WP_Post Object
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    [ID] => 5976
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2023-09-11 09:00:00
    [post_date_gmt] => 2023-09-11 09:00:00
    [post_content] => 

Spoiler alert: It's not that straightforward.

I have a confession to make: Over the last decade or so, it’s become increasingly difficult for me to understand why queer people raised in Christianity would want to remain practicing Christians as adults. This opinion is largely born of my own experience, and informed by the experience of countless others who have also had to overcome the self-hatred inflicted on them by anti-LGBTQ theology. I mean, why would I want to be part of a “big tent” religious affiliation in which a majority of my erstwhile coreligionists believe my very existence is sinful, including some—surely a larger proportion than most respectable Christians would like to admit—who think I deserve to be put to death simply for existing? As I see it, were I to continue to claim Christianity today, I would be submitting to the perpetual framing of my queer existence as a theological problem to be solved. And even if I were convinced that adopting “affirming” theology would solve that problem in my favor, the effort feels unnecessarily exhausting in the face of another option: simply refusing to defend my life in theological terms at all. No theology, no problem.

The mainstream punditocracy (both conservative and liberal) doesn’t see it that way, of course—and lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how profoundly Christian privilege shapes our national discourse on the intersections of queerness, religion, and secularism. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how legacy media outlets take it for granted that religion, and especially Christianity, is a good thing, full stop, for both individuals and for society, a position that condescendingly implies that the nonreligious just don’t know what’s good for us. I’ve also wondered how this conversation might change, and how we all might benefit, if we could open it up to the many queer people directly affected by but largely excluded from taking part in it.

Despite my own stance on religion, I know many LGBTQ Christians feel empowered by reclaiming their faith from bigots, making it into something loving and inclusive and fabulous. Some of them still believe in miracles and a literal resurrection, and, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know that humans really choose whether or not we believe in the things that are at the core of our identities. As someone committed to embracing pluralism as essential to democracy, I respect queer Christians and believe we can hold space for each other. We are as we are: Each of us is individually complicated, and those of us who have left high-control Christian backgrounds are not all going to land in the same place.

The premise that religion is unequivocally good for all of us, however, is one I’ve long been skeptical of. It also, frankly, offends me—because it suggests that secular Americans, including the many queer people who have consciously disaffiliated from religion for very good reasons, are to blame for any suffering or unhappiness in our lives, when this distress is in fact largely caused by stigma, unequal treatment, and, often, rejection by our religious families when we choose to live as our authentic selves.

The doyens of the punditocracy insist that people have “metaphysical needs”; that dangerous political extremism will inevitably fill the void for those without religion (which makes American polarization at least partly the fault of us secularists); and that religion is necessary for community, social support, and good mental health—all of which, by their logic, secular people must lack. We’re expected to sit back and take it when The Atlantic and The New York Times tell us, if not exactly in so many words, that they know better than we do what we need to thrive. That the actual people who embody America’s rapid secularizing trend don’t deserve a say in how the story of American secularization is told, because we’re basically petulant children refusing to eat our vegetables.

But is any of this conventional wisdom based in truth? (Spoiler alert: It’s not.) And if we could sweep aside the dogma and the taboos in order to have a more nuanced discussion of American religion and secularism, what might both queer Christianity and queer secularism have to teach us all?

As for queer Christianity, it’s currently having a moment. A few weeks ago, Christian singer-songwriter and drag queen Flamy Grant topped the iTunes Christian music chart, staying at number one for nine days—the first time a drag queen had ever achieved the feat. Although her star was already rising, Flamy Grant’s meteoric leap to the number one spot was fueled in part by a hateful, viral tweet from charismatic evangelical Sean Feucht, best known for the massive anti-mask in-person worship concerts he held in various American cities during the COVID-19 pandemic—often without obtaining the necessary permits. His hateful rhetoric wasn’t surprising. Two years ago here in Portland, Oregon, Feucht used street brawlers, including Proud Boys, as his security detail—the kinds of gun-fetishizing Christian nationalist thugs who in recent years have taken to using intimidation and harassment in all-too-often successful attempts to shut down LGBTQ events and silence queer folks and our allies.

For anyone looking for evidence that Christianity and LGBTQ people are at odds with one another, Feucht provides a data point. But Grant’s spectacular popularity in turn offers a counterpoint: Clearly, unabashedly queer Christian art resonates profoundly with millions of Americans. The phenomenon reminds me of the time I observed a Jesus cosplayer at Orlando’s 2017 Pride festival giving out hugs to attendees, at least one of whom was moved to tears. Seeing that, you couldn’t help but feel something positive and powerful, whether you yourself believe in the ostensibly resurrected Jesus or not.

Even so, it has long been clear that American agnostics, atheists, and humanists trend disproportionately queer for what seem to me like obvious reasons—quite a few of us come from Christian backgrounds, and Christianity has typically not been kind to us. Although it did not use a nationally representative sample, American Atheists’ 2019 Secular Survey found that a striking 23% of its 33,897 respondents, drawn primarily from members of secular advocacy organizations, identified as LGBTQ. According to Gallup, less than a third as many Americans (7.2%) identify as LGBTQ overall.

But what about religious LGBTQ people? Earlier this year, the researchers Kelsy Burke, Andrew Flores, Suzanna Krivulskaya, and Tyler Lefevor attempted to answer this question, crafting a survey that asked members of the LGBTQ community (though also not a nationally representative sample) about their religious affiliation, reporting on their findings and conclusions for Religion News Service (RNS). According to the researchers, 36% of respondents reported a religious affiliation, a finding they framed—oddly, to my mind—as indicating that queer Americans are more religious than we might expect, given an ostensibly prevailing media narrative, fueled by Supreme Court decisions in favor of “religious freedom,” that queerness and faith are inherently at odds.

But this perception of American media outlets is in itself biased—and demonstrably false, as I’ve attempted to illustrate above. Our legacy media constantly sings the praises of religion, and the Flamy Grant phenomenon has only further proven that religion journalists are more than ready to celebrate queer Christianity, too. Indeed, in their rhetorical attempt to “save” queer religiosity by emphasizing how “high” 36% is, it seems to me that Burke, et al. were participating in what I consider the quintessential religion of America’s public sphere: faith in faith itself.

A hint of this pro-faith bias shows through in the way that the researchers summarized the findings of a separate study, in the same story, about religious affiliation and mental health outcomes among sexual minorities. “Although faith and participation in religion have been clearly linked to better health in heterosexual people,” they tell us, “these effects are less strong for LGBTQ+ people.” However, what the study they link to, a meta-analysis, actually says is this: “The relationship between R/S and health disappears or becomes negative when participants are sampled from sexual minority venues (e.g., bars/clubs; r = .01).” That’s social scientist speak for, “Religion and spirituality has either no impact or a negative impact on queer folks’ mental health when a study’s sample is drawn from queer community spaces.” This is clearly not the same as a “less strong” positive effect on mental health outcomes—in fact, this finding suggests that what really matters is community and social support, and that in at least some cases queer people are actually better off finding that outside of church than inside it.

With that in mind, I turned to Joshua Grubbs, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and a fellow exvangelical whose expertise includes the relationship of religion to mental health, for an assessment of the state of the field. “Broadly speaking, religion provides two major positives for wellbeing: purpose/meaning-making and community,” Grubbs told me. But religion doesn’t provide that for all of us. If a person’s “religious affiliation is causing feelings of purposelessness, lack of meaning, or lack of community/belonging,” Grubbs explained, “it’s likely that the religious affiliation is causing harm to mental health.” He added, “In premise, if people are actively involved in community outside of religion and if they are able to find purpose/meaning in other things, they are quite likely to do just as well without religion as they would with it.” Unfortunately, as Grubbs noted in our email exchange, this is often difficult (but not impossible) to do in the United States.

To me, one way we can begin to address the media bias is obvious: Both religious and nonreligious queer folks should have and deserve representation in our national discussion of religion, secularization, and American society. They also both deserve to have their choices to be religious or secular respected. As for the RNS report, despite its shortcomings, I applaud the authors for undertaking original research on the relationship of LGBTQ Americans to religion. More of that should be done. But while data is important, so are our actual voices: Crucially, the report contains no qualitative data or quotations from members of the LGBTQ community, represented only as statistics.

Like the American religiously unaffiliated generally, the queer unaffiliated are particularly underrepresented in a public sphere being gatekept by the priests of the Great American Faith in Faith. The fact is, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to making meaning as a human. We do not all have “metaphysical needs.” We have human needs, needs to belong and be supported, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, to find meaning in our lives—and while religion provides that for some of us, for others it is downright toxic. What might a more robust, nuanced, inclusive conversation about religion, secularism, queerness, and society look like? I think it would benefit us all to find out by bringing more secular Americans, and more queer Americans, whether secular or religious, into the elite public sphere to challenge the punditocracy’s demonstrably false idea of religion being a universal path to wellbeing and happiness.

[post_title] => Are Religious or Secular LGBTQ+ People Inherently Happier? [post_excerpt] => Spoiler alert: It's not that straightforward. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => religious-secular-lgbtq-queer-people-happiness-christianity-religion [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5976 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
Drag performer Flamy Grant poses prior to the Songbirds of Ramona Ranch show at Ramona Ranch Winery on August 04, 2023 in Ramona, California. She has teal hair in a high ponytail, and is wearing a mint colored long sleeved, sheer dress. She is strumming at an acoustic guitar, her eyes closed.

Are Religious or Secular LGBTQ+ People Inherently Happier?

WP_Post Object
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    [ID] => 5941
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2023-08-22 21:01:16
    [post_date_gmt] => 2023-08-22 21:01:16
    [post_content] => 

People who lead lives in “deviant” bodies are familiar with the state’s attempt to control them. Finding commonality is how we fight back.

At age six, “Ashley X” was subjected to a series of invasive, irreversible medical procedures. Without her consent or understanding, her breast buds were removed, along with her uterus, and she was placed on hormone therapy to limit her growth. These procedures were performed at the behest of her parents, who insisted they were for her own good.

Today, Ashley’s story conjures up the nightmare of the “trans agenda” that is being advanced in conservative circles: a vulnerable young person unable to make decisions for herself, forced into procedures that will profoundly shape the trajectory of her physical, sexual, and social development. It’s easy to imagine it as the subject of mass outrage, the center of a think piece in a conservative gossip rag running on Substack or in the Daily Mail. But it wasn’t, because of one important detail: Ashley was subjected to these procedures not because she was trans, but because she was disabled.

Ashley’s case rose to public attention in 2007, when her parents wrote a detailed explanation, justification, and treatise on their “pillow angel” in a viral blog post, claiming they wanted to keep her smaller and easier to care for. Their disregard for her humanity was perhaps most apparent in the argument that the removal of her uterus would prevent potential pregnancy, “which to our astonishment does occur to disabled women who are abused,” a very odd way to address the shockingly high rate of sexual assault in developmentally disabled women—estimated to be 80 percent. Still, many agreed with them. Doctors at Seattle Children’s Hospital received ethical approval to perform these procedures, which were written up in medical journals and widely praised. Because Ashley had “severe disabilities,” the modification of her body was deemed appropriate and necessary, with one ethicist commenting “a step too far, or not far enough?” Another ethicist, notorious for his negative commentary about the disability community, praised the Ashley treatment for The New York Times.  

As the attack on trans rights continues to escalate, I have been thinking of Ashley X, and wondering how she is faring—the last update on her parents’ blog is from 2016, and she would be in her mid-20s by now if she is still alive. Much like the war on the trans community today, her “treatment” drew upon centuries of practices that use the medicalization of marginalized bodies to control them, with the free and open permission and sometimes active approval of society at large. In the process, she joined a long list of disabled people, many of whom are not even named in records, who have endured abuses such as coerced sterilization, brain surgery, and forcible medication, all for the convenience of others around them, and to protect society from their existence. It’s a familiar playbook: This demand for bodily conformity is also (and has been) experienced by the trans community, often in lockstep—laws designed to target one inevitably harm the other—inclusive of practices like “conversion therapy” in a goal to eradicate transness, alongside denials of care or gatekeeping by authorities who control access to social, medical, and surgical transition.

Through this lens, the overlap between both communities might seem obvious. But understanding the deeper connection between the lives of people like Ashley and the trans community is an important step in building solidarity through the shared experience of medicalization as a tool for dehumanization—and is key in working towards dismantling it. Both communities experience a very specific form of somatic oppression rooted in fear and hatred of their bodies. Sometimes, this is used to pit them against each other, causing a tension between these two communities and trapping those who are a part of both in the middle. In some instances, this includes rejection of the similarities between the harm caused to both groups, or refusal to make common cause. But this is by cultural design: Keeping two communities with much in common apart makes it harder for them to team up and push back against oppression.

Harmful attitudes and policies targeting disabled people are not issues of a faint and distant past, and many in fact have laid the grounds for restricting the freedoms of trans people today: Most states have some version of a law that allows for the forcible treatment and often medication of mentally ill people, especially of note in a world where transness is treated as mental illness or a social contagion. (It wasn’t until 2019 that being trans was delisted from the World Health Organization’s ICD-11.) Deaf people are increasingly pressured to get cochlear implants, especially in the case of children, whom, some people rationalize, can learn to “speak normally” if they receive an implant early in life, an echo of the oralism of the 19th century, when educators attempted to force d/Deaf people to learn to speak and read lips rather than use sign language. (Both offer limited, if any, benefit and in fact have caused harm, fracturing Deaf culture and communities for the convenience of hearing people.) Meanwhile, other young disabled people may be encouraged—or “encouraged,” without consent—to get IUDs, again for “convenience” and avoidance of menstruation while also making it impossible to get pregnant; if Britney Spears was not exempt, how is an ordinary person supposed to fight back?

These practices aren’t new, hearkening back to policies such as 19th and 20th century “ugly laws,” which targeted “unsightly” people with fines if caught “begging,” and contemporary sit/lie laws, which effectively criminalize being unhoused on the sidewalk, again pushing unwanted bodies out of view. Rather than progress, newer policies have only widened the net: Contemporary drag bans, for example, echo historic laws designed to erase queer people to ease social discomfort. Policies that prevent trans people from accessing necessary medical care do the same, an extension of historic trends including policing that specifically targeted Black and Latinx trans people during the Stonewall Inn and Compton’s Cafeteria raids of the ‘60s.

Because of this overlap, it is important to understand the shared legacies that span both communities, because they are ultimately one fight, and collaboration makes it easier to share both strength and tenderness when needed, to be vulnerable and ferocious, to work toward a shared right to autonomy. Disabled people have been fighting for centuries against coerced treatment that targets bodies and minds deemed monstrous, wild, and unacceptable, in contexts that are often heavily racialized as well, such as Black disabled women deemed “promiscuous” and in need of sterilization. Trans people have been fighting forced detransition and denial of access to care they need to lead full, active lives for centuries, as well. As the contemporary fight extends to trans adults, with a growing number of states including Missouri and Florida moving to undermine or ban gender-affirming care for people of all ages, the stakes are even higher.

The maliciousness and cruelty of this legislation is designed to put trans people in their place, under the guise of “protecting” people from harm; precisely the same kinds of arguments used to justify the mutilation of people like Ashley, and the irreparable harm done to intersex infants and children—who are often subjected to similar forced surgeries and hormone therapies—in a “for their own good” paradigm. The goal is eliminationism. The same people who conjure up myths of trans kids being coerced into irrevocable procedures by overeager parents and doctors are very comfortable supporting those same abuses when they involve disabled people and measures to wipe out trans people altogether, betraying where their true concerns lie. Notably, legislation targeting gender-affirming care for trans youth often has specific carveouts for intersex children, a reminder that this legislation pursues normative and desirable bodies, not evidence-informed care. The purpose is not safety. It is compliance.

This tension and hypocrisy highlights the common cause between the trans and disability communities—not least because trans people are more likely to be disabled. Multiple court cases have illustrated how powerful that common cause could be, with incarcerated trans women successfully leveraging the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to argue that housing them with men and denying them access to gender-affirming care is a civil rights violation, for example. Not because being trans is a disability, but because gender dysphoria may be, and as such should be entitled to legal protections, particularly in a country where many Black trans women are incarcerated in the first place because of crimes of survival.

People who lead lives in othered, “deviant” bodies are familiar with the state’s attempt to control them, and with the cultural pressures that lead people to challenge their right to exist as they are. In a culture where trans and disabled people are medical problems to be solved, thereby erasing them from society, working in solidarity with each other is extremely important, and is the best way forward in a hostile climate that uses medicalization as a tool of power and control. Issues of pressing concern to both communities can and should be common sources of organizing power. If the trans community sees applications for the ADA, for example, it also recognizes the power of legal protections against healthcare discrimination on the basis of sex and gender. The disability community is familiar with coerced care or denial of treatment, and can support the trans and intersex communities in the pursuit of their legal rights. This is a mutual struggle of survival that becomes more pressing by the day under the growing weight of the state, and its abandonment of responsibility to care for those most at risk of abuse and exploitation.

Solidarity includes thinking about the myriad ways in which medicalization is used to oppress vulnerable communities, and how to push back on these practices beyond the obvious. Mental illness is a major factor in police shootings, for example, while Black and Brown kids disproportionately experience school pushout, often on the grounds of the criminalization of behaviors that may be associated with disability, or because they are LGBTQ. Similarly, treating transness as a mental illness is used as a tool for social and institutional discrimination targeting trans people, while ignoring the mental health impacts of untreated gender dysphoria.

Many are already doing this work. Works such as Health Communism (Verso, 2022) push at the boundaries of understanding how medicalization has become such a sinister tool for suppressing marginalized groups. Similarly, abolitionists such as TL Lewis and the creators of Captive Bodies (AK Press, 2011) highlight the profound connections between disablism and larger social structures—including transphobia — while We Want It All (Nightboat, 2020) invites engagement with radical trans culture through anthologized poetry.

In a just world, humanity would not be calibrated against a medicalized status, and people’s personal health needs would not be used against them to deny full access to society. Until we live in that world, however, it’s vital to collaborate as co-conspirators in a hostile world, unpicking the threads of the tapestry someone else has knit.

[post_title] => When Medicalization Becomes a Tool for Dehumanization [post_excerpt] => People who lead lives in “deviant” bodies are familiar with the state’s attempt to control them. Finding commonality is how we fight back. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => medicalization-dehumanization-transgender-disability-rights-autonomy-solidarity [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5941 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
A black and off-white illustration, split in half in the center by the silhouette of a neck, torso, and arms. On one side, there's a white silhouette of the side profile of someone's face on a black background; on the other side, there's a black silhouette of the side profile of someone's face on a white background. Various surgical tools overlap on the image, appearing to stab into the body and faces.

When Medicalization Becomes a Tool for Dehumanization

WP_Post Object
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    [ID] => 5760
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2023-04-06 06:27:58
    [post_date_gmt] => 2023-04-06 06:27:58
    [post_content] => 

Attacks against LGBTQ rights—largely targeting trans people—have been ramping up. It isn't hard to imagine what will happen next.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015, we have been living through an era of fierce fascist backlash against progressive politics and “wokeness” in general—much of it targeted against the LGBTQ community. With each passing year, Republican theocrats have pushed the envelope in state legislatures, paving the way for the eventual passage of severe restrictions on LGBTQ rights. Across the board, these attacks have disproportionately affected transgender people.

In this era of defunding and banning gender-affirming healthcare—and, most recently, a ban on drag in the state of Tennessee that will likely lead to police harassment of anyone deemed gender-nonconforming, if it survives its legal challenges—the bathroom bills of yesteryear seem almost quaint. The Right’s onslaught has progressed incrementally but quickly, with the state bans on trans girls participating in school sports that began to pass in 2020 effectively serving as “gateway” bills to make today’s terrifying state-level, anti-queer crackdown possible. And now, congressional Republicans are threatening to take state persecution of the LGBTQ community nationwide once more: H.R. 734, the first national anti-trans sports bill to advance in Congress beyond committee, is currently awaiting a floor vote in the House of Representatives. This bill comes just days after the House passed a new “parental rights” bill, more accurately described as a “don’t say gay” bill: legislation that would force schools to out queer children to their parents in order to receive federal funding, among other repressive measures.

Neither of these bills will pass the narrowly Democratic-controlled Senate, of course. But should Republicans regain both houses of Congress and the presidency in 2024, national bills attacking queer schoolchildren (and the parents who support them), gender-affirming healthcare for both minors and adults, and public expressions of gender-nonconformity are very likely to become federal law. With the precedent set by the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade as a key turning point, the Roberts Court will already have established the “constitutionality” of allowing such cruel, draconian laws. And they will be passed, of course, in the name of “protecting children,” even though queer children will be severely harmed by these policies—forced to remain closeted or subjected to outing and conversion “therapy,” and, in far too many cases, driven to suicide as a result.

Using children as pawns to push a radical Christian agenda is nothing new. To make their enemies seem truly monstrous, authoritarians need innocent “victims” to “rescue.” This is where “the children” come in, so long as the children are never permitted to speak for themselves. We’ve seen this playbook before. The Christian boys supposedly subjected to ritual murder by Jews, according to the medieval European blood libel. The fertilized eggs that anti-abortion extremists insist to us are “persons” whose “murders” must be prevented and/or punished. And now, the all-American schoolchildren who might observe happy, thriving queer adults, or read about queer people in school libraries, or hear a female teacher talk about her wife, and thus “decide” to be queer against the wishes of their good Christian parents.

Of course, if proponents of anti-trans legislation actually cared about children, they would rally behind, for example, sensible regulations to make sure that homeschooling isn’t being used by parents to abuse, neglect, or indoctrinate their children. They would support initiatives like those in the state of California that provide wellness centers in public schools, where any student can get mental health help and queer children can get safe and confidential guidance without fear of being outed to parents that it may not be safe to come out to. Instead, the people concerned with “saving kids” from “transgenderism” promote the opposite—including unregulated homeschooling and Christian schooling where possible, and attempting to control public schools where it’s not.

As John Stoehr of The Editorial Board aptly put it, “The rights of children—the right to grow, develop and change—is conspicuous for its absence in the debate over anti-trans laws, book bans and other oppressive forms of government control.” In the United States, children’s rights at the federal level are almost nonexistent. We are the only United Nations member state not to have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. And if patriarchal, anti-pluralist, authoritarian Christians who treat their children like chattel want to keep things this way—and they do—fomenting a conspiratorial politics of moral panic is an effective means of doing so.

In recent years, a number of commentators have convincingly argued that the QAnon conspiracy theory is of a piece with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s—essentially the resurgence of an American impulse toward Christian-inflected moral panic. Then as now, conspiracy theorists have conjured up a phantasmagoric enemy, projecting their fears, anxieties, and grievances both personal and social onto a monstrous “other” in the name of protecting “children” from cabals of ritual child abusers who happen to be populated by the out-groups conservative Christians most despise: “heretics” and nonbelievers, liberals and progressives (including progressive Christians), Jewish-coded “elites,” and members of the LGBTQ community.

Again, this is nothing new. In 1977, Anita Bryant named her Miami, Florida-based organization that fought, successfully, for anti-gay discrimination “Save Our Children.” Similarly, in the original Satanic Panic, the panicking populace in question rallied around “believing the children.” The irony is that the adults involved did not, in fact, believe the children—the supposed victims of the supposed satanic ritual abuse, of which no physical evidence has ever emerged. It was only under prompting from their paranoid parents, wildly irresponsible mental health practitioners pushing “recovered memory” therapy, and police and prosecutors at the height of the “tough on crime” era that the children were “believed” at all—after they at last broke down and told the adults what they wanted to hear, by regurgitating those adults’ absurd dark fantasies back to them. In recent years, some of these children, now able to speak for themselves as adults, have explained the ways in which they were manipulated into lying. Some have even gone to court to formally recant their childhood testimony in an effort to exonerate innocent people who were falsely convicted. Not coincidentally, many of those innocent people who were unjustly locked up for years as a result of the Satanic Panic were also queer.

This historical context has been on my mind as I consider the American Christian Right’s current moral panic, in which fixations on Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the “deep state” coincide with the rebooting of baseless 1970s and 80s era conspiracy-mongering about queer people as supposed “groomers” and “pedos.” In fact, most child molesters identify as heterosexual. But as the website of the Zero Abuse Project, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing sexual abuse, puts it, “Abuse is about power and control and is not anchored by sexual orientation.”

Never mind the fact that 93% of child sex abusers are known to their victims, and 34% of child sex abuse victims are abused by members of their own families. Statistically, attending church on a regular basis is far more dangerous for children than attending an occasional family-friendly drag show in the company of their parents. Yet only the latter are regularly targeted by raving mobs of angry, mostly white, mostly male Christian fascists, carrying the Christian flag and shouting things like, “The fist of Christ will come down on you very soon!”

Abusers and authoritarians can’t handle ego threats, so instead of self-reflection on the real threats of violence within their own communities, they scapegoat members of vulnerable groups, casting them as “demonic” and connected to powerful, “evil” forces, thus allowing them to paint themselves as victims rather than victimizers. Rather than grapple with the ways in which their patriarchal ideology directly fosters abuse against women, children, and queer folks, they push actively harmful policies that purport to “help” them. Such are the contours of majoritarian grievance-mongering—and it’s the out-groups and the children the fascists claim to be so concerned about who suffer as a result.

Like other kinds of abuse, today’s right-wing American moral panic is about power and control—the power and control of the aggrieved, privileged population who fear they are losing their “right” to put the rest of us in our place. So far, the current moral panic isn’t generating an epidemic of false convictions for “indecency” or sexual misconduct involving minors, as happened during the Satanic Panic. But if we let them get away with it, today’s American fascists will simply criminalize queer existence, and then, you can be sure, the arrests will start in force.

Tennessee’s new drag ban, which would have gone into effect on April 1 before it was temporarily blocked by a court, stipulates that a second offense is a felony, punishable by up to six years in prison. And let’s be clear: While lower courts may still block laws like Tennessee’s from going into effect as they work their way through the court system, the illegitimately stacked, far-right Supreme Court can almost be counted on to stand on the wrong side of history. If the law does go into effect within the next year or two, how it is enforced may give us a hint of what lies in store for the rest of the nation if Republicans take full control of the federal government. We need to be aware of the stakes even as we continue to fight state-level battles, and we need to start pressuring blue states to commit not to enforce unjust laws targeting marginalized people, as dictated by an angry fascist minority who hold disproportionate power in our flawed American system. Fascists should not be allowed to frame the national discourse, and they have proven time and time again that they don’t truly care about the wellbeing of actual children, as opposed to the voiceless victims they’ve created in their heads. They only care about retaining power and control—and pitting scapegoated “demons” against objectified “children” is a means to that end.

[post_title] => Tennessee's Anti-Drag Bill Doesn't Exist in a Vacuum [post_excerpt] => Attacks against LGBTQ rights—largely targeting trans people—have been ramping up. It isn't hard to imagine what will happen next. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => anti-lgbtq-drag-policies-christian-attacks-rights-tennessee [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5760 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
Drag queen Vanity is under a spotlight in the foreground, while most of the background is black. Her red hair is teased high in an up-do, with the front smoothed back. She's in profile, looking off to the side, and is wearing a large earring with many large gemstones. She's wearing a low cut muted green dress, with a crystal broach at the waist.

Tennessee’s Anti-Drag Bill Doesn’t Exist in a Vacuum

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Why the Duma's new restrictions against LGBTQ "propaganda" are both dangerous and unsurprising.

Nearly everyone who pursues an advanced degree in area studies without having ethnic or family ties to their chosen region has an unusual story about how they got into the field. In my case, the interest stemmed from two short-term evangelical youth mission trips to Russia in 1999 and 2000. 

I had just graduated from high school at the time, and I was looking for something to help me contextualize a crisis of faith that had been troubling me for several years. I wanted to imagine a world beyond the stifling Midwestern conservative Christian enclave in which I’d grown up, and when I first stepped off the plane in Moscow, I was nervous but also thrilled to start getting a sense of what Russia was like. I was thus susceptible to certain romantic notions about the “Russian soul” and its depth of authenticity that supposedly contrasted with Western superficiality and calculation, and, after seeing the sights in Moscow and spending a couple of weeks getting to know young Russians in a rural summer camp environment, I was hooked. In that lingering post-Cold War moment of relative optimism, I developed a naive fascination with Russian language and culture that came to define my professional and intellectual life in the following years.

It’s embarrassing to me now that I ever engaged in missionary activities, but, while I quickly gave up on the desirability of converting (Orthodox) Christians to (Protestant) Christianity, the new friends and pen pals and an interest in the country itself remained. I began to study Russian in college, and from that point on, I traveled to Russia regularly until the end of 2015, by which time I had earned a PhD in modern Russian history from Stanford University and spent three years teaching at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), a school with which Stanford partnered at the time. But these days, I’m forced to wonder if I’ll ever go back.

Amid the coverage of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, which has dragged on now for nearly eight months, the Russian State Duma has been preparing to pass further restrictions against LGBTQ “propaganda” in an initiative that Deputy Alexander Khinshtein, chair of the committee on information policy, believes may pass as early as next week, according to reporting by the Russian news service Interfax. The new legislation, for which hefty fines will be demanded from violators, is quite comprehensive, banning any public representation of queer sexualities or gender identities, and making particular mention of banning “information that might cause children to wish to change their sex.” Thus far, this new legislation has received relatively little comment in the Western press. But there is no doubt that the legislation and the Russian discourse around it will generate yet more violence against a scapegoated minority as the government drives LGBTQ existence entirely underground. 

“Sodomy” was illegal in the Soviet Union, and was only legalized in Russia in 1993. At that point, many observers believed that a democratizing post-Soviet state was on a trajectory toward greater acceptance of difference and greater integration into the international community. Sadly, and in retrospect unsurprisingly, the openness did not last.

From 2003 to 2004, in between finishing college at Ball State University and starting my postgraduate studies at Stanford, I worked as an English teacher at the American Home—a private English school and center of cultural exchange—in the provincial Russian city of Vladimir, in the region I’d traveled to as a youth missionary. In my advanced English classes at the American Home, I had students read and discuss newspaper articles about current events, and that year, the state of Massachusetts had legalized same-sex marriage. When we discussed the topic in class, by and large, the students voiced negative opinions. But whether it was acceptable that we were discussing homosexuality and LGBTQ rights in the classroom was never remotely in question. 

Fast-forward to the 2012-2013 academic year, when, post-PhD, I taught humanities classes to both undergraduates and master’s students at RANEPA. One of the Russian students in my postgraduate course—the only liberal among the Russians in the class—gave a sympathetic presentation about Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” protest and its aftermath. She chose the topic entirely on her own, but I was admittedly enthusiastic. Her presentation gave way to a chaotic shouting match among the students, which I should have taken as a foreshadowing of things to come. Some weeks later, I got a frantic phone call from a RANEPA administrator demanding to know why I had “taught Pussy Riot lyrics” in my class. The conversation left me wondering if I was going to get fired. While I didn’t, I did learn to self-censor a bit in the classroom. Later that summer, the Russian State Duma passed its notorious anti-gay “propaganda” law banning the dissemination of any information about “non-traditional sexual relations” to minors. I was dismayed.

All of this has been on my mind in light of the Duma’s new anti-LGBTQ legislation—legislation that feels all the more potent given what is fueling it. Because while anti-queer sentiment has been brewing for years, with much encouragement from above, it is also quite clear that Moscow’s anti-queer obsession is connected with the war in Ukraine, both of which derive from an authoritarian ethos that elevates toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and “traditional values” as an ideal to be emulated, promising punishment for those who deviate. The legislation is of a piece with the war effort, which Russian Orthodox Church and state officials have cast in terms of “spiritual warfare” against the “satanic” West, specifically for its rejection of these same “traditional values.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken an increasingly right-wing populist line since 2011, a period when protests against corruption and election irregularities were a regular feature of life in Moscow. Meanwhile, since the Ukrainian protests of 2013, which centered on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) and developed into what is now referred to as the Revolution of Dignity, right-wing Russian politicians and Russian Orthodox Christian leaders have fixated on Ukrainian aspirations for democracy and self-determination, denouncing these hopes as a Western conspiracy, Nazism, Satanism—and, of course, as the corrupting influence of “Gayropa.” The authoritarian desire of the Putin regime and Russian nationalists to control the future of Kyiv has thus been framed in terms of “Western decadence” vs. “traditional Slavic values,” a framing that, until Putin actually invaded Ukraine, generated a great deal of sympathy for the Russian autocrat on the American and European Right.

Here at home, of course, LGBTQ rights are also under intense attack by the Right, and certain states’ governors—those of Florida and Texas in particular—have so severely abused their respective state bureaucracies in their efforts to persecute transgender Americans and their supporters that many families with trans children have been forced to move out of state. This isn’t the post-Cold War world many of us once young, naïve idealists imagined. When I returned from Russia to take a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of South Florida in Tampa in 2015, I still thought I was going to a place where things were getting better and better for queer folks like myself. I was wrong.

In both Putin’s authoritarian Russia and Trump’s authoritarian America, it was (and has been) painful to watch people I thought were reasonable go all-in for the nationalist narratives that leave no room for those who are different from the straight Christian norm. Ironically, it was while living in Moscow, at age 33, that I finally came to recognize my own queerness, the source of feeling “different” and uncomfortable in my own skin that had marked my evangelical childhood and youth, and which that same evangelical socialization had left me ill-equipped to see or acknowledge. Once upon a time, I had held up Russia as a mirror to America, my vague young adult discontent and inability to feel comfortable in my Christian Right milieu fueling a need to broaden my horizons about human possibilities. Now, I see in both countries a sort of imperial provincialism, a post-Cold War hangover borne of “great power” nostalgia and a yawning abyss of insecurity papered over with jingoistic bravado, conspiracy theories, and approved categories of people to hate, while (in classic abuser mode) claiming to “love” them so much that you have to beat them into conformity with what is ultimately “best for them.” In both countries, there are many good people who resist these toxic impulses, but the impulses persist, leaving destruction in their wake. 

The last time I was in Russia was December 2015, when RANEPA flew me to Moscow to sign a contract that supposedly had to be signed in person before I could get paid for the last semester of editorial work I had done remotely on one of the school’s academic journals. With not much to do other than wait for the paperwork, I visited friends, strolled down memory lane, and went ice skating with a colleague and an ex-girlfriend at the massive outdoor rink in Gorky Park. Amid New Year’s preparations, almost no work gets done in Russia in late December, and on the day I had to leave Moscow, there was still no contract for me to sign. “Don’t worry,” a young administrator told me. “We’ll just forge your signature on the contract.” I finally got paid in cash at an academic conference in the United States that took place nearly a year later.

That surreal goodbye to Russia is an apt coda to the years I spent at RANEPA, when Putin’s creeping authoritarianism started to become, well, much less creeping. In the first few years after 2015, I continued to assume I would return to Russia someday. But now, many Russians themselves, including some of my friends and colleagues, have had to flee the country for their own protection as conscientious objectors to the full-scale war that, back then, none of us anticipated. Some LGBTQ Russians have also fled in recent years, a trend that will no doubt continue as state persecution of the LGBTQ community intensifies. Just as Americans sometimes debate whether it’s ethical for people whose rights and safety are threatened to leave red states instead of staying and trying to change things for the better, the topic of leaving or remaining in Russia—which inevitably raises questions of privilege and survivors’ guilt—has been a contentious matter among the Russian intelligentsia in recent years. My own thinking is that no one who can find a way to leave—especially no marginalized person—is ever ethically obligated to remain in a place that denies them their rights and is unsafe for them. Sometimes, as you struggle to keep hope alive that someday things will be better, all you can do is bear witness.

[post_title] => Russia's New Anti-LGBTQ Legislation is Just More of the Same Authoritarianism [post_excerpt] => Why the Duma's new restrictions against LGBTQ "propaganda" are both dangerous and unsurprising. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => russia-duma-anti-lgbtq-propaganda-legislation-authoritarianism [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5317 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Russia’s New Anti-LGBTQ Legislation is Just More of the Same Authoritarianism

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An exclusive excerpt from "It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror."

In My Skin / Dans ma peau

IT WASN’T UNTIL I got pregnant that I finally saw how distant I was from my own body. This was late 2016, early 2017, and I was about to turn thirty-five, a late age for a first baby. I spent half my day reading pregnancy manuals and websites, baffled and embarrassed by their maniacally chipper tone, which seemed to be aimed not at parents of small children but at the actual children themselves: Baby is the size of a grape! A papaya! A spaghetti squash! It’s all right to be nervous. But more all right to be happy! Mom (the pregnant person is always addressed, in these texts, as “Mom”) is getting ready for a big change!

I was not getting ready for a big change, I was in the midst of one. My personality shifted with my hormones, giving me new tastes and interests and a terrifying ability to cry in public. I swelled and rounded, changed shirt sizes and pant sizes and shoe sizes, puffed up at the joints until I had the tree-trunk legs of a brontosaurus. In the more scientific manuals, I learned that my body had doubled its amount of blood; that the baby’s cells were mingling with mine, and would stay there after I gave birth, rendering me a biological chimera; that I was growing a new organ, the placenta, and when I gave birth, I would both expel and (the manuals strongly encouraged) eat it.

The teenage edgelord in me delighted in this information. A parasite turns you into a mutant and forces you to eat your own organs; what’s cooler than that? Yet, when I tried to talk to other people about how disgusting pregnancy was, I was met with baffled politeness, not only from the world at large but from pregnant women. This experience of being lost at sea in my own body, held captive to its processes, seemed to be mine alone. In fact, if the expressions on people’s faces were any indication, it was mildly crazy.

Yet the more I sat with the feeling, the more it seemed to me that my body had never belonged to me. There were whole areas—my hair, my breasts—that I was keeping around primarily because they got a reaction from people. There were processes that had always felt unwelcome; as a teenager, my periods were so distressing that I once passed out in the middle of a McDonalds because I felt one coming on. I could never figure out all the little things women were supposed to do, how it was that they managed to look adult and female and put-together. It seemed easy, or at least manageable; a necessary life skill, like cooking dinner. I just couldn’t do it. My body was something I needed to manipulate, a weird, soft machine I was never quite sure of operating correctly. I fed it like a pet, washed it like a car, exercised it... well, no, I didn’t exercise it, because that would require getting in there and fucking around, and I spent as much time reading or drinking or otherwise getting out of my body as I could.

It never would have occurred to me to call these feelings “dysphoria.” I pushed through them the same way I’d always pushed through the pangs of shame and panic I got when I tried to do girly things or present as convincingly feminine, telling myself it was just internalized misogyny or poor self-esteem. Yet it seems clear to me now that my pregnancy was the beginning of my coming-out process as a nonbinary transmasculine person. It called my body to my attention. It made me realize that I could successfully and intentionally undergo a big change.

Now that I’m out, my former alienation from my body seems normal. I wasn’t “put together” because I was trying to put together the wrong thing. It’s like I bought a coffee table at IKEA and spent thirty-five years trying to assemble a couch with the parts. Frustration was inevitable. Yet in the moment, before I knew any other name for my experiences, my only comparison was body horror—specifically, the body horror movie I loved most in the world, and have loved ever since I saw a crappy VHS copy of it in college: In My Skin, the 2002 independent movie by French writer-director Marina de Van. In My Skin (Dans ma peau) is one of those movies that frequently makes lists of the “most disturbing movies ever” or “toughest horror movies to watch.” The college boyfriend I rented it with noped-out by the second act, telling me he was just too uncomfortable to keep going. I’ve always enjoyed the nerdy flex of watching a horror movie that is too much for some cis guy, and yet it pains me that In My Skin is remembered primarily as a gross-out feature. The violence here is nowhere near as graphic as the average Saw or Hostel movie. In My Skin is scarier than those movies precisely because it reaches the viewer on a level that soulless splatter porn can’t; the injuries feel real and painful because they’re grounded in a frighteningly believable portrait of one woman’s self-destruction.

We open on a heroine, Esther (played by de Van, directing herself), who seems to more or less have her life together: she’s got a job at an advertising firm, with a promotion in the near future; she has a boyfriend who wants to move in together; she’s putting him off, but it seems clear where things are headed. It’s a recognizable white, upper middle-class, postfeminist, heterosexual trajectory. It’s what she’s supposed to want, even if some key elements, like the boyfriend, don’t excite her as much as she’d like.

One night, at a drunken party, Esther manages to rip her calf open on a piece of jagged metal in someone’s yard. Due to some combination of shock and nerve damage and alcohol, Esther doesn’t feel the injury, and goes through the whole night without realizing that her leg is gushing blood. She only sees what’s happened when she goes to the bathroom; she gasps, and fingers the edges of her wound, and begins crying. It’s not clear whether she’s in pain or simply horrified by what she’s seeing.

I mean to say: Esther is betrayed and traumatized to see her body shedding blood from a hole that shouldn’t be there. You can see where the transmasculine viewer might connect. It is also bizarrely relatable to see how Esther tries to deal with the injury, which is, at first, by pretending she doesn’t have one; she goes over to her friends and casually mentions that she might need to go to the hospital, but she wants to stop at a bar for one last drink first. The doctor who eventually stitches Esther up is baffled by her dissociation: “Are you sure it’s your leg?” he jokes.

Esther doesn’t laugh. She also doesn’t answer. Esther becomes obsessed with her injury, and with the numbness that seems to be spreading out over her whole body. She begins trying to re-create the thrill of getting hurt; first pinching and picking at herself, then cutting herself, then doing several things so gross that one hesitates to spoil them, except to say that this one woman somehow becomes both the perpetrator and the victim of an entire Texas Chainsaw Massacre before the credits roll.

The gross-outs are real, but never cheap. Esther’s self-harm addiction mounts slowly and realistically; the brief relief of a cutting session in the break room slowly giving way to more sessions, more extreme injuries, entire weekends spent alone in a hotel room, doing things to yourself that you have to explain later as the result of a car accident. Some scenes are uncomfortable precisely because de Van’s slack-jawed, compulsive pleasure as she works on herself feels like watching someone masturbate. It’s that kind of problem: an urge you can’t get rid of without indulging, a gross but pressing need.

Esther’s self-destruction is a symptom of alienation: from capitalism (during a business dinner, Esther has to forcibly restrain her hand from skittering around the table) or from womanhood (after one cutting session, she watches a female friend apply moisturizer, baffled by the concept of feminine self-care) or from heterosexuality (her boyfriend tries to “cure” her by fucking her while asking if she can feel him; he does not get the answer he’s hoping for). Careful viewers will have noted that de Van’s heroine shares a name with Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar. Like that other Esther, she self-destructs in part because meeting the expectations placed on women already feels like a kind of self-harm.

Most importantly, though, the cutting is symptomatic of Esther’s alienation from Esther. She doesn’t hate her body, she tells us, but she also doesn’t think of it as her. Her self-injury is exploratory, almost clinical; she’s a scientist, testing the foreign object of her flesh, trying to see what it can do. In fact, there is no part of Esther’s life that is truly hers: her friends are not really her friends, the man she fucks isn’t someone she particularly wants to be fucking, her professional success is maintained at the cost of disappearing into back rooms and wine cellars and coming apart at the seams. She takes her body apart because she is trying to get back inside it. She’s not trying to kill herself. She’s trying to prove she’s alive.

~

It’s dangerous, I know, to connect transmasculinity or gender dysphoria with a movie about female self-mutilation. The idea that transmasculine people are self-harming “women” is currently one of the main talking points TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) use to try to argue us out of existence.

As I write this, the number one book result on Amazon for “trans men” is a book called Irreversible Damage. The title is splashed across the page in big, bloodred letters, with a subtitle promising to expose the “Transgender Craze That’s Seducing Our Daughters” in the same tone 1950s horror movie posters used to advertise a “Terrifying Monster of the Ages!” or some “Students Made Victims of Terror-Beast!” Beneath the titles, there’s an illustration of a little girl, or possibly a baby doll, who is still alive and conscious despite the gigantic, red-rimmed, perfectly circular hole scooped out of her stomach.

The message is clear: transmasculinity is body horror. The average trans boy, according to Irreversible Damage author Abigail Shrier, is “psychologically alienated from her [sic] own body, and headed toward medical self-harm;” she predicts that medical transition will leave such a boy “angry, regretful, maimed, and sterile.” Give or take a “sterile,” he sounds very much like Esther from In My Skin.

Other TERFs have resorted to putting transmasculine bodies on display, hoping that the supposed freakishness of top surgery scars or testosterone-squared jawlines will scare the public away from supporting us. Photographer Laura Dodsworth has published an entire series of seminude portraits of “detransitioners,” women who formerly identified as transmasculine. Dodsworth was inspired, she says, by the horror she feels when she thinks about trans men’s bodies: “For me, the idea of having my breasts, ovaries, and womb removed, and then wanting them back, creates a feeling so unnerving that I cannot occupy it for long.”

She can, however, ask other people to occupy it in front of her while she takes pictures. It’s not clear whether Dodsworth informed her subjects that she would accompany the photos of their naked bodies with commentary on how scary and disgusting they are; nor is it clear how Dodsworth’s “unnerved” feeling is different from the pleasurable disgust carnival-goers feel at freak shows.

First things first: The posttransition body is not a mutilated body. It’s a healed body. Transition is not a symptom of psychological distress but a means to cure it. That “unnerving” feeling Dodsworth imagines—the horror of looking down at a body you don’t recognize, one which can’t do what you want or need it to do—is already felt by many people who are uncomfortable in their assigned genders, and it is spectacularly cruel for someone to use her own imaginary dysphoria as an excuse to deny transpeople treatment for theirs.

Yet the rubbernecking dread transphobic “feminists” have for trans bodies—Shrier, or Dodsworth, or J. K. Rowling, for whom trans boys are merely psychologically damaged and self-hating “girls” who’ve succumbed to the “allure of escaping womanhood”—is not unfamiliar to me as a horror fan. Whether these women know it or not, they’re talking about transpeople in the same way that sexist men have historically talked about the bodies of cis women.

The body horror genre is deeply rooted in cis men’s fear of femininity, and considers cis female bodies to be inherently freakish, flawed, and deformed. In particular, body horror often focuses an obsessive disgust on cis women’s reproductive cycle, either in a sideways fashion—like the exceptionally vaginal face-hugger in Alien, or that franchise’s many chest-bursting images of “child-birth”—or directly, as in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, where a woman’s fertility dooms her man to a life of tending the foul horror she’s produced. Body horror king David Cronenberg spent much of the ’80s explaining why he was scared of vaginas. There was the pulsating external uterus of The Brood, where a (cis) woman’s capacity to reproduce without a man led to countless hammer-based murders, or the “mutant women” of Dead Ringers, with their insatiable sexual needs and triple-headed Cerberus vaginas. Both movies feature a woman chewing through an umbilical cord with her teeth, I guess because no one told Cronenberg about the placenta thing.

This is how horror is used by the dominant culture: to justify fear and violence toward the Other, the Alien, the Mutant—and in a patriarchy, that title will always belong primarily to people who aren’t white cis men. Whether it’s David Cronenberg’s umbilical phobia, Laura Dodsworth’s close-ups of top-surgery scars, or the countless ways that cis-directed comedies and slasher movies have trained us to fear the bodies of trans women, horror is always located outside, in the marginalized person, in the body that doesn’t look like the person behind the camera.

I’m not interested in this type of horror, to put it mildly. Yet I still describe my own experiences in terms of body horror, because I am my own person to describe. I still hold out hope for body horror stories told by marginalized people, stories that are not about demonizing or destroying the Other but confronting the least comfortable parts of yourself. (It’s significant that when David Cronenberg discovered male anal penetration in the ’90s—Naked Lunch, eXistenZ—his gross-outs were improved.) There is a difference between feeling uncomfortable with your own body and having others proclaim how uncomfortable they are with you, between the horror felt by a person and the horror caused by a monster. Few movies understand this as well as In My Skin.

Marina de Van spends a lot of time naked in her own movie. Esther is perpetually taking clothes off, putting them on, hanging out at home in her underwear, taking showers. The camera encourages us to study her body in detail; here are her hands, here are her legs, here’s the odd fold of skin gathered at her right hip. The nudity has a strange dissociative effect, like catching your reflection unexpectedly in a mirror—de Van is both the object of our gaze and the subject directing it, somehow behind the camera and in front of it at the same time. All this serves a very practical purpose: de Van wants us to understand the architecture of Esther’s body before she destroys it. She’s laying out the parameters of the crime scene, giving us a tour of the house before she tears it down.

These points were missed by the film’s early (and nearly all male) critics, who invariably took the sight of a woman’s body on screen as an invitation to rate her looks: “Ms. de Van, who resembles a feral, gap-toothed version of the young Leslie Caron, is at once beautiful and ugly,” runs a representative assessment from Stephen Holden’s New York Times review. Dennis Lim at the Village Voice praised her “arresting screen presence” while also calling her “pale, flared-nostriled, and gap-toothed.” There are just so many more interesting things you could say about Marina de Van’s teeth in this movie—like, for instance, the fact that she uses them to eat her own leg like a chicken wing. Even in a movie about how women’s bodies are treated like meat, these men can’t help but leave three-star Yelp reviews for hers.

Cis men seemed incapable of understanding that a woman’s body could be put on screen for reasons other than objectification. We’re not meant to want Esther—we’re meant to be her. The movie is effective precisely because de Van blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, person and object, audience and action; when viewers of In My Skin scream or flinch at some gruesome injury, it’s because we’re so connected to Esther’s body that it feels like we are being injured. In the moment, as he squirms and averts his eyes from the bloody screen, the cis male viewer of In My Skin has become the very thing he’s spent his whole life trying not to resemble: a woman.

It’s that invitation to occupy the marginalized and monstrous body, to feel what it feels, that makes In My Skin unique. The power to make our oppressors share our perspective, to make them see the world as we see it—to bring them inside our skin, as de Van puts it—is one of the most potent tools any storyteller has. In My Skin is not an overtly feminist movie, but it makes the still-radical assumption that we will be able to identify with a woman enough to take her suffering as seriously as our own.

It worked. I’m not a woman. I feel my own pain, and Esther’s, when I watch this movie. What I relate to is not the cutting, though; the TERFs are wrong on that. What I relate to is the suffering the cutting is intended to relieve. It’s the baffled sense of being locked out of your own body; unable to connect with the person that is supposed to be you. Esther’s desperate need to get back inside herself, to have even one moment of being fully present in her own life, is something I’ve felt many times. It’s something I stopped feeling only when I transitioned.

I got so used to pushing past discomfort in the first thirty-five years of my life. I maintained my disconnected body in a manner that pleased others, gritted my teeth through periods and pregnancy, suppressed the flashes of anguish and shame and self-disgust that arose at predictable moments, but for no reason I could name. It’s only now, when the discomfort has lifted somewhat, that I realize I was hurting myself every day of my life. The injury was there. I just didn’t let myself feel it. I covered it up, mopped up the blood, went out and asked if anyone wanted to grab a beer.

When we cannot put ourselves together, we tear ourselves apart. This is true no matter who we are, no matter what reason we have for not fitting into the lives we’re given. Esther never explains why she needs to destroy herself, yet the answer is always right there in front of us. Why does any animal chew its own leg off? Because it’s trapped.

From "It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror," edited by Joe Vallese. Excerpted with permission of Feminist Press. Copyright 2022 Jude Ellison S. Doyle.

[post_title] => The Healed Body [post_excerpt] => An exclusive excerpt from "It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror." [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => it-came-from-the-closet-queer-reflections-on-horror-book-excerpt-in-my-skin [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5182 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

The Healed Body

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No, I'm not joking.

Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon, in a straight back chair on two legs leaned against the wall. Iced tea or Aperol spritz in hand, Dolly on the record player. We’ve just gotten back from work or visiting elder neighbors or distributing hygiene kits and we’re looking out over the garden, where we grow tomatoes and kale on land returned to and rented from its local Native communities. Some of us will turn our harvest into a vegan vegetable lasagna, while others will do the dishes so no one doubles up on chores. After dinner, we’ll sit around a fire and wax optimistic about the rise of leftist governments in Latin America or the latest rom com, and dance with the kids and pets to Beyoncé until we all get sleepy and retire to our own quiet, comfortable quarters.

… I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here—but it sounds pretty idyllic to me.

For the past few years, I’ve been pitching friends, my girlfriend, and pretty much every person I meet on the idea of starting a queer commune. To me, it’s an easy and perfectly logical sell. Built-in relationships buffered by solitude? Not having to do all the chores (or buy a whole house) yourself? A spirit of chosen family and anti-heteronormativity? I’m not sure what more a millennial queer could want.

Often my audience goes along with it, affecting enthusiasm as if placating a child who’s playing pretend. “Let’s look in the desert!” one friend offers, then later sends me a Zillow listing for land outside Palm Springs. (I guess we’re building.) An ex-girlfriend tells me she and her fiancé joke about buying a multifamily house with her cousin and his boyfriend and raising kids together. A good friend from college and I discuss the animals, activities, and ethos of “the compound” we’ll one day end up on.

What these people fail to understand is that I am not playing—and whatever surface interest they show barely conceals their endgame. Because for every feigned “Fuck yeah” and “We’ll host art shows in our yard!” is another friend, another queer couple, lost to the decaying Xanadu of the American dream: individual homeownership. As they’ve been socialized to see it, they’re not just buying a house, but also buying into the promise of safety, stability, and comfort that can apparently only be secured with a mortgage. I watch, melancholic, as they succumb. This could be us, I whisper, painting pastorals of home-cooked meals you didn’t have to make unless you wanted to make them, and someone always there to take you to the airport, but you and your girlfriend would rather sink a million dollars into an 800-square-foot single-family.

~

I got my first glimpse of communal living in college. I had recently found queerness, and with it, a community of other queer students and alums who lived in double- and triple-deckers where they cooked together, learned from one another, and formed all kinds of relationships—living, laughing, loving, as it were. They probably would have identified this as “intentional living,” more than “commune living,” although both are essentially a group of people sharing space and resources. But semantics aside, they showed me a configuration that felt more loving, more normal, than the purported ideal of a suburban nuclear family. (Admittedly, I was also watching a lot of Big Love at the time.)

Particularly appealing about these spaces was their foundation of queer ethics. The residents were queer, yes, in sexuality, gender, or both, but beyond that, their politics resisted assimilation and oppression and were rooted in inclusive feminism. Many were activists and organizers in other leftist movements; the houses were an experiment in mutual aid, honest communication, and non-punitive measures for addressing harm. They were environments that allowed a multiplicity of relationships and intimacies to bloom. If you were poly, if you didn’t want kids, if you didn’t aspire to anything but being a kind person, if you were just a freak—you could feel at home.

It made sense not just theoretically, but also practically. As someone who prizes privacy and interdependence—and as an Aquarian who loves humanity but not always people—I was taken by the concept of having one’s own space with friends close by, all of us contributing skills and goods and relying on one another. I’m incapable of house maintenance, for example, but I’d happily do the group laundry. I don’t want to raise my own human children, but I think I’d thrive as a weird aunt.

Some might call this immature; a failure to properly adult. In dominant U.S. culture, there’s an expectation of ascending from living with parents or roommates to living alone or with a spouse. But we’re somewhat of a minority there: Around the world, the most common living arrangement is the extended family household. It tracks, then, that we’ve been fed classist and racist notions of communal living as unhealthy, unproductive, and un-American. After World War I, the U.S. government conceived and propagated the aspirational narrative of individual homeownership as a direct response to communism. Later, the Public Works and Federal Housing administrations socially engineered segregated public housing and underwrote the white (wealthied) suburbanization of the U.S. We want to own our own homes because—surprise, surprise—the idea was marketed to us.

If sharing a home with extended family or non-relations is antithetical to this country’s identity, it’s not just about forgoing individual property ownership. Communal living demands and facilitates a way of life that’s inherently anti-capitalist. Six people on one piece of land don’t need to buy six lawnmowers. Cohabitating with housemates from different backgrounds and life experiences gives way to social and political alignments that threaten the dominant paradigm. And if we didn’t have to do everything ourselves—if we weren’t solely responsible for keeping our lights on and our kids fed—what freedom might we know, both collectively and as individuals?

The pandemic, for all its hellishness, has blown illuminating holes through our picket fence individualism. Many of us who’d been relatively comfortable minding our own were suddenly confronted with the reality that we’re vulnerable without each other. We started getting to know our neighbors, trading toilet paper and sourdough starter. The number of multigenerational homes increased, and roommates—whether platonic or romantic—looked after one another when we fell sick. Covid (re)introduced us to communal care.

It also demonstrated and continues to demonstrate how profoundly our neoliberal systems have failed us. From fractured supply chains and healthcare infrastructure to insecure housing markets and wages continually eclipsed by the cost of living, instability and scarcity have blanketed the collective. Rent and inflation increases are knocking more people out of their homes, while more than 3 in 5 people in the U.S. are in debt. After so many mothers left their jobs to care for kids at home in 2020, there are still 1 million fewer women in the workforce two years later.

Why not abandon the road once laid out for us, now all buckled pavement and gaping potholes, and take a detour down the less trodden path of communal living? Why not create our own, ever-expanding social safety net? It’s been made clear that traditional structures of power aren’t going to save us. We are all we’ve got. And when we’re not on our separate, self-reliant islands—when we have more robust immediate support networks of people who may not share our surname—we’re better able to help others in our communities and ourselves. And it works: One recently founded commune, the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, was explicitly developed as a safe haven for queer and trans people trying to survive the previous presidential administration, and continues to grow today. 

I’m not too proud to admit I Zillow as much as the next person (though I remain disturbed by how soothing it can be). There are some things I value more, however, than four beds and two baths to myself. In my 20s, I lived with three other queer people who taught me how to change my oil and reminded me of the simple joy of passing an unplanned joint after work. In my current fourplex, we count on one another for emergency pet care, for “Are you home? I think I left my oven on,” and for an unexpected, genuine conversation when passing in the yard. (Not to mention the loaves of bread one of my neighbors regularly bakes for the rest of us.) It’s experiences like these that trigger the spark of connection, the comfort of knowing someone’s close by, and the familial warmth of being cared for and taking care.

The American Dream was never imagined with everyone in mind. At its best, individual homeownership evokes feelings of stability, safety, and attachment. At its worst, it embodies exclusionary consumerism and white-hetero tribalism. The queer commune offers all of the former without the latter, instead gifting collectivism, kinship, and the potential for social transformation. And probably some good homemade dessert. 

Y’all coming?

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An illustration of a colorful house made up of a rainbow of faces.

I Want to Start a Queer Commune