough.
Here it is plain that, despite the bullying, primary and secondary sex characteristics are not sufficient to meet the threshold of being read as a girl.
In other words, their bullying even way-back-when proved there is an inherent understanding of the decoupling of sex and gender.
And our society has strict gender roles and scripts to follow closely or else one’s gender becomes subject to bullying and policing.
Bullying as gender policing
And therein lies the insidious nature of society's debate about people, especially youth, who are queer or trans: at the root of it all, homophobia and transphobia are gender-based policing and sanctioning.
A particularly painful part of this process is that rampant, unchecked, even state-sanctioned homophobia and transphobia harm cisgender and heterosexual individuals as well and the link between gender policing and the phobias isn’t openly discussed.
If someone is cisgender and heterosexual, they have a very strict set of rules to follow in order to be masculine enough or feminine enough, and those “enoughs" are never enough. There’s always an exaggerated goal to push toward for masculinity or femininity.
If someone is queer or transgender, they’re not performing gender the societally-correct way. They’re calling into question the concept of gender and who (doctors, society, or the individual) has the power to assign gender roles.
There is a tendency for people to retreat and recoil when they are accused of being transphobic or homophobic. Along with a calcium deficiency, they don’t have a homophobic or transphobic bone in their body! Even the people involved in this new wave of the so-called Parents' Rights movement would be more likely than not to be affronted at such accusations.
Because they are actually more concerned with upholding and protecting gender norms, policing gender roles, and banishing anyone who begins to deviate or simply question those norms and roles than they are with the nuances of someone being LGBTQ+.
Gender is meant to be unquestioned and, in some respects, invisible which is why shining a light on gender policing and homo/transphobia is extremely important.
Why else are drag performers under attack?
Drag performances are powerful drivers of the critical examination and questioning of what gender is and means.
They show how gender is performed. And if it can be performed, then a series of questions come to the fore:
Who can perform gender?
Can I perform gender?
Do I have to perform gender?
Who is the performance for?
With those questions in mind, I think back to that Little Morgan thirty years ago who didn’t know that gender had to be performed. And since I didn’t know, I was being punished for my poor performance.
My poor gender performance was certainly tied to my being actually poor. Poverty, bullying, and gender policing are all intertwined.
If it were not for the fact that I had been in sports since a young age, I honestly don't know if I would have been able to handle that bullying.
I credit sports participation for being the single biggest factor in the development of my self-confidence. This photo was taken the summer after I was first asked by a bully whether I was a girl or a boy.
State legislatures are bullies
Much of my own self-worth came from my formative years of being in competitive sports. Without sports, I think I would have lived an incredibly difficult life.
But, as state legislatures begin to craft hateful bills that prevent trans youth from having access medically-appropriate healthcare, from being able to socially transition at school without their parents knowledge, and from joining sports teams according to their gender, elected officials are outright bullying trans youth while also taking away many critical coping mechanisms and opportunities for self-expression.
I recognize how crucial sports was to my own development and cannot imagine the harm being done to trans youth by taking away those opportunities.
The questions over whether trans athletes belong in competition, and how, are just as disingenuous as the “are you a girl or boy"?” question.
It isn’t about whether a trans athlete winning takes away an important medal or record or scholarship from another person. It is about whether society will afford trans youth the opportunity to discover their self-worth and value and build their self-esteem and skills and become healthy and confident.
If society permits that, then what? We wouldn’t be as easily able to pathologize trans individuals. That’s one of the big impacts that representation has, but more than that, representation allows for people to see themselves when they were previously unseen.
And based on state legislatures pushing through “Don’t Say Gay" bills and school boards making efforts to eliminate specific books from libraries all in the name of saving children from seeing evidence of LGBTQ+ folks existing, it is apparent that any representation of healthy and successful trans individuals simply cannot be allowed in media or in sports arenas.
Queer and trans folk are not to be seen. We are, at best, to be invisible or, at worst, erased. No longer implied, that's the explicit goal of state-sponsored bullying and gender policing.
Parental rights vs parental rights
I listened to a radio show that aired a bit of a public comment period of a school board meeting where a parent decried the presence of certain books in a school library. Her words were shouted into a microphone that books containing LGBTQ+ content were inappropriate, pulling out all the classic tropes of pedophilia and grooming.
A library should be a safe space for her child, she said.
The irony infuriated me.
Mockery over safe spaces has been an old reliable activity of conservative circles for years now.
But suddenly, the bullies want a safe space...
People may come to a reasonable conclusion that this parent and others like her confuse comfort over safety. She’s merely uncomfortable around queer and trans people or with content created by and for them.
However, the problem is that those parents truly believe a school library without LGBTQ+ related content is what meets their standard of safety. Inclusion falls well short of that threshold.
LGBTQ+ folk represent an existential threat for people who believe gender is fixed, binary, and unquestioned. Safety is represented by a secure and shared knowledge that gender is fixed, binary, and unquestioned.
This is why they fight so hard to erase us, because our existence absolutely is a crisis for them.
In order for them to feel safe, they have to eliminate any evidence of our presence, and especially around youth because youth are inquisitive by nature. It is no accident that the “Don’t Say Gay” bills are written for K-3 grades. Curious kids asking about LGBTQ+ people and issues causes anxiety that those questions could lead to questioning gender.
Questioning gender is an attack on power structures and dynamics.
Those in power or fit a heteronormative role do not feel safe in the face of such questioning, so it is better for them to nip it in the bud as early and broadly as possible. This is what conservative parents are pushing for, again, in the name of parental rights.
But, clearly, there are affirming and loving parents of LGBTQ+ kids who do not feel as though they are being heard. Their parental rights are not being considered equally.
Why are legislatures suddenly favoring one set of parental rights over the other? Much like the question of trans athletes belonging and the "Are you a girl or a boy?" question, the question of parental rights is a bad faith line of inquiry.
Listen. There will be no changing of minds or appeals to those in power who uphold rigid gender norms. The only reason parental rights are even being used in this debate is because there are now enough parents loudly willing to fight to defend the status quo of current gender dynamics in our society.
There is no reasoning, no shaming, no satirizing, no convincing those benefitting from our gender inequalities to give up those benefits.
I want allies in particular to understand that. I personally have often tried to rationalize, shame, satirize, and convince those in power and those who defend power structures. Even when I failed, I still felt good, smarter, and funnier but I wasn't successful. The folks in power right now are not receptive to being convinced or shamed. So to what end do we use those tools if they’re not actually successful at challenging power?
The only way to put an end to this obsession with gender is to take away the preferential power associated with certain genders over others. Gender equality and gender-based justice would lead to the end of homophobia and transphobia.
Building a society like that will take immense collective effort. This is where we need to shift our energies instead of trying to appeal to the better nature of those in power.
I'm not even remotely suggesting this will be easy but it is the answer.
The bullies won't like it, will fight it every step of the way, will wage a culture war with scorched earth tactics.
They're already behaving reactionary and extremist with the tiny crumbs of nominal equality we've gained in the last 10-20 years, imagine how hard they will fight if we all embarked on and dedicated ourselves to the fight for gender equality.
What a shame. Our collective effort to build a society in which we all are safe will require making folks in power very uncomfortable and dismantling those power structures.
That is the only way, y'all. Take away the power of the bullies. And the first step is to recognize the links between gender inequality and homo/transphobia and to know that all of this boils down to bullying all of us into sticking to the heteronormative gender roles.
Spread the word. Let’s go!
Forever queer and always proud!