Organizing at the Intersections of Ageism and Anti-LGBTQ Bigotry

   Eight years ago, I wrote a piece about the intersection of LGBTQ rights and ageism. A lot has changed since I wrote that post and in a sense, a lot has stayed the same. There have been wonderful gains made in terms of outlawing anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy in minors. Is this child protectionism? Is it youth liberation? I don't know, but everyone does know that previously minors could be subjected to harmful anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy on the whim of their bigoted parents and now they cannot in many states and I consider that a victory. (Although these things may not pass in the states where they are most needed.)

   We have changed the culture such that being gay is no longer the sort of thing that gets you bullied in many places. Now, you have adult and youth allies that you can contact as a young person and many people will support you if you are dealing with heterosexism or cissexism. We are making positive change.

   And yet fundamentally the issue of youth liberation is left out of the conversation. Banning anti-gay conversion therapy does not lead to a more serious intellectual and political challenge of guardianship and minor status, but it should. If young people were liberated, so many harms that the LGBTQ community fights would disappear. Young trans folks could start transitioning medically and socially as soon as it felt right for them whether or not their parents approved. LGBTQ youth bullied in school would be able to choose a different school where other students shared their values. LGBTQ youth kicked out of their familial residences could start their lives with a guaranteed basic income and no need for the support of bigoted parents. Getting rid of legal age restrictions would integrate these youth into the community faster and help them to achieve a degree of self-sufficiency. Autonomy is the goal and supports facilitate that.

In the 1970s, gay liberation and child liberation went hand in hand. We need to bring that back.

   This Pride, remember to stay radical. In the past, youth liberation was on the LGBTQ agenda just as anti-racism, feminism, and disability rights are on the agenda today. We need to bring that same mentality back today. Happy Pride!

A Conference Presentation and a Distillation of Why I Am an Unapologetic Radical Youth Liberationist

Jackson Howard Wagner, me, and Alexander R. Cohen. Great friends and comrades.

   Back in November, I had the privilege of attending the wonderful Applied Philosophy Workshop at Bowling Green State University. On Saturday, November 3, 2018, I gave a presentation at this conference entitled "In Defense of Liberated Young People: A Critique of the Protectionist Developmentalist Position." The talk went really well and I could tell that folks were nodding along and understanding the message that I was trying to convey. The information that I presented was mostly taken from the Master's thesis that I wrote on this very topic (and which I am proud to say was given the honor of "passing with distinction" from my graduate committee) as a graduate student at San Francisco State University. My wonderful youth liberationist friends and comrades Alexander Cohen and Jackson Howard Wagner were there and they really helped to make this conference presentation a truly wonderful experience.

   After my presentation, a graduate student at Bowling Green State University was tasked with delivering a response to the material. At first, I thought he was raising some good points that I wanted to respond to, but he closed his remarks in a dismissive and flippant way by saying "What if teenagers are running off to the mall in their bikinis to get tattoos on their faces?" I had five minutes to respond and this is basically what I said after setting a timer on my iPhone.

   "The presenter that we just heard from raised some good points and I want to thank him for his response. However, he said one thing in particular that I wanted to respond to. He talked about teenagers in bikinis going to the mall to get tattoos on their faces. Well, I know a lot of young people and I don't know any that are clamoring to go to the mall in bikinis to get facial tattoos, although I suppose that that would be their right if that is something that they wanted to do. But here is what I do know about. I know about youth that are abused within their homes physically, emotionally, and/or sexually by their families and are returned to those very families when they attempt to run away. I know about youth who have been sent by their parents to gulag schools for behavior modification that traumatized them for life. I know about youth who are not allowed to express their gender or sexuality within their family and as a result they are oppressed and abandoned with no options. I know about youth subjected to medical procedures against their wills who have been traumatized for life by that. I know about youth who are bullied or mistreated in schools and do not have the option to choose other educational institutions. I know about youth who are in schools that are just not a good fit for them and where they are just not thriving as they should be and they do not have the option to make a change. I know about youth subjected by family members to behavior modification programs which traumatized and pathologized them. I know about youth who were denied freedom of conscience in reference to religion and spirituality, which is such a sacrosanct value in our society. I know about youth indoctrinated into racism, sexism, heterosexism, and cissexism by their families. I know about families that want to break up loving relationships involving youth because of the partners' ages, race, or sex. So, I do not know about teenagers in bikinis at the mall getting facial tattoos but that is what I do know about."

   After that statement, everyone clapped and I sat down, knowing that I had given the right response to my interlocutor's words. We cannot allow youth rights issues to be trivialized. They are too important not to do so.

Me and my wonderful host, Kathryn Gonda, at the Bowling Green State University Philosophy Conference.

Book Review: Roger N. Lancaster's "Sex Panic and the Punitive State"

   As many of you know, I have been doing a lot of research into moral panics of the 1970s and 1980s era in order to explain how previous tentative yet meaningful steps in the direction of youth liberation in the 1960s and 1970s had been rolled back in the ensuing years. I have been doing this research specifically because writing about this is part of the introduction of the large scale book project that I am currently working on in reference to youth rights. Towards this end, I have already read and reviewed Richard Beck's book We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. I am following this review with one of the anthropologist Roger N. Lancaster's book Sex Panic and the Punitive State, which was published in 2011 by the University of California Press.

   The thesis of Lancaster's book is that a series of sexual panics, in particular those related to minors, fundamentally changed America over the course of the 1970s and the 1980s and ultimately contributed to dynamics that made the United States a far more punitive place than it had been before. From a youth liberationist perspective, perhaps the key insight of this text is Lancaster's insight that successive waves of sex panics, with their focus on a stereotyped idealized and asexual innocent (fictional) child victim, have created a network of laws, policies, practices, and assumptions embedded deeply within the culture and the workings of the state in reference to minors, adults, and sexuality that is increasingly draconian and out of touch with reality. The effects have come to extend far beyond anything having to do strictly with sexuality and have not been for the good.

   One bedrock tenet of my youth liberationism has always been that serious youth liberationists cannot be afraid to confront the harm that comes to both youth and adults as a result of authoritarian attempts to police youth and intergenerational sexuality because, while this may be politically fraught territory, it is also the ground upon which successive waves of sexually inflected moral panics have eroded the rights of youth and others in all manner of ways that extend far beyond the realm of sexuality. Youth liberationists can do this in a responsible way that recognizes that sexuality is an ethically fraught territory for people of all ages and that sexual exploitation can indeed be seriously harmful as radical feminist theorists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon have written about eloquently. For this reason, I have long believed that feminists, youth liberationists, and everyone else should take a view of sexual politics that seriously grapples with the observations of sex critical radical feminism while pushing back strongly against notions of sexual panic that are used as a means of social control increasingly disconnected from any sense of proportion or reality.

   Writes Lancaster in a particularly poignant passage regarding the sex panics of the 1980s, "They distilled diffuse anxieties about sex and children into the pervasive perception that all children everywhere are at perpetual risk of sexual assault. In the resulting culture of hypervigilant child protection, the denial of childhood sexuality and the perpetual hunt for the predatory pervert are opposite sides of the same coin: the innocent and the monster, the perfect victim and the irredeemable fiend... They spawned expansive new subfields of psuedoscience - fanciful psychological profiles of abusers, whimsical diagnostic tools said to predict future predation or recidivism. They powerfully contributed to the consolidation of an ever more comprehensive culture of child protection, thus extending the purviews of both long-standing official bureaucracies (child protection services) and newer, quasi-official ones (victims' rights advocates)."

   In order to illustrate his point, Lancaster list a variety of important ways that these successive waves of sex panic "have led to to new terminologies and produced new ways of speaking and thinking about children." He writes that a "blanket 'no touching' policy" has pervaded many organizations responsible for child care in contravention of the long acknowledged wisdom that all people, especially very young people, need hugs and other forms of wholesome non-sexual touch in order to thrive. He notes that the insights of Freudian psychology, which acknowledged the reality that children are sexual beings and that all relationships "can have an erotic dimension without any overt sexual activity ever occurring" have been superseded by a new cultural logic that insists that acknowledging such psychological truths harms and damages children by "sexualizing" them. Lancaster states, "Commonsensical propositions, easily uttered before the 1980s - children sometimes develop crushes on their teachers, adolescents sometimes seek out sexual relationships with adults precisely because the latter are more mature, more experienced, and more sophisticated - have become suspect." Lancaster also notes that research findings which further the association between sex and trauma in the lives of youth are quickly afforded official status by politicians, journalists, activists, legal officials, and others while studies which find evidence to the contrary are ignored or even made into the targets of outrage and censorship. Finally, Lancaster notes that an obsession with the concept of childhood innocence "has become more valued than children themselves" as a focus on projects like abstinence only sex education and protecting children's and adolescent's sexual purity takes priority over securing the rights or material welfare of young people in any wider sense and that the term "pedophile" has, since the 1960s, become a household word denoting an increasingly widening set of sexual behaviors and desires.

   Lancaster wisely notes that unrealistic and stereotyped notions of youth asexuality are all too often quickly leveraged against youth themselves who fail to perform notions of childhood innocence to the satisfaction of the adults around them. He cites the statistic that ostensibly 41% of sexual abusers are said to be minors, but also notes that ultimately this statistic is problematic because "nonviolent, noncoercive sex acts between minors (or between minors and mature adults)" have come "to be classified as abuse." Ominously, the same sorts of logic that fueled the Satanic ritual abuse and daycare child molestation panics that were the primary subject of Richard Beck's We Believe the Children are now being employed in the service of labeling and punishing youth deemed to be "sex offenders" by overzealous and ill informed teachers, social workers, and law enforcement officials. Amazingly, Lancaster documents that in Maryland in 2001, for instance, one hundred and sixty-five elementary school aged youth were suspended from school for sexual harassment, including three preschoolers, sixteen kindergartners, and twenty-two first graders. Notes Lancaster wryly, "Children-who-molest, children-who-harass, children-who-abuse are mostly children who fail to validate adult fantasies of childhood innocence. And those fantasies are becoming increasingly fantastic." This is but one example of what youth liberationists are talking about when we insist that, all too often, child abuse and child protectionism are ultimately two sides of the same coin. A preoccupation with safeguarding an imaginary veil of childhood innocence does no such thing but in practice does ultimately lead to real and devastating harms for actual real flesh and blood children.  

   One fascinating and important point that Lancaster makes is that while mainstream acceptance of lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans has increased, the shadowy specter of the pedophilic child predator continues to perform a great deal of the sociocultural work that the figure of the deviant homosexual menace once performed. For this reason, Lancaster argues that sexual panics are especially detrimental to the freedom, rights, and interests of members of the LGBTQ community. In making this argument, Lancaster draws on the work of the renowned queer theorist Lee Edelman, a thinker whose name I have long been vaguely familiar with but who Lancaster's work truly made me want to read and engage with for the first time in a meaningful way. Lancaster also draws on his own identity as a queer man and his own experiences of how sex panics can wreck havoc within the LGBTQ community to buttress his analysis of the wider social phenomenon.

   Situating some fairly healthy and benign intergenerational relationships within the larger context of LGBTQ culture, Lancaster writes, "Like butch-femme or hustler-john relationships, intergenerational relationships were a long-standing paradigm of American gay life until recently. Equipped with fake IDs, teens as young as fifteen or sixteen were sometimes difficult to distinguish from young men who did not quite look their age ('twinks'). Their admirers (chicken hawks) were scarcely numerous, but they were a visible part of gay life in the late 1970s, when I arrived on the scene. (I should note here that, to the best of my knowledge, I have never met a textbook pedophile, someone whose sexual object of choice is a sexually immature child, and the chicken hawks I knew as a youth all condemned relations with children, as well as relations involving the use of force, deception, or exploitation, as they understood these terms.) No doubt opportunities for exploitation existed in these settings. But because participants in these relationships frequented the same bars and shared gossip through overlapping networks, they were subject to the norms of the subculture. Mature minors, young adults, and mature adults alike took a decidedly dim view of sugar daddies who mistreated their 'boys.' And whether the younger party was younger or older than eighteen, there was an explicit expectation that the older partner would mentor the younger, helping him to acquire education, skills, savvy, or other forms of cultural capital. It does not seem self-evident to me that deeply criminalizing this sort of relationship, banishing it from subcultural oversight and regulation, benefits minors." Lancaster goes on to note that in many cases it was the older lovers of mature gay youth who cared for, provided for, and loved these youth when ultimately their own biological families had abused, abandoned, and shunned them for their sexual orientation.

   Ultimately, I think that serious youth liberationists need to read this book in order to develop a deeper understanding of how the impacts of multiple waves of sexual hysteria in reference to youth in particular have shaped American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Lancaster's work should make it exceedingly clear that sexual freedom for youth must be on the youth liberationist agenda not because we seek to aid and abet the sexual exploitation of young people by older people or by each other, but because we see the very real harms that overtly puritanical and protectionist approaches to youth sexuality do to young people in particular as well as to society as a whole.

Roger N. Lancaster's book Sex Panic and the Punitive State published in 2011 by the California State University Press.

 
  

Reflections for June 2018

  

   So this blog post will just be some general reflections on various topics that have been popping up in the news recently and that speaks to the Pride season as well. First of all, like all decent people, I am horrified by what is going on in reference to immigrants seeking refuge in this country, particularly the youth my mother has taken to referring to as "the border babies." This is of course a youth rights issue. It is strange to see the same people who love to talk about parents' rights when this notion can be used to oppress a child suddenly deciding that family bonds aren't even worth recognizing once it goes against their authoritarian, racist, xenophobic impulses. I have been thinking a lot about Sojourner Truth's amazing and beautiful "Ain't I a Woman?" speech and how she speaks about her children being ripped out of her arms in the context of slavery. In the United States, there is an ugly history of invoking parents' rights when it is something that can be used to bolster authoritarianism and then ignoring the very real actual bonds that many parents and children have in the service of authoritarianism too. The people today that are willing to rip a breastfeeding baby out of their mother's arms at the border will be the very same people that will turn around and be angry that someone gave their child birth control pills or taught them about gay history without their permission. The same people who think that it is acceptable to tear these youngest of young people away from everyone they know and love and lock them in cages will also be among the first to pretend that it is due to children's special developmental status that they should be denied individual autonomy and freedom of any sort. It is because these bad people are authoritarians and oppressing people is what they do. Parents' rights are only invoked in order to help them do this. The notion of children as in need of "protection" only matters when "protection" is a synonym for "control." It has never been about protecting the children and it has never been about supporting healthy family bonds. It has only ever been about controlling and oppressing the children. Call your governmental representatives about this. Speak out on social media and in face to face interactions too. Attend rallies, marches, protests, etc. in your community. We cannot allow these atrocities to stand as Americans, as human beings, and as youth liberationists. 

   Moving on to a less depressing subject... I just read Michael Bronski's beautiful and amazing article entitled "When Gays Wanted to Liberate Children" He goes over a lot of the same history I am covering in the introductory chapter to the book I am writing on youth liberation issues right now but he also introduced me to some new things too. I would recommend that everyone read the article if they have not already done so. As a queer person and as a feminist woman who identifies particularly with the second wave radical feminist tradition, I found that this article inspired me to want to carry on this important and underappreciated legacy of radical youth liberationism because it is time for this generation and those coming up behind it to take the reins now. This article was a beautiful Pride present for me.

   I continue to make progress on the book I am working on about youth liberation issues. There is so much to say and I already know that the book will feature sections on scientific ageism, the problems with notions of parents' rights and guardianship, youth rights abuses taking place in K-12 schools, the suppression of youth sexuality, youth rights abuses in medical and psychiatric contexts, issues impacting youth of color and immigrant youth of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, issues impacting rural youth, the intersection of youth liberationism, feminism, and sex and gender issues, LGBTIQ+ youth issues, injustices taking place at the intersection of sizeism and ageism, the intersection of youth rights and disability rights, institutional abuse of youth, legal age restrictions, economic ageism, issues impacting poor and working class youth, the juvenile (in)justice system and other legal issues pertinent to youth, minor status, youth and social media, moral panics and their effects on youth, youth and politics, and cultural, spiritual, and social prejudices against young people. So little has been published in youth liberation theory since the early 1980s and yet so much has changed in our world since then. I don't want to leave anything important out of this work because I want it to begin to make up for all that hasn't been said on these issues for so long. I want everyone that reads it to see why we should all be youth liberationists and why we should all feel that we have a stake in curtailing anti-youth ageism in our society. If you have any comments, suggestions, or resources you think I should be aware of in reference to this project, please contact me and let me know.

   Thank you to everyone who reads this blog and/or follows The Youth Rights Blog Facebook page. Keep making your voices heard and your presence felt standing up for what is right and just. The world needs it now more than ever.

   

Youth Rights 101: How to Analyze Issues Through a Youth Rights Lens

   Previously I have posted about how youth rights is primarily a framing device as opposed to a set of hard and fast positions (i.e. youth rights supporters believe in this or youth rights supporters think that is wrong). As a framework for understanding issues related to young people, youth rights may not always give us a lot of easy answers (although sometimes it will) but it will lead us to ask certain types of questions that help us to understand an issue more clearly that we otherwise might have. This blog post isn't going to tell you how to come to the "youth rights position" on a given issue (as if there was only one!) but it will help you to learn to analyze everything from media representations of youth to legal issues involving minors to situations you observe in your daily life through a youth rights framework.

   First, ask yourself how young people are being framed in a given context. Are they portrayed as delinquent troublemakers up to no good? As helpless victims in need of adult guidance and supervision? As autonomous human beings with their own beliefs, values, and personality? Do youth speak for themselves or are others (parents, teachers, experts, etc.) primarily speaking for them? Are we being led to give the things young people say about themselves credence or are we being led to disregard their perspectives in favor of what someone older has to say ostensibly on their behalf? Documentaries in which adults speak about children without allowing children to speak for themselves in a way the viewer is led to believe are just as credible as adult viewpoints are an example of a problematic framing of youth in the media.

   Ask yourself if the solutions being proposed to deal with problems affecting youth deal with the systemic forces that endanger youth by depriving them of autonomy or if they simply reinscribe the adult supremacist logic which creates many of these problems in the first place. The vast majority of books, movies, television news reports, legislation, etc. that aim to tackle the problem of youth on youth violence and harassment (euphemistically termed "bullying") do little to solve the problem and sometimes even do a fair amount to make it worse. This is primarily because these "solutions" fail to take into account the structural forces which conspire to put youth into oppressive situations which they cannot choose to walk away from. Almost all adults have found themselves in a situation where they experienced alienation and unhappiness with the people around them whether it be at a university, a job, a place of worship, a community organization, or even an entire town. The reason that this sort of thing rarely drives adults to take their own lives or to resort to violence against others is not primarily because adults are more mature than youth are - it is that adults are more or less free to leave these situations and move on to one they are happier about. So "anti-bullying" programs which do not seek to ameliorate the lot of students by giving them greater control over their educational environment do little to actually address the problem.

   Another prime example of this phenomenon is how the issue of LGBT youth homelessness is framed, particularly within the context of the LGBT community. When LGBT people and their supporters speak about the tragedy of youth who are homeless due to rejection by their families on the basis of their sexuality and/or gender identity, the villain is always spoken of the in the vaguest possible terms. It's "homophobia" or "religious fundamentalism" or simply the fact that the young person's parents are bad. All of this is true, but it does little to address the problem of LGBT youth homelessness itself. There will unfortunately always be homophobes and religious fanatics among us. Hopefully there will be fewer of them in the future, but they are unlikely to become extinct any time soon. The reason that LGBT youth are in such a vulnerable position is not simply that many of them have parents who are bigots and fools. That is also true of plenty of LGBT adults who seem to do just fine for themselves. It is because of the legal, political, social, cultural, and economic forces which conspire to make young people without an adult patron essentially helpless in our society. There are almost no jobs where a young person without a diploma can earn a decent living. There are few social services that she is able to access on her own. Due to her age, she may not be legally allowed to sign the paperwork necessary to rent an apartment even in the very unlikely event that she comes into enough money to afford one. It is the evil of ageism even more than the evil of homophobia which works to incapacitate homeless LGBT youth and keep them in a dire situation. And what is worse, focusing solely on homophobia while ignoring institutionalized ageism virtually assures that the problem will never go away.

   Ask yourself if the discourse in play revolves around essentialist notions about young people.   Statements about the supposedly immutable, universal, and and essentialist characteristics that youth of a certain age possess are nearly everywhere in our society. They are so taken for granted in our culture that most people rarely if ever question them and will go so far as to label any deviation from these stereotypes as pathological - a child is "socially stunted" or "extremely gifted" for example. On the other hand, we take for granted that there is a great deal of variation when it comes to say, twenty-five-year-olds. Some are ready to have children of their own; some are not. Some are seasoned professionals in their chosen field; some are not. We don't pathologize these differences - we recognize them as a part of human diversity. We should apply this same attitude to youth and we should be highly skeptical in those instances where we see that it is not being applied. (For a great analysis of this phenomenon by a radical young person, check out this blog post.)

   Asking yourself these three questions is by no means all that it takes to analyze a discourse through a youth rights lens. For most of us interested in these issues - those of us who have read, researched, talked, and thought a lot about them - asking ourselves these questions is not something that we do intentionally when we hear someone make a comment about their children or watch a sitcom where youth are featured. It is rather akin to an automatic reflex. When you begin thinking about youth rights issues and using youth rights as a lens through which to analyze issues affecting young people, you will find that the opportunities to do so are endless. You will also find that most discourses centering on youth would make a lot more sense and do a lot more good if youth rights was a part of the average person's frame of reference.