The LGBTQ Scene is Not the Danger. You are the Danger (Big TW Transphobia)

I grew up in apartheid South Africa, so I heard all the racist stories as a child: Black and brown folk were violent criminals who’d take over the country given half the chance. We called it “swart gevaar” or “black danger.”

The lie was the only way the apartheid government could convince South Africans of its justness. Instilling fear was the only way to convince white folk to accept an oppressive society.  Hitler did it, too. So did many other dictators, so I’m particularly sensitive to it. I watched it destroy millions of lives.

Yesterday, I saw swart gevaar happen all over again, only this time it was pointed at drag performers and the LGBTQ+ community. People referred to their performance as a sign of perversion.

When the USA passed the first US bathroom bill, they justified themselves by suggesting trans folk would predate on women in single sex spaces, as though cis rapists would never dream of disobeying stupid laws like the bathroom bill while breaking major laws like rape. “I want to rape someone in a bathroom but I can’t cuz the law says I’m not allowed to commit minor crimes while committing major crimes,” said no rapist ever.

I mean, really. Do you even hear yourselves?

The very concept of it was ridiculous, and yet the same “trans gevaar” nonsense arose again yesterday all over the internet.

At the time of the bathroom bill, I decided to see how many bathroom rapes had been perpetrated by trans people. I found a very round zero. A Virginia judge found the same. [He said][ https://le.utah.gov/interim/2024/pdf/00000577.pdf] “There is no documented evidence of a transgender person in the United States ever causing an issue in the bathroom.”

I did find a different kind of statistic, though: Trans people are [four times][ https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/ncvs-trans-press-release/] more likely to be assaulted than cisgender people. Those numbers are still rising.

But when drag performers engage in performance art, the Christian fundamentalist brain still turns to sexual perversion as a justification for their oppressive desires. Just like the apartheid government, the only way to justify their bigotry is to attach falsehoods to the community they’re targeting.

Let’s be clear:

Drag is a performance art, not a kink. It’s performed by cis and queer people alike. Not all drag performers are transgender, and being trans is not an indication of anyone’s sexuality. Some trans people are kinky. Some are not, just like the cis community. They merely have genders that don’t correspond to the bodies they were born with.

The real threat is in the air right now. It’s sinking down around us on a global scale because bigots are crying “trans gevaar” everywhere. That kind of hatred is directly responsible for the rising assault levels the trans community is experiencing.

They are not the danger.

You are the danger.