Category Archives: Politics and Culture

What Country Is This?

This morning, in the bluest of blue states, I woke up to the news that a racist, sexist demagogue would be the next president of the United States. My world quaked and settled off-kilter. It reminded me of the day after 9/11, when realities I’d taken for granted literally crumbled, and I no longer felt I could predict what it meant to live in America. This time, though, the threat comes from within. I am frightened to realize that a large percentage of my fellow citizens are either prejudiced against minorities and women, or indifferent to our survival.

This morning, in the bluest of blue states, this Episco-pagan has never felt more Jewish. Growing up on New York’s Lower East Side in a non-religious but culturally Jewish family, I can’t remember a time I didn’t know about the Holocaust and the pogroms. We watched “The Sound of Music” and “Fiddler on the Roof” as history, not just entertainment. My mother got me a passport when I was born “in case we have to emigrate to Israel” and always reminded me that our host country could become hostile overnight. Now, going to Israel is not a win, either in terms of safety or social justice (I don’t have the right to displace the Palestinians!), but the mindset endures. I’ve read too many books about assimilated, well-off European Jews who refused to believe that their neighbors would turn on them. This racial memory needles me when I read Christian thinkpieces (usually by straight white men) about how we need to rise above our political differences and come to the communion table with our enemies.

This morning, in the bluest of blue states, when I opened the door to my 4-year-old son’s room, he greeted me with his thousand-watt smile. “I’m a butterfly!” he exclaimed, jumping on the bed and waving his arms to demonstrate the yoga pose he learned at his Montessori school. I want to live in an America where my son will always be safe to be a butterfly. His best friends are the children of single moms, lesbian couples, and a Muslim-American family. His birthfather is a Central American immigrant. He’s never had to worry about the people he loves, or even notice that they’re different from the “norm” that many voters yesterday were determined to enforce. I struggled with whether to leave him in this state of innocence, or to inoculate him with a little of the rational paranoia that is my birthright. Jewish again, I went with the latter.

“Mommy and Daddy and Grandma are sad today because we don’t like who is going to be in charge of our country.”

“Why?” asked the Young Master, echoing the morning-after cry of Democrats everywhere.

“Some people are very angry because they don’t have enough money for food or going to the doctor. And it’s okay to feel that way. But sometimes when people are angry, they blame the wrong person, just like when you’re upset and you throw a toy even though the toy didn’t do anything wrong. But don’t worry, we will always keep you safe.”

The Young Master, absorbing perhaps 10% of this, drummed his feet against the bathtub and growled to show me what “angry” looks like. We had breakfast and walked to school. I looked at the graveyard across the street, where I had planned to be buried after living the rest of my life in this house, and tried to practice non-attachment.

This morning in the bluest of blue states, I took courage from the survival of queer, Jewish, and African-American people through hundreds of years of oppression. I remembered growing up in the 1980s with the constant fear that President Reagan would push the red button and destroy the planet in a nuclear war. I was inspired by the memoirs I am reading this winter for the Winning Writers self-published book contest, about Jews who escaped Nazi Germany and African-Americans who migrated north in the Jim Crow era to seek equal opportunity. And I re-committed myself to upholding the humanity of all people through my work as a writer and publisher.

I’m still here.

Coming Out Witchy, and Other Links on Spirituality and Trauma

“My gender is witch,” proclaimed poet Charlie Bondhus, concluding a masterful set of published and new works he read at the LGBT Center in NYC last month. (Witch? Which? Switch!) In four words he summed up the elusive quality of our overlapping identities: queer, magician, writer. All involve a commitment to phenomena that may be immeasurable by outsiders and therefore vulnerable to challenge. Am I making this up? And who decided that creativity was a slur, anyway?

Little Red Tarot columnist Andi Grace explores the real obstacles to public witchiness in her latest post, “Coming out of the woo closet: Facing shame, stigma and historical trauma”. They write:

[T]he woo closet is the forces that keep us from being open about the way that magical, energetic, psychic, extra-sensory or spiritual forces nourish and guide us. To my mind, the woo closet is very old and is one of the most powerful spells (or cluster of spells) that keeps us from stepping into our truth and power.

I see the woo closet as being composed of several parts: historical trauma that has roots in the witch burnings, the stigmatization of neuro atypical mental states, and also the legacy and present day impacts of colonization–specifically as it relates to spirituality and conceptions of knowledge and knowing…

…If we accept that our bodies carry trauma from previous generations then we must also accept that unless we find ways to heal that trauma, we will carry it with us in our bodies and spirits. What this means is that, in a very real and tangible way, my body fears for its life in coming out as a witch and this manifests as anxiety, defensive self-judgement and deeply woven feelings of shame. The feeling of fear that I have when being honest that I can see and feel spirits, isn’t one that is just in my head. It’s in my bones and my spirit and it’s literally been burnt and drowned into my memory. And no, it won’t just go away with positive thinking, though that is one small piece of the magic needed to turn the tide of this spell…

…A fundamental mechanism of colonization is devaluing ways of knowing that don’t fit into empirical knowledge systems. This devaluation is used to undermine the sovereignty of indigenous people and ultimately to steal land, resources and labour. It has also been used to justify cultural, spiritual and physical genocide. Much of western science and higher education models are based on the assumption that empirical, measurable “truth” and linear understandings of time are more valid than understandings that do not fit into this box…

…The legacy of colonization and witch hunts has lead many people to believe that things like energy, visions, dream work, astrology, herbalism, tarot and magic are bogus and manipulative pseudosciences that should be disregarded with righteous fervor. Sure, we should be discerning (particularly with regards to oppression and appropriation) and yes some people are lying manipulators, but that doesn’t mean we should just dismiss whole systems of knowledge that have long and rich histories with tremendous learning and guidance to offer us.

Andi Grace’s piece includes useful guidelines and resources for folks with European ancestry to recover pre-Enlightenment ways of knowing, without being appropriative and colonialist in a different way toward nonwhite indigenous cultures. Here, for me, is where trauma and my political ideals get their wires crossed.

I agree completely with the critique of appropriation. But I feel this gut-level resistance to claiming a bond with my ancestors (bad-ass Polish witches, no doubt) because abuse and abandonment have largely severed my ties to my biological family. My mother is the product of multi-generational child abuse and mental illness. I blame my ancestors for our destroyed relationship; I don’t want to summon their spirits! My father is a nice guy but was absent from my life until I was 30. We’re becoming friends, but time will tell whether we ever have that sense of relying on one another like a true family. Perhaps this is where the writer magic comes in: I may have to invent a trustworthy ancestor who can be my guide through Eastern European hexery.

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[Baba Yaga and the skulls of her enemies. Source]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turning to what’s new in the Christian blogosphere, I was struck by this article at the Feminist Newswire, “‘The Least of These’: Black Children, Sexual Abuse, and Theological Malpractice”. Author Ahmad Greene-Hayes, a Ph.D student of religion at Princeton, is the founder of Children of Combahee, a new initiative to end child sexual abuse in black churches. He argues that “respectability politics” combined with homophobic and patriarchal theology in the black church create an environment where secret predators can thrive. Churches’ model of sexual morality/deviance should shift away from upholding rigid gender roles, and toward prioritizing consent and safety–a paradigm that admittedly the Bible does not always support, but here is a case where we must talk back to the Bible.

Black church people have used silence as a means of protection from white racial-sexual terrorists. To mitigate the effects of white supremacist violence, many African Americans do not address intracommunal violence, and in some instances extracommunal violence, because they do not want to portray the race in a negative light or they want to be race loyal, or even race first, everything later. These patterns are deadly and send a loud message that racial justice takes precedence over the justice that every individual deserves in regards to their bodies and psyches—regardless of age, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, religion, or any other marginalized identity.

The inability (or unwillingness) to address sexual violence as an evil that pervades home, church and community is steeped in larger cultural “norms,” though abnormal, of cogitatively dissociating one’s lived experience—in Black flesh—from one’s embodied and experienced sexuality. In other words, the inability to address violence and trauma as it relates to Black sexuality can be traced back to the plantation where rape and torture were codified by law and the theologies of the master class. In some ways, the contemporary Black church—which grew out of enslavement—mirrors the plantation of times past, and survivors are pushing the church to consider its reinscription of master tactics—that is , attempts to abuse, silence, marginalize, shame, victimize, and dehumanize marginal subjects, or as Jesus said, “the least of these.”

For white people reading this analysis, the takeaway message (in my opinion) should be that we can’t fight child abuse without fighting racism. The black church’s code of silence and internalization of toxic mainstream gender roles are an understandable survival strategy for an embattled minority. We have to do our part to end that battle.

Finally, here’s a comprehensive article from the progressive blog Religion Dispatches about campus Christian organization InterVarsity’s recent decision to oust all LGBTQ and affirming staff members. “Inside InterVarsity’s Purge: Trauma and Termination at the Premier Evangelical Student Org” is written by journalist Deborah Jian Lee, author of the well-reviewed book Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women & Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism (Beacon, 2015).

InterVarsity has rolled out a policy that calls for staff who disagree with its theological position to come forward and quit by November 11. If staff members disagree, the national campus ministry stated in a letter to staff, “we trust that they will alert their supervisors and conclude their work [within two weeks].” (The policy does not apply to students, though students who disagree cannot be leaders, and it includes dictates against divorce, pornography and pre-marital sex.)

Supporters of InterVarsity’s decision see the policy as a commitment to “orthodox” theology, while critics call it a “purge.” The news, first reported by TIME on October 6, has unleashed protests from droves of InterVarsity students, alumni, influential InterVarsity Press authors and Christian leaders, many of whom have released petitions calling for the organization to revoke the policy. Within InterVarsity, a number of LGBTQ and ally staff, including Vasquez, have formed “the Queer Collective,” which for months has been pressing executive leaders for unity amid theological differences. They have elevated stories of LGBTQ-affirming people in the organization and documented the mental health impact of LGBTQ exclusion.

Despite their advocacy, InterVarsity announced its policy in a manner that Queer Collective leaders see as severe and punitive. For example, InterVarsity created a “helpline” for staff who felt unsure about the organization’s theological position, but the “helpline” only offered “limited confidentiality,” according to a July email sent to staff workers by then-interim president Jim Lundgren and president-elect Tom Lin. If a staff worker announced their disagreement with InterVarsity’s position and did not declare this to their supervisor, “[the helpline] resource person [would] inform the supervisor.” This, and reports by other staff workers who say they have been questioned about their beliefs, seems to contradict InterVarsity’s claim that it is relying solely on the self-declaration of LGBTQ-affirming staff.

Despite the ministry’s disclosure of the helpline process, “to call something a ‘helpline’ as a place of support and also make it a place of whistleblowing—that’s not just harmful, but also unethical,” said Teresa Pasquale Mateus, LCSW, author of Sacred Wounds: A Path to Healing from Spiritual Trauma. Mateus sees patterns of spiritual abuse in some of InterVarsity’s treatment of LGBTQ-affirming staff and students and warns of serious emotional “collateral damage” in the aftermath of “the purge.” Already, members of the Queer Collective and other InterVarsity insiders say that every day raises new concerns about emotional trauma, unemployment, resignations, disaffiliations, and the future of InterVarsity.

This fracture reflects the larger rupture over sexuality taking place across the evangelical movement…

Lee goes on to describe InterVarsity’s inconsistent treatment of LGBTQ students and staff, their refusal to repudiate the discredited practice of “ex-gay therapy”, and despite all this, the difficulty of turning one’s back on the diverse and passionate Christian community that IV represents for many people.

Leaving isn’t so simple. To many like Vasquez, evangelicals are their people. As Alexis Garretson, a George Mason University senior who identifies as queer and LGBTQ-affirming explained, InterVarsity is actually the friendliest of the campus fellowship options. If students left InterVarsity for greener pastures, they’d have to leave Christian community altogether. “LGBTQ Christians fiercely believe in the faith we have,” explained Garretson. “Asking us to leave goes against our identity.”

To staff workers who have worked for InterVarsity for years and sometimes decades, leaving the ministry means losing both their livelihood and the entire community they’ve built for themselves over the years, sometimes since their own college days. After all, InterVarsity isn’t just a student club, it’s a family. “People here just loved me from the first moment I got here,” Scripps College junior and LGBTQ-affirming InterVarsity member Rachel Geller told me. InterVarsity goes the extra mile to welcome new students, surrounding freshmen with an immediate posse of friends at the start of college, following up with relentless evangelical zeal.

It’s also a lifestyle. Much like the Greek system, the activities are all-consuming: Bible studies, fellowship, dance parties, retreats, prayer meetings, dorm gatherings, group lunches, study dates and so much more. To feel this sense of love and belonging so fiercely every day is intoxicating, students and staff say. It’s what leads so many students to graduate college, join the 1,300 member staff, and build their lives around the organization’s mission. For Vasquez, “InterVarsity was the air I breathed.”

Perhaps the most consequential reason LGBTQ-affirming staff workers want to remain in the fold emerges from their concern that once they leave, LGBTQ newcomers will be isolated in a community that publicly welcomes them but privately misunderstands their most fundamental needs.

Is it just my love-avoidance that makes this description seem a little cultish? Be that as it may, it seems to me that similar reasons keep people connected to abusive partners: to protect the children, or to avoid what seems like the greater trauma of losing an entire family network. Building up new love relationships takes time and courage. Leaving is a leap into the void, at least in the beginning. Some of us decide we’re ready to make it, but woe be to those who pushed us off that cliff.

Sacred Wounds and Rescuing Jesus are going on my very long Amazon wishlist now.

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October Links Roundup: Did I Shave My Legs for This?

Hello, readers. As you can see, things have been busy around here, and the dishes (and emails to myself with “blog about this!”) have piled up. We return this month with some links about gender roles and personal grooming.

This piece about body-hair positivity, from the feminist website Bust.com, got a number of sympathetic comments and personal confessions when I shared it on Facebook this month. The article by Eleonor Botoman features a video from the fashion magazine Allure, in which several young women of different ethnicities share the shaming messages they received about body hair and their journey to accept themselves au naturel.

No girl should be placed in the position of sitting in her mother’s bathroom with a razor because someone (a fashion magazine, friends or family) told them that removing body hair will make them more beautiful. Girls as young as eleven shouldn’t feel insecure about wearing shorts in the summertime because their mom said no or be teased for having darker hair and have to spend hours shaving from head to toe in order to avoid more bullying.

These girls realized that they were wasting so much time keeping up with this ritual. They found self-love through the act of simply stopping and setting down the razor, choosing to spend their time doing other things they enjoyed instead. Letting go of social conventions brought on this new kind of self-acceptance for every natural part of their body.

If you go onto social media and you see a girl post an image with visible body hair (armpit hair, a mustache, pubic hair, you name it), there’s always this massive wave of backlash of comments (usually from male users) as they call her ugly, manly, gross, unhygienic. It’s ridiculous. It’s not like these girls are kicking puppies. As Monica puts it, “I’m literally doing nothing,” so why do people keep reacting in this angry way? It’s just hair! The problem is not a sanitary one. It’s because these women present themselves with visible body hair and disrupt the flawless-is-sexy narrative.

If you’re the kind of girl who enjoys body hair removal, who finds something soothing in taking the time to shave in the shower, then do it! But if you feel like you’re wasting time or don’t want to keep enduring the pain of razor bumps or getting your hair ripped off, then don’t feel pressured to keep removing your body hair! Don’t conform to someone else’s idea of beauty! We need to love our bodies with all of its hair, bumps and stretch marks.

I was that 11-year-old girl, disgusted with my legs because of their pallor and fuzziness, afraid to wear shorts or skirts without uncomfortable stockings. But that was nothing compared to mustache shame. Good Lord, if I could take back the thousands of dollars I spent in my teens and twenties to have my facial hair ripped out with hot wax or electrocuted with needles, I could afford to advertise my novel in every gay magazine in America!

I could have just shaved with a razor, as I do now, but I abhorred the idea for many years because I thought only guys shaved their faces. It would be admitting gender failure, if only to myself. Though the Allure video doesn’t talk about this, the body-hair stigma for women seems intimately connected to society’s policing of the binary. When I was going through puberty, I wish someone could have said to me–and more importantly, to the adults and schoolmates who shamed my ‘stache–that there is such a thing as genderqueer and it is okay.

If, like me, you’ve ever tormented yourself pointlessly with the question, “Am I really nonbinary or do I just hate wearing nylons?”, Ozy’s blog Thing of Things is for you. Ozy is assigned female at birth, identifies as nonbinary, and uses “they” pronouns. In this recent post, “Some Questions for FTMs, Answered”, they take on the argument, common in some cis-feminist circles, that women who transition are mis-identifying their problem as gender dysphoria when it’s really sexism-fatigue. In an ideal world where women’s social roles and safety were not constrained by gender, would any of us still need to reject our womanhood? The end point of this argument is that we should fight to create that ideal world, rather than a world where female-to-male transition or NB identity are normalized.

Ozy’s response is clever, thoughtful, and multifaceted, and is based on the principle that we should respect people’s diverse experiences of selfhood without making them justify it according to a one-size-fits-all ideology. The whole thing is worth a read. I’m highlighting this part because I recognized a quirk of my own life in it. I also feel more comfortable recently with my girly aspects since I started identifying as NB. (The boldfaced part of the quote is a question from the original article to which Ozy is replying.)

What if there was no such thing as hormones or surgeries and you had to just live your life as a lesbian, how would your life be different?

Well, I used to live my life as a queer woman, so here are the differences I’ve observed:

The closest thing to being seen as nonbinary, if you’re presenting as a cis woman, is to be seen as a butch woman, so I made a lot of effort to be seen as a butch woman. I didn’t wear skirts or colors. I didn’t complain when I was in pain. I didn’t admit to liking Disney movies. I was very clear that typically feminine things were stupid, that most girls were stupid, and that I liked hanging out with men and my exceptional non-stupid female friends.

(It always confuses people when I tell them I conformed more to my assigned gender after transition.)

To be clear, this wasn’t conscious. I had no idea what a trans person was, back when I was trying to be a girl. I thought of myself as a woman. But on a subconscious level, I still valued not being either of the binary genders, and if the closest thing I could get to that was being a gender-non-conforming woman, then by God I would watch as many action movies and wear as much black as necessary to make this happen.

And then I transitioned and about six months into my transition– around the point where I realized that this really wasn’t going to go away and I could be nonbinary as long as I wanted– by some mysterious coincidence colors reappeared in my wardrobe, Alan Menken reappeared on my playlists, and I started whining like hell whenever I had a stomachache.

So there you go. I’d much rather not detransition. I think being a gender-non-conforming women should be left to people who actually want to be gender-non-conforming and actually want to be women, instead of to people who are putting up with it because it’s the closest you can get to being nonbinary.

The queer feminist website Autostraddle published this roundtable discussion, “What We Mean When We Say ‘Femme'”, to explore and celebrate the diverse ways that queer people define themselves with this word. One question they asked was whether emotional labor and caregiving is part of your femme identity. Visual artist, educator, and storyteller Rudy Loewe answered with a resounding yes: “It’s allowing a particular kind of tenderness to be part of your identity.” By contrast, beauty blogger Aja (Fit for a Femme) said something closer to my own perspective: “I associate being femme more with vigilance than with emotional labor or self-care. That’s the energy I put into the world and that I feel from other femmes. The emotional force in my life comes from the quality of relationships I seek, not from being femme.” I also related to Erin’s punchy description, though I lack her mechanical skills:

Honestly, my femme experience is entirely tied to my appearance and not at all how I would identify my personality. I say Utility Femme, which to me means I CONTAIN MULTITUDES. Like I’ll be made up and then wear some sensible shoes, or I’ll make sure I have on like eight necklaces and then definitely be able to replace your car’s front bumper. So to me, it feels less like a brand and more like an aesthetic. But you know what? When I see other femmes and femmes with femmes it makes me want to get in a car and drive with the windows down while I blast an air horn out the driver’s side because of how pumped it gets me. 

I don’t associate femme with emotional labor at all, and actually, I don’t really associate femme with tenderness! I equate Femme with being able to ruin someone’s life IN A GOOD WAY if you wanted to, this bubbling-just-beneath-the-surface strength. Not that strength and tenderness are mutually exclusive, but maybe it’s that their approach feels different.

Meanwhile, Cecelia’s words about femme and witchcraft challenged me to rethink my instinctive aversion to the words “emotional labor and care work”. There is a way of being a caring femme that is not codependent, though it is hard to find models for it in our patriarchal culture.

When I broke up with femininity and embraced femme, I felt strong and confident and powerful, but I was left with certain desires that I couldn’t find room for in myself. What was I supposed to do with my desire to nurture, to care, and to love something deeply?

This is why magic and other healing practices are so necessary to how I identify as femme. I use witchy things to care for myself and show other people that I care for them. Reading someone’s tarot is a way to remind them (and myself) that vulnerability is a measure of growth and strength. Lighting a candle and saying a spell for another femme is a strategy that reminds me how important it is to comfort and protect each other. When I didn’t have a personal understanding of the word femme and only understood my caring process through the traditional femininity I inherited, I felt fragile and lost. The differentiation between the two is, in many ways, totally arbitrary — but by taking the word femme on as a project, I was forced to actively investigate and take apart the ways that traditional femininity lived in my body. Claiming femme made me feel like an agent of my own experience, not a passenger.

What does femme mean to you, readers?

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September Links Roundup: Could This Be Magic

Apologies for another long blog hiatus due to book promotion, practicing witchcraft, and reading the picture book Construction Trucks twice a day to the Young Master. (I highly recommend this one, by the way: very informative, with illustrations of multi-ethnic male and female workers. Bet you didn’t know how cement gets to the top of a skyscraper.)

A high blood pressure scare this summer motivated me to rethink my expectations and self-image with respect to health. I wondered, what if I set my sights on true wellness, instead of settling for functioning on top of a constant feeling of fatigue and fragility?

I remain deeply conflicted about how much to have faith in this vision. I have enough friends with PTSD and chronic illness, not to mention the brilliant disability activists I read online, to know that positive thinking can’t wish away every limitation. Our idea of “wellness” is partly constructed by a society with unforgiving norms about bodies and productivity. On the other hand, I’m well aware of my learned helplessness as a trauma survivor and the health toll of a habitually over-activated nervous system that hasn’t learned that the danger is past. As the bumper sticker says, I don’t have to believe everything I think.

A friend sent me Louise Hay’s self-help book You Can Heal Your Life, which gave them great hope during a low point in their recurring health problems. I achieved some stress reduction through her mantras; “I trust in the process of life” was an appealing re-framing of prayer because I’m going through a phase of mistrusting anthropomorphic god/parent figures. However, I found her wider philosophy kind of crazy-making for my personal trauma recovery.

Hay is also a child abuse survivor, and like some other spiritual teachers with this background, e.g. Teal Swan, she has coped by believing that we attract all our negative experiences–either in order to grow spiritually, or because we had the wrong beliefs. This feels to me like a flight from the painful truth of being powerless at our parents’ hands. It also elides the political dimension of trauma, an analysis that has empowered me more than any mantra. I prefer Alice Miller’s advice that our psychosomatic illnesses will clear up when we listen to the child inside. Hay overstates the case by framing all misfortune–medical, financial, relational–as an individual psychosomatic symptom.

I got a reality check from this 2010 article from Tikkun Magazine, reprinted on the blog Common Sense Religion. Be Scofield’s “When Positive Thinking Becomes Religion: How ‘The Secret’ and Law of Attraction Poison Spirituality” skeptically examines the historical lineage of the positive thinking movement, from 19th-century opponents of Calvinism through Christian Science to today’s Oprah Winfrey Show celebrities. These movements always run the risk of becoming cultish and neurotic because there’s no process for recognizing factors outside an individual’s control (boldface emphasis mine):

While there are no claims of virgin births or bodily resurrections made by the new prophets of positive thinking they do preach many miraculous and magical ideas. And the law of attraction’s most prominent promoters borrow tactics from the play book of Christian fundamentalism, ones that are found in any group based on psychological totalism. Like other religions the law of attraction (as it is taught) promises salvation from the difficulties, anxieties and tensions of everyday life. Charismatic leaders viewed as Godlike shout the gospel in auditoriums and halls instead of churches, practitioners meet in small groups comparable to Bible study and devotees believe they have discovered a revelatory truth. The storyline of many of these new prophets is that they were once lost but are now saved.

The law of attraction is actually the perfect example of a postmodern salvation. It is individualistic (no community needed, one person’s thoughts run the world); narcissistic (the universe will supply ME with anything I ask for); focused on immediate gratification (its central teaching is to “feel good now”); materialistic (strongly emphasizes achieving money and wealth); detached from structural reality (lacks an awareness of political/social/cultural systems) and is hypocritical (claims to be free from religious dogma when it is actually reproducing it). Just like Christianity created a religion about Jesus which most often disregards the teachings ofJesus, a religion has been created about positive thinking while distorting its real meaning.

Many Christians believe that Jesus is the answer for everything. All you need to do is accept him as your savior and pray when in need. When Jesus (the invisible, magical and wish granting friend) doesn’t answer a prayer the error can never be with the doctrine or dogma but rather it resides in the individual who doesn’t have enough faith or hasn’t prayed hard enough. This aspect is perhaps one of the greatest ironies in the history of positive thinking because as the new thought pioneers in the late 19th century broke away from the harsh Calvinism of the day they kept its most central element: incessant and obsessive self-monitoring of the internal landscape. Both the conservative Christian and law of attraction devotee must continually purge themselves searching for either sin or negative thinking. But rest assured both are not allowed to question the doctrine or dogma because this is just more evidence of their own shortcomings. Once the idea that the doctrine is perfect, flawless and divine has been planted the believer has only one place to examine and deconstruct when something goes wrong: his or her own mind and soul. Critical thinking in both cases is portrayed as dangerous and harmful.

The same conflict causes me to waver in my commitment to my new spiritual path, which is turning out to be a combination of Tarot, spell-casting, and some vestiges of folk Christianity (saints, hymns, the Holy Spirit). In both liberal and conservative churches, I used to shield myself from the weakness of my faith through intense engagement with theology. My current practice is intuitive and charismatic–not in the sense of speaking in tongues, but in expecting effects from my invocation of spiritual forces. I have to conceive of prayers (which is what spells are) as making changes in this world, not merely as a psychological trick to make myself feel better.

Some of my new role models for responsible magic are the bloggers Clementine Morrigan and Maranda Elizabeth. They’re both queer, disabled, survivor witches who use Tarot and creative rituals to re-center themselves in their life stories. Morrigan’s seawitch ‘zines are affordable ($3 US & Canada, $4 elsewhere) and filled with experimental essays, poems, and collages placing ripped-out phrases from psychiatric reports into a ritual context. Magic serves as critique of a mental health system with no room for non-normative bodies or spiritual modes of healing. In her recent post “Theory, Magic, More-Than-Human Worlds, and the Arts”, she reflects on a summer writing conference and the difficulty of translating her sources of inspiration into academia’s approved ways of knowing:

From a theoretical standpoint I am interested in how the more-than-human world can be a source of relationship, solidarity, and strength, in the face of trauma and violence. My lived experience as a survivor of child abuse has shown me that the more-than-human world can be sustaining. My relationship with trees, birds, and landscapes are what allowed me to survive. These relationships, which continue to be central to my recovery and growth, are difficult for me to articulate. These relationships were never linguistic and they were not relationships I spoke about with others. The safety I felt in the presence of trees was a private wonder, one which I now long to express.

As a writer and artist I am interested in how the arts can create space in which to speak trauma, in ways which traditional discourses do not allow. Because the violence I experienced happened within the family, within the home, as so much violence does, and because this violence existed in the double-reality of simultaneously being true and untrue, as so much violence does, and because the body experiences violence in nonlinguistic ways, I have found that mainstream discourses of trauma fail in expressing the complex embodied realities of trauma. The arts have opened up space for me to express aspects of trauma which I have been unable to express in any other way. The arts have also offered me the work of other trauma survivors which are instrumental in the process of my own healing…

… As much as I feared bring my creative practice into conversation with academic work, I feared bringing my spiritual practice into the conversation even more. Again and again, in subtle and overt ways, spiritual ways of knowing are dismissed and laughed at within academic writing. Each time I read theory which quickly and without engagement dismisses spiritual ways of knowing, I feel discouraged from being honest within my academic work. My creative practice and my magical practice bleed into each other. They both involve ritual, pause, noticing, intuition, and awareness of the connectedness of things. Writing poetry, filming plants, planting a pollinator garden and noticing bees, each of these practices returned me to my magic. This return opened up a deep space of sadness and longing. I began to feel deeply ambivalent about my academic work. I use language like ‘more-than-human relationships’ but I am not honest about the spiritual nature of these relationships. My creative work this summer resulted in a crisis of faith, not in magic, but in academia. I began to wonder if I could exist within academia if I could not be honest about the role that witchcraft plays in my experience of the world, and in my knowledge production. This resulted in the writing of a paper titled “Can Theory Be a Spell?” in which I unpack the importance of spirituality in my life, as a survivor of violence and sober alcoholic, and take the first steps toward bringing my magic into conversation with my theory.

Buy “Can Theory Be a Spell?” as a ‘zine for $3 here.

Maranda Elizabeth offers online Tarot readings “for weirdos, queerdos, misfits, & outcasts!” Her series “Exploring Trauma, Madness, Chronic Illness, & Disability with Tarot” meditates on selected cards with an emphasis on their significance for these issues. She wants us to discover the elders or role models in our “lineage” as mad people–a provocative question, since I’ve always thought of my family’s mental health history as a curse or a burden. My biological mother owned several popular books on magic (I suppose everyone did in the 1970s, but still…), used to brag that she had psychic powers to know what I was thinking (it usually wasn’t good), and was somewhat proud when my aunt pointed out her resemblance to the Wicked Witch during our annual viewings of The Wizard of Oz. Embracing my magic potential scares me because she didn’t use her powers for good. Some part of me would rather have no power than risk being connected to her this way.

Not coincidentally, this year I’ve been binge-watching Once Upon a Time on Netflix. This fantasy-melodrama features fairy-tale characters trying to change their fates in the modern world. I wouldn’t say it has a consistent theology, but it tackles the great questions of religion: Do people have free will to choose good or evil, or are they predestined by the Author or their own intergenerational trauma? Is anyone completely good or bad? Does magic always come with a price that’s too high?

By the end of the first season, supernatural events convince the skeptical characters that their enchanted cosmos is not a delusion. The town psychologist is bumbling and ethically compromised (and also doesn’t remember that he’s really a cricket) so no one makes a strong sanity-saving case against magical thinking. So far, no villains have tried, cult-leader style, to make people believe in fake magic as a smokescreen for real abuses of power.

In the world I live in, belief in magic is riskier than that. And under “magic” I include the Law of Attraction and other New Age philosophies that attribute practical power to your intentions, as well as Christian prayers and rituals. I return as always to the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” The wisdom is the kicker. In my abusive family of origin, I was groomed to fix adult problems that I actually had no power or duty to change, while having to resign myself to unnecessary physical pain and fear. So every time I light a candle to ask St. Dymphna or Ursula the Sea Witch for protection, I wonder, “Is this just my child self escaping into a fantasy world, avoiding the knowledge of my helplessness?”

Perhaps the conclusion of that Tikkun article can offer some guidelines. The author asks “What is a healthy spirituality?”

…[A]ny holistic system of spiritual or psychological development and transformation embraces the shadow. The law of attraction’s incessant avoidance of all things “bad” and obsession with feeling happy all of the time is what leads to narcissism and a dangerous denial of reality. A much more healthy but difficult approach is to learn to be present with what is arising in your awareness whether it is feelings of sadness and anger or joy and happiness. There is very little depth to a spirituality that is based on a superficial and shallow attempt to be happy all the time, but yet this depth is crucial for true growth. When devotees of the law of attraction are unable to be perfectly happy it is easy for them to blame themselves for failing to apply the law properly, thus doubling the pain or sadness…

…[I]f a spiritual tradition makes cosmological and metaphysical claims about the universe it needs to be done in the context of the reality of immense structural inequality, oppression and injustice. We can ask, can this idea about the nature of existence hold up in the face of racism, Imperialism and war? Or does the idea simply justify the dominant powers that be by empowering them to believe the divine or cosmic order of the universe is on their side? These are just a few of many elements that can be described as part of a spiritual system that is ethically sound and responsible.

Come to think of it, the characters in “Once Upon a Time” do sort themselves into reality-based or denial-based worldviews. Belief in magic is not the dividing line. Rather, it’s the kind of magic they practice. Good magic is powered by true love; takes moral responsibility for using power; sometimes requires sacrifice; is merciful even to wrongdoers; doesn’t trample on others’ free will; and is used for the benefit of others as well as one’s self. Bad magic tries to acquire love through control and deception; is frequently focused on revenge, blaming everyone but one’s self for bad outcomes; benefits at others’ expense; can be defeated by true love; and if practiced by women, causes them to expose more cleavage. (Hey, I never said the show was immune from sexism.) While practitioners of both types of magic may feel trapped by intergenerational trauma, the bad magicians use it as an excuse to repeat their forebears’ misdeeds, while the good ones say, “The buck stops here,” even if they have to give up something they really want.

In other words, the power of magic–the power of intention, desire, and belief–is like any other power. Delusional, selfish people wield it badly, and self-aware, empathetic people wield it as well as possible (though not perfectly). I can’t protect myself from all possible harms or errors by refusing to commit to anything. I guess I’m an existentialist witch.

Image result for regina once upon a time images

Regina the (reformed?) Evil Queen from “Once Upon a Time”.  (Source)

August Links Roundup: The Negative in Sex-Positive

This past March I attended the 5 College Queer Gender & Sexuality Conference at Hampshire College. One of the best workshops was “Sex-Negativity Never Happened”, led by Skramz Geist, a radical philosophy professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. We talked about how the “sex-positive” norm in queer communities can be exploited to push people’s sexual boundaries or create an uncomfortably sexualized environment. A theme that emerged was that no community rules are immune to subversion by a determined predator, whether they’re the consent and communication scripts of queer and kink spaces, or the rigid sexual boundaries in conservative churches, where I once sought protection from an emotionally numb and risky hookup culture. I read very little theology anymore, because it failed to perform what for me was its prime function: identifying safe people and creating safe spaces.

Very few hits come up when I Google “compulsory sexuality”, which is sad because this concept would have taught my 20-year-old self that feminism was about more than the right to get drunk at frat parties and have abortions. This 2010 review of Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women, from the feminist blog Fannie’s Room, provided a rare moment of validation for my motives in becoming a Young Republican:

Dworkin argues that, for good reason, Rightwing women fear the Left. The Left of the sixties was “a dream of sexual transcendence…. It was- for the girls- a dream of being less female in a world less male; an eroticization of sibling equality, not male domination” (91). What this meant in practice, however, was that it essentially freed men to fuck women “without bourgeois constraints” (91). What this meant for women was “an intensification of the experience of being sexually female- the precise opposite of what these girls had envisioned for themselves….freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by more men, a sort of lateral mobility in the same inferior sphere” (93). The Left, that is, continued to construct women as sex, while men continued to be constructed as the Doers Of Important Things.

Further, “sexual liberation” created an expectation that the sexually liberated were ready for sex at any time, effectively negating the concept of consent. Those who were not ready for sex were considered “repressed,” not liberated. For women, for whom pregnancy was sometimes an outcome of this sex free-for-all and for whom abortion was illegal, the consequences of sex were higher than for men. Rightwing women feared sexual liberation as it meant unfettered male sexual access to women, and possibly pregnancy, without the expectation of male support via traditional marriage.

This scenario was all too true for the many women who were mentored and sexually harassed by prominent theologian John Howard Yoder in the 1970s-90s, as history professor Rachel Waltner Goossen details in “Mennonite Bodies, Sexual Ethics”, a recent essay from the Journal of Mennonite Studies, reprinted at the sexual abuse survivor blog Our Stories Untold. Yoder is still widely cited and revered for his theology of pacifism, despite brave dissenters who point out that we should be skeptical of nonresistance preached by a sexual predator. Goossen observes:

For several decades, through the 1970s and 1980s, Yoder approached women with sexual invitations and intimidating behavior at the seminary, at academic and church conferences, and in homes, cars, and gathering places across the U.S., Canada, and a host of international settings. The women’s experiences varied widely. While each was acquainted with Yoder in some way, most of these women were not known to one another nor aware of Yoder’s sexual aggressiveness toward others. (One woman, married and much younger than Yoder, whom he surprised in the mid- 1970s with sexualized physical touching and who reacted with instant rebuke, later remembered the incident as deeply troubling: “It messes with the mind. I wondered, am I special to him? Is he lonely?”10)

Yoder justified his sexual approaches to women as theologically driven. He solicited help from female students and others, describing his entreaties as part of an “experiment” in sexual ethics in which he and a circle of “sisters” tested ideas about sexual intimacy outside marriage. For approximately eight years, over the objections of his supervisor at the seminary, president Marlin Miller, Yoder offered biblical justifications for his behavior based on Jesus’ ministry to women and what Yoder termed “the freedom of the Gospel.”11 Yoder argued that his ministrations to women were potentially therapeutic, and although he lacked formal training in psychological counseling, maintained that he wanted to help women overcome feelings of taboo. He intended to “defang” (or tame) “the beast,” he said, helping Christians to reject notions of sexuality as “a beast or a slippery slope which is … uncontrollable.”12

Yoder’s speculative project, arising as part of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, coincided with widening societal expectations about consensual sex. Although sexualized violence against women in the United States did not intensify markedly during the sexual revolution, one leading historian of the era notes that “In the new sexual order, the standard for consent had to be renegotiated. Why would a woman say no if sex presumably resulted in no harm? And who would believe that a woman had withheld consent, given new expectations of participation in the sexual revolution?”13 At a historical moment when lines were blurring about what constituted permissible sex, Yoder exploited notions that loosening sexual boundaries portended no harm.

The historian being cited in footnote 13 is Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). Hat tip to @GrumpyTheology for this article. Follow her for truth and cat pictures.

Consent and Altsex Culture is another recent gem of a post from Thing of Things, a funny and thought-provoking blog about philosophy, neurodivergence, gender, and nerdy special interests.

…[I]n our culture sex-positivity has a distressing tendency to collapse into compulsory sexuality.

What happens in a lot of cases is something like this: in conventional patriarchal culture, there are people women are supposed to fuck (their husbands) and people women are not supposed to fuck (everyone else). There is a socially legitimate reason for a woman to say ‘no’ to sex to anyone who isn’t her husband. And while there might not be much concept that women can say ‘no’ to sex with their husbands (remember that marital rape only became illegal in every US state in the nineties), most husbands are not rapists, genuinely love and care about their partners, and have no desire to have sex with their wife when she doesn’t want sex. While this is a terrible system in a lot of respects, it did reduce the harm of compulsory sexuality for many women.

Unfortunately, in this system, the natural way to do sex-positivity is to expand the set of people women are supposed to fuck. It is limiting to only have one person you’re supposed to fuck! Now you are supposed to fuck all your friends, or all the people in this intentional community, or everyone! Isn’t that great? We’re helping!

And, of course, if you’re supposed to have sex with a lot more people, then you’re much more likely to have sex with a rapist, or with someone who grew up in a culture that doesn’t give a shit about consent and who doesn’t have any reason to care about your emotional well-being. You’re a stranger, after all.

The worst excesses of the free love movement in the sixties birthed radical feminism, which instituted the rule that sex that one person involved did not want is rape. Most alternative sexuality communities seem to work under a similar rule today. This is a serious improvement, which I am not going to criticize.

However, I worry that a lot of alternative sexuality culture lends itself well to compulsory sexuality in more subtle ways…

…How can we fix this problem? I think part of the solution is just talking about it and trying to be aware of the pressures in our communities and the way that they make some people feel unwelcome. Another part is to explicitly work on including not just the sluts but the prudes in sex positivity– not just the people who want sex more or in different ways than society approves of, but the people who want sex less or don’t like some of the socially accepted kinds of sex. (Not, of course, that these are mutually exclusive.) And I do wonder if there are any simple changes we could make in communities dominated by kinky, poly, slutty, cuddle-prone etc. people to make them more welcoming to vanilla, asexual, monogamous, low-libido, not-in-favor-of-cuddling-strangers etc. people, without sacrificing our own needs and values.

Ozy’s blog is an unusual place: the comments are intelligent, and trolling is swiftly stopped. The ones below this post are worth a read. And of course feel free to share your own experiences and suggested solutions in my comments box too.

Don’t #DiagnoseTrump: How Progressives Exploit Mental Health Stigma

Cards on the table: I preferred Bernie Sanders’ leftist economics but am content to vote for Hillary Clinton this fall. Neither the persona nor the politics of Donald Trump hold any appeal for me. That decision made, I’ve skipped most of the election coverage that clutters my newsfeed. But I haven’t been able to ignore the slew of headlines labelling The Donald with various mental illnesses and personality disorders, culminating in the Twitter hashtag #DiagnoseTrump. This level of ableism from my supposed progressive allies scares me almost as much as a Republican president’s Supreme Court picks.

Speculative diagnosis of public figures is a common, yet basically unethical, tactic in modern journalism. The trend has gotten so out of hand in this election that the American Psychiatric Association had to issue a warning, as reported in yesterday’s Washington Post. The APA publicly reminded its members of the “Goldwater Rule” it issued in 1964 in response to a similar feeding frenzy around another GOP presidential candidate:

On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.

Simply put, it’s inappropriate to diagnose someone you haven’t treated as a patient, or to share that diagnosis without their permission.

My concern is not so much for Trump’s feelings or privacy, as for the climate of fear and shame this diagnosis-mania creates for ordinary people with mental health conditions. “Nothing about us without us” is the guiding principle of disability activism. To make better policies that protect the mentally ill and support their recovery, we need elected officials who’ve experienced the problems firsthand and are motivated to prioritize them. This can’t happen when we think it’s fair game to mock and disqualify any candidate with a diagnosis.

Moreover, there’s a huge difference between diagnosing someone in order to help them heal, and diagnosing in order to humiliate or silence them, which is what #DiagnoseTrump is all about. The latter is an abuse of power, plain and simple, which many of us have already encountered in our brushes with the psychiatric profession. Sometimes I think social workers should be required to give Miranda warnings. The current political discourse reinforces our fear of seeking professional help.

It gives me great anxiety to see my liberal friends on social media happily sharing bullshit from wellness guru Deepak Chopra about how Trump is “emotionally retarded”, and to have them push back when I explain how this language makes life harder for the non-neurotypical. Is Trump a narcissist? Maybe, but for what it’s worth, I was once diagnosed with narcissism for talking faster than the clinician could take notes, needing hourly bathroom breaks, being a virgin when I got married, and not being able to take a multiple-choice test when the radio was on. If the GOP is looking for a replacement candidate, I’m ready to serve.

For additional disability-informed perspectives on politics and daily life, follow @thisisableism, @riotheatherr, @crippledscholar, @theoriesofminds, @punkinonwheels, and @rsocialskills on Twitter.

Nonbinary Femme Thoughts

Coming out is peculiar when you don’t know what you are yet. I’ve been having a lot of conversations like this: “Um… I wanted to tell you… I’m decided I’m genderqueer now? But I’m not going to do anything about it? Like, I still use female pronouns and my husband likes boobs, so…” At which point my patient and understanding friends (because I’ve fired all of the other kind) smile and say that’s cool, and we go back to eating our fried rice.

The confusion is mainly in my own mind. I am certain of the reality of my masculine other self (he wrote a whole novel, after all) and my lifelong discomfort with assumptions that I should feel at home in women-only spaces. Beyond that, though, I struggle with the fear that this is all ridiculous unless I operationalize it somehow.

One problem is my limited imagination about what non-surgical genderqueerness looks like. I picture slender, androgynous, man-tailored women like these Beautiful Tomboys of the 1930s. I’d love to be them, but I don’t have that kind of body. I’d rather be a man who’s masculine enough to wear purple ruffles and eyeliner, like the late great musician Prince. That wasn’t in the cards for this lifetime either. When I dress femme, with a curvy female figure, I brace myself for being challenged that my queer identity isn’t real. But I don’t want to split the difference and wear asexual clothing, as I was pressured to do as a teenager because my mother didn’t think I was pretty enough to show my body. If I never see another plaid flannel shirt, it’ll be too soon.

And don’t get me started on the pronouns issue. I respect whatever anyone wants to be called, but for me it’s not worth the effort to insist on something different when people perceive me as a “she/her”. I’m not a “he”, and although I have a lot of personalities, “they” feels too neuter for me. Does that make me less queer? Am I a sell-out for passing?

There’s no getting away from sexism, however one identifies. Androgyny and masculine-of-center styles will be seen as cooler, and more represented in the media, because we’re still struggling with the second-wave feminist critique of femme fashion as inauthentic and oppressive. Magazines and TV prefer to show female-born bodies that are slim enough to get away with flat-chested male clothing, because women are better when they’re smaller, right? Don’t get me wrong, I have a serious crush on Emma from “Once Upon a Time”, but I’d like some gender-bending fashion role models in my size too.

The intersectional feminist website Wear Your Voice offers a fresh perspective. Ashleigh Shackelford writes about reclaiming femme beauty as a plus-size woman of color in “Why I’m Nonbinary But Don’t Use ‘They/Them'”:

Long before I came out as nonbinary, for most of my life, I struggled with gender and gender performance. I spent most of my childhood, adolescence and adulthood being violated for being a Black fat girl. I was often treated as if I was “one of the boys” or an “it” because I wasn’t feminine or girl-enough to be seen as attractive, worthy of being treating like a human, or seen as innocent/controllable. My blackness and fatness and proximity to girlhood was always othered in a way that most others did not experience.

As we see in the media and within our interpersonal spaces, femininity is significantly scripted through whiteness and thinness. I am none of those things. So my body being bigger, being Black and being read as cisgender/ or being assumed to be DFAB (designated “female” at birth) but not being seen as a girl/woman has forced me to grapple with gender in specific and violent ways. As I was growing up, I couldn’t fit into the girl clothing most of the time, so I was forced to shop in the boys’/men’s department to find attire. This alone is a queering of gender, incorporating a lens of fatness as a gender non-conforming quality, because girls’ bodies are supposed to be petite and small, be seen as controllable (fatness reads as “overpowering” to the gaze of masculinity), for consumption but only when you fit within certain beauty and humanity standards. My body was none of those things. And my only opportunity to find ways to present my gender in ways that would allow me to be seen as “more feminine” were denied to me because the clothes that would affirm my girlhood/womanhood were not available in my size…

…I don’t like using they/them pronouns because it feels so foreign to me. It’s really no shade to those who have found a home in they/them, but more so calling into question the terms “gender neutral” and “neutrality” in a world where nothing is neutral or objective, and often all defaults are based in masculinity and whiteness.

Shackelford’s piece reminds us that femme presentation doesn’t mean the same thing to all women. It’s forced on some of us and denied to others. Like Shackelford, I got all the downside of being perceived as female (body-policing, tone-policing, constant threat of harassment) without any validation that my gender performance was successful. When I put on lipstick and skirts, I thought I looked like Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie”: my body was too clunky, assertive, and large to be pretty. When I put on button-down shirts and corduroy pants, I felt childish and drab next to the other girls in high school. I was afraid I’d be mistaken for a lesbian and never get married. (Life’s little ironies.)

S.E. Smith, who blogs about gender and disability issues, expands on the topic of sexism and identity role models in the 2015 post “Beyond the Binary: Yes, Nonbinary Femmes Exist” . The piece takes aim at some of my negative self-talk about passing and femininity:

[I]t’s troubling that in general culture, only a very narrow range of people are treated and presented as nonbinary. If we’re to believe things like art projects that claim to be documenting nonbinary lives, nonbinary people aren’t fat, they don’t have breasts and hips. They present mostly masculine, perhaps with a slightly fey appearance. Perhaps some look vaguely like butchy women — but nonbinary femmes are nowhere to be seen, and when they try to assert themselves and speak out about their identities, they’re often treated very harshly.

In other words, they’re caught in the same antifemininity trap that women have to deal with, where feminine gender performance and expression is sneered at and deemed lesser. Which is incredibly misogynist — it’s effectively saying that women who are interested in makeup or who wear dresses or who like heels are somehow less worthy by nature of their femininity. This should trouble people who think this way and claim to be concerned about gender politics, but it doesn’t.

Nonbinary femmes are misgendered constantly, forcibly labeled as women even when people are corrected. Their preferred pronouns are ignored and people treat them as women in social and political settings. People attempt to suppress their work and personal expression, exclude them from trans spaces, and erase their very presence, which is incredibly isolating for nonbinary femmes, who are left struggling with their gender entirely on their own. If you don’t see any people who look like you talking about the things you’re trying to deal with, it’s really difficult to come to terms with them.

If you’re uneasy in an identity as a woman but everyone calls you a woman, you might have trouble thinking  of yourself as nonbinary — and when you turn to resources for the trans community to explore gender identity, you might see that none of the bodies represented there are like yours. In a community that’s allegedly diverse and complex, you’re tossed aside and treated like garbage, or even a pretender. Nonbinary femmes, you see, are just special snowflakes who want to have their cake and eat it too, dressing up like women and enjoying ‘passing privilege’ but still claiming a marginalised identity.

Things are much more complicated than that, as nonbinary femmes know. It can be incredibly stressful to live, move, and act on the margins of a society that repeatedly tells you that you don’t exist, and repeatedly erases your identity.

I’m unusually lucky to live in the Five Colleges region, whose culture is on the cutting edge of gender diversity issues. For me, most of the erasure is self-inflicted and internalized. At queer and transgender community events, I’ve seen plus-sized femme people wearing flamboyantly sexy, tight, wonderful clothing that I would never have dared to wear when I was their age. They make me feel I’ve found a place without body-policing, which is almost like a place without sexism.

I like the word “bigender” even though my eyes keep reading it as “big gender”. Or maybe that’s why. I have BIG gender. Too much to pick only one. Ekundayo Afolayan talks about this in their entertaining article for The Establishment, “My Genderqueer Quest for the Perfect Detachable Penis”:

From childhood into my teens, I learned that I had to be “feminine”—meaning big-breasted, with a flat belly, straight hair, and light skin. I kept myself clean-shaven, and stayed out of the sun so my brown skin wouldn’t get darker. I feared being seen as “butch,” or even expressing my interest in girls. I tied myself down with misogyny, and my sexual freedom went with it.

Being Black made my feelings about femininity even more complex. Viewed as a fat Black woman, I was both hypersexualized and desexualized by my peers. I was also keenly aware that my recent ancestors were never granted the right to be seen as feminine, so avoiding femininity made me feel guilty. I felt like I was throwing away something precious.

When I turned 14, my hold on gender norms broke. I developed chronic hirsutism. That meant thick tufts of hair all over my chin, a full mustache and thick sideburns and hard-to-lose weight. Not Western society’s ideal of “ladylike.” I felt ashamed. It wasn’t until I was in my last year of high school that I started to accept who I was. I was never completely a woman—I felt like a man, too, sometimes. Accepting myself as multi-gendered meant that my relationship with femininity became simpler. Still, my complicated relationship with detachable dicks was only beginning…

…[W]ith the discovery of Tumblr and my move to college, I was able to name who I was: bigender. I felt free!

Still, something was missing. I struggled with dysphoria, the sense that my body is fundamentally “wrong.” I’ve been taught all my life that I have to be soft and hairless, “feminine” in all the obvious physical ways. Men are supposed to be tall, muscular, with penises, flat chests and full of machismo. I didn’t know how I could break free of those norms. How could I, a person with wide hips, big breasts and long, flowing hair, ever been seen as a man?

I tried to hide. I tried costuming myself in ultra-femme clothes, cat-like nail tips and rouge lipstick, but it made me feel like people saw me as a joke: a “man” with not only a pussy, but also long nails and meticulous eyeliner. Sometimes I layered my clothes to hide my curves, but I couldn’t perform enough to convince people I wasn’t a woman. Finally, I realized that I needed to stop costuming and performing for cis-het folks, seeking their validation, trying to conform to their rules. I decided only I could validate myself. I don’t have to be anything for anyone but myself.

Some days I feel like my breasts don’t “fit” me, and other days they’re the perfect accessory; maybe I want to wear a binder one day and a push-up bra the next. Now that I know who I am, that doesn’t feel like a contradiction. These are all parts of my self-definition, which comes from within. I’m more than a man, and I’m more than a woman: I’m a singular experience. Some days I want be penetrated, and other days I want to top with the perfect dick. Which is why I now know that I have to push forward and find the perfect dick for me.

It feels like an act of rebellion to even search for the perfect dick—to know that one day, I will earn it. I will hand-select every single part of that dick and treat it right. I don’t need to show that I have a penis in order to be validated as a man, but I want one, for myself, in order to feel whole.

Read the whole thing for tips on how to find your missing piece. I recommend Toys of Eros in P-Town. (Of course I’m such a size queen that my new buddy doesn’t fit in my jeans. Time to try wearing skirts again?)

Book Notes: Queering Sexual Violence

The new anthology Queering Sexual Violence (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2016), edited by Jennifer Patterson, is a must-read for social service providers, activists, policymakers, and anyone who studies child abuse and intimate partner violence. It includes personal essays, poems, artwork, and hybrid-genre pieces by Sinclair Sexsmith, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Sassafras Lowrey, the late Chloe Dzubilo, and 32 others.

The book fills a gap in the common understanding of abuse as something that men do to women and children, and as a social problem best solved through legislation and policing. This familiar picture excludes survivors for whom the carceral state does not routinely offer justice: people of color, the disabled and neurodiverse, and of course the many LGBTQ people who hesitate to out themselves to the police and the courts, fearing that their victimization will only be compounded. (Think, for instance, of the Orlando Pulse shooting victim whose homophobic father refused to claim his body.) QSV is first of all intersectional, with a diverse list of contributors who explore the ways that both victims and perpetrators may need liberation from the web of oppression that binds them together.

Some of my favorite pieces confronted the question, taboo in mainstream “Born This Way” LGBTQ discourse, of causal links between trauma and sexual orientation/gender identity. Lately I’m haunted by the question of whether I’d be genderqueer if I hadn’t been abused by my mother, particularly her controlling and shaming of my gender presentation and sexual maturation. Who is that mythical woman I might have become in a happy family? Am I allowing my mother to steal my womanhood along with my childhood? Is my lifelong wish for my uterus to wander away forever a self-harming trauma reaction?

Funny thing, though, I never ask myself (nor am I asked by anyone else) whether I’m legitimately heterosexual, or whether my disinterest in sex with women is a trigger that I should overcome. Both trauma and queerness are stigmatized, deemed to be in need of explanation, and so I’m always tempted to split or disclaim these parts of myself. As Pam Mack writes in her piece on “Mother-Daughter Sexual Abuse”:

While I believe that my personal development was harmed by the abuse [by her mother and grandmother], I can still claim as mine the preferences I have evolved, whatever combination of innate, abuse-conditioned and the product of growth and healing they may be. And I can let them change over time, if I want. Knowing this hopefully provides another way of moving towards a culture in which a wide range of choices are seen as valid, even ones that may have been shaped by abuse… It is freeing not to feel I have a responsibility to make myself as normal as possible. Aren’t we all shaped by pain? (pg.57)

Jennifer Patterson’s essay “These Bones” also showed me I wasn’t alone in this struggle:

The conscious and unconscious ways people pervert sexual and gender identity through the lens of abuse has been something I have experienced consistently since I began identifying as queer and a survivor. Those who wish to render me deviant search for sources of my “illness,” a root for my queerness. They quickly find it when they learn I am a survivor. Not only is my queerness “understood,” then, it is sometimes challenged for validity. As in: maybe I am not really queer, maybe I am just damaged. I reject all of the judgments placed on my body and my relationships. The need to validate my sexual identity did not exist when I was in “straight” relationships with cisgender men…

…To believe that people “become” queer by way of violent exposure also informs a false idea of safety within our queer communities. When people imagine that I “became” queer because of the violence I experienced, not only do they believe that violence made me queer, it’s as if they believe that queer people don’t experience or perpetuate violence. This is not even close to being true. (pg.105)

(I think she means “perpetrate” rather than “perpetuate”; the book could have benefited from more careful copyediting and proofreading.)

Amita Yalgi Swadhin’s essay “Queering Child Sexual Abuse” considers flipping the causation around:

…[Q]ueer people who are willing to be out about our sexual orientation are already seen as non-normative. In a way, we have less to lose by also coming out as survivors of child sexual abuse than straight people do, since survivorship is in and of itself a queer (non-normative) identity.

And therein lie our opportunities.

We now know that, regardless of sexual orientation, people who exhibited gender non-conforming (or genderqueer) behavior in childhood were at a much higher risk of sexual abuse to begin with… The risk of experiencing sexual abuse for gender-non-conforming boys is especially alarming, at rates two to six times higher than gender conforming boys… If more queer survivors tell our stories publicly, we may be able to bring this data to life and pressure prevention and intervention efforts to account for the higher risk of sexual abuse that genderqueer youth (many of whom are not straight) face. (pg.219)

Meanwhile, Jen LaBarbera’s essay “Welcome Effects: When Sexual Violence Turns Girls Queer” embraces her attraction to women as one of the good things that came out of her abuse by her brother. She challenges both LGBTQ and survivor communities to drop the respectability politics that de-legitimize her experience.

The anthology includes many other good pieces on the healing aspects of kink/BDSM, alternatives to the prison-industrial complex, the intersection of personal and societal trauma from racism and poverty, and how we can keep ourselves safe without handing over our perpetrators to an oppressive system. Follow @QSVAnthology on Twitter for related articles, giveaways, and news of upcoming readings.

July Links Roundup: Mommy T-Rex

In the years leading up to Shane’s adoption, I used to say, “I want to be a parent, not a mother.” I had hoped that non-reproductive parenting would free me from predetermined expectations about the balance of caregiving labor and the self-negating emotional enmeshment that I didn’t want to replicate from my own childhood. I wasn’t reckoning on the internalized sexism of social workers, but thankfully that period is over, and my husband and I can try to raise our son to appreciate all gender roles without feeling bound by any.

I resonated with this post from last year by feminist blogger Melissa McEwan (Shakesville), “Childfree 101: The ‘Women Are Designed to Love’ Narrative”, where she challenges the common argument that childfree women (but never men!) are denying themselves some supreme opportunity to give love. Even in a perfectly egalitarian socioeconomic system, emotional labor is a finite resource, and being female shouldn’t mean that people are entitled to infinite amounts from us:

In this definition of womanhood, our value is determined largely or exclusively by what we give—primarily to children and spouses. If leniency is granted so that what we give to our work may be included, it is not the actual work product we generate that has attached value, but what we give to our employers, to our coworkers, to our clients or patients.

When women are viewed as designed to love and care, childfree women are hardly women at all. Only if our work can define us as an ersatz mother, e.g. Mother Theresa, might we be given reprieve from the harshest of judgments.

Women are held to a standard in which we have value only if we demonstrate a constant outpouring of love and care for other people, which is harmful in a number of ways, not least of which is that, if it is true (as I believe) that empathy and concern for other people is part of the human condition, it is only one part, not the whole.

And sometimes the way we find to express empathy and concern for other people is incompatible with parenting. Because we only have so much. Because women are not, in fact, built to be naught but endless fonts of care.

I think a lot about gender because I’m raising a boy in a sexist world. Now that Shane is verbal enough to engage me in imaginative play, I’m fascinated and pleased by his non-attachment to the categories that adults so anxiously defend. “I’m Mommy T-Rex, you’re Baby T-Rex,” he’ll tell me, and then he’ll switch us. Eddie the Teddy might be another bear’s daddy one day, his mommy the next. Shane’s self-chosen interests are what society typically calls masculine: robots, dinosaurs, building blocks, big trucks, loud machines, and rolling in the dirt. At the same time, he loves to try on my costume jewelry and make his own in art class, and his stuffed toys are more likely to kiss each other than to fight.

In hopes of delaying his fall from genderfluid innocence, last year we removed the YouTube and PBS Kids apps from his iPad. (Yes, he has his own, and it’s better than mine. Don’t judge, read the link below.) On his own, he picks sweet, sometimes educational games that cut across stereotypical lines: DinoTrux and the Big Button Box of fart sounds and ambulance sirens, but also pony hair salon, dollhouse, and baby animal care. We highly recommend Toca Boca, Fox & Sheep, and Sago Mini. Toca Boca proclaims on their home page: “Gender Neutral: No pink or blue aisles. Digital toys for all kids.” My PlayHome is a series of apps where you put a multiracial cast of characters through everyday activities in a school, a suburban home, and a quaint shopping district, though Shane was disappointed that he couldn’t put the girls’ clothes on the boys and vice versa. In Toca Life, on the other hand, hairstyles and clothes can be swapped freely by male, female, and gender-ambiguous characters.

By contrast, many picture books, especially the classic ones that he receives as gifts, are retrograde in their gender roles. Books about trains, trucks, robots, and other “boy” subjects, which happen to be Shane’s main interests right now, have few if any female characters. I’ve resorted to switching the pronouns in Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site so that some trucks can be “she” or “they”. My headcanon on the modern Little Golden Book I’m a Monster Truck! is that the narrator is a butch lesbian who is dancing with her femme girlfriend. As other parenting bloggers have complained, the Lego mini-figures that come with the City (garbage trucks, ambulances, etc.) and Dino World sets are predominantly male. So the argument for meatspace versus virtual playthings is more complicated than you’d think.

Over at Medium, social media expert Alexandra Samuel makes the case “Why Kids’ Screen Time Is a Feminist Issue” in this blog post from May. One of her commenters also makes a good point that the attack on screen time is ableist: autistic and other easily overstimulated kids need an activity that’s a respite from intense face-to-face interaction. I’ve observed that Shane does seem to benefit from the cool-down time with his apps after a very active day at his Montessori school, which is a technology-free zone. Samuel writes:

When we fret about excess screen time as bad parenting, what we’re really talking about is bad mothering. After all, mothers still do more than three times as much routine child care as fathers do, and almost four times as much solo care, according to a 2011 study by Lyn Craig and Killian Mullan. When we worry that parents are shirking their duties by relying on an electronic babysitter, we’re really worrying that mothers are putting their own needs alongside, or even ahead of, their kids’ needs.

It’s a worry that rears its head any time someone comes up with a technology that makes mothers’ lives easier. As mothers, we’re supposed to embrace — or at least nobly suffer through — all the challenges that parenting throws at us. We’re supposed to accept having little people at our heels while we’re trying to buy the groceries, make dinner, or go to the bathroom. We’re supposed to accept the exhaustion that comes from working a full day at the office and a second shift at home before falling into bed for an inevitably interrupted sleep. We’re supposed to accept the isolation that comes from raising children in a world that regards a crying child as a crime against restaurant patrons or airplane travellers.

The mother who hands her child a smartphone is taking the easy way out of these challenges. But since so much of parenting consists of situations in which there is no easy way out, I’m deeply grateful when somebody offers me a cheat…

…Just look at the prevailing attitude towards another innovation that gave mothers more autonomy: baby formula. We know that there are significant health benefits to breastfeeding, but that doesn’t begin to explain the horrified looks you attract when bottle-feeding in public. (The glares I got for bottle feeding my baby were good preparation for the glares I now get when I hand over my iPad.) As Cindy Sterns writes, “by deciding to formula feed, the woman exposes herself to the charge that she is a ‘poor mother’ who places her own needs, preferences or convenience over her baby’s welfare. By contrast, the ‘good mother’ is deemed to be one who prioritizes her child’s needs even (or perhaps especially) where this entails personal inconvenience or distress.”

When we shame women for adopting labor or sanity-saving innovations, we don’t limit ourselves to guilting them over the damage they’re doing to their kids: we also guilt them for what they’re doing to the earth itself. If disposable diapers emerged as one of the great symbols of environmental waste, that’s in keeping with the idea that women should be prepared to sacrifice themselves not only to the demands of motherhood, but of the greater good. The focus on “what you can do at home to save the earth,”Stacy Alaimo notes, “shifts the focus from patriarchal capitalism to the home and places the blame and responsibility, not on corporate polluters, scandalous lack of government controls, or waste-oriented capitalism but ultimately on homemakers, who had better use cloth diapers and keep those pots fully covered.”

Even before the advent of the contemporary environmental movement, saving women time took a backseat to saving men time, or to saving the earth. “Investment in labor-saving equipment for the farm took priority, partly because men made these decisions on their own,” writes Joy Parr, in her fascinating study of the differences between Canadian and American adoption of washing machines.

What’s really going on is an age-old problem: we don’t like innovations that make mothers’ lives easier.

This diaper-using, non-breastfeeding adoptive mother says, Amen.

In case you missed it, this May 31 New Yorker profile of the late Arnold Lobel made me feel even better about one of Shane’s favorite books. In “‘Frog and Toad’: An Amphibious Celebration of Same-Sex Love”, Colin Stokes discusses the enduring appeal of these gentle stories about the bond between two friends. Their situations are certainly not sexual or even romantic, since the youngest readers don’t usually care about such things, but instead center on the small crises and relationship glitches that make real drama for the pre-K set: wanting to play when your friend wants to be alone, or worrying that you look funny in your bathing suit. We don’t need sentimental conversations or tacked-on moral endings to know that Frog and Toad will stay together through it all.

[Lobel’s daughter] Adrianne suspects that there’s another dimension to the series’s sustained popularity. Frog and Toad are “of the same sex, and they love each other,” she told me. “It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.” In 1974, four years after the first book in the series was published, Lobel came out to his family as gay. “I think ‘Frog and Toad’ really was the beginning of him coming out,” Adrianne told me…

…Lobel died in 1987, an early victim of the AIDS crisis. “He was only fifty-four,” Adrianne told me. “Think of all the stories we missed.”

When reading children’s books as children, we get to experience an author’s fictional world removed from the very real one he or she inhabits. But knowing the strains of sadness in Lobel’s life story gives his simple and elegant stories new poignancies. On the final page of “Alone,” Frog and Toad, having cleared up their misunderstanding, sit contently on the island looking into the distance, each with his arm around the other. Beneath the drawing, Lobel writes, “They were two close friends, sitting alone together.”

Poetry by Donal Mahoney: “High School in the Fifties”

Reiter’s Block subscriber Donal Mahoney offers us this thoughtful poem prompted by this weekend’s hate crime against queer Latin@ clubgoers in Orlando.

High School in the Fifties

In my all-boys school
sixty years ago there were
two boys who were different.
All four years they walked
to classes together, books
clasped to their chests
the way girls walked home
carrying theirs.

I never saw another
classmate talk to them,
perhaps because like me
they didn’t know what to say
or they had nothing to say.
But I never heard anyone
talk about them either.
It was as if they weren’t there.

Now 60 years later
the school sends out
alumni updates and lists
the two of them as missing
and asks if anyone might
know where they are.
I doubt that anyone does.
We didn’t know where
they were back then.

***

Author’s note: “Donal Mahoney attended a Roman Catholic boys-only high school in the early fifties. The Orlando massacre reminded him of two apparently gay classmates from six decades ago. There were probably other gays in the school as well who did not fit the same stereotype. These two classmates were never picked on to his knowledge and they were not shunned, either. He feels to this day straight kids at that time simply did not know how to communicate with them nor had any interest in doing so just as there were some straight kids who did not ‘fit in’ as well. There was no bullying because neither the administration nor the students would have tolerated that kind of behavior. If you wanted to heckle someone, he had to appear to be your equal physically. It was not a good time for anyone who was different but maybe just a little better than today.”

I wonder about that last claim. Speaking for myself, even in the 1980s, in a liberal arts school in Brooklyn, I didn’t know any students who were “out”, though in retrospect I can guess at a few. That didn’t make it a safe space from bullies, by any means. One could argue that with greater visibility comes greater backlash, but perhaps there were just as many hate crimes that were not reported as such, because sexual and gender identities were not an acceptable discussion topic. Our erasure from history is a loss that continues to affect the current generation of LGBTQ kids. In any case, I appreciate this poem’s effort to bring those long-ago boys into the light of acceptance and truth.