New Year's Reflections on Christianity, Secularism, and America's Anti-Trans Panic
Secular Advocacy and the Fight for Transgender Rights Can and Should Go Together
Happy New Year, my fellow bugbears!
2025 promises to be a hellish year politically—certainly here in these United States—but I hope that in spite of that, all of you will manage to thrive in one way or another over the coming year.
Transgender folks like myself—the quintessential American bugbears du jour—are afraid of what may come, and with good reason. As porn bans sweep across the South, trans and queer writers, streamers, and YouTubers wonder if we will soon be swept up in them, our very existence defined—absurdly and unjustly—as inherently pornographic in Project 2025 and more broadly by the fascist American Right. The Right’s conflation of queer existence with “porn” is just one aspect of a years-long drive to make public trans existence impossible that includes drag bans (and conflating drag with being trans); discriminatory restrictions against trans people in areas like healthcare access, bathroom access, and driver’s licenses; legal (and illegal) attacks on Pride; and the rhetorical conflation of queerness and especially transness with “deviant” sexuality and sexual abuse.
Of course, these are DARVO tactics. Sexual abuse runs rampant in right-wing Christian and other authoritarian institutions and environments. So long as the abuse is the kind that upholds white patriarchal Christian values, American authoritarians are happy to sweep it under the rug, whether we’re talking about Southern Baptist preachers or the Republican Party’s relationship to Matt Gaetz (and other abusers too numerous to list).
The repulsive and amoral Donald Trump, who has been found liable for rape, defamation, and election interference by American courts, will soon be president again, but trans people face the very real possibility that we will be essentially banned from public life as the fascist Republican Party takes its anti-queer state policies national.
Even more disturbingly, some number of self-defined liberals and leftists, and even senior members of the Democratic Party, seem poised to give up on trans rights without a fight. That being said, the people who are primarily to blame are the Right and, above all, white Christians. The Christian part is as operative and significant here as the white part, and both white and Christian privilege infuse America’s institutions and norms.
And it’s specifically Christian politicians, Christian agitators (like Moms for Liberty and their ilk), and Christian lobbies like ADF who are pushing America’s anti-trans moral panic, arguing that we should be stripped of our rights on specifically Christian theological grounds.
With that in mind, would you expect transgender Americans to want anything to do with Christianity? Or, since most of us were undoubtedly raised as some kind of Christian, would you expect us to be religious at all? But then, there have been major disappointments of late from the organized secular community at all, which, unfortunately, leaves many trans people skeptical of skeptics, so to speak.
While you might expect a lot of transgender Americans to be nonreligious—and you would be correct—there are also pockets of the trans community in which atheism is written off as inherently reactionary, anti-trans, and not worth engaging. I was reminded of this on Bluesky the other day as I posted about the latest anti-trans, reactionary bullshit from the New Atheist old guard, and ended up defending the value of organized secular lobbying and advocacy against people who dismiss anything labeled “atheist” with obvious disdain and are, in my view, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It was a funny position to be in, since back in my Twitter days I was usually in the position of calling out the very real toxicity of online atheism and the Dawkins-and-Harris-loving “rationaler than thou” types.
I won’t belabor the details of the scandal that started it all, as that has been done well elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the Freedom From Religion Foundation published a vitriolic (and, honestly, irrational) anti-trans screed by old guard obnoxious atheist Jerry Coyne, and then removed it. Apparently it was FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor who greenlit the piece, and I honestly think (as I said on Bluesky) that she should resign over it, particular after the tepid “apology” the organization published in which no one took personal responsibility. After the piece was pulled amid fierce backlash, FRRF honorary board members and total dicks Coyne, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins resigned, and I’m with Hemant Mehta on this—good riddance to them. The less pull these guys have in organized American secularism, the better. And American secular advocacy has moved in positive directions in recent years, despite the undue deference too many in the secular community—and particularly visible leaders and public figures—give to the toxic old white men who, for too many, are still perceived as the face of atheism.
Dawkins and Coyne have since doubled down on their extreme anti-“woke” and anti-trans views, which is exactly what we’d expect from smarmy, hyper-privileged, wealthy, condescending white male atheists like them. But is it fair to treat them as the face of atheism? As loud and obnoxious as atheists like them are, and as much influence as they have had (and to some extent continue to have) in organized secularism in the United States, they most certainly do not represent grassroots secular Americans or most secular organizers.
How do I know? Well, I communicate and work with some secular leaders on a fairly regular basis. The national scene is a motley—the Center for Inquiry seems determined to remain in Dawkins’s camp, unfortunately. But FFRF is changing even if its leadership is far from perfect, and there national figures that are squarely in the corner of Americans. In 2023 Andrew Seidel, a constitutional lawyer and vice president for strategic communications at Americans United, changed into drag during a talk at West Texas A&M University to protest the censorious and unilateral cancellation of a student drag show by the university’s president on clearly Christian grounds. And in recent years Nick Fish, president of American Atheists, has done much to further both queer representation and to frame LGBTQ rights advocacy as an integral part of secular advocacy.
Meanwhile, from what I’ve seen of state and local secular groups, the support for LGBTQ Americans is robust. Those who are doing the real yeoman’s work of state and local battles at school boards and state legislatures largely understand that opposing theocracy means advocating for women’s, minority, and LGBTQ civil rights, all of which are threatened, in this country anyway, primarily by authoritarian Christians. I am pleased to have a particularly friendly working relationship with Secular Arizona at present, and their executive director, Jeanne Casteen, is one of my heroes.
It must also be said that the preponderance of available data—data we have in large part thanks to the Secular Survey that American Atheists commissioned in 2019—shows that younger secular Americans (atheists, agnostics, humanists, etc.) see LGBTQ rights advocacy as an essential part of secular advocacy. Yes, probably in every American secular organization of any significant size you will still find some number of Dawkins-brained doofuses who deride civil rights advocacy and efforts to diversify secular groups as “atheism plus,” as if atheism can ever be strictly values-neutral in a country dominated by a religion in the way that America is dominated by Christianity. But those people are the past of secular advocacy, not its future, and they have never represented those most harmed by Christian privilege.
So, what’s the point of making this case here? I suppose I’m making it largely because I was surprised at how much absolute, unnuanced, unequivocal dismissal of secular advocacy work that I recently encountered on Bluesky. And in that connection, I also think that the state of affairs I’ve sketched here matters precisely because secular Americans are disproportionately queer (see the Secular Survey linked above for more information), and queer Americans are disproportionately nonreligious in spite of the sometimes vocal disdain for atheism seen among online queer people.
One of my recent essays I’m most proud of addresses this disproportionate lack of religious affiliation among queer Americans. I do wish, however, that I had compared the study I examine in that essay to other available data, which shows a much larger proportion of religious affiliation among LGBTQ Americans, and I think some of the discrepancy surely lies in the wording and contextualizing of survey questions—this is indeed a complicated topic. I thank Bluesky user paulaptb for catching this.
In any case, as anyone who’s been following my work for long knows, I am a big promoter of pluralism—just not the kind that’s really Christian supremacy by another name. I believe in equal accommodation for people of all religions and none in the public square, and I also think that there is important work to be done cutting across not just interconfessional lines, but also across the lines of confession and nonconfession. At the same time, secular Americans do not really have a seat at the table in the United States, and the Coynes and Dawkinses of the world spouting off anti-“woke” bullshit only hurts our prospects for gaining one.
At the grassroots level, however, across most of America, not believing in god and/or not being religious is not easy. The nonreligious are in fact marginalized, at least if they are vocal and visible about their nonreligion—and it is impossible not to be in many small towns, where the church that you go to matters greatly with respect to your social circle and prospects. Queer Americans are, of course, also marginalized, as our Americans who adhere to minority religions. And we could all gain from affording each other mutual respect and working together toward our common liberation, rather than being at cross purposes.
In 2025, I will continue to strive to be a bridge figure in this regard. I’m available for speaking engagements, and I’m also happy for readers to reach out and to participate in interactions in the comments here. Nearly anything can happen this year, and not in a good way. I may, at some time this year or within the next few years, feel compelled to leave the country. But I will navigate all that one day at a time, and I will continue to push both secular and religious organizations to be more inclusive as I am able. I will also continue both to promote secular advocacy (and rights advocacy as a crucial part of that) and liberation for my queer and trans siblings.
Take care, fellow bugbears. 2025 is going to be a bumpy ride. That’s all the more reason we need those of us who are able to push for secular advocacy organizations to commit to robustly fighting for civil rights as a part of their church-state separation work, and in so doing to represent what nonreligious Americans actually look like on the ground: disproportionately queer and pro human rights. If you are a queer American who is deeply distrustful of these institutions, I get it. And I would still encourage you to offer the benefit of the doubt where you are able.
I remember back in the '90s when many gays were pagan because the churches they were in condemned homosexuality. Then times changed & churches loosened up with gay marriage & such. These days it seems to me that there are fewer pagans around. I'm not sure if gays went back to their now more liberal churches or decided to chuck it all & become "nonreligious."
As much as I despise Dawkins & Co., and I fucking DESPISE them, honesty dictates I admit I hate queer Christians with a religious superiority complex just about as much.
That said, I don't envy the shock they're about to be hit by when the churches they thought were inclusive and welcoming or whatever go right back to being openly queerphobic and toss them to the wolves.