Fascism and the Gender Cops
How things like transphobia are the engine of fascism - and why all this 'gender bullshit' matters in Australia. Or fuckin' anywhere.
Girls Living Outside of Society’s Shit
So it looks like the US is going to try make my gender identity [They/Them] illegal.
My first thought was “Siq, I can now add GENDER CRIMINAL to my bluesky bio”.
It’s the kind of reflexive, hardass response I instinctively have to bullshit before I have a decent period of time to think about how fucked it is. Even for me living in Australia.
Even for you living in Australia.
Couple of my friends are seeing all this ‘gender identity poltics bullshit’ in the states as a distraction from the real and present threats of the climate crisis and skyrocketing wealth inequality+democratic erosion. Don’t get me wrong - stoking transphobia absolutely is a distraction from escalating environmental, economic and democratic crises - but that is precisely why you need to fight it.
Anyhow,
Here’s why this shit matters:
1) Gender affirming care unambiguously saves lives
by lowering the rate of suicide among trans people - who likely constitute at least 1% of the population. The figure is probably higher, but 1:100 people you know is still a shitload of people.
Just collecting data on gender identification has already been subject to a huge culture war in Australia, which brings me to my second point
2) This shit will be imported into Australia real quick
because our media is either owned by right-wing billionaire arseholes [Murdoch:Newscorp, Rinehart:Fairfax/Nine], or are simply total fucking cowards like the ABC:
Purportedly ‘centrist’ publications like the ABC frequently play a role in importing fascism, as they try to pander to a potentially incoming right-wing governments [Dutton] by framing their cowardly fascist bullshit1 as ‘bold’, ‘effective’ and ‘potent’ strategies.
They do this in the hopes their funding won’t get cut (which it will of course anyway).
Yes, the vast majority of Australian’s support trans identities, and 66% support children’s access to gender affirming care, and media consumption is devolving into the major social media platforms - but please remember how quickly shit turned on the Voice To Parliament referendum once the racist disinformation propaganda engine got into gear:
This could happen on gender issues even faster given 45% of Australians get their news from social media and are therefore drinking from the toxic waste fountain coming out of America.
3) Shitting on minorities is how fascists get votes
Transphobia, racism, homophobia and misogyny work by ‘pitting the poors’ against each-other as their economic conditions fall apart
I’m going to define ‘the poors’ here as the elites would - i.e. anyone whose not a billionaire/multimillionaire.
The whole fascist project works by scything off the approval of the most economically powerful demographic of the poors (generally older white men) and telling them shit is getting real bad - but we’ll make sure most of the bad shit happens to brown/queer people and not you.
Yes, right wing voters will be voting for policies that erode their access to healthcare, education, social services and disaster relief - yes their access to national wealth will be choked by multinationals and billionaires paying no tax buying up all the countries’ assets - but at least they' know they’ll be better off than the real poors.
That’s how, for example, folk in the rural US consistently vote against their self-interest with successive republican state governments as their communities and environment completely fall apart around them.
The left’s offers the possibility that life could be better for everyone.
The right offers the certainty that your life won’t be as bad as someone else’s…
(for now, so long as you keep supporting them).
Fascism offers the fascist a position that isn’t the lowest on the hierarchy of shit-eating.:
*Relative* safety for fascists is not the only appeal - but also sadism
It is an unfortunate truth that some people just like bullying others. That they derive pleasure from degrading, disempowering and beating others. I am familiar with this from personal experience.
George Orwell described the appeal of totalitarianism as the pleasure of ‘a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.’2 - fascism promises you can be the boot and not the face.
The fascist right love it so much, they’re constantly doing it to themselves (which I’ll also cover in my final point, NOBODY IS SAFE):
This tactic, of course, requires a minority to shit on - preferably a relatively powerless one (because nazis are cowards):
Immigrants
Trans/gender non-conforming folk
People of Color
Gays
Jews
Women
They will , of course, start by focusing on the most marginalised or rare or disempowered of these groups (in the US - that’s currently immigrants and trans-folk) and then broaden the scope of persecution as they run out ways to persecute the initial targets (say, by eradicating them3 or completely disappearing them behind razor-wire).
4) This won’t work if you fight it
If would-be fascists receive consistent, community scorn for denigrating trans-people - the entire ‘being one leg up on the social hierarchy’ equation won’t work anymore. They’ll clock that transphobia is getting them no-where and maybe try being nice instead4. That will make them friends. Friends will convince them not to vote for shitheads who will erode their wages/sell off their national wealth to mega corporations.
Would-be fascist politicians (or weak ‘left wing’ politicians who adopt some fascist ‘anti-woke’5 tactics in order to try get votes) who receive consistent wide spread and hostile feedback on ‘anti-woke’ policies will try a different tactic to get votes.
Immediate, no-tollerance confrontation to this ‘Anti-Woke’ bullshit is key.
If your goal is a livable income for you and your community, secure housing and a survivable climate - you must also fight transphobia, homophobia, misogyny and racism.
Creating the hierarchy, with minorities at the bottom, is the stepping stone of how fossil-fuel lobby and its billionaries keep climbing to power. Take it away from them.
If you keep allowing those in power to pick minorities as scapegoats - you will forever keep allowing them to consolidate power and accelerate wealth inequality and environmental degradation.
5) Final uncomfortable reminder than transgender science, and people, were some of the first victims of Nazism
Yup. A lot of those photos of Nazis burning books you saw in higschool history classes were of the library of sexology, which included the life-work of pioneering gender researcher Magnus Hirschfeld (who performed the first gender re-assignment surgeries).
Usually reading from wikipedia is pretty dry, but this article is a wild read:
On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, came to power as Chancellor of Germany. His government cracked down on gay and trans movements within Germany.
On 6 May 1933, a group of students belonging to the National Socialist German Students' League, accompanied by a brass band, marched to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.[48] After failing to find Hirschfeld,[48] who was abroad,[49] the students proceeded to shout "Brenne Hirschfeld!" ("Burn Hirschfeld!") while ransacking and vandalizing the Institute, tearing pictures from the walls, pouring inkwells onto carpets, and destroying exhibitions while the band played outside.[50][48] Some students posed for propaganda photos amidst the destruction.[48] That afternoon, the Sturmabteilung (SA) arrived and systematically confiscated the Institute's materials, including thousands of books and documents from its library and archive.[49] The only documents spared were the thousands of medical questionnaires collected by Hirschfeld, either because the Institute's staff managed to convince the SA that the documents were simple medical profiles, or because there were physically too many to carry out of the Institute.[51] Dora Richter was long believed to have been murdered in the attack[40][52][53] until a paper trail of her life after 1933 was unearthed.[54]
The Institute was closed, and would never reopen.
There’s that poem everyone quotes all the time for a reason, first they came for the socialists…
So yeah, this shit is important.
So please - check in and support your trans and gender non-conforming friends. This is a terrifying time for them. And let any transphobes in your life know there are only immediate downside consequences for them in their communities. No leg up on the hierarchy for arsehole behavior - only scorn.
I’ll publish more detailed advice on how to resist fascist rhetoric soon, but for now - this’ll work:
being scared of brown and queer people
For anyway nazis reading this: George Orwell was not describing democratic socialism in 1984, dipshits, he was describing fascsim and Stalinism. Orwell literally threw grenades at fascists, as a volunteer, in the Spanish civil war - he fucking hated Nazis.
Making gender transition illegal does, thereby erasing the possibility of being trans, does constitute the definition of ‘destruction of a people’, and thereby genocide by some definitions. Or at the very least, violation of human rights.
And definitely reward people for being nice! Completely socially alienating people is counter productive.
Anti-woke is just code for racist, transphobic, homophobic and mysoginist - love someone to prove otherwise.