Image by Shalom de León.
It may have taken me decades of careful introspection to find myself amidst the wreckage of decades of institutional trauma, but it seems like every other asshole on the right has my gender identity all figured out the moment they clock me in as trans. I was pretty fucking sure that this was an intensely intimate issue defined by the complex interactions between biology and culture, but according to amateur genderologists like Matt Walsh and those fine young libertarians in the Mises Caucus, my entire existence and that of millions of others can be boiled down to a single ideology, and that ideology is some convoluted Marxist conspiracy to erode traditional American values and destroy the very fabric of Western Civilization itself.
While these paranoid fabulists need to cut down a bit on their steady diet of rainwater and grain alcohol, they actually aren’t totally off base. Those stuffy breeders in the Frankfurt School may not have known a tranny from a drag queen if one fucked them in the ass but Third World Marxist movements like Black Power and Aztlán had a profound and tragically under sung influence on the modern Queer Liberation Movement and this is nothing to be ashamed of. Movements to expand revolutionary consciousness frequently empower one another simply by expanding beyond each other’s designated boundaries and blurring the lines that once superficially separated them.
When Stokely Carmicheal boldly reclaimed Blackness as a concept defined by empowered otherness and Chicano firebrands like Oscar Zeta Acosta followed suit, Black and brown Queer folk like Marsha P. Jonhson and Sylvia Rivera were paying attention. And when the streets got wild from Watts to Detroit, it was these gender outlaws of color who decided to bring that same fire to roast the pigs at Stonewall.
At their heart, the Third World consciousness movements of the sixties and seventies were defined by colonized people struggling to recover what was stolen from them by generations of annihilation and assimilation. It was about building new cultures informed by what shreds remained of the old and this is what today’s straight white conservative culture war “experts” remain totally blind to.
While Marxist concepts on class oppression may have strongly informed our approach, much like Afrocentricity and Aztlan, Queerness is a construct defined by a decidedly conservative yearning for traditional values, our traditional values. We are a people in search of a home and this home can still be found if you blow the dust from the right history books.
Long before there was any need for concepts like Queerness and Blackness, the planet was divided into a diverse array of tribal ecosystems, each with its own classes, genders, gods, and spoken histories. While defined by diversity, gender fluidity was rife throughout these primitive cultures. Across nearly every continent, archeologists have found evidence of third genders existing amongst thousands of tribal cultures for thousands of years, from the Iron Age grave markings of Persian antiquity to the Bronze Age figurative art of Ancient Greece.
Many of these traditions relied on unwritten oral histories but some of them still survive to this day and many of those who don’t were recorded by the vicars and conquistadors who annihilated them to make room for their pseudo-Christian imperial new world order. Over 100 third genders were observed to have existed in North America alone during the age of first contact and they were far from the only ones.
In Africa, you had the Ashtami of the Maale in Ethiopia and the Oracles of Mukura of the Ankele in Uganda. In the South Pacific, we still have the ancient Maha of Hawaii’s Kanaka Mauli and the Fa’afafine of Samoa. The Incans had the Quariwarmi, the Ancient Sumerians had the gender-bending servants of Inanna, and Rome had the transgender priestesses known as the Galli.
This is my culture and not only is it older than Western Civilization, but Western Civilization is what razed it in the name of modernity and progress. Christianity may have been the weapon Rome used to cull us, but it was merely one of the countless spiritual traditions of the ancient world that the Ceasars plucked from the Garden of Eden and stripped of its indigenous divinity to use it as a battering ram for the real enemy of traditional divinity, the state and its debauched mutant progeny, empire. This is what destroyed a thousand tribal identities and decimated their people to the point of requiring revolutionary recycling projects like Black Power and Queer Liberation.
And this is what women and gender outlaws have been attempting to revive through populist pagan reform movements like Wicca and Asatru for decades, a spiritual consciousness that reflects our own diverse and ignored personal experiences. Conservative pagans will often take such communities to task for failing their historical purity tests, but the point here isn’t that any single tribal tradition is morally superior to Christianity or capitalism. The point is that many tribal traditions will always be morally superior to any single tribal tradition because humanity is far too diverse and complex to be homogenized in a single melting pot without that cooking implement becoming a genocidal charnel.
The transgender ideology, if any single one exists, is not a symptom of modern decadence. It is an act of resistance against it. So, you are goddamn right that we are at war with your precious civilization but that is only because what you call traditional American values remain an existential threat to any truly indigenous tribal society, new or old. In other words, it is not the Queer Liberation Movement that is modern and decadent, it is the vapid globalist monstrosity of the American Empire. A soulless monolithic corporate culture actively working to transform Queerness into just another brand like Marxism and Christianity.
But I still believe that it is in fact Queer people, and Black people and Chicano people, who must lead a new struggle against state-sanctioned modernity with a revival of truly traditional values like communalism and diversity beneath the banner of a bold new primitivism, not just because it has always been the ‘others’ of the lumpenproletariat who have carried the fire of revolution, from Amistad to Stonewall, but because revival is the only way forward for all of us in a world where the past has been ravaged by imperial conquest.
It isn’t just the traditionally marginalized who have been throttled into submission by imperial homogeny. It is the Irish and the Italians and the Polish and the Germans and all the other cultures erased by toxic modern concepts like race, gender, church, and state. Western Civilization has stripped us all of our traditions and movements like mine have found a way to revive them by embracing a culture of resistance through decentralized tribal diversity.
This is my transgender ideology, a form of Queer post-civ pan-archism beyond left and right. But I’m not here to recruit you; I’m here to encourage you to rebuild your own tribe so that together we can build a thousand tribes, too diverse to be governed by any single power, civilization be dammed.
The post The Real Queer Conspiracy Against Western Civilization appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.
Nicky Reid | Radio Free (2024-06-21T04:16:02+00:00) The Real Queer Conspiracy Against Western Civilization. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/21/the-real-queer-conspiracy-against-western-civilization/
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