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.

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.

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.

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.