In the theme I appear to have been developing recently of “Let’s take something I read on the intertubes and use it as an excuse to have an entirely different conversation,” Bilerico pointed out a statistic that, sadly, does not surprise me at all: “While women make up 14 percent of Army personnel, 46% of those discharged under DADT in 2007 were women.”

The saga of Caster Semenya tells us that women who do not behave in “womanly” ways—e.g. by displaying leadership, athletic prowess, skill in combat, fearlessness, or being good at things—wind up having their femininity and their sexuality questioned. In a world that frequently equates gender identity and expression with sex and/or sexual orientation, that questioning could take the form of suspicion about sexual orientation (and subsequently being fired for it), or suspicion about sex and gender (and subsequently having your name, reputation, and career dragged through the mud for it).

I don’t know whether our society will ever come to adopt a model of gender that doesn’t depend on two essentialist categories that have associated with them not only additional expectations with regard to sexual orientation and behavior, but also the notion that one essentialist category represents a higher moral good than the other. It seems impossible that Western society (and many of the societies by which it’s been more recently influenced), which has operated on this model for so long, should change now. But until and unless it does, our headlines will be wracked with these kinds of accusations. Caster Semenya is not really a woman! That Army officer is not really a woman!—but for entirely different reasons that have more to do with how our culture views sexual orientation than with how it views sex. The problem, though, is that over the past few decades it’s proven remarkably difficult to unravel the public’s perceptions of gender and sexuality and all these other forms of identification from one very muddled-up ball of yarn.

For the sake of being able to say “I told you so,” I predicted that Semenya’s battery of tests would result in an intersex diagnosis from the start. But whatever that may mean for Semenya and her sense of identity, identifying as a “girl” or a “woman” is her sole right, something completely apart from whichever internal organs she may or may not have. So is it anyone’s right to identify themselves with whatever sexual orientation labels they wish—only you know who you are. No one else should be able to make that decision for you.

That decision becomes a non-decision when it means being faced with exile from a community of international athletics predicated on a rigid gender binary. And as readers of this blog should well know, it becomes a non-decision when, particularly if you serve in the U.S. armed forces, your career and family life may depend on what you say or what you allow other people to say about you.

Can we force our culture to grant us the right to call ourselves what we please—or, more radical yet, to call ourselves nothing at all?

(cross-posted)

I did very little conventional work on the California No on 8 campaign last year. It was partly that I was in New Jersey for most of the campaign season and so it was difficult to do any volunteer work that involved a physical presence, but I was also, I must confess, lazy and complacent. I didn’t think it was worth donating to the campaign, I thought Prop. 8 would probably fail, and I also didn’t (and still don’t) believe marriage to be the most important LGBT issue worth fighting for. But when Prop. 8 passed, I felt pretty damn guilty. There’s no question I should have done more, that outreach to my Facebook friends wasn’t enough. The one-on-one conversations are a great tactic (if you haven’t talked to your friends and family about LGBT rights, get the hell on that!), but they still need to be coupled with traditional methods of political action for political campaigns to succeed.

And so I won’t be making that mistake again. I’ve decided to make a small donation—what I can afford—to the Maine No on 1 campaign, which is in a similar position to that of California’s No on 8 a year ago. I doubt that what I can afford to give will make a great deal of difference to what Stand for Marriage Maine is able to achieve, but it’s a symbolic gesture, and a wedge I can use when I encourage other people to take action, to volunteer or to donate what time or money they have.

But I also don’t want to get too sidetracked by distant battles: in New Jersey sometime between November (the gubernatorial election) and January (when the winner will be sworn in), marriage equality is going to come to a vote in the state legislature. Gov. Corzine has said that he will sign a bill—now the legislature needs to pass it. And you can bet I’ll be calling and writing my representatives; you can bet I’ll be doing what I can from my position on campus to support getting that vote through the legislature—and if it involves fighting NOM, so much the better! I know we can win.

I still have a lot of regret that marriage became the flashpoint issue for LGBT equality in this country, and that the culture war battle has come to center on assimilation, not something more radical. If there was going to be a fight anyway, I wish my predecessors had decided to go for broke. But they didn’t, and we have these state-by-state marriage battles now. That means we’ve got to work with what we’ve got. We’ve got to engage this issue head-on. We’ve got to use marriage as a jumping-off point to teach acceptance of all people, all relationships, all families, all children, all kinds of love. We’ve got to take advantage of this conversation, and from there move on to safe schools, hate crimes, employment discrimination, tax code, immigration, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and oh my god so many other things. When we let measures like Prop. 8 or Maine’s Measure 1 pass, we’re robbing ourselves of the ability to control those conversations about everything else. Even if some of us are not so crazy about the whole marriage thing, it’s a symbol to a large percentage of this country of something very meaningful. And if it will help get things done, I’m okay with rolling with that.

I’m so totally primed for battle. Let’s do this shit.

The LGBT blogosphere is so used to calling out homophobia and transphobia that it can often seem a bit knee-jerk and hysterical, but to my mind, last Friday’s outburst over a Washington Post profile of National Organization for Marriage executive director Brian Brown was entirely justified. As I said in a response at Campus Progress:

What is most disappointing—and disturbing—about the Post’s profile of Brown is the degree to which the writer, Monica Hesse, fell hook, line, and sinker for NOM’s marketing in its entirety. Hesse positively fawns over Brown, saying that in contrast to “the people who specialize in whipping crowds into frothy frenzies, who say things like ‘Katrina was caused by the gays,’” Brown speaks to a “country [that] is not made up of people in the far wings, right or left, [but] is made up of a movable middle, reasonable people looking for reasonable arguments to assure them that their feelings have a rational basis.” Hesse seems to have missed that fighting against same-sex marriage becomes a more and more unreasonable position as the public warms to it. The idea that Brown’s cause is rational is just a tactic: it’s exactly what he and other social conservatives want the public to think.[…]

Brown believes that because Western civilization has historically not recognized same-sex marriages, they shouldn’t have a place in our modern legal system. (As Stephanie Coontz writes, what’s actually most common in Western civilization’s history of marriage is polygyny, not monogamous heterosexual marriages.) The comparison means little when you factor in differences among regions, time periods, and cultures. But Hesse rolls with this flawed understanding of the glorified tax status that is marriage in the 21st-century United States, developing in its modern form fairly recently.

The Post’s profile does not hide the fact that Brown is a devout Catholic (like many of the crusading conservatives, he converted as a young man while studying at Oxford). In doing so, it gives away the tried-and-true tactic Brown is using—placing a dummy wall between his Catholicism and his “family values,” which he tries to defend on other-than-religious grounds. The modern social conservative movement uses supposed “logic” and “reason” to advance arguments which have traditionally been presented on religious grounds. Princeton Professor Robert George, chair of NOM’s board of directors, does the same thing with his arguments, using his distinguished academic pedigree and his debate skills to distance his social conservatism from his ardent Catholic faith.

Read the rest—and I mean it; I don’t usually self-promote unless I actually like what I’ve written.

A lot of stuff was going through my head as I sorted out why I actually do feel outraged by the way the Post treated this profile of a man who is far from moderate or reasonable. It wasn’t just that Brown, who dropped out of a UCLA history PhD program, was claiming that this background gave him license to pronounce authoritatively upon the legacy of Western civilization, and I felt offended on behalf of proto-historians everywhere. It wasn’t just that I felt offended on behalf of queerfolk everywhere. It wasn’t just that I continue to feel that the existence of NOM besmirches the name of Princeton, NJ.

I read, and watched the Granada television adaptation of, Brideshead Revisited this summer, and liked it so much that I’ve had it on the brain since. I find myself coming back to it when I think about the ways in which Brown and the other NOMites either call attention to or try not to call attention to their religion—often, specifically, their Catholicism. In Brideshead, Catholicism is for the Flytes (the aristocratic family central to the plot) at times a piece of social positioning, a networking tool that means being friends with monseigneurs and curates and other English Catholics; and at times it is an intensely private and deeply-held conviction that seems irrational to those who don’t subscribe to it, but is the natural order of things for the believers. And I can’t resist reading the novel as suggesting that, whatever homosexuality meant in the English 1920s and ’30s, it’s part of what Sebastian Flyte is struggling with within his tortured guilty Catholic conscience, part of what drives him away from his family and which propels his uneasy relationship with his religion.

In Brideshead, the family’s religious beliefs are the plot wedge, but it could conceivably be something else—and in 2000s America for people like Brian Brown, being Catholic is not the same as it would have been in inter-World Wars England. For one thing, being Catholic is just not as markedly incredible here and now as it was there and then. But I am struck in both cases by how dogged trust in a faith doctrine persists, even in the face of what seems to those who don’t have that faith as the most unassailable evidence that, for example, prejudice just isn’t in anymore, whatever Leviticus or your own personal brand of non-Biblical logic may have to say about it.

Okay, yeah, the Brideshead thing was a totally tenuous connection, and I’m not quite sure why I drew it in—except to say that this kind of fervor (whether it’s religiously driven or not) remains to me, as it does to the non-Catholic characters in Brideshead, a deeply incomprehensible thing. I find myself continuing to wonder in all these cases to what extent it’s actual devotion, and to what extent it’s a cultivated social pose.

Regular readers may be aware that one of my favorite pastimes is making fun of the National Organization for Marriage—their national headquarters is across the street from the building where I eat two meals a day during the school year, and so I consider them and the hate they spread a particularly ridiculous affront to my day-to-day existence.

Maybe I should be more careful about bullying people who can’t defend themselves, though, because they just make it so easy. Take, for example, the latest: a post by Maggie Gallagher, NOM’s president, at the National Review‘s blog. Gallagher lists “Five Predictions about Gay Marriage”:

1. In gay-marriage states, a large minority people committed to traditional notions of marriage will feel afraid to speak up for their views, lest they be punished in some way.
2. Public schools will teach about gay marriage.
3. Parents in public schools who object to gay marriage being taught to their children will be told with increasing public firmness that they don’t belong in public schools and their views will not be accomodated [sic] in any way.
4. Religous [sic] institutions will face new legal threats (especially soft litigation threats) that will cause some to close, or modify their missions, to avoid clashing with the government’s official views of marriage (which will include the view that opponents are akin to racists for failing to see same-sex couples as married).
5. Support for the idea “the ideal for a child is a married mother and father” will decline.

I am struck by two issues here, which I think actually typify fairly accurately the discourse of the fringe right: in the first place, some of Gallagher’s points are just wrong, or at least predictions that will almost certainly not come to pass. In the second place, some of her predictions are likely to come to pass, but if they did, it would be a great thing for all concerned. I strongly doubt that points 1 and 3 will ever happen, because no one—and I mean no one treats social conservatives that way. Our society and our political framework positively bend over backwards to accommodate them and their views, no matter how much in the minority they may be or how outlandish their views. This has been the case since Reagan-Moral Majority days, and it should be pretty apparent by now that the whole persecution complex thing is nothing more than a tactic to garner sympathy. Point 4 won’t happen, because we have freedom of religion in this country, and that’s not going anywhere. I know it may come as a surprise to some radical conservatives, but believing that the Constitution is a living document does not mean disregarding it entirely. And finally, my god, I wish public schools would include acceptance of LGBT people and their families in their life skills curricula! It would have made my own public school experience just a little bit less lonely and miserable, and might have cut down on the dozens of times per day I heard someone say “That’s so gay.” I wish that our society could collectively acknowledge that children raised in all different kinds of family configurations turn out okay, and that we could encourage all kids to take pride in their parents or guardians and their families. But heaven forbid kids should feel happy or safe or included! Maggie Gallagher doesn’t want them to!

As I sit and stare at my computer every day, only to read about radical right-wingers who think health care reform is akin to the Holocaust (even I, who so rarely identify with mainstream Jewish culture, am starting to get personally offended by that one), or that it is unconstitutional, or even something as comparatively minor as to compare the proposed House bill to the British or the Canadian systems, I find myself increasingly frustrated by the radical right’s propensity for simply making things up. I watch in open-mouthed shock as some senator or governor or talk-show host just says something that anyone with the barest rudiments of political awareness knows isn’t true—and yet it works! People believe it! They go and repeat it at town hall meetings! And Gallagher is doing the same thing here, just not with health care—with another issue that has a lot of emotional resonance and which it’s easy to scare people about. People are easily scared by threats that their Medicare will be taken away or that they’ll be brought before a “death panel,” because health care reform is a type of legislation that actually affects individual ordinary Americans. And so are people easily scared by threats that their straight marriages will be somehow less valid or that their religious beliefs will be challenged, because marriage and the family are personal things pertinent to individual ordinary Americans—despite what’s actually true. And it’s a frightening thing for a would-be academic to think that, in the democratic process, reason doesn’t always win out. The truth doesn’t always win out. The louder people attract more attention, regardless of whether they have the facts on their side. People keep on listening to the Maggie Gallaghers of the world, no matter how ridiculous they sound or what a moral stain their organizations’ offices are on perfectly lovely towns like Princeton, New Jersey.

(As a postscript: I am careful how I deal with the radical right now, because I don’t want to sink to the level that the radical right has sunk to when dealing with me. (By the way, YAF redesigned their website, and so the comments on that post got lost. They’re on a cached version of the page here.) However, I think my comments here have been more than fair-minded, and have focused on ideas and politics, not anyone’s appearance or age or gender. Making fun is fine, but it should be done in a way that focuses on the substantiated actions of people and the organizations they represent. But then, what standard of conduct should I expect from a movement that invokes genocide to describe a perfectly reasonable domestic policy proposal?)

UPDATE: More Maggie Gallagher being silly on national television here.

From Human Rights’ Watch’s report on the horrible crimes committed against gay men in Iraq:

All the survivors of militia violence Human Rights Watch interviewed for this report identified themselves as “gay.” Some reflection on terminology and identity is necessary here. The use of “gay” in English to describe men who have emotional or sexual relationships with other men is relatively recent, emerging out of a North American subculture in the twentieth century. (“Homosexual” does not much predate it in European languages; the term was coined by an Austro-Hungarian doctor in 1869.)

All the survivors we interviewed told us they first heard “gay” with that purport after the US invasion in 2003. Most said it had come to Iraq through the Internet or Western media, particularly TV and films. Its use cuts across classes: a doctor and a high-school dropout each employed it in talking to us about themselves. The men integrated the English word seamlessly into Arabic speech. [emphasis mine] The recent deployment in Arabic of mithli (plural mithliyeen) as a neutral, non-condemnatory equivalent of “homosexual” in English has not taken strong root in Iraq. Most of the men, if they were familiar with it at all, said it was rare. “All of us use ‘gay’ among ourselves, never mithli,” a gay hospital employee told us. “Even doctors in speaking to each other won’t use the Arabic word for it—they’ll sometimes say ‘homosexual’ in English.”

It is vital to stress two points. First, the fact that the word comes from beyond Iraq’s borders does not point to anything imported or foreign about the phenomenon people use it to describe. To the contrary: the conduct called “homosexual”—desires, erotic acts, or emotional relationships between people of the same sex— has always existed in Iraqi society, as in all societies. A new name for it is, by itself, only a shift in vocabulary, not in values or behavior.

Yet at the same time, no one should assume that the word bears exactly the same connotations in Iraq as it does elsewhere. That homosexual conduct has happened everywhere does not mean people interpret it in the same way, or give it the same individual or collective meanings. […] Many gay Iraqis we interviewed implied that, for them, having a “gay” identity is at least as much about how “masculine” or “feminine” they see themselves as about the object of their desire. Gender—the accumulated distinctions that societies and cultures impose, to demarcate what is “proper” to men and to women—is an important axis along which they situate their self-understanding.

I posted here a passage about the construction of gay identity, because I found it interesting, and it relates directly to what I write about on this blog. However, I consider the true substance of the report, which describes the cruelty of those who have kidnapped, tortured and murdered men based on allegations and appearances, far more important than the above triviality. This report, with its graphic depictions of violence and torture and unchecked hate, is terrifying, and it gives me a sick feeling in my stomach and I am trying not to cry while I read it. I’m working on a related article for Campus Progress, so expect that later this week.

It’s important to note that this kind of violence skyrocketed after the US invasion. We as a country have so much in the past six years to answer for.