What's Normal?

The road to Hell is paved with book bans and pronoun persecution

There’s a Doonesbury cartoon from the mid-1970s where a candidate’s boyfriend wants a volunteer to stop working with the campaign.

“I hear you’re gay,” he says, by way of explanation.

“I hear you’re black,” the volunteer responds.

“Yeah, but that’s normal,” says the boyfriend.

“Didn’t used to be,” says the volunteer.

Who’s normal now? Maybe we should focus on who’s not, since those who are stigmatized or limited because of who or what they are wind up being the worst off politically. Politically and socially, they wind up being the least among us.

It’s only been 32 years since a right-wing zealot ran for the GOP presidential nomination by attacking gay men, saying AIDS was nature’s revenge on them. Twenty years after that he was still a regular commentator on MSNBC. Gay wasn’t normal yet, but Pat Buchanan still was.

Gay has become normal, in part because the AIDS crisis made clear how many people are gay. It was easy enough to not speak its name until its practitioners began dying. In a weirdly similar vein, advances in gender changing science have made it clear how many people are not comfortable in the body they’re born in. Depending on who you believe, the growth in gender correction treatments is either doctors cashing in, or a kind of medical panic, or a greater understanding of what gender is and how medicine can deal with it. Let’s face it, being All-Male ain’t what it used to be. They don’t even publish the magazine any more, although I concede I may be thinking of Stag.

No matter how soon dysmorphic and non-binary patients are destigmatized, it will become clear their numbers are higher than anyone would have imagined when Christine Jorgensen was fodder for late-night comics. Normal? Hard to say. JMU used to be called normal, but now they call it R2. These things change.

Just as Christianity changed between Leviticus and the Sermon on the Mount. The earlier book, the third in the Bible, says you can’t be gay or eat shrimp, and women have to be hidden away when they menstruate. Six hundred or so years later, the sermon in Matthew says we’ll ultimately be judged by how we treat the least among us. Read it and see. Try to get around the local irony of the book’s name.

My mother always said that being poor was no disgrace, but it was a damned inconvenience. Likewise, there is no shame in being trans or non-binary, but there is still a stigma, and both are still far enough outside the mainstream to make them targets and victims of Pat Buchanan’s spiritual heirs. In that sense, they are the least among us, and those who prey on them for political gain will, according to their own religion, be judged for that. If the beliefs they espouse but don’t practice pan out, they’ll face judgment a lot more harsh than that of their more tolerant neighbors.

Will they burn in Hell? Hard to say. But history and our grandchildren will look back at them with wonder  at what used to be normal.