Current Trans-Hysteria Mirrors Jekyll and Hyde

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As a young child, my favorite activity involved going into my make-believe laboratory (a.k.a. the bathroom) and experimenting with powerful potions (empty shampoo bottles and such filled with water and soap). My big sister and I had a game we never spoke of. She would stand outside the door I’d left ajar and spy on me. I would stage-whisper to myself, “This will kill her, and she won’t even know how I did it!”

A few years later, I got hooked on comic books. One that blew my mind was a mega-sized anthology of classic horror stories. It was printed like a comic book, but definitely foreshadowed what would later be known as graphic novels. It included comic book versions of the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Stevenson’s novella was published the year following the 1885 passage of the Labouchere Amendment in the United Kingdom. The Amendment made “gross indecency”—defined as any homosexual acts—a crime.

From my early “experiments,” I was already primed for a mad scientist narrative. It wasn’t until reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde years later that I realized how deeply his theme of the double resonated with me. Stevenson’s novella was published the year following the 1885 passage of the Labouchere Amendment in the United Kingdom. The Amendment made “gross indecency”—defined as any homosexual acts—a crime. No less of a great artist than Oscar Wilde was persecuted and imprisoned because of Labouchere, ten years after its passage, and Alan Turing, esteemed World War II codebreaker and the acclaimed father of theoretical computer science and Artificial Intelligence was chemically castrated in 1952 after being convicted of breaking this cruel law.

The U.K. didn’t “pardon” any of those persecuted till 2017, under the “Alan Turing Law.”

No wonder “the closet” existed then and persists today. Imagine what it would feel like to have to hide an essential part of yourself, or risk public humiliation, loss of livelihood, prison time, and worse. Wouldn’t you feel as if you were living a double life?

In the preface to my novella The Uncanny Case of Gilles/Jeannette, a modern gothic gender transition story inspired by Stevenson’s iconic characters, I note that there has long been speculation about Stevenson’s sexuality. Was he a queer man who explored the State-imposed duality of his life through his allegorical masterpiece? Curious, I dug deeper to discover the actual date of the law’s passage: August 14, 1885.  According to Stevenson biographer Frank McLynn, most of the writing was done in September and October of 1885. The novella’s publication date was January 5, 1886. Could this have played into the extreme urgency with which Stevenson felt driven to write this story? You do the math.

Although his sexuality cannot be “proven,” one thing is sure. Jekyll and Hyde has become short-hand for split personality, double life. It’s a trope queer people know quite well. The terror of the closet has long kept us leading double lives. This month is Gay Pride and like all Prides past, the celebrations are a mix of joy and sorrow. Yes, it is wonderful how far we’ve come, but given the way queer people, and Trans youth in particular are being viciously targeted by legislative hate campaigns, we are still living with targets on our backs.

Consider the bill (SB 458) passed in Montana in May, 2023, which states: “a person’s sex can be only male or female” and “they are defined based on gamete size and chromosomes,” and finally that “one’s sex cannot be changed and the ‘subjective experience of gender’ is not important for the application of the law.” How different is that from the Labouchere language of 1885 which deemed sexual activities between two people of the same gender as “gross indecency?”

The goal of all these horrific laws is to chase queers back into the closet, and ultimately erase or exterminate the ones who come out. Section eleven of the Labouchere Act sentences anyone guilty of “gross indecency” to two years of hard labor. Right now, 138 years later, the American Civil Liberties Union is tracking 491 anti-LGBTQ bills across the U.S., many of which mandate jail time and other punitive measures. The indecency of this vicious campaign speaks for itself.

The question is: Why?

Jekyll and Hyde gives us a classic literary answer. When a person is cut off from their “indecent urges” (as judged by society and/or the courts), they are forced to create an alternate identity, one couched in secrecy. Mr. Hyde is a literal creation of Dr. Jekyll’s alter-ego—a set-up so resonant now, we see it everywhere, especially in fantasy and sci-fi genres, where characters are forced to physically transform themselves due to “social norms” imposed on them.

The moral of the story still applies, too. Dr. Jekyll was unable to understand his own urges, just like many anti-queer politicians are unable to recognize their own motives. In recent years, legislative homophobes turned out to be men who have sex with men, including Minneapolis Senator Larry Craig, Michigan State Representative Todd Courser, and many others. The list goes on and on. These tormented men were compelled to torment others because free expression of sexuality and gender held a mirror up to them. If they’d read and learned from Stevenson’s classic story, they’d have looked in that mirror, seen hidden aspects of themselves and even loved those rejected parts. There’d be no hate and no chilling laws like the ones Stevenson saw being enacted in his day. Today, anti-queer legislation is fueled by a similar lack of self-understanding—and a fear of anything “transformed” beyond “social norms.”  That’s how Mr. Hyde and the Labouchere Act are lurking behind hundreds of repressive legislative acts proposed today.

I wrote The Uncanny Case of Gilles/Jeannette to modernize a Jekyll and Hyde-style tale and reflect the torturous conditions for LGBT people in the 21st century. In the story, Ella and Simone are working through the complexities that have arisen in their long-term relationship, since Simone began transitioning to Simon. But this is just the present-day framing story. When Ella inherits an old family Inn in Hudson, she and Simon move upstate from Brooklyn. In the basement she discovers a diary that tells the mad tale of Jeannette and Gilles. When Jeannette, grieving the recent death of her father cannot win the love of her friend Dahlia, she descends into her father’s laboratory and creates a serum that turns her into a man. This man, Gilles, however turns out to be a charming, murderous monster—one that Jeannette cannot control.

The old tale is set in 1933, the height of the Great Depression. My previous crime novel Jazzed took place a decade earlier, during a time that was loose and free—the Jazz Age—but also a time when the hypocritical social forces were fighting hard to keep the country homogenized. Eugenics played a large part in that story. My new novella is set during the oppressive Prohibition era, and one year before the Hollywood Hays code goes into effect. Before Hays, at least queer people could see some reflection of themselves on the screen, even if stereotypical (though often quite sexy)! After Hays, queers were erased from the screen until the code was lifted in 1954.

I learned about the Hays code through The Celluloid Closet, a 1981 book by Vito Russo who died of AIDS at age 44. Russo’s book is one of the two nonfiction books that have had the greatest impact on me. The other is futurist Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near which, back in 2005, predicted that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and pass the Turing Test by 2029, and by 2045, humans will merge with the very artificial intelligence we’ve created. Isn’t it truly a horror tale, how important the “Turing Test” has become today—with the very recent rise of ChatGPT and hundreds of other AI applications—when in his own era, Turing was medically tortured for his sexuality?

Much the way there is AI hysteria in the air, and people fear that the non-human “other” will make them obsolete, queer-haters in American politics are equally hysterical (and not in a gay old way!) about trans people whom they also view as non-human and “other.” They fear that by allowing trans people to even exist they will be signing away their own powers, and their own relevance.

Stevenson had it right when he showed us that Jekyll and Hyde were both the same person. There is no evil “other,” only ourselves we see mirrored in others. We can either accept ourselves completely, and turn shame into self-compassion, or project that hate onto others and fight to take away their rights and very lives. Or perhaps that is a little too righteous and binary. In the name of a classic horror story, how about we all take one small step to just consider this idea, and act accordingly, with decency?

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