There’s a meme now circulating on social media of a guy in “blackface” on the left, and a picture of Dylan Mulvaney, a Transgender influencer, on the right. The caption reads,
“One is condemned to hell in our culture, the other is extolled to high heaven. Both are wrong because they offer a false and degrading representation of a real element of a person’s true identity.”
The image on the left is offensive in a way that this memer can never understand. He’s not black. None of us white folk can grasp the pain that comes from seeing a white man in black makeup, but I’ll guarantee you it goes far beyond any “false representation” or “identity” issue.
I saw this posted to one of my Seminary professor’s FB timelines, so I chimed in, asking where all these people who feel demeaned by Transgender females are. One of his followers replied, “We are many.”
I’m not entirely comfortable telling people how they should feel about something, especially given humanity’s long, painful history of men telling women to “get over” whatever painful thing that usually comes at the hands of men.
But I simply don’t trust this.
First, the people who feel demeaned by Transgender people most likely didn’t feel the same when they watched Robin Williams in his epic Mrs. Doubtfire, or in Pirates of the Carribean when two bad guys in a rowboat dressed like women to fool the English.
But one might say that it’s not the dress and the makeup that demeans women, it’s a man, claiming to have trans-formed into a woman, that gender is so cheap and easy that a man can comandeer one that’s not his own. Doesn’t that pose yet another threat to women? Like we needed another?
Some (many, I’m told) feel demeaned by people like Dylan Mulvaney because he allegedly
“prances around trotting out all of the most misogynist, ridiculous stereotypes of the past 50 years, which feminists have spilled oceans of ink and tears trying to reverse, and is rewarded with millions of dollars and media red carpet treatment…well yeah that DOES feel demeaning to many of us who have spent decades as actual women and all that comes along with womanhood and don’t become celebrities for it.”
I’m living in a cave on this one. I don’t know any women who feel this way, and I only know about Dylan Mulvaney from a cursory internet search. I have a hard time believing that this group’s numbers come close to the number of people who feel demeaned by blackface.
But comparing a Transgender woman – a natal male who harbors no known bias towards women – to a guy who most likely hates black people is an odd comparison. Why make it? How can we compare someone who self-declares as a woman with outright, blatant racism?
As a Christian who believes that Christians are very clearly commanded to unconditionally reach/serve the non-Christian world, I get uncomfortable every time we compare the exploits of non-Christians to some unthinkable sin. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, wants me to believe that Transgender people are pedophiles, as are the liberals who support them. Now, I’m supposed to believe that Transgender women are perpetrating some deed that’s on par with one of our nation’s oldest sins.
I have some questions.
First, Transgender women have been around for a long time, why get offended now? Sure, they are supported like never before in our world, and maybe this didn’t hit you until you realized that we’re mainstreaming it?
The disdain and disgust towards Trans people, however, is much older. So I need to ask, what came first, your disdain and disgust or the idea that women are being demeaned?
If any level of repulsion for Transgender people preceeded the idea that they are demeaning towards womanhood, the latter should be suspect. From where I sit, it seems that us Evangelicals were talking about the evils of Transgenderism long before the issue at hand surfaced.
If you could rid yourself of the disdain, would you still see Transgender women as a threat?
That’s certainly the problem with racism in America. What came first was the belief that “there’s something wrong with black people,” then the belief that they posed some kind of a threat to us white folk, then the atrocities.
In all of that lay the irrevocable idea that it’s bad to be black.
Transgender women don’t believe that it’s bad to be a woman, but Evangelical women who feel threatened by them believe that it’s bad to be Trans. Who should we be comparing to blackface, the guy who wants to be a woman or the follower of Jesus who’s convinced that Trans people are a) wrong AND b) a threat?
Regardless, I’m weary of Christians finding something they don’t agree with, then turning it into something it’s not so they can burn it down. To that, I’ll quote Jesus on how Christians should behave in a world they think is evil, or twisted, or losing its mind as so many of my anti-Trans Christian friends claim:
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Jewish people in the first century looked at non-Jewish people like Christians look at the transgender world: twisted, unholy, repulsive, etc. But here’s Jesus, claiming to have the authority of God himself, commanding his disciples to go to the grossest people imaginable and somehow convince them to act like Jesus. There’s nothing in his commandment about condemnation, or resisting cultural movements, or burning shit down.
St. Paul would come along later and write his letters to a bunch of fledgling Christian churches. With very few exceptions, his advice is filled with critiques, calling out unholy behavior within the church so that these new Christians might live more inline with what it looks like to “act like Jesus.” There is very little mentioned about the sins of the outside world.
If we could somehown turn our focus inward, critiquing the many sins that exist inside the church – the ones that thrive on our failure to do so – we’d be much closer to what Jesus intended when he unleashed the first Christians into the world. With that, I’ll argue, would come much more influence in the way the world operates.
Though the New Testament is filled with these inward critiques, the modern church considers it anathema when a congregant asks questions about racism, greed, gluttony, idolatry, hypocrisy, etc. Bringing these up on Sunday morning only hurts people’s feelings. Besides, it’s the non-Christians who are the real problem.
And so we oppose, doing twisted things like comparing a guy in blackface to a Transgender woman, which is really demeaning.
