Treading the Ever-Shifting Pink Line in the 21st Century | EXTRACT

Mark Gevisser’s The Pink Line expounds how ‘LGBT Rights’ have become one of the world’s new human rights frontiers in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It is an important and objective account of the dualities of gender, and how they vary across the world. Read this extract from The Pink Line to understand how issues of sexuality and gender identity divide and unite the world today.

In 2018 the World Health Organization amended its International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which provided the global codes for diagnoses, so that gender incongruence—the new term for gender identity disorder—would be moved out of “mental disorders” and into “sexual health conditions.” Some countries—led by Argentina and Denmark—had already begun to make it possible to change one’s gender legally by “self-determination,” meaning that you no longer needed any kind of external diagnosis or certification. In South Asia, where there have been third-gender communities for centuries, activists were energized by the new global transgender movement and used their country’s constitutions to gain victories in gender recognition.

But along the way, a new Pink Line had been drawn, with new battlegrounds opening up new frontiers of the culture wars. In the United States, this line ran right through children’s bathrooms, as school boards and parents fought legal battles to prevent transgender children from using the facilities consistent with their gender identities. In early 2018, Donald Trump tried to ban transgender people from serving in the military—a sign, The New York Times said, of the American president’s “cruel determination to transform America into a country that divides and dehumanizes its people.” Later, Trump’s government would moot restricting the rights and opportunities of transgender people by defining gender as “biological” and immutable.

In many parts of the world, the staking of a Pink Line along LGBT Rights disrupted age-old ways of dealing with sexuality and gender variance. As had happened in the West in the late twentieth century, homosexuality came to be increasingly understood in Latin America, Asia, and even Africa as an identity deserving of rights and recognition rather than simply a sexual behavior to be kept on the down-low. And having a gender identity different from the one you were assigned at birth came to be seen as a human right, something medicine and surgery could facilitate.

This offered opportunities for upliftment on the one hand, but shut down space on the other, as Western notions of the gender binary settled in societies where gender was often permitted to be more fluid. Suddenly, age-old transgender categories, such as Indonesian warias or Senegalese goor-jigeen, came to be pinked with the new LGBT brush. In many parts of the world, men walk arm in arm or hand in hand: in countries like Egypt and Nigeria, where there was moral panic against a new category of people demanding space and rights, even these gestures of affection became suspect.

If you had satellite television in Dakar or Lagos—or Cairo or Kabul—you could flip between Transparent or Orange Is the New Black on one network, and Wahhabi tirades against all sorts of Western infidel activity, including homosexuality and transgenderism, on another. You and your kids could fight over whether to watch homophobic rants on the Christian Broadcasting Network—or a Brazilian telenovela with a gay subplot. On BBC or CNN or even Al Jazeera you could watch reportage of gay pride parades in an increasing number of countries, including India and Turkey, or of children changing their gender in America. And you could also see mass protests by Catholics in France and Latin America against the new foe, gender ideology, a catchall term that covered sexuality education, same sex marriage, and gender transition.

In the age of digital technology and social media, previously isolated people suddenly found themselves part of a global queer community, able to connect with others first in chat rooms and then on hookup sites or social media platforms; to download ideas about personal freedom and rights that encouraged them to become visible; and to claim space in society. But so, too, through some of the same platforms, could members of faith groups forge networks—and access ideologies and strategies—far beyond their individual parishes or mosques. Religious identity, like sexual or gender identity, became globalized, and a clash between the two was inevitable.

There was a cultural bifurcation in some places. In Malaysia, conservative Islamism seemed to be gaining purchase: through the new adoption of Sharia laws that banned, among other things, “posing as a woman”; through raids on gay bars and the censorship of exhibitions; and even—in 2018—through an unprecedented sentencing of two women to public caning for lesbianism when they were found with a dildo in a car. But at the same time, younger and more urban Malaysians supported LGBT rights—as they did in many other places—as a way of branding themselves as part of the global village. When a prominent nationalist group called for a boycott of Starbucks in 2017 because the company supported gay rights, this made young urban coffee drinkers even more passionate about the “global space” the chain provided. A Malaysian acquaintance told me: “We go to Starbucks because it’s great coffee, but also because it’s part of the bigger world.” In India, middle-class professionals identified themselves as global citizens through their support of the decriminalization of homosexuality; in Mexico and Argentina, they did so through their support of same-sex marriage.

Mass migration had much to do with these shifts in consciousness: from the countryside to the city, and across national borders from one part of the world to another. People suddenly found themselves in worlds with mores utterly different from the ones in which they had been reared, beyond the reach of their clans or congregations. Perhaps fleeing persecution or struggling for economic survival, or perhaps taking advantage of the ability to travel or study that upward mobility brought, many experienced what is called “personal autonomy” for the first time: the power to make their own decisions about their lives. They then carried such notions about sexual orientation or gender identity back home, to shake things up there. Traveling alongside them on the journey South or East, or from the city to the countryside, were Western aid workers and public health officials, activists, and tourists.

All this movement—across borders real and virtual, on land and in cyberspace created a new sense of space and identity for people the world over. It also created a new set of challenges, as people attempted to toggle between the liberation they experienced online and the constraints of their offline lives, or between their freedom in the city and their commitments back home.

It created new categories of people demanding rights—and also moral panic.

It created new horizons, as societies began to think differently about what it meant to make a family, to be male or female, to be human—and also new fears.

The Pink Line ran through TV studios and parliaments, through newsrooms and courtrooms, through bedrooms and bathrooms, through bodies themselves.