Stoking ‘Trans Panic’?! We Have to Create Other Political Narratives

Andrea Pitzer’s video on ‘Ending Trans Panic’

Eye by Gidon Wessner on Unsplash

Andrea Pitzer put out a good half-hour video last November about the assault on the human rights of trans people in the United States. She put anti-trans politics in the context of other recognizable forms of discrimination.

First, Pitzer points to homophobia. She shows a clip of Corey Robin discussing the mid-20th century “Lavender Scare” that sought to out and evict gay people from U.S. government. Most of Joseph McCarthy’s “fan mail,” according to Robin, consisted of homophobic warnings about “sexual depravity”; this suggests the extent to which many alleged concerns about national security (the anti-communist “Red Scare”) were worn as a mask for homophobia. (2:48–3:16)

Pitzer also brings up sexism: the “deep, deep mistreatment of women across history. Gender can be used to trigger a firestorm because of the strange Puritan streak and…desire to control women that has been a bedrock of U.S. culture since the beginning.” (4:00–18) To illustrate, she shows a recent clip of right-wing anti-trans agitator Matt Walsh declaring that “gender ideology is a product of feminism” and admitting that his real political fight, as he sees it, is “to take on feminism once and for all. That’s the next great battle.”