Under Pressure: Stress Responses in the Face of Oppression

Part 1 - Introduction

Before we get started: I’m going to be live at 6:30pm eastern (3:30pm pacific) today with

Jennifer Harris Dault

on her TransFaith series! Register here if you want to be able to watch! We’ll be talking about my story and how churches can be more inclusive of trans people, and there will be time for Q&A at the end!

In 2021, I left an abusive church. After experiencing spiritual, psychological, and emotional abuse, I had to go on a journey of understanding what happened to me and others. I’ve written a lot about that church on my other blog, so I won’t repeat that here, but I want to talk about one of the things I learned through that experience, as well as from talking to those who have been in abusive relationships, toxic workplaces, high control groups, and other unhealthy situations. That is: it’s all one thing.

The dynamics of an abusive relationship, a toxic, high control community, and an oppressive government are fundamentally the same. In each, those with power use fundamentally the same tactics to control those without. These include, but are not limited to the following, with some examples from both ends of the spectrum.

• Threatening loss of relationship/community

  • Abusive spouse: “I’ll never speak to you again”, or “I’ll take the kids and you’ll never see them again.”

  • Oppressive government: Threatening to deport or imprison

• Withdrawal of critical support

  • Abusive spouse: If they have income and victim does not, victim is very vulnerable, especially if kids are in the picture.

  • Oppressive government: Denying health care or an equitable justice system

• Shaping the reality of the victim

  • Abusive spouse: “What?? I have never [done this thing that they have definitely done]”

  • Oppressive government: Propoganda

• Surveillance

  • Abusive spouse: Regularly checking victim’s electronics, having them followed

  • Oppressive government: wiretapping, secret investigations for any wrongdoing no matter how small

I’ll stop there, but feel free to add more in the comments!

What I really want to talk about is how the acute stress responses that you’re likely familiar with are also the same across these circumstances. This makes sense - if the stressors follow the same patterns, we would expect the same stress responses to be activated.

Before I do that, I do want to acknowledge that in some cases, the emotion in question is disgust, and of course

Billie Hoard

and

Paul Hoard

have written their incredible book Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life which discusses how disgust can manifest at the individual level all the way up to a societal level.

Acute Stress Responses

You’ve almost certainly heard of “fight or flight.” It’s understood as an instinctive response to danger exhibited by many animals, humans included. If you’re out in the woods and a rattlesnake crosses the trail in front of you, you might immediately run or you might attack it (consult your local wildlife expert for what the proper way to respond is). Either has risk, but the point is that these reactions are actually not even conscious choices. They’re driven by the more instinctive parts of your brain before you even have a chance to think anything through rationally.

At best, this can save your life and successfully mitigate the threat. The woman who runs out of the house from her abusive boyfriend might survive his latest drunk explosion. The former church member who tells their story publicly about how the leaders were harming those in the church might prevent further harm to themselves or others. The Jews who fled Nazi Germany had much better chances than those who remained, but also Nazi Germany was defeated by the allied forces in a long and terrible war. Different responses make sense for different individuals in different situations, and we don’t always choose the response as rationally as we think.

Spider-man says Trans Rights! (and embodies a healthy ‘fight’ response)

Sadly, these responses are sometimes deployed against phantom threats. Countless people have died when someone saw them as a threat, only to later find that the threat existed only in their minds. This is true in cases of “trans panic” where a would-be intimate partner discovers that their partner is transgender, and assaults them or even murders them.

And just as we see people in power try to encourage a disgust response towards “the other”¹, we see those in power try to instill fear of “the other” as well. The abusive partner might try to tell his victim that they can’t trust friends or family because of some ulterior motive. The cult leader might insinuate (or outright say) that books he hasn’t approved are dangerous for those in the cult to read. And the oppressive head of state might spread baseless accusations of widespread violence being perpetrated by a marginalized group.

An improper fear

If you’ll allow me a brief detour, that last one happened to the trans community last month as conservatives started falling over themselves to blame the entire trans community (and our allies), and in fact transness itself for the murder of Charlie Kirk². The Heritage Foundation’s “Oversight Project” released a statement in which they “urge the FBI to designate ‘Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism’ (‘TIVE’) as a Domestic Terrorism threat category”, which they define in a way that would apply to anyone (including me) who even states (accurately³) that government policies which oppress trans people lead to self-harm or suicide among the trans community.

Page 1 of a statement by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project recommending the creation of a new “Domestigic Terrorism threat category”, “Trans Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism.” The whole statement is here.

The statement incorrectly relies on the idea that a disproportionate amount of violence is being committed by trans people, saying, “Experts estimate that 50%of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender idology.” Pretty scary, right?

This idea has been thoroughly debunked⁴, including in an excellent piece by Dell Cameron and Andrew Couts at Wired, “Heritage Foundation Uses Bogus Stat to Push a Trans Terrorism Classification.” I want to quote it at length to demonstrate the absurdity of the claim:

There have been 74 total active school shooter incidents since 2015; of those, three of the perpetrators have identified as transgender, according to Riedman’s data. Data collected by the Gun Violence Archive shows that there were 5,748 mass shootings at any location in the US between January 1, 2013, and September 15, 2025; of those, five of the shooters identified as transgender people, nonbinary, or having undergone gender-affirming care—less than 0.087 percent.

In other words, Heritage’s “50 percent” claim is not just unsupported, it appears misleading by design, arbitrary in scope, and unscientific at its core.

“A methodology that limits the pool of potential observations in this way suggests researchers have a predetermined outcome in mind,” (R.G.) Cravens and (Rachel) Carroll Rivas say. “It’s a method that suggests the researchers are committing an error called selecting on the dependent variable—choosing a sample that ensures the study will produce the desired outcome. In combination with the use of ‘trans ideology,’ this suggests that the desired outcome is the further scapegoating and demonization of transgender people.”

Carroll Rivas and Cravens, who work with the Southern Poverty Law Center, also state that, “Trans people are far more likely to be victimized by gun violence than to perpetrate it.”

It must be noted that Kirk’s murder was, of course, allegedly committed by a cisgender man and we still don’t have a full picture of his motive.

I know that’s a long detour, and this has not been made policy (yet), but I wanted to demonstrate how the claims can be completely divorced from reality and yet still have the desired effect: spreading fear of trans people.

Myself, Billie Hoard, and Jennifer Harris Dault at the “Gender Liberation” protest in Washington DC in 2024. We expressed some feelings we have about The Heritage Foundation.

Healthy and Unhealthy Stress Responses

The United States was right to fight against the Nazis in World War II. And those who oppose trans rights out of fear are wrong to do so.

Which leads me to the point of this series. I don’t only want to discuss the ways fight, flight, freeze, and fawn manifest in the face of oppression, I want to talk about healthy and unhealthy manifestations of those. Each of them can be done in a way that is honorable and just. But each of them also has the potential to be deeply harmful if we’re not careful.

There is a saying I came across in survivor communities after leaving my abusive church, and I like it. “We never judge a survivor for how they survived.” That is, the sexual assault victim who stays quiet and still until the assault is over and she can get to safety is not “consenting” to the violence being done to her⁵. Her body may be in a “freeze” response, or she may quite reasonably fear that any other action will result in her death. Similarly, if she has an opportunity to incapacitate the attacker and takes it, we recognize that as honorable self-defense. The Biblical Rahab was commended for her dishonesty in hiding Israelite spies. While each of these involves some behavior that, in a vaccuum, might be seen as unethical, each is a perfectly reasonable and ethical (sometimes commendable!) way to survive a given situation, and the survivor should never be shamed for it.

At a societal level, every war for independance ever fought has included morally thorny actions, because every war has included morally thorny actions. Even peaceful protests can include actions that make us feel odd. Labor strikes are a refusal to work as previously agreed, but they have been instrumental in protecting the rights of workers across the decades.

But, not to cast doubt on too many who find themselves in this situation, there are also unacceptable ways of surviving. We cannot support when someone harms other would-be survivors in order to protect themselves. Individually, if two people are running from a bear, and one of them trips the other one to sacrifice them to the bear, I suspect none of us would approve. Collectively, attempting to eliminate an “enemy” group entirely because one of them committed an act of violence is a horrific overreaction that punishes innocents for the actions of one person.

In the face of oppression, I wanted to write a series of (short) essays describing the healthy and unhealthy expressions of these collective stress responses. We’ll talk about when inaction is admirable, when fighting back is damnable, when fleeing is bravery, and when fawning is betrayal. This is an idea that’s been on my mind for over a year, and I’m excited to finally share it out with you all!

You can subscribe (for free!) so you don’t miss the rest of the series!

1. See: Thabiti Anyabwile’s awful, “The Importance of Your Gag Reflex When Discussing Homosexuality and ‘Gay Marriage’”

2. A murder that I condemn in the strongest of terms.

3. Study published in Nature Human Behavior: “State-level anti-transgender laws increase past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people in the USA”

4. For example, by FactCheck.org: “Few Mass Shooters Have Been Transgender”

5. I’ve seen at least one pastor make the claim that such a victim is sinning sexually if she does not fight back and risk her life. Let me just state: such a claim is evil to its core.