“Transgenderism” push mirrors historic efforts to eliminate the LGBTQ community.
In 1909 a raucous meeting of medical professionals and community health advocates met to discuss the so-called “Indiana Plan”. Under this plan, hundreds in psychiatric hospitals would ultimately be subject to lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and worse. A bad proposal on its surface, the meeting would devolve into a noisy tirade from supporters of outright euthanasia. This proposal to eradicate those in psychiatric hospitals and prison wards would persist well into the World War II era, even being picked up and supported in principle by Oregon Governor Charles Martin in 1936.
It’s no mistake that the words being used by those opposed to a fictive “ideology” of “transgenderism” so neatly mirror the words of these past wardens and medical professionals. The presence of a boisterous maximalist backbench who use threats of death by woodchipper to attack LGBTQ people is also evocative of this era. It’s no wonder the transgender community and allies are pushing back.
Argument is not limited to transgender people
The idea that this effort is limited to a small subset of people is a delusion as those making such proposals rooted in old-time psychiatry are not too quiet about how they believe that transgender “ideology” is tied to queerness writ large. This includes the “L” and “G” and “B” as much as it impacts the “T.” The linkage has always been there, too; in the 1960s, the TV Clipsheet, a paper for self-identified transvestites, regularly noted that they and transsexuals are seen as just another type of homosexual. In 1971, Drag Magazine noted the participation of transvestite and transsexual protesters in the Christopher Street Liberation Day parades.
Contemporary examples of this kind of rhetoric is extremely evident in testimony from people like former B-list actor Michael Knowles who is the latest to call for the “eradication” of this so-called “transgenderism”. The rhetoric that an LGBTQ identity is unproductive to society and necessarily a threat to public safety has persisted until this day. In the 1980s, this manifested in the comic tracts of Jack Chick and in the particularly nasty “Homosexuality: Legitimate, Alternate Deathstyle,” published by Dick Hafer in several editions by 1986.
This isn’t to say that transgender people are the reason for this kind of oppression, as much as conservative and far-right queer people frequently insist, but it is a canary in the coal mine moment. As of this writing, at least one state has begun consideration of a bill that would once again ban same-sex marriage in line with the recent federal Equality Act which only mandates recognition, not solemnization, of same-sex marriages. The opponents of LGBTQ people are not merely inspired by recent transphobic legislation, they’ve already been clamoring for the same for years. It’s not an offshoot, it’s the same roots.
No good answers
With an offense against transgender people coming from multiple sectors, from famous fiction writers to a variety of former actors and performers, it’s no wonder there has been a counter-effort from numerous sectors of the queer and ally communities. While notable people like Martina Navratilova and J.K. Rowling insist their opposition is in the interest of women they’re still echoing eugenics-era calls for decency and the preservation of the good morals and rearing of children. The mere existence of transgender people has excited passions with data and ideas that just don’t bear out in reality. In some areas of the internet there are people who believe that the surge in transgender identity has been to the detriment of everyone from butch women to femme men, in spite of data to the contrary.
Evoking “social contagion” as a theory, writers like Katie Herzog of Dan Savage’s The Stranger in Seattle has insisted that the number of transgender people is really actually much smaller and only inflated by kids being coerced by peers into it. It’s not long before these people blame queer youth for killing the gay bar. Many of this strain of writer have written long before about the ways transgender people “harm” gay people. John Aravosis, for example, opined in 2007 that queer people should “drop the T,” part of what would become a parade of setbacks and sitdowns for transgender people.
The result of all this is of course the psychic harm of the queer community. The intentional attempts at fracturing the community by the almost entirely straight and white “gender critical” movement in the United Kingdom, for example, has caused trouble for organizations like Stonewall UK who has long been accused of being anti-gay for supporting transgender people.
Not just queer people, though…
The most important thing to remember about all these efforts is that they don’t occur in a vacuum or in any way isolated from the rest of society. The attempts at blocking the Equal Rights Amendment resulted in what scholar Gillian Frank notes was an all-fronts attack that suggested that approving the ERA would result in unisex bathrooms, sex changes, and integration. In Frank’s “The Civil Rights of Parents,” an excerpt of an anti-ERA comic book asks readers “Do You Want the Sexes Fully Integrated Like the Races” and implies that the ERA would usher in things like same-sex marriage and abortion on demand.
The same people who were trying to suppress post-Stonewall acceptance of the LGBTQ community were also pivotal in sinking legislative efforts at ensuring equality for women. Anita Bryant was known and beloved around the country at the time and the racism and homophobia of her crusade played well in parts of the country where the LGBTQ community remained largely out of sight, leading to dozens of measures aimed at keeping LGBTQ people out of the teaching profession and preventing schools from even remotely acknowledging the LGBTQ community, even scientifically. Phyllis Schlafly famously picked up this strain of homophobic anti-woman campaigning, using “feminist” in much the same way Knowles uses “transgenderism” today. These weren’t and aren’t merely grammatical choices, the use of these “-isms” is meant to divorce a person from the rest of society, meant to make them look insane.
Which circles back to historic hatreds and attempts at eliminating an entire group of people from society