This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm, Spotify, and other platforms
co-written with Cora Howell
Content warning: this episode will feature extensive discussion of transphobia and homophobia.
Resources for trans and queer people in crisis
In March of 2022 Senator and former Florida Governor Rick Scott released his new 11 point plan to reshape the Republican Party. It’s clear from this that Scott has aspirations beyond his current senate seat; with this plan, he has set out a vision not just for his home state of Florida but for the entire party of which he is a member. His plan, as outlined on his website rescueamerica.com, is not mere political strategy but rather a comprehensive vision for the future of America. Given all of this, we are led to ask from what lens he is viewing this country in the first place, and one need only look at his words in order to understand that perspective.
The specific points in Scott’s 11-point plan are as follows: education; color blind equality; safety and crime; immigration; growth and economy; government reform and debt; fair fraud-free elections; family; gender, life, and science; religious liberty and big tech; and America first. Each of these is worth examining in itself and we recommend that our listeners look into them. As an example, point 7, “Fair Fraud-Free Elections,” obliquely references the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, and Scott’s take on this warrants an entire essay in itself. In this essay we’ll be looking in particular at points 8 and 9, “Family,” and “Gender, Life, and Science.”
The website’s main text for point 8, “Family,” reads as follows: “The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science. The fanatical left seeks to devalue and redefine the traditional family, as they undermine parents and attempt to replace them with government programs. We will not allow Socialism to place the needs of the state ahead of the family.” Point 9 reads: “Men are men, women are women, and unborn babies are babies. We believe in science: Men and women are biologically different, ‘male and female He created them.’ Modern technology has confirmed that abortion takes a human life. Facts are facts, the earth is round, the sun is hot, there are two genders, and abortion stops a beating heart. To say otherwise is to deny science.”
Clearly these assertions are absurd on their face. However, we believe that the motivation and theory behind them are worth examining closely, because they reveal something crucial to the psyche of the evangelical Right.
The year 2021 saw the murder of 375 trans people around the world (Wareham, 2021). Trans people make up 1.6% of the population (Branigin, 2022), and are four times more likely to be murdered relative to the general population, in addition to being disproportionately targeted by harassment and other crimes (Transgender People over Four Times More Likely than Cisgender People to Be Victims of Violent Crime, 2021). As of this writing, there are 149 anti-trans bills being considered in state legislatures throughout the country (Legislative Tracker, n.d.). In states such as Arizona, where there are presently twelve anti-trans bills on the table, it feels overwhelming to face such opposition to one’s basic identity. Suicidality is dramatically higher among trans- and non-binary youth (Toomey et al., 2018) and rates of homelessness are far higher among the trans population than the population in general (Kaiser, 2022). In light of these statistics, and their demonstration of trans people as an oppressed and marginalized demographic, we have a senator with clear aspirations for national leadership stating that trans people violate the sanctity of the family, that trans people violate the natural order, that trans people are worthy of hatred, scorn, and derision.
Rick Scott, seeking to pander to his base, is constructing trans, non-binary, and queer people as a public enemy. Again, openly trans people represent approximately 1.6% of the American population, and yet are on the receiving end of an enormous amount of ire, prejudicial hatred, and legislative discrimination; so much so that Florida senator Rick Scott has made them a central point in his 11-point plan for America. It raises the question, why would such a small group of people warrant such attention and vitriol?
In order to explore this question, let’s begin by looking at what it is to be gender-non-conforming in the first place. And in order to explore that, we’ll begin by taking a look at the concept of gender.
The objective situation is that there are basic biological differences between people based largely on genetics, which manifest as physical differences that are typically broken down as a sexual binary of “men” and “women.” The reality of this sexual distinction is more complicated than this binary designation would indicate. And then, on top of this, society constructs a structure of expectations, cultural meanings, social roles, and entire life paths based on perceptions of this distinction. As an example, certain people with certain chromosomal configurations and the physical traits that most commonly manifest from these configurations, whom we call “boys,” are socially expected to perform certain behaviors, such as participation in school sports, whereas those with another configuration, whom we call “girls,” are expected to engage in different activities, dress differently, play with different toys… it’s fair to say that every aspect of one’s life is informed by the social perception of this underlying sexual distinction. And while the underlying differences between humans are real, the social universe we’ve constructed around these differences is exactly that: constructed. It does not have an objective reality but rather exists purely as an intersubjective phenomenon. To understand this, consider that there’s nothing physically preventing a boy from wearing a dress. The only problems that are going to arise from that are social.
“Gender” is the word that we use to describe this social construct. It describes a system of beliefs about people, including self-directed beliefs, which are commonly believed to be based on the objective physical differences already mentioned. In reality, these beliefs are based more on the forceful assignments of people to gender roles by society in a way that may or may not match one’s underlying self-perception. There may, for example, be a disconnect between one’s personality, preferences, and self-perception and the assumptions about those things made by society based on the person’s physical traits. Such a disconnect is gender nonconformity: in such a case, one might strongly identify with the gender roles and assumptions which are typically assumed as belonging to those with other body types, or may not identify with any gender roles or assumptions at all. Traditional gender roles are more likely to be challenged by younger people, with an entire 5% of the population under the age of 30 identifying as gender-nonconforming (Branigin, 2022).
Here would be a good place to address some terminology. Bear in mind that we’re not presenting these as absolute, universal definitions, as these are complex concepts with a large amount of room for interpretive difference. Rather, we present them as working definitions. For someone to be transgender is for someone to have a gender identity that does not match their assigned sex. For example, one might be assigned “male” at birth but be socially, in every respect, a woman, and such a person would then be a transgender woman. In contrast, one whose gender identity matches their birth assignment is cisgendered.
Remember point 9 from Rick Scott’s plan: “Men are men, women are women, and unborn babies are babies. We believe in science: Men and women are biologically different, ‘male and female He created them.’” He states that “to say otherwise is to deny science.” This is flatly false. As we have already mentioned, there are objective biological differences between people; however, the construction of these differences—which are not themselves neatly binary—into the social categories of “men” and “women” is not an objective reality. Scientific research clearly reflects this. To begin with, this statement completely ignores the biological reality of intersex people: people who may have physical traits of both or either sex and whose genetics might not line up with the sexual binary structure assigned by society. According to sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, intersex people—who may meet any one of twenty-two different medical criteria listed on the Wikipedia page which discusses intersex people (“Intersex”, n.d.)—may represent as much as 1.7% of the population (2000). This means that, if Rick Scott’s assumption that gender is equivalent to biological sex is correct, then there are at least twenty-four different genders, corresponding to male, female, and the twenty-two intersex variations listed in the Wikipedia page, and so we can say that Scott’s assertions are mistaken even in their own terms. Beyond that, gender incongruence—which includes transsexuality and other gender non-conforming identities—has been the subject of scientific study going back at least as far as 1919 (the year of the founding of Magnus Hirschfield’s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin; Schillace, 2021), and while scientists have not uncovered any single factor which on its own causes one to be gender incongruent, they have revealed numerous objective, biological factors which are clear influences, including genetics, brain structure, and prenatal exposure to particular hormones such as androgen (Causes of Gender Incongruence, n.d.). According to a 2013 study by Milton Diamond, in a full third of cases among identical twins in which one twin is transgender, the other is as well, compared to a prevalence of only one in 38 when the twins are not identical. This strongly indicates that genetics are a significant factor in gender incongruence (though not the only one). Contra Scott’s statements, the science shows that sex and gender are far more complicated than the matter of anatomy, and that there is an empirical, scientific basis for the phenomena of trans identity and gender incongruence.
Rick Scott is not only making erroneous claims about the science of gender, but supporting those statements with scripture: “Male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27, 5:2). One might be led to believe, based on this, that such a perspective is the clear and historically-prevalent alternative to the more complex, modern narrative supported by scientific research, that from the moment of God’s creation forward, gender has been a simple matter of male and female, and that that understanding has only recently begun to change. This is far from the case. As mentioned in the prior episode “The Lessons of Ancient Egypt,” the pharaohs Hatshepsut and Akhenaten were portrayed in contemporaneous artwork as having androgenous features. Hatshepsut was depicted in some statues wearing the royal false beard, and Akhenaten broke with centuries of artistic tradition in order to portray themselves (using the gender-neutral pronoun here to avoid any assumptions about their gender) with features such as wide hips and breasts. The Roman emperor Elagabulus, assigned male at birth, preferred female pronouns and offered vast sums of money to any surgeon who could provide her with a vagina (Varner, 2008).
In contradistinction to Scott’s preference for looking at the Western cultural tradition as if it were natural and universal, we can look to the traditions of other cultures to find a much broader and more complex understanding of human gender and sexuality. For example, the Bugis people of Indonesia have, for at least six centuries, recognized five distinct genders: oroani (cisgender males), makkunrai (cisgender females), calalai (“female men”), calabai (“male women”), and bissu (intersex) (Ibrahim, 2019). Considering the Bugis perspective on gender may clarify the concept of gender as a social construct: were gender purely empirical and biological, one would expect all cultural perspectives to converge on a single understanding. However, being that gender is a social construct, we see exactly what we would expect, which is a multitude of different perspectives between different cultures. Other examples include the two-spirit people of indigenous American cultures and the Hijra of India. There is even at least one example of a differing perspective on gender within the Christian tradition: the Skoptsy of Russia, dating back to at least 1771, who believed that “human genitals were a mark of original sin,” and so surgically removed them (Skoptsy, n.d.).
In contradistinction to this scientifically-informed, nuanced, and compassionate view of human diversity, we have numerous examples of the Christian evangelical movement advocating for the outright execution of anyone who deviates from their patriarchal norms. To take one example, pastor Dillon Awes of the Stedfast Baptist Church in Hurst, Texas said the following:
What does God say is the answer, is the solution for the homosexual in 2022, here in the New Testament, here in the book of Romans? That they are worthy of death. Every single homosexual in our country should be charged with a crime, the abomination of homosexuality that they have, they should be convicted in a lawful trial, they should be sentenced to death, they should be lined up against a wall and shot in the back of the head.
(Padgett, 2022)
This rhetoric is extreme, but it is far from uncommon. In order to inform my work, I regularly listen to Christian AM and FM radio, and while nothing this extreme ends up on air, the general discourse is of much the same nature: a suggestion, implicit or explicit, that queer and trans people are subhuman and worthy of exclusion, torment, and even execution. I’ll remind my listeners that radio broadcasts describing the ethnic Tutsis of Rwanda as cockroaches and calling for their deaths were instrumental in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
Let’s go back to Rick Scott. “Men and women are biologically different, ‘male and female He created them.’… Facts are facts, the earth is round, the sun is hot, there are two genders… To say otherwise is to deny science.” Well then, if we accept Scott’s claims, what are we to say of people who claim that they are of a gender different than what God appeared to have created them as? What are we to say of someone who claims that they don’t fall into any clearly-defined gender category? Clearly, the implication is then that these people are not part of God’s creation. They are something Other, perhaps something demonic. An enemy to be rooted out and destroyed.
Let’s shift here to a discussion of another political group who found it convenient to construct a public enemy: the fascists of the mid-20th century. We’ll find that this description is true not only of the Nazi party of Germany, but of the Italian and Spanish fascists as well.
To understand the parallels, let’s first consider what fascism is: far-right authoritarian ultra-nationalism. Much of German fascism was constructed based on the work of political theorist Carl Schmitt, who defined the political as the distinction between allies and enemies (2007). As mentioned in many episodes of this show, the political theorist Samuel Huntington, and many others, have described how we construct our identities in part through the identification of our enemies. Being ultranationalist and deeply obsessed with a sense of unified national identity, this identification and construction of enemies is central to fascist ideology: the fascist leader identifies an insidious threat outside of or within society (often both) and convinces his followers that he has to be placed in a position of absolute power and authority in order to deal with this threat. For the Nazis, the Jews, who had long been stigmatized in European society, made for a convenient enemy. Less known is the Nazi persecution of the LGBTQIA+ community. Fascism is a patriarchal cult of strength. It fetishizes power and authority, and male power and authority in particular. The leader can then, given a fascist-leaning mindset among the general populace, construct the LGBTQIA+ community as being a threat to patriarchal masculinity and to “traditional values,” and it was this cult of tradition that Italian author Umberto Eco listed as the first feature of what he called “ur-fascism” in his famous document of that name, published in the New York Review of Books in 1995.
We’ve already mentioned Magnus Hirschfield’s Institute for Sexual Research as an example of the more progressive-leaning values towards the LGTBQIA+ community present in Germany prior to the Nazi takeover. This institute was raided on May 6th, 1933, by the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, the SA (die Sturmabteilung). Four days later, the institute’s library of over 12,000 books was publicly burned on the Opernplatz in Frankfurt, a massive and tragic erasure of an enormous wealth of history and scientific information about LGBTQIA+ people (Marhoefer, 2015). The objective, of course, was the erasure of the people themselves: between 1933 and 1945, approximately 100,000 men were arrested by the Nazi government on charges of homosexuality (Whisnant, 2016), and then subject to incarceration, torture, castration (which was offered as an alternative to other punishments), execution, or imprisonment in the death camps.
Now let’s return to Rick Scott and the rhetoric of the American Republican Party. Rick Scott is using a framework of what he asserts as tradition—tradition predicated on a particular interpretation of Christianity and the Bible—to construct LGBTQIA+ people as a public enemy. This “traditional” interpretation of Christianity is decidedly patriarchal, with men established throughout the Bible as the natural heads of household and leaders of society. This mirrors the patriarchal cult of strength of fascism, and gay and lesbian people, trans people, intersex people, bi- and pansexual people, asexual people, and queer people in general are constructed as being a threat to this vision of the Christian male leader and to Christian tradition. Rick Scott, remember, is, just as with the fascist leaders of history, insisting that he be put in power so that he can deal with this threat. This is by no means limited to Rick Scott. The book Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020) is an extensive and detailed account of the relationship between Christianity and patriarchal male headship.
There is a widespread and concerted effort among conservative politicians in Texas, just to name one example, to erase LGBTQIA+ people from public discourse. Books which discuss issues relevant to this community have been banned (Hernendez, 2022). Doctors who provide gender-affirming medical care, and even parents who raise their children in a gender-affirming environment, have been threatened with state legal action (Klibanoff, 2022a; Klibanoff, 2022b). The State of Texas has ordered the Texas Child Welfare Agency to investigate the families of trans children (Klibanoff and Oxner, 2022). The intent of this last legal effort is entirely clear: to remove trans children from families who love them and accept them for who they are so that they can be placed in environments which reject who they are and which will inevitably seek to reprogram them to confirm to the “traditional” expectations of an increasingly authoritarian and patriarchal society.
Elsewhere, in Florida, we have the famed “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which aims to remove all discourse concerning LGBTQIA+ people from the educational curriculum in an effort to erase them from the public consciousness. Supporters of the bill will correctly note that the words “gay,” “homosexuality,” and the like, are nowhere present in the bill. But this is entirely the point. The wording of the bill is so vague that almost any discussion of human sexuality and gender identity—even including a gay teacher mentioning their husband in a casual, offhand way—could potentially be construed as violating this law and subjecting the teacher to personal and criminal liability. One of the key tactics used by fascists is obscurantism, the use of coded language or vague legal doctrines which conceal their true objectives. This bill is a clear example of exactly that.
A key aspect of this program is the use of religion, which is part of the broader cult of tradition already mentioned. The specific religion in question is, of course, Christianity, and there’s a great article on the Human Rights Campaign website that deconstructs various passages in the Bible as they relate to trans and gender issues and identity (Hartke and Markham, n.d.). Rick Scott mentions Genesis 1:27 in particular, and here’s the response to that from the aforementioned website:
In between day and night we have dawn and dusk; between land and sea we have coral reefs and estuaries and beaches; between flying birds and swimming fish we have penguins and high jumping dolphins, not to mention that uncategorizable favorite the platypus! No one would argue that a penguin is an abomination for not fitting the categories of Genesis 1, or that an estuary isn’t pleasing to God because it’s neither land nor sea. In the same way, God gives every human a self that is unique and may not always fit neatly into a box or binary.
The entire first chapter of Genesis is filled with binaries, but as we can readily observe, the whole of nature exists across various spectra. In Genesis 1:5, God separates day from night, and this is presented in the text as being just as much a binary as the creation of male and female in Genesis 1:27. But of course, we never see an immediate transition from day to night or night to day, but rather a gradual shift from one to the other across a duration that cannot properly be referred to as being strictly “day” or “night.” We have words for these durations, of course: “dawn” and “dusk,” but even these do not encompass the full depth of the transition from day to night or night to day. When more specificity is required, such as for purposes of astronomical observation, dawn and dusk can be subdivided into further categories: “astronomical twilight,” “nautical twilight,” and “civil twilight.” The Bible does not mention any of these categories; however, they undeniably exist and if we were to take the position that day and night were created by God, we would have to take the position as well that the spectrum between them is part of that creation. We can apply this exact thinking to the concept of gender. The Bible specifically mentions the creation of “male” and “female,” and, as we discussed, there are people who do not fit neatly into either of these categories, and there is no reason to assume that they are not just as much a part of the diversity of creation as dawn and dusk.
One might also mention Deuteronomy 22:5, “A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does such things is abhorrent to the LORD your God.” One might read this as being a prohibition against what we would refer to as gender-affirming clothing choices and what might be referred to in a more derogatory fashion as “cross-dressing.” We have to remember that the ethical codes presented in the Old Testament are largely concerned with the differentiation of the Israelites from the other peoples whose lands they cohabited. Beyond this, the verse does not stipulate what a “woman” or a “man” is, or what what constitutes their respective apparels, and at least with regards to apparel, fashions have changed somewhat over the last couple thousand years. Are we to take this verse as stipulating that men wear robes, as was the fashion at the time? Beyond this, things that are considered traditionally feminine today, such as high-heels and makeup, were originally invented for use by wealthy men.
There are numerous other prohibitions presented which we have largely acknowledged are no longer relevant to contemporary life. These include: not touching women who are on their period (Leviticus 15:19), bathing after any ejaculation (Leviticus 15:16), and not wearing clothing made from two different fabrics (Deuteronomy 22:11). Leviticus 11:7-9 prohibits the consumption of pork and shellfish, and while Jewish people still hold to these prohibitions, Christians in general do not. The Human Rights Campaign article also presents a brilliant response to these verses:
Beyond understanding why this verse was originally penned, a more pressing question for Christians to ask is whether or not we are supposed to follow the prohibitions present throughout all of Deuteronomy. The answer for most Christians today would be no, on account of the theological conviction that Jesus, through his life and death, has fulfilled the requirements of the laws Moses presented at Mt. Sinai in the story of Exodus and because they do not believe that maintaining the integrity of God’s creation prohibits mixing. In fact, the incarnation of God as Jesus, the mixing of the fully divine and the fully human, is often viewed as the necessary context for humanity’s salvation altogether. Christians who maintain non-affirming perspectives on transgender and non-binary people must ask themselves why it is that this command is being upheld when they believe that most, if not all, of the other directives around it have been nullified.
The article includes several other responses to arguments predicated on Bible verses and we highly recommend that listeners read it for themselves. Most centrally, we can look to their exposition of Galatians 3:28, from the New Testament: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” This verse clearly speaks against any attempt to separate humanity into categories which may be described as more or less holy, more or less close to God. This verse states explicitly that the matter of sex and gender is simply irrelevant to the matter of salvation. Once again, we find the Christian right making claims about the Bible which do not reflect its actual contents. If we are to take the Bible as authoritative in the first place, there is no room in that position to deny or ostracize anyone based on who they are. The Bible verses being wielded by Scott and by others in his party have been selected and divorced from their textual and historical context so as to provide ammunition for their hateful agenda and to provide a religious groundwork for a trans genocide. They are in no way being honest about or authentic to the message that they claim to hold above all others.
We’ve covered a lot of ground here so let’s sum things up. The Christian evangelical right is fabricating enemies in order to stoke fear and galvanize their base, not only constructing an enemy for them to use to gain and consolidate power but attacking a beautiful part of the diversity of nature. The music video of the song “The Village” by Wrabel—which has become an anthem for the trans community—includes the following quote: “In nature, a flock will attack any bird that is more colorful than the others because being different is seen as a threat.” For Rick Scott and his political allies, trans and gender-nonconforming individuals are a convenient way to stoke fear and gain votes, but we have to remember that these political targets are first and foremost people, people who, under sometimes violent threats from the rest of society, choose to be honest about who they are and to live openly according to that reality. There is a powerful, inspiring courage in the trans community that emanates from every single person within it. This is a courage that lifts up all of humanity. Scott’s position, on the other hand, is pure cowardice, and has no purpose beyond weaponization of humanity’s lowest fears of that which they find different or Other.
Putting all this together, our unfortunate and terrifying conclusion is that the American Republican Party and the American evangelical Christian movement are laying the groundwork for a trans and queer genocide. As Satanists and as decent human beings respectful of human liberty and dignity, we must fight against this by whatever means necessary. We certainly hope that this outcome never comes to pass, and if it doesn’t, our guess would be that that victory resulted from the deliberate actions of antifascists, queer activists, and those who will risk anything to protect human life. If, however, such a thing does occur, people will look to our time to understand the foundations and the rhetoric that fueled it, and they’ll point to exactly what we’ve discussed in this episode. The pattern we’re seeing today is a pattern that has emerged time and time again through the recent history of humanity, and it has often preceded the horrors of our worst nightmares.
Works Cited or Referenced
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Diamond M (2013). “Transsexuality Among Twins: Identity Concordance, Transition, Rearing, and Orientation”. International Journal of Transgender Health. 14 (1): 24–38.
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Eco, U. (n.d.). Ur-Fascism. Retrieved June 24, 2022, from https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
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Hartke, A., & Markham, M. (n.d.). What Does the Bible Say About Transgender People? Human Rights Campaign. Retrieved March 24, 2022, from https://www.hrc.org/resources/what-does-the-bible-say-about-transgender-people
Hernandez, J. (2022, April 26). In a lawsuit, a group of Texas library patrons says a book ban amounts to censorship. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2022/04/26/1094807686/texas-library-book-ban-lawsuit
Ibrahim, F. (2019, February 26). This Indonesian community has five genders—One of them is under threat of dying out. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-27/indonesia-fifth-gender-might-soon-disappear/10846570
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Padgett, D. (2022, June 10). Texas Pastor Calls for Gay People to Be Shot in the Head. https://www.advocate.com/news/2022/6/10/texas-pastor-calls-gay-people-be-shot-head
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Toomey, R. B., Syvertsen, A. K., & Shramko, M. (2018). Transgender Adolescent Suicide Behavior. Pediatrics, 142(4), e20174218. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2017-4218
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Whisnant, Clayton J. (2016). Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880–1945. Columbia University Press.