A trans review of 2017: the year of transgender moral panic
Interesting article by Meg-John Barker over at the Conversation, about how the transgender tipping point of 2016 gave way to the moral panic of 2017.
Barker writes:
I’d love to see the gender conversation change in 2018 to one acknowledging the negative impact of rigid binary gender norms on everybody.
There was much evidence in 2017 that the current gender system is bad for us all. We only need to reflect, for example, on continued gender pay inequalities or the link between how boys are raised and high suicide rates among men. Toxic gender roles are also involved in the normalising of sexual harassment and violence that the #MeToo campaign highlighted in 2017.
The BBC documentary No More Boys and Girls demonstrated how far these gender norms permeate society. The main life goal of the seven-year-old girls on the show remained to “be pretty”. Boys struggled to express – or even find words for – emotions other than anger. All the kids agreed that boys were simply “better” than girls.
Along with legal changes in the UK that will enable people to self-define their gender, I hope to see an end to the trans moral panic which targets a group of people who already suffer frighteningly high levels of bullying, discrimination, violence and suicide. In its place I’d love to see a return to the kind of celebration of the strength, courage, and talent of trans people that we had back in 2014.
Ilustration by Devin Kira Murphy.
