A couple weeks ago, one of my wife’s college friends and her husband visited the Morehead, KY area for a couple days. Like us, they’ve been retired for awhile and have been traveling for weeks in their RV. While in Morehead, they camped for a night at Cave Run Lake, joined us and 20 of our other friends for an event outside a local brewery, and visited our home before leaving for their next stop. They’re nice people and we stood around chatting after they had us up in their vehicle and showed us their queen-sized bed and extensive storage space. It was all easy and familiar though my wife hadn’t seen her friend in 15 years and the husbands were meeting folks for the first time.
But there was a more serious moment just before my wife’s friend and her husband left on the next leg of their journey. At least three of us started talking about transsexuality. Even though my wife and her friend both had careers as nurses, the conversation about transsexuality wasn’t about transition or trans medical issues. Nor was it about the right-wing effort to erase transsexuality from American society, the fraught politics of transsexuality among Democrats, or the cis v trans distinction which I think of as a monumental cultural accomplishment. Instead, conversation focused on trans people we knew or had met. Trans folks are barely 1% of the population but all of us knew trans folks. I know five or six and mentioned that a couple trans teens from the local high school had been facebook friends from the early 2010’s. My wife mentioned the trans daughter of a family friend and how his transition had made him more comfortable with life.
Although this conservation was as easy and friendly as the rest of the day had been, there was also something more serious at play. First, the four of us were identifying trans people as part of our lives (although absent for this occasion). More particularly we identified trans folks as part of “us” in the sense of the multicultural “society” with which we affiliate and also identified ourselves as accepting trans people into our sense of our collective. It was really striking to me that the conversation about trans folks came after saying goodbye and served as a concluding affirmation of a moral bond among us.
If the trans conversation involved an affirmation of a bond among white lib/lefties, the same conversation was also another way to disaffiliate from white MAGA/conservatives and a broader sense of cultural or civilizational whiteness. If acceptance and identification of transness is a bedrock of white lib/left culture, the refusal to recognize trans people as “us” is a bedrock of MAGA conservatism. The MAGA reduction of human sexual identification to male v female, the effort to erase transsexual identification from government documents, and general bigotry toward trans folks is one of the defining qualities of MAGA conservatism and much of what makes white MAGA so repellant to white Americans who identify as liberal, left-leaning, or progressive. Because the same bedrock conflict exists for the white population in relation to race, acceptable roles for women, and LGBT, immigrant, Native American, and disabled acceptance, the idea that there is a general white culture, shared values, or opinion has become obsolete. In most of the ways that count, whites in the United States are no longer a “people.”
And as we were saying good-bye to our friends, we were once again indicating our rejection and repugnance for white conservatives.
Early Blackface, Cultural Change, Latest Politics 