Rage against the rainbow:
Rage against the rainbow:
DeSantis's war on LGBTQ+ teens betrays a broader failure of the collective imagination
vol. 4 no. 3
Greetings,
The latest fascist cosplay by Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis amuses me. Of course his militant movement to stamp out nonconforming sexual expression is scary, but how does one outlaw rainbows?
Most likely, if you are reading this from within the US, you are aware that presidential hopeful DeSantis has declared a war on wokeness, largely focused on the LGBTQ+ community.
A year ago, DeSantis signed a law forbidding discussion of sexuality in kindergarten through the third grade. (Just how often this was occurring before he began raging about it is unclear, at least to me.) The so-called “Don’t Say Gay Bill”, is analyzed here in this behind-the-paywall link to a New York Times piece. Here is the actual law: Florida State HR 1557.
As to whatever “wokeness” actually means, for this piece, let’s just say it’s the Left’s own version of DeSantis’s imperiousness: a righteous crusade. As to who the “woke” are, let’s call them the shadow side of DeSantian fascists. Both like to provide distractions from their underlying attention-seeking and entitlement.
The problem then, is how to detect the deeper currents beneath the frothy waves of apolitical fuckery that passes for partisan politics, in order to surface the deeper meanings indicated by the surge in nonbinary sexual expression among adolescents, not just in Florida, but globally.
What if nonbinary-ness is a glimpse of what humans can be after the hierarchy falls?
I contemplated this recently as I observed a rainbow slowly come into sharp focus over the Atlantic and then gently fade into fizzy opalescence. As it did so, I thought to myself, “Good luck containing that kind of magic, Ron.”
This is not to say members of the LGBTQ+ community are rainbows. No. I am saying that the general association of non-binary sexual expression with various rainbow-themed flags seems metaphorically signficant at this moment in history.
In the LGBTQ+ community a rainbow of sorts comprises the entirety of the Gay Pride flag, and all subsequent iterations of it (there are many), including the pink and blue one generally flown on behalf of trans rights.
The symbolism of the rainbow in the original Gay Pride flag is multi-faceted, but generally speaking, is a sign of peaceful acceptance. First flown in San Francisco in 1978, the gay pride standard has undergone a few iterations, but typically is depicted as eight colors running horizontally, with hot pink at the top and violet on the bottom.
According to its credited artist, the late Gilbert Baker, each of the 8 colors are assigned a specific meaning.
Is it a happy accident, or a distinct sign from the Cosmos, that rainbows, universally regarded as a sign of hope, have come to symbolize a segment of the population helping to focus our attention on what it means to be a human being, and at a time when our collective myths are collapsing in on themselves?
Regardless of the culture from which the myth emerges, rainbows being equated with hope also implicates them in how we humans view ourselves as we are in the present moment, and how we are connected to the future, specifically by way of our creative urges.
What if nonbinary sexuality is a glimpse of what humans can be after the hierarchy falls? Because the hierarchies will and are already falling, authoritarianism notwithstanding. Which is why DeSantis, and others like him, are delusional to think they can succeed in controlling people’s bodies and identities. That paradigm is gasping its last gasp.
Could DeSantis be a ‘woke’ Bulgarian?
The BBC reports that Karens fear rainbow demons that eat children, while Bulgarians believe walking under a rainbow will cause someone to change genders. (NB: ok, Burmese Karens…)
Who reading this truly believes that democracy based on a shared viewpoint as communicated by Walter Cronkite every night will be restored? If that’s what you think of as the second coming of democracy after all we’ve been through in the past decade, you’re either gobsmackingly naive or grossly deluded, and frankly, you are in the way.
Keep in mind DeSantis’s freak-out over kids flaunting binary strictures is occurring simultaneous to the rise in artificial intelligence where whether we chat with a bot or another human is starting to become irrelevant.
It seems being human is starting to mean we take on different bodies, different expressions of consciousness.
To date anyway, there has been no move to ban the use of rainbow flags in Florida, but the field of terror this anti-gay law has created over what is and is not allowed to be said publicly, along with its imprimatur for bigotry that leads to potential violence, has the state’s LGBTQ+ community on high alert.
Last week, DeSantis announced he will expand his law to cover all grades, K-12, to “protect parents” whose rights he claims are being infringed upon by having their children exposed to an organized campaign of woke “grooming”, designed to create peer pressure and sympathy from activist teachers who support gender mayhem.
This is preposterous. Primary school teachers don’t typically provoke social justice movements. More likely, they are caught in them, forced onto the front lines by political stuntsmen like DeSantis.
If the LGBTQ+ community could find a way to move public discourse beyond the distractions amplified by the profit-driven corporate media that thrives on conflict, then chances would improve that Floridians and others could have a meaningful public conversation about how kids today are pointing to a very different generation of adults tomorrow.
DeSantis has the upper hand as long as he is able to keep the focus on wokeness rather than a policy debate that seeks to meet the future needs of a generation that clearly wants to color outside the lines of the status quo.
Which do we choose — the status quo or our future generations? To save one, we have to sacrifice the other.
It’s not wokeness driving this, nor is it peer pressure.
It might just be that a generation of kids who see no future in what has been the status quo for so long, are either doing things their own way, or checking out: never have teen suicide rates been this high.
Which do we want to support? The status quo or our future generations? To save one, we have to sacrifice the other.
Such frank conversations if they are to be productive won’t actually take place on a national stage. Innovating for the future while meeting the very real immediate psychological and other needs of all kids, LGBTQ+ or otherwise, must be done organically, from the ground up at the local level, facilitated by parents and teachers, and other compassionate community members, without the cynical media circus.
Which is why DeSantis won’t tolerate that happening. Instead, he is holding Floridian families and teachers in a matrix of madness, aided by a complicit media corps that amplifies his red hot rhetoric.
For example, why does the mainstream media not regularly point out that Florida’s LGBTQ+ community does not exist in a wokeness vacuum? So-called gender dysphoria across all ages is a global phenomenon. In 2018 in the Netherlands, for example, researchers reported a 20-fold increase in transgender clinic visits between 1980 and 2015.
Nor is the incidence even new. Historically across many cultures, including indigenous American ones, non-binary sexual behavior has not been considered a clinical diagnosis, but a full expression of such a person’s creative self, and a common enough one that such persons were viewed as a normal segment of the communities as a whole.
If gender fluidity is not actually novel, the LGBTQ+ community is hurting itself by not leading a more nuanced debate surrounding some of the legitimate issues DeSantis’s law raises, such as what, if any, medical interventions are actually appropriate for young adults and teens who identify as trans (see this article for more on the different expressions of “trans”).
It would seem from speaking with experts, as I have in the past, that when deciding how to respond to these expressions, taking a wait-and-see approach to whether the trans behaviors will persist has historically been viewed as the most pragmatic, and certainly best for the young person.
It’s a common sense approach that needs no hamfisted laws, and actually does empower parents, as DeSantis claims he wants to do.
Just last month, the efficacy of adopting a low-key attitude of acceptance without rushing toward medical intervention was reaffirmed in two separate studies as having the best outcomes, both medically and psychologically.
The first is a large retrospective cohort study of Dutch adults who slow-rolled their way through tranisitioning so that they typically didn’t fully commit to their decision until after puberty. The other is a large survey of American trans adults who similarly tended to hold off transitioning until adulthood.
But given that American medical science’s primary function anymore is rarely to wait and see, but is instead to formulate problems to treat and then intervene, cha-ching!, what’s best for this cohort lately has been sacrificed at the altar of woke social justice meets profit.
Joseph Harding, co-author of Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill, aka “Don’t Say Gay” law, faces 35 years in prison for defrauding federal government in money laundering and wire fraud scheme.
Even if “wokeness” is not the cause of kids questioning the status quo’s ideas of creative and sexual expression, it exacerbates the potential for irrevocable iotragenic harm to those young persons who do. Instead of a novel opportunity to promptly intervene and make money, what if we viewed this phenomenon of nonbinary sexual expression as an invitation to ask what questions this cohort are raising about what it means to be human?
Meanwhile, DeSantis is unsubtly leading the charge against doctors of adolescent trans medicine, accusing them of the “mutilation” of children vicitimized by wokeneness, forced to undergo unproven medical interventions.
In ancient cultures, the rainbow is most often described as a bridge between the material world and the nonmaterial one. That is not the same thing as saying a bridge between this world and the next. That’s because for ancient cultures, there was no separation of the natural world from the supernatural one. Life was life. It continued on after death, just in a different form. Accessing that form by crossing the metaphorical rainbow required psychic preparation, but not necessarily the death of the body.
And if not a bridge, then as it is in Australian aboriginal myths, the rainbow is considered a symbol of the regenerative nature of humanity. This speaks to there being a cycle of creative power, not a straight line.
A notable break from this is the Judeo-Christian tradition’s emphasis on the rainbow as a sign of hope from God that there would be peace, that the world would never end in a flood again (that doesn’t preclude other cataclysms, mind you — the Cherokee hold that there will be another apocalypse, and it will come by earthquakes), and that it was time to procreate after the destruction of humanity in the Great Flood.
Republicans eye a ‘cold civil war’ waged through cultural issues, says Robert Blizzard, Republican pollster.
Not being a scholar of such things, my amateur assessment is that the Old Testament marks the first time a rainbow was given as a sign from a god that was considered separate and “higher” than humans, instead of as an illumined path between two different, but equal experiences of beingness, and thus of consciousness.
With this precedent, sorting and ranking followed.
This is reinforced by the prevailing Judeo-Christian chauvinistic view that it was the inferior woman Eve whose curiosity and disobedience led to the separation between the Everlasting Source and the material world, making binary, linear, either/or thinking normal. Good/bad, boy/girl, black/white, Christian/Jew, straight/gay, saint/sinner, saved/damned, etc. This has been our status quo for about 2,000 years.
But nature doesn’t sort us. Just humans do that. And men started it.
It’s all a construct, not a fact, designed to flow resoures up to the top, and to control their access to all the rest below.
As I have written before, just because something isn’t factual doesn’t make it untrue, but for an explanation of something to have any meaning and relevance to society, enough people have to buy into it so that cultural norms and habits can be established.
What if the LGBTQ+ community is the leading edge of the Zeitgeist in what it means to be more connected to our whole selves, and thus even more creative than we’ve been before in our linearity?
Even if it is not “the” end time, these are end times.
It’s an age of great and rapid extinction. Life as we have known it collectively is ending, whether because of so many cataclysms in the aggregate, or a coming apocalyptic event such as nuclear war.
Whatever the myths and legends hierarchies have employed to separate us all and concentrate power at the top have served their purpose, but are now unsustainable. Massive migration on every continent is due to restricted access to resources, either by authoritarian governments that horde power, or because increasingly dramatic elemental events such as earthquakes, floods, fires, and wind storms are destroying ecosystems and communities.
Is it possible that the questions nonbinary sexuality raises are the rainbow we must cross if we are to evolve, or at least continue as a species, and govern ourselves according to new visions of society based on new collective agreements?
Democracy as we’ve known it is dead. The phony Darwinian science it has been based upon is now crumbling as fast as the American Dream. The tie-in between jingoism, patriotism, and Christianity is worn out.
However we reinterpret, that is to say, recreate democracy, it will be predicated on a new myth, because we will need a new collective story to gather around. Earth can no longer sustain hierarchical mythology’s demand that we remain sorted and separate from one another, disconnected from the regenerative cycles that nourish Earth and thus nourish as all.
What we are witnessing, whether or not we admit it, is the evolution of a world of genderless people, biology not withstanding.
What if the gender fluid community is the leading edge of the Zeitgeist in what it means to be more connected to our whole selves, and thus even more creative than we’ve been before in our linearity?
Rather than view this trend in discarding binary blinders on creative expression as a crisis, what if we viewed it as an opportunity to experience how the nature of being human, not “making” humans, is expanding, and in an Earth-friendly manner? And since imagination and creativity are among two inexhaustible resources on this planet, exploring new expressions of them seems practical, doesn’t it?
Consider the possibility that nonbinary sexuality and all the questions it raises are the rainbow we must cross if we are to evolve the Human Being story, or at least continue, as a species, and govern ourselves according to new visions of society based on new collective agreements?
If so, then self-appointed authorities like popes of old crowning themselves as guardians of the gate, mediators of the All, must go. The DeSantises of the world, they must go. At least where new democracy is to flourish.
What we are witnessing, whether or not we admit it, is the evolution of a world of genderless people, biology not withstanding.
Think that’s madness? Consider that virtually all cultural myths include a story of a child born outside the norm of kings and the rest of the upper classes, who goes on to bring the new world. Moses comes to mind. So does Jesus.
Or, consider this: how many people who lived in the 18th Century do you think were expecting that in their lifetime the divine right of kings would be sliced at the neck?
What if all the people we love are all soul-related and so it doesn’t matter about our bodies? In that scenario, gender is ephemeral, the body merely a way to house what is real, timeless, and integrated.
Certainly, the growing literature on psychedelics indicates that there is more to being human than living the material world. Not only that, but that what these so-called “psychonauts” consistently report is how these psychoactive plants help them to see how humans are meant to exist in the realm of the material that is enfolded into a larger, ensouled universe, not one of gendered and other sorting constructs designed to rank who does and does not deserve access to resources.
All signs point to humans leveraging our imaginations for the purpose of connecting with others, to using the materials of earth to grow our communities, to know ourselves better in relationship to others, including with the other living beings on this planet.
Rather than rushing to “fix”, shame, or limit these young humans, let’s love them. Let’s help them create new nonbinary boundaries against being manipulated or bullied by self-interested assholes. And, let’s let them teach us what it means to be more fully human.
We can either rage against the rainbow, or cross it. Crossing the rainbow might be the way we discover that the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend towards justice.
Peace,
Whitney
It bothers us more than others, because in our past lives there were real consequences for such things. Remember, Pappy, when there were entire departments paid to copy edit?Pass me my spitoon, would ya, hehe?
Love this. Love you. xo