blogcutter

One event I didn't mention in my last entry, on things that happened 50 years ago, is the Stonewall riots, which most people in the LGBTQ(etc) community regard as a kind of historical turning point. But given the impact such events have had on my life, I think it merits a blog post (or possibly a dozen or a few hundred) of its own.

I walked into Prospero books the other day and there between the two sets of doors was a display of all kinds of books devoted to gender, sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. I walked into the public library the other day and immediately found two books I wanted to borrow from the newly-received non-fiction display area. One was by the father of a young Ottawa-based transman who died much too soon (in his early twenties?); the other was entitled the Trans Partner Handbook.

It's been said that the attitude towards trans-people today is roughly the same as the attitude towards gays was 20 or 30 years ago. Personally I'm starting to find the idea of transsexualism decidedly staid and conservative when I hear of the proliferation of newer categories like non-binary, gender-fluid and so on. I mean, at least if you consistently maintain that the gender you were assigned at birth is the opposite of what you've always felt you were, that can (sort of) be fixed or alleviated. But supposing you feel female today and male next Thursday and two-spirited when the moon is full and none of the above a couple of months from now? I don't think too many people would argue that our publicly funded health care system should underwrite M-to-F surgery now and then reverse it in a few weeks time, especially when the rest of us are waiting months, sometimes longer, for relatively routine procedures like cataract surgery or knee replacements.

I don't mean to be overly flippant about a condition (or group of conditions) that clearly causes some people some significant psychic pain and distress. Gay marriage? No problem! Changing your name and gender marker on important official documents? Go for it! Should gender-variant people be protected from discrimination in the labour market, in renting or buying housing, in going about their day-to-day business? Absolutely! But, well, few things in life are totally black or white or pink or blue. There are a lot of grey areas and purple areas that we still need to talk out and sort through.

Anyway. What I'm thinking is that the challenges faced by family and friends of transgendered folk are only now (or certainly over the past five to ten years) really being recognized by society at large. I learned a new term the other day - SOFFAs. It's an acronym for Significant Others, Family, Friends and Allies. The book I got it from is called Trans-kin: A Guide for Family & Friends of Transgender People, edited by Eleanor A. Hubbard and Cameron T. Whitley. It's just one of four books I bought recently on that subject. The others are:

Airton, Lee. Gender: Your Guide; a gender-friendly primer on what to know, what to say, and what to do in the new gender culture. Simon & Schuster, 2019. (The author is a professor at Queen's University in Kingston)

Collier, Kristin K. Housewife: Home-remaking in a Transgender Marriage. Abbondanza, 2016.

Johnson & Garrison (eds.) Love Always: Partners of Trans People on Intimacy, Challenge and Resilience
Transgress Press, 2015.

I'm still working my way through them, but they look quite promising so far.

So we learned this week that yet another family member has decided to cross the floor, gender-wise.

She'll no doubt have a somewhat rocky road ahead of her, though perhaps not as rocky as the road was twenty-five or thirty years ago! And she's a free agent in that she has no spouse or children who could get caught in the crossfire.

All of which leaves me wondering whether there is any kind of a genetic or biological or hereditary nature to this business. Is it nature or nurture or a combination of both? Or is it just a social trend of some sort, an extension of the unisex and androgyny trends (fads?) of the sixties and seventies?

People (especially the younger generations) seem relatively blasé about gay or bisexual preferences these days and a number of people have commented on how gender fluidity is at the stage sexual orientation was at just a generation ago.

Meanwhile, I welcome her to the sisterhood.

And gender! And while we're at it, let's tackle orientation, identity and expression.

All of the above have been much in the news lately. To some extent I'm on board. Same sex marriage? Absolutely! Revamp the schools' sex-ed curriculum? Definitely a step in the right direction. Equal legal rights for the gay and trans populations? Bring it on!

But in other respects, I find myself at odds with the received "wisdom". I worry that we are still promoting just as many myths and half-truths about sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression as we did several decades ago - it's just that those myths and half-truths are different ones. And sometimes it seems that we are so concerned about protecting the rights and comforts of minority groups that we ride roughshod over those of the majority - and ironically end up satisfying neither.

I still remember when the newspaper classified ads had a column labeled "Help wanted: Male" and another one labeled "Help wanted: Female". I remember when bars had a "Gentlemen" entrance and a "Ladies and Escorts" entrance. And while I don't want to go back to those days, I'm a firm believer in sex-specific spaces for certain purposes and activities, or indeed as one option for just about ANY purpose or activity where members of the community see a need for it.

For example: I was glad that Girl Guides decided to remain female-only. I think it's vitally important for girls to have access to strong positive female role models. That's true when they're very young - the Sparks and Brownies - but also as they get older, going through Guides, Pathfinders, junior or senior leaders, whatever the steps are. Because although adolescent girls are hopefully aware that yes, women can be engineers and plumbers and surgeons just as men can, I still see a value for having spaces in which girls and young women can interact and share their innermost thoughts and aspirations, without worrying about what the boys or the men may think or do. What about Scouts becoming coeducational? I don't know. It seems to me that there's a value in having some of the groups remain all-male for those who prefer that option.

Some Women's Centres admit men, at least some of the time; others don't. In the mid-1970s, the Ottawa Women's Centre on Somerset Street did not. I thoroughly enjoyed attending their programs, particularly the Consciousness-Raising group. Frankly it would have been a far different and less positive experience if men had been allowed as participants or observers. By the 1980s (or maybe long before that), men were forming their own groups, doing drumming circles or whatever - and that's always been fine with me. And for reasons which to me (and I suspect most men) are obvious, places like battered women's shelters have always been circumspect about their location, to guard against violent current or ex-husbands and -boyfriends tracking down "their" womenfolk.

I could go on. Same-sex education, at least in certain subjects; courses like "Home repair for women" or "Meal planning for men" based on the often quite-warranted assumption that their upbringing and/or education may have left them lacking in certain practical skills. Health care facilities and athletic clubs which limit their membership to one sex or the other.

But here's the thing. A large part of the rationale for same-sex spaces is to have forums (fora?) where women (or men) can interact on their own terms, liberated from the spectre of sexual attraction and/or sexual interference. The moment that the gay, lesbian and trans communities enter these spaces, all bets, as it were, are off. Which is, I suppose, a large part of the reason that the LGBTQQ community has been demanding and creating its own "safe" spaces.

So today I'm going to address what I see as a few of the most prevalent myths and half-truths of the modern era. I know that to a lot of people, what I'm writing is politically incorrect in the extreme, but hey - this is my blog and I call it how I see it.

#1 - Being gay is not a choice

It's true that we don't choose who(m) we're attracted to. We may not even fully understand ourselves why we're attracted to one person but not another. But the decision to enter (or not to enter) into a relationship with another person IS (or at least OUGHT to be) a choice. If I suddenly find myself attracted to, say, a priest who is obliged to remain celibate, or to a co-worker (especially if that co-worker happens to be my boss or someone I supervise), or even just to a man or woman whom I know to be happily married to someone else, then as far as is reasonably possible, I'm going to keep myself out of the path of temptation.

Besides, I rather subscribe to the view that there aren't really gay PEOPLE, only gay relationships. Some people do lean more towards one or the other but ultimately, it's INDIVIDUALS whom we love, not orientations.

#2 - Gender identity is set and immutable by the age of three or four

Nonsense, I say! And by the way, same goes for sexual orientation ("gay gene", anyone?)
I do accept that children are sexual beings, perhaps right from the beginning. Many children masturbate from a very early age. But children, certainly throughout adolescence and early adulthood if not beyond, are still in the process of becoming full-fledged, fully-rounded people; they are "finding themselves" as we used to say in the sixties. We wouldn't expect a three-year-old to know definitively that she wants to be a doctor or lawyer or grand First Nations Chief when she grows up. In fact, it's becoming increasingly rare for people to remain in just one career or occupation over their entire working life. We decry - and rightly so - cultures where girls are married off at the age of eight or nine, usually to boys and men many years older than they are, yet somehow we think a preschooler innately knows whether he'll grow up to be a man or a woman or straight or gay. Personally I don't see any logic in that.

#3 - There's no such thing as the "gender binary"

Yes, I know about inter-sex people. I know about some of the odd genetic configurations like XXY and XYY. But it's very rare. Generally speaking, if you put 100 random people into a room, about half will be readily identifiable as male and another half readily identifiable as female. Even if they're fully clothed. Moreover, I can't think of any other human characteristic that so readily divides the human race roughly in half. You can't say, for example, that half the world's humans are black and the other half white. Or that half have brown eyes and half have blue eyes. That's not the same thing as saying that the characteristics of men and boys versus those of women and girls are mutually exclusive. We are all human, after all, and more alike than we are different!

When a man says he is "really" a woman or a woman says she is "really" a man, that presupposes he knows what truly defines or constitutes womanhood and that she knows what truly defines or constitutes manhood. Isn't that a little presumptuous? Surely it is up to those who are already clearly and demonstrably under the "male" or "female" umbrella to define the quintessential nature of manliness or womanliness? Following the logic typically promoted by the trans movement, it is discriminatory to, for example, deny a "trans woman" access to a female-only space. Even though she has probably had a male upbringing and socialization and possesses a well-ingrained male sense of entitlement. Murray McLauchlan asked "Just who made the map of a man and a woman's life from beginning to end?" If the point is to broaden accepted social or psychological notions of who a woman or man should be and what s/he should do in life and how s/he should behave, then great! It illustrates that at least to a great extent, anatomy is NOT destiny. But why should we start letting MEN map out women's lives and WOMEN map out men's? And given that we are getting farther and farther away from the anatomy-as-destiny inevitability, surely it is a big mistake to strive to change destiny by altering the anatomy; to, as Gloria Steinem put it, change the foot if the shoe doesn't fit?

When even the medical profession is embracing (though admittedly with a few safeguards) the "change the foot" approach, I can't help feeling that the world has gone crazy. A few decades from now, as we progress (at least in this part of the world) towards equality of the sexes, will health care professionals look back and ask "What on earth were we thinking?"

At least with adults, however, we can normally assume that they know their own minds and can pursue whatever medical care they feel is right for them, in consultation with the medical professionals involved. I'm much more concerned about the ethics of allowing minor children to embark too far on the path to gender reassignment. Because they're still very much in the process of growing and becoming and to do anything irreversible or difficult-to-reverse at this stage is, I believe, irresponsible if not immoral. The families of these kids are certainly well-meaning and it's to their credit that they are willing to go to bat for their kids and offer them unconditional love and acceptance. But I really think that when children, especially very young ones, claim to "know" that they are the other gender, it's usually because of adult attitudes they have unconsciously absorbed and been exposed to. Or even a bid for attention, although I think in that case it would die a natural death once adults started taking them seriously.

Will they pin all their hopes and dreams on breaking out of the confines of their closet, only to find themselves stuck permanently in Narnia?

In my lifetime, I have witnessed a sea change in public attitudes towards the LGBTQ community.

When I was around eleven or twelve, the attitude of parents, teachers and other authority figures towards same-sex attraction was generally that until the age of, say, eighteen or twenty-one, it was not really to be taken seriously - a youthful indiscretion, nothing more. Or perhaps a question of seeking out a role model. The attitude of most other adolescents, however, seemed to be that it was something to avoid being associated with at all costs! I remember girls in my class saying silly things like, "You wouldn't believe my three-year-old cousin - she's a real LEZ!" As if any kind of physical affection demonstrated by a little kid towards an older one of the same gender were to be construed in a sexual, and therefore unsavory manner.

Of course, sex education in the schools in those days left a lot to be desired - and goodness only knows what kind of desiring went on in our teenaged hearts and minds and behind closed bedroom doors! In grade seven, girls got to see that "special health film". The cloying images of hearts and flowers and birds and bees and romanticized statements about the miracle of new life were far removed from the considerable discomfort I was already experiencing every month with my newly-arrived womanhood.

As we progressed through high school, we got stern warnings about the perils of "going all the way" which included the spectres of gonorrhea, syphilis and unwanted pregnancy. We didn't know about AIDS then and I don't even recall discussion of chlamydia. We got to see a film called "Phoebe" about a girl who discovers right at the beginning of the film that she is pregnant. The remainder of the film consists or her fantasizing about the possible reactions of her parents, teachers and boyfriend when she breaks the news to them.

But homosexuality, bisexuality and gender identity were not discussed. Of course, that was Before Stonewall and before Jan Morris, though certainly not before Christine Jorgensen.

What a difference a few decades makes. Gay marriage is now legal in Canada. A decision not to allow Jenna Talackova, né male, to compete in the Miss Universe Canada competition, was recently reversed. We've come a long way, baby, but we've still got some distance to go. Next month, when Bill C-279 (the Trans Rights Bill) comes up for debate in Parliament, we should make our views known and urge our MP's to support it.