Scrambling The Desires Of Decent Men
Most of this video is a review of a worthy-sounding book about modern fascism called The Player And The Played by Max Haiven. But what fell most heavily into my ears were a few short words about conservative/fascist hatred of trans people:
He says capitalism becomes gamified but the game is rigged and we all know it.
…
The cheated are seduced by a grandiose sense of entitlement that mobilizes resentment away from the oligarchs and leaders and towards scapegoats who are the truly loathsome cheaters:
Immigrants cheat the borders.
Minorities cheat through diversity and equity policies.
Feminists cheat men of their dignity.
Grade school teachers cheat parents out of total control over their kids.
College professors cheat students out of their inborn love for capitalism.
Or trans people cheat God by not following the gender rules and scrambling the desires of decent men.
I find that phrase “scrambling the desires of decent men” incredibly descriptive of trans panic. “I don’t desire her!!! Him? It? Shit! My pronouns just crashed and I’m mad about it! I don’t even know what that is! Double shit, so attractive! But OMG but I’m still confused about what they are, that’s scary! Fuck, why is this sexy freak even on my feed?!? That ought to be illegal!”
If he’s sex-positive and reasonably enlightened, an actually-decent man (unlike your neofascist bigots) can survive a bit of scrambled desire, surf the confusion, let the social media ocean spit him out onto the beach, and get on with his life, no harm done. But the usual suspects who explode across the internet (and our political landscape more generally) with outbursts of anti-trans bigotry don’t have enough emotional intelligence for that. When their desire gets scrambled, they move immediately to look outside themselves for someone to blame, and the obvious target is the trans people who “cheated” and scrambled their libidos.
I won’t soon forget the phrase “scrambling the desires of decent men” — it’s too descriptive, I think, of what the bigots are mad about.
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