Gay Men and Gender Role Enforcement Rage
Lately in my psychotherapy and coaching practice specializing in gay men, I’ve noticed guys describing a certain kind of stress that they get from being exposed to current events in the news.
This time is an era of particular political polarization, between Republicans and Democrats, and while there have always been those tensions, they have been heightened during the eras of Clinton/Bush, Bush/Obama, and Trump/Biden. Republicans have been using issues related to sexual orientation and gender minorities for a while now as “wedge issues” to fire up their political base of voters, first by harping on same-sex marriage and whipping up a frenzy about that, until we achieved full marriage equality from the (then) Supreme Court, to now their efforts to target and scapegoat drag queens or trans people, especially trans women. What both of those groups have in common, especially in the eyes of the bigots, are “men” somehow becoming “feminized;” drag queens as (usually) gay men dressing up in costume, and trans women transitioning from a traditionally male to traditionally female identity and presentation.
It is my belief that these are being used as controversial issues that “rev up” a political party base with a topic they don’t seem to understand, especially among people who aren’t very well educated and where it’s easy to appeal to their fears, much like the times when Black people and “Communists” were demonized as threats to mainstream (White, Christian, straight, cisgender, upper-middle to upper classes) Americans.
What the anti-gay and the anti-trans groups, and their messages, have in common is that they are both related to a certain “rage” that seems to consistently trigger a certain type of person that comes with the idea of challenging “traditional” gender roles and gender stereotypes. When we bring critical thinking to this, we see that Republicans and other “conservative” parties in other countries just use this as a manipulation of the masses to gain power, influence, and ultimately money. They look for, and find, “wedge” issues that aren’t really that important to huge numbers of people, but they carry the “isn’t this just awful?” power to raise the ire of especially bigoted people. It’s a sad situation, but it works tremendously effectively for their cause, influencing tens of millions of people.
And we see it so many ways, all of which cause harm to real, living people, from inconveniences all the way up to gruesomely violent murders of innocent people whose only “crime” is in the eyes of their oppressors, who appoint themselves police, judge, jury, and executioner of acting in a way outside of traditional gender binary roles and presentations.
Here, I’d like to go over some ways that we see how “gender role enforcement rage” gets manifested in recent society, how it harms all of us, and what to do about it, so that we preserve our rights and our dignity as communities and as individuals:
- Straight Fathers of Gay Sons – Some of my colleagues as well as myself have written about straight fathers of gay sons, and the “alienated” or “failure to relate” phenomenon that occurs, perhaps even unconsciously to the father, who doesn’t quite “recognize” himself in his “different” son, and might “pull back” because of that. This creates distance which can usher in a lifetime of strained relationship, that even though they are both male, they are not the same in the straight man/gay man sense. Straight fathers of gay sons who indulge in gender role enforcement get annoyed, angry, disappointed, disgusted, or enraged at their gay son for not being an “extension” of their straight selves. They experience a Narcissistic injury that their “expectation” or assumption or “hope” for a straight son didn’t come to pass. The straight fathers experience having a gay son as a certain “fuck you” from Mother Nature that they take very personally, and a narcissistic father will be enraged that Mother Nature “did this” “to him”, when he had a “right” to have the kind of son he wanted, not the one he got, and there are no returns, no exchanges.
More progressive fathers – one I saw on Instagram in a car taking his young son to buy a Little Mermaid doll for his birthday – are becoming more frequent now, but in past decades, fathers of gay sons who either lacked showing traits that “most boys” (read: straight ones) do, or, perhaps “worse” in their eyes, showed traits that “girls” do became enraged, even unconsciously.
There is such an inherent misogyny in Gender Role Enforcement Rage. The idea that anyone “male” has traits that get anywhere near being “female” disgusts or enrages people – usually “toxic masculinity” men, but women as well. It’s the old idea that when a little girl is a “tomboy”, that’s fine, it’s seen as “bold” or charming, but when a little boy shows feminine traits, he’s a “sissy”. This is the idea that something loses worth in proportion to how feminine it is, such as women in “pink collar” jobs like teachers, daycare workers, elder care workers, and social workers being traditionally being underpaid.
We can be grateful that some of the worst of Straight Fathers rejecting gay sons has abated, but it’s far from eliminated. Many of my clients describe estranged relationships with their fathers, especially after coming out, but even this can have a hierarchy: the straight father of a gay son who is “butch” and an athletic star might be more “accepting” and less enraged than the father of a gay son who is also a drag queen or effeminate.
The straight fathers and gay sons who have managed to make a go of it has often been, to my observation, just through repeated exposure. While straight fathers might always wish they had a straight son instead, a “chip off the old block,” sometimes a relationship can be forged of mutual respect, especially if the father is basically compassionate. But for gay men, it can be luck of the draw. It is a sad reality that a bad, or just estranged, relationship between a straight father and a gay son often exists, especially in comparison to gay men’s relationships with their straight mothers.
What to Do About It?
We can speak to women and men we know who either have children, or will one day, that having an LGBT is certainly possible. It’s not as likely as a cisgender, heterosexual child, by the odds, but all LGBT people have to come from somewhere; we have families, too (something the bigots forget). We can prepare these men and women who are potential parents to be emotionally with the possibility their child will emerge with an LGBT identity, and offer support if that is so for their emotional navigation and cultural education. Even progressive, affirmative parents of LGBT children can need emotional support for knowing what kinds of actions might especially help – or hurt – their LGBT child, especially the non-gender-conforming child (who might not be LGBT!). Reminding them not to make assumptions that a little boy wants a truck for Christmas and a little girl wants a doll. It could be, but best not to assume.
We (as gay men) can befriend straight men and women who are willing to accept (key word) education and help if they want to be the best parents they can be to a gender-non-conforming child, and if they don’t want to be supportive, then we can warn them of the harms they cause their child for a lifetime of their upbringing, and the harms they would experience from having a child despise you because of how badly you treated them. Being affirmative is a win for everyone. Challenging parents, teachers, coaches, etc., that gender non-conforming behavior does not automatically mean a child is gay or lesbian, and challenging the idea that gender-non-conforming behavior is antithetical to God, school systems, a ready military, a workforce, society, whatever. Enforcing gender role conformity has no ultimate benefit, but plenty of harms.
- Straight Women around Gay Men – Another way that Gender Role Enforcement Rage manifests is with straight women around gay men. I knew someone who won a good financial settlement in an employment discrimination lawsuit because he had a female boss who hated gay men so much she once screamed, “You people (gay men) drive me nuts!” and then punched a hole in the wall near his head in the workplace. Someone else I knew won a lawsuit after a female boss called him a “Negative Nancy” in the workplace when he complained about lousy working conditions. Another one was heard saying to a colleague, “I know how to handle all these fa—-ts”, and then systematically fired every gay man in her department.
Some straight women resent gay men because they “squander” their male privilege by what they believe is “choosing” to be gay men, where if they were men, they would embody Toxic Masculinity for power and domination in a way that they try to have (as women) but don’t quite succeed (Ellen Degeneres is notorious this way; acting as if the only way to get things done, or to avoid being exploited, is to adopt the behavior of the “mean man.”) When straight women get enraged at gay men, it’s because they believe in Gender Role Enforcement and resent that they don’t have male privilege to be gruff, aggressive, and attain status and power that they want for themselves, leading to misandry as a retaliation for misogyny from men in general. Two wrongs don’t make a right; revenge is not justice.
It’s a sad phenomenon, but I’ve seen it in my practice often. Straight women sometimes will “like” gay men, with phrases like the “gay best friend” or “I love my gays,” but they don’t respect them like they do straight men. Some straight women resent reporting in the workplace to a gay man, where they would respect reporting to a straight man. They feel that reporting to a gay man is an indignity, much the way misogynistic men might resent reporting and “taking orders” from a female boss, and made “even worse” if they’re racist and reporting to a woman of color (TV’s “Mad Men” depicted this: a woman was promoted and a male co-worker complained to his male colleague, “What am I supposed to call her? My boss?” said with a derisive scorn. In the 1960s, that would have been more common than today, but it still happens.
For these women, it’s an internalized sexism that because gay men are “feminized,” it is a “comedown” in respectability and status.
What to Do About It?
We assert that everyone – regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender presentation has a right to dignity and equal opportunity in the workplace. If we are managers, we respect this. We hire/fire/promote everyone equally, and we enforce discipline against our reports who indulge in gender role conformity oppression of their colleagues.
Personally, we speak up. We tell friends and family when something they say that’s sexist (either way), or transphobic, or homophobic offends us. We don’t need to be a part of an oppressed group to defend that group in the name of human dignity. I’m not Jewish, but I’ll confront anti-Semitism, for example. But I’ll also criticize “conservative” or Orthodox Jews who are sexist or anti-gay, which many are, as are conservative Christians or Muslims, or more. It’s the idea of not being so tolerant that we tolerate intolerance, and try to live as examples of, “Hey! I know! How about not being bigoted about anybody??”
- Gay Men against Gay “Fem” Men and Trans Women – Certainly within the gay male community, we see our own version of Gender Role Enforcement Rage, when “butch” or “masc” gay men look down on “bottoms”, or drag queens, or otherwise “fem” men (like the obnoxious phrase on gay social media profiles, “No fats, no fems, no Asians,” which is remarkable how such a short phrase can be so profoundly offensive based on body type, gender presentation, and racism all at once.
Gay men who are more masculine might shun or avoid fem gay men socially. Historically, some gay men create an internal “hierarchy” of the gay male community, where they consider themselves gay, but “I’m not like you,” meaning more fem gay men (That’s a line that a butch gay male character says to another character in “Fellow Travelers”, a popular TV series this season about gay men in 1950s Washington, DC during the McCarthy Era of “Communist witch hunts.”
Gay men like that consider their fellow gay men to be unpopular to the extent that they are feminized; again, the misogynistic notion that that which has been made more feminine has been reduced in quality or status.
Gay men have also been known to have antipathy toward trans people, wanting to distance themselves from trans women in the LGBT movement. Part of this is a legitimate desire to educate the public that gay men “don’t want to be women,” and that there is a difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, which many bigots confuse and refuse to be educated otherwise.
One example of this was in the depiction of one of television history’s first “out” gay characters, Billy Crystal as gay brother “Jodie” on “Soap”, a hilarious nighttime sitcom parody of daytime soap opera TV shows, when Jodie is gay but there is discussion of his having a “sex change operation” as a result. This was written by (now legendary) TV writer Susan Harris, who wrote “The Golden Girls”, a gay iconic show. Hopefully, she’s learned that difference by now, since “The Golden Girls” not only has a huge gay male fan base to this day, but the show also dealt with gay characters (and even HIV) in sensitive ways.
What to Do About It?
So while it’s important for the public to be educated about gay men versus transvestic fetishism versus trans women versus drag queens, it’s important that our LGBT collective community is not divided from within, as this is just what our enemies want, to dilute our power to strive for full and equal rights by a “divide and conquer” strategy. In fact, I believe all minorities, from women, LGBT people, people of color, immigrants, veterans, and people with disabilities should all rise up as one to fight oppression and achieve full equality against the cisgender, White, straight, Christian, rich, masculine, able-bodied males.
- Single Gay Men as Fathers (not “mothers”) – We see more Gender Role Enforcement Rage when we hear resistance to either gay male couples or gay single men adopting or creating children by surrogate egg donor with a carrying mother.
In psychology and social work, every text book that discusses a child’s formative development, medically and psychologically, just “assumes” that all babies are raised by “stay-at-home” mommies, and criticize the idea that two men or even a single man could raise a child; women are seen to be “equipped” to be primary parents, and men are not.
The idea that women just “can’t” be priests or ministers or corporate executives, and that men “can’t” be stay-at-home parents or primary caregivers for infants is Gender Role Enforcement Rage.
What to Do About It?
Again, education. The men who raise children, such as single straight men, single gay men, or partnered/married gay might be smaller in number than heterosexual-led families, they are still part of the fabric of the American Family. In child development classes, or other settings that discuss raising a child, as teachers or students, we can add “or other primary caregiver” when discussing infant and child development, beyond just “the mother” does this or that.
- Republicans/Religious Right against LGBT People – Anyone who has seen the news media, especially in the United States but also in the United Kingdom, among others, has seen the special focus of antipathy and aggressive vitriol about sexual and gender minorities lately. Republican lawmakers from governors to state representatives to House members to Senate members have formed some kind of “anti-gay, anti-trans” bandwagon, like Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” bill in Florida, or his efforts (successfully) to ban medical care for trans youth, such as puberty blockers, and spreading deliberate misinformation that “woke” parents are “forcing” gender confirmation surgery on children, which is not true.
Conservative religious figures demonstrate a wild, unhinged rage that “man shall not lie with man” or the “God created two sexes, male and female”, completely ignorant and downright hostile to learning about the nature of sexual orientation and gender identity, which any sexologist, endocrinologist, obstetrician, pediatrician, social worker, psychologist, biologist, nurse, etc. could tell you about (or should be able to tell you about). Aggressive, gender binary “enforcement” is a reaction from ignorant or intolerant people who just aren’t educated about things like Intersex Children or the nature of psychological gender and sexual orientation, and they get mad at things they don’t understand. My thought is they are defending against a sense of shame about their own ignorance, and asserting that anything they don’t know doesn’t exist, isn’t legitimate, or doesn’t matter.
The antipathy and level of hate is so strong that Republicans in America and “conservatives” in other countries go into drafting and passing “black-letter law” and policy that systematically oppresses trans people, causing a very real damage to their mental and physical health, and that of their families.
The level of hate and rage that “those people” are not “acting” and “conforming” to how they “should” for their gender is curious in that they are not harmed in any way by sexual and gender minorities existing, but they act as if the more rights and well-being sexual and gender minorities have, the “less” they have, which doesn’t make sense.
However, in their minds, a rigid world view is the “correct” world view, and that life works best when “girls were girls and men were men” and that a functional or idealized society is when gender roles are delineated and severely enforced.
The cautionary tale of “fiction that’s too close to reality” of The Handmaid’s Tale, book, movie, and TV series, labeled all LGBT people as “Gender Traitors,” a crime punishable by death in their dystopian, far-Right Christian theocracy hellscape of a country that used to be the United States. That Republic was formed when birth rates went very low, the environment was increasingly polluted, and people lost their way of what “God intended” for each gender, so they intervened by staging a violent revolution that established an Evangelical theocratic dictatorship instead of an “unholy” democracy, forcing the few “fertile” women to be “handmaid” carriers of babies as the result of rape with their “commander” for the benefit of childless “wives” served by servant “Marthas,” all watched over by The Eye (a CIA-like government paramilitary police force).
This kind of Gender Role Enforcement Rage goes back far, such as in the late 1880’s when women’s suffrage, the right to vote, was being debated. It was during this time that the term “Religious Right” was coined, with shrill pundits then saying that if women got the right to vote, it would “destroy the very fabric of the American Family,” which was heard again during the Republican fight against marriage equality, which is still part of their formal party platform.
One of the leaders of women’s suffrage and early feminist civil rights was Matilda Gage, the mother of Maud Gage, wife to L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the Oz book series. So, even then, those opposed to the Religious Right were “friends of Dorothy,” so to speak (although I recently read that the “Dorothy” in that phrase refers to poet and essayist Dorothy Parker, not the Dorothy from Oz).
What to Do About It?
Republicans who believe in the “old values” of not spending taxpayer money on social services, limited government regulation, personal freedoms, and a focus on personal wealth accumulation in an unregulated market need to assert what they want from their party leaders who have gotten “distracted” in recent years by “culture wars” issues. Democrats and others who oppose Republican oppression of sexual and gender minorities need to participate in the political system by voting, running for office, or doing things to influence for their candidates and against the others as an active participant in a democracy, in small and large ways.
- Lesbians/TERFs Against Trans People – Gender Role Enforcement Rage can actually come from feminists, straight or lesbian, male and female, or others. While feminists usually fight for gender equality, and fight against women’s long-standing and global oppression, we’ve seen exceptions to this when cisgender women have Gender Role Enforcement Rage. The “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, or TERF, movement is about this. Figureheads such as JK Rowling (author of the “Harry Potter” books) have aligned with figures and organizations that endorse even violence against trans women, seeing them as nothing but “sick men who want to dress like women to get access to “real” women in order to commit sexual assaults” or “selfish men who want to dress up as women and compete in women’s sports where they are more likely to win prizes.” While JK Rowling has made some statements abhorring violence against trans women, she has also “liked” comments on social media hat are related to violence against trans women and girls. This is misandrist, and could be related to her own disclosure that she is a sexual assault survivor from a cisgender male perpetrator, and she is sensitive to “women’s spaces” being reserved for cisgender women only. Other lesbians have been against trans men because they accuse trans men of “just being women who aren’t allowing themselves to be lesbians” and feel that trans women are just women who are capitulating under pressure to join the patriarchy.
What’s interesting is that these aren’t calm, casual positions, they are sometimes taken to extremes. The internet controversy over the fight for trans rights versus the resistance from the TERF movement or the religious conservative camp rages with fervor. “Politics makes strange bedfellows,” in that religious conservatives aren’t usually in bed with feminist issues, but in this case, they seem to have found common ground in the effort to oppress trans people. One politician in Florida even said in a speech, “Trans people should not exist.”
It’s important to note that there are plenty of feminists who are not TERF; they advocate for equal rights and life/dignity for all genders, including gender minorities, and feminists can come from any gender themselves, including cisgender men. It’s just the (ooooooh – radical!) idea that women should be treated equally, which is what the early feminist movement said all along, and yet we are a long way away from this, whether it’s in the “gender pay gap” of equal pay for equal work, or the idea that “pink collar” professions traditionally filled by women are paid less (including mental health providers), or that women are tremendously more likely to be victims of violent crime rather than perpetrators of it, globally.
What to Do About It?
It’s important that all oppressed “out” or minority groups understand our commonality when it comes to advocacy and activism. The Right-wing, cisgender male bigots giggle with glee when they can divide minority communities, including sexual and gender minorities, against one another. In this way, they continue their oppression relatively unabated, “because they can,” but if all the oppressed minority groups would rise up as one, we would achieve better treatment and conditions for each, and every, minority group. Look for ways to build bridges with other minority groups. I’ve been to protests and community rallies advocating for groups I’m not a part of, such as women advocating for the right to control their own bodies in abortion and birth control, or oppressed Jewish or ethnic minority groups.
- Religious Institutions – The idea of Gender Role Enforcement Rage is an old one. Religious institutions have been especially misogynistic for years, banning female priests, imams, or ministers, or things like saying women are to be silent in church services, or that women should be segregated from men socially and educationally, or that “woman was created for man’s pleasure” and the like. The current rage against gay men, drag queens, and trans women in particular from the Republican party in America or other conservative political parties in other countries is certainly well-influenced by conservative religious outlooks that embrace Gender Role Conformity Rage as some kind of “obligation to God.”
These people believe that Gender Role Enforcement Rage is not only “OK,” but it is “demanded” in the eyes of “God”, that men should do certain things, women should do certain other things, and that trans people neither exist nor should exist. And they wonder why church and other religious services have lost attendance numbers in modern times.
The idea that gay men are “sinners” in a religious context is the basis for most, if not all, of the oppression gay men face in societies worldwide. While we supposedly have “separation of church and state,” we obviously don’t if religious bigotry against gay men has been allowed to be the Law of the Land, with some recent exceptions such as marriage equality, but it’s a constant political battle. Part of “heterosexual privilege” is that straight people don’t need to wake up every day and see debates in the news on whether they should be allowed to live or not.
Gender Role Enforcement Rage goes back to “Adam and Eve” in the bible, and this idea that “Woman tempted Man” with the apple from the forbidden tree as “original sin” ever since, and need to be “controlled” and punished for that original act forever more.
What to Do About It?
If we bring critical thinking to how these religious fables have been too long allowed to be part of public policy, we start to see a way out of Gender Role Enforcement Rage and its harms. If we are a part of religious groups or institutions, we let it be known to our colleagues and to the clergy that oppression and Gender Role Enforcement Rage has no place in a benevolent spiritual community. We “vote with our feet” to leave congregations where clergy are bigoted. We refuse to participate in religious institutions that allow oppression to flourish. And maybe we especially support spiritual communities that do not believe in oppression, and are actually a part of the solution.
- Academic Institutions – Academic institutions from preschools to graduate schools have been big perpetrators of Gender Role Enforcement, perhaps more passively and less than actual rage. Until relatively recently, there were “men’s” and “women’s” colleges. There were “men’s” and “women’s” dormitories. Social groups were divided (and still are) into sororities for women and fraternities for men. So, where do nonbinary students go? Do they not get to participate in the dominant college social group structure of Greek Life?
I remember when it was controversial and newsworthy when a college “went co-ed”. The term “co-ed” used to refer to a young woman in college. Back then, raging debates ensued and many conservatives predicted (wrongly) that their academic institution would be diminished or ruined if it allowed women.
Sexism reigned until Title IX (of the Educational Amendments, 1972), a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex (gender) in federally-funded educational institutions. Yet, we still see women under-represented in the “hard sciences” of chemistry or engineering or medicine.
While they collectively have made some strides, it’s a more subtle and even insidious gender role enforcement in educational institutions, in ways that are made worse by not being talked about as much as gender debates (rages) in other settings.
That said, I recently became aware of an “over-enforcement” of diversity advocacy in academic settings, in which the long-standing ill of misogyny on college campuses was met with a problem on the other side of this, which was an act of misandry, where a man was treated very unfairly. In these kinds of situations, “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Any antipathy based on a person’s traits (gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, national origin, handicap status, veteran status, etc.) is destructive to a collective society. Justice is good; revenge is harmful. Discretion between the two is paramount.
What to Do About It?
If we are students, staff, or faculty of academic institutions, we try to view everything we are near, especially things we are in charge of, through a lens of fairness and equity. Not “revenge,” but a challenge to ourselves and others to undermine the old views of binary gender exclusions toward a new fairness in academic pursuits. Speak up. Look for the binary and challenge it: “separate but equal” is not equal.
- Entertainment – Gender Role Enforcement, rageful or not, continues in entertainment. The winter “awards season” of the Golden Globes, SAG Awards, Emmys, Academy Awards (aka “Oscars”) still delineates in its award categories of “best” actor or actress, or supporting actor or actress. The recent 2024 Golden Globes telecast featured terms “best male actor” and “best female actor,” shying away from the now seen as passe’ term of “actress”, but still saying the same thing by creating a gender line. How do actors who are non-binary get considered for awards? And why was “actress” retired as a term anyway, in place of “actor”? Why is something “made better” when it is made “more masculine,” eliminating the “female who acts” terminology subsumed into the male terminology? We don’t have “directress” but Hollywood has an actually long history of women directors, at least in filmdom’s infancy (Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino come to mind).
It’s all a bit convoluted, because in the Golden Globes’ attempts to be more sensitive in their acting category descriptions, all they seemed to do was re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Entertainment has a history of Gender Role Enforcement Rage in that while in Shakespeare’s time women weren’t allowed to act, as it was seen as vulgar for a woman to do, male actors portrayed female characters (the first “Juliet” was most likely played by a male actor, probably a teen with a higher, yet-unchanged voice).
Silent film sensation Rudolph Valentino was criticized as “pink powder puff” for being especially “pretty,” especially when he was made up for filming or photographs. Figures like Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn were severely criticized for wearing pants instead of only skirts and dresses.
The history of drag is long, and important, but even while early drag performers were admired, they weren’t really respected, similar to Black performers in history. To this day, shows like “RuPaul’s Drag Race” are relegated to the lesser television networks, despite its tremendous worldwide success and Emmy wins; the show led by the a) Black and b) Drag host has been known to have to fight for its production budget and is not exactly “Big Three” prime time network TV.
What to Do About It?
As viewers, simply watch programs that feature gender progressivism. Give them the validation of viewership, which is how networks and production companies set policy. As creators, challenge the old norms. Maybe a woman rescues a man? Maybe a woman is the brash one, and the male is the humanitarian who tries to soften them up. Maybe the characters can be different from what we’re used to seeing by having characters who engage in gender non-conforming behavior be the heroic ones, not just the comedic ones who are the butt of the jokes or the “court-jester” fools whom no one really respects.
How to Mitigate Gender Enforcement Harms
All of this is to say that when we take a survey of the social landscape and examine how Gender Role Enforcement Rage is present, it should give us all pause at its frequency, breadth, magnitude, and impact. This is not a good thing. This survey is a (partial) list of how it manifests (although it’s not exhaustive) and all of these are harmful in some way. Gender Role Enforcement Rage is like any other “angry” prejudice in society; it doesn’t speak well for that society, and it isn’t healthy for that society, despite those who claim, again, in a rage, that a “healthy society” is one where gender roles (among other rules) are strictly enforced.
How do we mitigate the harms of Gender Role Enforcement Rage? Which manifests in everything from schoolyard bullying to the most heinous violent murders and hate crimes imaginable, usually against gay men or trans women sex workers of color?
I think it’s by doing just this: By thinking about it. Taking stock. Enumerating it. Considering how ubiquitous it is. How harmful it is, for all people, not “just” (as if that weren’t enough) the people directly harmed, especially LGBT people, and especially gay men, globally.
Gregory Herek, PhD, of University of California was one of my heroes in my research in grad school. He was the one credited for the coining of the term “heterosexism,” which is the belief that everyone is, or should be, heterosexual. He did a lot of work on anti-gay hate crimes, and advocacy for these crimes to be documented in law enforcement agency statistics. Republican legislators were the ones who fought hard against hate crimes against LGBT people being counted and recognized, along with hate crimes committed against races or religions. (One of the tenets of the Republican “Project 2025” is to roll back legal protections against gender and sexual minorities against discrimination in order to promote “freedom of religious expression” and “individual rights” instead.)
Herek described his hypothesis that hate crimes against gay men were an expression of trying to get “revenge” on men the perpetrators believed were “betraying their gender” as men by “acting like women” as receptive intercourse partners.
His research, plus that of others, led to my writing project back then about the differences between people who commit anti-gay hate crimes, versus people who are “merely” homophobic; the basic bottom line was that the poorly educated, the more impulsive, the more criminal history overall, and the more Antisocial Personality Disorder (lack of capacity for remorse) or Narcissistic Personality Disorder (“I’ll do what I want, because I’m me, and you’re not”), the more likely the capacity for violent acts.
We combat Gender Role Enforcement Rage first by recognizing it, because “naming a problem is the first step toward solving it.” We raise awareness. Amnesty International basically says, “when you shine a light on bad behavior, you get less bad behavior,” which is how they can be successful in getting Prisoners of Conscience freed by exposing their maltreatment by vicious authoritarian governments.
We combat it by calling it out wherever we see it, and not just request, but demand that all people be treated equally, and that basic personal freedom includes the right to be who we are in identity, expression, activity, and way of life. We call out the place of employment. We call out the social organization. We call out the religious institutions. We call out the bigot politicians. We call out the academic institutions. It’s no longer the Dark Ages, and sensibly-minded people will not allow the resurgence of one, in any country. We will continue to fight for equality of status and opportunity and legal protection for all genders, equally.
Being treated with dignity and fairness at the level of large groups eventually comes down to the well-being of individuals, including their mental health. Social workers call this how the Macro affects the Micro. Gay men’s mental health is enhanced when the denigration we experience from perpetrators of Gender Role Enforcement Rage seeking to punish us, in all manifestations, is vanquished for good.
If you need support for how you express yourself in a gender-binary world, or for recovering from the abuse and ill effects of how Gender Role Enforcement Rage has been acted out against you, consider therapy (in California) or coaching (worldwide). Text me at 310-339-5778, or email Ken@GayTherapyLA.com, or Ken@GayCoachingLA.com for more information on my services. I’d be happy to help.
