Trans panic is projection
Gender policing makes no one safer
Last week, Nancy Mace and House Speaker Mike Johnson became the newest faces of anti-trans legislation.
This recent attack on trans people, however—similar to book banning and attacks on public education—does exactly what it says it’s against. The language in drag bills, bathroom bills, and other anti-trans legislation often alleges that the existence of trans and queer people in public spaces is a form of “grooming” and that such legislation is an effort to protect women and girls.
Meanwhile, 1 in 3 of Trump’s cabinet picks have been accused of sexual misconduct.
The GOP’s mass hysteria, manufactured crisis, and moral panic is just a psychological projection. In fact, public spaces are built around the policing of gender.
Never has this been made clearer to me than while raising two kids, one assigned female at birth, one assigned male. “One of each!” strangers have said to me for years in the grocery store, at the park, on the street, whenever I am with both of my children and they present as boy and girl. “Now you can be done!” people said when they were young. Apparently I had fulfilled some quota.
When my daughter was an infant, before she could smile, more people than I could count commented on how “serious” she looked—an ominous precursor to “give me a smile sweetie” and the expectation that women should constantly perform the affective labor of spreading joy. But no one ever seemed concerned about my son’s wrinkled brow or frown. He looked tough and strong, apparently.
Others told me to expect his brute physicality, her caregiving tendencies. “It’s really great to have a girl first,” I was told by folks I knew and did not know. “They’re much better helpers.”
The number of people who have gone out of their way to ask my daughter what helpless princesses she likes or connect anything my second kid does to war and superhero metaphors is daunting. As my kids have gotten older, I’ve written before, they have been disturbed by strangers’ aggressive attempts to gender them. They regularly point out the absurdity of it all.
My daughter comes home with stories about boys telling her about the things she can and cannot do because she is a girl. She is so sick of pink unicorns. Kids have been using “gay” as a slur against her and her friends. And my youngest doesn’t play much with other boys at school because he’s unsettled by all the fighting, finger guns, and violence in their games. It makes him uncomfortable.
For them, it’s easy to see. There are not two types of people.
One of the accusations GOP legislators and conservative interest groups like to make in defense of their retrograde bills is that LGBTQ culture and comprehensive sexual education are social contagions that sexualize and indoctrinate children.
But if that’s the worry—where is the legislation against all the consumer culture I encountered as a parent that sexualizes my daughter, or indoctrinates both of them into heteronormative gender roles by force feeding them myths about their bodies, their talents, and their futures? Where is the moral panic over stuff that grooms my daughter for a life of objectification and subservience, and my son for a life of violence?
Most importantly, where is the outrage for the incoming pro-assault administration, which demonstrates how public spaces and culture enable masculine violence?
The more highly gendered kid culture and content I am exposed to, the more I see how blatantly disciplinary it all is. It takes vigilance to resist. Many adults put weapons in the hands of boys and dress girls up like dolls while teaching them to dream of marriage, motherhood and looking pretty. Not only is there no in-between, there’s not really any outside, at least not when walking through Target. Representations of gender diversity and queer life are scant in little kids’ pop culture. I can’t even search for a holiday present without being prompted to pick a lane— gifts for boys or girls?
As kids grow, the comments and culture become less innocent. Peggy Orenstein taught us years ago: As she wrote in Girls and Sex, “every girl I spoke with, every single girl—regardless of her class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; regardless of what she wore, regardless of her appearance—had been harassed in middle school, high school, college, or, often, all three.”
As a parent, I have observed the violence of the gender binary up close and personal, at every stage, with a remove that was not possible in my own childhood. Though I knew there was a regime of pink and blue before I had kids and hated it, not until I moved with my two children through stores, family gatherings, restaurants, parks, schools, and other public spaces did I understand how confrontational and forceful this socialization really is— or how often and how hard I’d have to push back as a parent.
When my children don’t fall in line, people contort themselves into the oddest rhetorical shapes, trying to convince me that what my children want or like is a phase, is temporary, is misguided, or is a fundamental misunderstanding of who they really are—rather than admit we are having a radical encounter with a little body who doesn’t give a shit about our dumbly limited and arbitrary cultural obsession with slotting everyone into restrictive gender norms from the moment they are born.
As my kids have played with gender and continued to sort out what they want from it, I’ve also heard all sorts of reasons why their liberated sense of self won’t or can’t last: they’ll “grow out of it” or “just wait until the teasing starts.” People have told me my children—or theirs—are confused for wanting to wear x outfit or have x haircut, or are imitating older friends or siblings, or play x games because hormones, or are in a brief period of their lives when they can do whatever they want, but that will end. That pressure to conform is what we really need protection from.
The truth is that anti-trans legislation has nothing to do with protecting children or women, or any of us. It’s about protecting a narrow form of power. After all, the gender binary and its rigid roles uphold the patriarchal nuclear family—a major economic engine for white supremacist capitalism and male power.
This essay was originally published in this newsletter in March 2023, but I’ve updated it. You can read the original essay here.
Be sure to also check out my conversation with
for on so-called “identity politics” and the left’s tendency to trade away people’s rights. And check out my conversation with and cohosts on the state of the hetero union.This essay is coming earlier in the week because of the holiday. I’ll be away the rest of this week eating, arguing with family, and trying to rest.