Keeping the Faith

Gays played a major part in the founding of trans ideology, but over the last 25 years it's become a religion that has completely run us over.

Young Arty

(You can watch or listen to me read this article here.)

Earlier today Ophelia Benson wrote something interesting at her website:

An exchange on Twitter has got me thinking about belief in the trans ideology, and whether I ever had any. I don’t think I did. From what I can remember, I didn’t believe in it, but I tried to prevent myself from really grasping how thoroughly I didn’t believe it. But maybe that’s not quite right – maybe I did grasp it but just pretended I didn’t. Basically, I lied about it, but what I’m not sure of is how aware of the lying I was.

That in turn has got me thinking about the evolution of my own beliefs about trans ideology. I was going to write a comment over there, but it’s spawned such a flurry of thoughts I figure this is a good opportunity to kick off my very own Substack. Welcome!

25 years ago…

Having lived and worked in the inner-city gay village since I was a teenager, I was probably around more trans people than many of us were in the mid-to-late '90s, and I find it interesting to think back to how I thought about trans then compared to now. I never believed people literally changed sex, but I did buy into the social taboo around language. It was considered ignorant and cruel to say or do anything that might remind a trans person of their condition. But that's just it: we knew it was a mental health condition and that they hadn't really changed their sex. And we knew this because we watched some gay men and lesbians evolve into their trans identities over time: we watched the lonely drag queen date a series of men who were more interested in him when he was in makeup and a skirt than when he was dressed en homme, and as he gradually moved towards crossdressing full-time, we knew what was up. We watched the really butch lesbian routinely fight off homophobic harassment & physical assaults, and as she got into increasing states of distress and belligerence and tried to erase every trace of her femininity, we knew what was up. We weren’t entirely surprised when eventually one day, whispers would rush across the village that Henry was now Enza or Lisa was now Jake.

I actually found it quite stressful, trying to remember when I was obligated to pretend about someone's sex and when I was free not to, especially because the stakes were high: to slip up was to cause deep distress to them, and worse, to make yourself look intolerant and at odds with the community's shared progressive values. (I worked at a trans bar for a while, and I was tense around my crossdressing regulars because some of them still identified as men in drag, and it was hard to remember which ones were shes and which ones were still comfortable being hes.) I think we were all feeling that anxiety, and some of us coped by policing others: we had to pretend we weren't stressed and confused about all this pretending; we had to act like we were perfectly comfortable, or someone might come down hard on us for putting a crack in the façade, and we in turn would come down hard on anyone else in order to ensure our own place in the group was secure. 

This is the formula for starting a religion, isn't it: you create a faith — a condition where everyone has to profess to believe in something that's not believable in order to maintain their standing in the group. Once you've set that dynamic in motion, everyone polices each other and the group keeps the faith going on its own, thus keeping the group cohesion going, sometimes long past its original purpose, sometimes for thousands of years. I suppose it was inevitable that amid all this confusion and fear about all these trans identifiers cropping up among us, what started out as a little lie of courtesy within the gay & lesbian community would grow to be taken more and more literally, and would eventually spread out far beyond the confines of gay & lesbian social spaces. By now, all the familiar religious players have taken their positions: we have our sacred priests and our inquisitors and our heretics and apostates and, among the gay & lesbian laity, who are mostly just keeping quiet with their heads down, we have just enough vocal true believers to keep the flock on the righteous path.

From gay to queer

Looking at it like that, the evolution from the gay community to the "queer" community makes perfect sense. Same-sex attracted people congregated by necessity because of homophobia and because we needed to socialize physically together to find dates and partners. We needed a cohesive and physically close community in order to survive, and at some point the idea got seeded that in order for our community to hold together¹, and in order for each of us to maintain our standing within it, we had to be very polite to (and never ask questions about) the gradually increasing number of trans-identifying people among us.

But over the last couple decades, social progress and technology has eliminated the constraints that originally kept same-sex attracted people ghettoized together. We’re welcome and accepted outside the ghetto; we can connect to each other online to find dates and keep up-to-date on the issues that affect us. But the dogma about gender identities, the one that we originally started out of a need to keep our group together, persists past its usefulness, and has been adopted by an entirely new group, like a disused mollusc shell that’s been taken up by a new hermit crab. The “queer community” that currently upholds gender identity dogma is entirely faith-based: anyone can be "queer" (and some 20 percent of young, mostly straight, people say they are) so long as they pledge allegiance to the tenets that trans women are women, trans men are men, and nonbinary people are valid.

To go back to the question of how beliefs about trans and gender identity have evolved, I think until quite recently most people were like me: it was never a question of whether someone’s biological sex could literally change (of course it couldn’t); we saw the issue as a matter of compassion and practicality. Do we believe trans people are deserving of compassion, and if so, how can we best accommodate them in society? Built-in to this was the implicit acknowledgement that biological sex doesn’t change: this group deserves compassion and requires special accommodation because they are not the sex they wish they were. We all agreed that trans people deserved compassion, but as the issue moved out of the gay bars (where the bathrooms were always informally mixed-sex anyways²) and into the broader public, there was, briefly, some much-needed debate about what such special accommodation would entail.

Let’s put a placeholder at this point in time because it’s important and I’ll come back to it in a moment. Because it was at this point that everybody lost the plot. If the gay community maintained the dogma that we were never supposed to acknowledge a trans person’s sex because we were afraid of losing the cohesion of the community that we needed in order to survive, what would happen when gay people gained acceptance in the wider community and all of that pressure was lifted? Well, what happened was that the broader society split into Blue States & Red. As gay & lesbian culture was enthusiastically embraced by the progressive left, the entire left became afraid of losing their own cohesion in the face of threats from the increasingly extremist right (see: Trump), and so the dogma became supercharged: when once it was necessary for gay people to play along with gender dogma for fear of being banished to the straight world, now it had become necessary for everyone on the left to never question the sex of trans people³, for fear of being forever banished to MAGA-land.

A full-blown religion

Now that we’ve got a full-blown religion on our hands, the question of whether someone’s sex can truly change is a matter of faith: just like transubstantiation in Christianity, it’s not so much about whether or not it’s materially, scientifically, factually true, it’s about what you believe counts to be true, and which social factors influence your belief. In order to come to the view that it’s true (and in the case of gender identity dogma you must, if you want to keep your standing as a decent progressive person), you have to drill down two levels: first, to the meanings of the words woman, man, male, female, sex, gender (something like, words are just words and their meanings evolve all the time); and then down another level to the meaning of truth itself (something like, it’s true because it has to be true, because if it wasn’t true then our evil opponents would be right, and they just aren’t, because they’re evil, so even though I can’t explain exactly how or why it’s true, I already know that it is, because I am one of the good people and it is good for it to be true). Just like every other faith, you make these decisions based on your relationship with your religious community, not based on critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning.

It’s a terrible irony that same-sex attracted people find ourselves needing to come together to organize once more, this time to put down the dogma that we helped create in the first place to keep us together. We need to get society back to that time I put a placeholder in earlier: right at that moment, when same-sex marriage was being legalized everywhere, when gays & lesbians were starting to turn up all over television and movie screens, the honeymoon period after Ellen & Will & Grace, and before Tumblr and Trump. Then, there were the beginnings of rational mainstream conversations about sex and gender and transgender and gender dysphoria. For just one example, the 2004 UK Gender Recognition Act spawned some really interesting and reasonable discussions about the boundaries of transsexualism and how we can accommodate trans people in society. That was a turning point, and if we can make our way back to it, maybe we can try to get back on track.

I’ll leave it there for now. Let this serve as the introduction to my Substack. I’ll be picking up from here in my future writings. So please do subscribe!

1. or communities, plural, depending on how you look at it; gays & lesbians largely kept socially to our own but we also shared resources like media outlets, community centres, & even some bars.

2. But there were of course still problems such as incursions on lesbians’ sexual boundaries.

3. For proof of how easy it was for straight people ostensibly on the left to flout the dogmas of trans until very recently, even offensively so, just do a search on Twitter for progressive people using the word “tr***y”.