A visit to Japan changed how I think about American LGBTQ+ history
Sometimes we need to escape our usual routine to see what’s peculiar about our context—or our history. For many years, I’ve taught and written about American fears that homosexuality or transgender identity harm children. We can trace these anxieties about queerness back at least a century, though they intensified after World War II and accelerated in the late 1970s with efforts like Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign to repeal a gay rights ordinance (on the premise that openly gay or lesbian public school teachers would “recruit” impressionable students into homosexual vice). We are all familiar with contemporary allegations from the political right about the dangers that gender affirming care—or even the discussion of LGBTQ+ people or history in school—pose to children.
Yet I think we can’t yet explain why Americans frame questions of gay rights or transgender healthcare in terms of child welfare. Do these concerns reflect an inherent or obvious preoccupation with a vulnerable population, or are they idiosyncratic? How much of the American framing of sexual diversity in terms of children’s well-being, in other words, emerges from some sort of universal human concern for young people’s safety, and how much of it reflects national or cultural preoccupations specific to the United States?
I confess it had not occurred to me to approach the issue that way until I stepped out of my own typical context. In late May, I boarded an international flight to Tokyo, Japan, for a short-term residency jointly sponsored by the Organization of American Historians and the Japanese Association of American Studies. The program asks US-based scholars to give a series of talks, but as anyone who has attended a conference or seminar of any kind knows, the real work happens in the question-and-answer sessions and the meals that follow them. It was during one of those less-formal exchanges that a Japanese student of U.S. culture asked me: Why do Americans so often discuss homosexuality and transgender rights in terms of their effects on children? In Japan, the student added, that is not the case.
That observation piqued my curiosity, and I’ve been mulling it over ever since—throughout a very busy month that included that incredible trip to Japan, the end of my children’s school years, and a vacation to some of Utah’s glorious national parks. I’m resuming my more frequent publication of this newsletter now, with gratitude for my readers’ patience. Top of mind is that question about why Americans who oppose LGBTQ rights tend to frame the issue as a form of child endangerment. It leads me, today, to a broad overview of the state of LGBTQ rights in Japan and some reflections on their current state in the United States as well.
Japan’s record on LGBTQ+ rights is mixed. It has slow-walked civil rights measures. In 2023, after years of pressure from LGBT rights activists and liberal lawmakers, the Diet passed a law declaring that “all citizens, irrespective of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity, are to be respected as individuals with inherent and inviolable fundamental human rights.” The law seeks to “promote understanding” of LGBT people in order to avoid “unfair discrimination” against them. It fell far short of equal protection guarantees that advocates promoted in the lead-up to the 2020 Olympic Games as the LGBT Equality Act. Tabled prior to the rescheduled 2021 Games, the bill was reintroduced in 2023 and passed by making several compromises that limited its scope. (An aide to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made derogatory comments about LGBT people earlier that year, and the prime minister’s support for the measure likely was, at least in part, a face-saving measure.)
As Erin Gallagher explained in an essay for the Council on Foreign Relations,
The Promotion of Understanding bill … does little to help the cause of LGBTQ+ equality and, in fact, has the potential to do more harm than good. The banning of “unfair discrimination,” as one editorial noted, is meaningless when discrimination is, by definition, unfair. More broadly, as some LGBTQ+ advocates pointed out, a “promotion of understanding” bill centers the viewpoint of the majority population, continuing to marginalize the needs and rights of the LGBTQ+ community in favor of protecting the comfort of the average citizen. An example is the bill’s promise to “take care to ensure that all citizens can live in peace and security,” a line added at the behest of the conservative Ishin No Kai party to emphasize that the majority opinion must also be considered. Though such phrases may seem to be promoting collaboration and solidarity, in practice, they could be used by conservative interest groups to edit or veto efforts by LGBTQ+ activists to do the very thing the bill is supposed to allow: promote understanding of their community.
Protections for transgender people in Japan are tenuous. In 2023 a transgender woman won a lawsuit she filed against her employer, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, over bathroom restrictions. Yet under Japan’s Gender Identity Disorder Special Cases Act, as reported in The Diplomat, “transgender people must undergo surgery or sterilization in order to be legally recognized according to their gender identity. They must also be medically diagnosed with a gender identity disorder in order to have identification paperwork updated.”
Japan is the only G7 nation that does not recognize same-sex marriage, but the country faces external and internal pressure for reform. In 2023, Rahm Emmanuel, U.S. Ambassador to Japan during the Biden Administration, circulated a video with fourteen other ambassadors in advance of the G7 Summit held in Hiroshima. The video failed to persuade the Japanese Diet to action, but district and prefecture-level courts are ruling in favor of marriage equality. In 2024, both the Tokyo District Court and the High Court of Sapporo found that Japan’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Just last month, the Osaka High Court similarly ruled that the Japanese constitution prohibits a ban on same-sex marriage. These rulings align with public opinion in Japan, which is strongly in favor of marriage equality.
When Japanese conservatives argue against same-sex marriage, they frame the issue in terms of family formation. Prime Minister Fumio, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (which is politically and socially conservative), argues that the Japanese constitution protects marriage as a fundamentally heterosexual relationship. “Ultraconservatives” in the party, by contrast, describe same-sex marriage as a violation of traditional values in ways that echo the American debate. The LDP relies on the support of several conservative religious organizations, including the Unification Church and the Shinto Association for Spiritual Leadership. Some of the Shinto Association’s arguments against same-sex marriage borrow from US Christian conservatives who portray homosexuality as a psychological disorder. (The Shinto Association has been a major force behind the Japanese requirement that women take their husbands’ family name when they marry.)
Opposition to LGBTQ rights in Japan seems to reflect a somewhat inchoate disgust with queerness, but not a particular fixation on child endangerment. In the “off-the-cuff” remarks that led to his 2023 firing, Fumio aide Masayoshi Arai told reporters that he “hates the sight” of LGBTQ couples and “shudders at the idea of being next-door neighbors with them.” Arai expressed not a fear of queer people indoctrinating his children, it seems, but a visceral antipathy to non-heterosexual sexuality.
Let’s be clear: the United States Congress has not passed national LGBTQ nondiscrimination legislation either. While the Supreme Court affirmed marriage equality ten years ago this week in Obergefell v. Hodges, recent court decisions have pushed in the opposite direction. In 2023, the court majority in 303 Creative, Inc. v. Elenis found that a Colorado-based wedding website designer could not be compelled to provide their services to a same-sex couple. Just last week, the court’s ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti allowed a ban on gender affirming care for minors in Tennessee to take effect, giving a green light to similar laws in twenty-four other states too.
The Skrmetti case culminates years of fear-mongering about the effects of transgender healthcare on the wellbeing of children and adolescents, in ways that permit broader discrimination against all transgender people. (I highly recommend Erin Reed’s analysis of the decision at her Substack, Erin in the Morning.)
We cannot take popular support for LGBTQ equality for granted in the United States. In 2024, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that American support for LGBTQ+ rights was declining after years of steady increase. Melissa Deckman of the PRRI observed a predictable correlation of anti-LGBTQ sentiment among people who identify with Christian nationalism. More notable were the study’s findings about younger Americans:
We were really surprised in our findings that younger Americans have trended downward with respect to support for LGBTQ rights. If you look at our data, we find that roughly one in five Americans aged 18 to 29 identify as LGBTQ. But yet what's happened over the past couple of years is that there's been a slight decline among younger Americans…
So one number really stands out to us. If you look at young Americans attitudes about same sex marriage, and 2020 among Republicans, two thirds supported same sex marriage rights. But in last year's data among young Republicans aged 18 to 29, it's less than half, that's a really big cratering of support.
A speaker at the annual meeting of the Japanese Association of American Studies, which I attended in Sapporo, described the United States as a place growing “more incomprehensible” with every passing day. The “cratering” of support for LGBTQ rights illustrates the opacity of contemporary American rights discourse about whom discrimination affects and what role, if any, the government should play in protecting them.
One way to explain American opposition to LGBTQ rights is to point to the distinctive power of religion—more exactly, Christianity—in American politics. Yet the influence of the religious right over social policy does not necessarily lead to a narrative preoccupied with child endangerment. Why, then, do Americans who oppose LGBTQ rights so often express their antagonism as a defense of children’s safety? When did Americans start to talk about these issues that way? To what extent are those ideas borrowed from—or exported to—other nations or contexts? I have some theories, but I hope in the months ahead to spend more time digging into the research to learn more.