Brave New World and Transgender People (Patreon)

A more theoretical piece, inspired by some discourse I encountered today. Don't think I'll be making this into a video but wanted to put it up here

In Aldous Huxely’s novel Brave New World, the world has adopted Henry Ford’s eugenicist and social control theories and taken them to their logical extreme, creating a sterile, joyless world with a rigid, genetically deterministic caste system - alphas, betas, deltas et cetera. The roles people are born and raised into are completely immutable, but it’s important to note that part of that is because the social system they exist within is so rigid and inflexible - someone designated the role of “beta” or “epsilon” at birth receives less education, works a shittier job, has worse social opportunities their whole lives anyway.

One way that this is enforced is a technique the book calls hypnopedia - from the greek words for “sleep” and “child” - where children are played tapes of repeated phrases while they sleep, and when they wake up they are capable of regurgitating these phrases wholesale. A historical example talks about a child who was played a tape that told him “the Nile is the longest river in Africa” and so on while he was asleep and when he was awake he could regurgitate all sorts of facts about the Nile and the rivers of the world, but here’s the catch - asked “what is the longest river in the world” the child couldn’t answer. He hadn’t learned the fact, but instead just picked up a knee-jerk instinct to a situation or phrase.

So the system of teaching children in their sleep was abandoned.

However, when fordism overran the world, it occurred to the powers-that-be that this technique could be used to teach children not facts, but a system of knee-jerk instincts that would reinforce a social system. Instead of making children repeat “the Nile is the longest river in Africa” you get them to repeat “No I’d never play with delta children, they’re brutish and uneducated. Besides, they wear khaki, which is such a beastly colour. I sure am glad to be an alpha”. It doesn’t matter if they believe this, they just have to say it. Socially if you say something like this you’re going to have to stand by it once it’s out, and even if you didn’t, the lower-caste children aren’t going to play with the children who say this.

Such an extreme example lets us look very explicitly at something that often happens really implicitly in real-life society. Children who are around each other who naturally want to play together, so the activating context for that phrase is just seeing children from a different caste - in Brave New World indicated by colour coded clothing. In real life people notice things that mark others as different from them - perceived racial group, disability, gender signifiers and sexuality - and humans as social animals want to be able to interact, like children wanting to play together. The thing about the way people interact with difference is that if they feel like they have permission to enjoy and appreciate difference they will, but if not then the social context is the trigger for phrases that we absorb socially and through media - nonsensical jokes and stereotypes.

This is why simply knowing people from a marginalised community dispels so much prejudice. It isn’t that a cis person who knows a trans person constantly has conversations with them about bathrooms and hormones and pronouns. Instead, the social context arises that would trigger all the nonsense that the cis person has soaked up and they can catch themselves and examine it, and simply find it to be unfounded gibberish.

This is a key way that media representation of trans people, both fictional and celebrity, can have a real, tangible, noticeable effect towards deconstructing transphobia. People have the chance to catch themselves earlier, shake loose some of that hypnopedic nonsense they’ve absorbed. “besides, they wear khaki, which is such a beastly colour” is a nonsense phrase as soon as it’s thought about in the conscious mind, not just in the context of seeing an epsilon-caste person wearing a different colour, but self-evidently. There is no metaphysical quality called epsilon that makes someone wear khaki, nor does it make them inherently socially lesser.

As of writing this, Elliott Page, star of Juno and The Umbrella Academy, came out as transgender 6 days ago, making him probably the second most famous known trans person in the world, and almost certainly the most famous transmasculine person. This will materially affect the lives of trans people, who will feel safer to come out as trans not just because it will show them a trans person being treated with respect and compassion, but also because it will force the issue to the surface in their lives, make the people around them talk about trans people, and yes - shake off some of the hypnopedic nonsense these people have learned.

Transphobia is a material reality, not just through disproportionate rates of unemployment and poverty, not just through work discrimination and hate crimes, but through the experiential differences between a trans person’s life and cis person’s, and it needs to be considered on its own terms, not just in terms of economic effects on trans people but also in terms of the social. More transgender celebrities coming out as trans will not singlehandedly solve the issues of trans people, which are intersectional and inextricably linked to other forms of bigotry as well as capitalist class-based oppression, but it will challenge transphobia on its own terms, and that is a real change to the material conditions of trans people.