Once upon a time, to devote yourself to your work became a way to glorify God. To work was to be virtuous, to try to demonstrate that you must be a good person, even though you might not be because, of course, the final arbiter was post-life.

Nowadays, God doesn’t get much of a lick in anymore, but by golly if we haven’t replaced God with capitalism and productivity. And you women really aren’t cooking or minding the children as well as you used to…

Which reminds me, I’ve been thinking about public health issues and how any society does have some legitimate cause for encouraging healthy practices and setting standards of behavior on issues that go beyond an individual’s body. Infectious diseases, smoking, things like that, a society has some merit in monitoring. But the point should be “everyone’s health and happiness,” not productivity. And if what you’re doing only affects your body, I don’t care. I guess capitalists view productivity as affecting everyone – if too many people are ill or unproductive, “the economy” suffers, and so do others in society. We all have to do our part!

All glory to constant work! All glory to the hypnotoad!

African homophobia does not exist, nor does European homophobia, Asian homophobia or South American homophobia. Acts of homophobia occur in each of these spaces.

…African conceptions of homosexuality are shaped by factors including nationalism, globalisation, migration, ethnicity, and religion. They are shaped by labour practices and national politics, by participation in sports and watching movies…

Homophobia in Africa is a problem, but not as African homophobia, a special class that requires special interventions. And certainly not the kinds of special interventions that reconsolidate old, ongoing and boring oppositions between a progressive west and an atavistic Africa.

Indeed. Enough primitivization and infantilization of the other peoples of the world. We are all here, in the current “modern” era. All people, together, trying to figure this dumb old world out.

Not that it’s always easy to figure things out. I’d not heard the story of Agnes before.

It’s worth reading the whole story, if you’re not familiar with it. I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the twist ending. Suffice to say, Agnes was a transgender person who encountered the medical science complex in the late fifties, and was written about in depth by a Dr. Garfinkel. Quoting from his book, eastsidekate writes:

[Agnes] wanted to know as well whether [further research] would help “the doctors” to get to the “true facts.” I [Dr. Garfinkel] asked Agnes, “what do you figure the facts are?” She answered, “What do I figure the facts are, or what do I think everyone else thinks the facts are?” [emphasis original]

Agnes’ question, in a nutshell, summarizes the key dilemma that I think LGBTQ people have faced, (that I have faced) for generations. I know very well that I’m a woman, but I have to manage myself very carefully, as other people are prone to think otherwise… Furthermore, there are often seriously good reasons why I may not want them to understand the facts as I do.

We have spent generation after generation “passing”, painstakingly manipulating and carefully disclosing bits and pieces of the way we “really” are. A lot of time, people don’t see us, and sometimes, that’s because we know it’s not safe for us to be seen. This is a particularly troublesome proposition for transsexual people– to the extent that we’re out as such, cissexual society often views us as somehow “not really” the men and women we claim to be.

…My dream, for Pride month and beyond, is for all of us to envision a world where passing isn’t necessary. I can’t imagine living in a world where simply being one’s self is sufficient grounds for full membership in society. That said, I can’t imagine a more beautiful goal.

Hear hear.

And this post is already too long, but let’s throw this in: Faustus at Erosblog takes note of a book about a New Jersey woman who found herself joining a Malay prince’s harem — more than once. It seems a fascinating story, and I couldn’t help thinking of Faustus’ highlighted passage when reading the above stories and pondering the murky waters of identity, including my own:

There’s a persona you create to fill in for you on the strangers’ laps all day, or to lie forgotten about between the black silk sheets in a prince’s office bedroom. The persona is sexier, bolder, wilder, and inevitably feels less pain than the real you. If she doesn’t, you haven’t done a very good job inventing her. So maybe you start to visit that persona once in a while when you’re not at work. On weekends, you know, just when you’re being socially awkward at a party, or when a friend hurts your feelings or you’re out on a date and feeling vulnerable. And you find out that she helps you, that brazen stripper, that sophisticated call girl.

…that girl who wears the thong so effortlessly in public might not be the one making the major life decisions for you.

I’m not making any sort of strict comparison here, for such would be unfair. The cis person drawing on a specific alter-persona as needed has the privilege of not having to “pass,” having her “real” self accepted much more readily and more often than does the LGBTQ person. Still, it speaks to the need for more queer discourse, feminist discourse, more stories told and awareness of the variety of possibilities available within the human experience. Perhaps one day there will be little to no need to adopt a persona or a wall to be accepted as valid.

It bears repeating: “I can’t imagine living in a world where simply being one’s self is sufficient grounds for full membership in society. That said, I can’t imagine a more beautiful goal.”

Hear hear.

…if there are words and phrases that I use, but haven’t actually thought about — idioms that may be so common that I don’t have a clue about their etymology, but which I find are undeniably rooted in discrimination and oppression when I use the “explain it to a non-native speaker” exercise above (such as the phrase: “I got gypped” — a slur against Romani people that I’m often surprised people don’t know about) — if I continue to use these words and people are offended by them and I say: “Hey, it’s common usage! I didn’t mean it like that” . . .

Well, if I do that, I think that what I’m really saying is:

“I want to use these phrases because they are an easy short-hand for me, and/or they make me sound hep, or edgy, or current — and I want that more than I want to effectively communicate and connect with you.”

Which, when I put it like that, sounds really shitty of me.

Unrelated, this post on “mansplaining” is also good – I’ve definitely been guilty of it.

One of my favorite responses:

This is the same kind of argument I often hear from young women who, despite fully supporting gender equality, don’t want to be “labeled” as a feminist. Which makes me wonder: Do men really lack an alternative to “toxic masculinity”? Or is it just that even these gender-conscious youths still have trouble fully identifying themselves as feminist–balking, like too many women’s rights supporters, from a conception of themselves that should be empowering? Moreover, the concept of a “feminist masculinity” seems unnecessary, and if anything detrimental, to the goal of combating sexism and homophobia in that it continues to present men and their “masculinity” in opposition to women. What if everyone just worked toward being a decent (feminist) person?

This all reminds me of John Stuart Mill’s ideas of liberty, and critiques of them. The idea being that he has important things to say about liberty, but they’re negative philosophies: “Don’t do this, don’t do that,” that define freedom as against what it isn’t. But how do you have a positive idea of freedom as an empowering, enabling force? And again, my favorite answer is basically, true freedom requires each generation to constantly renew its freedom by finding the new limits and removing them. Some would call this progress… But the point is, this means positive freedom is the struggle itself to achieve freedom. And you do this by acting positively to remove limits, which may itself be a negatively-defined thing, but the actions of doing so are positive.

Thus, if you want to be a manly, masculine male man, but reject oppressive masculinity and male hegemony, the answer is: simply be a decent human being. If you need some sort of storybook archetypical role to fit yourself into, and you’re rejecting the ones presented to you, I’d say “simply human” is a pretty good alternative

Or as another person put it, “If all the problems are due to the fact that the sexist masculine stereotype is simply an act, then not acting is actually quite an accomplishment.”

Yup. Yet another part of the constant struggle to be authentic. And I’ll take “human” over “male” any day.

Kanye West

Need: These, microphone, and a willingness to repeatedly make the “Imma let you finish” joke.
Related ideas: Taylor Swift (Couple costume!)