Cultural templates

This past weekend, a man on the TTC called my best friend and I faggots and warned us not to look in his direction. I had rested my head against my best friend’s / ex’s shoulder. The man’s demeanour suggested he might be mentally ill.

This interaction made me think of Panthea Lee’s words during an interview about the long history of violence against Asian women:

We have seen officials and elected officials treating these attacks and these murders as isolated incidents, as exceptions to the norm, the work of mentally ill individuals. But mental illness is a red herring meant to distract us from the truth.

And the truth is that these attacks are an epidemic that was seeded and nurtured by the American state and by American culture and we’re seeing Asian communities paying the price. When asked for comment for Christina Lee’s murder, New York City Eric Adams replied that “the city must do more to address mental illness.” But I’ve been to far too many rallies around stopping Asian hate and vigils for slain Asian women that I can’t go anymore, it’s become a political circus that is disrespectful to these women, to their lives, to their families, where officials line up to lament yet another tragedy, say “this must stop”, point the finger at mental illness, and then hang around for photo ops.

But thing is, treating perpetrators as aberrations, as if they’re deviants from the norm really misses the point because mental illness operates within specific cultural contexts, and I actually interviewed a forensic psychiatrist who has treated the most violent of offenders around this, and the mentally ill still draw upon existing cultural templates which they may distort or act upon in more extreme ways. And so when it comes to Asian women, the cultural template has long been dehumanization and sexual denigration. And so I think for officials and some of the media reporting we’re seeing around this repeatedly denying the role of race while pointing the finger at mental illness really serves to absolve the state of responsibility. But these attacks are not strange coincidences, they’re not just the actions of crazy people, and we are seeing actually where the state has fallen short. Martial Simon, the man who pushed Michelle Go to her death in the Times Square subway, he’d been in and out of hospitals for years, the New York Times found that in 2017 a psychiatrist at a state mental institution had noticed that Simon had said it was just a matter of time before he would push a woman on the tracks. Despite this, he was still discharged. So who is to blame here? Is it the mentally ill, or the system that should be taking care of them? And are these lone instances? Is Martial Simon from the norm? Is Assamad Nash who plunged a knife 40 times into Christina Lee an exception? Is Steven Zajonc who assaulted seven women through Manhattan an exception? Is Tammel Esco who punched an Asian elder 125 times an exception? Are the ten attacks on Asian women every single day in this country, are they all exceptions? Because if every single one of these attacks is an exception, then I guess we must be living in some exceptional times.

Panthea Lee

While I face nothing like the violence described above, the concept of how cultural templates shapes who is targeted is palpable as a queer and trans person. I draw a direct connection between Netflix releasing multiple comedy specials that implicitly advocate to exclude and/or mock people for being trans, and the 40% of trans 15-17 year olds in Canada who attempted to end their lives this past year. This might seem far-fetched to others, but they’re not privy to how these comedy specials share the same language as the street harassment, the bullying, the parental rejection, and gatekeeping faced by these kids. The words used might differ in sophistication, but the meaning remains the same: you shouldn’t be you, you don’t belong, you’re repulsive, because, gender. Previously I might have used a “pyramid of prejudice” to explain the relationship between seemingly disparate events like the release of the specials and suicide.

The pyramid captures how socially acceptable forms of transphobia (such as the Netflix specials) render permissible the more immediately damaging forms and contributes to increasing the occurrence of worse acts. This is a useful tool, but it doesn’t capture why people engage in the bottom tier.

When I first talked about my sexuality on this blog, I documented how my boyfriend and I were called faggots by strangers, how a pedestrian told us that she’d cut off our heads if we were her children, how peers revulsed at our kisses, that my workplace excluded my partner from health insurance, and that my step-dad was telling me how my getting hitched would devalue the marriages of people like my sister. I remember taking First Aid training for work and my classmate asked if he could refuse to attend to a car crash victim if the injured person was suspected to be gay. This was normal for Ottawa in 2010. Such an insignificant and harmless thing – a partner’s gender – elicited disproportionate and cruel reactions.

It was the same too when strangers in public couldn’t tell my gender, or when they perceived me as embodying something reserved for the other gender. Some of the cruelty I faced were by mentally ill people, like when a man interjected himself while I was on a first date with someone else and groped my breasts to see if I was a woman, but most were not. The men who got up to beat me after I flipped them off for openly mocking me at a pub were not. The woman pulling my sports bra at an outdoor venue was not. It’s not just me; friends have been spat on, groped, beaten, and thrown mystery liquids for how they look in relation to their perceived gender.

Why pick on people based on gendered associations of all things? Why aren’t these reprobates targeting those who wear mismatched socks? That is no more consequential to the lives of these perpetrators.

But people don’t go after the mismatched sock crowd. Conservatives aren’t trying to fire them from being teachers, or calling them child groomers. Men aren’t throwing bottles at them from cars. Catholic schools aren’t telling students they’re intrinsically disordered for it. There isn’t a new category of hate group, analogous to TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists), who are out there peddling conspiracy theories about the mismatched sock crowd.

Gender non-conformity is targeted because people learned to target it. These teachings for how to regard incongruity with gender norms are so ubiquitous that perpetrators aren’t even necessarily even conscious of their bias.

What taught them?

• Movies that openly mock trans women and non-binary people (eg. Ace Ventura, The Hangover, Zoolander 2, Ted 2).
• Shows that do the same (eg. South Park, Family Guy, Friends).
• Leading religions that call to reject people over their sexual orientation and gender identity (eg. Catholic Church).
• Lawmakers in the anglosphere portraying the inclusion of trans and non-binary people as an existential threat (examples).
• News organizations that platform and normalize transphobic disinformation (eg. CTV’s W5, the National Post).
• Peers and family members influenced by the same.

…and yes, Netflix comedy specials:

Oh, women! Not all women, I mean the old-fashioned ones. The old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs. Those fucking dinosaurs. I love the new women. They’re great, aren’t they? The new ones we’ve been seeing lately. The ones with beards and cocks. They’re as good as gold, I love them. And now the old-fashioned ones say, ‘Oh, they want to use our toilets.’ ‘Why shouldn’t they use your toilets?’ ‘For ladies!’ ‘They are ladies — look at their pronouns! What about this person isn’t a lady?’ ‘Well, his penis.’ ‘Her penis, you fucking bigot!’ ‘What if he rapes me?’ ‘What if she rapes you, you fucking TERF whore?’

Ricky Gervais in Netflix’ comedy special “SuperNature” (2022)

I feel bad for [trans people]. But they’re so confusing. And it’s not all my fault. I-I feel like they need to take some responsibility for my jokes. ‘Cause I didn’t come up with this idea on my own, this idea that a person can be born in the wrong body. But they have to admit that’s a fucking hilarious predicament. It’s really fucking funny. If it happened to me, you’d laugh. Wouldn’t you? That wouldn’t be funny if it happened to me? I think it would be. What if… What if it did? What if… What if I was… What if I was Chinese? But… But born in this nigga body. That’s not funny? And for the rest of my life, I had to go around making that face. “Hey, everybody, I’m Chinese!” And everyone gets mad. “Stop making that face. That’s offensive.” -“What?” “This is how I feel inside.”

It’s hard not to write these jokes. It’s hard not to think about it. Even when I watch sports, I’d be thinking about it. Like, think about it. Okay, say… say LeBron James, uh, changed his gender. You know what I mean? Okay. Can he stay in the NBA, or, because he’s a woman, does he have to go to the WNBA where he will score 840 points a game?

Dave Chappelle in Netflix’ comedy special “Sticks & Stones” (2019)

I’m Team TERF. I agree. I agree, man. Gender is a fact. I am just saying that those pussy that they got, you know what I mean? I’m not saying it’s not pussy, but it’s Beyond Pussy or Impossible Pussy. It tastes like pussy, but that’s not quite what it is, is it? That’s not blood. That’s beet juice.

Dave Chappelle in Netflix’ comedy special “The Closer” (2021)

This encourages a pattern of callous behaviour for people to follow, and they do.

That template can change. I saw that happen with how sexual orientation is treated now, compared to a decade back. It’s night and day. The same is true with transness; the progress in the last decade is staggering. But we’re not there yet on either front. Not when adults are making life so impossible to live that 40% of surveyed trans adolescents tried to end theirs in the past year. Given that 0.73% of 15-19 year olds in Canada are trans or non-binary, how many died? How is it that every trans person I know whose been out long enough can name one, often more than one, trans person within their circle who died by suicide? The deceased were victims of a transphobia whose outcome makes it no less egregious than if they were murdered.

Screenwriters and journalists alike portray homophobia and transphobia as the work of bad apples: unaccepting parents; a bigoted teacher; sketchy men in an alley; the lone guy in a pick-up truck; a bad cop. People who are just mean all the time. Prejudice when identified as such is treated as the moral failing of irredeemable individuals. Sometimes, such as with politicians and comedians and religious figures, it’s treated as a legitimate other view of equal moral standing. Prejudice here is passed off as neutral discourse important to the advancement of society.

In reality, all of these individuals are the product of their environment, one that normalized picking on others over these specific traits. They can be well-liked and they will almost always face no consequences for harming their victims. In my experience, the perpetrators always walked away, and short of discussing murder, cis people were always far more likely to defend the perpetrator than the victim. Purveyors of transphobia with a high profile can even be rewarded with millions of dollars for their prejudice, become bestselling authors, and lead political parties. Cis bystanders of these high profile cases punish trans people for speaking out, or worse, such as when one boy attempted suicide citing the acts of one aforementioned high-profile transphobes, cis people attending to him at the hospital involved the state to forcibly detransition him and rip him from his family. Yes, they were following orders, but they had a choice. For lower profile incidents bystanders, unless they’re queer or trans themselves, almost never intervene, never try to stop the perpetrator, and never check in on the victim.

Transphobia and homophobia will not end by sentencing assaults and murders as hate crimes; by relegating action to the socially unacceptable top half of the pyramid. It will not change by falsely attributing it to mental illness.

It’ll only change by addressing the socially acceptable forms of prejudice, the template from which everything else follows.