Sotomayor

The buzz around Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s recent nomination, as well as the ongoing hearings, has brought to the forefront the issue of gender and race in the currently U.S. Supreme Court, which does not appear terribly representative of the country it deigns to serve.  But critics and journalists are missing the boat with respect to a determinant factor of identity, going beyond race and gender.  There’s a glaring omission from this debate.

While the racial milestone that will be made with her appointment to the court will certainly be significant, an important trend (perhaps the most important trend) in the court itself will be broken by her ascendancy. That is, she will be the first Catholic on the Court who is not a conservative.

(from: Southern Appeal)

While every is scrutinizing the race, gender, and whiteness of the Court, and how it affects the decisions that it makes, the religious denominational breakdown of the Court has been the leading (and perhaps sole) indicator based on identity as to how the Court has voted.  That is to say: All the Roman Catholic Justices are conservative (from moderately-tempered Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, to the barking mad Scalia), whereas all the other non-Catholic Justices (Ginsburg, Stephens, Breyer, and the now-departed Souter) are more liberal in their decisions.

Since the end of the Rehnquist Court in 2005, the the sides in decisions of the Court could be nearly always determined by Catholic affiliation (or non-affiliation).  For instance, Justice Kennedy is occasionally a “swing vote” between the liberal and conservatives of the court, but almost always sides with his Catholic buddies.  A few exceptions have occurred, such as Kelo v. City of New London, but such exceptions largely prove the rule.

With Sotomayor on the Court, all that will change!  LIberal Catholics around the country can rejoice that finally a non-conservative Catholic will represent and advocate their ideological perspective in the future.  A wall will be broken, a stereotyping of Catholics as socially backwards, intolerant curmudgeons will end, and “progress” will be upon the U.S. Supreme Court.

Question: Should liberals now fear that Sotomayor will abandon her hitherto liberal instincts, and start taking orders from the Vatican? (See B.E. Howard’s question to Kennedy)

Giving Warren even more mainstream cred is not just a cost-free nod to evangelicals. It’s a boost for someone who actively opposes Obama’s agenda and who is eager to influence secular affairs.

That mainstream cred may be cost-free to the evangelicals, but it comes at a deadly cost to the LGBT community…

(Mikko Allane, emphasis mine):

The problem, as many commentators have noted, is that we’re not disagreeing about abstract ideas — we’re disagreeing about civil and human rights.

I would argue that we’re disagreeing about most basic human right of all — the right to live a life free of violence.

Because words are where violence begins. And in America, violence against gays, lesbians, and transgendered people most often begins in hateful and intolerant words spoken in right-wing churches like Rick Warren’s Saddleback. Warren has compared gay and lesbian people to pedophiles and perpetrators of incest (you can watch the CNN video of his remarks here). His words may often be cloaked more politely, but in his intolerance, Warren is really no different than James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Fred Phelps, or other peddlers of anti-gay hate.

And the seeds of that hate are growing faster than ever.

This year, the FBI reported a 1% decline in hate crimes in the United States. At the same time, they revealed a 6% increase in hate crimes against gay, lesbian, and transgendered people. In the past few months alone, shocking murders have been reported across the country from Oxnard, CA to Brooklyn, NY, and most recently, San Francisco.

That’s a powerful statistic.  Hate crime on average has gone down while hate crimes against the LGBT community have gone up.  Crimes including gang rape (Vanessa, Feministing):

Last Saturday in San Francisco, a lesbian was beaten and repeatedly raped by four men, while the perpetrators “made comments indicating they knew her sexual orientation.” They then left the 28-year old naked outside of an abandoned apartment building, who was helped by someone living nearby.

Its impossible to imagine Obama inviting the leader of a white supremacist group attempting to gain mainstream appeal.  I can understand what Obama is going for by inviting an evangelical to the inauguration.  The problem is that the cost outweights the benefits.  He’s helping a wolf get his sheep costume on in the hope that they can work on common problems like fighting hoof and mouth disease and too much logging in the woods.  To do this he’s ignoring the sheep who go missing.

Violence against gay/bi/trans people continues to burn and Obama is helping the man with the gasoline.

Write to Marry Day!

Arguments in favor of California’s Proposition 8 are a fascinating study in hate apologetics.  Just as with the “life begins at conception” anti-choice movement or the pro-creationism lobby, from the start there is an intense pressure to hide the religious foundations beneath the nearest available logic-like substitute.  It comes down to an often hilarious yet very sobering look into the kind of people who think discrimination belongs in the California state constitution.

The favored defenses of institutionalized bigotry are:

• Cultural Definition/Clarity
• Protecting the Institution of Marriage, Social Role of Traditional Families, Etc
• Claiming Same Sex Relationship are Unnatural
• OMG They Will Make Our Children Gay
• Majority Rule vs Courts
• Protecting Religious Freedom

The first argument goes something like this (DocDodson’s first comment):

Marriage law in this culture represents one thing.
A man and a woman. For clarity another word must be used to represent any other type of union. Specifications reject confusion. Now, Let’s do talk about religion. If you attend a church, would it be a church of God in Christ, or a church of Satan? What if you walked into a building that just said church, and became trapped? You thought it was one thing, but you got trapped in another. Deciet is a horrible thing. Misrepresentation of values, a crime.

I can see why DocDodson is afraid, who would want to become trapped forever in a building that “just said church”?  Its painfully easy to dismiss the idea that straight people might become so confused by marriage in a post prop-8 world they might accidentally marry someone of the same sex.  The cultural definition provides more to go on.  This argument is remarkably similar to the Southern Way of Life arguments against racial equality:

The Southern way of life divided the world into white and black – sacred and profane.  In this sacred way of life, all who were white were viewed as fully human and all who were black as less than human.

The anti-gay movement and the support for proposition 8 shares a lot in common with the racist campaign against equality during the civil rights era, as this brilliant video hack shows (via Amanda at Pandagon):

By taking the Morman Church’s campaign against equality regardless of sexual orientation and substituting in “interracial” for “same-sex”, they’ve effectively shown the true colors of those who claim to champion family values.

Which leads us to the next three arguments, which often go together.  The basic idea is that Same sex marriages somehow:

• Effect opposite sex marriages
• Go against the purpose of marriage, which is to further society (ie make more people)
• Provide an Immoral/Unnatural/Icky Environment for Children

The first point is the easiest to tackle.  One can simply look to Massachusetts, which has a complete lack of “Well, gay marriage is now legal” statements in divorce proceedings.  The opportunity to point out the utter nonsense of this argument is not one to squander.  At its heart is the idea that the actions of some can affect the morality of unrelated persons.  The reasoning is remarkably close to the heart of many pro religion-state marriage partisans:  Its about removing temptation so the weak do not succumb to what they view as sinful.  We need look no further than the tendency of Republican officials – paragons of morality – to seek out prostitutes and other sexual activities they rail against in public.  It is religious conservatives of all stripes who seek to institute a nanny state.

The second point is often lightly dealt with by referring to childless marriages, and offering to institute a deadline for producing offspring for marriage licenses to remain valid.  Anyone foolish enough to walk into this arguing that would be fine by them can be shamed by bringing up the example of infertile couples.

Against the third point there is some encouragement to find in popular culture (Apple Trailer: Breakfast With Scot). This boils down to two implied arguments:  That homosexuality is learned behavior (which feeds into the paranoia about children even being taught same sex couples exist), and that homosexuality is ok “for adults who already are gay, but not for children!”.  The clear implication being that despite all the assurances to the contrary, people who use this argument are really wearing their homophobia on their sleave.  The best thing to do is to bring the discussion back to the biological basis of sexual preference, and to argue so as to bring out their homophobia into the light, where you can then counter that they have no place forcing their fear and hate on the general public.

To quote Comparative Religious Ethics again:

The Southern way of life divided the world into white and black – sacred and profane.  In this sacred way of life, all who were white were viewed as fully human and all who were black  as less than human.  Therefore Southern white morality did not require whites to treat blacks with the same dignitiy that they treated each other.  For a black person to enter the sacred space of white society, except under strictly controlled conditions, was to pollute that space.

The fear and hate of homophobia, combined with the disapproval of religious authority, has had a similarly violent impact on homosexuals.  When people are viewed as hateful, less than human, or a sinful influence, they become objects of aggression.  Opposition to same sex marriage is innately eliminationist in its expression.

We now arrive at the last two arguments for proposition 8, wherein the anti-gay movement tries to have it both ways at once (preservingmarriage.com):

One the one hand, the anti-gay contingent is intent on insisting their religious freedom to believe homosexuals are sinners are at risk, and need to be protected.  They are however quite comfortable with ensuring their beliefs restrict all same-sex couples from enjoying the same rights as straight couples.  With regard to their perceived vulnerability to a flood of lawsuits demanding churches marry homosexuals, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to back up this kind of fear (mormonapologetics.org, emphasis mine):

But will it happen? Will churches be forced to perform gay marriages, even when it contradicts their religious convictions?

No one can see the future, but we can look to the past for similar situations. The closest comparison I can think of is the legalization of interracial marriage. I’ve searched and searched, but I can’t find a single case where a church was forced to perform an interracial marriage. From a broader perspective, the same argument could be applied to civil rights as a whole. The civil rights era created anti-discrimination legislation which was applied to public and private institutions, but churches were (and still are) exempt from such laws. The LDS church was free to deny priesthood status to blacks until it decided on its own to end the practice. The government never attempted to force the LDS church to change its policies regarding blacks, even though those policies were racist and discriminatory. The church was never threatened with the loss of tax exempt status for those policies.

History shows that churches will be free to practice their religion, even when such practices are discriminatory. There is, therefore, no reason to believe the hysterical arguments now being put forth with respect to same sex marriage.

Further down in the same thread, there is a link to a California law professor debunking the legal threat:

Kaimi Wenger, a law professor addressed this question in a discussion of the legal issues in California, and his conclusion was that it is unlikely that the Church would be required to perform same sex marriages.

http://ldshomosexuality.com/?p=168

Given that churches have in the recent past successfully barred interracial marriage, I doubt they’ll have much trouble being just as bigoted when it comes to same sex marriage.

This leaves the desire of the anti-gay mob to force their religious beliefs on all Californians.  And they are increasingly acting not just like a mob, but like the mob (SFGate via August):

Leaders of the campaign to outlaw same-sex marriage in California are warning businesses that have given money to the state’s largest gay rights group they will be publicly identified as opponents of traditional unions unless they contribute to the gay marriage ban, too.

ProtectMarriage.com, the umbrella group behind a ballot initiative that would overturn the California Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, sent a certified letter this week asking companies to withdraw their support of Equality California, a nonprofit organization that is helping lead the campaign against Proposition 8.

“Make a donation of a like amount to ProtectMarriage.com which will help us correct this error,” reads the letter. “Were you to elect not to donate comparably, it would be a clear indication that you are in opposition to traditional marriage. … The names of any companies and organizations that choose not to donate in like manner to ProtectMarriage.com but have given to Equality California will be published.”

No word on whether or not in addition to being “outed”, supporters of gay rights would wake up next to a disembodied horse’s head:

Equality California executive director Geoffrey Kors said Thursday he has heard from two other business owners besides Abbott.

“It’s truly an outrageous attempt to extort people,” Kors said.

A church is acting like the mafia to protect institutionalized inequality and hate.  Their excuse for doing so is mind boggling:

She called the tactic “a frustrated response” to the intimidation felt by Proposition 8 supporters, who have had their lawn signs stolen and property vandalized in the closing days of the heated campaign.

Individuals act out inappropriately and the response is to extort business owners?  WTF?

Its an incredibly stupid move, and one we can help backfire simply by bringing more attention to it.

I’ll close with this video (through Feminist Law Professors via Samhita at Feministing):

I’d like to draw your attention to a particular scene at the end where one of the “No on 8″ counter protestors attempts to debate with the “Yes on 8″ supporters.  Unable to defend their desire to impose their views on others, they break into a chant, drowning out the lone “No on 8″ activist, literally turning their backs on him.

There is literally no room for nuance on an issue like this.  Supporters of Propostion 8 are on shaky ground with only veiled appeals to theocratic tendencies to lean on.  In contrast the opponents of Prop 8 have their shit remarkably together, and are willing to engage in smart and reasoned discourse.

Equality California has an Action Center and a helpful Ways to Get Involved page.  It also isn’t too late to donate.

Vote No on Prop 8!

Political battles are often nuanced fights, in which an issue is wrapped up with personal history, racism, sexism, mysterious backstories, internal power struggles, party politics, and more.  “Sides” are seldom clearly distinguishable as purely right or wrong, true or false.  Politics is a muddled business in this way.

But one fight going on in the U.S. – most notably in California – is really quite simple.

Proposition 8 is a constitutional amendment to the California Constitution that, if passed, “eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry”.  Voters of that state will cast ballots on November 4th to determine whether they wish to revoke a right for a segment of the population.

There is little nuanced about California’s Proposition 8 (and Florida’s Proposition 2 and Arizona’s Proposition 102).  These are refreshingly clear fights for full human rights of folks who happen to belong to the GLBTQ community.

The fight is about whether fear is going to continue to drive how we live, how we see each other, how we interact as a people.

The fight is about whether hatred is going to be the lesson taught to our youth, whether we’re going to teach them how to shun, whether we’re going to instill injustice in their hearts.

The fight is about whether religion will again be used, in an all-too-familiar way, to create an “other” who we can point our fingers at.  Christians will have to demonstrate whether they actually have read and understand the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, whether they accept or reject spiritual decay.

The fight is about whether the United States is a place where there exists a separation of church and state, whether we wish to become a theocracy, or whether our values truly are better than the foreign religious fundamentalists so often decried.

The fight is about whether citizens who proclaim the virtue of “small government” will actually realize that principle, whether they will respect a person’s right to privacy, or whether they will thrust a lengthened arm of the law into their own bedrooms.

Write to Marry Day!

The fight is about whether we will maintain the bondage on the dignity of each individual, whether we will repudiate our own civil rights, or whether liberty for one means liberty for all.

In essence, the fight is about whether we will be a civilized people, that uses our institutions to learn how to live together in peace, or use those institutions to create divisions and foster discrimination.  Rarely are people given such clear choices in the voting booth that will declare their equitableness, or their iniquity.  There is no nuance here, only the opportunity to embrace our own humanity.

Massachusetts is also a state where Gay Marriage has been legal for quite some time. Looking over at the fight brewing in California makes me a little nostalgic. MA has its fair share of theocrats too.

This is something we need to be clear about. Anyone opposing the freedom of consenting adults to enter into the bonds of marriage with each other is doing so to impose their religious views on the entire country.  This line from the Wall Street Journal caught my eye:

Mormon leaders, on the church’s official Web site, ask their followers to support the California ballot measure to reinforce church teachings that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God.”

There is just no justification on this green Earth for using a ballot measure – an instrument of state – to enforce church teachings.  None.  This shit burns me up.  Sarah Palin, the Republican VP candidate is eating it up:

The issue has come up in the presidential campaign, with Republican Sen. John McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, suggesting this week that she would support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage nationwide.

She’s signaling just as clearly as she can that if elected, she’ll use her power as Queen of the U.S. Senate to begin pushing her Bible on our laws.

Its getting to a point where its just too much to take.  Check out this video of a McCain/Palin supporter (via an especially pertinent and brilliant post at Pandagon):

Its marked the first time I’ve felt strongly “This person shouldn’t have the right to vote”.  This thought startled and upset me as soon as I had it, since I strongly believe everyone has the right to vote (and ought to be encourage to).  Faith in this sense is not a virtue.  It is a liability.  It is a knife through the heart of reasoned discourse.  Watching that video, do you think it remotely possible to discuss positions and substance with that woman and get anywhere at all?  Everything comes down to this black and white binary of whether it fits into her personal religious view, and there is no room for anything other than the comfortable dogma she knows by rote.

What it comes down to is this rage and this conviction I have.  That however I feel about the election, I want with every ounce of me to resist a small but vocal segment of this country dragging us all deeper into their theocratic pit.

to the theocrat:

this is the land of the free

you won’t tread on me

]]> http://revolutionaryact.org/2008/10/theocrats-dont-tread-on-me/feed/ 1 http://revolutionaryact.org/2008/10/on-the-abuse-of-the-personal-is-political/ http://revolutionaryact.org/2008/10/on-the-abuse-of-the-personal-is-political/#comments Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:00:04 +0000 Daisy http://revolutionaryact.org/?p=248 This post almost made me lose faith in humanity.

I don’t want to be too harsh — it’s a thoughtful post and I agree with its conclusions, and I have a good deal in common with its author — but my heart was half-broken by just the title.

Can I Be a Feminist and a Bottom in Bed?

Uh oh.

Now, let me make this clear, in case I didn’t already: I agree with the conclusions of this post. I’m just really, really sad that we’re still asking this question.

The post continues:

One unfortunate consequence of feminism’s emphasis on the personal as political is that it becomes too easy to discriminate against people for not being “feminist enough.”

This is the opposite of what “the personal is political” is supposed to mean. “The personal is political” is not an excuse to bash other women or take away someone’s feminist membership card. It’s the idea that our ostensibly “personal” problems — like rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment — are actually part of large-scale systems of oppression. Many personal hardships are the result of political injustices.

Now, of course individuals should be held accountable for their own unfair or bigoted actions. But wearing lipstick — for example — is not an act of bigotry, even though it’s caused by a bigoted system. The fact that women wear lipstick is a function of the gender system, but the fact that women wear lipstick doesn’t itself cause sexism. We could have an egalitarian world with lipstick; we couldn’t have an egalitarian world with a wage gap.

I try to be comfortable with my naughty subservience, but as a feminist and a fiercely independent person, it’s an awkward thing to feel and admit to. I get this niggling sense that I should be large and in charge all the time, like my personal politics should be carrying over into my sexual preferences. I’m trying to overthrow gender roles, here. Being submissive in bed is a stereotypically feminine thing. Bad feminist!

I happen to be not at all stereotypically feminine, but nonetheless, I totally disagree that “stereotypically feminine” = “bad/worse feminist.”*

My best friend is a heterosexual with long hair, and I’m a dyke with a buzz cut. She can’t help liking men any more than I can help liking women, and she might feel as uncomfortable with very short hair as I would with a ponytail. Am I therefore a better feminist?

My girlfriend wears lots of dresses, jewelry and girly shoes, while I prefer to wear pants, t-shirts and motorcycle boots. We both wear the clothes we like, feel comfortable in, and look best in, and our choices are both, inevitably, influenced by the gender system. Am I a better feminist?

Of course I’m not.

So getting back to the original question:

Can I Be a Feminist and a Bottom in Bed?

I don’t know, can you?

Do you like being tied up because you think women are inherently inferior? While your partner is telling exactly you what to do, are you secretly thinking that the state should outlaw contraception? While you’re being spanked, are you thinking that boys shouldn’t cry and girls shouldn’t learn math? Are you thinking that everyone should be in a heterosexual marriage in which the man is the head of the household? Are you thinking that women who are date-raped and men who are raped prison deserve what they get? Are you think that sexism is permissible? That equal pay for equal work is a bad idea? While you’re having sex, what are you thoughts on suffrage? How about your thoughts on the ERA? Are you having on ideas about whether women should be allowed to own property?

Our actions are undoubtedly influenced by the gender system. People’s sexual proclivities may be influenced by the gender system — I honestly don’t know, and I really don’t care. At the end of the day, if you’re opposed to sexism — if you believe men and women should be equal, that the gender system in unjust, that our freedoms, both legal and cultural, should not be dependent on our genitals, chromosomes, or our gender presentation, that every person has a sovereign right to reproductive justice — then you’re a feminist in my book, regardless of how you choose to use or not use make-up and handcuffs.

* The author of the original post explains that she disagrees with this, too — this post is not a take-down of her post, really, just of the ideas that caused her to write it in the first place.

The ruling was groundbreaking in various respects. In addition to establishing Connecticut as the third state to sanction same-sex marriage, it was the first state high court ruling to hold that civil union statutes specifically violated the equal protection clause of a state constitution. The Massachusetts high court held in 2004 that same-sex marriages were legal, while California’s court decision in May related to domestic partnerships and not the more broadly defined civil unions.

Though I believe that civil unions have been beneficial and important to many committed couples, they are not a sufficient separate-but-equal alternative to marriage regardless of the legal benefits conferred by them. Justices Palmer, Flemming L. Norcott Jr., Joette Katz, and Lubbie Harper got it right when they agreed that “The former is an institution of transcendent historical, cultural and social significance, whereas the latter is not.” (The former=marriage. The latter=civil unions.) But also for this reason, I think that both the option to marry and the option to obtain civil unions should be and remain available to all committed couples.

Many, many things about the recent Biden/Palin vice presidential debate saddened me, not the least of which is that neither of the two main parties in the country is ready to attribute more value to equal respect for all citizens (this includes sharing the word marriage; favoring respectful treatment for all over the hoarding of language and value systems which disparage particular groups of them) than to hurtful notions of tradition and to ideologies of hatred and fear. Patience is not always a virtue!

But: slowly, steadily, the LGBT community and allies are gaining ground.

As Aviva’s post at Bi-Furious just reminded me, yesterday was National Coming Out Day. So, in the spirit of that (and apologies to Aviva for stealing her question!), what’s your coming out story?

If you came out as any stripe of queer, please do share that. Alternatively, feel free to share any other coming story, i.e. the story of someone else coming out to you (without revealing private information, of course), or of yourself coming out as anything else that’s important to you: as an atheist or as someone with other beliefs, as a liberal, as a vegetarian, with a diagnosis that you have, as an ally to any group, etc. Any part of your identity that you’ve had to reveal to people will do.

Here is the coming out story I left in my comment on Aviva’s afore-linked post:

I had a dear boyfriend for a year or so in middle school, S. We got together both identifying as straight, then both came out to each other as bi. A few moths after we broke up (we remained good friends), the two of us and our female, then-straight-identified best friend, J, decided it would be a good idea to try to form a three-way relationship. We tried very sincerely but couldn’t make it work; J and I kept trying to make out but, despite mutual desire, couldn’t bring ourselves too. (We’re all fifteen at this point.) Anyway, a few weeks later, S the ex-boyfriend comes out to me as gay: I was the first person he told, and our would-be girlfriend was the second. Fast-forward about six months and another boyfriend: I come out as a lesbian to J — she’s the very first person I tell — and then call S, making him the second. Fast-forward another year and a half; J and I start kissing and holding hands and eventually sleeping together, at which point she (belatedly…) realizes she’s bi, telling me first, of course, and then, for tradition’s sake, calling S to tell him second. So it’s a perfect, three-way circle of coming out!

I really like that story.

What is problematic is the massive culture conceptualization of monogamy, which, in my estimation, goes way beyond how many people one is sleeping with. It is, rather, the cultural construction of love itself, which seems to amount to the idea that each person should get (and give) all her love from (and to) just one person. It is the idea that we should have all our emotional needs met by a sole other person, and meet 100% of that person’s needs in turn. It’s the idea that adults should have only one really important adult relationship — that the (sole) person one is sleeping with should become the single most important person in one’s life, that one’s spouse should exist on this sacred plane of total devotion, while our friendships should be basically casual, basically unimportant, or, at best, less important.

I think this causes a lot of heartbreak, both in the form of the strange disappointment of discovering that one’s lover is not, as one had been taught to expect, a perfect carbon copy of oneself, but a complex human being, and in the form of the loneliness, anxiety and frustration of trying to get all one’s emotional needs met by one person and trying to singlehandedly meet all of another person’s needs. And I seriously think that many of our common ailments are the result of the pervasive lack of strong social support systems, the grievous lack of real community. So it’s a doomed mission and we would do well to abandon it, whether we practice sexual monogamy or any of the various forms of polyamory.

(By the way, I first put this idea into words in a comment over at Dave Pollard’s excellent blog How To Save The World some months ago, on this post. This post is largely an elaboration of what I said there.)

So, I don’t know how many sex partners humans are supposed to have — I suspect it varies widely, and I also suspect that that’s not really the point, in terms of what I’m talking about here.

Some people are much happier with polyamorous relationships, and that’s great; others do best with monogamy, and, as I said earlier, that’s great, too. I’m very glad for everyone who’s found what makes her happy. Those are important issues. They’re also, I think, personal issues. I don’t think it’s a matter for political consideration, really, how many sex partners each person has, beyond the obvious statement that we should respect and recognize each person’s choices.* What is a social and political issue, though, is how many people each of us loves — or, more to the point, how many people we are permitted to love, and what love means in our society.

That is the problem with monogamy: that we are expected to love only one person. Family relationships are recognized, but they’re also marginalized — we’re expected to see our parents, siblings, still-living grandparents and grown children only a few times a year (and what of our aunts, uncles, cousins?); they’re not set up as vital relationships in our daily lives.

What a bereft existence! I think it’s absolutely clear that no one is meant to love and be loved by just one person, and that we slowly kill ourselves when try to make this happen. No one can meet all of another person’s needs, and there is no reason to expect anyone to do so. People are complicated, multifaceted creatures; those of us who are waiting for someone who is totally compatible with every facet of our being are going to be waiting a long, long time.

A much better solution is to encourage everyone to have many important relationships (and again, this has no bearing on one’s sex life) — diverse, fulfilling, important relationships with many people, so that some parts of oneself get exercised and appreciated with some people, and other parts with other people. This both assures that our various needs actually get met, and takes the pressure off of other relationships — I suspect it’s much easier to forge a good romantic partnership, for example, if you’re not expecting your partner to be perfect or trying make the relationship as big as your whole life.

Having major relationships is, of course, work. It can be hard work. It is also some of the most fulfilling work a person can do. It is worth it. And the natural outcropping of this, when we do it daily — when we form many diverse loving relationships, as many as will grow, and treat their maintenance as important work — is community.

*And beyond discussions of legal arrangements and recognition, but that’s a whole other thing.

Also, if you are reading this as a gender-conforming person, and you think I’m making no sense, please consider that some parts of the gender system may not be apparent to you, in the same way that white people (like myself) sometimes say, in sincere but nonetheless damaging ignorance, that they “don’t see color.”

Introduction

Since I started getting heavily involved in feminism, I’ve had many different takes on gender and sexism. I’ve felt, at different times and to varying degrees, that gender itself is the problem — that this whole business of differentiating between men and women, between femininity and masculinity, is, at best, unnecessary, and at worst, catastrophically damaging. I no longer feel this way. While sexism and oppression are poisons to human happiness, I’ve come to see gender as a critically important part of identity and culture.

I do not know anyone to whom her gender is not a significant, meaningful part of how she sees herself. What that gender is varies widely, from masculine men and feminine women, to masculine women and feminine men, to something in between, to something that changes, to something outside of that, and more. Regardless of what someone’s gender identity is, regardless of whether it conforms to the dominant culture or not, people seem to strongly identify with their own. Gender is a very significant part of most of our senses of self — even those of us who are feminists or otherwise anti-sexism, and/or who don’t fit well into the gender system.

If you’ve ever had someone misread your gender, you probably have a very strong sense of what I’m talking about here. I’m a lesbian, the kind people can spot, and, as a I recently explained here (and do read that post; it’s very much relevant to this one), I sometimes feel like I’m lost in a quagmire between typical feminine presentation and identity and butch presentation and identity. I’m not butch, but I often don’t feel like a “real” girl, and I’ve sometimes had people tell me as much. I’m very happy being female and being read as female, but my queer identity is also very important to me. This ambiguity makes for a lot of misreading, which seems to scatter about equally between people misreading me as butch and people misreading me as straight and/or (for lack of a better word) femme. (Apologies for conflating gender and sexual orientation… They are, of course, often intertwined.) When this happens, in either direction, my heart sinks: I feel like I’ve failed at gender presentation. If it happens intensely, I start to feel sick, and start experiencing something like dysphoria. I get dizzy and nauseated, and begin to panic, losing my grip on my sense of self. “Who am I? Where am I?”

It’s an awful, awful feeling to have someone misunderstand your gender. So, I think that people all over and outside of the gender spectrum need cultural acknowledgment of their genders — not just tolerance, but recognition and affirmation. With this in mind, it is my sense that we can make a bigger, better impact on sexism and gender-based oppression by proactively creating more options, more gender designations, and working to make those accepted, than we can by only trying to tear down gender as it currently exists. A truly just gender culture is not a culture without gender, but a culture with respectful and non-coercive gender.

So, what would a just gender culture look like? What would it mean to have gender without gender oppression?

A Just Gender Culture Has More Than Two Boxes

Thanks to generations of work by feminists, womanists, and queer rights activists of every stripe, gender has opened greatly here in the US and in many other places. At a fundamental level, though, I think that our society still largely assumes that everyone does (or should) fit into two very narrow categories: male-assigned at birth/man/masculine/attracted to women (the culture conflates all these things) and female assigned at birth/woman/feminine/attracted to men. (Male-assigned at birth = MAAB; female-assigned at birth = FAAB). People get punished for any variance from those categories.

We are starting to have some real room for a few more options, for example, MAAB/man/masculine/attracted to men, FAAB/woman/masculine/attracted to women, and FAAB/woman/feminine/attracted to men and women — that is, for non-heterosexual people, whose gender may or may not deviate from the two categories above. We’re also starting to have room for transsexual people, for example, MAAB/woman/feminine/attracted to men.

One commonality between these alternative gender packages, which are slowly gaining varying degrees of social acceptance, is that they have one, maybe two deviations from the starting categories. I’d like to see social space for every possible combination, and for combinations that can’t be rendered in that simplifying framework. I think a lot of people — me for one — would find themselves writing “in between,” “both,” or “neither” for one or more of those fields, which is a sign that that tool is inadequate.

A just gender culture would need an absolute minimum of five categories: masculine man, masculine woman, feminine man, feminine woman, and people who don’t identify as women or men, with sexual orientation completely divorced from those categories (so, for example, it would seem normal for a feminine man to be hetero-, homo- or bisexual), and with broad respect for trans people (so, for example, a trans man would be as accepted as a man as a cis man). Some other very important categories would be ones for people who don’t identify as women or men but who are feminine or masculine, and for women and men who are genderqueer, gender neutral, in between, or something else.

I should say at this point that I think “masculine” and “feminine” are basically subjective, cultural things. I do think humans probably want/need to have some sense of “masculinity” and “femininity” (since most people feel like either women or men, and as I said earlier, feel that that is an important and meaningful part of their identity), but I think there’s a big range in terms of what a given culture codes as one or the other. The existence of some observable differences between women and men (that are probably biological in origin) at the large scale doesn’t negate this. (And, about that, I should say that, obviously, the fact that women are X% more likely to display trait Y is totally meaningless when you’re dealing with an individual woman who doesn’t display Y; that’s why we need more gender categories.)

What I’m talking about is divorcing all those things the culture conflates — sex assigned at birth with gender identity with gender presentation with sexual orientation — so that people can recombine them in whatever way fits. I’d also like to see all those categories nuanced and broadened, and the option to leave out axes and/or add new ones. I do think it would work best to have boxes — that is, understood roles, the kind that get their own noun, for people to select and reject. This is because of what I said earlier about people needing more than tolerance; gender is so important that people need outright affirmation. I mentioned earlier the experience of having one’s gender misunderstood or undermined — having one’s gender actively comprehended and embraced is a really powerful experience, too. As someone who’s gender is often misconstrued, it is not an exaggeration to say that some of the happiest moments of my life are those in which I felt my community and my peers really saw, understood, and accepted my gender. It makes me really sad to think about how rare those moments are, and about how much rarer they are for many other people.

A Just Gender Culture Is Non-Hierarchical

Another critically important piece is, of course, that all genders are valued equally. A just gender culture doesn’t connect gender to power or to inherent worth as a human; a just gender culture respects and values all permutations of gender and all sexualities.* This means that women and men are respected equally, and so are people who don’t fit into either of those groups. It means that the identities of trans people are considered just as valid as the identities of cissexual people.

Creating more boxes — more gender designations — is useless if they’re not respectful. So the work of combatting sexism, misogyny, misandry,** heterosexism and transphobia is equally important. And there is, of course, a lot of badly needed reform of the gender categories we already have.

A Just Gender Culture Is Meaningful Without Being Sexist

This is, by far, the trickiest item. Obviously, there needs to be a cultural sense of what “masculine” and “feminine” mean in order for gender to play its role as an important part of identity — that is, gender has to be meaningful. But, in order to be just, it also can’t be overly narrow or constricting, nor can it be unfair — it wouldn’t be just, obviously, if femininity were defined as “goodness” and masculinity as “evilness.” It would be unjust to define one as “strength” across the board, and the other as “weakness,” or to have one signify righteousness and the other sin.

I think this part of the equation is one to be undertaken at the smallest scale, as we each ponder what it means for us personally to feel feminine or masculine, to be whatever gender we are, to inhabit the identity we do. If we do this with an eye toward fairness and compassion, and with a resolute rejection of misogyny, misandry, and all gender oppression, I’m sure we will develop many beautiful ways of being who we are. And in conversations with our communities, we can compare ideas and experiences, validate and acknowledge one another, and build alternatives within our own (sub-)cultures.

This is, of course, something that many queer people are already doing and have been doing for a long a time. I strongly believe, though, that it’s an important task for all of us to undertake. Whether we feel comfortable in the dominant gender system or not (and I think we all feel both comfortable and uneasy in some ways), it’s an incredibly damaging system. People suffer and suffocate in here. People do terrible violence to themselves and others. We all have a stake in this. A lot of real change could come as a result of straight, gender-conforming cissexual folks seriously thinking about what gender means to them, embracing the parts that work and rejecting those that don’t, and, perhaps most important having the conversation — participating in the dialogue about the ways in which our gender system fails and succeeds, and in the process of imagining new possibilities.

Conclusion

Finally, in order to have a healthy gender ecosystem, we need rich, thriving gender biodiviersity.

These ideas are new for me (though certainly not for everyone); I’m still at the phase of exploring and figuring things out, so I hope that you — my fellow fighters against gender oppression — will join me in testing these waters. I’d love to hear other takes on what a just gender culture would look like, and what gender means to you.

* Referring, of course, only to sexualities that involve consensual acts between adults.

** A note about my use of the word misandry: unlike some other folks, I do think misandry very much exists in our culture. However, I hope it’s clear that I, as a hairy-legged dyke, don’t buy into the “man hating feminist” trope; there are some misandrist feminist out there (feminists are people, too — people raised in a sexist culture), but the vast majority of man-hating comes from the dominant culture and gender traditionalists.