By Melisa Ferati
Safety and freedom are two concepts often placed at opposite ends of a spectrum, whether in circumstances as frivolous as taking personality quizzes or as serious as surviving and navigating sociopolitical cycles determining the fate of human rights. Two states that should be able to feasibly coexist placed at odds. Post-9/11, how do we liberate the American image of freedom from this frame of danger? Now more than ever, people fall for propaganda touted as fact without so much as a little fact-checking before internalizing it as truth. With even scientific knowledge, like hard statistics surrounding vaccination, debated and dismissed as mere opinion, the dissemination of information among U.S citizens has become increasingly muddied, riddling the search for objective facts with aimless redirections and hot takes; contrary to the view of the internet as a boundary-free source for self-education (“just Google it”). Capitalism portrays the world from an individualist perspective. We find ourselves especially subject to the influence of political agenda digitally as unprecedented coverage through the online saturates every aspect of being – reporting various major issues and providing endlessly more room for misinformation. A conditioned hyper-fixation on appearance (expression) and the inner self facing outwardly rose in tandem with the expansion of identity politics’ prominence among varying modern day discussions. Looking at this construction of personal identity socioculturally, it seems crucial to look to the most vulnerable point in establishing core beliefs that guide us – our teen years. It is the last time we look to the future as something looming, ahead of us, full of hypothetical paths and potential, before adulthood hurtles us into the awareness that we’re all just perpetually figuring things out with no definite outcome. By the time someone enters the cycle of the 40 – hour work week, that pubescent perspective easily transitions over – “next week I’ll start working on that book”, “I want to enter that field, I just have to wait for the right time”, “maybe next year I’ll be better.” Tired enough to remain bound to the fantasy of “one day”, the average American leaves work looking for some sort of escape, whether in the form of a beloved tv show or heavier vices. With the unprecedented influence of 24/7 access in the form of social media and the world wide web, a new era of burn-out has been interwoven within the experience of coming-of-age that works to keep people just tired enough to keep from questioning. In resisting the hyper-saturation of information, namely in relation to systems of power, what can we do to help take sociopolitical knowledge and understanding back into our own hands?
We’ve entered a new wave of language being manipulated with concepts like “social justice warriors” and “cancel culture” polluting the conversation surrounding basic rights. Identity politics and the etymology surrounding them become a tool for distraction. This conservative lens is one of fighting for an established nostalgic “normal” that’s seemingly being challenged by the expansion of the modern world through widespread technology and resulting hyper-exposure of the digital age, now making common identities beyond established heteronormativity clearly visible. In American politics, there’s this constructed sense of a supposed, elusive “natural” alongside a dogmatic hunt to control the definition of some unwavering base human nature. The reality is “…[nature] looks natural because it keeps going, and going, and going … like the undead. And because we keep on looking away, keeping our distance, framing it, sizing it up” (Timothy Morton). With genocidal rhetoric building rapidly against the transgender community now, this choleric resistance works to erase them in the so-called name of science (biology), arguing it as a supposedly new subversion of this elusive so-called natural. The idea of transgender existence as new is unequivocally false. “Trans” people have existed as long as humanity has walked this earth, traced as far back as ancient Mesopotamia, from which our oldest known record of written language exists. Now, modern conceptual language surrounding transgenderism works its way into the social lexicon not so much through learning from those with lived experience, but rather sociopolitical talking points – bringing gender theory to the table as means for making the existence of trans bodies a debate when gender expression is an intimate, personal exploration of self. The personal is irrevocably made political. “For intimate encounters we turn to time. It is there that we feel the intimacy of other lives and others’ experiences of things” – but when so many citizens already get little exposure or education regarding gender theory and expression, we begin to see that we are also robbed of time – of historical record and the personal time necessary for educated exposure beyond our small social bubbles (Lyn Hejinian). There is no intimacy, no growth; a purposefully cultivated stagnancy left in its place. So many citizens are left to gain their perspective of the trans community through these arguments of legitimacy. In not seeing trans individuals and their stories, but rather hearing about their being as a hot topic issue, it’s easy to manipulate and turn the fact of trans existence into a question or trend and dehumanize them as statistics – outliers at that. Like spectators, trans people are left to watch as politicians attack their few social safety nets while simultaneously witnessing the interpersonal saturation of new labels created outside of them. Of course, this terror tantrum will never stop at just transgender people. As of March 2023, Tennessee passed a state bill into the senate which would allow clerks to deny marriage to not only LGBTQ couples, but couples of interracial and interfaith standing. The fact that it even managed to make it to the senate should be grounds for major, blaring alarm. When the policing of bodies becomes intertwined with legality, there is no minority safe from the threat of the loss of civil rights. Saving ourselves from this fate lies in a radical re-realization of just how much of our identities are built and shaped by the concepts we’re raised adjacent to.
There is no “true” masculine or feminine persuasion. Only floating principles and ideas unavoidably shaped by the ever-shifting body of sociocultural perspective, predominantly formed by those in power, and within Western culture especially, with the goal of attempting to establish a “right” way to be. “If you look like you are ‘acting’ masculine, you aren’t. Masculine is Natural. Natural is masculine. Organicism is a performance of no-performance. It is ‘un-perversion’, with all the ambiguity a double negative can muster, a desire that erases its trace as soon as it appears. Organicism articulates desire as erasure, erasuredesire. The curtain rises on a pregiven holistic world. But interdependence is not organic: it’s differential. Things only look like they fit, because we don’t perceive them on an evolutionary or geological time scale” (Morton). There seems to be a clear proposal forming on the other end of the proverbial coin: all gender, by modern definition of the natural, is unnatural. An ever-shifting concept subject to both socialization and natural proclivities. Gender is bound to the conceptual; the archetypal. No matter the source, we are interacting with a nebulous construct. With change being nature’s only constant, defined boundaries suppose a grand display as society is primed, conditionally shedding skins in favor of those born from outside motives unquestioned rather than realized within the self, all of us constantly encountering new definitions as to what the right way of being is. From film to the news, there is no medium that isn’t subject to political influence – meaning there is no “true” stable core. Between the republican push to look back to supposed “good old days” and the liberal take of always looking to the future, we are left strung in this hypothetical limbo in place of the now. The concept of American centrism is an illusion – it’s all centrist, pumping right back into the same broken system. Thinking of the ways in which gender expression has manifested societally, a particular occurrence that comes to mind is the cultural leap in the switch from femininity’s ties to shades of pink/red and masculinity to those of blue within the last hundred years, despite the reverse being the standard for hundreds more. What was it that ushered in the masculinization of blue? With white smocks transitioning out as standard baby-wear and pastels grew in popularity in the early 1900s, pink and blue shades first actually entered the market as gender-neutral. Soon publications like Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department made claims of a “generally accepted [rule-] pink for the boys, and blue for the girls… [with] pink, being a more decided and stronger color… while blue, which is more delicate and dainty… [appearing] prettier…”, echoing prior common social color theory. This trend of color being linked to gender identity at birth fluctuated in popularity until the invention of prenatal testing, popularized through the 70s and 80s. Sweeping the nation, the momentum built to that of the culture of gender-reveals we see today, one of the hot topics in the gender debate as to whether children should be raised explicitly in relation to the concepts surrounding boy/girlhood before having the chance to understand how gender looks, feels, and means to them.
Between fear of the unknown and the respective desire for stability in the face of it, people are conditioned to seek clear cut boxes to put others in within a simultaneously hypersexualized and de-eroticized culture. Super fans en masse lose it when their favorite pop star they thought was single actually has a love life. People gossip about each other’s sexual orientation. Non-binary people are hit over the head with questions of authenticity from cis and trans people alike. The ego becomes tainted by this instilled need for answers to questions that don’t necessarily pertain to oneself in the slightest, tricked by some fabricated sense of the right to accessibility in the simple witnessing of something unfamiliar, speaking volumes to the rise of the para-social relationship in its effect on our interpersonal connections. People look at people in theory, not the moment. We’ve witnessed this fear of the unknown evolve into depictions of trans bodies as monstrous, as an ultimate subversion of some supposed natural. That fear also breeds morbid curiosity, which combined with our culture of consumption has been reflected in surprising ways – such as the increasing exposure of transphobes that sexualize trans people. With regular curiosity/exploration of fluid identity (as well as sexuality in whole) so culturally saturated with judgment, often chalked up to perversion, natural fascination is reshaped into a weapon against self-expression and free choice. Speaking namely to the religious influences underlying western society, even among the secular it’s clear puritanical ideals still manage to permeate the general perception of sex, resulting in this seemingly nonsensical sexualization of what’s ostracized/othered. I think of just how many sexual subcultures and fetishes are born from the extremes of either resistance through radical acceptance – reclaiming the sexual in “alternative” ways (BDSM and its ties to queer culture, from leather mommies to sweet subs alike) – or from the confines of culture that bastardizes – and concurrently eroticizes – ways of being that aren’t inherently sexual at all, like the aforementioned bigots drooling over trans bodies. Of the language of sex and how it’s used as political device. Of the way heteronormative society still finds it so hard to understand the divide between sexuality and gender. None of this is a coincidence. For so many, the sexual itself is already quite the taboo, repressed topic. That repression becomes figuratively broken in the visible presence of the trans body – often spoken about among the right-winged as dirty or perverse – linking the transgender experience to an expression of sexuality as opposed to its actual root in gender identity. Sexuality is not sexual. People are. A trans child is not sexually deviant or perverse. A trans woman is not some erotic novelty for the bedroom. Dating a trans man, as a woman, is not exploring a same sex relationship. Fear robs us of mutual understanding and within this culture, turns into grounds for a war against all that falls outside of heteronormativity. The violence born from these false links is multiplied by the already existing shame and restriction surrounding intimate self-expression (gender/sexuality) prior to any look past the limited roles we’re assigned and their facetious ties to supposed bio-logic. We exist as vessels for “…accumulated time…” through these soft forms cultivated by personal experience and the various, fluctuating sociocultural standards that tout themselves as unchanging (Hejinian). The cruel irony of this practice of demonizing and othering the trans community, in the name of moral, or even holy, justice can’t go unacknowledged.
I think of the monstrousness of the creatures that are angels. The way they are made to disguise their true forms so as not to shock, scare, intimidate humanity. I think of the narrative of all our bodies being made in the shape of God. Of what appears to me as blatant suggestion of an intersex God, a fluid God, a God that exists beyond all time and limit and therefore must be beyond any limited form, nonetheless that of man. I see transgender people embracing this divine nature; that of change. Growth. What are we robbed of when made to fear this growth? The importance of tracking the evolving etymology behind words and their meaning in general, nonetheless in relation to our identities and livelihood, cannot be understated. Shifting syntax and cultural connotations forming new “truths” and defining the course of a multitude of realities; we must always remain skeptical and questioning – who is deciding the terms and confines of these supposed “truths” and why? Thinking about the silence of holiness versus language of being, is language not an inversion, a monstrous act born of our inherent craving for answers to understand all that surrounds us? We are witnessing what happens when language is repurposed from a tool of understanding and connection to a weapon targeting vulnerable populations behind thinly veiled political objectives. I think of the horror of plagues. The trials of Job and Ibrahim and the like. The irrevocable experiences in life that give us no choice but to adapt. To live an existence riddled with endless change in which survival relies upon allowing for the only true natural state – morphing, evolving. Liberation from genocidal agendas and fascist pipelines lie in our ability to humanize the monstrous. To reclaim conceptual monstrosity as a tool of radical change and resist ideology that tries to turn us to battle with each other rather than hold accountable the system attempting to keep us pedantically bound to fear is to free us from the trap of language taken out of communal hands and warped in the name of corporate greed and selfish desires. As much as hope keeps us pushing forward, doubt keeps us alive. We must, as a whole, embrace this monstrous self and other. Our future depends on it.
