Eredien's Journal

My grandfather and grandmother moved from their home in FL last year into an assisted-living facility, when my grandfather's Alzheimers' finally got too much for my grandmother to deal with on their own.

That means that we get mail for them here, at our home, and usually bring it up to my grandmother at her current home, a long-term nursing unit where she lays slowly slipping into decline; my grandfather died in May at the age of 96. I visit her as often as I can, and sit with her as she struggles to breathe.

I won't be bringing her the letter from the FL Focus on the Family affiliate we got today, urging her to vote for Romney as "the candidate who shares your values": Florida Family Action and Citizen Link may think that my grandmother is a bigot, but she loves her queer granddaughter. And I love her.

A few years ago, while living in Boston, I met a wonderful person who cared for me and whom I cared for very much, and came out to my parents after almost a decade of being in the closet. My parents, who had previously seemed neutral on LGBT rights in general and quite supportive of other queer family members, told me I was wrong and should never get married. I was crushed.

They told me never to tell my grandparents: "you'd kill them." I'd been forming a close relationship with my grandparents--the kind I'd never been able to have with them as a child, since they lived so far away and we saw them so rarely--via letter. Rather than elide my partner and my life with them from my letters, I simply stopped writing to them. They were hurting, and I was hurting.

I wrote to them anyway. I told them I was queer. I told them I wasn't supposed to tell them. I told them I was angry at my parents and that I didn't have the family support I had hoped for. I told them that I loved them whatever their response was. I told them that if we were to stop talking to each other, we should at least know why. I told them I was terrified. I sent the letter, and I waited.

My grandmother wrote this letter back.
It's gotten me through the really bad times--the subsequent three-year battle for respect for my relationship from my parents, the loss of a job, my untreated clinical depression, my breakup with my partner mentioned in the letter, my move back to my hometown, my grandfather's death this May and my grandmother's subsequent decline, and the guy today who sat next to me in a government office and called me a carpet muncher to see if he could gay-bait me (it didn't work).

I am really glad that my then-partner, and my current partner, got a chance to meet my grandparents. I am glad to be their granddaughter. I am glad to be their queer granddaughter. And my grandmother is glad to have me, just as I am. I remember that when I'm tempted to give up on love, or frustrated with the daily, exhausting work of being an out queer person, and it makes my life a lot better every day.

I wrote to Florida Family Action, CitizenLink, and Focus on the Family, and asked them to take my grandmother off their mailing list.

She doesn't want your letter. She loves me.

If you are a queer person or an ally, and have received a similar election-year flyer, I ask you to do just two things:

- Write to the group that sent you the flyer, and its affiliates, and ask them to take you off their mailing lists. You have the power to stop their bigoted, ill-informed fears from coming into your mailbox and your home. Stand up and tell them you don't want any part of it.

- If you have a similar story or letter, please write about it. Talk about the hope that gets you through. Be honest with your family, whether they're blood or chosen.

Let them love you as you are and it might save your life. I know my grandma's letter saved mine.

There is an awesome conversation about gender, identity, transitioning, schooling, and respect going on in the comments of this post re: BMC and trans issues. I still haven't heard back from the admissions office yet, but really am happy with how awesome and well-thought-out the comments are, and when I do hear back from admissions you all will be the first to know!

Also, I am going to try to connect to a bunch of Smith students working on these issues too.

A new bill recently introduced in the Maine Legislature would repeal the protections that transgender people have already had for five years under the Maine Human Rights Act. Maine Rep. Ken Fredette (R, Newport) says,
"The concept here is that there is not an absolute right for the transgender to go into a bathroom, there's not an absolute right for the transgender to go into a locker room of the sex that they simply identify with," Fredette said. I mean, that's it: "that they simply identify with." I wish somebody'd make Fradette go into the ladies' room for a month and see how that made him feel, since he apparently has no right "to go into a bathroom...a locker room of the sex that he simply identifies with"--oh wait, I forgot that it's only cis people who have the right to use the right bathroom or changing room in Maine.

The bill is LD 1046. According to this article on the website of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, (which I think is an NPR affiliate) and which also has an audio clip about the bill: "Fredette's bill, LD 1046, says that--unless otherwise indicated--a restroom or shower facility designated for one biological sex is presumed to be restricted to that biological sex and that a transgender person would no longer be able to claim discrimination under the Maine Human Rights Act if denied the use of the facility of their choice."

It's a gross article--people are using the term "transgender" left and right (and not just in quotes, either, but in the article text itself) instead of "transgender person," but people need to hear about this. There are hopeful quotes from cis gender advocates, and people like Jennifer Finney Boylan, who gave testimony to the legislature, and is a very public transgender person and trans activist who teaches and lives in Maine. But they are going to need more than hopeful quotes to get this thing passed; it looks like there's a fair amount of popular/political/organization support.

People in Maine, and people who know people in Maine, please write your legislators and let them know that they shouldn't support this bill. Write the governor, who supports this bill, and let them know that Maine shouldn't be known for taking away its citizens' rights. If your legislator already supports this bill, let them know your're pissed off. And feel free to link to this post as much as you like.

Here is information about the bill from the Maine Legislature Website, plus full text, current action status, sponsors, and other information. The text of the bill is specifically crafted to remove a right transgendered people have already had for five years under the Maine Human Rights Act.
As if that weren't problematic enough, the criterion for bathroom/locker room allowal/denial is "Unless otherwise indicated, a rest room or shower facility designated for one biological sex is presumed to be restricted to that biological sex." So...what bathroom do intersex persons use? You gonna post cameras or people by the door to make sure that everyone who pisses passes? I sense a lot of undesignated restrooms in the future, except that a lot of time building codes require bathrooms to be designated--not sure how it is in Maine.

This is nasty,in terms of how it's being supported politically as well as in terms of the language being used to report on it.

I want to go to Maine in a little while and give them my tourist dollar, but will plan on staying out of the state if this bill passes and so long as it is in effect.

Maybe that sounds like an overreaction, but if I take a roadtrip to Maine, I know I'm gonna need to stop at some roadside diner to pee, or decide to eat in a restaurant my friends from college recommended to me, and if I'm not dressed "right" that day (ie, in accordance with the gender roles of whoever I ask to tell me where the bathrooms are), I really don't think I should have to get into a public fight with the staff and have to drag out my license to prove I'm a woman--no matter what the waitress or the guy behind the counter at the gas station thought about me when I walked in the door. I especially shouldn't have to get into a fight in order to fulfill a basic biological need, wash my face, and comb my hair. Nor do I want to.

If you would like to support the work being done to fight this bill, please volunteer or give to organizations working for rights for transgendered and queer people in Maine, such as Equality Maine.

Please, please repost this. Mainers, we're counting on you.

Update: After reading Boylan's testimony to the judges, I have to say that my initial impression that the bill is about passing people vs. non-passing people (I assume that both trans and cis people who didn't pass would be equally screwd over) was absolutely right. Here's Boylan's conversation with a legislator:
A supporter of the bill (remember that “supporting” means being against trans rights; “opposing” means being for them) said as much. One of the Senators asked, “If a trans person has had surgery, and appears to be female in every sense, how would you be able to know they were in violation of the law?” And the supporter of the bill–another Republican legislator–said, “Well, if I have no way of telling, the person wouldn’t be in violation.” He then looked around and said, “I mean, if you can’t tell, what’s the difference?”

If you meet his standards, whatever they happen to be, then you're not the person this bill is aiming for. Everybody's standards are assumed to be the same. Everybody's understanding of "male" and "female" is assumed to be the same. And if your standards aren't the same? If your understanding isn't the same? If you're a dykey dyke or a really slender guy? If you're wearing the "wrong" clothes or walking the "wrong" way or your facial structure makes people come up to you and ask what's between your legs? If your head is shaved and you're dressed in a hat and coat because it's winter and all the person can see is the tip of your nose, and your eyes and they have to guess your gender because you're all bundled up (not that such a thing would ever happen in sunny Maine)? Well, this bill's for you!. Specifically and deliberately.

Books as Wine: The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew & the Hardy Boys, Carole Kismaric & Marvin Heiferman

First impressions: I have not read the authors' other book, "Growing up with Dick and Jane." This is a coffee-table book which purported to discuss the politics of early childrens' publishing, as well as the historical conception of teen and pre-teen life in America through the idea of famous American mystery series franchises for teens. I thought it would be interesting to read that book, especially since as a young child I inhaled--with equal parts boredom, annoyance, and speed--my mother's collection of 1940's era Nancy Drew books, simply because they were in the house and were printed words on a page, and realized even at the time they were racist, not very original, or well-written. I wanted to see how the authors tackled those topics.

The book started off with a relatively discussion of the building of an early publishing franchise/empire for the newly created idea of "teenagers," which was interesting enough, and relatively straightforward coffee-table-historical-biography fare, if not particularly well-written.

Middle: Halfway through, I still thought it would be interesting to read that book, but realized this book was about as far away from that book as as you could get while still purporting to be the same thing--the way that a chocolate donut hole from Dunkin' Donuts and a 5-layer French mousse dessert with handmade caramel chocolates are both "chocolate desserts," but that's about all that can be said in terms of their similarities.

You can tell which parts of this book are written by the female author, and which parts are written by the male author (hint: the male author writes about the Hardy Boys series); paragraph transitions are just that clunky. This type of book is one that gives me hope that someday my works will be published in softcover, but gives me hope for all the wrong reasons--namely, if they're publishing this dreck, they'll probably enjoy a neatly-formatted ms of any of my high school essays even more. A sample paragraph transition: "On the other hand, unlike Frank and Joe Hardy, who join the line in the literary pantheon of male adventurers, Nancy Drew bears a special responsibility: she stakes out new territory by showing girls how to take action..."

There are also pages in this book which are an attempt to tie the book's main subject--the history of these two American novel series, and their evolving interpretations of the [straight, white] American teenager--to the rise of a special idea of "American teenage culture" and that idea's evolution over the past 150 years. They don't. For instance: there is one page is basically about John Wayne being the 1950's masculine ideal, which is not only a debatable point in and of itself, but is tied to the Hardy Boys' series by the authors basically saying, 'John Wayne has quality x, y, and z. The Hardy Boys do, too.' There's another side-note, about civil rights and race in the 1960's, which doesn't mention either series of books at all: it starts off by basically saying, 'some teens in the 60's were concerned about their clothes and hair as teenagers, but other teenagers had to deal with racism! Here's a stock photo of school integration!' You start to check for tipped-in pages, strange glues or bindings, indicating these pages weren't actually original to the book and were ripped out of a particularly bad American history text and pasted in. Alas.

If the authors wrote this book in their sleep, the photos and illustrations must have been gleaned from a particularly somnambulistic episode.
As far as I can tell, there are three types of illustration in the book:
1.) Scans of out-of-copyright Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew cover art, endpapers, etc.
2.) A bunch of stock photos of people between the ages of 10 and 30 doing things, which are related to the book's main subject matter with captions so transparently padded as to be laughable.

For instance, on a page where the main text discusses the rise of the adult detective/mystery novel and claims, without evidence, that the popular adult format was a publishing goldmine when the heroes became teenagers ("pure inspiration for kids whose lives are defined by changes and confusion, whose growing bodies often feel like haunted houses" [?!?]), there is a sidebar titled, without preamble, "Other Brother Acts," which discusses: The Jackson 5, the Kennedys, the Righteous Brothers, and the Groucho Brothers. No joke. It is left to the reader to make the tenuous, and hilarious, connection between such sidebars and the main "ideas," such as they are, of the book.

I kept desperately wanting to see the book segue into a "Pat the Bunny" parody:
- "The Hardy Brothers are brothers. Here are some other brothers. Many people have brothers. Do you have a brother?"
- "Both Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were made into TV shows. TV shows are generally popular with teenagers. Here are some other TV shows which were popular with teenagers. Can you name any other TV shows which are popular with teenagers?"
- "Nancy Drew's father was a man who was an apolitical cipher of a father figure. Here are some real men who were deeply involved in politics in America, who could arguably be called father figures if you were of a certain political bent. Do you have a political bias and a license from Corbis that only allows you access to certain historical stock photos?"

3.) Scanned-in, copyright-free advertising drawings and line art from the 20's through the 50's, often with no caption at all.

For instance, in the page facing the opening of chapter 2 (creatively titled "Action, Action Action," but in three different typefaces so it looks...action-y), we see a collage made of four images: a cropped partial scan of a Nancy Drew book cover, a photo or film still from the 50's of a "friendly white male neighborhood cop type" laughingly separating two white elementary-school age boys who were throwing ineffective punches at each other, a B&W line drawing of a giant fist which has captured tiny people a la Gulliver's travels, and what appears to be a scan of an interior end-page from a Hardy Boys book. The text accompanying this collage is all about the improbability of the perfect, scenic, idyllic, yet somehow constantly crime-ridden towns which the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew live in.

Finish: At times, it's hard to tell if the authors are aware of their absurd padding of what could otherwise be an informative and relatively factual two-page historical society pamphlet about franchised publishing efforts in the nineteen-teens and are amused by it, or if they are totally unaware of their gender, historical, political, and cultural bias.

Here are some items that point toward the authors' own awareness of the absurdity of this book:
"In fact, the two of them [Nancy Drew and her father Carson] seem more like husband and wife than parent and child--Carson doesn't flinch when his attractive daughter playfully runs her hands through his wavy hair. When the two Drews flirt shamelessly, which they often do, they're unaware of the dark psychological undercurrents that kept twentieth-century shrinks' couches warm."

"[The Hardy Boys] simply affirm their loyalties, believe in their own involunerability and unwavering moral strength, and act out their version of masculinity in a timeless, endless loop of thrilling excitements. The Hardy Boys never stop and, like most men who are married to their jobs, can't imagine retiring."

"Nancy has no mother to apprentice herself to, no homework that needs to be done. She has no worries about money nor chores around the house..."

Here are some items that point toward the authors' plain and painful biases:
"...But shopping at Burk's Department Store or eating dainty luncheons with her nice but conventional friends just isn't enough for ambitious Nancy Drew. The only time she feels truly alive is when she's on a job....when Nancy's not working she feels 'empty,' she can't sit still and seems restless at play. Lucky for her that just as she's obsessively thinking that she'd 'go to the ends of the earth to find another mystery,' someone in need rings her doorbell, or something unsettling...grabs her attention and snaps her back to life." (Yes, that's a continuation of the above sentence).

"The Hardys' boy friends are important throughout the series, but because the preteen kids reading the Hardy Boys are not particularly interested in romance, the presence of girls in the mysteries is insignificant. They have to make an appearance, of course, for otherwise the Hardy Boys and their pals' sexuality would be a little suspect."

"Young teen girls like the thrill of romance, not the ickiness of sex, and that may explain why Nancy Drew's a little bit blase on the subject of romance[...]Nancy doesn't need Ned. She's got her own car and money and is too busy to be needy. To be honest, Nancy knows that Ned's got nowhere else to go; he lives to serve her and isn't interesting enough to merit a book series of his own."

A sidebar, discussing the rise of the popularity of mystery fiction based on true crimes of the 20's, is illustrated with another seemingly unrelated stock photo, this one of a hangman's noose. And then I got to this sentence: "Bullet-riddled bodies, sexpot killers, and machine-gun blowouts became the symbols of hard-boiled detective fiction, now known as 'crime novels' and lambasted by some critics, who called them 'really prolonged literary lynchings.' (Really. Really really. I shit you not).

And then there are really the sentences that make you wonder if this book isn't a sadistic plot on the part of the authors to drive you crazy trying to decide between self-aware, ironic arch commentary winking at itself, the most breathtakingly unaware stereotyping you've ever seen, something that makes you laugh in horror:
"Teen detective Nancy Drew is nothing like most young girls--boy-crazy, always on the phone, morbid, mooning over unicorns, or subject to fits of uncontrollable giggles. [...] A clotheshorse with an ever-expanding wardrobe, Nancy acts out every girl's desire for material goods..."

"Nancy's been raised to take men for what they are in her world--sometimes helpful, sometimes troublesome, but more often than not, criminals. She's usually more capable than they are; no wonder they tie her up, gag her, lock her in closets, and knock her unconscious."

"[Nancy Drew's] persona--equal parts girl, boy, teenager, and adult--allows her to blossom in a man's world without giving up the perks of being a girl and frees her and her readers from a prison of gender expectations."

This book is a sexist, racist, boring bit of tripe, with an interesting three-pages-at-most aside on the history of publishing syndicates which catered to childrens' literature as a new market, and another half-paragraph at the end about the fact that the books were eventually revised to take out some of the most egregious stereotypes about non-white WASPS (not how they were revised, not why--that would have been interesting--just that they were). The subject of the book was sexist, racist bits of tripe for children, but it was made more horrible to read by the fact that the authors knew this, and could only sporadically bring themselves to comment acerbically on the dark undertones of the otherwise stupid, repetitive, impossible, perfect, biased, sheltered lives of the characters these books held up as role models.

I guess that if the authors had consistently trashed the books, perhaps they wouldn't have gotten paid for writing it, but I wonder if they would have been happier people. I also wonder if they really wanted to trash the books consistently, which is a rather unsettling thing to wonder about.

In the end, this book was worth reading only because I knew if I finished it, I would be able to ethically write this review, trashing both the book and its fawning devotion to both series, which was a joy to do.

Pairs well with: a light trepanning.

Wine this book most reminds me of: the dusty 6-pack of 1987 "Seasons' Best" holiday beer sitting in the basement of my parents' home since that date, which they will not throw out, but cannot drink--at least not without major stomach pumping.

I've been reading this piece about the Eddie Long scandal [summary: yet another anti-gay pastor accused of having gay sex with young adults in his pastoral care], and how the idea of the "prosperity gospel" of Long's church feeds into the scandal, over at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog (the piece itself is written by Coates' friend Jelani Cobb though it's on Coates' blog).

In the comment thread there, people have been discussing the idea, the historical roots and the absurdities, of the "prosperity gospel" idea. For those of you not up on your Christian dogma and theology, this is basically the idea that you should pray to god for literal wealth, which makes you better able to reflect the glory of God to others who see you and know you've got it together because of God, which reflects well on God, etc. This great Chick-tract-esque comic about "Supply-Side Jesus," co-authored by Al Franken, pretty much sums up the whole movement.

Another commenter, Maretha2, summed up a dissertation she'd edited, giving a concise summary of the historical and social reasons why White Christians and African-American Christians interpreted, and still interpret, the idea of the "prosperity gospel" somewhat differently. Of the African-American interpretation of the "prosperity gospel," she wrote, The world says you can't get ahead--but with God you're more than a Conqueror. And the King wants his children to live well--it reflects well on God if his children aren't poor and pitiful.

And I thought about that, and realized how and why that theological idea,
it reflects well on God if his children aren't poor and pitiful, was drummed into me as a child in church in terms of clothing and appearance. I've never quite believed it, and always thought it patently ridiculous, but the conflict between this "it reflects well on God if you dress up for church" idea I was taught and how I actually felt is, as far as I can tell, pretty much the entire root of my conflicted thoughts about clothes, and my ambivalence about and joy in clothes, and a lot of my ambivalence and conflicted thoughts about the beauty inherent in my own body. I feel like I've just dug up one huge dandelion, and can see how ridiculously long the root was.

( Here was my response to Maretha2's post, which made me realize all the above as I was writing it. I swear it gets back to general theology eventually. )
--
And that is why I am going to get a tattoo of a deep-sea fish on my body, as soon as I can afford it, to remind myself, when I forget, that I am beautiful, until I don't forget anymore. Because I am beautiful, and I deserve to know that.

I might put some of the text in, too, about the bees or about the fish or about "didn't even have the eyes to see them," but I haven't decided on that yet. However, I am definitely getting a fish. I haven't decided which fish yet, though. Can you help me? (Vote is non-binding, since this is going to be on my body and not yours.) :D

Candidates include both glowing and non-glowing fish:
- Lanternfish
- Anglerfish (though maybe not, because damn those things are toothy)
- Daggertooth, which looks pretty awesome (this is a new species of Daggertooth discovered in '08 in Antarctica. The record-setting specimen of the Nettled Daggertooth species was hermaphroditic.)
- A Barracudina
- Rattail
- Tripod Fish [this is a video]
- Coelacanth, a fish of which I am terminally fond
- Stoplight Loosejaw, a kind of deep-sea dragonfish which hunts with a red (essentially invisible) beam of light and synthesizes chorophyll from its prey in order to see [damn!]

Feel free to point me toward other deep sea fish I've missed here (fish only please, no other deep-sea glowy things. Stingrays are ok, since technically they are fish. Also, I like stingrays).

In short: there's a seriously worthwhile discussion over at Coates' blog; go and read it!

From an article about a presidental straw poll at the recent Values Voters Summit:

Abortion was the leading determinant, followed by government spending, repeal of healthcare reform, protection of religious liberty and national security.

In a speech earlier Saturday, Gingrich outlined what he described as the two greatest threats to the nation: a "social secular machine" and radical Islamic extremism.

I find these these events, and the articles about them, interesting not so much for tracking what values they people who attend these events espouse, but because the people at these events are often in a position to use terms describing said values. You see a lot of newer coinages--words known in back rooms and in the halls of congress, but not on the street--brought into the public sphere for the first time during events like this.

Look at "social secular machine." That's going to take off on CNN soon, if it hasn't already. The GOP has talked a lot in the past few decades about what constitutes a social unit, what should constitute a social unit, the decay in the social unit, etc. But here, the idea of being "social" is becoming tainted through association with that bad-boy adjective, "secular," and the vaguely uncomfortable connotations of "machine." (Not to mention "socialism." It wasn't explicitly mentioned in Gingrich's threat-list, but the echoes are contained in the roots of the word themselves, and if people weren't talking about socialism as evil at the Values Voters Summit I'll eat my hat). There's no recognition that people are the ones who possess the quality of secular-ness; there's just this idea that groups of secular people are a machine. The word "machine" conjures up a lot of images--ants, production lines, shiny metal rivets--but none of the connotations of the word "machine" are particularly human, or particularly friendly. After all, humans create machines to do the work that they, as humans, don't want to do. So, as far as I can tell, the first danger is "groups of people who don't have a religion."

The second group of people, radical Islamic extremists, seems more forthright, but since this country can't decide what, exactly, constitutes radical Islamic extremism as opposed to normal Muslim belief or practice, in the meantime there's a panic about everybody who's Muslim. Nobody is paying much attention to the people who say, "I'm not a radical Muslim," except for the the people whose job it is to discuss the idea that those moderates may not be telling the truth. So, as far as I can tell, the second danger is "pretty much all Muslims, at least until we can figure out what our definition of radical is, which hasn't happened in the last decade."

Where does this leave us? We have "Christians," "Jews," and "other religions that are too small to matter to us in terms of votes and/or that have not yet committed acts of terrorism against America and hence come to our attention."

I don't understand how this same Values Voters Summit made "protecting religious liberty" a priority...

...Oh, wait. That's totally code for "we can't say 'oppose the homosexual agenda' anymore, because we have a few gay friends now, so we've started saying that our religion is attacked whenever those gay friends want to do something our religion tells us it's wrong for them to do."

That's what's been happening in the news and in the point/counterpoint columns we've been seeing for the past few years: once the cultural window shifted from "doing this is objectively gross" to "doing this is subjectively gross," the people who subscribe to that particular brand of subjectivity as part of their cultural identities gradually shifted to arguing for that cultural identity's right to retain that subjective assessment of grossness.

Here's the thing: I agree that people who subscribe to that particular brand of subjectivity as part of their cultural identities should have the right to retain that cultural identity's subjective assessment of grossness, even if I vehemently disagree with their particular cultural identity's assessment of grossness.

However, I do not think that the assumption of a cultural identity should shield the people who assume that identity from criticism of that identity's subjective assessment of grossness, or from criticism of that identity as a whole in terms of the policies and ideas it spreads as a group.

I also think that one religious cultural identity's subjective assessment of grossness should not take precedent over:
- all other religious or secular cultural identities' subjective assessments of grossness
- any other religion's cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness
- any other secular cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness

In America, separation of civil and religious law should ensure that:
- there are a multiplicity of secular cultural identities and their subjective assessments of grossness
- there are a multiplicity of religious cultural identities and their subjective assessments of grossness

However, this is not currently happening. Instead, we are being told that one (or maybe two?) historically and emotionally important and widespread religious cultural identities' subjective assessments of grossness (the Christian right's assessment, or possibly the "Judeochristian" right's assessment) should take precedent over all and any other secular and religious cultural identities' subjective assessments of grossness--because that one religious cultural identity is historically and emotionally important and widespread.

The members of that one historically and emotionally important and widespread cultural identity feel free to tell the members of all other religious and secular cultural identities that:
- their religious or secular cultural identities' subjective assessments of grossness are wrong
- their religious or secular cultural identities have no or harmful values in terms of the policies and ideas they spread as a group
- that particular religious cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness should be given primacy over all other religious and secular cultural identities.

And the members of all those other religious and secular cultural identities would feel free to refute those ideas.

If that was what was actually happening, we would be having a debate on somewhat more equal footing. The historically and emotionally important and widespread cultural identity of Christianity would still have more of a foothold because of its historical roots and its widespread adoption, but that problem is at least a known bug.

But that's not all that's happening.

What is actually happening? If members of any other religious and/or secular cultural identities object to the cultural primacy of one religious cultural identity, they are told that because the people in question also have a right to their religious cultural identity and its subjective assessment of grossness (which is true). But they are also told that people with any other cultural identities, religious and/or secular, have no right to question:
- that religious cultural identity's subjective assessment of grossness
- the religious cultural identity's value as a whole in terms of the policies and ideas it spreads as a group
- the primacy of that particular religious cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness over all other religious and secular cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness.

That is untrue.

And that one religious cultural identity? It's already got power, enshrined in politics, law and culture, and is doing its best to ignore or defame all other religious or secular cultural identities in those arenas in order to retain its primacy and keep the other cultural identities from not only obtaining primacy, but from obtaining much power at all.

So we have Unitarians (for instance, among other religious cultural identity groups) unable to religiously marry (a religious cultural action) religious queer people (a religious cultural identity group), due to the political power of the primary religious cultural identity group.

We have judges (a secular cultural identity group) unable to civilly marry (a secular cultural action) atheist queer people (a secular cultural identity group), due to the political power of the primary religious cultural identity group.

We have Christians (the primary religious cultural identity group in the US) using their political power and cultural primacy to ~successfully argue that it is unfair that queer people are able to question their religious cultural identity's subjective assessment of grossness, their religious cultural identity's value as a whole in terms of the policies and ideas it spreads as a group, and the primacy of their particular religious cultural identity's subjective assessments of grossness over all others.

Yet what does the Christian right do when arguing for the retention of their cultural primacy and political power in secular American law? They question queer people's subjective assessment of grossness, queer people's secular cultural identity as a whole in terms of the policies and ideas they spread as a group, and try to argue that queer folks' particular secular cultural identity's subjective assessment of grossness has primacy over their own understanding (at the same time, they use language that implies that their own subjective assessment of grossness is still, and still should be, the most powerful).

Do I think that people in America have freedom of speech, such that the people with the culturally dominant religious subjective assessment of grossness may insinuate that I am a danger to children, and religion, and a menace to society, in their TV ads? Yes, but I should also have freedom of speech, such that I can shout about their lies.
I have this right as a queer person in this day and age and location, but I am consistently told, in words and in actions, that it is unsafe to shout too loudly, and I am constantly reminded that I just got the ability to speak.

Do I think that people in America have freedom of religion, such that the people with the culturally dominant religious subjective assessment of grossness may refuse to marry me to the person I love in a particular place of worship with a particular policy of believing that I am a sinner? Yes, but if I am religious, I should also have the freedom of religion such that I can go to another place of worship with a particular policy of believing that I am not a sinner, and they should be able to marry me to the person I love.
I do not have this right as a queer person, in this day and age and location, because the people with the culturally dominant religious subjective assessment of grossness have successfully used their power to defend their position that I should not be able to marry the person I love in a religious ceremony.

Do I think that people in America have freedom of religion, such that the people with the culturally dominant religious subjective assessment of grossness may refuse to marry me to the person I love in a particular place of worship with a particular policy of believing that I am a sinner? Yes, but if I am not religious, I should also have freedom of religion such that I can go to a place where civil marriages are performed, and they should be able to marry me to the person I love.
I do not have this right as a queer person, in this day and age and location, because the people with the culturally dominant religious subjective assessment of grossness have successfully used their power to defend their position that I should not be able to marry the person I love in a non-religious ceremony.

This is the most ridiculous, and dangerous, definition of "protection of religious liberty" I've ever seen.

And it's already becoming a buzzword, a shorthand.

Watch for it, and defend against it wherever you see it.

Yay. PA no longer requires transsexual people to get SRS before changing the gender designation on their drivers' licenses.
I am actually a little suprised this happened in PA, as its politics are sometimes contentious, with Philadelphia itself being a little contentious and Philadelphia vs. the Rest of PA also being differently contentious. But they did the right thing!

Thanks to rm.

The meatloaf analogy

In rm's journal, trinker wrote a comment about how surviving abuse makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get.

I wanted to expand on that a little, and wanted to put it in a place where I could talk about how that was rekevant to my own situation right now.

To trinker's comment, I would add to this that it makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get--even if they don't want it, even if they detest it, even if getting it is actively bad for them. And when people are told and believe that they should be grateful for getting things that are bad for them over and over again, they generally end up not being able to articulate what it is that would actually be good for them, because they have never had the opportunity to have something that was good for them, whether they got it for themselves or had other people give it to them.

When you are starving for food, and someone hands you meatloaf, you are going to eat it even if you don't like meatloaf. You are going to eat it even if you are allergic to meatloaf, if you are hungry enough. And if all that the people who cook for you know how to make is meatloaf, you are eventually going to learn to eat and probably cook meatloaf, even if you don't want it. Then, once you've learned to eat it all the time without throwing up, you will start to wonder if you really do like meatloaf--after all, you're eating it all the time.

Then, you learn that other people eat other things--beans, squash, fish, ice cream, sometimes even meatloaf. At first you are surprised--people eat a variety of things? You spend a while adjusting to that idea, and then you go to the kitchen and tell the chef about pumpkins and they say, "but my meatloaf is the very best!" or "sorry, I don't know how to make salad; you'll have to make do with meatloaf!" or "you don't like my meatloaf? Fine! Don't eat tonight, then!" or "but you've been eating my meatloaf your whole life, so you must like it--and look at how healthy you are! " These last two arguments are quite convincing, because you a.) don't want to stave, and b.) you yourself were already wondering if maybe your hatred for meatloaf was irrational--it reinforces that self-doubt that was already there. You never stopped to wonder if you could have become more healthy if you ate soup instead: for one thing, you'd never had the opportunity to try soup because you'd never had it in your kitchen. And for another, you had no reason to think that eating something else would fix the problem, since when other people said they ate other things and were "normally healthy" you assumed that meant that they were constantly sick, since that was "normally healthy" for you and everyone who you knew, since you all ate from the same kitchen.

But then you finally figure out that maybe you should to learn how to cook.

You go to the cook and ask to use the kitchen, but they won't let you make anything other than meatloaf; so you have to go elsewhere to learn to cook.

There are three options from that point.

( Please read below the LJ cut, this is cut only for length and not for importance. )

I have been--am--guilty of this fundamental selfishness, in terms of relationships. I think that is because I believed that the only permissible way to live with and love others in a relationship--and in turn be lived with and be loved by those others--was the already socially sanctioned way of showing those things. Which is just not true.

Which is probably why I spent a lot of time in the past six months deconstructing arguments against gay marriage and following the news about worldwide queer rights and Prop 8--I was using my thoughts about what was actually happening as a tool to try and work through my feelings about the social sanction of marriage. After the first few months, I was even able to articulate to myself that I was using all that reading and writing as a tool to get to something else, a means to an end, but I wasn't quite sure what end I was looking for. (I was so crushed when the prop 8 victory was handed down a day before R. and I broke up, but the reason I was crushed didn't make sense to me--we had never planned on getting married in CA anyway, so why would the timing have such an affect on me and my relationship, personally? Turns out I was crushed because the social sanction aspect so central to the case was something that I had really believed I needed to have a happy, loving relationship, and at the very point that that social sanction was making global news headlines, I no longer had a happy, loving relationship for those sanctions to apply to). It was that reading and writing and thinking that led me to realize that I didn't actually want or need those social sanctions to have a loving relationship, and further led me to realize that my insistence on those sanctions was what led me to ignore my own idea of what I actually wanted, which led me to destroy the loving relationship I actually had going on already. [After some reflection, I don't think that I destroyed the relationship, and I don't think it was the pressure for social sanction that led it to be destroyed. I do however, think that my insistence on the sanction let me to ignore what I wanted.]
This is not to say that other people shouldn't want or need social sanctions, because I think the vast majority of people do, and deserve them. I will continue to fight for gay marriage. I just won't continue to fight for it for me anymore, because it's not what I want.

(The meatloaf analogy, BTW, is both a metaphorical and a literal analogy--I'm vegan and I literally get the "wow, this is so good but it's so weird, I don't think I could eat it every day; are you sure you don't want steak--and you aren't losing any weight, are you?" with every family dinner for which I make and bring my own food. (When I was a preteen and decided to become pescatarian, my parents forbid me from buying and/or cooking my own food at home. I would eat what they cooked and pick out the bits of meat. I survived a year on frozen/canned side-dish vegetables, pasta, and McDonald's caesar salads, before I realized that I could not get enough protein without the tofu that I could not buy or cook, and went back to eating meat for my own long-term health.) The whole point of bringing the food in the first place is to enable me to make the food choices that are right for me, and stay emotionally and physically healthy by doing so), but my mom just complains that eating fish would make me healthier and feels bad that I won't eat her turkey gravy, and my dad won't try anything made of tofu at all, though I think he had three slices of vegan cake).

I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with food--I didn't like the food I was being given, but didn't have an opportunity to eat kind of food I wanted much, wasn't allowed to have my own diet when I found out my ideal foods were radically different from those of the people around me, and was told my choices were invalid so began to doubt my own ideas about what I liked and whether my food opinions were just totally invalid.

I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with relationships--I didn't have an opportunity to get much attention as a kid, and didn't like what attention I was given. But when I expressed this, I was told that it was not acceptable to ask for or want different kinds of affection, because the kinds of attention I was given were the kinds they could give, and the prevailing socially sanctioned idea my parents and I had of love was "the parents will love to the best of their ability, and since that is all they can do, the child will know and feel loved" -- even though that doesn't really follow. Even when I found out that my ideal forms of getting attention and expressing love and affection were acceptable to ask for from people who weren't my parents, I still didn't have a good understanding of what kinds of attention I did want, or if I wanted attention at all, or if I wanted it how to get it or give my own.

I think this problem, though, has gone a long way toward being solved in the past decade. Some highlights: I learned a lot about what kind of types of affection I actually wanted and about what kinds were no good for me. I learned that it was ok to desire them, and to ask for them. I learned how to say "no" and "yes" when someone gave them to me, and mean it. I learned it was ok to say "I don't know," and wait. I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself beyond "what I desire in my relationships." I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself within my relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires in their relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for themselves beyond "what they desire in their relationships."

All those things are really important.

I had started thinking about keeping a relationships and sex blog before rax 's and my recent breakup, and have now decided that it is more important than ever for me to start one.

I realize that to some of you the idea about blogging (rather than simply privately journaling) about relationships and sex may seem crass or too uncomfortably open, and I have to say that while I do not agree with your opinion--I think a blog, any blog, can be a tool for both private and public conversation and reflection in a way that a private journal cannot be--I don't want people who won't want to read about things that will make them uncomfortable to feel like the idea of my writing about this stuff was going to be sprung on them. So, I'm going to keep this post up top for several weeks, so people can really give consideration to whether they want to be on my new relationships and sex blog friends-list, or not.

I will probably start writing in said blog later today.

Please comment below if you would like to opt-ON to the friends list for the new blog. Otherwise, you will not be on it.

You can also ask questions, etc.

Thanks!