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Over the years I have changed my nationality, my name and my religion. Some of that caused problems with a few members of my family and lesser others, at least for a while. They got used to it and respected all the changes. Anyway it really wasn’t their business. One’s identity is one’s own and would mean nothing if it were dependent on others’ approval. Fortunately we live in a country that compulsively pledges allegiance to liberty for all.
Or so you’d think. That line is more often a crock than a truth. Who you are very much depends on how others want you to be or who they assume you are rather than what you prefer to be, especially in this land of supposed liberties.
Most of our history was built on defining and demeaning others according to fabricated stereotypes. It’s a means of control. By reducing others to stick figures of assumptions, we take away their humanity and more easily slot them in the roles we want them to play. We absolve our conscience so we can more easily enslave or slaughter them. They cannot be citizens or human beings. They are mere parasites or property.
Native Americans were romanticized and demeaned as either noble or savages, or both, but certainly not as human beings on par with white Americans. There’s no need to remind you to what extent Blacks were dehumanized, starting in law written with brain cells three-fifth compromised and ending at the lash of a whip or the end of a rope, with Christianity’s supposed blessing. We sent 120,000 American citizens to concentration camps during World War Two because they looked Asian, though we didn’t do the same even to declared Nazi sympathizers who filled Madison Square Garden. The sympathizers were white. We’ve been doing likewise to Muslims and to Ay-rabs, down to purposefully mispronouncing their race, not just since 9/11, but since the 1973 oil embargo.
Migrants are now reduced to the same dumb sterotypes, the way Mike Waltz, our former congressman and current national security adviser, did on TV the other day as he defended the illegal use of an 18th century law to deport migrants in defiance of a judge’s orders. He unholstered the word “terrorist” to describe them, then spoke of “attacks, torture, rape,” identically to the way his boss in 2015 reduced Mexicans crossing the border to criminals and rapists. Waltz of course, a sieve of military secrets, is proving himself not to be the smartest cookie in Trump’s stable of jarheads.
In all these cases the stereotypes relied on fabricated rationales to control, marginalize, imprison and at times expel those others, but not to deny their existence. Their existence was the problem, requiring all those tools of control.
Now the United States in general and Florida in particular are enacting laws that literally erase the existence of an entire class of human beings. Trump signed an order declaring that transgender people don’t exist. Only men and women do, as they were at birth–itself an illusion, as any geneticist worth her gonads would tell you: our chromosomes are never as simple as the Georgias and O’Keefes between our legs. And Florida is about to adopt a law that would let government employees dehumanize their transgender colleagues by refusing to refer to them by their preferred pronouns.
It’s like someone refusing to refer to you by your chosen name, or to acknowledge your new nationality or new religion, but worse, because gender identity goes to the core of who you are. Rather than fabricate stereotypes this time, we are simply erasing transgender people from existence. It is a new kind of genocide: bloodless, to be sure, but no less obliterating.
Over what? Because two and half athletes may have had an unfair advantage in one of a billion matches (as if the hundreds of thousands of athletes doping at every level of every sport have no effect on fairness). Because we haven’t yet settled what should be a reasonable debate rather than an inquisition over puberty blockers for adolescents. Because millions of church-going Americans, family men and women, decent Rotarians and chamber members, are perfectly ok with calling fellow-human beings freaks, mentally deranged, deformed, repulsive. None of it is true. None of it is fair. None of it builds goodwill. None of it is beneficial. Yet we happily, intentionally tank the four-way test over pronouns.
People should not impose their gender beliefs on you, I keep hearing. “We have crossed a line here when attempting to force all others to address you with these ridiculous pronouns,” went one ridiculous line I read in a comment on this site–dropped there by the spouse of an elected official. “Live a happy life but forcing others to adhere to your belief goes against the Constitution and the will of the people.” Some people being more people than others, I presume.
But who’s imposing on whom? How does it injure you to refer to me by a different pronoun anymore than it would to refer to me by the name I now bear, which is not the name of my birth? It would not. There’s no difference. The imposition is yours when you refuse to respect who I am, when you refuse to respect an entire mass of people who prefer one lousy pronoun over another.
I’m not dismissing your beliefs. But are you so theologically convinced that calling a colleague by their preferred pronoun rather than by what you presume their genitals command you to use would somehow violate Christian tenets you inherited from a Christ who washed Mary Magdalen’s feet? Of course you don’t look that far because you’ve entrapped yourself in an old habit from which you’ll emerge some years from now, ashamed. It is the habit of faith as a shield, an excuse, an absolution to inflict indignities. It has always been so with regimes from the Antebellum South to the Taliban to Trump, those regimes willing to pervert religion in the service of cruelty.
No. It’s not your faith you’re exercising. No faith is that uncharitable. You want the freedom to slur those you degrade, fully aware that for those on the receiving end of your self-righteous obstinacy, the effect of calling them by the wrong pronoun is N-wording them by dog whistle. And you want that written in laws more hateful than Plessy: separate, unequal, non-existent.
You might delude yourself into thinking this is a matter of personal freedom even as you deny others theirs. All you’re doing is clothing your bigotry in the same rationales that dehumanized all these other groups in our history to reassert your power, your definition of a human being, your means of control. All you’re doing is proclaiming that the pledge of allegiance you recite at the drop of a hat, that liberty for all, is your preferred blasphemy.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
