Happy Pride!
It's June, which means Happy Pride Month! If you're not part of the LGBTQ+ community, you might be wondering what everybody is so proud about, why they look and act so outrageously. Why should you care? If you believe in gender equality and your own freedom as an American, then you should care about Pride.
At the start of our lives, other people assign us a fate. "It's a boy!" Or "It's a girl!" We all learn the ideals of how men and women are supposed to behave. Humans of one slightly different shape are to be sugar and spice, attractive yet chaste, clean, graceful, fashionable, sensitive, agreeable, never angry, encouraged to date boys at the appropriate time with the appropriate level of enthusiasm, and, oh I guess you can like boy things because we're all feminists here. Humans of another shape are to be rough and tough, muscular, commanding, certain, to never cry, to smile but not too warmly, encouraged to date girls with gusto, encouraged to be condescending, messy, even violent, as long as they never, ever show enthusiasm for feminine things. Follow your role models, boys and girls!
Or else. Over years, we learn our gender roles, one gentle scolding or bully's insult at a time. Every letter of LGBTQIA+ has paid the price for being different from the ideal of who boys and girls are expected to be. You know the slurs. Maybe you know what it feels like to hear them or be threatened with them. But did you know...
Within living memory, America had a gender police. Just like Iran. They would arrest you for showing interest in the same sex, for wearing clothes illegal for your sex. In the land of the free, conform to gender roles, or else. This is the America that Republicans want to bring back, starting with clothing bans, bathroom police, and mandatory genital inspections.
The Christopher street march, and every pride event since then, screams "We exist! We deserve to exist! And we deserve to be free!" Every sashaying drag queen, every shirt-free trans man, every butch on a bike, and every gyrating man in a sequined thong challenges the idea that men and women should only exist in narrow ways.
Back then, there weren't clean distinctions between gay and trans identities. Everybody was branded as degenerates, together. The cleanly separate identities, “normal” gay men, and sidelining of trans people, came later, in pursuit of the ever-elusive respectability.
Respectability means conformity. Trying to change oneself to meet the impossible, ever-shifting standards means sacrificing those who can’t or won’t. That’s fascist logic. The fascist machine cannot be appeased, because it needs invented internal enemies to justify its existence and brutality. Fascists find a minority that's different and lie that they're dangerous, to trick you into letting them build the infrastructure to control everybody. Are we going to fall for the billion-dollar lie machine of the Epstein class?
Gay people are us. Trans people are us. Queer people are us. Nobody fits the ideal of man or woman carved in stone. Republican policies and campaign promises demand that you do, or else.
Indivisible SF rejects the fascist logic of transphobia. Do you? With your actions? Do you think you would have championed a misunderstood and vilified minority, as did the suffragettes, abolitionists, or freedom riders? Then:
Come to the SF Trans Ally March and Rally. Saturday, June 27 at 10 AM, Embarcadero Plaza to Civic Center Plaza.
Stop the DMV Data Grab. Newsom’s DMV is about to be complicit in immigrant abuse, up to violence in detention and in countries they are sent to. Trans immigrants are especially in danger due to the gender marker on their IDs!
Wear an I Could Be Trans t-shirt! Proceeds go to Trans March.
Spread the message, "I Could Be Trans"