If You Joined The GOP But Don’t Hate Queer People...
Historians Will Have A Word For You
Do queer lives matter? If so, why don’t we act like it?
In 2016, sixty-three million people, complacently or enthusiastically or ignorantly, aligned themselves with transphobia.
In 2020, seventy-four million people aligned themselves yet again with the same candidate and political party that spent the last four years making their positions toward women, queer people, and people of color as blinding as a red-colored sky.
What the **** happened?
Almost no one hates trans people, at least not in the way we talk about hate as a hateful impact based on hateful intentions. People take actions that have a harmful and often deadly impact toward trans people, but those actions aren’t usually motivated by hate.
They also aren’t usually motivated by the internalized transphobia everyone struggles to overcome — even trans people.
Baskets of deplorable queer haters
Remember that famous “baskets of deplorables” comment? Often quoted but just-as-often misrepresented, the remark argued that people voting for the GOP weren’t doing so because they supported GOP policies and their harmful impact toward queer people.
They were doing so because the government had let them down (Washington Monthly).
Conservative candidates promised to disrupt a system that had failed them. Overwhelmingly, white men recognized they would be relatively untouched by conservative policies that hurt queer people but promised birth, transformation, and resurrection.
Fighting back was always going to include collateral damage, but disrupting the system would eventually help everyone. Even the people it hurt.
History recorded the same seductive promise in World War II.
What word will historians have for modern conservatives?
In his famously-quoted (but less-often cited) blog post “Sky,” AR Moxy wrote:
Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.
That word is “Nazi.” Nobody cares about their motives anymore.
They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?
The moral arc of silent complicity
In 2016, sixty-three million people, complacently or enthusiastically or ignorantly, aligned themselves with transphobia.
In 2020, seventy-four million people aligned themselves yet again with the same transphobia.
Those voters became complicit in harming and killing trans people in order to thumb their nose at the system.
Voters remain complicit.
They showed the world that it was okay to sacrifice trans people if it made the world a better place.
It’s going to be our job to show them otherwise.
The future is a rainbow-colored sky
If you, like me, are queer, there is still the great danger of complicity. Not through apathy, but through the inaction of fear. Our safety is already fragile. How can we ask each other to risk what we barely get to touch?
But while we have all been hurt in different ways, we have also healed in different ways. And now? Now we are all strong in different ways.
A call to action
In his final days, Chadwick Boseman/Black Panther spoke to a graduating class at Howard University to remind them that one lost battle is not a lost war. And just so, even when you win, the fight must continue.
Sometimes you need to get knocked down before you can really figure out what your fight is and how need to fight it.
When I dared to challenge the system that would relegate us to victims and stereotypes with no clear historical backgrounds, no hopes or talents, when I questioned that method of portrayal, a different path opened up for me, the path to my destiny.
We’ve made our suffering clear. Facts and feelings were never going to change conservative hearts and minds.
What we can do is stop trying to change and control people who were never within our power to change anyway.
What we can do is let go of the very strategies that would turn us into the people we are fighting.
What we can do instead is work together as a diverse community full of imperfect allies.
We are a people who have dreamed of a rainbow-colored sky. Let us work together in order to make it real.
Additional reading
Note: this article is a playful (yet insightful!) homage to AR Maxon’s “Sky” blog post
Conservatives Are Cruel Because Cruelty Is Their Point (An Injustice)
Stop Making Excuses for Trump Supporters (Washington Monthly)
