This is a topic I have touched upon many other times in my writing, in these blogs and elsewheres on the internet, so much so that I would need to really do some digging to find specific examples, which I will happily do if anyone asks me about something specific, but otherwise, I will try to consolidate some of my ideas about why expectations about gender roles seem to matter so much and to whom, here, now.
Whether it was actually a simmering issue in the minds of many US citizens who voted in the 2024 election or an issue manufactured by far-right/Patriarchal Misogynistic (PM) media saturation because those media personalities knows the center-right democrats don’t actually believe in youth voters enough give power to platform issues young folks care about, the topic of gender identity (who defines it and why) has really moved into the US political mainstream. Contrary to how many gender scholars and radicals probably imagined gender becoming an active political conversation, it has largely been the right that has been the most effective in generating the stories that define the conversation around gender identity, sensationalizing and exaggerating a very, very small handful of accounts (many of which have turned out to be false) about the threat of a trans people as sexual predators preying on children. On the one hand, this is the argument the right has been making for decades about trans people, queers and anyone that doesn’t conform to “traditional” (read: authoritarian and essentializing) definitions of gender and sexuality, so it isn’t really shocking that it continues to be the avenue of attack. At the same time, the actual, factual violence inspired by people’s ideas about gender and sexual essentialism is so massively lopsided against LGBTQIA2S+ folks, that it is fairly telling how thoroughly centrist democrats have decided to ignore the issue as toxic, rather than use it to strike back at rightwing paranoia and cultural authoritarianism.
The reason why is pretty obvious. Democrats don’t believe that gender violence (violence directed at people based upon their gender identity and gender presentation) is a winning political issue. They don’t think the people whose votes they are trying to prioritize care about the harm being done, and worst of all, they have pretty much conceded that violence against women is something different than gender violence which has enabled the right to argue that women need protecting from trans people and not misogynistic men.
I am not someone that most people would think of as being at risk of experiencing gender-based violence. I am a large white dude who (especially now as a boring old man) looks like a large white dude most of the time, and large white dudes who pass as straight experience gender-based violence much less frequently than anyone else. At the same time, over the course of my life, the scariest and most threatening violence I have ever experienced has always been directed at me for reasons related to my portrayals of masculinity and sexuality. Literally the only time I have ever had anyone but a police officer push me around or lay hands on me in anger have been accompanied by homophobic slurs, or when I was younger, people calling me a girl, a pussy, or other words questioning my ability or authenticity as a man. I think there has been a tendency to write off the vast majority of this kind of violence as “boys being boys,” and even in my own thinking about the issue, I dismiss a lot of the violence I have experienced along these lines as “kids at play,” but even ignoring problematic examples of gender-based hazing and roughousing (much of which I am certainly guilty of, some of which I remember, and probably even more that I never even thought of that way), when I am talking specifically about things like a group of young men chasing me around town in car and throwing rocks at me, for example, situations where I actually thought someone else might actually kill me, the violence was always tied into my gender presentation.I guess there was one time I had someone pull a knife on me, and another time where someone (who was not a cop) pulled a gun on me that should also qualify as experiences of violence, but the thing about both of those situations is that I knew that the threat of violence being made against me was for a case of mistaken identity or purpose that I was going to easily be able to talk my way out of. But the times people, well, men, have threatened or attacked me related to my presentation of gender or sexuality, I knew that there was going to be no talking my way out of those situations rhetorically.
And this is where I think the Democrats have really dropped the ball by refusing to take up the cause of gender violence as a political issue. Pretending like it is an issue that only affects specific, marginalized communities (when it does horrifically, disproportionately affect marginalized communities), has made it an issue that they are afraid to touch. They have largely (deliberately) ignored the decades of feminist and queer theory writing that has drawn the connections between authoritarianism and gender-based violence, and thus left themselves in a position where they don’t know how to read the newspaper, see example after example of violence with direct ties to patriarchal, misogynystic, homophobic and transphobic views about gender, and say “This keeps happening because, as a society, we refuse to talk about the connection between gender identity, power and violence within society.”
Meanwhile, the right runs rampant getting to claim that leftist “gender ideology” is a real danger to people’s lives while their own vile and reductive gender ideologies are actually, literally killing people.