Playing the Victim Card
As a former Evangelical Christian and Republican, I understand why they’re coming after me and my transgender children. But as a family living in their crosshairs I now understand the difference between the propaganda of victim mentality and the cruel, terrifying isolation of real world victimization.
“Nobody is a villain in their own story.
We’re all the heroes of our own stories.”
― George R.R. Martin
The Joy of Being Right
One of the most seductive qualities of my decades spent in Evangelical Christianity was the unrelenting mantra that I was so right and that those who disagreed with me were so very, very wrong. It was exhilarating to have an entire community organized around sympathizing with my sense of woundedness when someone disagreed with me and rushing to my side with contempt and disgust for those who would dare defy my worldview.
This worldview of unending rightness is a fragile one though, and it needs shielding from sharp edges or introspection. One of the most powerful tools in shielding it from self-awareness is the narrative of victimhood.
I, like Evangelical Christians across the nation, had a sincere and deep belief that I was an oppressed minority. True believers were rare in my imagination, and the world was hunting them down aggressively.
But the game of make-believe, it turns out, is intended for young children. Staying in that headspace as an adult begins to take a serious toll. The mental gymnastics necessary to reconcile my real-world experiences with my rigid beliefs would soon consume most of my mental, relational, and emotional energy. The amount of time in prayer meetings, worship services, revivals, and Bible study necessary to numb my inner awareness that the world was not as we claimed it was would steadily increase until it became unsustainable for me.
Humans, as Marginalian curator Maria Popova would put it, “are touchingly prone to… mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence.” Believing harder seemed like an effective strategy for cutting off nagging doubts. But in the end it wasn’t an effective one for me.
Standing up to giants
Evangelical Christianity is famously distrusting of science, and for good reason. We were taught that we should dismiss science (at least when we disagreed with scientific conclusions) because it was a tool for people to force their misguided personal beliefs upon others by framing them as “objectively” true using overly complex arguments and by leveraging authority on the matter that was established in a circular sort of way. (It would be decades before I would notice that this accusation was actually a confession of the way our community operated)
And while people can make appeals to science that use this exact strategy, it was, as was our assessment of everyone who didn’t share our worldview, a gross mischaracterization of the actual worldview. As fantasy author Terry Pratchett would so tenderly put it, “Science… is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.”
“Science… is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.”
-Terry Pratchett
Most humans, it turns out, have a rather decent and fair sense of justice at our core. So in order to get us to enact fundamentally unjust violence on others, you must first convince us that we are the victim and those we are drone-striking, sending to prison camps, or lynching, are the perpetrators. Fascists don’t work to convince their nations that they are strong and powerful. They convince their nations that they rightfully deserve to be strong and powerful, and are unjustly being kept from that rightful destiny because of the malicious injustice of specific vulnerble parties. The Jews. The undocumented immigrants. The communists. The drag queens. Trans children.
The powerful must believe they are the powerless. Goliath must believe that he is David.
And if anyone attempts to introduce a Pratchettian reality check onto these victim arguments, another defense mechanism arises to shield our eyes from looking at the test results: A deadening, numbing relativism.
For example, when I suggested to my MAGA brother that white supremacy might be reasonably suspected to actually exist in America based on the observation that white families hold about seventeen times the wealth of Black families, or my white children are about one-fifth as likely to end up imprisoned as my neighbor’s black children, my reasoning was easily shut down by him.
Statistics can just be made up and manipulated.
And so they can. Which is why you might want to explore their veracity. Why you might want to spend some time learning about how statistics are generated, how they are double checked, what scientific consensus actually means, or what peer-review means. These are necessary skills for anyone sincerely interested in truth with or without a capital “T.”
But such research is a waste of time and resources for anyone submerged in a faithful community’s make-believe. Because they already know what the result of any careful investigation will reveal.
They are right.
It’s hard to be curious when everything you believe is true.
English preacher Charles Spurgeon proposed that the Christian faith is like a lion that doesn’t need defending, but rather needs to be let out of its cage. English apologist G. K. Chesterton proposed that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
Sentiments like this abounded in my circles of faith. Naturally. They are so self-soothing. So heartwarming. We are on the right side of history! We are the ones who know. Our truth bats .1000 and has never been defeated. We are the ones who are right.
That the Christian faithful are never allowed to actually interact with secular truth claims without a pastoral filter on them is irrelevant. That the Christian ideal may have occasionally been tried and found wanting is important to filter out. Christian children must not be confused by these adult issues. And adult parishioners can’t be entrusted with evaluating such damning lies.
That the Evangelical worldview isn’t actually allowed to play at recess with others is something best left unnoticed. Faithful men of God assure you that their very accurate representation of evolution, homosexuality, and feminism were beaten fair and square once in a debate they watched. Further investigation is unwarranted.
Repeating that experiment is entirely unnecessary.
Honest repentance
It wasn’t until I entered the (ironically: admittedly problematic) halls of Social Justice that I would ever meet someone who actually encouraged reality-checking my assumptions. They were the first community to invite me into asking Pratchett’s awkward questions.
Like all communities and world views, the idea of truth could, and would, be wielded by social justice practitioners against others (and one another) to create a sense of superiority and self-importance. But, at least in the community of queer poets I stumbled into in Seattle, it had some sort of safety mechanism built in.
The godless liberals I met didn’t have a mantra that “we” were the victims, and those who disagreed with us were the perpetrators. It turns out that the notion of playing the victim card (like the notion of using science as a sleight of hand trick) was rather a confession of my Evangelical community that we projected onto others. These social justice warriors I would meet in my thirties did indeed place a heavy emphasis on systematic harm and the injustice of who wielded power over whom. Their world too had Davids and Goliaths. But these Davids and Goliaths weren’t only groups of people or individual people. They were also inside each of us.
Like Solzhenitsyn observed in The Gulag Archipelago, these people sincerely believed that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
The woman who first explained the invisible backpack of privilege to me was a fat, queer, woman of color. Who had every opportunity to organize me into the straight, white, cisgender, male demographic I inhabited while organizing herself as a victim of every unearned privilege I was hoarding.
But that’s not how the lesson goes.
She instead spent 45 minutes highlighting the immense privileges she held that she wanted to be more mindful of. Because the exercise is fundamentally an exercise in asking the oh so tender, awkward question: where do I benefit from injustices other suffer? Where am I part of systematic harm in ways that I am unaware of?
After two decades in a community that championed “repentance” at every turn, I sat with this fat, queer, woman of color who was practicing repentance in front of me in real time. I had never been in a community that located Jung’s shadow creature within each of us rather than exclusively residing in the communities that didn’t hold to our world view.
It was the first time I was in a community that located Jung’s shadow creature within each of us rather than exclusively residing in the communities that didn’t hold to our world view.
Despite two decades in an Evangelical community organized around the idea of the fundamentally sinful nature of each human, it was the first time I was sincerely invited into self-awareness about the harm I was causing others. And the brilliant scaffolding of intersectionality laid out by fierce black women a generation before me gave me a framework in which I could make room for the ways I was both beloved, deserving of grace and love, while I was also accountable for my participation in denying the image of God in my neighbor and enemy.
The monsters under the evangelical bed
J.K. Rowling has developed a reputation as the most prominent celebrity opposed to runaway, unchecked rights for transgender people. She feels that speaking her truth is coming at a great cost. In fact, she just released a book she wrote about a transphobic cartoonist who is doxxed, stalked, and killed for her transphobia. And I personally don’t think Rowling is cynically employing the tools of propaganda to mislead others. I think that she really believes that the criticism she has experienced for being transphobic is that unfair and dangerous. I think to her that it feels like she is facing the possibility of death.
While certainly not an Evangelical, I believe she’s employing the same victim mentality to lubricate her thinking as the church I come from: I think she sincerely believes that the billionaire being criticized for amplifying dangerous and deadly ideas is the central victim in the grand narrative unfurling all around us.
It’s easy for me to be convinced of that because I personally believed that I was in a small minority group in danger of being eradicated. While growing up in the most powerful empire the world has ever witnessed, which has exclusively had heads of state who publicly practice my Christian religion, for its entire history. I sincerely believed that secular, atheist, anti-Christian leaders held the lion’s share of the power in American politics.
I personally believed that I was in a small minority group in danger of being eradicated. While growing up in the most powerful empire the world has ever witnessed, which has exclusively had heads of state who publicly practice my Christian religion, for its entire history.
The mental gymnastics are breathtaking in retrospect.
The fact that no one has ever been killed in an anti-TERF hate crime is entirely lost on Rowling. The overwhelming evidence that a transgender identity is the most damning identity variable to someone’s lifespan isn’t present in her imagined world. The actual murder of actual transgender children doesn’t need to be taken into account.
This is the kind of math formula that transmutes Barack Obama’s personal testimony of entrusting his life to Christ into him simultaneously being both a secular humanist and devout Muslim, while Trump’s repeated and ongoing denial that he has any need for Christ’s forgiveness is transmuted into his identity as the leader Evangelicals are most likely to be picturing while orgasming.
My actual family with its real flesh and blood children
None of my children are gender conforming, and I don’t know why. At the time the youngest was born I was on the board of a church that belonged to the Baptist General Conference, a denomination famous for blaming natural disasters on gay sympathizers. So while I grew along with my kids, I certainly didn’t engineer their gender expansiveness or creativity. And given pronoun changes in preschool, for example, it’s highly unlikely that YouTube or Tumblr contributed much to their gender journey.
Out of four kiddos, I only have one who has consistently asserted that he identifies with the gender we assigned him at birth. And he’s a boy who likes to wear dresses sometimes. In middle school. So our family isn’t going to pass any of these Republican legislatures litmus tests.
I have one child who’s name and pronouns were legally changed before a compassionate judge in the days leading up to Trump’s presidency, when the early shadows of the transphobic panic engulfing our nation today were just beginning to appear. We didn’t know what fear was back then.
These days our neighboring state has brought up legislation that would imprison me for allowing my children to choose their own pronouns. Florida is proposing legislation that would require the state to take my children away from me and place them in state care. Texas has already passed that legislation.
So far eight states have made the medical care my daughter receives illegal, despite the fact that every single reputable pediatric medical and psychological association in the nation recommends and affirms the precise actions I’ve taken.
Today in Alabama supporting my transgender daughter’s wishes is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Pretend persecution
My partner grew up in Missouri under the cloud of fear that the state would come to take them and their siblings away from their parents. They were warned about this possibility, and taught how to navigate government authorities to avoid it.
The reason they would be taken away was that they were Christian homeschoolers. Surely a fringe worldview in 1980’s rural Missouri.
I know so many Evangelical friends from my childhood who are still living in this make-believe world. I know the fear they feel is real, because I felt it too. But their fear is being manufactured as a way to keep them compliant to Evangelical power brokers. I know now that none of it would pass Pratchett’s reality-check.
But their fear is being manufactured as a way to keep them compliant to Evangelical power brokers. I know now that none of it would pass Pratchett’s reality-check.
There are no laws on the books anywhere in the nation that make Christian homeschooling illegal. No legislature has ever proposed outlawing homeschooling anywhere in this nation on the basis of it having a religious lens.
Christian homeschoolers are in no danger of being taken away from their parents on the basis of their schooling. Christians are in no danger of being rounded up by FEMA on the basis of their faith. No city, county, or state in the nation is in any danger of being required to live under Sharia law.
None of these things pass even the gentlest reality-check.
The majority of the states in our country, in reality, are currently proposing, or have already passed bills that would imprison me and, or, take my children away from me on the basis of their gender. And the gut punch of that reality, and the make believe I participated in as an Evangelical, are light years apart from one another.
The essential ingredient of victimhood
One of the central patterns of intellectual dishonesty necessary for this reality to come into being is the make-believe victim mentality that allows the powerful to punish the weak without triggering their own personal ethical gag reflex.
It is essential that schools, Hollywood, and state legislatures allowing trans children to exist, unpunished, is understood as an existential attack on Christian families. How can they go on worshiping Christ under these circumstances? While dismantling families and imprisoning (inaccurately assumed to be) secular parents is a win for freedom. Forcing trans girls to grow beards and trans boys to grow breasts must be understood as a kindness that they will later thank us for, not a cruel punishment that will turn their adolescence into a vivid hell.
The mere existence of those who don’t share your world view is understood as a more significant danger to you than forcing conformity to your worldview onto them would be from their perspective. The alchemy of transforming Jesus’ golden rule into inert lead.
As long as your camp is understood as both vulnerable and in the right while those you disagree with are framed as powerful and in the wrong, this sort of shadow projection and scapegoating will continue to prey on the lives of the least powerful among us. As long as the line between good and evil divides your community from the communities that surround you, trans children will continue to attempt suicide at seven and a half times the rate of their peers.
But that’s okay. I know It won’t bother you. Because you don’t even know any children that have been allowed to transition. They only exist in your imagination. And in your imagination, those children are now better off, separated from their parents and in state custody, or forbidden to make medical choices about their body that reflect their desires and not yours (a complete stranger). You’ll simply imagine that they aren’t committing suicide, and find someone with made up statistics that “prove” they’re not. Surely you’ll be able to find the testimony of at least one teen saved from the hell of bodily disfigurement by the gospel of Jesus, right? Your ex-gay ministries transformed millions of gay men and women into straight, chaste, content Christians, didn’t they?
Didn’t they?
So you’ll simply imagine that you’re making the world a better place. You’ll picture it very clearly in your mind. Because in the absence of any reality-checks, the world gets to be exactly as you pretend it to be.
So go back up to the beginning of this article. Go through and cross out everything you know is false. Redact it entirely with a thick black marker. Remember that trans children kill themselves because being transgender is so fundamentally toxic, not because of the bullying of adult men in suits outlawing their lives. Remember that the parents of transgender children are deeply misguided, pushing a toxic liberal agenda of gender confusion and early sexualization down their children’s throats and that their children need to be spared from this by the loving arms of the well-funded state foster care system. Remember that you know what’s best for your neighbor’s children, not them. Remember that the statisticians and pediatricians and psychologists who study these matters are secular humanists, dedicated to pushing a vulgar agenda into American’s homes, sowing confusion among your own children. They don’t actually know anything about real joy or hope or freedom or the shape of the human soul.
Only you know about those things.
Remember that you are the light. That you can discern the truth. Remember that those who disagree with you have been sent to cause confusion by hell itself.
Take a deep breath. Keep your eyes shut tight.
God himself agrees with you.
You are right.
