Barack Obama is a very intelligent man.  Which is why his invitation of Rick Warren is such a confusing move.  Its his latest fuck you note pinned to the hope that swept him into office  (Jesus’ General has a short and brilliant synopsis).  It would also appear to be a fundamentally naive misunderstanding of what Rick Warren represents.  Rick Warren is an ultra conservative Christian who is actively working to put a mainstream spin on fundamentalist ideas.  As Lindsey Beyerstein notes:

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…

Read More…

Posted under News, Politics, Religion, Sexuality

I apologize for my lack of a post last week — I was visiting Emily in New York, and the disruption of all my usual routines caused me to forget many of my responsibilities. This week, I’m right in the middle of my finals, strapped both for time and for brainpower. Nonetheless, I have prepared short rumination for you.

I’m thinking today of the mythical Amazons. I say “mythical” not to make any statement about their actuality, but because I’m thinking specifically of the mythology. That is, what does this mythic idea mean?

The idea is of a woman warrior, but she’s more than that. She is a person who occupies the space between sexes. She cuts off one breast, the better to shoot arrows, but leaves the other: a combatant who can nurse children. All her life is dimorphic. Women are her friends and comrades, men her enemies; her daughters are treasured children, her sons left out to die.

I am being somewhat ahistorical here. I’m interpreting this idea from my vantage point as a 21st century dyke, wondering what the symbol means today — I find its simple endurance as an idea noteworthy — and, to a lesser (and less informed) extent, what it might have meant once, what purpose this idea serves.

So. The Amazon is, I think, the visceral reaction to the gendering of violence. We code violence as male and tenderness as female and, therefore, men as dangerous and women as nurturing. Trapped in such a system, people respond in many ways — most frequently by performing these roles and behaving as if they are natural and inevitable. But I don’t think of any of us is truly comfortable with this incredibly reductive picture of human nature. The life of the Amazon is a life of both protest against this system and capitulation to it: a rejection of the system on the system’s own terms. The Amazon is following an older, crueler Golden Rule — treat others as they treat you. In a world where men, and only men, are brutal, and women, and only women, are kind,* the Amazon, in an imperfect stand against cruelty, becomes callous to men and considerate to women.

This is a profound assent to the premises of the gender system — she accepts that women are one way and men another. But it also, inevitably, gets her kicked out of that same institution. As soon as she practices both violence and tenderness, even in her sexist way, she is no longer qualified for membership in the group “woman.” This contradiction embodies the essence of life under this regime: we are trapped and re-trapped in the system even as we are constantly kicked out of it, constantly deemed unworthy of our assigned class. And that’s the real cruelty of it.

Even in exile there is no escape.

* This is not the real world. It is the world the gender system tells us we live in, though.

Cross-posted at Our Descent Into Madness.

Posted under Culture

The other day, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry and got rid of their civil union law. This makes Connecticut the third state to legalize same-sex marriages. However, this ruling is slightly different than the previous two states’ (California and Massachusetts) in that it not only legalized gay marriage but also declared that civil unions violate the equal protection clause of their state constitution.

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.

Posted under Politics, Sexuality

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.

Posted under Discussion Question, Sexuality

As a foreword, to make sure folks know where I’m coming from here: I’m a steadfast feminist and have been for many years. I consider it self-evident that the gender system is complex, cutting in multiple directions and intersecting with racism, classism, ablism, heterosexism, and other oppressions. I think it’s clear that the gender system is one of male dominance; I think it’s equally clear that men, like women, are profoundly damaged by it, that this arrangement is good for no one (that is to say, that we would all be much better off with open, egalitarian gender).

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? Read More…

Posted under Culture, Sexuality