Stay in Your Man-or-Woman Lane or Risk Social Conservative Wrath
Subversion of Gender ‘Norms’ Fuels Right-Wing Movements
Nothing riles and unites social conservatives worldwide like subverting gender norms or strictures. (Though state-protected abortion care is in the same category.)
I learned earlier in life, in Nashville, Tenn. that men in dresses could and often sent white evangelical Christian women and men, and Black and Latin people in general into conniption fits, rambling stupidity, and lethal hatred too.
Not far from a Pride gathering in downtown Nashville, several drag queens were cornered by truckloads of Pride “protestors,” a motley mix of rabid men, mostly white. The rabble of testosterone descended from flatbeds and trapped five of the drag queens before sexually molesting them, and then burning their frocks and wigs and dousing the abused queens in urine. It was later reported by news sources that five of the so-called protestors were undercover Nashville cops.
This was sometime in the 1990s, but hatred of people who fuck with gender norms continues unabated. This hatred also transcends the U.S. Good God almighty most countries in Africa are consumed with hatred of queers.
It is far from stunning that U.S. social conservative thrive when fueling hatred of people who screw with gender norms, such as many people who make up LGBTQ community.
And woe to the Black or Latina person who dares revel in queerness. Kid Cudi, a popular U.S. rapper, wore a dress on “Saturday Night Live” and half the readers and most of the workers of Hot New Hip Hop and Complex committed suicide. The Root covers the vicious hatred of transgender Black people on consistent basis, and it is especially dangerous to be Black and queer in the U.S., and Uganda too.
Nevertheless here we are in 2023 and U.S. social conservatives in states like Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Utah, and nations such as Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia are taking legal actions to terrorize, if not kill people who challenge gender norms, such as the maligned drag queen.
For example, right-wing lawmakers in Texas including Gov. Greg Abbott are considering legislation that if enacted into law would encourage their right-wing base of people to hunt and terrorize drag queens or any person challenging gender strictures or “norms.”
The Intercept_ reports:
The proposed legislation defines ‘drag’ as any ‘performance in which a performer exhibits a gender that is different than the performer’s gender recorded at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers and sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs in a lascivious manner before an audience.’
The inclusion of ‘lascivious’ might suggest that the bill is only aimed at performances in venues that already exclude minors, like nightclubs. But given that Texas Republicans are at this very moment attempting to pass a law defining any venue that hosts a drag performance as ‘a sexually oriented business’ — including restaurants — it’s clear that ‘lascivious’ provides no limit to the bounty hunter bill.
…
The drag bounty bill likewise encourages citizens to sue anyone who hosts or performs in a drag performance in the presence of a minor — with the added allure of a monetary reward. Successful plaintiffs could receive as much as $5,000 in “damages,” up to 10 years after the event.
Across the country, even in New York City, far-right militias and other armed fascists have already made a habit of threatening family-friendly drag performances and story hours. The Texas bill grants the practice a vile authority — and pulls from a long legacy of the government using state-sanctioned vigilantism to enforce white supremacy, gender conformity, and border rule.
These types of laws are becoming rampant in the U.S. The national Republican Party, a white-power party, needs to distract from its rotten agenda, so demonizing challengers of gender norms is good for that and for riling up a base of people who enjoy hating instead of living.
Social conservative lunacy by the way is not isolated to the U.S. Indeed most countries in Africa outlaw gay sex and effeminate behavior. Most African countries instead revel in Taliban-like brotherly love.
For example in Uganda a landlocked country in East Africa so consumed with hatred of gay people who subvert gender norms and strictures that its national legislature passed a bill to “make homosexual acts punishable death.”
The bill states, “A person who commits the offence of aggravated homosexuality and is liable, on conviction to suffer death,” as The Guardian reports.
The Guardian dryly notes that Ugandan bill “marks the latest in a string of setbacks for LGBTQ+rights in Africa, where homosexuality is illegal in most countries. In Uganda, a largely conservative Christian country, homosexual sex was already punishable by life imprisonment.
So what is a queer person in Nashville or Uganda to do?
It is called the closet and survival to fight another day is often what is required. Yes, there are human rights lawyers and groups in and outside both Nashville and Uganda advocating for humanity, but they do so with limited resources. It is a dire situation for the nonbinary person, the transgender person, or those needing to transition. U.S. states and nations in the case Uganda and Zambia are in grips of a social conservative fever dream.
