Power, ignorance, and the healing promise of curiosity
As of today, there are 432 bills in U.S. state legislatures proposing to segregate trans people from public life and outlaw life saving health care.
The first of these bills to pass was in Ohio. It traces a narrow box around gender, outlawing any deviation from the white Christian binary, or any adult support for deviation, punishing doctors, parents, and youth who defy the state. It admits that some children are transgender, and then dismisses the group as too small to be deserving of rights. The cis authors of this bill then write, on behalf of all trans youth in Ohio and their parents, that the gender affirming care and full school participation that is likely to save children’s lives poses risk that outweigh benefits — the benefits, of course, being living. This bill, and the 431 other bills like it, ultimately dream of a world in which trans people do not exist, or are at least shoved back into the closet to live in fear and despair.
The question is why. As skillfully reported in the Anti-Trans Hate Machine, some who sponsor these bills want a “Christian” nation built upon a supreme being’s conditional love, which as of late, apparently requires that one not be transgender. Others want political power, and are willing to hurt people to get it. The machinery that has been built to destroy trans lives has been long in the making.
But that is not the whole story. Because our democracy is one in which conservative political actors are guided not only by their own desire to erase human diversity, but also by citizens who have the same wish, and who give those politicians power to do these harms. Perhaps a hundred million people in this broken nation willfully vote for representatives who fight to deny human rights. Gerrymandered or not, it is impossible to deny that a substantial portion of the U.S. voting public would be happy if trans people simply didn’t exist.
But there is a deeper why behind this wish. I was listening recently to an interview on Code Switch with Hajar Yazdiha. She talked about the appropriation of MLK’s legacy and shared the idea of a culture of ignorance. This is the idea that most Americans willfully ignore the reality of our country’s past, the complexity of the civil rights movement, and the singular nature of our country’s original and ongoing sins against Black and Native people. The culture she described was one in which there is a power that comes with that ignorance: not knowing nuance is freeing, rhetorically, morally, politically. It allows us to lie to ourselves about our complicity and behave in ways that are ruthlessly self-serving.
Yazdiha’s idea feels familiar with my identity as a scholar, which often feels like a shrinking exception to the culture of ignorance. I try to start from the premise that I don’t know everything (and often fail, in the heat of debate). I try to remember that I never will. I know that there are things that I cannot know, sometimes because they are not knowable. And I know that there there are things I cannot know, because I cannot be someone else. But as a scholar, I try to know. By asking questions, by trying to lead with humility, by assuming my ignorance, and trying to listen, learn, and change my beliefs, I resist the culture of ignorance. It is a way of being that is one of constant failure, but also one of constant growth and wonder, as I learn to better see the world for what it is, what it was, and what it could be.
We might ask why, then, there are so few scholars. I think answering that means reconciling with the privilege of scholarship. As an academic at a university, I have the incentive to be humble. I am rewarded for nuance. I am affirmed for both knowing what I know and knowing what I don’t. My questions are my gift to to the world; my answers are mere trail markers on a circuitous path up a hill to a view from above. I do this work with a community of others who largely share these values, and we reinforce these incentives and affirmations for each other. And this is only possible because of a commitment long ago to scholarship, by the churches, the governments, and the philanthropists of the past to create protected spaces for learning and discovery. It is a precious, fragile institution that has never felt more vulnerable and unwanted.
But the broader public has few of any of these opportunities for scholarly being. I know, because I wasn’t always in academia, I did not always have time for scholarship, and for most of my childhood, I didn’t know it existed. When I fifteen, I loved learning, but most of my time and attention was on my father’s bankruptcy, my mother being laid off as a teacher due to property tax cuts, my part-time jobs that I used to pay for family expenses and the costs of gaining access to college. I did not read or write more than I had too. Instead, I cleaned up broken Corona bottles full of limes, needles, and condoms. I listened while entitled wealthy white women reprimanded me for not knowing how to spell “au jus”. I tutored unmotivated wealthy Asian kids on the SAT who had little to do but play baseball or the violin well to go to university. I longed for a world where I could be scholarly; instead, I was mostly surviving.
When I hear the right talk derisively about “elites”, there’s a part of the sentiment that resonates. I think they know that it is a privilege to be able to know and learn about the world, to change one’s mind, to spend the time to educate one’s self, and better yet, be around others who can help you. How nice it must be to get to go to fancy schools, to read books, to think of ideas, to question the world. All of that is a luxury when you’re hungry, sick, addicted, broke, tired, and despairing. There are times when it still feels like a luxury to me, as far as I’ve come from my fleeting encounters with poverty. I’ll walk to work sometimes and think, “How am I possibly getting paid to ponder these thoughts?” Every day on campus, as stressful as it is, still feels like a gift.
On my worst days in these times of civil rights loss, I want to be angry at the public for not being curious and humble about trans lives. How dare they weaponize their own ignorance against my community, which has little to defend itself with other than the occasional 15 minutes of trans fame in Hollywood. They have no moral right to their ignorance and no excuse bludgeoning defenseless children with it, or the adults who protect them. And in any just system of government, they would have no legal right to do any of it. And yet, right, left, and center, I see ignorance all around, from bad faith questions to painful indifference.
And then, on other days, I think about our country’s poverty, underfunded schools, decaying small towns, rising income inequality, inhumane built environment, and collapsing news ecosystem. And I can’t help but think, is anything but ignorance even possible in our democracy? What irony that the internet has brought more information than we’ve ever had, and yet we’ve largely used it to erode the central ways that we might learn to understand the complexities of the world, through books, journalism, and education. All we have left are four second videos and four sentence posts about a four day window of cultural and political drama, enough to keep us “engaged”, but not enough to truly change who we are or how we see each other.
It is an old idea that fascism thrives on ignorance. And at least in my position as a trans person, supporting trans students, youth, and adults, that’s the simplest explanation for what’s happening across the country. Conservatives lie about trans people; the public, in the absence of capacity or incentive to learn, listens to the people they elected and trust; and the systems of domination that continue to shape our world stomp along, sustaining the brutal status quo. I can educate, testify, support, and write as much as I can from my privileged position, and still, there will likely be a dozen or more states by the end of these legislative sessions where I can’t safely travel or live, and where trans youth die by suicide, having lost all hope. The power of ignorance guarantees it.
But rather than see this as a permanent inevitability, I see it as a calling to work towards a different vision for this broken country. One in which children’s innate sense of curiosity are cultivated into a sense of possibility and wondrous uncertainty. Where youth become adults who have the time, incentives, and opportunities to keep learning, because they can do more than survive, and want more than distraction. Where their first reaction to something they do not understand is not fear or hate, but good faith questions and a desire to change their knowledge. Where being a citizen is subsidized, with time and opportunity for everyone to make sense of our nation’s complexities and to build trust with the people around us we least understand. I think creating that world is the only way that all people, trans or cis, will truly be free. And I’ll probably have to spend the rest of my life, in community with others like me who have no choice, trying to build it.
