Not Just Gus Walz: Understanding the Ableist Logic of Toxic White Masculinity in the New Eugenics Era

Not Just Gus Walz: Understanding the Ableist Logic of Toxic White Masculinity in the New Eugenics Era

 

Ly Xīnzhèn Zhǎngsūn

 

Content notes: Mention of IQ, ableist slurs

 

I am tired. So is everyone that I know. And I don’t mean tired as in “didn’t get enough sleep last night” or “worked too much in the last couple days.” I mean bone-tired. Exhausted. Spent. Spooned out and burned out.

It’s been over a year of bearing witness to genocide in real time, funded and armed by my government. Over four years of witnessing consistent COVID denialism, even and especially from the left, and utter abandonment of those most vulnerable – those deemed most disposable and most expendable. Decades of witnessing a rising tide of open and unabashed white supremacy and Christo-fascism at home and abroad. Surviving amidst climate catastrophe generating deadlier hurricanes and floods and wildfires, and hyper-consumerism and racialized capitalism that’s gutting lives and livelihoods and contributing all the more to disablement.

I’m tired of hearing people who are supposed to be on my side, who claim to care about social justice and human rights, weaponize the very same ableist beliefs that they should be fighting against. But investing in oppressive beliefs is nothing new. 

I was at the Democratic National Convention this August and what I witnessed exhausted me. I was one of only a handful of people (of tens of thousands) I ever saw wearing masks. Between the United Center and McCormick Place, CART captioning and American Sign Language interpretation were at times only sporadically available – even in the Disability Caucus – with no reliable or consistent signage indicating physically accessible pathways or support for communication or sensory access needs. 

Kamala Harris spoke glowingly about “the deadliest military in the world” while tens of thousands of U.S.-flag waving spectators cheered “USA! USA! USA!” sending chills through my entire body. The U.S. military is the single largest polluter on the planet. Meanwhile, the U.S. empire is responsible for committing and enabling atrocities and war crimes and overthrowing sovereign governments worldwide from Chile to Palestine to Laos to Ethiopia to Afghanistan, not to mention within its own borders against Native/Indigenous tribal nations. 

Like many organizers, I woke up after the convention and again after the election to messages running the gamut from shock (laughable, in my opinion) to horror (very reasonable) to fierce determination to keep organizing no matter what – as we always have done, no matter which politicians or parties hold power. There is no U.S. President who has ever been innocent; the very position of the presidency requires upholding and maintaining the U.S. empire. All candidates, as April Rosenblum reminds us, become our opponents once they hold the office of President, no matter how nicely they articulated their policies around civil rights, tokenized marginalized advocates for social justice causes, and co-opted activist terminology while campaigning.   

But what I do know is that global fascism has been on the rise for a very long time, not just within these borders. And fascism, as always, is a profoundly eugenicist political machine and ideology, rooted in and shaped by ableism just as all forms of oppression and domination are. 

No party or leader is exempt from this ableism, and it also comes in spades even from those ostensibly on our side. Over the past year, we’ve borne witness to ableism over and over again in the political sphere, reflecting back ableism that shows up in the everyday lives of ordinary people: 

Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on Kamala Harris calling her “a low IQ individual” and “mentally impaired.” Mass media speculation over Joe Biden’s “senior moments” and the possibility of dementia or another neurological disorder. Mockery when Biden struggled to complete sentences (“senile”), when Trump spoke in meandering, off-topic soliloquies (“not well,” questioning “mental capacity”), when Harris’ verbosity is described as “word salad” – all of which are often characteristics of neurodivergent people of all types. When Trump used two hands to hold a cup instead of one, failed to open a garbage truck door during a political stunt, and simply exists in a body mocked as ugly and fat. Snide commentary from the alleged left that for nearly a decade has painted Trump as unfit for office not because of his white supremacist allegiances and admitted sexual abuse, but because of his perceived learning disabilities (“he can’t read,” “ignorant,” “stupid”), psychosocial disabilities (“narcissist,” “emotionally unstable,” “psychopath,” “paranoid,” “germaphobic tendencies”), and physical appearance. 

And then came the announcement of Tim Walz’s nomination for the Vice Presidential slot on the Democratic ticket for 2024, on stage at the United Center. As Walz accepted the nomination, his son Gus cried a stream of happy tears, shouting, “That’s my dad!” 

Right-wing media immediately erupted with vicious attacks describing Gus as a beta male, weak, representative of the inevitable end product of the left’s alleged degeneracy in promoting feminism and rights for queer and trans people. When confronted with the fact that Gus has a learning/developmental disability, the tenor of the comments changed ever so briefly, with a classic fauxpology. Of course they didn’t mean to attack a disabled person! These comments had assumed Gus was neurotypical and deserved to be mocked, ridiculed, and degraded for the audacity of being male and crying in public. 

The left’s response to these comments, like the left’s generally apathetic (at best) attitude toward ableism, was to decry the deep insult and offense when disabled people are mocked. But once again, these responses failed to capture the root of the problem, just as the left’s response to Trump’s mockery of disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski did years ago.  

Fascist, eugenicist ideologies valorize the mythology of strength, health, and masculinity, while demeaning any actual or perceived weakness, sickness, or femininity as degeneracy (with limited exceptions for submissive, Christian white women’s femininity). Within these ideologies, disability is a burdensome and loathsome cost – a drain on society. Disability is also embedded in the rhetoric used to demonize queer and trans people, as evidenced by the liberal nonsense giving rise to further insults on Trump about the size of his penis and the use of the feminized “Elonia” to mock his notoriously anti-trans billionaire supporter Elon Musk. 

Nazi propaganda posters from the Third Reich depicted caricatures of people with nebulously defined physical and mental disabilities (hunched over, drooling, with blank expressions) in contrast to images of healthy, strong, nondisabled families. These posters explicitly compared the cost to society of maintaining the Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”) to the cost of supporting a presumptively nondisabled family. During the Holocaust, Aktion T4 pioneered mass murder by first designating disabled people for forced slaughter to test the tools that would be used to engineer genocide of Jews, Roma, and all other people deemed undesireable. 

The Nazi party also orchestrated major book burnings, destroying texts held by the archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science/Sexology), the very first sexology research center in the world, which also performed gender-confirmation surgeries. Later, the Nazi party criminalized queerness and other perceived sexual or gender transgression, paving the way for mass murder of people who were actually queer or trans or perceived as such. The same rhetoric advanced by the Nazis to describe all people whose sexuality, intimacies, and gender expressions were perceived as deviant is still alive today – and commonplace within the far right and increasingly, the mainstream right. They still call us degenerates today, and people who care about protecting queer and trans people’s lives should know the chilling history of this term.

Gus Walz was ridiculed and attacked because of toxic masculinity and cis-hetero-patriarchal ideals that idealize a version of masculinity in which men and boys , especially white ones, do not cry or show emotions. If men and boys do cry or show emotions, they are then femininized – their gender and sexuality can both come into question. This only becomes possible because of the pre-existing ideas that femininity and queerness are themselves inherently degrading or lesser states, and that white masculinity depends on projecting strength.

Disability becomes one of the only available defenses to the charge of beta masculinity – a disabled person is exempt from the expectations of toxic masculinity because disabled people are so often forcibly degendered, that is, denied recognition of our actual femininity or masculinity. Meanwhile, rhetorically attacking a disabled person is positioned as uniquely horrifying and offensive from a paternalistic and patronizing view of disability that paints disabled people as permanently innocent and infantile – yet disabled people comprise the vast majority of people incarcerated, killed by police, and experiencing homelessness. Apologizing for inadvertently insulting someone over a perceived manifestation of their disability becomes a point of superficial “progressivism” or “inclusion,” while disabled people are dying because of structural ableism and other forms of oppression, violence, abuse, and neglect. 

Disabled people of all genders (and agender and genderless disabled people) deserve to have the full range of emotions as experienced and expressed as nondisabled people – as do all people, regardless of gender. And we should weep – and rage – and grieve – and seek pleasure, rest, comfort, and joy wherever we can find and cultivate them. 

Gus Walz deserved his moment of joy – regardless of his gender and whether or not he had a disability. 

It wasn’t wrong to mock him because he had a disability. It was wrong to mock him because it is wrong to mock anyone for displaying their tenderness and vulnerability. It was wrong to mock him because those who did so only chose to target him because his father is a prominent Democratic leader and he happened to be male. It was wrong to mock him because people who hold far less power than anyone in the Walz family or at the center of the Democratic party can face deadly consequences when our gender presentations, emotional expressions, and disabled existence do not conform to societal expectations. 

The rest of us deserve far better and much more than vapid, hypocritical apologies and call-outs for insulting a disabled person, when real disabled people are dying. In just the last year alone, our community has witnessed an endless train of immeasurable loss – Atinuke “Tinu” Abayomi Paul, Diane Coleman, Steve Silberman, Andrés Gallegos, Kathi Wolfe, Deola Elaine Phair, Stevie Hopkins, Paul Fogle, Mark Partin, and so many others. Meanwhile, in just one year, the number of disabled people in Palestine has grown exponentially across multiple categories of disability, illness, and injury during Israel’s genocidal campaign masquerading as war, which has had catastrophic effects on Palestinians who were already disabled and those who are newly disabled.

While much of the progressive world is in mourning and disbelief about Harris’s loss to Trump, those of us who’ve been in the trenches in struggles for liberation were neither surprised nor shocked. Even had Harris won, we would have had to prepare for mass deportations, a return to tough on crime policies that harm marginalized communities most, and a continuation of U.S. support for apartheid and genocide in Palestine. The impending Trump inauguration has stoked very real fears of increased state repression, particularly targeting queer and trans people, Palestinian solidarity organizers (including the many of us who are Jewish), people who can become pregnant and give birth, refugees and asylum-seekers and all others with precarious immigration status, and disabled people dependent on government-funded programs and services – among so many others. The list of dangerous and potentially deadly policy proposals coming from Project 2025 and the transition team seems overwhelming and terrifying and of course – exhausting.

I know you are tired too. But disabled people have always been freedom fighters and dream weavers and community builders and social justice engineers. We know how to survive and fight back when the state criminalizes us, pathologizes us, and tries to disappear us. We’ve done it through wildfires and pandemics and genocide. We’ve kept loving and supporting each other through every U.S. presidential administration before and we were prepared to keep doing it no matter who won the election. I believe in a future in which our sickness, unwellness, frailty, and messiness are no longer equated with unworthiness, expendability, or disposability. A future where marginalized communities no longer hinge hopes and dreams for life, love, and liberation on political parties and leaders that do not care about justice, care, or accountability. A future where we orient our world around Disability Justice principles prioritizing radical care and rest as practices of justice made manifest. A future where men and boys can cry regardless of their sexuality or current disability status, where disability is no longer weaponized against oppressed communities, where disabled people can exist – and thrive – in all our neuroexpansive, crip, mad, disabled brilliance. 

ABOUT

Ly Xīnzhèn Zhǎngsūn is an internationally recognized advocate, organizer, attorney, strategist, scholar, and writer whose work addresses interpersonal, corporate, and state violence targeting disabled people at intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation. They are an East Asian, agender/aro/aspec queer, trans, disabled, Jewish survivor of transracial/transnational adoption who contains multitudes. Ly Xīnzhèn is faculty in disability studies and women’s and gender studies at Georgetown University and founding executive director of The Autistic People of Color Fund, a project of collective care, mutual aid, generative economies, and just transition. They are a public policy expert with experience working for many national disability and LGBTQIA+ advocacy organizations, including leading the nation’s only policy and advocacy project focused on disability rights, algorithmic harm, and technology justice for several years. Ly Xīnzhèn has also been creating Disability Justice Wisdom Tarot, a reimagining of the tarot centering disabled BIPOC, since 2020. www.lydiaxzbrown.com

 

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