The Serpent's Wisdom

Among the transphobic stuff from a couple of weeks ago, one thing that sticks in my memory is the accusation that transsexuals (male to female they mean of course, because FTMs are invisible) are deliberately misappropriating femininity, diluting it so that it has no real meaning anymore.

I want to tackle this head-on because i can see how someone with feminist sensibilities would be concerned about this. I've been to enough drag shows to see how this concern would develop. Myths and stories concern me too: why, for exampe, in Hindu mythology the most beautiful woman who ever breathed is a man in disguise, and why did Dustin Hoffman's Tootsie become a better advocate for women's rights than any of the women around her?

Perhaps what underlies this portrayal of transgenderism is a largely unconscious attitude that if men did take on 'women's work' -- whether that be seducing men or standing up for women's rights -- that they would do it better. But fiction is not real-life, and the real-life attitude of most men towards transwomen is vastly different.  My belief is that this attitude is inserted by the dominant culture into media portrayals of transgenderism.

It seems to me that if transsexualism were a patriarchal plot to undermine femininity, then transwomen would be highly prized, be celebrated in the media, have more privilege than women, and be more highly valued than women as sex partners and spouses.

The charge of misappropriation only works if transwomen are "really men" who retain men's privilege in some form even after finding ways to cover the expense and cope with the pain of transition. It presumes that there are no parallels whatsoever between what women experience and what transwomen experience. It presumes that the men who line up for "undermining women duty" are rewarded or celebrated in some way. None of this holds up to any actual scrutiny:

• GenderPAC's "50 under 30" project assembles data on the murders of young transpeople, a statistic the FBI can't be bothered to track, and demonstrates that the rate of hate-motivated murder of transpeople rivals that of racist murder.
• It is not known what percentage of the transgender population is homeless and/or prostituted, but it is disproportionately, even shockingly, high. Advocates around the country argue that 35% to 42% of all homeless youth are GLBT -- from a segment which makes up about 4-5% of the general population. Homeless shelters are particularly unsafe for transpeople, who are typically segregated into shelters by birth gender, and some cities are finally, finally responding to this with special shelters for transfolk.
• Employment discrimination against transwomen continues even in parts of the world where people "should know better."

I can offer an alternate hypothesis for the positive portrayal of transwomen in myths, stories, and media: it is indeed misappropriation -- of transgenderism. The dominant culture dips into the expression and experience of the oppressed transgender culture and borrows what it likes, treats the entire subject as humorous, inserts what it thinks is important about being transgendered without any concern for our reality, and overall conveys the impression that transgenderism is merely the wearing of a disguise. This is why every portrayal of transwomen in the dominant culture's media focuses overmuch on "applying makeup and strutting around in frilly dresses". To paraphrase Kate Bornstein, if i thought that's all there was to being transgendered, i'd be suspicious too.

ETA: after consideration, i've decided to crosspost this to feminist.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it's a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.

... Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.

... The revised guidelines specify that states seeking grants are "to identify groups ... most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock, targeting adolescents and/or adults within the 12- through 29-year-old age range." Previous guidelines didn't mention targeting of an age group.

"We wanted to remind states they could use these funds not only to target adolescents," Horn said. "It's a reminder."

from Abstinence message goes beyond teens

Let that sink in for a moment. The government is paying people to tell adults they shouldn't have sex out of wedlock. Anyone want to guess who is going to be particularly targeted here? Here's a hint: have you ever been to a government assistance office?

The government does not exist to tell you how to live your life. The government exists to facilitate the decisions you, as a free person, make.

The government does not exist to tell you what language you may or may not speak, the government does not exist to tell you what religion you may or may not practice, the government does not exist to tell you what chemicals to put in your body or not put in your body, the government does not exist to tell you to have children or not have children, and the government sure as hell does not exist to tell you who to have sex with or who not to have sex with.

Some of these choices might not be as economically efficient as others, but economic efficiency is not the end-all-be-all of human existence, not even close.

A number of people on my friend's list have written recently that, rather than state that they support "gay rights," want to state that they support "human rights."

I understand the desire to transcend the frustrating divisions in our society, the potential pitfalls of identity politics (oh, yes, trust me on that). But wishes don't make it so, and here's why it is not enough to say you support "human rights."

In a country where men can vote and women cannot, no matter how much you talk about "human rights," you are not going to communicate to anyone why it is wrong to deny women's suffrage. That is because the majority of the population -- or at least a majority of the policymakers -- in that country think that the laws reflect a just understanding of human rights.

You have to specifically address the rights inequity because otherwise it does not enter anyone's consciousness. Women have to speak about how it affects their lives that they cannot vote -- in large part so that women can become aware of how their rights have been restricted. Raising consciousness is the biggest part of the struggle, and consciousness is not raised by abstract talk about human rights. The policymakers (if they cannot be replaced with new ones who have a better sense of justice) have to be made aware of the injustice their policies create, and again, this only happens if women talk specifically about their experiences and the restrictions on their lives.

People who oppose the right of women to vote will argue that women's suffrage is against the natural order. It was seriously believed 100 years ago that women could adversely affect their ability to reproduce if they use their brain too much. They will argue that it is against "common sense" and against tradition and is not necessary since women have men to protect them. They will argue, furthermore, that women who agitate for the right to vote are being divisive and creating discord.

In the modern United States, there are few people still alive who can remember a time when women could not vote. We take vote equality for granted and rail against the "obvious" injustice of other countries where women do not have the right to vote. We understand women's suffrage as a human right. So from this perspective of hindsight it could seem unnecessary (if one doesn't examine the historical perspective) to argue for women's right to vote by mentioning specifically "women's rights."

In our generation, the defining civil rights struggle is for the right of same-sex couples to have the same rights and privileges -- and duties -- as heterosexual couples. The fight for gays and lesbians to have legal protections as individuals from job or housing discrimination has largely been won. But now we understand that relationships have to be recognized as well for any true measure of equality to exist.

The only way to raise awareness of the disparity facing same-sex couples is to talk about their specific experiences, the 1001 myriad actual ways in which they cannot count on the same privileges as a married heterosexual couple. This means talking about the unfairness in the tax code; the unfairness facing a lesbian who does not receive benefits a husband would when her wife dies; the difficulty of adopting children when you are unmarried; and so on.

Awareness of unfairness is not going to arise in people through abstract declarations about support for the right of everyone to marry who they want. The specifics have to be described and talked about. The pain has to be voiced, so that others with similar pain which they have not previously articulated can say, "Oh, YES, i know this pain too, but i thought i was alone or weird!" People who already have this awareness consider the statement "everyone, gay or straight, should have the right to marry" to be obvious. People who do not already have this awareness consider this statement to be just as wrong as any demand for "gay marriage rights."

Another reason i reject the idea of "human rights, not gay rights" is that reactionaries have done a good job of convincing people there is a 'culture war' going on. Here is what this so-called 'culture war' looks like: "There is a free marketplace of ideas, in which the proponents and opponents of an idea stand on an equal footing. Therefore, if there is any nastyness, then the proponents and opponents are both equally to blame, throwing ideas around like bullets instead of dialoging rationally."

The idea of 'culture war' is a LIE, an insidious fiction designed to hide the real nature of the struggle for civil rights. People who lack access to equal rights, who are historically scorned and discriminated against, are not in any sense on an equal footing as the people who oppose their quest for equality.

People who have been systematically wronged have a right to be angry and to express that anger.

People who have been systematically wronged have a right to express their pain and anguish over the ways in which they have been traumatized, too.

Those who oppose equality complain that expressions of anger or anguish are "unfair" because they cannot "argue against" them. And what allows them to say this is the idea that there is a 'culture war' which should stop and be replaced by 'rational dialogue,' an artificially stultified form of discourse designed to allow opponents of equality to cite "logically and rationally" why they should continue to have special rights not shared by the disadvantaged, essentially allowing them to ignore everything and anything the disadvantaged say.

A while ago i wrote about an idea i had, that perhaps economic necessity shaped the moral code of the Tanakh (aka the Old Testament) -- that pastoral societies have a need for maximum reproductive output from each person... hence mandatory marriage, polygamy, prohibitions on homosexuality and masturbation, and so on. I was quite proud of this theory; if i do say so myself, it's brilliant.

I also now think it's wrong.

At the time that i came up with this theory, i was not inclined to consider the likelihood that the people who devised these laws and wrote these texts had an agenda and were participants in a factional struggle for control of their society. This is because whoever opposed them no longer speaks to us across the millenia; the opposing voices in this debate were not recorded for posterity.

This is why i am now a proponent of what i've been calling (for lack of a better term i'm aware of) "embedded theology": because when you deliberately overlook the political agenda behind "spiritual" texts, when you don't examine religion through the lens of human power dynamics, you miss too much, and much of the real historical significance of a piece of "scripture" is obscured.

What makes me inclined to re-examine my previous hypothesis was a series of realizations about the militaristic and authoritarian imperialism of the modern USA. And what's going on now is not in any way new or unique, because it resembles too closely what happened in the last century.

It began in the early 20th Century with efforts to prevent 'undesirables' from having children -- eugenics boards, forced sterilization, etc. The Nazis took many of their ideas about sterilization from eugenics measures which were already being enacted in the US and Canada and elsewhere. (And actually, American proposals to euthanize people with disabilities helped inspire the Final Solution.) Alongside with eugenics, women of "desireable" races were encouraged or pushed towards having as many children as possible.

I cite this historical stuff not for hyperbole, but because i think most Americans are not aware of how deeply embedded these barbaric principles and practices are in our recent history, and to illustrate how potentially damaging the ideologies now being espoused by the American right-wing really are.

John Gibson of Fox News really tipped his hand when he told white women that they were neglecting their duty to have babies:

Do your duty. Make more babies. ...

Now, in this country, European ancestry people, white people, are having kids at the rate that does sustain the population. It grows a bit. That compares to Europe where the birth rate is in the negative zone. They are not having enough babies to sustain their population. Consequently, they are inviting in more and more immigrants every year to take care of things and those immigrants are having way more babies than the native population, hence Eurabia.

Why aren't they having babies? Because babies get in the way of a prosperous and comfortable modern life. ...

To put it bluntly, we need more babies. Forget about that zero population growth stuff that my poor generation was misled on. Why is this important? Because civilizations need population to survive. So far, we are doing our part here in America but Hispanics can't carry the whole load. The rest of you, get busy. Make babies, or put another way -- a slogan for our times: "procreation not recreation."

from Gibson: "Make more babies"

Behind this, we see exposed the nexus where sexism, racism, and homophobia swirl together into a single whole: a war over the nation's population. It doesn't matter to these reactionaries that America's population is still growing, it matters who that population consists of. And only someone hopelessly naive would think that this faction is not going to become more brazen and brutal in the coming decades.

Put this next to proposals to prevent the children of undocumented immigrants from having automatic US citizenship, and Pat Buchanan's crusade against Mexican immigration, and one part of the pattern comes into focus: they believe the US should have fewer non-white children.

Combine this with the new classification of all women of childbearing age as "pre-pregnant," efforts to deliberately make it harder for mothers to hold down a job, the ageless and ongoing efforts to stem abortion rights and make it more difficult for women to have access to any form of contraception, and another part of the pattern comes into focus: they believe white women should be forced to have more children.

A third part of this pattern comes into play with the right's program of mandatory heterosexual marriage, designed more than anything else to keep gay and lesbian people in the closet so they will reproduce, which is punctuated by the 'unintended' consequences of punishing unmarried cohabiting straight couples as well. The message, increasingly, is, "marry or else."

The babies you have better not be disabled, either. The right-wing, following ancient and historical precedent, is not too keen on protecting the self-sufficiency of people with disabilities, either. And the gateway to the Final Solution was the Tiergartenstrasse 4 project.

It was this comprehensive perspective on the modern "baby wars" that led me to re-consider my interpretation of ancient moral codes on reproduction. Efforts to encourage the upper class race to reproduce may prove to be a signature pattern of militaristic and expansionistic regimes.

Bridget Mary Meehan said she and seven other women are Roman Catholic priests after being ordained Monday during a riverboat ceremony in Pittsburgh.

But church officials say the ordination was invalid and could lead to excommunication. Pittsburgh's Roman Catholic Diocese warned the women beforehand that those participating will have "removed themselves from the church."


The Church of Kenya writing to the Anglican Consultative Council interprets this as, "the provinces of Canada and ECUSA... by their actions have chosen a different path from the rest of the Communion and should be considered by the rest of the Communion as having broken fellowship. They need to re-consider their official standing in the spirit of repentance, reconciliation and willingness to re-affirm their commitment to the Communion and restoration should only take place after repentance and healing".

What do these statements and issues have in common? Look at the emphasis i added to these quotes above to see what i am getting at. In each case, we have a worldwide religious organization with clear rules about who is allowed to contribute in what way and who is not, and a group of dissidents who believe the rules are against the spirit of the church and who actively break the rules in accord with their conscience. We have in each case the organization stating in response that the dissidents have removed themselves from fellowship by their actions.

Actions of conscience in defiance of prejudicial institutional rules can have a profound effect on public opinion. For example, look at what has happened in the United States since San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom began issuing marriage certificates to same-sex couples in 2004. Opposition to same-sex marriage has dropped from 63% to 51% and support has risen from 30% to 39%. Since then one state, Massachusetts, has instituted same-sex marriage; in Massachusetts, same-sex marriage is supported by 62% of the population.

Public opinion took a similar course when courts began to strike down laws banning interracial marriage, too. When this redefinition of marriage took place, conservatives warned that public morality, indeed the fabric of society itself, was threatened with collapse. This has not happened, in fact in the last 20 years there has been a notable and enduring drop in the crime rate. Massachusetts has not seen any sign in the last two years that its social institutions are collapsing.

Similarly, there have been no signs of collapse of British civilization since the Church of England began ordaining women.

I've written in the past about "trajectories" in the development of Christian doctrine and practice. The idea of trajectories (or as Jon Stewart called it in his interview with Bill Bennett, the "human condition"), extended to the evolution of justice over the course of human history, provides a way to gauge the change over time in a culture's social institutions.

If the trajectory of the human condition is towards greater equality and equity of human rights, seen through the history of debates over slavery, freedom, suffrage, property rights, employment access, freedom from violence, then we must conclude that those who seek female priests, gay bishops, or same-sex marriage are on the right side of history.

At the outset, the church was an egalitarian emancipatory movement seeking justice for the oppressed and downtrodden. Christian doctrine, however, is not equipped to handle the situation where the church itself is an instrument of oppression, or, even more subtly, where the language itself of Christianity has been co-opted and misappropriated. The authors of the christian testament could not have conceived of such an outcome. They did see the dangers of literalism, but could not have protected against the subverting of their message.

As the ancient theologian Valentinus observed, when we awaken from a bad dream, we find that the scary phantoms which gave us chase are nothing. Similarly, "one's ignorance disappears when [one] gains knowledge, and... darkness disappears when light appears." Acts of conscientious dissent, like the ordaining of women as Roman Catholic priests or the consecration of homosexual bishops in the Anglican church, have the effect of waking us from our bad dream because they are in accord with the trajectory of justice in human history. The phantoms we feared prove to be nothing, just figments, and public opinion shifts drastically in the course of a single generation.

This demonstrates the importance of being brave.

Have the dissenters truly separated themselves from the community of justice and faith? Notably, talk of divisiveness and schism comes not from the dissenters but from the voices of the institutions -- who then is the actual source of that divisiveness? Is what defines a strong union conformity and strict obedience to written rules, or is it mercy and respect for diversity?

Yesterday, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that Petition K -- the proposed statewide referendum on a state constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage -- may proceed. From here it will go to the state legislature, where it must come up for a vote this year and next, and be supported by 25% of the voting legislators.

The Massachusetts state constitution contains a provision that makes it illegal to amend the constitution to reverse a decision by the Supreme Judicial Court. So, Petition K should not have even been certified, right? In any case, the SJC decided that this amendment, which would overturn their ruling in 2003 mandating that the state allow same-sex couples to marry, does not reverse their decision. Huh-wha?

It's amazing how far the rules of logic and reason will bend when it comes to hating queer people.

The next time i hear a Republican whine about "activist judges" i'm going to get on a bus and throttle them, i swear to god.

In other news i heard yesterday that Governor Romney used his line-item veto to specifically strike from the state budget its (very meager) funding for same-sex domestic violence agencies. So, in order to get any money this year, the Network La Red and the Gay Men's Domestic Violence Project will have to come up with the votes for a veto override.

Is there any way to say more clearly that you hate gay people and want them to die?

And all this, in "pointy-headed" ultra-liberal queer-loving Massachusetts.

This demonstrates the truth behind the old addage, "If anyone is not free, then no one is free." The War on Gay Marriage is, increasingly, causing heterosexual casualties -- in particular, unmarried heterosexuals. I posted two months ago when a judge ruled that a domestic violence law in Ohio does not cover unmarried couples. Now, today, we have this:

BLACK JACK, Mo. - The city council has rejected a measure allowing unmarried couples with multiple children to live together, and the mayor said those who fall into that category could soon face eviction.

Olivia Shelltrack and Fondrey Loving were denied an occupancy permit after moving into a home in this St. Louis suburb because they have three children and are not married.

... The current ordinance prohibits more than three people from living together unless they are related by "blood, marriage or adoption." The defeated measure would have changed the definition of a family to include unmarried couples with two or more children.

Mayor Norman McCourt declined to be interviewed but said in a statement that those who do not meet the town's definition of family could soon face eviction.

from Mo. Town Denies Unmarried Couple Permit

Now, the article doesn't say specifically that this is related to the war on gay marriage. But, put two and two together: gay marriage was outlawed in Missouri two years ago, and the nation is in the throes of a reactionary spasm to push "family values," though how family values will be preserved by making families lose their homes is beyond me...

The brewing mindset is that unmarried cohabiting straight people (traditionally referred to as "living in sin") are sinners who deserve to be punished. Not only is marriage to be made up of "one man and one woman," but marriage is to become the required norm. (At least the movement to promote the odious "covenant marriage" has turned out to be a non-starter.)

A line-by-line response to Gay Marriage Foes Face Issue in Schools

Ever since her 5-year-old brought home a book from kindergarten that depicted a gay family, Tonia Parker has felt that her parenting has been under attack in the only state that allows same-sex marriage.

Translation: they want to feel safe in imparting bigotry to their children.

She and her husband, David, didn't want to discuss sexual orientation yet with their son, and were shocked that the book was included in a "diversity book bag" last year. David Parker subsequently got arrested for refusing to leave a Lexington school after officials refused to meet his demand that he be notified when homosexuality was discussed in his son's class.

Yes, i remember this. The arrest was for trespassing or creating a nuisance, that sort of thing, but they've tried to characterize it as an arrest for "standing up for what is right." I'm sorry, this is not the same as protesting outside the School of the Americas, okay?

Now the Parkers and another couple have sued school officials in federal court, claiming Lexington officials violated their parental rights to teach morals to their own children.

The way they and other opponents of gay marriage see it, the 2003 ruling that cleared the way for same-sex weddings has emboldened Massachusetts gay rights advocates to push their views in schools and ignore those who feel homosexuality is immoral.

"In many parts of the United States, we could have presented our concerns and our objections, and it wouldn't have been a problem," Tonia Parker said.

Translation: anywhere else in the country, their bigotry would be perfectly acceptable.

Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, said there is no pro-gay campaign in the schools, just isolated cases exaggerated by anti-gay marriage activists who suffer from "narcissistic activist personality disorder."

Yes. Reduction of your privilege is not oppression.

Carisa Cunningham, spokeswoman for the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, said school curriculums haven't changed, just the reaction to them by gay marriage opponents. "Maybe the impact of the law is that it has made people much more defensive and much more afraid," she said.

She has more sympathy than i do (though, to be honest, any sympathy would be more than i have). It is not rational for homophobes to be defensive and afraid. They are not losing anything here except the privilege to be a bigot.

...Brian Camenker of the Article 8 Alliance, which opposes gay marriage, said there's been a striking change in tone by gay marriage proponents since marriages started.

"It's like you're dealing with people from Mars, people who feel they're so superior they can use your child's mind as a sandbox for their own personal ideologies," he said.

That's quite a statement from someone who wants to treat OUR child's mind as a sandbox for THEIR personal ideologies.

But Eliza Byard of the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network said gay families exist everywhere — the only thing different about Massachusetts is that same-sex marriage makes it much harder to push them aside. Public schools must acknowledge gay families, she said, even if it upsets parents who believe same-sex relationships are immoral.

"One of the basic realities of American life," she said, "is that all of us have to deal with beliefs we disagree with."

Queer people have been forced to live with, and continue to have to live with, offensive and hateful ideologies shoved down our throats every day. We get to see the privileges others around us have and take for granted, that have been denied us. These bigot crybabies wouldn't last five minutes in our shoes, to judge from the way they get so freaked out by what are actually very small nods to the fact that queers are people too.

Yesterday i talked to someone in my human resources department about my plan to transition at work. Today i read this (yes, Harvard University is my employer):

Harvard announced yesterday that it would amend its University-wide non-discrimination policy to protect "gender identity," following growing pressure to safeguard the rights of transgender students and staff.

"Amending the non-discrimination policy to include gender identity is intended to reaffirm that all members of the Harvard community, including those who are transgendered, should be judged on their own merits, not their status," said University spokesman Joe Wrinn.

Harvard joins 52 other universities, including Brown and Cornell, in amending its policy.

The decision was announced this afternoon to members of the Transgender Task Force (TTF)­­——a group of students, staff, faculty, and alumni who has advocated for the inclusion of gender identity since 1997——in a meeting with Robert W. Iuliano ’83, University vice president and general counsel.

According to students at that meeting, Iuliano said that the Corporation, the University’s highest governing board, had agreed to add gender identity to the non-discrimination policy at their last meeting, which was scheduled to be held on April 3.

from Policy To Cover Transgender Students: Harvard non-discrimination policy set to include gender identity

Edit. I'm sure the timing of this has *nothing* to do with the recent resignation of any transphobic Harvard Presidents or anything...

Maybe i shouldn't be writing this screed while migrainey and furious, but i'm writing it anyway.

( very long; contains rape triggers and strong angry language; NSFW )