Look in the mirror.

Identity, insanity, and change.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

In an opinion piece, Frank Bruni addresses the current constellation of attacks on trans people in the US in a mildly surprising way. He doesn’t dissect the logic of proposed laws and restrictions. He doesn’t dismiss the attitudes and beliefs that drive these efforts as nutjob philosophies or religious extremism. And he doesn’t package trans identity in a fashion that would be more appealing or seem less dangerous. Instead of these “tried and true” (and only mildly effective) approaches that defer to and actually reinforce the status quo (while carving out a little niche for the marginalized group to stay safe and out of the way), he empathizes.

Straight people have often asked me what I, a gay man, have in common with someone who’s trans. Gay people have often put that question to themselves. There are many answers. Here’s one: I know what it’s like to have my identity, my dignity — my very hold on happiness — pressed into partisan battle and fashioned into a political weapon.

I know what it’s like to be used.

And right now, trans people are being used, cruelly.

And he doesn’t pussyfoot his way around naming the source of this cruelty: Republicans who are engineering a nation-wide attack on a vulnerable group, playing with people’s ignorance and stoking their fears, and “identifying vulnerable, marginalized populations and demonizing them in the interest of political gain.”

Of course, the current machinators of the Republican Party didn’t write this playbook, but they’re pulling it out right on cue. When disease and economic instability impacted European cities and countries in the Middle Ages, groups already on the margins absorbed irrational blame and became targets for persecution. Natural disasters, economic collapses, plagues and epidemics were followed by retaliatory attacks on Jews, on homosexuals, on foreigners, identified not as fellow sufferers of calamity but as causes of the devastation du jour. They bore accusations that revived the dangerous blood libel myth and invited speculation that deviance from sexual conventions invited divine wrath. Persecuting groups already vulnerable because of social prejudices was, for the dominant majority, a way to participate in divine justice. Those responses turned into policies and theologies that circularly affirmed that any difference, any undesirable qualities were rooted in evil, in the work of Satan, relieving people of any need to empathize. People didn’t have to wonder about difference and figure out how it challenged their worldviews. Instead, they were given permission to degrade others who were, in their estimation, less than human. Women who didn’t conform to notions of womanhood were burned as witches. Homosexuals were branded as “sodomites’’ and tortured and killed. Children born with disabilities and deformities were treated as “cursed” and too often disposed of. Jews were stripped of their rights, their property, their ability to live freely, and were forced into the first ghettos. That way, when disaster struck again, they were an easier and clearer target.

That playbook was translated and updated with every generation, perhaps most evidently and disgustingly in the schemes of the Nazis to eliminate the Jews, homosexuals, the Romany and Sinti, the handicapped, the mentally ill, and political dissenters. Let me rephrase that: the schemes to eliminate people who were Jewish, homosexual, Romany, Sinti, handicapped, mentally ill, and political dissenters. Prejudices became policy in the Nuremberg Laws, defining citizenship through stark restrictions defining not only who was “in” and who was “out” but also whom one could associate with, marry, work for, or, in other words, who was clean and who was unclean. Though the world saw what those policies resulted in (a World War and genocide), it was translated into the American vernacular, already dripping with racist and white supremacist ideologies, in the form of “restricted” memberships and neighborhoods. It was translated into an irrational fear of communists to the point that entire industries were ready to hand over anyone who even blushed pink. It was translated into the Lavender Scare and defining homosexuality as a psychological disorder. Bruni zeroes in on the rhetoric of Republicans who have waged war against LGBTQ folx in the political arena for decades.

Many Republicans portrayed me and my kind as leches, even child molesters, laundering perversion into propriety. It’s a hell of a thing: to hear words from civic ‘leaders’ that openly or tacitly encourage people to hate you, maybe even to strike out at you. It puts fear in your heart and rage in your brain.

You think being trapped inside for a year is hard? Try living with an identity that has no mirror, no reflection — not just a lack of guidance but a total absence of seeing one’s current or potential self in the world around you. For most of my life, I’ve felt relatively unscathed by all of this, but I can identify the roots of my own self-doubt, and at times self-hatred, in the experience of finding myself on the margins, of being treated as “other,” of finding myself isolated and without seeing myself reflected in the rest of my world. When kids bullied me, teachers looked the other way. When celebrities came out (or rather, were outed), their careers ended. When I started to understand my sexual identity, there was no one to ask about it. The few people who spoke compassionately about queer people were themselves labeled as faggots or dykes (though when that happened, it was weirdly reassuring to know that others, if not by their personhood or choice, were tossed into the pit with me). But then I got to a point — an age, a location, a level of confidence and self-awareness — that I stepped outside the ring defined for me and I sought out my mirror. I found my experiences reflected in other gay men’s experiences and started to make some new experiences of my own to bolster my confidence and sense of self, to participate in a world (or at least a part of the world) that felt safe.

By that time, though, the scales had tipped. Ellen came out. Will & Grace was produced. Sentiments changed, unjust laws bent, and claiming identity as gay or lesbian was a respectable political act. At 23, just walking out on stage with the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus for the first time was an exhilirating political act, and a few years later, I started to really understand the political dimension of my gender and sexual identity when we traveled to Poland to deliver the first openly gay performance in Poland’s history. We received death-threats, the local promoter of the concert was mysteriously arrested and detained a couple of days before the concert, and we watched “protesters” hurl crass phrases toward us from our dressing room windows. We were accompanied to the concert by a police detail, an attempt to rush the concert hall during our opening number was halted, and we sang the best we’d ever sung. We gave our new friends in Poland a mirror they’d never had, a glimpse into how people thrive when they are embraced, supported, and can construct an authentic community.

You think being trapped inside for a year is hard? Try being trapped in a body that doesn’t match one’s self. When I started teaching in a small Catholic girls school, all of my students knew I was gay (that’s a different story altogether), and each year a different student would start hanging out in my office, lingering after class or just popping in to chat. I could intuit what was happening — I was the mirror they’d never seen before. One student who came out to me in high school went off to college and, for the first time, met people who were trans, and that student started to see himself fully for the first time. One of the greatest honors in my life and career was, years later, receiving an invitation to his wedding. If he was in high school when Laverne Cox was on the cover of Time or when Peppermint and Gottmik sailed to the finals of their seasons of Drag Race, he wouldn’t have needed me to start to see himself clearly, but he’d still need me. Rather, to put it more precisely, I’d still be responsible for making a safe space for him, for advocating for him, for modeling for others how to treat people as, well, people.

Is it trite to suggest that anti-trans efforts reflect a lack of compassion, of empathy? Perhaps. What’s the old mot, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Well, if that’s true, then it’s time to embrace insanity, to get more and more people to engage in the insane practice of seeing people as people, of recognizing difference as good, of approaching others and the world with kindness, of resisting the false safety and damaging definitions of “normal,” and believing along the way that it’s leading to the construction of a better world.

It’s only through the lens of this insanity that we can recognize that recent efforts to restrict access for trans people from sports, from appropriate medical and psychological care, from participation in civic institutions, from socio-economic equity, from (as someone once captured it succinctly) “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” are just the latest iteration of the Nuremberg Laws, are destructive and damaging to all of us. We can recognize that there’s no logic behind these efforts, only a passion to eliminate difference. We can recognize that the shield of religious or cultural conviction is not inspired by divine revelation or authorized by ancestral practices but buttressed by selfish grasps for power and privilege. We can also recognize that the most despicable aspect of the current wave of anti-trans efforts is its focus and impact on children. It’s an attack on the most vulnerable among the most vulnerable, the kids who already don’t see their current or potential selves reflected in the world. It deepens their sense of isolation and further dissipates their capacities to imagine what might or could be.

Each of us has the capacity, if not to provide a mirror and a clear path to the future for every person, to make the world — at least our little corners of the world — safe(r) places. Each of us can recognize that people are more important than grammar, bathrooms, and NCAA rules. Each of us can add our preferred pronouns to social media and our Zoom profiles to normalize talking about gender identity and difference. Each of us can adapt gendered language and alter plurals like alumnx and folx. Each of us can intervene when a joke is made or an insult is hurled. Each of us can do these things (quite literally, the very least that we could do) not because we suffer a savior complex or want to signal our virtues to the world but because it’s right and good. Each of us should do these things because it’s the small choices that each of us makes that effect (or at least prepare for) real, sustainable change.

So you change your profile. You repost messages of solidarity. You reach out to old friends or current colleagues or family members who bear the brunt of these efforts. You read books and articles and listen to podcasts. You donate to organizations that protect trans people and fight for their rights. Is it worth it? If it makes me aware of the impact of the language I use, how it might be heard or read or felt, it’s worth it. If it makes one person who identifies as trans feel a little more comfortable interacting with me or a little bit safer with me, it’s worth it. If it makes me uncomfortable, if it opens my eyes to the relationships, structures, and patterns in my life that perpetuate injustice, that further marginalize the most vulnerable, it’s worth it. When I look in the mirror, if I see the humanity that I share with 7.8 billion people in all their diversities, if I see that my first steps are kindness and empathy, it’s worth it.

Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash