Guest post written by The Meadows author Stephanie Oakes
Stephanie Oakes is the author of The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly, which was a Morris Award finalist and a Golden Kite Honor book, and The Arsonist, which won the Washington State Book Award and was an ALA/YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults pick. An elementary school librarian, Stephanie lives in Spokane, Washington with her wife and family.
Her latest release The Meadows is a queer, YA Handmaid’s Tale meets Never Let Me Go about a dystopian society bent on relentless conformity, and the struggle of one girl to save herself and those she loves from a life of lies.
When Margaret Atwood reflected on the reception to The Handmaid’s Tale when it was first published, she described the reaction in the United States in 1985 with a question:
How long have we got?
In Atwood’s novel, the implications for the future are obvious. When I first read The Handmaid’s Tale as a teen, I imagined something like the growth chart of a bean plant that elementary students might study. We were in the budding infancy, a seed with only the daintiest tendril of green curling from the ground. The future Atwood described was that plant grown to adulthood, strong and immovable: our inevitable destination if things didn’t change.
At the time Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, the progress of the women’s rights movement was incomplete. The Equal Rights Act hadn’t scraped together enough support to pass, and American women had only recently won basic rights such as applying for credit cards without a man to cosign. Strangely, though, by the time The Handmaid’s Tale published, the women’s movement was marked by a new lethargy, a sense that enough had been accomplished and urgent demonstration was no longer necessary. This, coupled with conservative attacks and messaging that women should take their wins and quit while ahead, meant that the women’s rights movement slowed in the next decades, through the nineties and early aughts. The false idea that feminism had been “solved” arguably contributed to a complacency that has led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, an upsurge of so-called “tradwives,” and the sluggish headway in improving the gender pay gap, particularly for women of color.
The pendulum swings, and if nobody’s there to hold it in place, it swings back.
We are witnessing an eerie similarity in the current stagnation of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. In recent years, there’s been an uptick in legislative discrimination and moral panic fanned by conservative pundits and influencers. Most communities in America have been impacted by book bans, anti-LGBTQ+ curriculum laws, rollbacks of protections for queer people, and more than 520 new anti-LGBTQ+ bills being debated across the United States.
I sense the backlash in the air, in subtle and not so subtle messaging online, in politics, even when I walk down the street: You’ve had enough progress; it’s time to stop now. You got marriage equality, but trans kids playing sports? Gender-affirming healthcare? Drag performances? Now you’ve gone too far.
What I don’t sense is a proportionate meeting of strength from the queer community. I have this vision of queer people in a collective nervous-system freeze response, a state of shellshock and confusion. What can we possibly do in the face of so many loud, angry voices?
I get it. Most of the time, I’m more concerned with the labor of getting through the day than debating conservatives about my right to exist. I don’t want to match the unhinged energy of Republicans screaming on cable news, religious zealots shouting unintelligibly into cheap megaphones at Pride, or proudly anti-queer influencers making bad-faith arguments on TikTok. It’s pointless, and besides, I don’t consider my sexual orientation to be a topic with potential for worthwhile debate. It’s a vital and fundamentally unchangeable part of me; debating it is akin to debating the existence of my own heart. It feels exhausting, pointless, and self-defeating after a while.
There is a time, though, to combat the inertia we all feel in witnessing national politics. And nowhere is an urgent uprising of voices more vital than in the discussion of conversion therapy.
There’s a strange, near radio-silence in the media and online around the subject of conversion therapy, a dangerous pseudoscientific practice intended to change someone’s—most often children’s—sexual or gender identity. Because of this, for a long time, I assumed conversion therapy was a thing of the past. In Washington, my home state, I knew the practice had been banned. I had a concept of the LGBTQ+ movement as an upward trajectory, still advancing, driven by the momentum of events like Stonewall and marriage equality. Things are bad, I thought, but they’re not like they were.
I didn’t realize at the time how limited my view was, and how flawed my logic. Despite the lack of media attention, conversion therapy never went anywhere. Even in states that supposedly ban the practice, such bans only apply to licensed mental health practitioners and do nothing to impede where the great majority of conversion therapy occurs—inside religious institutions.
A peer-reviewed study by the Trevor Project found that over 500,000 youth are at risk of conversion therapy each year. The practice costs the US economy over $9 billion, and the human impact is far greater. Children subjected to conversion therapy are many times more likely to experience mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation.
And conversion therapy isn’t what you probably picture: shock treatment, exposure therapy, something close to medieval torture. That image was seared into American consciousness in the 1970s, when shock treatment and exposure therapy were accepted psychological practices for a wide-range of mental illnesses (including homosexuality, which was classified as a mental disorder in the DSM until 1973). Today, conversion therapy in the United States is far more cunning and camouflaged: it happens in re-branded “life coaching” facilities, underground counseling centers that hide behind terms like “reparative therapy” and “spiritual warfare,” and inside the offices of bishops, pastors, and priests where young children sit for weekly counseling sessions.
The conversion therapy of today is slow torture, a gradual unraveling of self. It is an adult in a position of authority using words and power and shame to reconfigure a child’s mind into a living nightmare of self-doubt and self-hatred.
And it’s happening everywhere—a dystopia in our own communities, hidden from the public eye because most of its victims are children, and because most adults believe the practice to have been eradicated. When I learned of this, I began writing a book that would eventually become The Meadows, a queer dystopian novel grown from the same fertile soil as The Handmaid’s Tale. In the novel, queer young adults are sent to facilities intent on changing them, cultural assimilation is compulsory, and queerness has been erased to the extent that the young characters don’t even have a word to describe themselves. When I began writing The Meadows in 2017, I imagined its themes might be obsolete by the time it saw publication. I was very wrong.
So, how long have we got? How long until the future forecast in The Meadows is reality? I imagine many factors might spur it along: climate disaster, the rise of AI and technological surveillance, today’s anti-queer moral panic further legitimized in the realms of politics and law.
I also imagine a counterweight to all of that: Queer people existing, voting, and raising our voices to protect queer youth. Many of the laws conservatives have championed in recent years were motivated by a supposed desire to protect children. But while there is no evidence that trans people or drag artists pose a risk to children, the documentation around the harm conversion therapy causes queer youth is sweeping and conclusive. By ignoring it, by not crafting effective legislation against those who conduct it, the world turns its back on its most vulnerable.
Queer youth are the epicenter of the LGBTQ+ rights movement today. While on shaky ground, laws currently exist to protect queer adults in marriage and the workplace. But queer youth living in unsafe families and communities are as vulnerable as ever–perhaps more. In some communities, they can’t play on sports teams or use school bathrooms that match their gender identity. Their affirming parents could go to jail for seeking best-practice medical treatment, and they could be outed to unsafe parents by school staff. Their teachers risk termination for using their proper name and pronouns, and their school libraries are being stripped of queer literature that could help them feel less alone and find needed resources. And their caregivers can force the psychological violence of conversion therapy onto them, and the country will let it happen because it’s entirely legal, because its victims are too young to advocate for themselves, because “that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.”
How long have we got? For many, we’re already there.
