Buttigieg’s comments on his family, protection, and support last night were a bit on the nose

Peddling heternormativity is a dangerous business in the anti-trans age

Let me first preface this by saying that I like Pete Buttigieg. He is back in the spotlight, and for good reasons. As someone who got stuck in the NYC subway this week because of a shopping cart on the tracks, I am all in favor of upgrading America’s infrastructure.

However, I am wary of his constant messaging presenting marriage and parenting as ideals or moral accomplishments underpinning respect, protection, and support for his family and our community. I am not the first one; in 2019, for example, Greta LaFleur penned a rather mean article about him titled “Heterosexuality Without Women.” But as American conservatives regress to the idea of an absolute moral order, Buttigieg’s line is becoming more problematic. 

In this Friday interview on CNN rebuking Speaker Mike Johnson’s anti-LGBTQ+ antics, Buttigieg doubled down on the point he has made multiple times before: “But my lifestyle is that I’m a dad. I’m a married father of two, a beautiful boy and girl, twins two years old. And our family deserves to be protected. It deserves to be supported just like every American family."  He even threw in “driving the family mini-van on our way to daycare” in case the inuendos were too subtle. He continued on that thread while visiting The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in the evening.

I like to watch Chasten doing little domestic chores…

I know he is aware that for many in the LGBTQ+ communities, “perfect” coupledom and white picket fence families are either not what they wish for or not accessible. He does have an adorable family, which makes him, along with his many accomplishments, a great candidate for the White House, but this is not why he deserves respect, protection, and support. This does not mean LGBTQ+ people are anti-family or anti-tradition; they are not (there is nothing queerer than Christmas anyway), but it means that our differences need not be erased for us to deserve respect, protection, and support.

Ironically, articulating marriage, parenthood, and beauty as having intrinsic values acquiesces to Mike Johnson's beliefs about the right way to live meaning along “18th-century values” and Johnson’s idea that anybody who does not conform is an enemy to “American morality and religion.”

It is worth noting that Buttigieg comes from Indiana, and his political success was limited initially. He had to craft a persona and identity tailored to resonate with the sensibilities of the Midwest, particularly within a small-town context, but wearing his faith and morality on his sleeve could be a risky bet.

Buttigieg’s political narrative is a slippery slope as the next logical step is to suggest that protection and support for trans individuals hinge on their acceptance and integration into the societal norms of cisgender individuals, something that is not desirable or possible for all. We all have observed that “beautiful” passing trans women (by cisgender norms) gain acceptability much more quickly in the same way that Buttigieg does. Similarly, the pure and cornfed Pete and Chasten family looks very different from the queer people I encountered in radical faeries gatherings in my thirties.

I understand his political strategy because I was briefly engaged (I like to say until I stopped hiding my personality), have two kids, and often wear a tie. Once I started speaking about my fiancé at the World Bank around 2011, I got incredible kudos from colleagues there. And when I had babies in 2013, I became “honorary straight” overnight. I love to joke that I had the “perfect gay family” in a DC townhouse for a brief six months before it unraveled. 

This idea of the “perfect gay family” reminds me of Truffaut's quote, “Private life is shaky (“boiteuse”) for everyone. Whereas in movies, there are no traffic jams, no downtime. Films are trains that speed through the night. »

It is ironic because I left France, where expressions of racial, cultural, sexual orientation, and ethnic diversity were suppressed in favor of “The Republic” in search of the American melting pot, only to return (albeit briefly) to a Bourgeois lifestyle. Passing and validation do wonders for people who suffer from entrenched feelings of inferiority, lack of self-confidence, and disenfranchisement. That is why my Instagram profile is a shrine to fatherhood. But passing and validation remain elusive for many in our community who will never experience or wish to experience them.

What is more twisted in the Buttigieg narrative is that assimilation is also what Buttigieg’s gay donors are after. By definition, affluent and influential gay people in America today often have had to pass. For many of them, Buttigieg’s celebration of ties, marriage, and kids is reassurance that the sacrifices it came with were the right ones. 

My friend, the social theorist Michael Warner coined the term “heteronormativity” in 1993 in his seminal book “The Trouble with Normal,” which I suspect Buttigieg must have read by now. In it, Warner writes: “The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists of these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it.” 

Ultimately, it comes back to a simple truth, which is the political objectives of Pete Buttigieg won’t always align with ours. The marriage between our movement and Democrats has its limits. Let Presidential candidates peddle heteronormativity while we continue encouraging America to approach differences with respect, free from preconceived notions, and open to learning new things. There is a wealth to be uncovered in our pluralism, and that pluralism deserves respect, protection, and support.