Tuesday
We’ll take every glimmer of light we’re can get in these dark days, and the Supreme Court’s recent decision protecting LGBTQ individuals against discrimination fairly glows. The ruling comes three days after the Trump Administration finalized a rule allowing LGBTQ people to be stripped of health care and health insurance and two days after a “Black Trans Lives Matter” march in Boston drew thousands of protesters. In other words, this past week has been an emotional roller coaster ride for LGBTQ people and their supporters.
I’m repurposing a blog essay I wrote three years ago applying Twelfth Night to Trump’s attack on the transgender community. I also touch on J.K. Rowling’s recent insensitive remarks on transgender individuals, which run counter to the creative energies released by the Harry Potter novels.
In Twelfth Night Shakespeare captures our gender complexity, showing that we have much more variety to our natures than those who want to reduce us to a simple man/woman binary will admit. As University of Hawaii biologist Milt Diamond puts it, “Nature loves diversity; humans hate it.”
Diamond, incidentally, is just referring to unusual chromosome combinations, ambiguous sexual organs, and body chemistry. He doesn’t even enter into gender identity’s psychological and social dimensions.
Shakespeare, who understood humans as well as anyone ever has, couches his exploration within comedy, which circumvents the censors. Then, to cover himself, he returns all of his characters except for Antonio to socially acceptable gender identities. Before that point, however, characters try on a variety of gender identities. It should be noted that Twelfth Night was a holiday comparable to Mardi Gras for gender crossing, a time when people could behave as they would (“What You Will” is the play’s subtitle).
The play opens with an Orsino who longs for a female sensibility and then moves to an Olivia who feels trapped in expectations that she be ultra-feminine (she’s prepared to mourn the death of her brother for seven years). Fortunately for them both, they encounter a character who moves easily between genders. The shipwrecked Viola is prepared to be a lady-in-waiting for Olivia until she learns that the court is closed for mourning. Without missing a beat, she decides instead to dress up as a man and apply to Orsino’s court.
Orsino falls in love with her because she’s the only guy around who understands his longings. (His normal attendants, unnerved by his behavior, suggest deer hunting as a way to restore his masculinity.) Olivia, meanwhile, falls in love with someone acting with the freedom she herself desires. Both, in other words, fall in love with someone who represents the unfulfilled potential they sense in themselves.
I interpret the opening shipwreck that separates Viola from her twin Sebastian as an allegory about gender confusion. Small children aren’t hung up on gender but, all too soon, social expectations strike like the lightning that splits the ship, separating everyone into one of two camps. Those who feel that an important part of them has been sheared away recognize themselves in Orsino and Olivia.
Because Twelfth Night is a comedy, the gender confusion is played for laughs, even though many in society find gender identity to be no laughing matter. And because Shakespeare couldn’t have gotten away with Olivia married to a woman or Orsino to a man, he returns to prescribed roles at the end of the play. For four acts, however, he has let us know that gender identity is not as solid as society tells us it is.
Rowling is currently under fire for openly fearing that gender fluidity will erase female identity. As she sees it, one is a woman if one menstruates. Washington Post’s Molly Roberts has a clever column about Rowling’s views, which the author has conveyed in a sarcastic tweet:
“‘People who menstruate,’” Rowling tweeted last week in response to an article about access to sanitary supplies during the coronavirus epidemic that included “gender non-binary” individuals in its analysis. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
And then, in a follow-up tweet:
If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
To which Roberts responds,
[N]o one is telling Rowling that she can’t be a woman. No one is trying to erase the term women, at all. The tolerant are merely trying to move beyond the biological dichotomy our society has constructed over centuries — to show there’s something between Platform 9 and Platform 10 after all.
Roberts calls Rowling a TERF:
A TERF, as it turns out, is not a fantastic beast — but J.K. Rowling continues to insist on showing us where to find one.
The term trans-exclusionary radical feminist, meaning someone who denies transgender women’s womanhood on the theory that it detracts from cis women’s womanhood, is more of a mouthful even than tarantallegra. This jinx, one of many conjured into the cultural canon by the Harry Potter author, sends the legs of the subject into uncontrollable, tap-dancing-like spasms, and Rowling herself in recent years appears afflicted. She flails around on the Internet, upending her legacy piece by piece.
To elaborate with a little history, certain feminists in the 1970s, even as they sought to undo patriarchal limitations, themselves resorted to forms of gender essentialism. Particularly threatening to some of them were individuals who were anatomically male but felt that they were female (trans women). Wouldn’t this just be another instance of men finding ways to take over?
Regarding identity, we all have work to do, given that we have different histories. I’m always willing to give people time to evolve. Now that Rowling has stepped in a hornet’s nest, maybe she will act on the love she says she has for trans people and explore her biases.
More than Rowling’s personal view, however, I am interested in the extent to which fantasy, like comedy, is a powerful forum for grappling with vexed identity questions. Roberts notes that Rowling’s fans are letting their own imaginations run wild, even if Rowling isn’t:
Maybe it’s time to let go. Give the Harry Potter books over to those to whom they have meant, and continue to mean, so much. Allow Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood to end up together after all; allow Remus Lupin and Sirius Black to be lovers. Allow Wiccans into Hogwarts; allow Hermione to be black, yes, but trans too, if readers and imaginers believe it.
Yesterday I wrote about how Terry Pratchett has taken fantasy into areas Tolkien could not have imagined. Whereas Tolkien imagines trolls and goblins, with their industrial working class associations, to be a threat to small town hobbit life, Pratchett sees them as contributing members in an increasingly diverse society. In other words, even if Tolkien and Rowling can’t see beyond their own prejudices, the next generation of fantasy writers will do so.
Shakespeare’s genius is that he not only kept up with the times but was at least was at least 400 years ahead of them. Only now can we fully appreciate his insights into trans identity.