The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [173]
And yet… as I write this, the killers of Gwen Aruajo are once again using the “gay panic” strategy in their retrial, alleging that they were so sickened upon learning that Aruajo was biologically male that they bludgeoned and strangled her in a passionate rage. (The first trial ended in a hung jury.) A similar argument was used in the murder trial of Estanislao Martinez, who stabbed twenty-nine-year-old Joel Robles more than twenty times when he discovered that Robles was biologically male. The Gender Public Advocacy Commission noted that “ ‘crime of passion’ and ‘gay panic’ arguments have traditionally been at the core of defense cases in murder trials with gay and transgender victims.” Martinez was sentenced to four years in prison for the murder—a telling indication of how little value our legal system assigns to the lives of transgendered people.
Coincidentally, a hate-crimes bill that for the first time includes language inclusive of transgendered people was proposed in Congress in spring 2005. It’s a foregone conclusion that a trans hate-crimes bill has about as much chance of being passed by the current Congress as one legalizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states. “Values” voters just won’t stand for that kind of thing, we are told.
It’s a strange set of values that unblinkingly accepts murder as a legitimate response to learning that someone has a penis rather than a vagina. And it is a twisted interpretation of the “sanctity of marriage” to forbid one category of lovers from formalizing their sexual, emotional, and economic commitment to each other while permitting another group to make and break such bonds at will. At least for the present—the same “values” voters who quake at the thought of gay marriage are also deeply disturbed by divorce, we are now being told by the clergy who claim to represent their interests, just as they are outraged by abortion and (in some cases) birth control. In fact, some of these “values” voters are so horrified by the immoral and amoral behavior of their fellow Americans, gay and straight, that they see the need for a great cleansing—something like the flood that recently drowned the hopelessly decadent city of New Orleans days before the city’s annual gay carnival—a clear indication of God’s displeasure, they say.
Yes, we’ve heard this kind of talk before. In Germany in the 1930s. In the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan when the Taliban ruled. In any society you can name where a perceived need for purification and spiritual renewal requires a scapegoat, a category of unclean persons who need to be ruthlessly suppressed and even obliterated for the good of the society as a whole. Once, we recognized this monster and called it by its proper name—group psychosis. Today, the media and much of our political leadership bow down before this beast and worship it.
This, even more than the provocative and enlightening research I summarized earlier, is the greatest change that has occurred since I began researching and writing The Riddle of Gender in 2001. I would like to believe that science itself can, as it has so often in the past, beat back the forces of ignorance and intolerance and create a space for rational discourse. Yet when so many people, including those at the highest levels of government, fail to understand the most basic scientific facts—or seek to manipulate and pervert them for their own ends—how can science save us? As Jay Sennett pointed out in our e-mail conversation,