Responding to Comments

Last week (God, was that really last week? How time flies), I wrote an article about Facebook reinforcing gender binarism. It got an unusually large number of hits for a CP article, as it was linked, to my pleasant surprise, at Bilerico, Feministing, and Queerty. But all that traffic meant that I got a lot of critical comments on the article, and this was really my first experience dealing with the humbling, no-holds-barred experience of anonymous people on the Internet telling you frankly what they think about something you’ve worked hard at. At my editor’s urging, yesterday I wrote a response to the 20 comments on the article itself, and it took me nearly two hours to write these four or so paragraphs. I don’t usually have that much difficulty writing something like this, but since I spent so much time on it yesterday I thought I might as well repost that comment here:

Hi all,

Thanks very much for offering your thoughts! As the author of this article, I wanted to respond in a general fashion to some of the issues you raised in your comments.

Firstly, it seems as if there’s a prevailing sentiment that Facebook and its attitudes toward gender identity are not as important as some issues that Campus Progress could be covering. While I can certainly see that Facebook seems trivial, I decided to write about it because this issue is a good example of how gender is represented in our culture—that is, binarily, in a way that conflates it with the differing concept of biological sex. Facebook is also overwhelmingly populated by users under the age of 30—the group that is meant to be more progressive than ever before on social issues such as same-sex marriage, and yet is perhaps less aware of the more theoretical and perhaps less political aspects of gender identity and our culture’s often-gender-essentialist nature. My belief is that, while this issue may not have as convenient a political application as something like same-sex marriage, it is no less essential to understand. Moreover, this article hasn’t caused Campus Progress to lessen its coverage of issues such as health care and the environment—we continue to address a wide variety of issues important to young progressives.

To those who believe I misleadingly conflated sex and gender: if my writing was anything less than clear, I apologize. I am well aware of the distinction between those two concepts and it wasn’t my intention to confuse them. However, the problem, as commenter JD helpfully pointed out, is that Facebook is conflating sex and gender, which can lead to some very confusing language and difficulty in rendering Facebook’s own definitions in terms of modern gender theory rhetoric. I do certainly grant that I could have tried harder to lessen the confusion, though.

And to those who believe that this issue is a non-issue because Facebook users are not obligated to list a sex, or who believe that it could be easily solved by adding an “intersex” or “both” or “neither” option: it’s not as simple as that. Just as sexual orientation is often conceived of in broader terms than “straight/gay/bisexual,” gender identity has as many gradations as there are people. While this article was more intended to raise awareness of how websites like Facebook implement a binary understanding of gender than to hand Facebook a policy proposal, I believe it would be best to have either a fill-in field or no field at all. The most progressive way to treat people is to allow them to define themselves, rather than attempting to choose their labels for them.

I understand that the way I addressed identity and its social constructions in this article may seem reductive to people more familiar with august writers who advance more complex academic theories of gender. I was writing with the knowledge that Campus Progress is not a publication dedicated to queer issues, and so its readers may very well be new to thinking about gender in an abstract way—as, perhaps, some of these comments indicate. I had hoped that the words and experiences of the people I interviewed for this article might have helped deal with this problem of writing to a variety of levels of familiarity—but if they didn’t, I’m happy to self-promote the personal essay I wrote last February which gave me the idea for this article, and which deals with more theoretical issues. (It’s posted on my personal website here.)

If you’re interested in discussing this any further, feel free to contact me.

Emily Rutherford
Editorial Intern and Staff Writer
CampusProgress.org

QOTD (2009-06-16)

From a post at The Bilerico Project:

In just the past two days, our nation’s capital has went from RuPaul, Martha Wash and Capital Pride to a smackdown on LGBTQ issues. From the D.C. Board of Elections just saying NO to a proposed voter referendum suspending recognition of same-sex marriages performed elsewhere to the allegations that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he does not have ANY senator willing to sponsor the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – this town is hitting the ceiling on the perceived betrayal of the Democratically-controlled executive and legislative branches of government.

And I’ve been right here in the middle of it, covering Pride and starting some research on DOMA for Campus Progress, reading all the blogs, spending day after day right in the middle of the discussions over LGBT rights that are going down in this town. I know that my schedule next week is going to put me even more in the middle of things. And it’s so bizarre to think that I actually am doing what I read about. In however small and insignificant a capacity, I work in Washington, covering the things I know and am passionate about.

I keep apologizing to my editor for covering too much LGBT stuff, keep promising her I’ll branch out. But at the same time, I like being able to be an expert on something, and I like staying in the middle of things. DC Pride was one of the coolest events I’ve ever attended, and I’m glad that it feeds back into my work and that my work in turn feeds into the most up-to-date conversations about important public issues that matter to me. I’m a very, very lucky person indeed.

(For frivolity’s sake, here’s a picture of RuPaul from Pride):
RuPaul

Dissent of the Day

(My apologies, first off, for not covering the truly most important story of the weekend—the Iran elections. I can’t top the coverage of real bloggers, though, so I might as well talk about things where I can make a legitimate contribution to the discourse.)

That said: at Bilerico, Monica Roberts writes:

Since today is Flag Day, starting like yesterday, the TBLG community should make sure Old Glory is front and center at every protest, every march, and the backdrop at every press conference that’s held from now until the next electoral showdown in 2010 and beyond.

One factor as to why the GLBT community continues to lose is that it hasn’t forcefully made the unassailable case that we are AMERICANS who deserve and are demanding our constitutional rights.

And how do we do that? The easiest way to prove that we are is by flying the flag.

[…]

Face the facts that no American civil rights movement agitating for the constitutional rights of a minority group has been successful or done so without consistently flying and prominently displaying the American flag at its myriad events.

[…]

Failing to fly it makes the rights case a non starter with persuadable people who do believe in mom, apple pie, fairness, the American Dream and tear up when they hear the Star Spangled Banner.

And if you won’t do it for yourselves, do it for the TBLG veterans who served and the GLBT service members who died defending it on foreign soil so you can use it.

I’m going to have to respectfully disagree on this one. I am as patriotic as the next person, and I wouldn’t be devoting so much of my time and energy to writing and thinking about LGBT rights if I didn’t believe in fighting for American constitutional principles such as equality under the law. However, my experience with the Stars and Stripes is, I sense, a very different one from Roberts’: as someone from a younger generation whose first real political memory was the outpouring of empty gestures of patriotism in the wake of September 11, I am cynical about the use of the flag to make a “we are all Americans” point to folks who might not otherwise be on board with LGBT rights. My experience with the flag in middle and high school in a predominantly conservative neighborhood is that it was used to shame me and mock me, to call me un-American because I did not reflexively display it or engage in other apparently patriotic gestures. To me, the American flag represents little—and I don’t believe that makes me any less American or any less a patriot; I don’t believe that it means I have any less support for the men and women in the armed forces or that I believe any less in the ideals of freedom and equality. It just means that, to me, the flag does not represent those ideals.

I’m not any more enthusiastic about the rainbow flag; I’m really just not a flag-waving kind of gal. But I suspect I’m not the only person out there for whom the American flag represents something more exclusionary than inclusionary, and for whom singing all the verses of “This Land Is Your Land” is a more meaningful patriotic gesture than displaying the American flag. Of course, one of those great American ideals I’m going on about is the freedom of expression, and I wouldn’t dream for an instant to suggest that Ms. Roberts, if she is so inclined, should not bring an American flag to any rallies, demonstrations, or celebrations she attends. But I also bristle at the suggestion that all of us should be doing the same, because for me (and granted, this is a very personal reaction) the last thing that I want to do is to brandish a piece of cloth because it means something to someone else that it does not mean to me.