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A Trans Person Is Trans Everywhere We Go
We belong to the world
Richard Morgan has a guest essay in today’s New York Times: “As a Gay Man, I’ll Never Be Normal.”
He shares these recent stats: 12 percent of characters on “scripted broadcast primetime programming” were found to be LGBTQ (GLAAD), and—perhaps as a result?—USAmericans collectively estimate that 24 percent of society identifies as LGBTQ, even though only 7 percent of USAmericans truly identify this way (both from Gallup).
Morgan complains about such “overrepresentation” and “overestimation.” He thinks these phenomena point to “respectability politics,” “normalization,” “homogenization,” and cultural “taxidermy.” “Being popular,” he worries, might mean being “forgettable.”
We could, he suggests, instead celebrate the “fringe.” In fact, “LGBT identity is nothing remotely approaching mainstream,” and the rest of society will “never get used to it.”
So What‘s the Problem with Belonging Everywhere?
This is the odd paragraph:
“The ACLU righteously blares that “trans people belong everywhere.” Of course they do belong everywhere but there are simply not enough trans people out there for their presence ever to hit those heights (the total U.S. trans adult…
