There are a lot of ideologies that cause significant psychological distress. Indeed, the history of religious experience has at once been ecstasy and torment—and alienation. The angst Christians feel at having doubted the Holy Spirit is very real and terrifying. I saw it all around me growing up in the Bible Belt. I saw people getting baptized more than once because they’d had doubts. I saw terror in the face of a young Scientologist whose beliefs I blew up in class (criminology), exposing them as fraudulent, unaware that an L Ron Hubbard devotee was among my students (a highly unlikely occurrence in Northeast Wisconsin). Muslims will behead a man for challenging Islamic doctrine. Fact. That they don’t hesitate to do such a wicked thing tells us how damaged they are.
I have no doubt about the pain of those who don’t fit in and the terrible consequences of having been handed an explanation for their existential terror. Religion and religious-like belief causes people to sacrifice humans on an altar of lies. Queer theory is no different in kind. But it is different in excess. The consequences of queer theory are far worse than most religious belief; a horror show surpassed only by the antics of ancient Aztecs. Queer theory has broken more bodies than most religions we (righty and) routinely condemn.
Alongside queer theory stands Islam, its clerics and doctors subjecting gay boys to wrong-sex hormones and debilitating and disfiguring surgeries because Allah loathes homosexuality with such exceptional passion. Make the gay boy an artificial woman—a simulacrum—good enough for the Shi’ite. No wonder Foucault loved Islam as much as he loved boys. Maybe a little less (although he has his defenders).
“Trans folx have been around forever,” an X (Twitter) user said to me. “In the Talmud, rabbis wrote laws for men who had periods. They had to leave the community for ritual cleansing, but once done, they resumed living as men. It was done thousands of years ago, so nothing new under the sun.” Folx. That’s a sign. Of course, men don’t have periods because men can’t have periods. The Talmud must be wrong. Who’d have expected that?
freedom and reason 