The Best Answer is, "Why the [expletive] Do You Care?"
On Pride Month, Queerphobia(s), and nosy-pseudo religious asses
Well, the US Supreme Court has dogged over folks and folx again, this time with its 6-3 decision on Wednesday in United States v. Skrmetti. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, concluding that their “role is not ‘to judge the wisdom, fairness, or logic’ of the law before us…but only to ensure that it does not violate the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. Having concluded it does not, we leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.” How convenient that the wise bought-and-paid-for ones across the street from the US Capitol decided to uphold a Tennessee law that pries into the lives of transgender youth all while saying that the equal protection clause has not been violated.
But the hypocrisy gets worse. Here’s a paragraph from Roberts’ majority opinion, written in the circular reasoning of a 15-year-old contrarian who sampled too much of his daddy’s liquor cabinet.
Roberts essentially wrote that the Tennessee law cannot discriminate against transgender youth because they can find other medical excuses for getting hormonal treatments or puberty blockers.
The real question is, why is the Supreme Court deep in the weeds of attempting to understand the biological, neurological, and genetic development of youth and how that relates to sex and gender? Why come up with cockamamie and asinine examples of “gender dysphoria” in the context of transgender folx? Because without directly saying it, the US Supreme Court has said that as long as the evangelical and ethnonationalreligious set defines sex and gender as strictly male and female with little variation beyond the cis-heteronormative, no child can know their own body, mind, and spirit. Nor can their parents and doctors, apparently.
All this points to the biggest question of the era. Why the fuck do you care? Really, in the name of Pride Month, why do you care? I asked my mother this question the week my younger sister Sarai died due to complications from sickle cell anemia at 27 years old. It was mid-July 2010. One of my mother’s church friends had helped me with the arrangements. She was incredibly kind, and really, the only person I met that week who I could converse with honestly about the larger issues at play in my dynamic with my dysfunctional immediate Mount Vernon, New York family.
After my mother’s friend had helped me with the final edits for Sarai’s eulogy and left to pick up the copies from Fed Ex Office, my mother blurted out, “You know she’s a lesbian.” I was already pissed about so many things from that week. That was it for me. “Why. Do. You. Care?,” I said with a raised voice. “She’s your friend. That’s all that should matter.” My mother stood there with nothing to say, her face blank in the face of my question.
I’ve asked that question a lot over the years, with a lot of blank stares and blinking eyelids in response. In Spinning Sage’s Gold, I answer that question, and attempt to present a world where queerness, binaries, trinaries, and genderqueer fluidities are embraced, allowing all of us our full humanity.