Gay Marriage Arguments Divide Supreme Court Justices (New York Times)
9 questions about gender identity and being transgender you were too embarrassed to ask (vox.com)
‘We just need to pee’ transgender protest (bbc.com)
‘Killed myself. Sorry.’: Transgender game developer jumps off bridge after online abuse (Washington Post)
Part of the problem of being such a loner is that I haven’t had much of a social support network when I’ve come to huge realizations about myself, including my sexual orientation and gender identity. Even when I’ve been around people who could help me, and who even offered their help, I haven’t always taken advantage of those opportunities, in part because of fear of being rejected (even by people I know would never reject me). As much as all non-cisgender and non-heterosexual people are often lumped under convenient labels or acronyms, there’s a wide panoply of people represented by those terms, and they haven’t always gotten along. In the 1990s, when there was an uptick in acceptance of gay and lesbian people among the American population, there was huge pressure within the community to not “look gay” or “act gay,” the idea that the only way to keep gaining acceptance was to appear and behave like “normal” straight Americans. That started to diminish in the 2000s, but transgender people were still treated like the red-headed stepchildren of the community by many, under the umbrella but not fully accepted because they weren’t photogenic enough and were so “weird” that many worried that pushing for the rights of transgender people would hinder the advancement of non-heterosexuals.
Even today, a lot of misconceptions about non-heterosexuals and non-cisgender people still persist, from the notion that all gay people want sex change operations (because penis-and-vagina sex is apparently the only “real” sex), to the idea that anyone who violates gender and/or sexuality norms in any way must want to violate them in every way, and therefore they are all dangerous, predatory pedophiles. Some of these still persist within the community itself, such as the idea that bisexuals who are dating someone of the opposite sex somehow magically become heterosexual, or that bisexuality doesn’t even exist. Things have gotten even more complicated in recent years with the increased visibility of groups previously unknown to even many people within the community; it can be difficult even for those of us who inhabit those spaces to keep up with it all.
Looking back at the past few decades, it’s easy to find pivotal moments in the growing acceptance of non-heterosexuals and non-cisgender people: Celebrities “coming out of the closet” in the 1980s, Pat Buchanan’s “culture war” speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, television shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Massachusetts becoming the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, the rise of Laverne Cox. It’s also easy to find broader societal trends, such as increased acceptability leading to more people coming out, and their friends and family members realizing that these people, regardless of their orientations and identities, are still just that: People.
What’s not so easy to explain is how American support for same-sex marriage went from around 30% a generation ago to 61% today. Huge shifts in public opinion like that are extremely rare, and they’re hard to pinpoint because they don’t occur in a vacuum free from other issues and concerns. Yes, increased recognition of the humanity of non-heterosexual people has a lot to do with it — basic arguments like hospital visitation rights and wills — but I’m not so sure that the “battle for people’s hearts” was necessarily won so much as it was forfeited.
Having been a part of the community for so long, a community leader at times, and an advocate for these issues since my first realizations so long ago, it can be difficult for me to gain a proper sense of perspective of the world as a whole. It probably hasn’t helped that I’ve been deeply entrenched in higher education in some form or another for nearly fourteen years now, and while I’ve seen wide cross-sections of people in that time, and seen how attitudes have changed over the years among people of the same age group, academia is a far different beast from the American population as a whole. Still, having listened to so many students’ feelings on these issues, and looking at broader societal trends, I do have a hypothesis to put out.
The sea change appears to have started a couple of years after the huge uproar against Massachusetts legalizing same-sex marriage. The Republican Party was able to mobilize that outrage in the 2004 election, using state ballot initiatives to put anti-same-sex marriage in their state constitutions to drive their voters to the polls, not just to pass these initiatives but also to keep both the presidency and both houses of Congress in Republican hands. Although Democrats took back control of both the House and the Senate in the 2006 midterm elections, that was less about Democratic momentum and popular support than it was a rising backlash against President Bush and the Republican Party, for a host of issues ranging from Terry Schiavo to the botched Hurricane Katrina response to the war in Iraq. It wasn’t really until 2008, when things got even worse for Republicans and the Democratic Party was mobilized for a historic presidential campaign with an inspirational leader, that there was really a pro-Democratic Party atmosphere in America.
Maybe that campaign cycle had something to do with it, but it was still relatively rare for Democrats to publicly avow support for same-sex marriage back in 2008; President Obama himself campaigned on civil unions, and had previously voiced opposition to same-sex marriage (although he’d supported it before he became a nationally-known figure, but you can read David Axelrod telling that story on your own). In between those two elections, though, there was another huge event: The near-collapse of the world economy that triggered a long recession. Despite all the numbers and news stories coming out of Washington, a lot of people live in neighbourhoods that feel like they haven’t really recovered from the 2008 collapse, if they’d even recovered from the 2001 recession before then. With so many people having to work fifty or sixty hours a week just to keep roofs over their heads, any issues that don’t directly affect their ability to provide for themselves, from environmental concerns to what their neighbours do in the privacy of their own homes. It’s hard to care about a rainforest thousands of miles away, or whether or not your neighbour is gay, when you’re worried about getting an eviction notice.
It was around that time that there appeared to be a huge increase in the percentage of people who were okay with non-heterosexual people in general (although perhaps limiting the definition to homosexuals and bisexuals may be more accurate here), and same-sex marriage in particular. Unlike before, though, this wasn’t what I would call an active acceptance, where people consciously affirmed, “Yes, you may ‘love differently’ or express yourself differently, but I still recognize you as being as much of a human being as anyone else, entitled to the same rights I have.” Instead, it felt more like this new wave of acceptance took the form of, “Eh, whatever, do what you want as long as you don’t come on to me.”
Is that really victory, though? On a purely functional level I suppose it is, as can be measured through polls and such. That kind of acceptance doesn’t touch on the underlying problems non-heterosexuals and non-cisgender people face, though, from structural oppression (in 29 states you can be fired by private employers for not being heterosexual and/or cisgender) to societal pressures (leading to higher suicide rates by non-heterosexuals and non-cisgender people, especially among youth). The struggles of African-Americans are embedded in our collective conscious and unconscious through a well-documented and well-discussed history, from slavery to the Civil War, to Jim Crow and the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, to the protests against police killings being broadcast on my television as I type this very sentence. The struggles of American women are similarly documented and discussed. That history just isn’t there for non-heterosexual and non-cisgender Americans; remember that homosexuality was considered a mental illness here until the 1970s, and same-sex sexual activity was still illegal in some states as late as 2003.
As we await the Supreme Court’s ruling on whether or not same-sex marriage will be made legal nationwide, the distinction between passive and active acceptance becomes even more important. As welcome as a ruling making same-sex marriage legal in all fifty states will be, you can’t change people’s hearts through law. You can change people’s actions through law, and this is very important, especially as attacks by intolerant people diversify, from the “religious freedom” bills of recent vintage, to the fearmongering over trans people using public restrooms, to backlash against non-traditional pronouns, to even organized campaigns to push trans people into committing suicide, to say nothing of the physical violence that continues just as it always has. Having same-sex marriage legalized across America will be a laudable milestone, but it will do little, if anything, to address any of those issues.
Battling for people’s hearts is incredibly more difficult than trying to win legal protections, and there will always be a substantial portion of the American public that will flat-out hate non-heterosexuals and non-cisgender people regardless of what anyone says or does. Without people’s hearts, though, the societal and moral framework backing up these legal victories is nowhere near as substantial as it could be. If more was being done to turn people’s passive acceptance of non-heterosexuals and non-cisgender people into active acceptance, if more was being done to contextualize our present-day struggles in the same way that the struggles of African-Americans and women and other minorities have a widely-known history to frame them in, then maybe we will see appreciable drops in things like violence and suicide rates, and politicians who would try to make their constituents afraid of “the gay” will think twice about using such despicable tactics. It may be a much harder fight, but it’s one that could yield rewards even bigger than marriage equality. Even if it stops just one hate crime or prevents one suicide, it will be a worthwhile struggle. It’s something to think about as we wait for that Supreme Court ruling, anyway.