The Brewing Backlash
Thoughts on The Right's most recent (but not new) culture-war fixation: queer people and our lives.
Suppose you’ve been online as much as I have (or even that you’ve just been keeping up with the news). In that case, you’re probably well aware of a troubling trend in American right-wing circles: an increasingly unhinged moral panic surrounding the LGBTQ+ Community (In particular, the transgender community has been the target of the most intense abuse). Of course, the right-wing expressing disdain for queer people is nothing new—though, in recent years, it’s seemed like the kind of casual homophobia that conservatives often engage in had become passé. In 2019, James Kirchick declared in The Atlantic that “The Struggle for Gay Rights Is Over”. Of course, his argument was always more complicated than the title implied, but overall it seemed prudent to consider that at the end of the 2010s, the brand of generic homophobia that we’d come to expect had gradually dissipated from the mainstream. Yet, here we are at the end of 2022, just three years after The Atlantic’s favourite gay neoconservative declared victory on behalf of the queer community, things have…definitely not gotten better. We live now in a time with an unprecedented wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation on the state level, and while the courts have struck down a number of the enacted bills, there’s still a clear separate social front at which the right is fighting. It seems that despite the hard-won progress of the last fifteen years, The United States of America is backsliding on social acceptance and rights for queer people.
Now, I don’t think that I’m the first person to point all this out, nor will I be the last. There are many other queer people (particularly trans people) who have spent the better part of the last few years exhaustively cataloguing the resurgence of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric in mainstream conservative media and politics. In particular, Seattle-based transgender YouTube creator Jessie Earl has spent the last year taking on Matt Walsh and people like him.
Others have more comprehensive works documenting this particular issue, and I would encourage you to give them your support. I’m here to ask two simple questions:
Why is this happening?
What is the end goal?
Well, I don’t think it’s got much to do with religious dogma or with a sincere belief in anti-trans conspiracy theories—it’s likely a lot simpler than that. People like Matt Walsh, Chaya Raichik, and Ben Shapiro are reactionaries, yes, but more than that they’re opportunists. All the sturm-und-drang about “groomers” and trans-affirming care is demagoguery. Whether these bad-faith actors actually believe the things they’re saying is immaterial (though I do happen to think that some of them hold the beliefs they espouse), the effect is the same. It galvanises a political bloc in a way that gives power to their cause. When people show up to “protest” drag events armed to the teeth, their prejudices are being exploited for political expediency.
This isn’t a way of excusing this behaviour—it is still abhorrent and the harm that they cause is very real.
Now, I don’t know if the “Wake up, sheeple!” approach is enough to combat this, but it’s important that the queer community and their allies try everything we can.
The stakes haven’t been higher in decades—we have politicians like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis actively attempting to use the power of the state against the LGBTQ+ community. We have stochastic terrorists like Chaya Raichik (a.k.a “LibsofTikTok”) galvanising real-world violence and intimidation. The cynical tactics being employed here are effective. As Susan Benesch wrote for Just Security:
Speech that increases the risk of intergroup violence, often by describing one set of people as posing a mortal threat to an in-group, can make violence against those people seem defensive, necessary, and even virtuous.
In her testimony before the January 6th congressional committee, Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace pointed out that the United States is experiencing an unprecedented rise in the acceptance of political violence. With the data showing that approval of political violence in the US is nearing the levels seen in Northern Ireland at the height of The Troubles, we’re in an undeniably precarious position. For the Right, queer people make the perfect scapegoat. Mixing this rhetoric with our current political situation poses a very real threat to our community.
However, I didn’t write this to make people afraid (though I think that we certainly have good reason to be). The point of all this is to encourage the people reading this to share an idea with people they know who aren’t particularly concerned with the state of things for queer people—the kind of person who still thinks that we’re in the 2019-era paradigm: get involved.
As some on the internet are prone to say: This is not a drill.