Open letter to Queerlient

In which I respond to the cover of Queerlient, a queer themed issue of Salient, student magazine for Te Herenga Waka (formerly Vic Uni) in NZ's capital city Wellington.

Dear Queerlient¹,

STRAIGHT=QUEER

DENY=AFFIRM

SHAME=PRIDE

It’s 2022 and the Queerlient front cover image is a photograph taken by a man of a young, skinny, female-bodied person with their breasts cut off, naked and lying on their back – a classic pose of submission. The great fuck you queerification of the magazine is oh so very straight. A stereotyped, heteronormative, misogynistic celebration of control, power and bodily harm inflicted on (the class of people formerly known as) women. 

The editorial for a student magazine of an institution, supposedly the critic and conscience of society, has capitulated to the Great Brainwash. The idea underpinning this new form of queer², is that the two biological sexes are a social construct (so too must be human reproduction and evolution, hello fundamentalism), that babies can be born in the wrong body and that humans can literally change sex. And underpinning that idea is a bundle of tired gender stereotypes about what it means to be a man or a woman. 

As champions of tolerance we might feel sympathy for people caught in this mystical anti-science faith, but should question its adoption by student papers, health providers, HR departments, and university faculties.

It takes the Great Brainwash to believe you need to cut body parts off to be your authentic self. 

It takes the Great Brainwash to believe “gender-affirming care” is affirming³. Penis tucking, breast binding, puberty blockers, hormones, mastectomies, are denials not affirmation. It’s shame not pride.

It takes the Great Brainwash to ignore the fact that double mastectomies to affirm gender are an unnecessary major surgery fraught with the possibility of complications. Double mastectomies remove healthy tissue, deny women sexual pleasure and remove the possibility of ever breastfeeding children if you choose to have them. 

It takes the Great Brainwash to see this as a life-saving intervention not a social contagion as young women attempt to deal with the utter shit hand many of us are played for simply being female. As I write there are 42,118 Go Fund Me campaigns for gender affirming “top surgery”. In the States, insurance companies and surgeons are making a fucking killing. Some surgeries boast that they remove breasts in the morning while doing reconstructive surgery for regretters in the afternoon. 

It takes the Great Brainwash to see voluntary double mastectomies and not think of foot binding, or breast ironing, or menstrual shaming, or women forced to cover their faces in public, or anorexia or non-medical cosmetic surgery. There are myriad ways in which women learn that female bodies are dirty and disgusting and are forced or compelled to change and hide them. 

And it takes the Great Brainwash to see a magazine cover of another naked skinny damaged member of the class formerly known as women as something remotely queer, different or even decent.

1. I would have submitted a shorter version of this to Salient/Queerlient but while you can use a pseudonym for publication you have to submit under your real name. That is a reasonable policy, but means people in the paper will know who I am which I feel cautious about in the current political climate which forbids reasonable discussion on this topic and the castigation of those of us who believe in biology.

2. On my use of the term queer: I know many LGB (and some T) people have always found the term queer awful. Often they lived through periods of extreme violence and well funded and organised hate campaigns against same sex love where queer was a rallying cry used against them. Any attempts to reclaim the term feel offensive. Youthfully oblivious to the hurt we might cause, later to the scene, but before queer studies and all that came from it, in the late 80s and early 90s the reclamation of the term “Queer” (alongside dyke and fag) felt to me and my mates an exciting rebellion against homophobia, heterosexual norms and a straight, boring, patriarchal society. Queer to us meant lesbianism, or bisexuality and being unashamedly women-centred. It was a feminist political challenge to the images and ideas we were surrounded by: of women seeking male approval, or pornified ads, or women compelled to diet and shave and to conform to rigid conventions of society. It seems a great let down that Queer is now used to push stereotypes (boys who like make up are girls, and and butch lesbians are men wtf?); to deny sex and therefore same sex orientation (lesbians are transphobes to this current regime); and to facilitate men entering women’s spaces (however you spin it). It all feels very old school sexist and controlling, the very things we were fighting against.

3. To those who are angry and saying but this is “literally lifesaving” people are going to kill themselves if they don’t get their hormones fucked around with or parts of their bodies whacked off, I encourage you to look at the real statistics on this issue: Stats for Gender is a useful place to start for credible information. You might also like to acquaint yourself with the thousands of stories of detransitioners for example on detrans reddit. Many of these people and their parents were fed the lie that they would die if they did not transition, a message often used by cults to compel behaviour and loyalty. I’d hope all of us, whether we believe in gender theory or not, want open discussion and the best evidence available to inform the ways we support people with dysphoria.