Yvonne Zimmerman

This is the third part to a 3 part interview series between Stephanie Krehbiel and Yvonne Zimmerman on the narrative of sex-trafficking. Zimmerman is a veteran of the sex trafficking debates. Her book, Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking, examines the influence of conservative Protestant theology on U.S. anti-trafficking policy.

Today’s piece discusses the sexualized violence of anti-LGBTQ theology, how it helps put queer youth at particular risk for sex trafficking, and finally, why queer youth cannot be “kittens that we rescue.” Particularly, it focuses on Mennonite Church USA’s lack of conversation on sexual ethics, which contributes to abuse within the church.

If you haven’t seen the other two parts yet, we recommend catching up. In part one Zimmerman explained the differences between sex trafficking and labor trafficking, the theological reasons why Americans only seem to care about forced labor when it involves sex, and what social conditions create vulnerability to trafficking. Part two contained a more in-depth discussion of the question of choice in sex work, and why it’s important to fight the assumption that all prostitution is sex trafficking.

Our Stories Untold believes this is an important, yet challenging topic that deserves our attention, thought, and consideration. We welcome conversation and dialogue around this topic, one that we often think of as far removed from ourselves but that we are in fact interconnected and participate with whether we recognize it or not. — Rachel Halder, OSU Editor 

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S: You mentioned how the idea that selling sex is inherently exploitative, abusive and violent towards women is a form of refusing to believe sex workers, as not seeing them as people who are believable. It seems to me that not only are sex workers not believed, but that people who are vulnerable to reliance on sex work and to trafficking relationships tend to come from other social groups that are stigmatized. So they are seen as categorically suspect from multiple directions.

I guess this is where I start to despair with Mennonites. They’re supposed to be nonviolent, and yet they do such an excellent job of perpetuating the kinds of social conditions that make people vulnerable to violence. I’ve struggled with that so much in my own work on queerphobia in the Mennonite church. There’s great effort put into creating an official discourse that sounds reasonable and moderate, and it lulls reasonable, moderate people into believing that the violence isn’t really that bad, or that harmful. But we both know that it is.

Y: One of the things I love about your work is how you state so clearly that Mennonite theological violence against LGBTQ people is a form of sexualized violence. It isn’t just analogous to sexualized violence; it is a form of sexualized violence, and it’s waged as a form of sexualized violence. That was so powerful for me, because it is something I had known, but did not have words for.

Around the same time that I read your dissertation, I also read the short piece by Addie Liechty on queer youth, “The children are listening.” She wrote that the child and adolescent brain is basically tallying “for” and “against,” and does not pick up the gray area of “discernment.” I think this insight connects to trauma, to the ways therapists and psychologists talk about how people who are traumatized at a young age kind of get stuck at the particular developmental age at which they experience the trauma until they’re able to deal with it. Liechty’s reflections and analysis resonated with my experience. In many ways, I was traumatized by the Mennonite church around queer issues. When I was a young adult in the process of articulating a non-straight sexual orientation, all I could pick up on from the church and people in the church was either “for” or “against.” The gray area of discernment was too emotionally complicated. It registered emotionally as “against.”  And even though now I can wrap my mind around other options, there are certain ways, when it comes to my own spiritual and emotional survival in Mennonite spaces, that I’m still that adolescent, and what I feel from people and institutions is either “for” and “against.” Descriptively, those are the only emotional categories that I have when I’m in those spaces.

I am grateful for the ways that you, Liechty, and others are taking seriously the kinds of violence—sexual, theological, emotional, and so on—that Mennonites and the institutional church wage, and naming it as violence. It’s given me better words and frameworks to make sense of my experience of being a queer Mennonite. And, more generally, I think that the willingness and ability to take seriously the violence and abuse that LGBTQ youth are experiencing, whether it is physical or overtly sexual or not, is a big deal. We certainly know that there are plenty of queer and gender non-conforming youth in Mennonite homes today who are receiving terribly damaging messages from their families, friends and churches about who they are.

One of the ways that the issue of Mennonite violence towards LGBTQ people intersects with my work on human trafficking is around the way that queer youth are becoming the new face of domestic sex trafficking. Some of the young people who are the targets of Mennonite anti-gay theology and violence might be contemplating leaving. Striking out on their own. Going somewhere else. Running away. A commonly cited statistic is that more than 40% of homeless and runaway youth identify as LGBTQ. Although statistics like this aren’t always completely accurate—that’s a different conversation—it calls our collective attention to the effects that antigay theology and rhetoric has on young people. Many experience this as an assault, as violence. It highlights that shame and stigma are powerful forces that can push queer and trans youth out of their families of origin.  Sometimes the risks of leaving home become preferable to the known violences and indignities of staying. And when young people leave home –run away—and if they end up on the street, it is very possible that they will face sexual violence and abuse there as well.  It’s important to keep in mind that for many such young people, homes and families of origin are often precisely the place where they’re first experiencing trauma and sexualized abuse, even if that doesn’t come in the form of a male preying on them sexually.  And, of course, for some that’s exactly the form it takes. My point is that for some people, unknown risks and the potential of violence or sexual exploitation might seem preferable to staying at home and dealing with the known risks, forms of violence, and realities of sexual exploitation.

At the same time, I don’t want to suggest that queer and gender non-conforming youth, particularly Mennonite LGBTQ youth in live in homophobic environments, should be understood only in terms of the pain they experience and the violence they suffer. When queer people are portrayed only in terms of what they suffer, it’s easy for them to be seen as sort of like kittens and puppies who need to be rescued. They’re cute and they’re cuddly, and people are willing give generous moral accolades to people who will take them in. However, I think there’s a risk that some well-meaning Mennonites might respond to LGBTQ people, especially kids, with love and empathy and all manner of Mennonite goodness, which will last exactly as long as they can be seen as sweet and innocent victims. But at the point at which queer folk start speaking for themselves, articulating what they believe and what they want for their lives—if what they say and what they desire does not confirm what we already think theologically, or doesn’t conform to dominant ideas of respectability—and even legality, in some cases—empathy and kindness very quickly takes an ugly turn. We are seeing a lot of this in the Mennonite church as more and more queer people are speaking for themselves and on their own terms about the institutional violence they navigate in the institutional church. And the backlash against their voices is stunning, not to mention incredibly violent. I worry about this exact dynamic in the anti-trafficking movement’s current fascination with rescuing queer and trans youth. This attention is only going to be good only insofar as it is accompanied by a simultaneous acknowledgement and recognition of the inherent dignity and worth of queer and gender non-conforming people as queer and gender non-conforming people, not as rescue projects to be heteronormativized.

In many ways, I see much of the anti-trafficking movement as just such an heteronormativizing project. A giant heteronormativizing project, the effect of which is to try to make women into good Christian wife material, and men into docile citizens.

S: I really resonate with your worry about queer kids being treated like kittens who need rescue. Because I already see that happening, with Mennonites. My experience is that a lot of the young people I’ve spoken with have a sophisticated vocabulary and understanding of what’s happening to them in the church. And that is so threatening, even to people who think of themselves as allies, and think of themselves as being in the movement. It’s the same thing that white Christians do with the people of color in their congregations—they just heap adoration on the youth. They focus on the youth, because young people are more likely to give leaders the benefit of the doubt, to sound optimistic and grateful, and to uplift people. Whereas people who have seen a bunch of shit, and say, I’ve seen a bunch of shit, so I don’t believe you and you need to listen to me for a change, are just such a downer. There’s this cyclical pattern of the church chewing through young, marginalized people. Once they’re old enough to understand that the system is screwed up, and they’ve been set up to not change it, then nobody’s listening anymore. And we can say that you’re bitter. What the hell do you do with that?

[Aside from Stephanie Krehbiel: Zenebe Abebe describes some aspects of this phenomenon in his piece in The Mennonite: “Hope for the future requires changing our direction.”

Y: Yes. I see exactly what you’re talking about. It’s kind of a black hole that sucks the ability to even speak coherently and articulately in opposition to what’s going on right out of you. It’s like the scenes from Madeleine L’Engle’s book, A Wrinkle in Time, when Meg and Charles Wallace are in the presence of the IT, and IT’s rhythmic control just draws you in so that you can’t have any independent thought or emotional connection. That’s how I experience the institutional church.  It sucks you into its orbit, such that even though outside of it you might be articulate,  insightful and so clear; but once you’re inside its spaces, you have to speak its language and use its syntax.  It’s a process that’s designed to shut people down. I think you diagnosed the problem so beautifully.

S: It’s really hard to have honest conversations about the choices people make, and how they do or don’t stem from vulnerability, and how to talk about agency, when you’ve got this “We’ve got to prove that we’re sexually good enough” thing hanging over it.

Y: Yes, and it’s an impossible challenge to be “good enough” sexually. The dynamic you’re describing is compounded by the belief so many Mennonites have that power is something that happens out there. And it doesn’t happen in here. Queer Mennonites have known that for a long time, that that’s a bunch of shit. Power is very internal to the Mennonite world! I think that the idea that if queer Mennonites could just articulate their sexual ethics and promise to be ‘good’, sexually speaking, is premised on this idea that “in here, among us, we don’t do power.” Which we obviously do, all the time, and in really terrible ways.

One of the things that many queer Mennonites have been doing for a long time that I think is really important is saying, sometimes directly and sometimes just in so many words, that this Mennonite sexual ethic does not work. And sometimes that’s said as something personal: “It doesn’t work for me.” And sometimes it’s stated more broadly: “It doesn’t work for anyone.” This, I think, is important as a practice of truth-telling. Now of course in terms of the institution and institutional power, queer people’s perspective doesn’t matter.  I mean, what queer people have to say about sexual ethics has already been disqualified before they’ve even said anything. I think it registers as saying, essentially “This holiness code doesn’t work for people who aren’t holy.” And the response, in turn, is “well, it wouldn’t work for you.” And so queer voices are systemically disqualified as having anything insightful or relevant to bring to conversations about sexual ethics.

One of the reasons that it’s so important to take John Howard Yoder’s abuses seriously and, more recently, the solicitation charges against Luke Hartman, is that these instances clarify that it’s not just queer people who need new and different conversations about the role and content of sexual ethics. The status quo of sexual ethics in the Mennonite Church is failing more broadly, and in ways that impact everyone, far beyond the queers on the fringes. Even for people in the center, the status quo sexual ethics are not working. The difference between how this failure impacts people on the margins as compared to people located closer to the center is that people in the fringes having had more time to think about the impacts and implications of this failure and work on the task of develop alternative sexual ethics—plural. I’m not talking about ways of having “holy sex,” or “righteous sex,” but about what it means to take issues of violence, abuse, and harm seriously. Unfortunately, thus far it seems to me that MCUSA is utterly uninterested in a sexual ethic that centers on taking seriously violence and abuse of power. They just really care about marriage so freaking much, as if by articulating a sexual ethic of marriage, we’ve thereby done all the necessary work of sexual ethics.

That’s where I feel really hopeless—because sexual ethics require so much more than an ethic of marriage. Marriage has never been an adequate bulwark against violence and abuse. To the contrary, it seems to foment them!  We don’t even need to go very far to find this out; most of us can start simply by telling stories about our families. Marriage has provided no protection against these kinds of things; no guarantee that physical violence and sexual abuse won’t happen. That’s the elephant in the room—the big Mennonite room—that can’t be named, and sat with because it would require a level of honesty that many leaders and good church-going people aren’t prepared to deal with. And yet this is one of the tasks that I think is utterly crucial if Mennonites are to have any integrity as a peace and justice-loving people.

S: And then there’s the discernment and bridge-building fetish. There’s such an obsession with asking where we can find our common ground. What can we all agree on. And actually—nothing. You cannot find anything that you all agree on. There is no there there. Because Mennonites have been so reluctant to talk about sex in general. In my research I found that almost every initiative or movement to talk about sex and sexual ethics got squished out of a desire to not talk about queerness or sexual violence. The people who wanted to talk about sex and sexual ethics, a lot of them went to evangelical resources for that. So now, even though it’s not really stated, I think that when Mennonites need to talk about this stuff—we need to talk about what happened with Luke Hartman, or whatever it is—there’s still this evangelical discourse. The way evangelicals talk about sex is using the language of addiction, recovery, captivity, rescue. Everything gets thrown into there. So if somebody’s a sexual predator, we can talk about sex addiction, and how they can be liberated from sexual addiction. And obviously the ex-gay movement is totally founded on that stuff. Mennonite leaders don’t necessarily have the appetite to take on that language whole-hog, because it’s so culturally marked, and they know not everybody is going to be on board, but they’re more than happy to let it do the work around the fringes, you know what I mean?

Y: Absolutely. Letting the language of the ex-gay movement do the kind of work its rhetoric performs, while keeping it at arm’s length, officially. I think that language of “deliverance” [whether from “homosexuality,” “sex addiction” or any other “issue] has become the same kind of trigger-rhetoric that words like “lifestyle” and “homosexual” are.  That is, when someone refers to LGBTQ people as “homosexuals” and refers to their sexual orientation or gender identity as a “lifestyle”, those terms are a dead give-away, even if nothing else is said, that the speaker is homophobic bigot of one stripe or another. To queer people and their allies, those word choices communicate volumes. The same goes for the language of “deliverance” around sexual abuse and violence. That rhetorical framing also is a dead give-away that violence and abuse are going to swept under the carpet and aren’t going to be substantively addressed.

Frequently, these kinds of rhetorical strategies go hand-in-hand with advocating sexual conservatism among adults as the way to prevent child sexual abuse and sexual violence. But the truth is that sexual conservatism has never been adequate for addressing these kinds of issues. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that promiscuity is the answer—as you know, this is how the issue gets framed so frequently: in dichotomous terms, so that if you’re critiquing sexual conservatism then, by definition, you must be advocating for its opposite, sexual promiscuity.  This conceptual framework is another example of what I was talking about earlier, of how certain formulations of the moral possibilities are immobilizing because they are so simplistic and reductionist that they leave us without the moral frameworks and concepts that we need to confront, understand, and navigate the social worlds in which we are situated. In binary terms, if what is being proposed it isn’t what we’ve always done, then it’s the opposite of that, which is what we fear. And that is not helpful for generating imaginative, creative responses that intervene in and interrupt these dynamics of abuse and violence, and that offer new ways of relating justly to one another.