In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler illuminates the perverse parallel between the Catholic Church’s assertion that “gender ideology” is a threat to children, and its own refusal to hold itself to account for the untold numbers of children whose abuse it aided and abetted. Writes Butler:
Haunted by its own abuse of children, the Church externalizes the origin of child abuse, attributing it to sexual and gender minorities who have for the most part thought carefully about matters of consent, defended the actions of consenting adults within the law, and fought for social freedoms on the street. The Church thus ignores the fact that it has lost all standing to articulate this objection. It commits a moral error of gross proportion by projecting and externalizing the specter of its own abusive history onto sexual and gender minorities as a way of making others responsible for its own crimes.
Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? page 85
That is, the Church’s claim that queer folk are a threat to children or to the social order is a projection of its own sexual crimes onto an undeserving and entirely blameless group. In a similar vein, Republican proposals to police the use of bathrooms serve to obscure and deflect from the fact that the party is led by an adjudicated rapist and actively promotes men with histories of sexual assault, sex trafficking, and rape among its ranks.
A projection is often understood as an unconscious transfer of one’s desires or fears onto another person or object. But there’s nothing unconscious about these projections. This is projection not as unprocessed trauma but as grift, and like all grift, it needs a mark to succeed. If a bystander to the projection merely walks on by, accepting the hallucination, then the projection persists. But if they refuse to be complicit? If instead of passing by, they bare witness, testify, and move to protect? If they show that their love for the person being unfairly projected upon is far too great to be diminished by a cruel but ultimately insubstantial phantom? Well, we may not be able to stop the projectors, but we can sure as hell take care of each other.