He’s not one of those who think it’s necessary to write something like that before every sentence, but in the foreword of his 600-page exploration of current struggles over sexuality and gender, the South African journalist and author Mark Gevisser does it once: be yourself a “middle-class white, gay, middle-class South African cisgender man”.
Anyone who is already deterred at this point, that is, suspects dreary identity politics, should read on anyway, or of course precisely because of this. He or she will – I promise – learn a lot and even be entertained in the process. Almost ten years of research have gone into “The Pink Line”. Gevisser leads not only through all of the current debates concerning sexual and gender identity, but also around the world. He travels to Malawi, Uganda and Nigeria, the USA, Russia and Great Britain, Mexico, Israel and the West Bank, India and Egypt and countless other places. Everywhere he looks for the “pink lines” of our time. And writes a story of global queerness.
The word “cisgender” would be an example of the pink line he described. Anyone who knows and uses the term positions themselves on one side of a ditch, says what is being wrestled about: that there is a social gender in addition to biological gender and that these two gender dimensions coincide with some people and not with others. Some “cis”, the other “trans”. On the other side of the pink line are those for whom this is nonsense or even dangerous. However, Gevisser only deals marginally with the language wars that are omnipresent in the German debate.
The gay dating app with the most users in the world is Blued from China with 40 million users
For him, the pink line runs around Mexico City, a liberal island in a Catholic country where the oldest gay pride in Latin America has been taking place since 1979. Or through school toilets in the United States, where politics and the judiciary are fighting a battle over which toilets trans-schoolchildren are allowed to use. In Eastern Europe, a pink line is being drawn against decadent Western liberalism and its LGBT rights. So the pink line is a line of conflict, one of the most important of our time. It separates people, families, states, just as other ideological questions do.
Gevisser describes the pink line as an area “in which queer people change time zones every time they look up from their smartphones and see the people gathered around the family table”. The gay dating app with the most users worldwide is not Grindr (27 million users), but the Chinese version Blued with 40 million users.
Gevisser finds people around the world who live on the pink line. The teenager Michael from Uganda crossed it when he was caught with another boy and again when he had to leave the country, chased and persecuted. Aunty, a trans woman from Malawi, does so when she holds a traditional engagement party with a man in her village. She was sentenced to 14 years in prison and was only released through the intervention of Madonna and Ban Ki-moon. The couple Zaira and Martha celebrated their first lesbian wedding in their Mexican hometown – under police protection.
Mark Gevisser: The pink line. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2021. 655 pages, 28 euros.
The global struggle for sexual self-determination is sometimes about gay marriage, sometimes about being able to father children, but often above all about sheer survival. In 69 countries homosexuality is banned, in nine it can be punished with death. At the same time, LGBT movements can celebrate success around the world. 29 countries now allow same-sex marriage. Openly homosexuals now rule states (Ireland, Iceland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Serbia). In the past twenty years in particular, so much has happened that the counter-movements are sometimes all the more violent.
African countries, but also Russia, are massively resisting Western pressure to become more liberal. “The pink line” illuminates this other side in detail. “It would be too easy,” writes Gevisser, “to describe this reaction as homophobia or transphobia”, even if horror tales spread around the world about the “recruitment” of homosexuals naturally had to do with fear and hatred, as did warnings about the alleged endangerment of young people and families through LGBTQ rights. And while some states may be rightly angry that the West is trying to force them to change through funding and sanctions, the hysteria along the pink line is often limitless.
Nowhere have more people been arrested for homosexuality than in Egypt
The Bishop of Krakow spoke of the “rainbow plague” and painted an ideology on the wall that “wants to control our hearts, souls and our minds”, just as the “red plague” once did, communism. The gender theory, representative of all that is bad in society, is regarded by many as the nightmare of today. Not only Viktor Orbán warned against “ideological colonization” from the West with gender theory and LGBTQ rights, but also Pope Francis.
“The pink line” contains an important change of perspective for everyone who thinks it is just about the sensitivities of privileged minimal groups. Because while in some places liberalization may be taken for granted, life for queers is becoming more and more impossible, especially in Islamic countries. In the past decade, for example, Cairo’s scene has been massively repressed, with more people recently arrested for homosexuality in Egypt than anywhere else in the world.
It is getting better, is a mantra of the movement, and this is how George Clooney recently managed to change Brunei. The sultanate announced a new penal code in 2019 that would have allowed the death penalty for homosexual sex. Calls for a boycott by Clooney were followed so quickly by so many companies and organizations that the Sultan of Brunei imposed a moratorium after just a month.
Incidentally, one thing speaks against the thesis of “indoctrination” with “gender ideology”: Not only is homosexuality naturally as global as everything human. There are also numerous cultures that have always had a third gender category. Bakla On the Philippines, kothi in South India, waria in Indonesia, ‘yan daudu in northern Nigeria, two spirits in indigenous cultures of North America. They don’t always fit well into today’s transsexual or non-binary categories.
Both bakla be it so, says Gevisser, a Filipino trans politician explains: The seat of her identity is not the mind, as one would see it in the West, “but the heart, the spirit, the inner self”. There is also a pink line in the question between mind and heart. Those who arrest identity in their minds tend to pathologize trans people, said the politician. On the other side of the line, it’s “just about who you are”.