Throwing trans and nonbinary people under the bus is a terrible compromise to the very authoritarian ambitions that liberals say they’re stepping up to fight.
Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, was a rough day to stand at the front of a gender studies classroom. I spoke first in the election debrief, reading from something I’d written that morning, then looked up to a sea of red eyes, cheeks dewy with grief. I couldn’t believe I forgot to bring a box of clean tissues.
This wasn’t just a generalized and age-appropriate response of optimistic youth on a liberal college campus. In the portion of the population that is middle-class, mostly white and native-born, my students are among those most likely to be harmed by the rhetoric sharpened to a point by the president- and vice president-elect, and by policies they will seek to implement in the days after taking office.
The young people in my course are all, or almost all, feminists, mostly women, overwhelmingly in favor of abortion rights, many in same-sex relationships, some nonbinary or transgender. They are intellectually and emotionally engaged in questions about how power and hierarchy map onto real and perceived gender distinctions, as well as distinctions of race, ethnicity and dis/ability.
I know some people, even leading Democrats and Democratic-leaning pundits, find the work we do in the academic field of gender studies laughable. I hear the voices responding to Vice President Harris’ and Gov. Walz’s defeat at the polls by advising Democrats to steer clear of “identity politics,” to choose something imagined as entirely separate from those politics: “a focus on the economy.”
In particular, many savants of the national opinion pages suggest that the campaign should have pushed back against anti-trans attack ads from the Republicans (“She’s for they/them”) by insisting that Harris and Walz oppose trans women’s participation in high school women’s sports, and praising President Biden for not having filled out the ACLU questionnaire that got Harris into trouble around access to transition medical care for federal prisoners, and for having not issued a draft federal rule that interpreted Title IX, against sex discrimination, to keep K-12 public schools from banning trans athletes’ participation in varsity sports.
Throwing trans and nonbinary people under the bus is a terrible compromise to the very authoritarian ambitions that liberals say they’re stepping up to fight. We need more love and support for people who are stigmatized and under assault, not less. And we desperately need more understanding of sex, gender and sexuality.
Today’s authoritarians hate what we do in gender studies. That’s not an accident: The intellectual tools that researchers have developed and shared with the public help us interpret the world, develop compassion and fight repression.
When Hungary’s Viktor Orban—the one foreign leader Donald Trump praised at the presidential debate this year—won his third not-quite-fair election in a row, in 2018, he made headlines by using prime ministerial fiat to eliminate all of the country’s gender studies programs.
“The government’s standpoint,” an Orban representative said, “is that people are born either male or female, and we do not consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially-constructed genders, rather than biological sexes.”
This was a camel under the tent for broader attacks on academic freedom and diversity of opinion more generally, as well as a way to telegraph a broad shut-down in opportunities for women and sexual and gender minorities to live as we choose.
A little more appreciation of Black women’s shared experiences of discrimination and stereotyping … and a little less pontificating about Vice President Harris’ unique weaknesses as a candidate, might really have helped.
Two months later, the Central European University, funded by Orban’s great antagonist George Soros to be a center of democratic ideas and culture in post-Soviet Hungary, was forced to leave for Austria.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida famously followed Orban’s example, making the public and once-very-good liberal arts-oriented New College of Florida “the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings,” according to Chris Rufo
If more people in our society had a sophisticated understanding of gender, sex and sexuality, the presidential campaign would likely have been conducted and interpreted a lot differently than it was. Students in my course, a history of diverse feminist traditions in the United States, just finished reading The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977), a classic piece of Black feminist thinking. They learned the roots of “identity politics,” which may have appeared for the first time in that statement. The authors write of a “personal genesis for Black Feminism, that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women’s lives.” These experiences that are in fact rooted in big structures of power.
They also read a classic piece by lesbian feminist Joan Nestle titled “My Mother Liked to Fuck”—a manifesto in behalf of sexual pleasure for women, gay and straight, despite class hierarchy, the norms of mainstream marriage, stereotypes about mothers and the ubiquity of sexual violence (at a time when, according to CDC data, at least one in five women have experienced rape or attempted rape).
At the end of a political season in which the winning candidate and his surrogates accused their Black female opponent of sleeping her way to the top, having “low I.Q.,” and being generally “nasty,” a little more appreciation of Black women’s shared experiences of discrimination and stereotyping, à la the Combahee River Collective Statement, and a little less pontificating about Vice President Harris’ unique weaknesses as a candidate, might really have helped. On the eve of a second Trump presidency, this time after a civil court found him guilty of having assaulted a woman journalist and defamed her repeatedly, a little more Joan Nestle and a little less Bernie Sanders arguing for a refocus on “working class people” might make the future seem less bleak to us survivors.
I don’t think voting for a second Trump administration meant endorsing all of the presidential race’s anti-feminism and middle-school masculinity. But, middle-school masculinity certainly wasn’t a deal-breaker. Given the overwhelming importance of “the economy” for people who chose Trump, and the thin-ness of his policy proposals for fixing what ails working-class finances, it seems that a promise of male and gender-normative supremacy worked in 2024 as a kind of economic policy.
Like the pledge to eject millions of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers from the country, a half-joking promise to shove women and queer people out of the public sphere may have helped Trump’s voters believe he was committed to raising their wages by limiting competition in the labor market. One big problem with Sen. Sanders’ demand that Democrats listen more to the “working class” is that (as we discuss in gender studies classrooms) there’s no tidy divide between people’s ideas about class and their ideas about race, class, gender, nationality and sexuality.
Next time out, Democrats, instead of turning on each other or on the students in my course, let’s equip ourselves with the intellectual tools that will help us understand how would-be tyrants use gender to divide us.
