Stonewall and the search for meaning What made nonsensical dogma so appealing?

For somewhat inconveniently, every year records would reveal that around three quarters of reported murders came from gun-loving Latin America and the Caribbean — where general murder rates were already horribly high — and around half of victims would be in prostitution, probably the most dangerous occupation in the world anyway. Even so, committed celebrants somehow knew that the root cause of every single death was that ubiquitous phenomenon, “transphobia”, while all other circumstances were just downstream effect.

Even today, despite consistently and thankfully tiny murder rates for trans-identified people in the UK and Europe, the habit of such ceremonies occasionally lingers. Wednesday’s ceremony at University of Central Lancashire involved the trans flag being “lowered to half mast”. A spectacularly mawkish vigil in Reading, streamed live to YouTube, included poetry, sermons, and secular hymns sung by a choir. Still, even in strongholds of the declining empire, it seemed as if hearts are not entirely in it. Cambridge University’s LGBT+ society reminded its members this week that, though it would be offering a service, “You are not any less valid if you don’t come, TDoR is a lot of feelings and we each grieve in different ways”.

Perhaps, now that that this very weird day of observance is apparently on the way out, we have a bit of room to stand back and ask ourselves what exactly was going on there. In an age when Millennial and Gen Z participation in formal religious services is at an all-time low, and mainstream public commemorations such as Remembrance Sunday show similar patterns of decline, how did such a patently ridiculous event ever get embedded in the national calendar?

In fact, these points are probably linked. Fervent LGBT+ activism does appear to perform a quasi-religious function in a mostly secular world — with its sacred texts and chants, commitment to soul-body dualism, and obsession with resurrection into a new life. But perhaps just as important as the absence of religious doctrine is the attendant diminishing of rituals in modern life — that is, a structured, repeatable ceremonial act with a familiar format, shaped by tradition. The ceremonial aspect to TDoR, repeated annually, seems for a while to have helped fill that gap.

Consider the wedding service: no longer a predictable rite, it has been hacked into a million pieces by high status individualists in search of an event that truly “represents” their coupledom. The actress Rebecca Hall, told The Observer last weekend that her wedding was a deliberately improvised affair, during which one friend “leapt out of the shrubbery dressed as a werewolf” to sing a song by The Smiths, and another “called everybody out to the pond as a blood moon was rising and gave them a candle to hold”. Hall summed up: “It was about saying, ‘This is our world, these are our people and we will define ourselves exactly how we want to’.”

Equally, there are hundreds of resources on the internet about how to write the perfect personalised ceremony. One “professional vow writer” briskly advises Vogue readers to “Address your partner and briefly recap your love story, communicate traits that you admire about your partner, describe what you appreciate about your relationship, list three to six specific promises, and close with how you envision your future together.” When a marriage ceremony stands in need of an accompanying PowerPoint, you start to wonder what was so very wrong with the Book of Common Prayer.

Since organised religion has been the main means of inserting ritual into our lives for centuries, it is not surprising that both are simultaneously in retreat. Christenings, already unfashionable, were given a further blow by church closures during lockdown and have yet to recover. At the other end of the life cycle we now have individualised funerals, where attendees must do things like wear bright colours and try hard not to sob through Another One Bites the Dust by Queen. And in between the major life events, we have largely lost the old Christian rituals: Sunday as a day of rest; Lent as a time of fasting and reflecting; Advent as a time of looking forward. Easter is now mostly for children, and every December there is a spate of media extolling the virtues of spending Christmas alone or otherwise “doing it your way”.

In his superlative book The Disappearance of Rituals, philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes the stabilising role that rituals used to play in human societies, independently of their religious value. They would give the passing of time a structure, acting as comforting rejoinder to Heraclitus’s terrifying observation that no one ever steps in the same river twice. Repetition and the recognition of familiar words and objects, met again and again as a particular ceremony unfolds and repeats, would offer shelter from the exhausting deluge of disconnected experiences and random bits of information. Life would be given a meaningful shape. And in reciting words and performing actions you did not personally invent, but only inherited, you could get a rest from the narcissistic demands of self-creation, as well as experiencing a sustaining sense of connection to those who had practiced the very same rituals before you.

Neoliberalism’s emphasis on the ceaseless consumption of new and transient things — purchases, experiences, bits of information, identities, selves — discourages such unflashy memorialising. Viewed in this context, it doesn’t seem so very farfetched to think that, in the annual histrionic performances of TDoR, and perhaps also in things like annual Pride parades — we can detect a secret hankering for older, steadier rhythms of life. Further evidence for the prosecution includes many sentimental references in LGBTQ+ circles to “trancestors” and  “trans elders”, a practice just as ludicrously hyperbolic as TDoR  and yet perhaps also betraying a longing in spiritually deracinated people for a genuine connection with the past.

And then, of course, there are all the tattoos: not exclusive to the LGBT community by any means, but especially beloved of them. As Han observes, in the context of a ritualised society, tattoos used to symbolise “the alliance between individual and community”. Nowadays, he says, “the neoliberal hell of the same is populated with tattooed clones”. Still, the choice of such an ancient — not to mention, stubbornly permanent — medium for queer (supposed) self-expression seems significant.

The demise of the transactivist empire is going to leave many vulnerable victims bereft — irrevocably marked, both physically and psychologically. Alongside appropriate forms of punishment for the cynical opportunists who literally and figuratively took their cut, it would be good if we noticed the surging emptiness in our culture that made nonsensical dogma look so appealing in the first place. For a few years in the early 21st century, lighting a candle and solemnly incanting a mysterious holy name in the dark clearly felt good to a surprising number of atheist-identified people. The next time a quasi-sacred moral fad grips us collectively, we should hang on tight to the remembrance of things past.

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Kathleen Stock is an UnHerd columnist and a co-director of The Lesbian Project.

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