transandnonbinary

While degeneration is not a real phenomenon, unfounded fears about “pure” and “untainted” members of our ingroup being “contaminated” or “corrupted” by some “lowly” outsider or “Other” is an extremely common trope. In fact, it’s a popular reaction to stigma. In Sexed Up, I cite research demonstrating that people imagine stigma to act as a “contagion” that can be “contracted” via interactions with stigmatized individuals. Once “contaminated” by this stigma, the person in question is imagined to be permanently “dirtied” or “spoiled” by it.

So returning to our late nineteenth century examples, it’s not that people of color, or sex workers, or LGBTQ+ people, and so on, had “de-evolved” or were “degenerates,” but rather that these groups were socially stigmatized. And fears that these groups might “corrupt” the “pure” straight white majority stemmed from a deep-seated belief that their stigma was “contagious” and had the potential to “contaminate” (and thereby “ruin”) those who are otherwise “untainted.”

Clearly, these anti-trans/LGBTQ+ “grooming” charges have nothing to do with CSA. But they do perfectly fit the stigma-contamination mindset that I described in the previous section: As LGBTQ+ people, we are imagined to be imbued with stigma that has the potential to “contaminate” anyone who is “exposed” to us, potentially “turning them queer” in the process. In other words, this is merely the failed theory of “degeneration” all over again. And just as “degeneration” was imagined to spread via “sex,” the “grooming” charge — as well as the related accusation that we are “sexualizing children” — insinuates that LGBTQ+ people (but not cis-hetero people) are inherently sexually “contaminating” and “corrupting.”

There are many facets to fascist and far right thinking, but a major recurring theme involves stigmatized outsiders (whether they be immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, Jews and other non-Christians, and of course, gender and sexual minorities) as an imagined “contaminating” force that is insidiously “corrupting” society and the traditional family, and which must be eradicated for the greater good. This is what allows them to perpetually cast themselves as the “aggrieved victim” even when they are members of the dominant/majority group in society. And it’s why they often continue to refer to said minority groups as “degenerates” — in other words, they still believe in “degeneration” as a threat to their own “purity” and “superiority.” The stigma-contamination mindset is central to fascist and far-right thinking.