The Coming Wave Of Oppositional Sexist Panic - YesMeansYesblog

http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/the-coming-wave-of-oppositional-sexist-panic

New anti-bullying laws sometimes contain not just sexual orientation but gender expression. As I and others point out, sexual orientation protections are not much protection if they don’t also cover gender expression: “oh, he didn’t beat you up because you’re gay, he beat you up because you’re effeminate. Under the statute, we don’t have any obligation to protect you from that!” So good antibullying statutes, and good antidiscrimination laws, should include gender expression. Transphobes are terrified, because they know this makes the world safer for trans and gendervariant folks.

Some people see the world as they know it slipping away. They see a world coming where society doesn’t effectively enforce a bright line between masculinity and femininity, or force men for be masculine and women to be feminine. A world where someone assigned male at birth can wear a judge’s robes as a woman and someone assigned female at birth can take the basketball court as a man, and maybe even a world where people can operate in their daily lives without having to check a box. Something as small as a football player in pink cleats will send them into a swoon, and then paroxysms of rage. They’ll act like they’re fighting the last ditch effort to protect the world they know.

They are correct. They’re fighting to protect the world they know, the world of oppositional sexism (see here), where there are fixed, binary, opposite gender roles; where gender conformity is mandatory and violently policed. That’s what they’re fighting for, and they’re losing. They will lose. They will lose because, as Rev. Dr. M.L. King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”