The current focus of the political religious and right with gender identity is driven by deep seated personal inadequacy. Existentialist philosophy offers an excoriating analysis of why this obsession arises.
In his brilliant 1944 critique of nationalist racism, ‘the Anti-Semite and the Jew’, Jean Paul Sartre sought to understand why so many of his countrymen collaborated with Fascism. Revisiting this essay by the French philosopher, alongside his wider writing on existentialism, helps to contextualise and interpret current transphobia.
Sartre realised that anti-Semitism is different from, say, anti-black racism, in that a Jew can potentially ‘pass’ as non-Jewish. Jewishness, unlike blackness, is permissible when and because it can be hidden.
This leads to a dichotomous situation. On the one hand ‘good’ Jews are those who supress their identity publically. This is as opposed to those ‘bad’ ones who do not blend in with normative demands. Jews are permitted as long as they are firmly in the former, invisible, category.
On the other hand the fact that Jews can pass initiates a paranoia. Secret Semites may be infiltrating institutions, positions of power, even families, unbeknown, or worse, at the behest of their nefarious allies. Though they might outwardly appear only mildly Jewish, in secret they might be wildly so.
Thus the all-too-familiar conspiracy stories. The invisible Jew becomes a paranoiac problem and an obsession. They are a threat that needs to be rooted out. To anti-Semites, Jews cannot be assimilated. Indeed their attempts to be so are nefarious. The good Jew is a myth.
The exact same dialectic occurs for other gendered individuals who do not fall neatly into the male-female dichotomy falsely yet resolutely applied in almost all societies. The few high profile trans people who make it into Western media tend to be those who most convincingly appear as the gender they identify as. Those trans persons who do not pass, who do not appear as sociocultural expectations of their identified gender presumes, are subject to ridicule. Their visible otherness makes them a target for neglect, ostracising and violence.
Conversely fear of those who might pass is at fever pitch. Trans people will use opposite gender bathrooms to prey on cis-gendered individuals. School children will have their tiny minds irreparably warped by teachers whose genitalia and hemlines contradict each other. Bishops write about the possibility of their priests accidentally marrying two men. The convoluted and disingenuous nonsense of such positions is little comfort to those who face the consequences.
Anti-transgender rhetoric is particularly obliterating. When Trans individuals refuse to comply with expectations, they can be questioned as to why they don’t just blend in. Why not just use the gendered bathroom that fits your outward appearance rather than your inner identity and avoid all the fuss? The violence frequently meted out to women or people of colour who challenge power imbalances, is further accompanied for Trans people by denial of their very existence.
The question is why does this dismissive dialectic exist for our transgender communities?
Existentialism is a philosophy concerned with what it means to be human, happy and oneself. Within this the freedom and responsibility of the individual is emphasised. Bakewell summarises existentialism as a philosophy of life itself, the difficulties, choices and self-assertion therein.
Sartre considered that the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every individual in possession of themselves as they are and places the entire responsibility for their existence squarely upon their own shoulders. The individual is urged to be brave and take responsibility for their decisions, their identity, and their self-expression, even though this is often not easy. Exploring and affirming your sex and sexuality is a perfect example.
However, existentialism recognises that many people flee from such acknowledgement. Rather than confront the painful realities of existence, many people much of the time choose to distract themselves from these by becoming immersed and lost within the routine, quotidian, group, and inauthentic.
Briefly speaking there are two main sources of existential avoidance. Cultural-adherence involves identifying with and favouring social in-groups and acting in accordance with social norms and distracting routines. Meanwhile ego-enhancement relates to comforting the self as of unique significance amongst peers and in the world. Through these one’s individual responsibility and insignificance can be derogated.
The problem with these comforting distractions is that they are ultimately unsatisfying. Individuals cannot escape from their sense of complete and profound responsibility, those who do are merely disguising their anguish or are in flight from it. Avoidance can lead to a loss of the real self, subsumed within the collective, the routine or the egocentric. People cannot be their true self for fear of undermining their carefully crafted social groupings and personal egos.
Every so often this underlying tension is exposed. Sartre famously wrote about ‘the look’ using the example of peeping through a keyhole. Hereby the peeper happily does so until they realise that somebody else is watching them. Suddenly they realise that what they are doing is wrong and they feel ashamed. It is only in the eyes of another that one can see one’s true self.
Naked exposure of the true self is frightening. We fabricate entire identities around our fragile insides for public consumption. Ways to avoid the look of the other. We belong to desirable social circles and set up flattering images of ourselves through the things we buy. We cover up the deep-seated existential dread that lurks deep inside.
According to Sartre, what the anti-Semite, anti-transgender, anti-other, flees even more than reason, is his intimate awareness of themselves. Fear is that the non-binary individual will see something inside you that perhaps you don’t want to be seen. Your sexual inadequacy, confusion, fluidity, repression, might be more visible to the sexually self-aware. Attacks on transgenderism are a pre-emptive strike by those who fear what lies within; a self-loathing lashing out. It is not surprising that those who most virulently launch attacks on sexuality, in all its forms, have a well-established track record of hypocrisy.
Sartre suggested that by eradicating Judaism the anti-Semite attempts to eradicate all of the things stereotypically associated with. Things such as intellectualism and creativity. Things that the anti-Semite is consciously self-lacking, and which by linking with Jews, with the undesirable, are themselves then written of. By eradicating Trans people the transphobe eradicates that which they otherwise lack; their individual sex-sexuality identity affirmation and fulfilment.
Grene describes the bravery of those who are able to face up to and own difficult decisions along life’s journey. It is through such actions that the existentially authentic life can be lived; one where one is true to oneself and not conforming to the expectations of others. In the current climate almost no decision can be as brave as owning one’s gender where it falls outside of heteronormative boundaries.
Transphobia has nothing to do with those who are trans. It has everything to do with those who are themselves deeply and fearfully inadequate. The only questions of sexuality or gender that they need to ask are to do with their own. However it is unlikely they will be brave enough to do so. Unable to look within, disquieted by the realisation that others can see through them, the transphobe chooses to be nothing save the fear they inspire in others.
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