Morning Meditation: After the election

While there were definitely many good things happening yesterday and in this election cycle generally, there are good reasons to feel sad, hurt, angry, sick, and maybe some worse things.

I’ve not yet written my review of Will & Harper because I am not good at writing reviews of popular media and also my reaction to it is complex. Difficult to put into words. Somewhat less than fully effable, is what I’m saying. But it makes sense to bring it up now for a couple reasons. This first is this quote from the Titular Harper, a woman who loved making long road trips through, around, over and across this here North American continent during the before times, when she was not yet out and the people she met perceived her as a straight man.

Harper: He knows that I’ve been across this country almost as much as a truck driver. I’ve driven it; I’ve hitchhiked; I’ve been everywhere. I love it so much. I just don’t know if it loves me back right now.

I have driven a good bit of this country. I’ve flown over it. I’ve met good people in Iowa and North Dakota and Nevada and so many other places. And I love this country not so much for its countriness or its peculiar institutions or history. I just love the land and the people, no matter what name you attach to it or power structure you build over it.

But the land’s love of me doesn’t help me live, and the love of its people is decidedly questionable right now. In the run up to this election much was made by folks I quite respect — Erin Reed of Erin in the Morning most prominently — that anti-trans ads are ineffective because people just don’t care about trans people enough to vote for a candidate specifically because of their anti-trans positions.

---

---

Do not think for a minute that I do not love Reed and respect the incredible work she does, but I had opportunities to jump on the wagon and spread the message that anti-trans ads do not work and I did not do that thing. Why? Well, if Reed is right and the anti-trans advertising strategy hurt the GOP this cycle, then I had no interest in interrupting my enemy while they were making a mistake. And if Reed was wrong, and the ads were helping Republicans, I had no interest in pushing my side toward overconfidence.

It’s not that the reporting was bad or non-factual. But the solid journalism done by Reed and others underpinned a prediction (express or implied) about how the election would turn out, and it seemed to me that there was no upside in spreading that message.

I have lived through rape and knife attacks. I’ve lived through death threats and demonization. I’ve lived through political campaigns great and terrible. And while I remain optimistic about long term change, those experiences remain part of me. These messages wound people. They wound the non-trans kids from Oregon whose images were stolen for Ted Cruz’s anti-trans ads. They wound the trans woman who played basketball on her community college team whose image was likewise stolen. They wound parents and friends. They wound communities, towns, cities. They wound our nation.

Slavery left the United States gutted and bleeding when the 13th Amendment ended it. The wounds from our anti-queer, anti-trans history spilled not nearly so much blood, but the wounds are still deep. There is only so deep you can stab a body politic before ripping through to the other side, and without comparing racism to our current anti-QT panic, I think it’s fair to say that each experience has struck deep enough to reach the American core.

Americans don’t say that trans issues are important to them, but gender is important. Gender is at that core. Weddings and bar nights and football and quinceañeras. Psychologists and sociologists will tell you that humans make eye contact with someone for different lengths of time depending on the genders involved. Who looks first? Who turns away first? If seven seconds is an uncomfortable stare, what about two?

The most basic rules of societies’ structures are adjusted for gender again and again and again. If you don’t believe me, ask Dale Spender or Kimberlé Crenshaw or Kimberly Springer or Maxine Hong Kingston or Suzanne Pharr. Ask Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna who wrote the phenomenal and still important anthropological text, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach.

The reactionaries have been fighting gender equality so fiercely and for so long because they frequently intuit something which the majority of those advocating for liberation cannot or will not articulate: it’s not as easy as simply saying you’ll treat people equally. Hire people equally? Okay, we can measure that. We can survey the workers at an auto plant, assign them to demographic categories. But to actually treat people equally means equal handshakes, equal eye contact. And yet eye contact between two straight women means something different than eye contact between a straight woman and a straight man. There are rules, and more important there are traditions, trends.

How do I know if someone is interested in me, sexually? Well you could just ask, but then you break rules and risk social censure. But if you use what you’ve learned through socialization, well, all that learning came in a different time, when equal wasn’t a priority. What if you change to equal practices but the person next to you does not? Again, you break rules and risk social censure.

Cis people obsess about gender. It rules the cocktails they order and the foods they eat in public. It rules the clothes they wear and the jobs they seek. It rules the cars they drive and the roads they travel. It rules the dog breeds they love and the animals they kill. Of course Harper Steele is going to feel unwelcome, unloved, uncertain in places they once felt loved, embraced, and supported. But also, too, every cis person who meets Steele is going to feel equally uncertain, and with that uncertainty comes fear.

Trans people have a chance to experience this uncertainty daily, until it becomes quotidian, until it becomes its own form of reassuring certainty. When that transformation occurs, the greatest measure of our fear is lost. Cis people do not suffer this daily torture, and thus do not gain this daily opportunity. Cis people thus have a peculiar ability to retain these fears for life.

Every time a trans person is introduced into a previously all-cis environment, cis people suddenly become conscious of how precarious are the gender traps that they’ve constructed. Details too numerous and too subtle to ever consciously consider require always knowing the genders of everyone in the room. There are calculations to be made, rules to apply, and while the uncertainty in this gender math is always present, cis people are used acting as if it is not, because to admit to themselves that they don’t know the gender of the person across from them is to become paralyzed with the awareness that they do not know which rules to apply.

It is better for most to blunder forward and apologize profusely when wrong than to confront the reality of gendered complications. This is especially so for men because masculinity requires confidence and confidence requires some minimal level of certainty. For the insecure man, to change the gender rules — even for the noblest of reasons — is to paralyze them, to prevent them from performing the most basic task of masculinity: convincing themselves that they are manly.

This was the threat that enraged chairmen who were called “chair,” firemen who were called “firefighter,” and boyfriends who were called “partner.”

Trans issues aren’t important to the bigoted, the insecure, the gender reactionaries. But being a man is important to cis men, and being a woman is important to cis women — more so than being a man or woman could ever be to a trans person. Trans issues aren’t important, but avoiding change is important as all hell.

Maybe Reed is right. Maybe the ads didn’t impact the election’s outcome. But maybe insecure men and women aren’t willing to say that they’re insecure because they’re insecure about that insecurity. Maybe they don’t connect their need for Tucker Carlson’s Big Daddy to supporting or opposing trans issues. Listen to them talk about illegal immigration or voting or safety net programs. Those are all fine in theory, they say. What they don’t like is when people don’t follow the rules.

Accepting trans people means accepting that the rules have changed, can still change, will change in the future. Transition is itself a word for change and they will not have it.

The other bit from Will & Harper it makes sense to bring up now is an image early on, of an outside lounge chair in Harper’s yard, one covered with untouched snow.

To the cis person this might be a beautiful image of winter’s soft touch. To the trans person, it haunts. In a bi-gendered world there is always an empty chair. I was assumed to be a boy and raised to be a man. There are experiences I had as a child and at college that I would never have had were I assumed to be a girl and raised to be a woman. As a trans child, confused and unready to assert herself, my girlhood spent long months untouched, a lounge in the snow. As a trans adult fighting for respect, I was required to display sufficient womanhood to justify the special and burdensome requests I was making of others, requests like, “Please use this new name,” or “please use this new pronoun.” Society demands I prove that I’m serious, prove that I’m real. To do that a certain portion of myself must be set outside in the snow, apart from the house, apart from the space in which I live.

For the trans person there is always an empty chair that calls to us, a chair we cry to miss. The defining difference for the cis person is that they have accepted what the trans person cannot. For the cis person there may be an empty chair set outside the house. The three year old who loved glitter and fairy wings but grew up to swing hammers and wear Carhartts also has an empty chair in their yard, but they are content to draw the shade, live comfortably within the bounds of their home, never looking outside.

Dar Williams performed When I Was A Boy about two cis people who are still able, at times, to raise the shade, to look out at their own desolate snow-covered chairs. And while it’s heartbreakingly beautiful to some, to others it’s a reminder why the shade is closed.

Williams says, “But I am not forgetting that I was a boy, too.”

For large numbers of cis men and women forgetting is a central task of performing gender, of being the individuals that they believe they are, that they believe they must be for their own safety and security. I do not think that trans sports are important to voters. The sports are incidental. The ads remind voters of what they are desperate to forget, and they will vote for fascism if a fascist will sweep away such uncomfortable reminders.

This militant desperation is far worse than even the deepest cut I have ever suffered, the most painful of the many rapes I have endured. It is this particular experience of gender unique to the insecure cis folks among us that is so detached and deadly it can turn its eyes away from dying children.

As distant, neglected and sad as is the image of Harper’s lounge, she has not forgotten. Her spirit still flits out to the empty chair, an angel in the snow.

---

Crip Dyke also writes for the delightfully cussmouthed Wonkette!

---

You could also follow me on BlueSky. Pretty sure that would make you cool or something.