LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back.

Respectability Politics is Just Another Word for Silencing Legitimate Dissent

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

-W.B. Yeats

As the world continues to follow the US along it’s watery downward spiral into the sewer of history, I think it behooves us to swim against the stream, even if that means occasionally colliding with some unpleasant shit. Make no mistake, the next four years are going to suck for women, black people, immigrants, people who kinda look like immigrants in dim lighting, and LGBTQ+ people.

I only belong to two of those categories, and according to the right wing, only one. But fuck them, and fuck anyone who voted for them, because we’re Not Going Back into the closet. What’s important right now is that anyone and everyone who falls into these targeted categories needs to be getting each others’ backs, or the casualty list is gonna be a lot longer than it needs to be.

I’m angry. I’m terrified that the power in this nation has been handed to the worst bunch of racist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynist transphobes since 1933, I’m heartbroken that such a large number of Americans decided that some illusion of economic growth is more important than human decency, and I’m sickened at the prospect of what’s coming. But right now, I’m angry, and in a world where social media (and the government of the United Fucking States of Motherfucking America) is an open cesspit of racism, rape culture, and violent homophobia, I will not be told that my anger is inappropriate.

I will not be tone-policed, and I will not be cajoled into respectability. And why should I be respectable? It’s been made clear that regardless of my actions, I will not actually be afforded any respect. So long as trans people are denied compassionate health-care, conversational respect, or even the right to take a piss in peace and quiet, there’s no room for respectability. There will in the future, I hope, come a time when we can come to the table and speak quietly and respectably, yet forcefully, in defense of our rights, but given that those who wish to take those rights from us have abandoned even the pretense of decency and decorum, I find it frankly fucking ludicrous that we need to be the Bigger Person here.

Here then, is the heart of why respectability politics is a sham and a fucking massive political red herring. Respectability politics is a mute button on righteous indignation and entirely appropriate anger. And now is not the time to be silent. Now is not the time to make nice with the people (supposedly on “our side”) who would see our continued existence and civil rights as one among many bargaining chips they can discard for gains in other areas. It’s certainly not the time to be friendly with the ones who have openly called for our eradication. I reserve politeness, at a MINIMUM, to people who don’t openly call me a groomer, a pedophile, and a threat to women. I reserve my respect and my respectability for people who aren’t advocating for my murder.

I think back to the 90s, when Queer Nation were considered the radicals. What was their radical message? “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Think about that for a second. 34 years ago the idea that LGBTQ+ people simply existed in the public sphere was a radical idea. The idea that we wouldn’t hide ourselves away for the comfort of those who are discomforted by our very existence shook up a lot of people. As a rural Canadian teenager who started college in Portland OR in 1992, that message was a system shock that fundamentally altered my thinking. Just imagine. The idea that a Lesbian or a Gay Man might simply exist and not apologize for existing! The idea that you could be different and not hide that fact was a goddamned revelation.

40 years of progress is being threatened, and anyone who’s still denying that needs to go back and read my last post. Normalcy bias needs a swift kick in the metaphorical balls so we can get on with the work of taking this shit seriously. And the people who need to hear this most are the ones who are looking sidelong at the un-respectable activists and their strident calls to action.

There’s a fundamental error in thinking that pervades the tone-police. They wrongly think that they have some imagined status or safety to lose by allying themselves with the Loud Ones. They think that if only the Loud Ones would stop being so embarrassingly in everyone’s faces, that the gains they’ve made will be somehow unassailable. In short, they’d like to put a respectable face on queer politics for their own imagined safety.

Image Credit: Adam Ellis

It’s a mirage. Those who would harm us all would love it if the ones they’ve begrudgingly offered some measure of respect would sit out the fight, or worse, turn on the Loud Ones. The enemy knows this dynamic. And come on, man; nobody’s really fooled. Groups like the LGB alliance are mostly straight people; anti-trans gay and lesbian people are a very convenient fig-leaf, but that emperor not only has no clothes, his title as emperor was written in crayon on the back of a MacDonald’s napkin.

Trans people are, somewhat frustratingly, at a point in our political trajectory that looks suspiciously like the 90s were for LGB people. The 1992 election was the year that conservative groups tried to pass Measure 9, a ballot initiative that would have declared homosexuality to be “abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse” and would have banned gays and lesbians from, among other things, any teaching positions in the state of Oregon. You can’t help but hear echoes of this kind of thinking in the rhetoric of anti-trans politicians today. But here’s the secret. Chuds like the OCA and the Christian Coalition never stopped hating the “respectable gays”, they just realized that continuing to rant against a group of people who were gaining majority support for their public existence was damaging their own supposed respectability. There’s nothing at all stopping them from going back to stuff like Measure 9 once they’ve got us transes shoved safely back into the closet.

We have a (deeply corrupt) sitting supreme court justice who has said as much, in writing, in an official supreme court opinion. Let me just quote justice Thomas directly, hmmm?

“For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,”[…] we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents.” (Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. (2022), THOMAS, J., concurring)

You hear that, LGBdropT respectability bootlickers? What do you think is stopping the courts from overturning your right to marriage, your right to privacy, hell, your right to use a goddamned condom? Not the president-elect. Not his R-majority congress. Not “concerned centrist” hand-wringers like Susan Collins. I’m sure her brow will be heavily furrowed when they take your kids away (but she’ll keep rubber-stamping everything that Mango Mussolini shits out into the senate).

Now before you think I’m stridently against all reasoned discourse, that’s something of an overstatement. Honestly, my gut instinct is that realpolitik requires both the Loud Ones and the Respectable Ones, but situations like the one we now find ourselves in really requires that these groups use each other strategically.

Greenpeace used to be considered pretty radical until Sea Shepherd started ramming whaling boats. I’m sure conservative despoilers of the environment had strong issues with the Sierra Club, right up until Earth First started sabotaging dozers, spiking trees, and generally monkeywrenching the fuck out of clear-cutters. Suddenly those nice folks looked downright reasonable.

The Democratic party need to understand that the Loud Ones are speaking for a lot of Respectable voters. LGBTQ+ voters broke hard for your team in this last election, and throwing us under the bus isn’t an option if you want to take back congress in two years. Trump and his merry band of broligarchs, science deniers, and religious radicals are about to do some wildly unpopular shit, and you can capitalize on that, but let me be clear. I just voted in a district that flipped from Red to Blue by a razor-thin margin. I live in a VERY purple district on the VERY red side of a blue state. You need my vote to do this. I made it pretty clear in the runup to this election that I saw it as a choice between a party that is mildly indifferent to my existence vs a party that wants to eradicate me. If you show through your actions that you’re unwilling to protect my rights, then there is no functional difference in where my vote goes. If Harris had been elected, I imagine that this would be a very different conversation, but the amount of moderate liberal hand-wringing over how the trannies somehow cost you this election with our unreasonable demands to be treated like human beings? Yeah… that shit’s gotta stop.

I will be greatly relieved if we can make it through the next four years without any backsliding on our constitutional rights, but right now I’m angry. It’s giving me a lot of stress, but also a lot of energy. I would greatly prefer to focus that anger and energy on the ones who are coming for my rights, but that entails the Respectable Ones give me a clear field of fire. Pigfuckers like Seth Moulton need to take several seats and understand that their mild discomfort at the existence of trans people doesn’t get precedence over our right to live free of violence. I get that there are those in a position where being a Loud One isn’t tenable. I get that there are those who have too much to lose by speaking out. All we ask is that you stand aside and let the Loud Ones take their shot. You’re gonna look so damn reasonable by comparison.

#LGBTQNotGoingBack