On Queer Issues

1. The Problems of Pride

Modern queer politics—mostly taking the form of “queer pride”—have several problem, but activists won’t admit it.

Using pride as a wellspring of political motivation and justification begs trouble: it is difficult to explain, often misunderstood, can be maliciously reworked against us, produces directly-competing “straight pride” events and indirect offshoots like “white pride”.

2. Enough is Enough! or: LGBTQ month!? Another one?

It’s April 2018: I walked through a bookstore over the weekend, where there was a sign for GLBT books to celebrate GLBTQ something-or-other month. June is Gay Pride month, remembering the Stonewall riots back in the 60s; and October is LGBTQ History Month, expanding on in National Coming out Day on October. We already have 2 goddamn months, why are we going for a third?

I mean, Black folks only get one month–the shortest one, February–even though they represent about 13% of the population (per US Census Bureau). GBLTQ folks represent about 4% (self-identification in a Gallup poll). So for 1/25th of the population, we get 2 months, 1/6 of the year, and are now expanding to 3 months? No. We have enough flipping holidays/solemn remembrances/special occurrences.

Stop making more special days; we already have 34 by this count. That’s one every 11 weeks. We don’t need more holidays, we need to get out and live our lives, demonstrate to the world who we are, and why we are worthy of respect. We should be dignified, and contribute, and put in the effort to fix the brokenness around us; we need doers, not more opportunities to pat ourselves on the back and/or bemoan how horribly we’re oppressed. And we should stop bitching how bad we’ve got it, because there’s plenty of injustice in the world outside our little niche. We should be focused on making the world better for everyone, not just our little corner of it.

Back in the late 60s, early 70s it seems like all the groups on the wrong end of the stick came together, tried to understand one another and work together. It didn’t fix everything, but it made a bunch of dents. Then we all went back to our separate worlds and progress stalled. If the AIDS crisis hadn’t galvanized the Gay community, who knows how little progress we would have made? Meanwhile, Black folks are continually being shot by cops and young black men imprisoned for drug offences that would often be written off as poor choices for white kids. The young are economically screwed as college prices rise and pay doesn’t keep up. Everything is insane.

I don’t know how to fix it, and I’m not sure what to do. But I am confident the answer isn’t retreating into my little niche, tucking in and pretending I’m the only one who has it bad. There’s plenty of other folks being screwed by the mad, mad world the Baby Boomers created, that we are inheriting, full of hatred, wars, overpopulation, political entitlement for the rich, and economic oppression for the rest of us—and I’m not even starting on environmental issues. Ignoring the insanity won’t improve the situation. We need to acknowledge how broken things are, for everyone, and start communally thinking about fixing it. Because individually, we can’t. Even the individual groups can’t. The only way this gets better is all the groups working together, and that won’t happen as long as each group’s members are myopic to their own little tribulations.

3. Protecting Straight Marriages Through Queer Liberty

It’s 2022, and although overall the queer community has been making positive gains, there’s been a backlash this year. So far, gay and lesbian rights have mostly held their own, culminating with the Respect for Marriage Act. On the downside, experiments by religious folks using “Jesus” as a legal equivalent to the sudo command, allowing them to veto any rules they don’t like, are showing success. Trans folk took the brunt of the political backsliding this year.

Socially, though, this year has been tough on all of us. Right-wing propagandists have brought back and aggressively pushed the idea that queer folks are pedophiles. They say that queer marriage is unethical, ungodly, sinful, dirty or some random other pejorative. Basically, the same nonsense from decades long past is now back, being spread anew.

Adding to that, threats and violence continue to be used to try to intimidate us back into the closets.

If you’re one of the folks trying to do this, perhaps in your mind you’re just trying to protect your children by hiding us, erasing us. But I’d like you to consider for a moment why that’s not in your interest, because I don’t want to see your children suffer the horrors I’ve seen.

While transitioning in the early 1990s, I met dozens of others in upstate New York (where I attended university) and in New England (where my family lived). My peers were almost exclusively male-to-female, and shared many common experiences: like me, they felt conflicted about their assigned gender; like me, they’d tried to conform.

Unlike me, though, they had tried desperately for decades to conform. Instead of acknowledging early-on that it wouldn’t work and giving up, like I did, they did anything that sounded like it would “make a man of them”: going into the military, getting married, and having kids—often all 3, in that order. And that meant that unlike me in my early 20s, they were all transitioning in their 40s and 50s.

But it wasn’t limited to us: I met gay men who went through the same things, tried the same things, hoping it would “cure” them. Lesbians too.

It didn’t work for any. Not the transgender folk, not the gay men, not the lesbians. They tried for years, some even decades. For those who had children—most of them—the responsibility of raising children made it easier to manage. Their romance with their spouse might have been a sham, but parenthood was genuine. If there was a blessing in the heartache to follow, it was the children they’d had along the way.

These folks had married thinking it would set them right, it would turn them straight. But decades of family life didn’t change their hearts, and years of sustaining the illusion eventually became unbearable. Others managed to hold on until children grew up and moved out, but when the responsibilities of parenthood diminished and they had time to reflect on their own lives, they found themselves confronted with a long-running lie that could no longer be tolerated. And so, in the end, their marriages inevitably failed.

And that’s when we see how this affects straight folks. All these queer folks had mated with straight partners, who believed they were in straight relationships. They had built lives, bought houses and made plans to grow old with someone—but after decades of investment, those relationships failed.

It wasn’t the first heartbreak, though. The straight partners had already sensed there was something wrong, but didn’t know what; they wondered what they were doing wrong, why their husbands and wives weren’t sexually interested in them. They’d chosen good providers, and were often good friends with their spouses—but they spent years living without the spark of romance.

Maybe you don’t like queer folk. Maybe you think we choose our lives. Maybe you think we brought any suffering on ourselves. I don’t know how to change your mind on that, but I think we can agree that the pain of these sham marriages isn’t borne only by us queer folk.

Imagine your sons and daughters investing years of money and energy into a relationship, only to have it fall apart because of an incompatibility that was there from day 1, and was only covered up because of wishful thinking. What could you do to prevent that happening?

Even if you don’t care about us, is adherence to anti-queer ideology so important that you will make more generations of straight young adults suffer?

The alternative is to choose to not be actively anti-queer. You can let us live our lives as we see fit. You can refrain from slandering us, and choose not to to spread lies and misinformation that create fear of us. You need not demand conformance with straight ideals at any cost. I am not saying you need to encourage kids to be queer—that would be creepy—but I am suggesting that the damage done by anti-queer propaganda is not limited to queer folk, and thus it is worth considering the ramifications of pressure and propaganda on people that do matter to you.

By allowing queer folk freedom to pursue relationships with each other, fewer will try to conform by getting into sham marriages doomed to fail in pain and angst. Instead, these queer folk will get to make the most of their lives. That meets my goal of reducing others' pain.

Every avoided sham marriage also means there is a straight person spared pain and angst. That further meets my goal of reducing others' pain, and I believe it should meet yours too.

4. Heteronormative Culture and the Role of the Oppressor as Cisgender… Huh what?

October 22, 2018

I want to raise an issue with the way some argue for equality. It’s not that I’m arguing with the idea of equality, but instead that the form of the argument is difficult for others to grasp, and probably drives opponents further into their beliefs, or at least frustrates them into not listening.

If you’ve encountered something like this, you know what I’m talking about:

The primary issue of the heteronormative culture in the role of the oppressor as cisgender is that being queer implies that we have to choose between textual subsemiotic gender identity and sexual orientation. The premise of trans identity holds that class, somewhat ironically, has significance even in the face of third-gender deconstructivism, and furthermore the gender quality paradox promotes the use of non-binary masculinity to perturb entrenched social pressure of conformity.

When I encounter this, I tend to ignore it. “I don’t know what that means,” I think, “but it sounds like they’re on my side.” But I’ll be honest: I have no idea what this means when I hear it. To me, it sounds like nonsense constructed by the post-modern generator.

Now, I’m not dumb. I’m an engineer. I write code. I’ve got understanding of electricity. I’ve studied psychology, anatomy, physiology, microbiology. I’ve fixed cars, refurbished bathrooms, sweated pipes and hung doors. But when I hear this stuff, I still can’t figure it out.

To be fair, it may actually mean something. It may be domain-specific terminology, similar to technical jargon: talk about grepping, throwing an exception, forking a thread, IRQs or interrupt requests, or pushing a context in daily speech. When talking among each other, we techies often apply technical phrases to our personal and daily lives. Even among non-techies, we salt our language with a few phrases, but often context provides a sense of usage.

But if you’re a non-techie asking a technical question, you may get an answer loaded with jargon that means specific stuff to us, but to you appears to be unintelligible gibberish. Understanding techspeak requires indoctrination to really understand it. That’s true of all domain-specific language.

I suggest that those who write in—well, to be fair, I’m not even sure what it is: women’s studies jargon, gender-theory speak, or something else?—but whatever it is, those who write or speak it, need to learn to shut the jargon off and translate into plain language if they want others to listen and understand.

And that matters to me, because I think we are on the side of the issues. I think we agree that women are equal to men. I think we agree that male and female categories aren’t enough to describe all gender experiences. That racism is a bad thing. That wealth and income inequality is a real problem. That mass incarceration has spiraled out of control in this country. And so on.

There was a lovely lady some years ago—pretty, with a great smile—that I was attracted to, and seemed to take an interest in me. Unfortunately she often used such double-speak in her speech and e-mail conversations. It wasn’t long before gibberish formed a wedge between us.

So I fear it’s not just that your efforts are going to waste: I have seen jargon-filled nonsense break down communications channels, and I suspect it also works good as fodder for those complaining about elite lefty liberals. You have a better chance of reaching those on the right by learning to speak their language, than expecting them to understand yours.

Please think about it. Yes, it’s hard translating out of a domain-specific language; jargon provides short-hand or special meanings. But if you don’t, you’re probably not reaching many outside your own little niche anyway.

5. Thank You

In the aftermath of the 2022 elections, I want to thank the sane Republicans who chose to vote against party lines.

• Those who voted against all the election deniers who were running to “fix” Trump’s loss by rigging future elections in favor of their preferred candidates.
• Those who voted against radical-right and MAGA candidates in favor of sane ones.
• Senators who voted for the Respect of Marriage act, protecting gay and lesbian marriages from being annulled by angry, radical-right MAGA types.
• Those national representatives that voted for the Electoral Count Act Reform, to close the exploits used by Trump and friends to try to overturn the will of the people.

I’m really glad to see that there are Republicans that put Country above party. I did not expect this; I really thought America was headed for the scrap-heap of failed democracies. I don’t think we’re out of danger entirely, but these are far more positive steps than I imagined possible.

Nevertheless, spending a month in The Netherlands in 2022, my eyes are open to the madness that is the US way of life. The Democracy may be girded anew, but it does not fix the policies and politics that pander to Wall Street, corporations, and the plutocrats. Wealth and income inequality have been bred over decades by policies disempowering workers from fighting for wages. The middle class us struggling, poverty has worsened. Sadly, the people have blamed taxes, instead of wages that haven’t kept pace with costs even as the rich increased their portion of the take from 30% to 40%.

So I continue looking forward to emigrating to Europe, to Nederland, although I will admit I am intimidated and nervous about it.

There’s a better life there. Better work-life balance. Less religiosity. Public and mass transportation are still priorities. Walking and biking treated as first-class transportation options, not afterthoughts; fewer painted bike gutters. They are not so beholden to their ideologies that they are prevented from having sane gun policies, nor prevented from stopping a madman nationalist liar provoking more division and hatred every night on television. There’s less consumerism, less disposability. Race relations aren’t perfect, but they’re nothing like the racism in the US. Fewer mass shootings. Less out-of-control, abusive policing.

I am glad the US is no longer poised to imminently fall into authoritarianism. Nevertheless, I think my best shot at a better way of life awaits me elsewhere.

A. Related Reading

On Trans Issues (on-trans-issues.html)

Thoughts on all things Transgender.