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Title: From Inclusion to Resistance Author: CrimethInc. Date: July 27, 2017 Language: en Topics: Donald Trump, inclusion, resistance, transphobia, US, military Source: Retrieved on 23rd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/07/27/from-inclusion-to-resistance-neither-trumps-trans-ban-nor-assimilation-but-liberation
Well-meaning allies and earnest trans activists responded with dismay to
Trump’s announcement that transgender people are to be banned from
military service once more, recognizing it as a rollback of LGBT
inclusion. Behind the scenes, however, some of us reacted with relief:
at least we don’t have to worry about being drafted for some rich man’s
war. Do we really want to legitimize the US military in return for the
forms of legitimacy that are now being taken from us? How does this
question sit in the decades-long history of LGBT struggles? And what
does it mean that this question is returning to the fore right now?
To allies: the best way you can support trans people is by ensuring that
none of us ever has to join the army in the first place. Help us fight
for access to health care, community, camaraderie, self-respect, and
options for survival that don’t come at the expense of others’ survival.
We shouldn’t have to hire on as mercenaries for the biggest armed gang
in the world to get those things.
To others in the trans community: the best way we can fight for our own
liberation and the liberation of all people is to create a world in
which the US military does not and cannot exist. When we legitimize the
US military, we are legitimizing the very weapons that politicians like
Trump will employ against us. The purpose of institutions like the US
military is to impose control by means of coercive force; they have
always been used against those on the margins of society. Participating
in these institutions is no way to achieve self-determination: the
stronger they are, the less assured our own freedom will be.
As in the same-sex marriage debate, every “right” that we would
supposedly gain from the right to serve in the military is either not
worth having or something that everyone should have without having to
join the army. If you need health care, you shouldn’t have to marry
someone to get it; if you need a scholarship to college, you shouldn’t
have to pledge to kill people to get it. On both of these issues,
mainstream LGBT activists missed the opportunity to talk about the
deeper issues that connect all of us—issues that put us in conflict with
our rulers, offering the possibility of real social transformation.
Here’s an example. The Trump Administration began their assault on the
late-blooming liberalism of Obama’s trans-inclusive policies by rolling
back some of the recommendations regarding bathroom access for
transgender students in public schools. The way that students are forced
into one of two standardized bathrooms—learning gender difference
through this process of sorting and segregation—reproduces in miniature
the ways that the school system categorizes, restricts, and shoves
everyone down different paths along lines of identity. The wealthy and
obedient are shot upwards into a life of advanced degrees and student
loan debt, while the rest slip into the pipeline to prison or service
work drudgery. Whatever its apologists say, school serves to sort us
into a hierarchical society and to train us to accept authority.
What’s radical about trans students contesting bathroom and gender
assignment is the possibilities this opens for all students to contest
authority. If we don’t accept their rules regarding which toilets to
use, why should we accept the legitimacy of the system that functions as
a school-to-prison pipeline? While we support anything that can reduce
the misery of trans kids, we also recognize that trans-inclusive
bathroom policies are a safety valve intended to divert student
resistance and to bolster the legitimacy of a failing public school
system. As with marriage and the military, trans liberation in schools
isn’t just a question of easing our inclusion into them. It would demand
something more like dismantling them altogether.
It’s strategic for defenders of the status quo to re-center the LGBT
rights debate around trans people in the military at this moment. As
transgender, genderqueer, and non-binary communities are appearing in
mass media and popular consciousness in unprecedented numbers, an
optimist might speculate that US gender relations could come up for
renegotiation—along with all the institutions they undergird. What
better way to protect those relations and institutions than by reducing
the scope of the discussion to the most reactionary formulation
possible: integration into the military?
It’s better for both liberals and conservatives that we stop talking
about radically reconfiguring health care, sexuality, education, the
economy, and numerous other social institutions shot through with
patriarchal norms. Those conversations could put anything on the table.
If we can keep trans people and their supporters fighting for the
“right” to kill America’s enemies abroad, we won’t have to worry as much
about them undermining American institutions at home.
Let’s look at how gay and lesbian people have related to military
exclusion in the past. This history may offer useful insights for
transgender people today.
The first formal gay rights demonstrations in US history took place in
the spring of 1965 at the White House, Civil Service Commission, State
Department, and the Pentagon. Activists from what was then called the
homophile movement picketed and leafleted in protest against the
exclusion of homosexuals from federal employment in the armed forces,
State Department, and other government bureaucracies.
Inspired by the civil rights movement, these demonstrations reflected a
new “militancy” on the part of a previously timid community. But these
genteel pickets neither captured the attention of the homosexuals on
whose behalf they were ostensibly organized nor influenced the
government to change its policies of exclusion. As the war in Vietnam
escalated, protesting to be included in the US war machine attracted
little sympathy from social movements increasingly fighting to prevent
young people from being trapped within it.
By 1969, younger gays and lesbians inspired by the New Left and youth
countercultures were articulating a dramatically different politics
around homosexuality and the military. For instance, a gay theater
collective in Berkeley staged a performance riffing off of Muhammad
Ali’s defiant critique of war, titled, “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a
Queer.” Early Gay Liberation Front groups offered counseling to young
men around how to navigate local draft boards in relation to their
sexuality. One notorious collective in Oakland parked a van outside an
induction center and offered incoming draftees blowjobs, then provided
them with photographic evidence of their ineligibility for military
service.
These gay liberationists didn’t aspire to win inclusion for a homosexual
minority in established heterosexist institutions within a framework of
equality. They saw themselves as the vanguard of a struggle to unlock
the capacity for same-sex love possible in all people. They believed
that this love could undermine militarism by replacing the fear, hatred,
and violence promoted by a patriarchal society with affection, desire,
and a recognition of common interests. From late 1969 onwards, gay
liberation intertwined critically with the anti-war movement,
challenging its sexist and homophobic tendencies while deepening its
vision of peace and international solidarity.
By the mid-1970s, however, internal divisions had isolated most of the
gay liberation front groups. Lesbians gravitated towards feminist
organizing while gay male activists pursued an increasingly single-issue
agenda. Yet the anti-militarist roots of gay liberation remained; when
Leonard Matlovich made headlines after coming out as gay and fighting
his discharge from the Army, some gays and lesbians offered support,
while others condemned the campaign as a betrayal of the ideals of gay
liberation. Lesbians flocked to the anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s,
while lesbians and gay men took active roles in Latin American
solidarity struggles, continuing to link sexual and gender liberation
with resistance to militarism.
However, by the 1990s, the politics of assimilation seemed triumphant.
Many fiery young LGBT activists targeted ROTCs on college campuses, but
most framed their campaigns as anti-discrimination efforts rather than
making common cause with whose who suffered at the hands of the US war
machine. By the time gays, lesbians, and bisexuals were allowed to
enlist openly, few voices within the mainstream LGBT movement challenged
this “progressive” development. With “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repealed,
gay and lesbian liaison units flourishing in urban police departments,
and federal non-discrimination statutes in place in most government
bureaucracies, the full integration of sexual minorities into the
repressive power of the state seemed at hand.
Times have changed again. While older gay and lesbian community leaders
continue to champion pro-police and pro-military lines, younger queer
and trans generations increasingly not only reject but actively resist
these politics. Queer and trans millennials have taken active roles in
Black Lives Matter, protests against police violence, and
anti-deportation resistance. Pride festivals this summer have been
wracked with controversy between younger radicals who want to minimize
or exclude police and older generations who want to collaborate with law
enforcement.
We see evidence of the radicals’ success in eroding pro-police LGBT
politics in the escalating social media campaigns by police intended to
position them as protectors and allies of LGBT people. Trump attempted
to capitalize on this sentiment after the Pulse massacre, when he
attempted to shift the focus away from anti-queer violence towards
“radical Islamic terrorism” and the need for an ever more repressive
state to target migrants, Muslims, and “bad guys.” Yet substantial queer
and trans participation in anti-Trump demonstrations and organizing
reflect a widespread rejection of this effort to turn attention towards
scapegoats and away from state power.
As a result, Trump has decided that the LGBT constituency is expendable.
It was already essentially lost to him, with the exception of those gay
men and a few lesbians who identify more with the interests of capital
and the state than with others like themselves. He’ll lose virtually no
support from anyone who might have previously favored him for his
anti-trans move, and he’ll shore up his support from the far right—the
proponents of escalating repression. With his popular legitimacy
flagging under Russia scandals and legislative ineffectuality, he hopes
to stabilize his power from the top down by consolidating his
relationship with the forces that directly carry out coercive violence.
We see something similar in Turkey, with Erdogan’s purge of the army
paving the way for his seizure of increasingly centralized power—or in
Russia, with Putin’s anti-gay laws serving as a bone thrown to the
Orthodox Church.
So perhaps it isn’t useful to understand Trump’s move simply as an
instance of transphobia. Trump is merely making calculations about how
best to keep the sinking ship of his administration afloat. He is
treating us like Muslims, like Mexicans, like any demographic he
computes to be vulnerable to scapegoating. At least with Christian
conservatives, we can depend on the consistent ideological zealotry;
with Trump, all that matters is power. That’s why he visits the CIA
headquarters on his first day of office; that’s why he throws trans
people under the bus.
He has grasped something that is becoming more and more apparent around
the world, from Egypt to Turkey to Venezuela: governments come and go,
but whoever controls the deep state wields the power that determines our
daily lives. This state of affairs cannot be remedied by elections, but
only by revolution.
And that’s why today, every important social movement begins from a
basic opposition to the violence of the state. Whether people are
responding to the monotony of pointless work enforced by debt and rising
rents, or the constant policing and harassment and surveillance that
structure more and more of our lives, or the imposition of destructive
development upon the ecosystems we depend on, the result is the same.
When our precarious lives become too miserable, we reach a boiling
point. Invariably, the flashpoint takes the form of a reaction against
police or military control.
We’ve seen this over and over the past ten years, from Athens to Ankara,
from Ferguson to Standing Rock. City, state, and federal police, the
National Guard, and US soldiers, not to mention infiltrators and
informants, have been instrumental over the past few years in preventing
people in the United States from seizing back cities, halting pipelines,
and ending state violence. Yet despite the overwhelming force at their
disposal, the authorities know as well as we do that force alone won’t
hold this regime together forever.
Transgender people today are at a crossroads. Which side of the
barricades will we be on? Will we be letting our commanding officer know
which pronoun we prefer them to use as they order us to shoot tear gas
canisters at our neighbors? Or will we be joining everyone who hungers
for the freedom to determine our lives, our genders, our sexualities,
and our futures together, as we see fit, outside the boxes offered to us
by enlistment forms and cellblocks?
The decision is up to us.