Recently on TikTok, a Muslim couple appeared on my For You page. I’d seen them a few times before, and I enjoyed their videos. It’s fun learning about different religions, I think. And the two of them typically present their educational videos in cheerful, energetic tones. The one I came across confused me for a second as I thought it implied they’d gotten a divorce. They had not, which was nice, because they seem to be a cute and loving couple. I scrolled through their page for a second and came across a video with the label: Can a Trans Woman See My Face?
It took me aback watching it. It surprised me, slightly, because of how positive they seem, but it wasn’t truly shocking. One of the seemingly sweetest people I ever met turned out to be a homophobic Catholic who thinks gay marriage should be taken away from us. What really got to me was the comments section. The comments are filled with things like “respectful queen,” “this is the definition of respect,” and “you really approached this with kindness.”
What’s interesting is that I think those commenting see themselves as general progressives. A handful were trans people fawning over themselves to praise the video.
In case it isn’t clear, Mehdi and Mubina, in this TikTok, are being transphobic. “In Islam, we go by assigned gender at birth.” Now that might hit you as being obviously a transphobic religious belief, and you would be right, but the video is also structured in a specifically transphobic way. After their little intro, Mubina says, “All women can see my face. However, there are limitations.” She then lists two limitations. She has to know her, and she has to trust this woman wouldn’t describe her face. This is presented as a list with the label “2 conditions for women to see my face.” So, as long as these two conditions are met, any woman can see her face. Her husband then asks clarifying questions. After questions about friends, there’s one about trans women. Buffer questions before the meat of the video. Trans women aren’t allowed to see her face. Now, in my critical reading of the text, I have to point out that this ordering seems insidious. The point is to launder transphobia while distracting you about what it is. It isn’t just that trans women can’t see her face because they were assigned male at birth. (If) “All women can see my face (and) if they meet these two requirements. (and) Trans women can’t.” The logical connection between those two statements is: (then) trans women are not women.
That’s plainly transphobia.
When asked about trans men, she says that, assuming they pass, she wouldn’t talk to them in the first place. But also that trans men want to be treated as men. That phrasing, benign as it may seem, connected with the rest of the video, means that she believes trans men are not men. When asked if a trans man in her family could see her face, she says she would consult a scholar. Now, that’s interesting. Because if Islam, according to her, goes by gender assigned at birth, there should be no need to consult a scholar at all. The answer would be clear: that trans man would be a woman who could see her face. But Mubina doesn’t say that. As YouTuber Shaun says in his video on Posie Parker:
"While one minute she refers to trans men as poor little victims who need to be protected from damaging their own bodies and the next minute she refers to them as dangerous abusers who need to be sterilized to prevent them from reproducing. On the surface it doesn't make sense, does it? I went back and forth on this trying to understand how one person could believe what seems to be too directly contradictory things but I finally understood it when my girlfriend pointed out that Keane is operating on zombie rules. From her perspective everyone starts out as a potential victim but the moment they are actually victimized as she sees it they become infected and cease to be human the key to understanding this contradiction turned out to be dehumanization
A lot of transphobes pull this stunt where trans women are men, and trans men aren’t men, but they also give up their womanhood.
In another video answering who Mubina could and could not marry, she quickly and briefly flies through the fact that, by nature of her religion, she’s not allowed to marry a woman. That is, by definition, homophobic. It goes even further. In a video they posted to YouTube titled “Why Can’t I Live with My Gay Uncle,” they strongly state that they are not homophobic. They simply wouldn’t want to live with, for instance, someone who eats pork. And they believe that “having same-sex relationships is not permissible.” It’s a “oh I’m hating the sin, not the sinner.” It’s also a very clear, “The only correct version of Islam is one which is against homosexuality.” The comments on this video are more mixed. There are people who correctly point out this is plainly clear homophobia. But still, there are those who go on and on about how respectful they’re being. Respect, of course, being non-raging bigotry. They speak soft and hit you with a big stick. And then they look at the stick they hit you with and they claim, “We’re against hitting. We don’t even own a stick.” It’s gaslighting. Or, to be charitable, it’s deflection. “If I say I’m not homophobic, that absolves me of my homophobia. This way I don’t have to feel like a bad person and don’t have to question my beliefs.”
I don’t really want to talk about their bigotry or their happy brand of neo-evangelizing, though. What I’m curious about are the comments. Why are people so ready to ignore the stick if the speaker speaks softly?
The Stick Doesn’t Matter. It’s Who Wields It.
The most obvious, surface answer, I think, is a knee-jerk reaction to defend religious minorities. In the United States, Christianity is and has been the dominant religious force working both culturally and politically. Violent Islamophobia has been rampant throughout our history, especially taking force after 9/11. President Obama was accused of being a Muslim as if that were a horrid thing to be. Disgraced former-President Trump enacted his infamous Muslim ban. Indigenous beliefs and spirituality have been subjected to violence and ridicule and forced conversion from our early days. One of the most harrowing essays I’ve read was of a young Native American girl who was taken and raised in a white Christian world that was going to force assimilation on her. “The School Days of an Indian Girl” by Zitkala-Sa. Wicca is often the butt of a joke. Our currency espouses, illegally in my opinion, that was are a nation under God, singular, throwing both the non-religious and the polythiestic under the bus.
But this isn’t a history lesson.
Walk Off the Earth is a Canadian band who I know mostly through TikToks. They had a somewhat viral song with “My Stupid Heart”. They tend to post covers with the band members playing wild instruments or sometimes even sharing a giant bass. There are boomwhackers, theremins. I find their covers pretty cool.
In the summer of 2022, there were a lot of really popular covers of older pop songs. One was “Blue (Good)” by David Guetta and Bebe Rexa. Walk Off the Earth posted a cover. I really enjoyed the chaos and the bass drop. I went to the comments, and that’s where I saw hell had broken loose.
The comments were filled with people railing against them because member Sarah Blackwood plays the didgeridoo, or at least appears to do so, some people have said it looks like she’s playing some other instrument attached to the back of it. The comments called it disrespectful as some native peoples of Austrailia view the didge as a sacred instrument and using it, especially for a silly pop song, is almost sacreligious.
Personally, I don’t think “something is sacred” is a good argument for other people not to be able to bastardize it. Ironically enough, religion is not sacred. But I can understand and find it a healthy argument to engage with that belief were it to end at cultural appropriation, something that is an entire other conversation about a neutral phrase that has been weaponized beyond its uses to make excuses for homogeneous isolationists. The comments and stitches, though, went farther than that. This cover was a specific instance too far because it was played by Sarah. And Sarah is a woman. And women aren’t allowed to play the didgeridoo.
“You can’t play this because you’re a woman” is a clearly sexist statement. The stakes are super low so I understand thinking it doesn’t matter. It’s not really oppressive. But it is still sexist. Definitionally. But when people would point that out or ask about the sexism, the commentators would get really defensive. They would go something along the lines of “It can’t be sexist. The yidaki is just men’s business. There’s also women’s business that men don’t do. And our ideas of gender and critical theory are modern, whereas this is an ancient cultural practice by a repressed minority. It can’t be sexist because of that.”
That argument does not track. “Because you were born as this sex, you can and cannot do x and y respectively” is bioessentialism. It’s inherently sexist. To socially construct the playing of an instrument, for instance, as something only a man can do is to, by its essence, enforce a discriminatory binary that seeks to box people into categories that have been constructed for the specific purpose of division and restriction.
There is, though, another defense that people would deploy when the sexism was pointed out: supposedly, playing the didgeridoo causes infertility.
It’s to protect women.
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t.
Playing a musical instrument has literally no effect on your fertility. It’s a belief people have, sure. However, like with young earth creationists, they’re simply incorrect. The made the mistake of stating something that can be falsified.
When the sexism is pointed out, though, and when this false statement about a scientific thing is pointed out to be false, there’s still the heavy pushback. Religion and culture must be respected even when they happen to be sexist. Except for when you point out, correctly, that women not being allowed to teach in some Christian churches is also a sexist belief.
Why can we recognize the stick in some situations, but defend its wielding in others? If the Muslim couple I started this video off with were instead Christians, would people be playing the song and dance of pretending their queerphobia is anything but queerphobia?
There’s a relatively popular mantra meme thing re: conservative Christianity in American politics for those of us nominally on the left. “I can’t do that because of my religion” is fine. “You can’t do that because of my religion” is not. Now, to be fair, I don’t necessarily agree with the first half of that. It’s fine in that it’s enshrined religious liberty. That doesn’t mean the restrictions you place on yourself, such as Mubina being unable to marry a woman, aren’t based in bigoted expectations. Put a pin in that.
So we tend to understand that as far as Christianity is concerned in the United States. It’s a fight we still fight against a lot of the Right-wing who do want to enforce their religion and its “can’ts” on the rest of us. But why do we throw that out when it comes to other beliefs?
Another instance of this came recently when art professor Erika Lopez Prater was subjected to backlash, academic censorship, and later dismissal. In a lecture, Dr. Prater showed two paintings of the Prophet Mohammad. According to a CBS article, she claims she gave plenty of warning to her students, including in the syllabus, so no one would have to see it. If you didn’t know, some Muslims believe it’s wrong for Mohammad to be drawn or portrayed in any way. A Muslim student complained to Hamline University and, together with the university President, accused her of Islamaphobia. That president later resigned and regretted her role. Prater is currently engaged in a discrimination suit against the school.
The responses to this were immediate and varied. Part of what seemed to exacerbate feelings of hurt at the incident is a series of Islamophobic moments in Muslim students academic careers on top of issues of race. In an article for Religion News Service that I thought was fair, Kayla Renee Wheeler and Edward E. Curtis IV go into the intricacies of why the students might have felt especially hurt while also not conedmning the teacher.
The student paper took down a letter to the editor from Dr. Mark Berkson, a Hamline professor of religion, who argued that the university and students overreacted to the incident, that depicting the prophet or showing depictions isn’t always Islamophobic, and that student religion should not be allowed to censor academic freedom. The paper originally took down the letter, claiming it hurt students. They later republished it.
The student who reported the incident has implied that not only was she specifically harmed by seeing it after not paying attention to the syllabus or warnings, but that it was morally wrong to show it at all. The professor knew she shouldn’t do it. But that’s just enforcing your religious beliefs on others. Which is wrong.
College students often have weird and whacky beliefs. College is a weird and whacky time. We’re all always growing. I’m not going to deny anyone being emotional or making mistakes. But why did the paper immediately go on the defensive and why did so many suddenly take the religious views of a group and hold them above those of others? We would not accept that behavior from others, though Christians certainly try to ban things all the time, see Floridian censorship in the Don’t Say Gay times.
Do you remember the game Until Dawn? It’s a horror survival game that’s filled with consequential choices and quick time events. I watched my college friends play a bit of it once. I hated it. It gave me anxiety for a couple of days. I love horror. Anyway, and I suppose content warning for Algoquian Natives, please skip ahead or mute now, the game features a cannibalistic creature as the main monster. No, not zombies. Wendigos. The Wendigo is an evil spirit, literally the emobodiment of evil from my understanding, that posesses those who partake in the worst and greediest transgressions such as cannibalism. Now. You may be slightly familiar with internet discourse, primarily pushed by my fellow white people, saying that, because certain Natives don’t believe the word should be spoken, thought, or read, anyone saying or writing it is committing a wrong. Using it in fiction would be wrong. But. These same people, in my experience, have no issue with people saying “goddamn,” a thing plenty of people find horrifically offensive. I’ve had people request I not say that. Around them, I don’t. But that doesn’t make my usage of it on my own or in public spaces or in my writing morally wrong. Because other people’s beliefs do not get carte blanche to strangle me. So why, here, again, do people allow that stick to be used?
There does tend to be a tendency to see the world not in a concept of actions but rather in inherency or teams. See the Israel-Palestine conflict. There are fringe elements that look at the IDF and Hamas killing civilians, and they manage to come to the conclusion that it is not the killing of innocents that is wrong. It’s wrong when you’re on the wrong team.
That’s an extreme example. You see that sort of thinking all throughout politics. It’s the primary drive of people who can’t stand when people whose goals they agree with are depicted as antagonists in media for doing something morally wrong. Because being the “bad guy” is for people they don’t agree with. And if someone you agree with does something evil, it must either have context that excuses it or it must be useless propaganda that ruins everything.
These are the people who want to do away with the death penalty in the United States but, if they got their glorious revolution, would want to use it against their enemies. Who advocate for prison abolition while longing for their opponents to land in jail. For those who preach love and compassion in policy while gleefully wishing eternal torment in hell for those they hate. They do not care that the wheel is evil. They have no interest in breaking in. They just want to give lipservice to its breakage. What they want is to control it.
It does not matter if you beat someone with your big stick. It just has to be you and yours doing the beating.
It’s Neither Stick Nor Beater; It’s the Cadence of the Speaker
I said earlier that I think that’s a bit easy. Yes, there are people who excuse bigotry if it comes from people they would otherwise want to support. That can be Log Cabin Republicans not caring about the GOP’s institutional, extreme homophobia because they otherwise are on the same team. It can be liberals who excuse the bigotry of minorities and the oppressed. And I do think that’s in play in those comments on that transphobic TikTok. But it doesn’t hit the full-picture.
I recently posted a video about Side B Christianity, the Revoice Conference, and, specifically, a Twitter thread where a tran woman claimed that viewing queerness as a sin isn’t necessarily homophobic or transphobic. Like with the YouTube video about not living with a gay family member, it espouses that “hate the sin, love the sinner” can be a loving approach. It speaks with love. If you are kind in your bigotry, if you claim to love gay people, then you’re okay. Because Side B people who proclaim that all queer people should be celibate in order to be holy in their understanding of Christianity tend not to be absolute assholes, then the inherent anti-queerness of their ideology shouldn’t matter. Unfortunately for that Twitter user and for Side B, the kindness in your voice doesn’t remove that you still hold a stick for beating. Revoice, as I pointed out, believes in a divine conversion therapy that will eventually rid us all of queerness. They hold their stick up to the sky and proclaim that God holds a loving stick with which he will beat the gay out of us. Lovingly. But they speak softly.
Consider ContraPoints’s Westboro Baptist Church theory of bigotry:
There's really two different styles of bigotry. They express the same prejudice, but they're very different in tone. I'll call the two styles “direct bigotry” and “indirect bigotry.” Direct bigotry is openly contemptuous. It's bigotry manifested in slurs, in outright discrimination, in demonizing the target group, in calls for shunning, subordination, or even violence.
Whereas indirect bigotry manifests as "concern", or "debate" about a host of proxy issues. It's often “defensive” in tone rather than offensive. Frequently the claim is that a once needed liberation movement has now gone too far; that it's now the activists who are the new oppressors, who are disturbing “law and order” with violent and chaotic protests, who are victimizing and silencing innocent people by calling them bigots, who are infiltrating the media and replacing good old-fashioned entertainment with politically correct propaganda. And of course ordinary people are too intimidated to speak out against it because “cancel culture” is out of control and “free speech” is under attack.
The direct bigot is always frothing at the mouth, ranting and raving about predators, perverts, invaders, rapists, brutish animals, vermin, roaches, rats, contagions. Whereas, the indirect bigot is always defending something, always a knight in shining armor. Defending women, defending the children, defending marriage, defending freedom, defending the family, defending our values, defending common sense, defending tradition, defending civilization itself, defending God.)
We see this a lot in specific with vocal political opponents of liberation movements, especially in regards to trans rights. I experienced both things growing up in the early 2010s in Kentucky. I’ve been called the f-slur on the street multiple times in my life. I had a friend whose mom worried about me living with him because she thought I would rape him. He jokingly told me about it. When I joked and played along, a few of my friends were appalled. It was funny apparently to say by nature of my existence, I might assault someone. Me going, “Yeah, totally,” was gross.
What you’ll find under indirect bigotry is a subcategory that I think people don’t like to deal with much. It’s when people may not politically advocate for anti-anyone legislation, but still, personally, lovingly, hold bigoted beliefs. I’ll call it Pillow Touch Bigotry. This is where you have the non-affirming Christians who say they lovingly, sincerely disagree, they just think queer people are living in error. They wish they could be affirming, but they can’t. They can’t support gay marriage or gender transition, but they won’t advocate for people not having access. Or maybe on a libertarian basis, they’ll even want people to have access to those things, but they’ll still think it’s a sin to be or to act on being queer. They’ll smile, tell you they long to hit you with the stick, but that they’re being so sweet by not smashing it down on your knees. Meanwhile, they’re tapping it against your shoulder. They’re still hitting you. Just not as hard as they could.
It’s the gaslighting form of bigotry. It’s when people say they could never live with a gay relative but insist they’re not homophobic. It’s when people play semantics and think the phobia ending of transphobia is some sort of gotcha they can employ to thoroughly defend themselves. Some people employ Pillow Touch Bigotry specifically to watch you twist yourself into corners. Others will use it as a form of ego defense, refusing to allow themselves to see the damage done by their views. And, as we see online, it can often lead to people defending you.
There’s a lot of talk about respectability politics, tone policing, and people’s hate of having to think about optics. I have a lot to say about tone policing as a concept on the internet and how it’s been perverted to somehow mean, “You can’t critique me for being an asshole.” But that’s another conversation. For all that talk among certain ineffectual politicos who simply want to yell at and bully people, in these instances with Pillow Touched religious bigotry, the effectiveness of respectability and tone as optics to push viewpoints is pretty obvious. We can think if the Muslim couple was Christian, they’d be more likely to be critiqued. But I’m not sure that’s the case. Part of their appeal is the bubbly, happy energy they bring. It’s their insistence that they love everyone and want to spread understanding and joy before pushing their homophobia and transphobia. They label themselves as respectful, purport to have respect for others, speak in a bubbly, happy tone, and people in the comments defend their transphobia as respectful and thank them for it.
Not being an asshole is a legitimate political strategy. Even though it seems everyone thrives off of anger, off of the mistake that is popularism, happy messaging is seen as a relief. I agree people should be kinder. But we must be careful. Someone beating you with a stick whilst speaking in gentle tones does not change that they are hitting you.
What Matters the Speaker? It’s the Size of the Stick
Besides tone and the various identities of any potential speakers, the other thing that gets us, I think, is comparing sizes. We all love to stand around in a big beating circle and compare the size of who’s beating on us, and focus on the biggest sticks. That’s what I call a good time.
It’s sensible, though, to look at the various cudgels and focus on the biggest sticks. What’s it matter if these people are espousing anti-queer beliefs when they’re not the ones attempting to smear all gay people as groomers? Obviously it’s more politically expedient to work together with small bigots to get the large sticks off of us.
When Side B Christians, those who think it’s okay to be gay as long as you don’t act on it, are critiqued for harming queer people by holding and espousing anti-gay beliefs and retoric, they often pull back in offense and alarm. They’re not conversion therapists. They’re not the ones yelling slurs and saying you can’t identify as gay. Not all of them oppose civil gay marriage. They aren’t screaming about hell and not all of them talk about brokenness. They aren’t hitting gay people with the biggest stick, so why would we ever raise a fuss about them? It’s like when progressives and liberals correctly point out that tankies do not and never will hold power because they’re all LARPing little babies, but then go too far and say we shouldn’t ever focus on them. Because they’re not the biggest stick.
But they’re still swinging.
The longest video I made was a long dissection into the queerphobia of the GOP. I read the national platform and every state platform. I looked at their current governors at the time, all of their then senators, and what were then the major contenders for the primary. In the United States, there is no greater gander to LGBT folks than the Republican Party. I expect the coming 2024 platforms to be far worse. I’ll read them when they come. And I’m sure I’ll see plenty of talk about new censorship guidelines, the same old conversion therapy desires, push to turn back marriage equality, and more transphobia than should ever exist in an official document. That’s the biggest stick. Defeating them politically, surviving their coalitions, and spreading joy amongst ourselves have to be our main focuses.
But. Other people are still hitting us.
Side B Christians still think gay sex and gay relationships are immoral. Many of them support gay people marrying people of the opposite sex. Their main get together, the ReVoice Conference, thinks God will eventually destroy the concept of queerness altogether. And that stick, getting beat with it still fucks you up. When Mehdi and Mubina “respectfully” spread transphobia and reject their queer family members, they’re still hitting someone with a stick that will fuck you up.
Growing up, non-affirming rhetoric made me suicidal. Getting hit with the stick sucked. Even when it wasn’t the biggest beating. It was still a beating. It didn’t matter if the stick was comparatively small. Size matters, but it’s more about how you use it.
Why.
Fundamentally, I think we want to believe in kindness. There is a lot of hell bound up in living. With social media, we’re inundated with horrid news, horrid views, and cruel loneliness at all times. So we take those moments we can get that are hopeful. I’ve trained myself over the years to build a sort of wall of naivete. I have these red color correcting glasses I sometimes wear because I’m colorblind. They let me see more colors than normal. I have rose-tinted glasses. And I wear them. I know what they are. Because otherwise I look at the trees, and I see gray death everywhere. My silly stupid optimism, purposefully baked, is what keeps me alive. Everything Everywhere All at Once.
It is hard to be hurt in a place you expect hope.
So sometimes, we pretend there is no hurt.
But unfortunately, you can’t optimism your way out of wounds.
In the end, people play defense for religious bigotries for all of the reasons above. We can excuse it depending on who does the beating, how gently they speak when they swing, or how large the stick they use. Conflict sucks. Most of us want to avoid it where we can. Unfortunately, a lot of times, life is nuanced, and nuance is inherently conflict. We need our enemies to be monsters, because when they are monsters, we can breathe easier. The conflict is external alone. Because our enemies must be monsters, therefore, anyone we ally with cannot be. The oppressed are bound up in a bigotry of low expectations. Those who speak softly are wrapped in a shroud of clouds that we pretend are clothes. When we’re beat with small sticks, we know there are worst ones out there. The monsters are the powerful ones who throw out their roars and swing wildly with a bludgeon.
Unfortunately there are no monsters. There are only humans.
And there are plenty of them out there who have realized they can spread sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia and get praised for it so long as they speak softly and carry a less big stick.
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