Gender Ideology and Its Discontents
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            In Cairo we encounter an affluent middle-aged man named Zack who has withdrawn into the closet after the notorious raid on the Queen Boat, a gay nightclub anchored in the Nile, that dragged 52 homosexual men off to torture and imprisonment. In Moscow, a political analyst named Alexey Muhkin tells the BBC: “It is true that being gay in Russia can be quite difficult. But if you are not publicly active within the gay community, the vast majority of the problems simply disappear. You could say that being gay in Russia is like living in the closet; a very big and very comfortable closet.” In Lagos, gay people of means solve the problem by flying to London. “Wheels up, hair down!” they cry as soon as the plane has left the tarmac. But the closet—though it may hold the vast majority of gay lives, I suspect—is not the subject of The Pink Line. Gevisser’s book is about coming out—about two African men who flee their countries, Malawi and Uganda, for South Africa and Kenya, respectively, but find little comfort in their new homes; about two lesbians running a café in downtown Cairo; about a married father in Russia fighting for custody of the son his wife has taken from him after he begins dressing as a woman. In India we become attached to a transgender man who feels he is a woman but doesn’t wish to join the community of hijras (a third gender consisting of males who may or may not opt for castration and breast implants).

            Nowadays the way people in the developing world—people like Michael, the young man who fled Uganda for Kenya—make contact with homosexual life, Gevisser says, is through porn and apps like Grindr. “It was Facebook that saved me, and Facebook that hurt me,” Michael tells Gevisser when describing his abortive attempt to live in Kampala, because it still didn’t save him from the awful stew of religious prejudice, predators, and intolerant fathers Gevisser describes here:

Through social media Michael found a man who housed him for a couple of weeks, had sex with him, and then chucked him out. Michael found shelter in a mosque for a while until the imam discovered he was a “Christian dog” and then turned him out, too. On the street, disoriented and hungry, he was picked up by a Christian crusade that took him in and put him up at the Destiny Orphanage and Boarding School. At the end of the year, the Destiny pastors took Michael back to his home, where his drunken father confronted them with a machete and the words, “Are you the ones who are teaching my son homosexuality?”

Such is the world of The Pink Line—the border between countries that accept LGBT people and those that don’t. In Brazil, the president, Jair Bolsonaro, says “that if his son were gay, he would rather he die in a car accident.” And in Iraq:

In April 2009, as American troops began to withdraw from the country, a squad of assassins in black masks swept through Baghdad, picking out men who seemed effeminate, exposing them to their families as “perverts,” abducting and killing them in gruesome ways. A thirty-five year old man named Hamid escaped: “They came into my house and they saw my mother, and one of them said: ‘Where’s your faggot son?’”

From then on Hamid hid in a cheap hotel for two weeks and finally escaped Baghdad. But “his partner of ten years had been one of the victims, pulled out of his family home: ‘They had thrown his corpse in the garbage. His genitals were cut off and a piece of his throat was cut out.’”

            But if the impression one gets from The Pink Line is that being homosexual in the developing world is difficult, being transgender has its own complications. What makes many of these stories so moving is not just what Gevisser calls his subjects’ “demons” but the poverty and alcoholism, and inability to find a job, get a birth certificate, or register a marriage—not to mention find a place to live and obtain support from one’s family. There are parents who are accepting, and relatives who scream, as Pasha’s former mother-in-law does when asked why she won’t engage with him: “Because i do not want to speak to you!!!! Because i want to break your face!! Because of you, all our lives are destroyed!!!!” A cumulative sadness runs throughout these stories, especially when Gevisser checks up on them (via Skype) four or five years later. Aunty is a drunk; Pasha has lost the lawsuit for custody of his son; Maha, who fled Egypt for Amsterdam, misses Cairo; Michael has moved from Kenya to Canada, where he finds racism and loneliness; Lakshaya has lost her job with an NGO in India and is back to begging. The turmoil, difficulty, and homelessness in these stories become so great that Gevisser is drawn, despite his wariness of “the savior complex,” to help some of his subjects financially.

            Although at a certain point a kind of transgender claustrophobia may set in, after you accept the premise of The Pink Line (that transgender people are the real frontier now), the book is fascinating. The places we visit include South Africa, Cairo, Moscow, Mexico, Israel, Ann Arbor, and India. Israel is the only chapter not about lesbians or transgender people; the tension there is supplied by the fact that the male lovers are an Arab and a Jew. Israel and India seem to be the two most interesting societies, for very different reasons. India has the world’s largest number of transgender people. Israel advertises its embrace of gay rights to stress its modernity to the world. “I came to murder on behalf of God. We can’t have such abomination in the country,” says an ultra-Orthodox man after stabbing to death a sixteen-year-old at the Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem. But Tel Aviv seems extraordinarily gay-friendly. Ann Arbor comes off as progressive, scientific, liberal, open-minded, and individualistic by comparison. The teenagers there faced with a choice of gender seem like Americans paralyzed by too many consumer choices.

            It’s the parents of these kids, Gevisser argues, who are the real warriors on the battleground of gender fluidity—because it’s their children they’re worried about. Should you let your daughter have an operation that removes her breasts, or chalk up her depression to the onset of puberty? A mother worries about “the tides of history that wash in and when they wash out they leave some people stranded. The sixties were like that, and the sexual culture of the eighties, with AIDS. I think [the transgender explosion]could be the next wave like that, and I don’t want my daughter to be a casualty.”

            What’s surprising in The Pink Line is learning how advanced the culture is that has arisen to deal with gender dysmorphia. It’s not just American high schools that provide clubs for the genderfluid or hospitals that offer the operation. The Thai medical tourism industry attracted over two million people a year in the 2010s, Gevisser notes, “and gender-affirming surgery had become an important niche in it.” But in the chapter on Ann Arbor we learn about a category of people called “regretters.” It is this possibility that haunts the parents of these teens—the fear that “gender-affirming surgery” may, as they say of suicide, be a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

            All of the chapters devoted to individual stories begin with a list of the people we will meet and the pronouns they prefer: he/she/her, they/theirs/them. But reading their stories, it’s easy to get lost. Is the “he” or “she” referring to the gender the person prefers or the sex he or she was born with? Often one has to go back to find out just what Rose, say, is or was. Then, too, the permutations seem endless.

            In Ann Arbor, we meet Liam, an adopted Chinese teenager who was miserable until she had the operation. After his “gender-affirming surgery,” his depression vanished. But Liam says he no longer fits in with his transgender peers at Riot Youth, a social club for the genderfluid. “When they spoke about ‘straight people,’” he tells Gevisser about a recent meeting, “it was usually to talk about other people, who were either homophobic enemies or ‘allies.’ I thought, ‘Hey! What about me? I’m sitting here. I’m straight!’” But the reader wonders: in what sense?

            That’s what makes the kothis in India so interesting. Kothis are not like gays in the city who lead glamorous lives, explains Lasankaya, one of Gevisser’s most appealing subjects. They live in villages and do “women’s work,” cooking and cleaning for their pathis (male sex partners). Kothis are distinct from hijras—transgender people who belong to an ancient tradition that includes eunuchs and intersex people. Lasankaya is urged to have the operation because hijras have a powerful support network of mentors and leaders. But Lasankaya does not want to be emasculated or even to dress in women’s clothing. It’s enough, she says, that “I feel like a woman.” So she lives with her mother in a little cottage on the beach, and continues to dress as a man.

            The Pink Line will leave you with a lot of questions, but it is in the end a thoroughly researched picture of some very brave people around the world who are dealing with permutations of sexual identity in societies that feel threatened by gay liberation, not to mention the refusal of the male-female binary. Toward the end, the book feels like those old Joan Crawford movies or Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. But it’s all terribly real. At one point even Gevisser writes: “I felt overwhelmed by the contradictions … between the political meaning of the people I was meeting all over the world—their public places on the Pink Line—and their private struggles, with one another and with their own demons.”

            At the end of the book Gevisser wonders whether the liberal West is after all proof that It Gets Better. In India he is told that using terms from the lgbtq+ train to categorize people like the hijras could expose them to a level of homophobia they’d never experienced before. Perhaps Westerners like himself, he suggests, should learn from countries like India, Mexico, and South Africa, instead of waiting for them to “grow up.” He even looks back on his own reluctance to play with other boys in grade school, and, when asked at an AIDS meeting to choose his pronouns, he selects ”he,” “him,” and “his,” but then he adds “kothi.”