In gender outlaw and other LGBTQIA Facebook groups and internet forums, someone will occasionally ask "What songs really reached out to you and made you feel recognized and understood?"
I need to remember to nominate Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" the next time someone asks.
It may not have a giant billboard sign on it proclaiming it to be relevant to gender inversion and being genderqueer, but that's where my head went when I first heard it, and how I interpret any time I've heard it since. "If only I could", Kate sings, "I'd make a deal with God and I'd get him to swap our places". Many of my trans friends, who have often plaintively wished that the transgender women who didn't want their penises could donate them to the transgender men who did, and receive a uterus and fallopian tubes and vagina in exchange, should be able to relate.
But that's not quite how Kate came to wish for the exchange of positions, to be sure. Her angle of approach has more to do with a concern specific to sexuality of the non-same-sex variety: "It doesn't hurt me; do you want to feel how it feels? Do you want to know that it doesn't hurt me?" Not every listener seems to immediately think that the "it" she speaks of is sex, but that's totally where my head went. She's conversing with a male lover who is concerned about how this is for her. Because he doesn't know, never having been female.
My feminist women friends are ready to hoot in derision. "Men don't spend much time worrying about whether any sex practice hurts women. They think that's what we're there for. And that whatever gets done to us must be hot for us if they find it hot, whether it's the joy of gagging on a dick or being raped and choked or just the everyday joy of being objectified and catcalled to by strangers, men never try to put themselves in our position and imagine what it must be like to be us. Or if they do, they have pathetically impaired imaginations!"
But not everyone who is male of body is a man, and not all sexuality involving a male person and a female person is heterosexuality. Because heterosexuality is an institution, one that is defined by and depends on seeing the sexual partner as Other, as utterly alien, one whose feelings and thoughts can't be approached by imagining what it would be like, because, well, because It's Different For Them. Because They're Different. And reciprocally, for people whose interactions and attractions are not defined around that alienating difference, there is likely to be that fervent wish to understand, to know what it's like.
"Let's exchange the experience", Kate says. That's intimacy. It's empathy.
Our current social politics often teaches us that empathy isn't real, that it's illusory. "Don't speak for them. You aren't them and you don't know what it's like". It is entirely valid to say "You should not speak for people when they can speak for themselves, especially if they've been kept voiceless by their marginalization". I agree with that. But some go on to say "Don't think that you know what it's like. You don't. You can't. It is arrogant of you to think that you do. You aren't them". It's not a nuanced position, as stated; and if it discourages people from thinking it possible to know what it's like, it can turn away their inclination to try. To imagine, to wonder, to watch from the outside and attempt to conjure up an awareness of what it must be like from the inside.
We can't even identify as part of a group without empathy. Transgender feminist author Julia Serano acknowledges the legitimacy of the statement that some have made to her: "How do you know you are 'a woman'? How do you know that who you are is the person that women are? You've never been one, you've only been yourself!" Serano agrees that she's never been anyone but herself, but, well, that's true for the person directing the question. How does a cisgender woman know she's a woman in the sense of having an identity in common with other women? She's never been any of those other women either, how does she know what it's like to be any of them, and to claim a commonality of identity? Only by observation from the outside. Which is how Serano knows the same thing. It's how I know I'm a femme; it's how I knew I was one of the girls (despite being male) when I was in grade school. It's empathy. The power to look across the divide and bridge the gaps and recognize and relate.
"We both matter, don't we?", Kate Bush asks.
Yeah, we do.
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You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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Showing posts with label sex as insurrection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sex as insurrection. Show all posts
Monday, September 28, 2020
Sunday, October 7, 2018
Gender and Sex and Cognitive Dissonance
Do you notice this inconsistency?
People in our society so often insist that each sex has a rigid set of characteristics, and any and all efforts to make either sex more like the other is bound to fail, like trying to repeal the law of gravity. That there are two sexes and that they are different, and different in specific ways, making them opposites.
Then people expend so much effort making sure that this gets emphasized, lest anyone miss it. Encoding additional cues and clues that we're all supposed to use to make sure everyone knows what sex any given person is at all times. Pink for girls and blue for boys. Girls pushing little strollers, boys toting miniature sports equipment. Scotch-taping a little bow onto an infant girl's forehead.
I mean, after awhile it's kind of like someone insisting that something is so obvious and self-explanatory that you can't miss it, and then they keep explaining it and pointing it out and creating billboards and posters to draw your attention to it and eventually even passing laws to make it mandatory that you say that you see it, too.
After awhile it begins to dawn on you: these people don't believe what they're saying! They may wish it were so, they may want it to be so, but their actions show that they are afraid that it isn't. I mean, if you believe that night and day are so compellingly different from each other that you go around comparing other things to it ("as different as night and day"), you don't generally find it necessary to go around complaining about evil streetlights or telling children it isn't appropriate to draw a moon in the daytime sky lest people think it's night.
No, their defensive actions betray that as much as they insist that these differences are as they describe them, and inevitable, they secretly fear that if effort isn't taken to maintain things this way, it will all crumble away and there'll be no getting it back.
Once folks see that defensiveness, I think it is easier for them to understand it as an ideology. Now let's look again at some of the stuff that the ideology insists upon:
• TWO sexes — why so insistent on denying that variations exist? Because they've created a polarized situation, defining the sexes as opposite, like up versus down. It has to remain an either/or binary choice at all times to be consistent with that polarization. Intersex people are a threat.
• KNOWING — why do all the lilies have to be gilded, overemphasized and underlined? Because the systematic way of treating people different based on their sex is dependent on knowing at all times which sex a person is. Indeterminacy is a threat.
• GENDER — first time this word has appeared in this blog post, have you noticed? Gender is the assortment of traits and assumptions and meanings that get attached to the sex identification of the person. People are treated different, and their behaviors interpreted differently, according to which sex they are perceived to be. All that different-treatment stuff, that's the assignment of gender.
• INEVITABILITY — The insistence that these traits invariably attach to the corresponding sex, the insistence that they follow inevitably, hides the fact that gender isn't sex itself, it's a socially maintained set of beliefs and assumptions that we attach to sex. Screw around with any of the previous bricks that this structure is built from (that there are exactly TWO sexes, that you always KNOW which sex you're dealing with, and that the sexual differences in traits that we've all had drilled into us will be duly present) and you start to see that gendering is occurring as a verb. But when all of those illusions are successfully maintained, the inevitability of gender is maintained too. The ongoing act of gendering becomes invisible.
• SEXUAL ORIENTATION — The fear of getting sex and gender wrong gets turned into a sexual threat. Sexual appetite has been mapped onto conformity to gender. You won't be heterosexually eligible if you deviate. But that in turn makes non-heterosexual people a threat to the system. Since the system is mobilizing fear here, a threat can be useful though: something that people are given a fear of being or becoming if they don't conform.
• ENEMIES — Opposite sex, polarized sex differences, diametrically divided traits and characteristics... what is this all aimed at? Keeping in place an adversarial hostility. Sexuality tends to forge intimacies, have you noticed? But the system (let's give it a name: patriarchy) is based on inequality. Real intimacy is a threat to maintaining inequality. But if the overwhelming majority of people deal with the folks they're sexually attracted to by treating them as utterly foreign creatures that you have to treat according to rules instead of treating them the way you yourself want to be treated, and if they interact with them like enemies trying to negotiate a truce and don't really trust each other easily, intimacy is kept to a minimum despite the barrier-breaking potential of human sexuality.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
People in our society so often insist that each sex has a rigid set of characteristics, and any and all efforts to make either sex more like the other is bound to fail, like trying to repeal the law of gravity. That there are two sexes and that they are different, and different in specific ways, making them opposites.
Then people expend so much effort making sure that this gets emphasized, lest anyone miss it. Encoding additional cues and clues that we're all supposed to use to make sure everyone knows what sex any given person is at all times. Pink for girls and blue for boys. Girls pushing little strollers, boys toting miniature sports equipment. Scotch-taping a little bow onto an infant girl's forehead.
I mean, after awhile it's kind of like someone insisting that something is so obvious and self-explanatory that you can't miss it, and then they keep explaining it and pointing it out and creating billboards and posters to draw your attention to it and eventually even passing laws to make it mandatory that you say that you see it, too.
After awhile it begins to dawn on you: these people don't believe what they're saying! They may wish it were so, they may want it to be so, but their actions show that they are afraid that it isn't. I mean, if you believe that night and day are so compellingly different from each other that you go around comparing other things to it ("as different as night and day"), you don't generally find it necessary to go around complaining about evil streetlights or telling children it isn't appropriate to draw a moon in the daytime sky lest people think it's night.
No, their defensive actions betray that as much as they insist that these differences are as they describe them, and inevitable, they secretly fear that if effort isn't taken to maintain things this way, it will all crumble away and there'll be no getting it back.
Once folks see that defensiveness, I think it is easier for them to understand it as an ideology. Now let's look again at some of the stuff that the ideology insists upon:
• TWO sexes — why so insistent on denying that variations exist? Because they've created a polarized situation, defining the sexes as opposite, like up versus down. It has to remain an either/or binary choice at all times to be consistent with that polarization. Intersex people are a threat.
• KNOWING — why do all the lilies have to be gilded, overemphasized and underlined? Because the systematic way of treating people different based on their sex is dependent on knowing at all times which sex a person is. Indeterminacy is a threat.
• GENDER — first time this word has appeared in this blog post, have you noticed? Gender is the assortment of traits and assumptions and meanings that get attached to the sex identification of the person. People are treated different, and their behaviors interpreted differently, according to which sex they are perceived to be. All that different-treatment stuff, that's the assignment of gender.
• INEVITABILITY — The insistence that these traits invariably attach to the corresponding sex, the insistence that they follow inevitably, hides the fact that gender isn't sex itself, it's a socially maintained set of beliefs and assumptions that we attach to sex. Screw around with any of the previous bricks that this structure is built from (that there are exactly TWO sexes, that you always KNOW which sex you're dealing with, and that the sexual differences in traits that we've all had drilled into us will be duly present) and you start to see that gendering is occurring as a verb. But when all of those illusions are successfully maintained, the inevitability of gender is maintained too. The ongoing act of gendering becomes invisible.
• SEXUAL ORIENTATION — The fear of getting sex and gender wrong gets turned into a sexual threat. Sexual appetite has been mapped onto conformity to gender. You won't be heterosexually eligible if you deviate. But that in turn makes non-heterosexual people a threat to the system. Since the system is mobilizing fear here, a threat can be useful though: something that people are given a fear of being or becoming if they don't conform.
• ENEMIES — Opposite sex, polarized sex differences, diametrically divided traits and characteristics... what is this all aimed at? Keeping in place an adversarial hostility. Sexuality tends to forge intimacies, have you noticed? But the system (let's give it a name: patriarchy) is based on inequality. Real intimacy is a threat to maintaining inequality. But if the overwhelming majority of people deal with the folks they're sexually attracted to by treating them as utterly foreign creatures that you have to treat according to rules instead of treating them the way you yourself want to be treated, and if they interact with them like enemies trying to negotiate a truce and don't really trust each other easily, intimacy is kept to a minimum despite the barrier-breaking potential of human sexuality.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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