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Old 08-25-2011, 02:47 PM   #21
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"I'm a woman, I can act however I want and it can't be sexist."
"I'm a transman, I don't have male privilege to throw around."
"I'm a POC, nothing I say can be racist."

That's what I'm talking about.

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Old 08-25-2011, 03:04 PM   #22
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I'm not actually talking about being called out for who you are. More not being called for what you do because of who you are.

"I'm a woman, I can act however I want and it can't be sexist."
"I'm a transman, I don't have male privilege to throw around."
"I'm a POC, nothing I say can be racist."

That's what I'm talking about.

Also, regarding morals: I think we've made a big mistake in not being willing to claim morals or take a moral stand. Yes, some people think we're all immoral. My moral center says those people are the ones who are immoral. If one side says they're taking a moral stand, and those they're opposed to won't, things will continue just as they are. Different people have different morals, and we would help ourselves a lot more by standing up and claiming *our* morals and holding them up against the morals of the opposition. As long as only one side is willing to claim a moral stand, only one side will be seen as moral. This is one of those cases where we need to be willing to say "no, what you're calling moral is actually wrong and immoral."
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I agree with you about our community being accountable. In my opinion, if we cannot start with being accountable to one another here, then ? I am having a problem with the "moral" statement. Who's morality? There are some that think our way of life is NOT moral and I would disagree.

I don't want to get caught up in another round of semantics. Thank you for posting your thoughts, and I support you in speaking up.
I am going to say that we do need to talk about morality. Dr. King gets invoked a lot and, quite honestly, I find it tiresome but I'm going to invoke him today. I'm invoking him because the *reason* why a national monument was opened in his honor this week is because he spoke for a moral vision. He said to America that the struggle for civil rights WAS a moral struggle and that one side was wrong and it wasn't his. He was, in fact, right. The struggle I was a beneficiary was was first and foremost a moral struggle because segregation was first and foremost a moral stain on our country. I believe that our struggle is a moral struggle, that there is the right side of that struggle and the wrong side of that struggle and those who argue that queer people have no place in society because this or that holy book says we don't are on the wrong side of it.

You ask what morality? I don't know that I have specifics but let me toss out a touchstone that I wish I had thought of but I didn't. If we ask ourselves "would I feel comfortable if everyone applied this rule, behaved this way, held this ethic" and if we can come away with a yes (or perhaps even a probably) then chances are that's a pretty good bet that you're onto something that works. It works in so many domains and I think if we use that as our flashlight and our machete as we hack through the underbrush then I think we will likely do more good than harm.

Why? Because let us assume that people don't want to screw themselves over. I don't. I'm willing to take some things on the chin but I'm not going to intentionally put my family on the street! Once we get past the simple stuff (the not killing, not taking other people's stuff, etc.) and we get to the knotty issues that touchstone really comes in handy.

How would I like to be spoken to? Well, I prefer not to have racial slurs thrown at me. Since I cannot think of a single good reason--certainly not one any of y'all would accept--that I should be able to use racial or sexist language but you can't, I should avoid using racial or sexist language. I prefer not to be pushed in the mud, so I won't push you in the mud so that you won't push me in the mud. Is that a perfect moral system? No, there is no such animal. It is workable, though.

So what kind of morality? All people have worth and value. Their worth and value is intrinsic to them being human beings. All people have rights, those rights adhere to them BECAUSE they are human beings and injustice entails denying them their rights because of this or that fully arbitrary trait. (This allows us to seriously constrain the rights of, for instance, a serial rapist who has proven he has no interest in playing nice with the rest of us) All people have a right to bodily integrity meaning that violence against persons is wrong.

This doesn't give us a list of moral codes but it begins to form the outline of a morality by talking about the values we hold dear.

Cheers
Aj
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Old 08-25-2011, 03:06 PM   #23
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It seems that when one or very few members of a minority make a mistake or are a jerk then they seen as representative of that entire group.

For example one Transperson (Argentine, Woman, Master etc) acted in this or that way so I hate all Transpeople (or whatever the group is). This is not reality.

Individuals do not speak for the whole.

Yes, we "represent" our group in the same way we are supposed to "represent" our parents, and should ac t right. But I hope I am not held as representative of all adoptees or women or Lesbians etc.

We need to stop thinking things like..."well I was raped by a redmeck white woman", so I hate all redneck white women. and when I say "we", I mean I need to stop.
YES!

I want to piggy back off this by saying that I have felt hurt when I have seen femme threads on here where some people have talked about men with a broad brush, and a negative one at that. And since it was in the femme zone, I felt I couldn't and shouldn't come in and say, "Hey, as a transguy I want to say that not all guys are like that. I'm not like that!"

I also want to say that I, personally, try to keep in mind that we queer people, LGBTQ, etc. all know what it is like to be marginalized and oppressed by the hetero-normative, non-trans, homophobic, white-centric, racist and patriarchal dominant culture of our respective countries. We all experience it on one level or another, or on multiple levels. We need to stick together and stop attacking each other! I have said this several times before and I will keep saying it. Stop the madness! lol.

I try my best to listen to the concerns and issues of others, and put myself in their shoes. I can't always relate to what everyone is going through because I don't always have the same exact experiences. But I have to take someone's word for it when they say they feel marginalized. However, sometimes, given all the facts, I can see that there are times when such feelings are based on miscommunications or misperceptions of the facts. One person says one thing, and another person assumes there is an intent in those words that simply isn't there, and then feels upset.

Here is a personal example for me: I have been told that I could never understand what it is like to be on the receiving end of racism, and my comments were dismissed. My point of view is, yes I will never know exactly what that is like, it's true. However, I do know what it is like to have a hard time getting employment on the basis of who I am and what I look like, being passed over for promotions, stared at in public places, treated as if I am less than human, had my property vandalized, called hurtful bigoted words, etc. It's not exactly the same, but it's something. And I will never understand any better as long as no one tries explain it to me. I would love for someone to say, "Drew, these are the experiences I have and this is how it effects my life and makes me feel." As a white person who doesn't experience the receiving end of racism, I want to understand better. And I want others to understand better what it is like to be me and what I go through too. All it takes is an openness to listen, and the patience to explain without judgment. The same goes for sexism, and all the other -isms.

I have more to say but I have to get going now. I will be back later. Great topic AJ!!
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Old 08-25-2011, 04:01 PM   #24
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I'd like to share the word 'morals' is like a trigger, it's cause of the way it can be used to demean. How Aj used morality was not so triggering I'm trying to figure out why...
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Old 08-25-2011, 04:25 PM   #25
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I'd like to share the word 'morals' is like a trigger, it's cause of the way it can be used to demean. How Aj used morality was an not so triggering I'm trying to figure out why...
I like to think because it is not a scolding. As SA Ma'am pointed out, the right-wing--at least in America--has spent a long time claiming that the queer movement (and the Left generally) has no morals or thinks that there's no such thing as morals. We have, as she points out, delivered ourselves into their hands. This is not to say that the word isn't going to taste strange on our tongues. It will for a while. It will because we ceded space that we did not need to. At the time, the reasons seemed like good ones. The laboratory of the real world, I think, shows that it wasn't. At the end of the day, theory (we should avoid using moral language) was not in agreement with experiment (human beings use moral language and need to do so).

I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it. Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj
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Old 08-25-2011, 07:11 PM   #26
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I like to think because it is not a scolding. As SA Ma'am pointed out, the right-wing--at least in America--has spent a long time claiming that the queer movement (and the Left generally) has no morals or thinks that there's no such thing as morals. We have, as she points out, delivered ourselves into their hands. This is not to say that the word isn't going to taste strange on our tongues. It will for a while. It will because we ceded space that we did not need to. At the time, the reasons seemed like good ones. The laboratory of the real world, I think, shows that it wasn't. At the end of the day, theory (we should avoid using moral language) was not in agreement with experiment (human beings use moral language and need to do so).

I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it. Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj
Yes.

And I think of morality as strictly about doing right by each other as human beings. To me, singling out people and excluding them and harassing them with finger wagging because they are different from you is immoral behavior. Favoring policies that keep the rich richer and the poor poorer is an immoral stance. Anything that creates a strata of civil rights where some have more and some have less is immoral. Racism is immoral. Sexism and homophobia and transphobia and ageism are immoral. Those are all immoral things because they are unfair and harm people in some really significant ways.

I agree with you Aj, that this is a different way of thinking of morality than the religious right seems to. The whole, "the bible says it, I believe it and that settles it!" kind of thinking isn't what I consider moral. I think it's more like using religion to justify one's prejudices and bigotry. That kind of hypocrisy makes me mad because there is no reasoning with people like that. But those people don't have the market cornered on morality; in reality they are lacking it in the most fundamental ways.
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Old 08-26-2011, 12:52 AM   #27
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So much good stuff in this thread already.

I wanted to put together a coherent post that had some sort of discernible structure and flow. Yeah, that ain’t happening tonight. So instead I’m just going to throw a few disjointed thoughts out there and shoot for coherence another time.


We are no longer – as a community – as embattled as we were a couple decades ago, which is not to say that things are swell for everyone, but in general as a community, we are not bobbing in the middle of the ocean surrounded by sharks and clinging to a half-deflated life raft like we once were. And I think maybe that is some of where the rush to cast the victim and oppressor roles that Medusa mentioned comes into play. We’ve come to expect sharks, so we see them around every corner (and yes I realize the middle of the ocean doesn’t technically have corners). We sharkify each other in part because we are accustomed to battling sharks.

Somewhat conversely is the phenomenon that AJ and Heart and others have talked about, whereby things stand unchallenged that should be challenged, or if they are challenged, the response is defensive and dismissive. And I think they are right when they talk about needing to build the community around shared values or morals instead of just around identities. But I also think there is simply not enough education on anti-oppression. I think most all of us are familiar with general concepts but I am talking about understanding the mechanics of how oppression functions and learning how to do the work of combating it.

One other thing that I’ve been thinking about, though I’m not quite sure how this fits in to this discussion, is that we need to stop pretending that broadened inclusiveness is always free in every circumstance. That is, sometimes, in some situations, there is a cost. That doesn’t mean the inclusiveness isn’t the right thing to do or isn’t worth the cost, but maybe acknowledging the cost might make the process easier for those who are paying it.

For instance, there was a time when butch was considered a specifically female identity. And I admit, when I first heard male-identified people using butch, I felt like something was being taken away from me. While it’s obviously true that male-identified people using the term does not prevent me from identifying that way, it does change what the word means and therefore it changes what I am saying about myself when I use it. When people talk about feeling erased, maybe that’s what they sometimes mean. The femaleness of butch was, to me, an integral part of it. It described a particular, and highly marginalized, way of being female in the world. And then it didn’t; it meant something else.

I want to be clear that, for me, it was never about thinking transmen should not be part of the community. It was about wanting to hold onto a word that named my experience. I know some people think the naming thing is or should be unimportant, but I don’t agree. I think it is vital for marginalized groups to have words for themselves, words that represent their existence and specific experience in the world. When I was in college and newly out, I had a friend who was from a rural part of China. She could scarcely comprehend coming out to her parents because in the dialect they spoke there were no words for lesbian or gay or even homosexual. There were no words at all that named her reality. It was clear how lost and helpless she felt even thinking about how to begin that conversation with her parents. Our names matter.

I came to understand the reasons why butch was being used by some transmen. I do understand. But I will say that I appreciate it when a male-identified person uses the term transbutch. To me, that clearly connects them to the butch identity and community while at the same time acknowledging and respecting that the female tradition of the word.

I realize I’ve wandered a bit far afield from the topic of the thread, so I’ll try to bring it back around. If one of the things we are talking about is how to better coalesce our various groups into a united community, I think we need to honestly acknowledge that sometimes broadening definitions or scopes can mean something is going to be lost along the way, sacrificed to the process of change. While this doesn’t mean the change shouldn’t happen, it might at least be worth considering what, if anything, is being sacrificed.


Considering I can hardly stay awake I should probably stop here. Hopefully in the morning I will not have horrifying realization that I should have stopped long before now.

Great thread, important discussions, looking forward to more.
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Old 08-26-2011, 06:17 AM   #28
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For instance, there was a time when butch was considered a specifically female identity. And I admit, when I first heard male-identified people using butch, I felt like something was being taken away from me. While it’s obviously true that male-identified people using the term does not prevent me from identifying that way, it does change what the word means and therefore it changes what I am saying about myself when I use it. When people talk about feeling erased, maybe that’s what they sometimes mean. The femaleness of butch was, to me, an integral part of it. It described a particular, and highly marginalized, way of being female in the world. And then it didn’t; it meant something else.
What time was butch considered specifically a female identity?

My understanding and knowledge of queer history, is that the term butch is and has been used by both lesbians and gay men, and it is not, nor was a term exclusive to females.
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Old 08-26-2011, 06:52 AM   #29
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I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it.
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Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj
This I mostly agree with - I like your definition of harm-based morality.

I've wondered many times what it would be like to wake up and know that yesterday I committed a terrible crime. I have dreams like this too. (I have a very low likelihood of committing a terrible crime). I have thought and thought about the difference between a person before and after s/he commits a violent crime - are they the same person?

I tend to think so. I judge. But in (my) perfect world, I would rather judge the behavior and not the person. I'm not sure where that discomfort with judging people comes from, but it is perhaps from an emotional rather than a logical place. At least, I think the murderer benefits from compassion more than s/he benefits from judgment. And I think society benefits more from the compassionate treatment of criminals, while the crime is still punished. More later, work calls.
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Old 08-26-2011, 07:28 AM   #30
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I like to think because it is not a scolding. As SA Ma'am pointed out, the right-wing--at least in America--has spent a long time claiming that the queer movement (and the Left generally) has no morals or thinks that there's no such thing as morals. We have, as she points out, delivered ourselves into their hands. This is not to say that the word isn't going to taste strange on our tongues. It will for a while. It will because we ceded space that we did not need to. At the time, the reasons seemed like good ones. The laboratory of the real world, I think, shows that it wasn't. At the end of the day, theory (we should avoid using moral language) was not in agreement with experiment (human beings use moral language and need to do so).

I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it. Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj
Hi AJ,

I'm a little confused about the portion I highlighted in blue. Cruelty and torture have long been a systemic means of coercion and oppression utilized not only by our Armed Forces but by hegemonic powers by in large since the beginning of time.

More later...gotta go pick up the kiddos
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Old 08-26-2011, 09:06 AM   #31
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Hi AJ,

I'm a little confused about the portion I highlighted in blue. Cruelty and torture have long been a systemic means of coercion and oppression utilized not only by our Armed Forces but by hegemonic powers by in large since the beginning of time.

More later...gotta go pick up the kiddos
When I was in the military we were taught that if we captured the enemy whatever else we might do we do NOT torture. Ever. It is a war crime. If given an order to torture, it was our *duty* to refuse to carry out the order and support our superior to the next in the chain of command and, if possible, relieve the officer giving that order of his command because giving an illegal order is prima facie evidence that one is unfit for command. Has torture been used by nation-states and by monarchs before them? Yes. However, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) is quite clear on the matter of torture. We are signatories to the Geneva Conventions and by Constitutional mandate we are *obliged* to conform to it.

George Washington, who explicitly forbade torture, had it right. If we torture their people, they can torture our people. They might torture our people even if we do not torture theirs but if we torture theirs we make it a near certainty that our people will be tortured.

My saying that there was a time when torture was considered out-of-bounds does not mean that torture did not happen anymore than saying that murder is out-of-bounds means that murder never happens. But it was once the case that any commander who gave his troops an order to torture would have been relieved of command. There was a time when we, the American people, would have demanded the impeachment of any elected official who signed off on torture. It was once the case that we prided ourselves, we differentiated ourselves, by our NOT torturing.

Cheers
Aj
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Old 08-26-2011, 09:26 AM   #32
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What time was butch considered specifically a female identity?

My understanding and knowledge of queer history, is that the term butch is and has been used by both lesbians and gay men, and it is not, nor was a term exclusive to females.
I should have been a bit clearer in what I was saying. It’s certainly true that gay men use the word butch. I don’t know for sure whether they adopted it based the usage in the lesbian community although it doesn’t actually matter to what I was trying to say, but wasn’t quite explicit about.

I wasn’t talking literally about the collection of letters b-u-t-c-h (which is of course also used as a first name), but with the distinct identity of butch that exists in our community. While butch is used by gay men, it has never coalesced into an identity and community the way it did among lesbians. But regardless of the nature of its usage among gay men, it occupies in a separate part of the cultural landscape than the butch identity I was speaking of, so in that sense they might as well be different words. A little bit like life forms that may share a common ancestor but evolve distinctly on neighboring mountainsides.

So what I was talking about was the butch name and butch identity that exists is our part of the cultural landscape, the one on our mountainside. That butch identity was a female identity. That butch identity has changed to no longer be a specifically female identity.

I don’t know if that makes what I was saying any clearer or not. Hopefully it does. My intention in bringing it up in the first place was merely as an example of the way a change, even when it makes sense for the community, can mean the loss of something that is valued by at least some members of the community. And I think if we were better at being mindful of that and acknowledging it along the way, we might be able to incorporate changes with a little less friction.
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Old 08-26-2011, 09:36 AM   #33
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Just a quick note before I dash off to work. They decided to block logins to this site the other day.

One of the things that makes me feel like an outsider these days is the assimilationist politics of groups like the HRC and Marriage Equality USA. When I was younger, my queer friends and I were all about trying to create alternative notions of family. The idea that the family you chose was just as viable and important as the nuclear family you were born into. Family could take on all different shapes and sizes: it could be a partnered couple, a triad, a free-for-all multilayered polyamorous collective, or it could be just you and your cat. But the foundation of that was trying to break down the patriarchal, heteronormative concepts of marriage and family that have been used to punish queer folks for eons.

I was married (to a man), but even then marriage didn't sit right with me. I probably got out about 8 years too late, but it was that experience of being "heterosexually" married that made me realize that I'm more interested in dismantling the institution of marriage and remaking it into something radically different.

I came out of that relationship looking for similar rhetoric from queer communities and thought leaders, but now all I see is people fighting to be "as good as" straight people, fighting for assimilation, fighting for their slice of the two-parent, two-kids, house in the suburbs, subaru in the driveway, and mortgaged up to their eyeballs American dream. I'm left standing on the sidelines thinking "this is not what I was fighting for."

I am not out to malign anyone who wants this sort of arrangement for themselves. My issue is that if I'm seen as not being on board with marriage equality, that I'm looked at as some sort of traitor to the community. And I'm not sure what that means for my continued participation in it, or whether that means I've overstayed my welcome.

Did the process of rethinking and reshaping queer community that we've been going through for all of these decades lead us to whitebread, non-threatening, average lifestyles? What becomes of those of us who don't want that?
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Old 08-26-2011, 10:58 AM   #34
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Just a quick note before I dash off to work. They decided to block logins to this site the other day.

One of the things that makes me feel like an outsider these days is the assimilationist politics of groups like the HRC and Marriage Equality USA.
This is a sentiment that I've heard quite a bit. My wife and I live in a house in the suburbs. Our fence is chain link, we don't have any kids at home, it's just us, the dog, the cats, the lizard, and a vegetable garden in the back yard. She goes to work in a big office 5 days a week. I'm a full time student. We barbecue with the neighbors and take the dog to the dog park. What, exactly, is so terrible about that? You say you're not out to malign anyone who wants that kind of life, but then you call us "assimilationists" and talk about how we want to be "as good as" straight people. Have you ever asked a queer person who lives in the suburbs and wants to get married *why* they feel that way? It's not about being "as good as" straight people or about assimilation.

I'm absolutely with you that family is more than just people who are related by biology or marriage. I'm also a realist. Marriage has quite a few benefits that my wife and I need, and dismantling marriage as an institution isn't happening in my lifetime. It's not happening in this century, or most likely even in the next several centuries. Marriage as an institution is just about as old as humanity, and it's here to stay. So, since marriage isn't going anywhere, I really don't understand how anyone who doesn't currently have the right to marry the person(s) they love can be against gaining that right for as many people as is humanly possible. And yes, for me, that includes "non-nuclear" families.

So yes, I tend to get a little hostile while a queer person tells me they don't think my wife and I should be able to get married. To me, they're making the same argument as the religious right who are fighting against us (that we shouldn't be able to get married), they're just using a different justification.
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Old 08-26-2011, 11:04 AM   #35
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LTD:

You bring up an interesting issue. One that I think needs to be discussed in the broader queer community because the question of assimilation is one all minority groups have to face at various times. What I'm about to say is filtered through my experiences, growing up as an upper-middle class black kid, in a predominately white neighborhood, in the 1970s.

My family used to get accused of being assimilationist and being insufficiently 'black' because my parents were college professors and they had the same kind of expectations other middle-class professionals have. I have often wondered what alternative those folks who made that line of argument had in mind. I also wondered how those who followed their advice/ideas fared in their lives.

Not everything comes down to economics but economics do count. I often wonder if we would have been more sufficiently 'black' if my parents hadn't put themselves through college and had expressed no preference for my sister and I going to college either. I do not think we were trying to be 'as good as' whites. I do think we were trying to live our lives with dignity and in the process of doing so we were going to show that the idea that blacks weren't as capable as whites as a lie.

The things you critique may not be the idealized way of family formation but they are the ways that we have. Yes, my wife and I live a very assimilated life. I work in an office that allows me to be a nerd at work (meaning I get to wear jeans, tee-shirts and running shoes) while paying me a professional salary. My wife goes to school on her little pink scooter. On the weekends I'm not working, we put the dog in the car and drive him to the dog park. When we come home, we putter about the house, maybe have friends over for dinner. Four times a year we pick up the shipment from our wine club. Very assimilated.

I rather like that I could invite my coworkers to our wedding without fear and have people show up and enjoy themselves. I rather like that I can talk about my wife in the day-to-day office banter about the latest antics of the dog or what-have-you, and not fear that I'm going to be called into the HR office and told I no longer have a job. Because of that, I can support us while my wife goes to school full-time. That way, she can focus on her studies. If being an assimilated black lesbian is the price I pay for that, it is a price well worth paying.

Would it be better if, instead of average lives, queer people only lived at the margins of society? I've watched this play out in the black community and what I've seen in the four decades that experiment has been run hasn't really done much to recommend deliberate marginalization. What's the difference? It's the difference between making enough to live on and not making enough to live on.

At any rate, society may not *want* marriage torn down. Society gets a vote in how society is constituted so if marriage is going to be torn down and built into something else, a convincing argument will have to be made and it may have to be made over the course of generations. If it is a truly better idea, then it will be adopted and one day *that* will become the new normal. I believe--and my observations of how different black communities have fared since the 60s seems to bolster my hypothesis--that the path to the world you hint at runs through the suburban house of assimilated queers.

I say that because I believe, based upon how we were treated when I first started school in the neighborhood and how we were treated when I graduated high school, that my parents assimilation and raising us assimilated did more good for the cause of race relations than all of the fist-raising Black Power stances that were all the vogue during that period. Why? Because when we first moved into the house and until I was, probably, in the second grade our house would be egged. We had a cross burnt on our lawn when we first moved in. My dad caught one of the egg throwers, dragged him in the house and made him call his parents. They came and picked him up and they were none-too-pleased at the experience. A decade later, these very same people were showing up at my parent's door on a very different mission. This time they wanted advice because they looked at my sister and I, looked at their own kids, and figured my parents were doing SOMETHING right. Their kids were in trouble with school and the law. My sister and I were at the top of our respective classes, never in trouble with the law, and were known around the neighborhood as industrious (we always had some kind of money-making scheme going on because our parents didn't believe in allowances so we had paper routes and mowed lawns or did babysitting).

That is quite the change, don't you think? This isn't a story of gaining the acceptance of white folks. This is a story about how people's minds change. When we moved in, the people around us thought we had no business in that neighborhood. By the time I left home, my parents were pillars of the community, leaders in the neighborhood and the 'go-to' people if you were having trouble with your kids.

Cheers
Aj


Quote:
Originally Posted by lettertodaddy View Post
Just a quick note before I dash off to work. They decided to block logins to this site the other day.

One of the things that makes me feel like an outsider these days is the assimilationist politics of groups like the HRC and Marriage Equality USA. When I was younger, my queer friends and I were all about trying to create alternative notions of family. The idea that the family you chose was just as viable and important as the nuclear family you were born into. Family could take on all different shapes and sizes: it could be a partnered couple, a triad, a free-for-all multilayered polyamorous collective, or it could be just you and your cat. But the foundation of that was trying to break down the patriarchal, heteronormative concepts of marriage and family that have been used to punish queer folks for eons.

I was married (to a man), but even then marriage didn't sit right with me. I probably got out about 8 years too late, but it was that experience of being "heterosexually" married that made me realize that I'm more interested in dismantling the institution of marriage and remaking it into something radically different.

I came out of that relationship looking for similar rhetoric from queer communities and thought leaders, but now all I see is people fighting to be "as good as" straight people, fighting for assimilation, fighting for their slice of the two-parent, two-kids, house in the suburbs, subaru in the driveway, and mortgaged up to their eyeballs American dream. I'm left standing on the sidelines thinking "this is not what I was fighting for."

I am not out to malign anyone who wants this sort of arrangement for themselves. My issue is that if I'm seen as not being on board with marriage equality, that I'm looked at as some sort of traitor to the community. And I'm not sure what that means for my continued participation in it, or whether that means I've overstayed my welcome.

Did the process of rethinking and reshaping queer community that we've been going through for all of these decades lead us to whitebread, non-threatening, average lifestyles? What becomes of those of us who don't want that?
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Old 08-26-2011, 11:20 AM   #36
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alettertodaddy; As I type this, another youth was just beaten to death on the streets of Iowa because of his sexual orientation. Equality laws are not going to make us safe. I've been faithfully married for 35 years without the same legal benefits as others. As far as we've come, we can easily be catapulted back into the dark ages again in one day. In comparison to that, this thread seems like a delightfully normal picnic. So yes.. I hear you. Glenn
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Old 08-26-2011, 11:22 AM   #37
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LTD:

You bring up an interesting issue. One that I think needs to be discussed in the broader queer community because the question of assimilation is one all minority groups have to face at various times. What I'm about to say is filtered through my experiences, growing up as an upper-middle class black kid, in a predominately white neighborhood, in the 1970s.

My family used to get accused of being assimilationist and being insufficiently 'black' because my parents were college professors and they had the same kind of expectations other middle-class professionals have. I have often wondered what alternative those folks who made that line of argument had in mind. I also wondered how those who followed their advice/ideas fared in their lives.

Not everything comes down to economics but economics do count. I often wonder if we would have been more sufficiently 'black' if my parents hadn't put themselves through college and had expressed no preference for my sister and I going to college either. I do not think we were trying to be 'as good as' whites. I do think we were trying to live our lives with dignity and in the process of doing so we were going to show that the idea that blacks weren't as capable as whites as a lie.

The things you critique may not be the idealized way of family formation but they are the ways that we have. Yes, my wife and I live a very assimilated life. I work in an office that allows me to be a nerd at work (meaning I get to wear jeans, tee-shirts and running shoes) while paying me a professional salary. My wife goes to school on her little pink scooter. On the weekends I'm not working, we put the dog in the car and drive him to the dog park. When we come home, we putter about the house, maybe have friends over for dinner. Four times a year we pick up the shipment from our wine club. Very assimilated.

I rather like that I could invite my coworkers to our wedding without fear and have people show up and enjoy themselves. I rather like that I can talk about my wife in the day-to-day office banter about the latest antics of the dog or what-have-you, and not fear that I'm going to be called into the HR office and told I no longer have a job. Because of that, I can support us while my wife goes to school full-time. That way, she can focus on her studies. If being an assimilated black lesbian is the price I pay for that, it is a price well worth paying.

Would it be better if, instead of average lives, queer people only lived at the margins of society? I've watched this play out in the black community and what I've seen in the four decades that experiment has been run hasn't really done much to recommend deliberate marginalization. What's the difference? It's the difference between making enough to live on and not making enough to live on.

At any rate, society may not *want* marriage torn down. Society gets a vote in how society is constituted so if marriage is going to be torn down and built into something else, a convincing argument will have to be made and it may have to be made over the course of generations. If it is a truly better idea, then it will be adopted and one day *that* will become the new normal. I believe--and my observations of how different black communities have fared since the 60s seems to bolster my hypothesis--that the path to the world you hint at runs through the suburban house of assimilated queers.

I say that because I believe, based upon how we were treated when I first started school in the neighborhood and how we were treated when I graduated high school, that my parents assimilation and raising us assimilated did more good for the cause of race relations than all of the fist-raising Black Power stances that were all the vogue during that period. Why? Because when we first moved into the house and until I was, probably, in the second grade our house would be egged. We had a cross burnt on our lawn when we first moved in. My dad caught one of the egg throwers, dragged him in the house and made him call his parents. They came and picked him up and they were none-too-pleased at the experience. A decade later, these very same people were showing up at my parent's door on a very different mission. This time they wanted advice because they looked at my sister and I, looked at their own kids, and figured my parents were doing SOMETHING right. Their kids were in trouble with school and the law. My sister and I were at the top of our respective classes, never in trouble with the law, and were known around the neighborhood as industrious (we always had some kind of money-making scheme going on because our parents didn't believe in allowances so we had paper routes and mowed lawns or did babysitting).

That is quite the change, don't you think? This isn't a story of gaining the acceptance of white folks. This is a story about how people's minds change. When we moved in, the people around us thought we had no business in that neighborhood. By the time I left home, my parents were pillars of the community, leaders in the neighborhood and the 'go-to' people if you were having trouble with your kids.

Cheers
Aj

AJ, are you referring to your marriage/wedding as a commitment ceremony or a tried and true, legally binding marriage?
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Old 08-26-2011, 11:30 AM   #38
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When I use the word assimilationist, it carries no baggage for me. Martin Luther King was an assimilationist. W.E.B. DuBois was an assimilationist. Anna Julia Cooper was an assimilationist. Assimilation just means being collected into the body of the whole.

If you saw something negative in my use of the word, I apologize for causing offense. None was intended.

I also want to reiterate that nowhere did I say that people who want to get married shouldn't be able to. If that's what you want, go for it. Fight for it. Don't give up, and do it anyway until society and legislation catches up with you. But to me, that is not our only fight. That is what concerns me, because so much of our rhetoric is only focused on that one issue.

It's as if the beautiful plurality of voices that I was used to hearing has been silenced by a few who want to be able to claim their place at the centre. I just want those of us who can see that the centre isn't healthy to be heard as well.

As for me, I've never wanted to be mainstream. Rather than thinking of my experiences as marginal (which is negative), I prefer to think of them as exceptional. I want to be the exception to the rule.

As far as the use of "as good as you", there's a blog and active online community for marriage equality and LGBT rights called Good As You. That's what was in my mind when I use that phrase, and it rankles me. Again, wanting to be equal and "as good as" straight folks are fine if that is your goal. I want to be better than the norm. I want us all to strive to make our society better, not to just accept the status quo.
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Old 08-26-2011, 11:39 AM   #39
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I'm thinking that my contribution here is adding fuel to a fire, and isn't constructive. I apologize. I'll bow out. If you want to continue the conversation, I'm happy to do so via private message.
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Old 08-26-2011, 11:56 AM   #40
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I'm thinking that my contribution here is adding fuel to a fire, and isn't constructive. I apologize. I'll bow out. If you want to continue the conversation, I'm happy to do so via private message.


I don't see your posts as inflammatory, did I miss something? I thought there was constructive dialogue going on. If you bow out, how will I learn from the conversation?
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