Monstrous Children
(Photo by Morgan M Page, August 2024.)
“My strong impression is that the whole trans phenomenon is a desperate desire to remain childlike,” Mary Wakefield opined in The Spectator in June 2023. She proferred this theory “to celebrate Pride month,” in an article titled “The kids aren’t trans, they just don’t want to grow up.”1 The gender critical journalist — herself the daughter of a Baronet and current wife of Dominic Cummings (chief advisor to Conservative ex-PM Boris Johnson) — came to this theory after “many terrible, rubber-necking evenings in the online trans world.”
Staring through her phone at Dylan Mulvaney, she describes her “expensively softened features” in almost erotic detail — searching for millimetres of bone that no longer exist — before declaring that all the social media influencer really wants to be is a child. Mulvaney’s coming out to her parents is attention-seeking behaviour, her choice of fashion childish. But don’t worry, Mulvaney isn’t the only source of Wakefield’s grand theory of transness. Her hungry gaze moves onto the freshly surged chests of young trans men, reinterpreting a desire for masculinization as a return to a prepubertal state of grace, driven to regression — she alleges — by a toxic porn culture, autism, and anxiety.
Despite smugly patting herself on the back for this bold take, Wakefield is by no means to the first to accuse “transactivists” of being out of control children. Indeed, it has become the most ubiquitous clarion call of the anti-gender movement the world over. Trans people are too emotional, too irresponsible, too unruly to be trusted to make our own decisions — medically, socially, and politically. Therefore it is only right that “the adults” step in.
In February 1899, the US Senate was locked in heated debate about what to do with the Philippine Islands they had ‘acquired’ during the previous year’s Spanish-American War and their 10 million Filipino inhabitants. That week, a poem by English imperialist and poet Rudyard Kipling had been published on both sides of the Atlantic in The Times and the New York Sun. Senator Benjamin Tillman stood to quote it at length in his argument against retaining colonial control of the Philippines. It’s an odd take given the contents of the poem.
Titled “The White Man’s Burden,” Kipling — born in British-occupied Calcutta — exhorts men to “take up” their God-given responsibility to rule over their colonial “captives.” Only through the rightful rule of white men could the enemies of sickness, famine, and “heathen folly” be brought to heel. It wouldn’t be easy, the poem cautioned, a test of manhood and a thankless job, one that inevitably brings with it “the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard.” These captives Kipling brands “half-devil, half-child.”
Tillman didn’t want America to pay so high a cost, agreeing with Kipling’s assessment that Brown and Black people the world over were “not suited to our institutions. They are not ready for liberty as we understand it. They do not want it.” But while Tillman lost this argument, leading to the Philippine-American War, the now-famous poem became a touchstone for imperialists. The poem crystalized ideas already floating around in this late colonial expansionist period, justifying how the “civilized” must take control over the unreasonable “primitive” Brown and Black people the world over.
Kipling’s image of the “half devil, half child” subaltern was particularly familiar to white American minds that had spent the preceding debates debating the emancipation of enslaved Black people. Enslaved people were reduced to a racist caricature: “Sambo, the typical plantation slave, was docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing; his behavior was full of infantile silliness and his talk inflated with exaggeration. His relationship with his master was one of utter dependence and childlike attachment; it was indeed this childlike quality that was the very key to his being.”2
Childlike, illogical, lazy, dependent, and potentially aggressive, the racist argument went, enslaved Black people could not be trusted with freedom, let alone enfranchizement.
In the opening decades of the 20th Century, the spectre of women’s suffrage was becoming a growing problem to the men in power. Decades of genteel meetings and political pamphleteering had gotten women nowhere. A new generation of women were taking more extreme actions to force the matter, focusing on “deeds not words” by locking themselves in the House of Commons and going on hunger strikes. Between 1912 and 1914, the Women’s Social and Political Union under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst carried out a series of arson and bombing attacks against government infrastructure. Most famously, they blew up a number of post office boxes. Pankhurst, now immortalized as a statue outside Westminster, was branded a terrorist, and indeed the attacks resulted in two deaths and dozens of injuries.
Despite being their fond treatment in films like Mary Poppins, the Suffragettes were not beloved in their time. Anti-suffrage forces focussed much of their attention on undermining women’s credibility outside domestic affairs. Anti-suffrages cartoons and postcards frequently depicted women as children, little girls demanding men’s attention.
This perceived childlike relationship to the world made women too volatile for public political life. Baron Frederick Banbury, MP for City of London, famously scoffed in the Commons at the 1918 bill that eventually allowed (some) women enfranchizement, “Women are likely to be affected by gusts and waves of sentiment. Their emotional temperament makes them so liable to it. But those are not the people best fitted in this practical world either to sit in this House... or to be entrusted with the immense power which this bill gives them."
This charge of childishness and dependence on male authority followed women well into the second wave of feminism in the 1960s-70s. Feminist leaders of this period — from Angela Davis to Betty Friedan — could not even open their own bank accounts without the help of a father or husband until 1974 in the US and 1975 in the UK. And while white women won the vote in most of Canada (except Québec) in 1922, it would take until 1960 for Indigenous women to gain the vote — a pattern also observed along similar timelines for Black, Asian, and Indigenous women in the United States.
Every June, tens of millions of people arm themselves with cardboard signs, rainbow flags, and the thumpa-thumpa of disco music to march in the streets in cities across the world. In Western countries, these mass mobilizations have been swallowed alive by corporate sponsorships and feel-good liberal narratives of progress, while elsewhere they remain sites of courageous resistance against police violence and state repression.
The “shot glass heard round the world” responsible for this — one of the largest and most enduring protest movements in human history — was launched at police on a steamy night in New York City in 1969. The Stonewall Rebellion3 erupted from the bowels of a mob-run gay bar after a routine police raid and it lasted a week. Many of the historical characters now claimed to have been present have in recent years attained household name status — saints Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Stormé Delarverie — and serve as founding parents of the now-global movement for gay liberation.
While global news outlets today release celebratory (though frequently inaccurate) historical fluff pieces as Pride month fodder each year, their initial reception of the Rebellion wasn’t so flattering. The first article covering the event appeared in The New York Daily News on July 6th, 1969, titled “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad.”
In it, journalist Jerry Lisker holds back no venom, portraying the beating and arrest of drag queens with derisive absurdity: “A beauty of a specimen named Stella wailed uncontrollably while being led to the sidewalk in front of the Stonewall by a cop. She later confessed that she didn't protest the manhandling by the officer, it was just that her hair was in curlers and she was afraid her new beau might be in the crowd and spot her. She didn't want him to see her this way, she wept.”
Though they actively sought to have their Rebellion covered by the press, many in the Gay Power movement were incensed by such demeaning articles. Gay Liberation Front held one its first protests in September 1969 against the Village Voice for its use of gay slurs in its coverage of the Rebellion. This tone — one that renders gay liberationists childish and absurd — would follow the LGBTQ+ movement from Gay Power, through AIDS, and straight to the assimilationist Equal Marriage debates of the 2000s-2010s. Walking talking hate crime Jesse Helms, for example, excoriated his US Congressional colleagues in 1996 for bending over backwards to meet what the homosexual lobby “hysterically” demanded.
Far right Christian Evangelists, like Helms, both in and out of politics have long viewed homosexuality as an example of unruly childish sexual behaviour, caused by overbearing mothers, absent fathers, and/or childhood trauma. Its cure: to accept adulthood and enter into the proper heterosexual marriage contract — a man becomes a man when he marries a woman, a woman becomes a woman when she bears his children.
At the end of August 2024, I found my way to the Department for Education. The last time I had been there, a year and a half before, we’d been protesting the murder of 16 year old Brianna Ghey. Ghey had been stabbed to death by two other students after years of transphobic bullying. For a full year I carried around the single tealight passed out at that vigil in the pocket of my leather jacket, jolting into remembrance every time my fingers absently brushed against it.
This evening in August was different. The exterior of the building was occupied by dozens of teenagers united under the banner Trans Kids Deserve Better. We adults — trans people, allies, family members — stood across the street to support them ending their weeklong occupation. These brave young people had stayed there 24 hours a day, sleeping on grates, with little support and almost zero news coverage, to demand that their voices be heard by those adults in power who are intent on legislating them out of existence. Having transitioned myself decades ago as a young teen, I was moved deeply by not just their courage but their brilliant organizing tactics.
Weeks later, the same activist group would sneak into an anti-trans conference and release 6000 crickets, disrupting and effectively ending the hate group’s gathering. (Chirp, chirp!)
The accusation of childishness hangs over the so-called “trans debate.” But it is not unique to trans people. Nearly every marginalized group has had precisely the same treatment when demanding their rights from the dominant majority. It’s a smug, self-aggrandizing impulse — a narcissistic delusion inculcated by dominant power.
One of nostalgia’s many pernicious effects is that it makes us collectively forget this common impulse by the powerful to protect against the truth of their own violence. We look backwards into time and nostalgia reframes anti-colonial struggles, women fighting for suffrage, AIDS activists, and crip4 advocates as courageous freedom fighters — historical characters we can hold up at their appointed times of year to feel good about the march of human progress.
Our nostalgia refuses us the ability to see this process while it is happening. Trans people, including young people like TKDB, are infantilized in the current political and media landscape — absurdities to be squash by anti-trans politicians and terf activists in one corner, and aggravating redheaded stepchildren of liberal LGB “allies” in the other. We cannot be trusted to make our own decisions or advocate for our own interests. No matter how polite, thoughtful, or expert we may be, our voices are heard only as the cries of monstrous children. It’s time, the cis world tells us, for the “adults” to wrest back control from our sticky fingers.
But, like those who came before us, we will not relinquish our voices, our hands, our minds. We will no longer be led by others, told which of us are deserving of the pittance of healthcare and human rights available to us, silenced while the self-proclaimed ‘experts’ speak.
Perhaps we really are the bastard offspring of heteropatriarchy and modern medicine, as they accuse us, but if so then let our shrill voices ring out into the night — a red scream that will only end with our liberation.
I will not link to this trash.
Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). Referenced in this article.
A hill I will die on: many Stonewall veterans prefer the word rebellion over riot. I, for one, am happy to respect this distinction.
The infantilization of disabled people and, particularly, disabled activists is another of the most egregious and longstanding examples of what I am discussing in this essay.