Listen to thisAs those of you who have read this column for a while know, I have been and continue to be an advocate for all degrees of freedom implied in the LGBTQ+ spectrum. My advocacy and allyship spans over 50 years from the very early 70’s through today. Over the that time, I have seen major breakthroughs in degrees of freedom and heartbreaking setbacks such as we are experiencing now. Over the years I have had innumerable friends, colleagues, and comrades who have struggled for the right to claim their bodies and loves on their own terms, free of the dictates of others to tell them who they are, how their bodies should be composed, or who they can love.
As life would have it, this all became even more personal decades ago with my son coming out as trans and my grandniece taking on a very public persona as a trans advocate and influencer. I watched them both transition, including all aspects of medical and psychological care from hormone suppressants to surgery. I watched them struggle against transphobia, bullying, and threats of violence. I couldn’t be prouder of both for the integrity and courage they have shown in taking on the responsibility to truly express who they are in the face of a society that at best is ambivalent about their existence and at worst would erase them with violence if necessary. At that level, this column is unabashedly personal.
In my work with unhoused young people, I have also had the opportunity to work with a broad spectrum of LGBTQ+ young people struggling to survive in a world that can make that quite difficult. Working with street outreach, schools, emergency shelters, and transitional living programs, I saw first-hand the profoundly damaging effects of bigotry and hatred towards young people who were simply trying to be themselves as fully and completely as possible. The impact of community, familial, and interpersonal attempts at systematic denial of the very existence of LGBTQ+ young people can have devasting effects that can lead to anxiety, depression, and even suicide. To be transgender in this historical moment is to face an escalating pattern of existential refusal on the part of a world that increasingly questions your very right to exist.
Of course, as I noted in last month’s column, erasure of groups of young people worldwide is part and parcel of a rise in what can be described as a reinvigorated fascism complete with a whole array of exclusionary social parameters designed to invalidate anyone not designated as one of “us”. These exclusions follow a well-worn pathway paved over hundreds of years of colonial logics premised in white masculinist supremacy that lies just under the surface of global capitalist rule.
This social, cultural, and political movement is taking shape globally with calls for the radical reinstatement of very narrow state forms of religion, highly restrictive definitions of a renewed and invigorated patriarchal family, the reinvigoration of white supremacy, mobilizations of intensely anti-immigrant sentiment, a powerful reassertion of the patriarchal state, a demonization and trivialization of young people, and a revalorization of hetero-patriarchy and normative gender roles.
If there is any doubt about the reassertion of colonial logics, I would point to a recent column in which Heather Cox Richardson notes the return of manifest destiny as U.S. policy.
“On July 23 the X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of an 1872 oil painting by John Gast, titled American Progress. Gast represented the American East on the right side of the painting with light skies, a rising sun, and the bustling port of New York City, full of ships. He painted the American West in darkness, through which bison and Indigenous Americans flee the people in the middle of the painting: white hunters, farmers, settlers, and stagecoach riders. Over the scene floats a giant, blonde Lady Liberty, evidently moving west, carrying a schoolbook and a telegraph wire being laced on poles along a train track behind her. Over the reproduced image, the Department of Homeland Security account wrote: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”
The concept of manifest destiny can be defined as the idea that God has destined the people of the United States to spread the cultural and political ideologies of emerging capitalism across the Americas and beyond. There is a certainty that the “American Experiment” represents the advancement of the best of human civilization and that all other social forms and ways of life must be assimilated or swept out of the way. As Cox puts it,
Along with that … the system would travel an economic system that developed resources for private owners, the Protestant religion, and a cultural system that privileged white people. Such a system was best for everyone, even those people whose land, lives, and culture would be absorbed by the movement.
This reassertion of manifest destiny is accompanied by an equally troubling reference to the Nazi ideal of a pure state made up of a unique and superior people with deep ties of blood kinship to the land. To be an American is no longer tied to a belief in the common belief in a democratic ideal. Just a few days ago, the vice president of the United States, J.D. Vance stated “I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century.” “America”, he said, “is not just an idea, we’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” He went on to claim that “millions and millions of low wage serfs” are entering the country and polluting the purity of the distinctiveness of the American people and the American Homeland.
Of course, this is a wildly contorted rewriting of whose land this is and who has the deepest ties to an identity rooted in a sense of historical place. The sleight of hand here is truly pernicious, in that it produces a pattern of exclusion premised in an utterly false historical account that defines ties to the land as being founded on deep affiliation and complicity to the colonial project. The Homeland has nothing to do with indigeneity but rather with land claims based on theft, enslavement and brutality couched as Gods will.
The pattern of rewriting history extends also to other acts of radically re-envisioning the parameters of the nation state and who belongs and who does not. While the U.S, is a singular example, the same social diagram is being replicated and extended internationally on every continent with disturbing consistency. Forms of binary normativity that reduce the nation state to a paranoid social formation of us vs them is increasingly prevalent across the political landscape at every level of global capitalist socio-cultural formation. The nomenclature of “culture war” perpetuates the insidious idea that there are cultural norms and values that hold “civilization” together and without which we would all descend into depravity and chaos.
What is profoundly troubling is that these norms valorize the values of European/White pseudo culture which has little or nothing to do with actual polyphonic lived culture. Rather, such assertions of civilization have more to do with the narcissistic investments of those who would reduce culture to a highly restricted set of activities and identities that match what they claim is their own way of life. Such a way of life is entirely mythical and operates only at the level of sheer abstraction. In fact, those waging the most aggressive culture wars are riddled with hypocrisy, as scandal after scandal emerges and fades away in an exemplar of a global society saturated in the absolute corruption of greed and self-aggrandizement.
The fantastical nature of the culture wars, as an expression of world that never existed and cannot be sustained, does not in any way impede the brutal enforcement of its strictures. Attacks on people of color, migrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, academics, students, and teachers have all come under the banner of culture. The argument is, that all of these groups have engaged in practices and belief systems that seek to undermine the truths represented by white, Christian, nationalism. The claims to truth are such that anyone who deviates from them in any way must be ostracized, silenced, and stopped from persisting in any activity that would challenge or contradict the standards of “normalcy” set by this movement. The strictures are ever proliferating and international in scope and include restrictions on women’s reproductive rights, anti-immigrant legislation, erasure of the history and accomplishments of people of color, attacks on academics and teachers who do not teach approved curriculums, banning books, and the absolute refusal of transgendered people’s right to exist.
It is critical to note that all these issues impact on the young people we serve in CYC practice. We have young people in our care who need access to reproductive rights, who need assistance with migration, who need to know that their peoples have power and important histories, who need access to books that assist them in finding a full place in the world, and who need the right to make choices about their bodies. In my view, the emerging and proliferating system that would deny young people access to their very identity is inherently antithetical to CYC practice and theory and we need to do more to stand up for the young people in our care.
Perhaps one of the most egregious exemplars of the kind of damage that this neo-fascist movement represents is what has come to be known as gender-ideology. Gender ideology, as an aspect of the culture wars, has been defined in an executive order by President Trump as the political effort to subvert the biological definition of sex with false claims of identities that can exceed the binary categories of male and female. The executive order refuses any set of beliefs or actions that supports a spectrum of genders.
The implication here is that gender and sex are intrinsically tied together and that there are only male and female bodies. This is scientifically false, as even in the realm of biological sex there are many different bodies that do not conform strictly to the definitions of male and female. It is also the case that gender is an expression of how a body is perceived by the person living in it. To reduce the complexity of this to an ideology or set of asserted beliefs is to deny the lived experience of those whose gender and sex exceed the narrow boundaries of sex/gender set forth by the executive order and its proponents.
The notion of gender ideology has had a devastating effect on transgendered young people. It has led to an escalating number of radical exclusions and refusals at an international level. The discourse has been vicious and hyperbolic with transgender affirmative health care being characterized as genital mutilation. This conflation of consensual treatment initiated by trans youth and their families with female genital mutilation, which is a recognized human rights violation, is unconscionable. There are now laws being passed internationally that deny needed medical care for trans youth along with exclusions from participating in sports, using toilets or restrooms that align with their identity, use of chosen pronouns and names, and the refusal of legal identity documents that align with their affirmed gender. This is a massive assault on a small and vulnerable group of young people who have done nothing wrong. All they have asked to do is to be able to express their lived experience as fully and publicly as possible. If this group of young people can be so easily demonized and excluded, other young people are not far behind.
For those of us in CYC who make claims to decolonization and social justice, this should be extremely concerning and a call to action. The future is dawning and as of now it doesn’t look as though it will the kind of future we would want for the young people we engage in our work. We can change that. We must change that.
