This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
In all these years, one of the good things about TomDispatch for me is that it's so often proved a learning experience. Today is a perfect example. Longtime TomDispatch regular Ira Chernus, who last wrote for this site five-and-a-half years ago, returns from retirement to discuss his drag-queen son and our growing world of gender-blending. On this subject, let me not act knowledgeable. I'm anything but "woke." I'm an old guy and an editor who's found himself stumbling over the very idea of a single person being "they."
Normally, the sort of binary opposition I've dealt with and opposed at this website has been the urge of our government officials to consider those they don't care for as a full-scale "them," nothing but an enemy to fight. (If you want to know what I mean, just check out Michael Klare's most recent piece on the Pentagon and China.) But the truth is that, even at my age, it's a good thing to encounter those who, dealing with binary oppositions of quite a different sort, relating to the possibilities that exist in all of us, have the urge to meld them.
Honestly, in my youth in the 1950s and 1960s, things were all too painfully binary and, thinking back, I never felt comfortable with it. The caricatured and aggressive maleness of the planet I then found myself on always put me off, especially when I encountered it as a college student at Yale (not exactly my favorite experience in life). Looking back, I don't think I ever felt even slightly comfortable as one of those men, even though at the time I never truly imagined alternatives either.
Still, one of my close friends at college was gay " he would later die of AIDS " and that, at least, was eye-opening for me. So, given my life, given what's mattered to me, and having now spent time with Chernus's piece, I feel I should indeed open myself more to the way young people are questioning the binary nature of our world and exploring the true complexity of us all. Let him introduce you to his experience of it and see what you think. Tom
Who Will Speak Up for My Child, the Drag Queen?
And the Non-Binary and Transgender Folks Among Us, Too
By Ira Chernus
What makes a good society? Is it a guaranteed right to pursue happiness, as our Declaration of Independence proclaimed? Perhaps, as Gandhi said, it's providing the poorest and most vulnerable among us with the means to control their own lives. But what happens when it's the pursuit of happiness that makes someone most vulnerable?
Let me introduce you to my child, my one and only. They " and, no, it wasn't as hard as I expected to get used to the gender-neutral plural pronoun that they prefer " are brown-skinned, Mexican-American, secular-Jewish, and gay-married. In a country where Donald Trump is still admired by some 40% of the public, don't imagine for a second that my child, with all those identities, isn't horrifyingly vulnerable.
Lately, however, the Trumpian movement (with the full support of the future president's assumed Republican opponent in 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis) has targeted its most intense hatred on another part of my child's identity. They are a gender-non-binary (and highly successful) drag queen, bringing happiness not only to themselves but to their cheering audiences. That's where their right to the pursuit of happiness is most threatened at the moment and what makes them most vulnerable.
My child has been safe from attack " so far. Others haven't been so fortunate. The murderous shootings at a drag club in my home state of Colorado are just the most notorious in a string of hate crimes directed at drag shows. More than 120 of them reportedly experienced protests, were threatened, or even attacked in 2022. Some transgender folks have come to believe that it's no longer safe to live in this country. Others are thinking they might be better off taking leave of life itself.
In such a world, what's a proud, concerned, on-the-edge-of-frightened father to do? For me, a first step is to come out of retirement and try to write some helpful words.
It would be easy to simply denounce the spread of right-wing bigotry as misinformed, misguided, and unjust, but what good would that do? Right-wingers live in a Fox News-mediated world of their own, where their bigotry seems to make perfectly good sense to them, while otherwise reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears.
So I want to write for a different audience. I'm inspired by the words Martin Luther King, Jr., penned while sitting in a Birmingham jail. "The Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom" was not, he said, the out-and-out racist. It was "the white moderate, more devoted to 'order' than to justice" Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
Of course, there are big differences between the Jim Crow South of his day and the gender-identity-biased world of today. Still, I've talked to people who would never countenance discrimination, much less violence, against any minority, yet offer, at best, the most lukewarm acceptance of drag queens, non-binary, or transgender folks. They tell me they aren't quite sure how they feel about such people. Some admit to just not being comfortable going to a drag show and finding themselves surprisingly unnerved around anyone who claims to be transgender.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
