Utopia and Gender in Society by Fran Napolitano

Imagine a world where milk and honey drips from lilac clouds; a world in which there is no linguistic barrier, no poverty, no ignorance, be it blissful or not; a world in which art, poetry, philosophy and science prosper alongside each other and flourish at harmony with one another and bring fruits to the academic realm. A world of no discrimination, of sweet sunshine and cool breezes, of no pain unless it brings about pleasure, of wisdom and full health.

This is the world so many people claim to be striving for, the utopia everybody is apparently suffering endlessly to bring to light, and, at the risk of being exceedingly pessimistic, I say this is an agonisingly false declaration. I mean, one simply does not have to look far to see this monstrosity rearing its ugly head in its full form:

Venus Xtravaganza, 1988 New York City, unsolved.

Marsha P Johnson, 1992, New York City, unsolved.

Loni Kai, 2001 Oregon, unsolved.

Julie Doe’, 1988 Clermont Florida; mutilated so heavily that it took extensive post-mortem testing to reveal that she was transgender and not hormonally altered from pregnancy, and she remains unidentified to this day.

Unsolved.

But what could I possibly be talking about? The fallacies of a seemingly robust law system that cannot serve justice? Feminism and the mindless, cold-blooded murders of women that are still plaguing our world today in a macabre woman purge? Surely, this cisgender woman cannot be talking about the rights of transgenders and crossdressers; surely, the two things are discrepant, worlds apart, on astronomically different astrological orbits. But that is merely the failing in judgement of a society that doesn’t understand it is undoing itself.

You see, what we find here is discrimination of minorities, but what is truly pitiful is that this discrimination has taken place at the hand of minorities as well as those more privileged, minorities who know how it feels to suffer, who know how it feels to have society rob them of opportunities on the grounds of their sex, skin colour or religion, yet still are so inherently prejudiced towards transgender people because it’s deemed as an unnatural way of life. They are less than human, preferable at a distance, the same attitude I would have towards a daddy long legs scrambling up my wall a little too close to my sleepless eyes. And just like the countless spiders squashed underneath gum-stained heels, the list of transgenders and drag artists that have been brutally murdered, sexually assaulted and disregarded under the law is bitterly long, and there are plentiful documentaries and articles begging feverishly for their justice to be served. Victoria Cruz, a prominent LGBTQ+ activist and transgender woman noted that these people are ‘shouting from their graves for justice’, and I hear their cries so deafeningly every time I see such injustices, and I think that anybody with any ability in them to empathise does as well. However, the line between listening to something and hearing it is too often blurry, so I decided to use this article to present a glimpse of this tremendous and unnerving injustice, to demonstrate the path which must be taken to silence those cries forever, whilst interweaving the narrative of a society that is plucking itself apart as it tries to save the ‘norms’.

Almost exactly 51 years ago at the time of writing this article, an uprising took place at the mafia-run Stonewall Inn in New York City, a bar frequented by numerous LGBTQ+ people in a time when it was illegal for homosexuals to enter bars and relish in leisurely activities among heterosexual, cisgender citizens, a disturbing law eerily similar to that of the Jim Crow segregation laws that encouraged the flourishing of racism in the US not many decades prior. As it was raided by the police in the early hours, three nights of unrest followed, with LGBTQ+ people, long frustrated by police brutality, finally fighting back and kick-starting the gay liberation movement, for as we know, the people soon weary of oppression. Despite much progress seeming to have been made by the movement, even its presentation in anniversary articles in newspapers was overly focused on the ‘campy’ and typically ‘effeminate’ nature of the rising itself, focusing on drag queens hitting policemen with their handbags rather than the true meaning and importance of an oppressed group finally fighting back, at least in my opinion. The laws in New York were hideous at the time, with thousands arrested each year in the city for 'crimes against nature’ and what was deemed lewd behaviour. Some even had their names published in newspapers, which meant they lost their jobs and were financially hindered. And the cherry on top of this frankly inedible cake is that what you wore was policed, to the point where fewer than three pieces of clothing deemed appropriate to your gender could put a vulnerable LGBTQ+ person behind bars. Stormé DeLarverie, a butch lesbian and drag artist rumoured to have thrown the first brick, along with drag queens Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who established the Star House in New York City to keep LGBTQ+ youths off of the street, were prominent figures in the riots, but they did not come without their individual tales.

The latter was Andy Warhol’s muse, an icon for fearing no judgment of the harassment and ridicule of dressing and living as a woman while having the masculine features of a man and- despite the struggles she faced in homelessness, harassment and oppression-revelled in life and art, well known for her happy disposition and sharp humour. And what was her fate? Marsha ‘Pay it no mind’ Johnson was found floating dead in the Hudson River in July 1992, with an apparent hole in her head, and whilst the police were ferociously protested against as they briefly closed the case and attributed her death to suicide, the case remains that way, because police were too prejudiced to even regard her as a human with a beating heart and a sense of morality (unlike them) worthy of justice. None of her family were given closure; unfortunately, this is the tragic story of one of many transgender people murdered with unsolved cases due to the deep-rooted transphobia of police all around the world, and we are not exempt from such attitudes.

But why does gender matter? This has been the question buzzing in my mind ever since I heard Marsha’s story, ever since I’ve heard the stories of backlash faced by many modern drag queens behind the glitz, glam and seemingly hedonistic culture presented by the media, in RuPaul’s Drag Race and other LGBTQ+ programmes. Behind the slicked back eyebrows and manicured nails, there is a genuinely beautiful, serene disregard for society’s vast and most perilous fixation which causes the infinite problems of stereotyping, sexism and transphobia, and that is gender. Why, due to the arrangement of our genitalia at birth, so many things come into play, is genuinely confusing; why do we not pay equal heed to our eye colour, foot size or whether our hair is curly or straight? Why are people with green eyes not expected to dress, have their hair a certain way and marry solely people with blue eyes? The answer is simple; because this is ridiculous- and this strange dictatorship of gender is too. In fact, if we look at gender from a philosophical viewpoint, the most prominent of these being that of Judith Butler’s study, we see ideas about performative gender arise. Butler made a vital commentary on the non-binary nature of gender in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, in which she argues that being born male or female does not determine behaviour; rather, people learn to behave in particular ways to fit into society, and copy a series of acts associated with either the male or female sex in a performative and repetitive way to create what society views as male and female. This would explain the painful existence of transphobia and homophobia in our current society, since, as we speak the actions deemed appropriate for men and women have been transmitted to produce a social atmosphere that maintains an imitative but seemingly natural gender binary. As society continues to cling to this idea of male and female, and the normal behaviours attributed to the sexes, it rips itself to shreds; suicide is the highest killer of males, due to the gender stereotype of men having to be independent, and the vulnerability of being raw, honest and open with emotions is a feminine and ‘weak’ way to go about any sort of mental descent. This is only one of many examples of the way in which the reality of performative gender is ignored and only spurs more problems, and I feel what we need to truly understand is that we need society; Thomas Aquinas said it all the way back in the 13th century, and ultimately any discrimination harms the construction the stability that is imperative to our survival, be it racism or transphobia.

With this in mind, do we have the right to oppress others, when the grounds are merely a societal mirage? Do we have the right to oppress others when the majority of people do not permit the oppression of certain minorities?

We cannot pick and choose.

Society is in an utter crisis; pandemic aside, LGBTQ+ people are at a permanent risk that no vaccine can cure, with reports from The Guardian last year revealing that offences against transgenders have trebled in number since 2014 and homophobic hate crimes had doubled in the same period in the UK, the place in which we find our home, which we sing praise of and support with taxes and the fruits of our dutiful hard work. Stonewall says that 80% of these hate crimes go unreported. And this is our dystopia... the paradox of a society that claims to be so equal, but is in actuality, painstakingly far from it, and if this continues, society will crash and burn, and we will become the vestiges of a utopia we could have had, the smothering ashes of its corpse.

“I'm not missing a minute of this, it's the revolution!”

-Sylvia Livera-