ERASED IN PLAIN SIGHT (A POLITICAL MEME, FAR-RIGHT ANIMUS, AND TRANS VISIBILITY)
The very existence of the March 31 international Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV) is striking on the face of it. Many cisgender folks might reasonably ask, “Aren’t you visible like never before? It seems like every week we’re hearing about you in the news, whether it’s Trump’s troop ban or some ‘bathroom bill’ somewhere.” It’s undeniable, in one sense, that trans and gender nonconforming folks are in the public eye to a degree unimaginable (to me, at least) even a decade ago. But there’s “visibility” and there’s visibility. There’s the baseline reality of being seen, and there’s the equally important question of how we’re seen. Far too often still, the how is as a crime statistic or a political wedge issue — or worse. For this reason, the TDOV (as the Human Rights Campaign describes it) is a day not only for “celebrat[ing] transgender people around the globe,” but also for “raising awareness around the discrimination [we] still face.” In the interest of contributing to the latter goal, I’d like to consider the matter of our visibility in the context of a recent social media scandal involving Republican U.S. congressman Steve King.
For those unfamiliar with him, King has long since secured his spot in the rogues’ gallery of far-right hardliners. The nine-term rep from Iowa’s deep-red 4th congressional district is far from the most colorful member of that dubious crew, lacking the clownish dandyism of Roger Stone or POTUS’s special brand of magnetism. He compensates, though, with a pitbullish plainspokenness. Where Stone talks out of every side of his mouth at once and Trump serves serves up his narcissistic delusions on a bed of shredded grammar books, King just blurts out (and does) dumbass shit. Really racist dumbass shit. Like linking pornography to “a Jewish plot to destroy Christian families and morality,” and displaying a Confederate flag on his Congressional office desk.
His Republican colleagues in the House finally rebuked him early this year after their midterm drubbing, stripping him of his committee assignments when more dumbass racist comments surfaced in a January 10 New York Times article. In the past, such a rebuke would likely have cowed him into silence, or at least curbed his excesses. But this is Trump’s GOP, in which standing down is a sign of weakness rather than critical self-reflection or civic-minded commitment to civil discourse or [insert your own favorite “lib” virtue]. So a couple of weeks ago, King was back at it, retweeting and sharing on Facebook the “civil war” meme at the top of this post.
The blowback against his post was swift and damning, and it was deleted from both social media platforms two days later. The lion’s share of public ire unsurprisingly centered on the propriety of a sitting U.S. Congressman “openly encouraging civil war and the murder of Americans.” I’d like to focus on another feature of the post, however, one that was widely but for the most part only passingly noted: the meme’s use of the far-right attack on trans folks’ right to pee in peace in its polemic.
The largely cursory nature of the response to this feature was due in part, no doubt, to there being nothing surprising about it. As Tamar Auber observed on Mediaite, such “bathroom snark…is frequently used in far-right dog whistles.” The fact that King himself would endorse the tactic was no shocker either given his 2016 “call for civil disobedience” over the Obama administration’s directives to public schools concerning Title IX and the rights of trans students. Some outside the LGBTQ+ community did call out King for using trans folks as a political football. Notably, Director of Harvard’s Kennedy School on Public Policy and former NAACP president Rev. Cornell Williams Brooks tweeted:
And of course there was pushback within the LGBTQ+ community. Orlando trans activist and science writer Lubekeeper Zinnia’s tweet is a propos to our purposes: “Love being reduced to a punchline for a white supremacist congressman’s joke about murdering half of his country.” Zinnia’s observation about “being reduced” speaks directly to the issue of trans visibility, specifically the question of how we’re seen by a large swath of the country. As a punchline. And in this case, I would argue, also as a symbol.
Let’s unpack the meme. The image presents us with two battling figures representing blue (Dem/liberal) and red (GOP/conservative) states, with the latter gaining the upper hand, as a Newsweek piece on the incident described it, by appearing to land “a gut punch” against the blue figure. The image’s caption, “One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use,” crudely frames the conflict in terms of certain traditional ideas about gender, in particular (toxic) masculinity. Red states are more manly, and thus more capable of imposing their will, the argument runs, because of their embrace of violence as a means of doing so. This much is obvious enough.
The contrast between bullets and bathrooms points to the role of gender in the meme’s polemic in another, less obvious way, which we can get at by returning to the image. Newsweek’s description of the red figure’s blow as “a gut punch” doesn’t tell the whole story. The red figure’s fist (Utah) extends below the blue figure’s “gut” (southern California) to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which looks suspiciously like a small penis. Not coincidentally, I suspect, the comparable area of the red figure’s anatomy is made up of the larger phallic outlines of Tennessee and North Carolina. By not so subtle implication, then, red states are more manly than blue states because they have much bigger love guns (with eight trillion bullets!). And this penis size/sexual potency = manliness equation, in turn, points to the really damning thing about the blue state confusion over bathrooms. It suggests that in entertaining the idea that trans folks should have civil rights, blue state “libs” are condoning the abominable if weirdly fascinating Operation — “men” (trans women) whacking off their junk — that in the far-right view seems to epitomize what being trans is.
As I trust is clear from the above discussion, trans folks are “visible” in this meme only indirectly and in the abstract as the occasion for a right-wing attack on liberals. The fact that the majority of the left stands with us is mocked as a symptom of a fundamental moral failing, as the product of lost potency and will. We aren’t neighbors struggling for baseline legal protections and asking to be treated with dignity, then, but merely a symbol for our allies’ shortcomings. And for at least the majority of the meme’s target audience, I would guess, it’s trans women who are burdened with this negative symbolic function: trans men, as so often, are invisible altogether.
This form of erasure in plain sight is characteristic of the far right’s sustained attack on us over the past few years. Again and again, right-wing hate groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom have tried to have us expelled from the public sphere using a variety of pretexts: the desire to protect the “privacy rights” of cisgender women and girls or the “religious freedom” of people whose God tells them to hate us; the need to ensure that combat readiness isn’t compromised or, absurdly, that the military’s budget isn’t stretched too thin. Underlying all these pretexts is the belief that we are not who we (and the medical community) say we are: that we are sadly deluded people whose “healthier” course of action, as an ADF higher-up recently opined with faux-benevolence, would be to stop trying to “change [our] gender” and instead strive to “align [our] mind with [our] biological reality.” The underlying belief, that is, is that we don’t — or shouldn’t — exist.
Recent polls suggest that these extreme views are not shared by most Americans, notably where trans folks’ service in the military is concerned. But the extremists, of course, have a disproportionately large megaphone at present thanks to VP/Grand Inquisitor Mike Pence and the many other transphobic deplorables in the orbit of the Trump administration. The fears they’re playing on, moreover, remain widespread and entrenched; and when enflamed by a steady barrage of gross misinformation and demonization, those fears continue to provoke everything from verbal harassment to just-cuz firings and evictions to physical violence, including of course murder, at depressingly high rates. Indeed, by any rational measure the plight of many transgender Americans, in particular trans women of color, is a humanitarian crisis.
The TDOV has been observed for the past ten years as a response to this ongoing state of affairs. It enacts our recognition that in order for awareness around the discrimination we face to be raised, we first need to be seen not as symbolic scapegoats for hate-driven agendas, but as fellow citizens, as neighbors. As another bloom of the wondrously complex human species, one that has always been here, and will persist despite the efforts of those hell bent on asserting otherwise.
