"How do you diagnose a panic? Perhaps you know it when you see it. Canonical approaches describe panics as scapegoats for a more fundamental conflict that cannot be addressed on its own terms. Exciting but never touching the displaced topic, a panic gathers momentum, spiraling outward, lurching toward its furtive objects and away from the liberal commitment to reason, even threatening to overturn reason’s vaunted place in public discourse. You cannot reason with panic-stricken people, we tell ourselves, but perhaps the serene are no more amenable to it. In the irrational mode of the panic, something finds expression that otherwise cannot be spoken.
The current panic over trans people presents itself as a concern over the proper relation between adults and children. The phobic objects of the panic, as is often the case, appear somewhat threadbare under the apocalyptic light in which they’re cast: children’s books with queer or trans characters, drag queens hosting library readings, schools issuing guidance to call children by their self-affirmed names. These are supposed to represent elements of a widespread plot to either coercively transition children to some unnatural gender or inure them to sexual predation—“grooming.” Reading to children, speaking to children, even speaking about children have all been brandished as evidence of this predation. Because grooming is understood as a kind of sexual interest that hides in objects remote from any sexual act, this panic can seize on any relation to children or transness as its sign.
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As the resistance to an imagined answer to an imagined question, this panic, in fact, conveys a number of presumed certainties that run together: that talking about sex is sexual activity, that gender nonconformity is sexual perversion, that children have a fixed gender but no sexuality, that to recognize someone’s gender is to be implicated in it, and that trans people cannot be children. The panic is not about ignorance or uncertainty, then, but about the demand, in the panic-stricken adult’s mind, to give the answer to a question they believe should go without saying."
excertos de um artigo publicado na Parapraxis Magazine — leitura integral aqui.