When we talk about political stances on LGBTQ+ issues, a lot of perspectives get tossed together. Often, the distinction between any two finer points won’t prevent a larger consensus; a man who believes that queer people are living a life of sin, and a woman who believes that queer people corrupt others into becoming queer themselves would both openly assert that queer people should not be allowed to teach children. This is a part of how coalitions form and people come together to lobby for a common cause. On the political “right” of discussions around LGBTQ+ people, there is a longstanding partnership between people who are morally opposed to and reflexively scared of LGBTQ+ people and their actions. In 2018, however, while campaigning for Massachusetts Ballot “Question 3”, a veto referendum which asked residents whether or not to uphold a recent state law mandating gender identity discrimination protections, the right-wing coalition encouraging voters to veto the law fell apart and began attacking itself. One campaign firmly seated itself on the previously undefeated “bathroom sexual predator” scare tactic. This argument was then denounced and openly criticized by another right-wing campaign which argued that transgender people did not deserve civil rights at all. While this schism was not the only reason that the protections were upheld, it was the first reactionary campaign that used the fears around bathrooms to be defeated in part by its own allies. This splintering demands a close analysis in order to inform strategies of how to both shut down the right and bolster the left on supporting trans people.
The “sexual predator” scare tactic that has galvanized so many people against transgender public accommodation laws is fairly recent, only premiering during a 2015 Houston ballot initiative campaign against an equal opportunity ordinance. Fear mongering around trans/gender non-conforming people as sexual deviants and predators is not a modern invention. The particular image, however, of a man walking into the women’s restroom to assault school-aged girls is one that the campaign curated and unleashed with an artistically questionable video ad. During the 30 second spot, the phrases “ANY MAN ANYTIME” followed by “CLAIMING TO BE A WOMAN” and “REGISTERED SEX OFFENDERS” are superimposed on close ups of a presumably cisgender man in an empty women’s bathroom. It ends with a female-coded narrator voice asking us to “protect women’s privacy” as we see a white-passing girl with a backpack entering a stall as the man steps in behind her. It would be naive to suggest that these are not emotionally compelling images, but why is there a young white girl in this call to action for Houston, one of the three metropolitan areas in the country with the largest Latinx population, where less than half the population is white?
White women’s tears have historically been evoked to galvanize action against oppressed social groups, most dramatically with those belonging to marginalized racial identities. Long before the 1915 feature film Birth of a Nation glorified the KKK in the White House to roaring applause, the trope of fragile white female purity besieged by black men had been a justification for racism. In The Fair Sex, Pauline Schloesser traces the roots of this racialized and gendered mythos back to the American Revolution and argues that in the post-war era, white women were tasked with maintaining the nation’s virtue. Once you start thinking about it, examples in modern life, located everywhere from the workplace to news coverage, become apparent. One relevant example in American politics is the figure of the undocumented immigrant (Latinx) rapist and criminal who threatens the safety of our (white) cities. In a horizontal transfer, we see that the new “man in a dress” predator is merely the old game of the socially conservative pitting white (cisgender) female purity against a new group: transgender people. In the same way that women must be protected from Muslim refugee rapists and murderous black “superpredators,” they must also be shielded from the perverting spectra of “transgenderism.” The liberal left is not guiltless in upholding these implicit racial messages either; trans people of color, or POC, are usually missing in ad campaigns for accommodation laws. Whether this is purposefully done to increase appeal to white supremacists or accidentally overlooked by racially homogeneous institutions of privileged identities, the end result is the same. While black trans femmes (who face the most violence) are the perfect candidates for tragic stories on the Trans Day of Remembrance, they are rarely the first ones chosen to convince voters that trans people deserve respect. The pro-protections Massachusetts campaign unfortunately does not deviate much from this pattern in its messaging.
It is also important to note that pro-protections movement primarily showed cis-passing (also sometimes referred to as “stealth”) transgender teenagers. Transgender teenagers are one of the highest risk groups for suicide because a lack of support can be devastating, but the ones showcased were evidently from supportive families and there was no mention of at-risk youth. The choice to use children as potential victims—by both sides of the campaign—is not an accident. Due to children’s cultural association with innocence, it heightens the fear of a potential attack in both cases. At the same time, however, the choice by pro-protection campaigners to only show cis-passing transgender teenagers completely ignores the implicit messaging in the right’s fear-mongering videos that older, non-passing trans women are predatory “men in dresses”. They instead concede that adult trans people are a taboo subject. The campaign chose not to show non-stealth, gender non-conforming, or adult transgender individuals that face elevated levels of discrimination because of their visible status as transgender—despite comprising large sections of the community. By only showing cis-passing trans individuals, these ads reinforce the notion that only those who conform to the beauty standards of our cis-sexist society are worthy of support. Thus, the emphasis on children in the pro-protection legislation campaign messaging is doubly problematic.
The actions of both those defending and opposing the Massachusetts law were typical when compared with similar ballot initiatives. Surprisingly, not even the left lobbying to keep the hard-won protections was extreme. The 2015 Houston campaign, which was defending a broad equal rights ordinance, based its messaging on bolstering city pride around civil rights (“Discrimination Has No Place in Houston”) and calling bathroom concerns stemming from the law illogical. The only real update in Massachusetts to the general approach of the Houston campaign was intentionality; after all, people involved in the Houston campaign had considered the appeal of a civil rights ordinance to be self-evident. The revamped Massachusetts strategy involved larger advertising and grassroots canvassing campaigns centered around grandstanding transgender citizens, normalizing their existence, and explicitly emphasizing the necessity of civil rights. The right-wing Massachusetts coalition (who called themselves “Keep MA Safe”) campaigning to veto the new law asserted that, regardless of civil rights, the risks were too high to give excuses for “men in dresses” predators to access women’s restrooms. Even their 2018 video ad mirrors the 2015 Houston one, though the acting from their ad’s (white) young woman is arguably worse. “ANY MAN” and “ANY TIME” make a reprise, but are joined by “EVEN CONVICTED SEX OFFENDERS” this time around. The only way one can tell they are from different campaigns is that “Keep MA Safe” shot theirs in color. Whether it was fear of the proactive campaigning on the left or the supposed leftist leanings of Massachusetts in general, a bigger right-wing lobbying organization “MassResistance” took note of the situation. They were worried enough to begin their own sub-group devoted to a pro-veto ballot initiative campaign one month before the vote.
It is with MassResistance’s relevant ideology that the finer points of anti-trans movements became important. They subscribe to the idea perpetuated by pseudo-academics, like Ryan T. Anderson in his book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment”, that transgender individuals do not exist. Instead, it is more accurate in their minds to describe someone who is trans as someone who is cisgender but suffering from extreme mental illness such that they have deluded themselves into thinking a change in sex, which is not distinct from gender in this ideology, is possible. Thus, the most humane approach to transgender issues is to convince these poor unfortunate souls that they are the gender they were assigned at birth. This ideology not only lends itself to supporting conversion therapy, but actively supports it as the only compassionate response to discovering a loved one is questioning their gender identity. Letting people who believe they are transgender use the restrooms they want to only feeds into a dangerous delusion from this perspective. The original pro-veto campaign was failing to address this broader ideology by claiming that transgender people only pose a risk in public restrooms. MassResistance felt the need to add their own campaigning, explicitly stating that transgender people do not need and do not deserve civil rights protections, to correct the message and improve their chances of winning.
When the law was upheld with a sixty-eight percent majority, MassResistance turned the blame entirely onto Keep MA Safe for their blatant misinformation on the nature of transgender people. In an “analysis” post hosted on their website, the organization discusses how this “nightmare” was caused by “conservative groups trying to use a clever side argument to avoid getting into the real fight.” They paint their intervention as necessary, explaining (as expected):
“They [MassResistance’s “No to 3” ballot committee] felt strongly that three important points were not being presented to the public: (1) the LGBT movement’s “civil rights” argument has no basis whatsoever; (2) that “transgenderism” is actually a mental disorder and a destructive ideology, and (3) this law forces people to accept an absurd lie – men can never become women. Thus, the “yes on 3” people were pushing bizarre lies and an Orwellian mandate on society.”
MassResistance detail their struggles to save the doomed campaign further as hindered by “‘conservative’” reporters “skittish” to publicize their “more inflammatory alternative arguments.” This, of course, left voters with a “terribly skewed presentation of the issue” and misled them into upholding the destructive law. The post ends by foretelling that, unless the right- wing coalition changes their tactics, they will suffer defeats as they did with the “‘gay marriage battles.” One man’s doomsday is another’s respite from harassment and discrimination.
Temporarily putting aside the absurdity of MassResistance’s ideology, we must ask ourselves: What are the most effective ways to stop these attacks on trans existence? While MassResistance asserts that they share the same ideology as Keep MA Safe (hence the “side argument” comment), this reads too much into the original campaign’s stance. MassResistance is morally opposed to the existence of transgender people; Keep MA Safe is merely afraid. One’s fear of transgender people can be assuaged as trans people are normalized, but one’s moral conviction that we should not exist at all is irreconcilable with our very existence. The only way to convince Ryan T. Anderson, MassResistance, and their followers that they are wrong is to completely restructure their beliefs—both religious and pseudo-scientific. This is the work of several lifetimes and requires much more than a single ad campaign. By insisting that transgender people are normal human beings whose gender identities happen not to match the one assigned at their birth, and by normalizing the existence of trans people in everyday spaces, we can chip away at the political right’s coalition. We can begin to distinguish between those who are merely afraid of transgender realities and those who seek to actively harm transgender people, and pursue strategies accordingly. For the present, at least, capitalizing on this ideological schism to isolate and weaken these “inflammatory” voices is the next best step.
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