Sexuality can be beautiful, free, and liberating if we remove it from the confines of male dominance and female submission. – D.K.C.
[from The Alabamian, Vol. 92, No. 8 (January 2018)]
In high school, I remember losing the will to continue living, wishing for death, not because I knew that I liked men, but because I knew how I would be treated for liking them. Every day in the closet felt void of color. I make these personal statements about my sexuality to demonstrate, perhaps vividly, a situation that either strengthens or kills LGBT people [1].
Montevallo’s recent panel on the “threat” posed by the Non-Discrimination Ordinance remains on my mind mostly because it seemed as if the speakers could not see from the perspectives of LGBT people, especially from the perspectives of LGBT children contemplating suicide around the country and around the world. While the panelists seemed to view LGBT people as sex acts, not as human beings, I assert that society must recognize the humanity of LGBT people. Regardless of religious identity, sexual identity, or gender identity, every human being deserves to be treated as a human being [2]. Practicing equality means that an individual or entity provides services equally to all other individuals with no arbitrary exceptions.
The panelists’ remarks implied that the only acceptable and permissible sexuality is heterosexuality, meaning that one must be heterosexual or one must not be. As humans, however, we use sexuality to communicate and to bond with one another, expressing sexuality differently—not always in adherence to male-female relationships. [3]
Sexuality can be beautiful, free, and liberating if we remove it from the confines of male dominance and female submission [4]. The speakers, however, seemed to be in favor of the rigid tradition of heterosexuality in which men possess women. Within such a view, no beautiful, free, and liberating sexuality can exist. In this way, human sexuality twists into an act a person does because of some absurd biological or religious destiny. Such a mindset accounts for the failure to fully outlaw marital rape across the United States of America until 1993. Contrary to the idea of enforced and regulated heterosexuality, I assert that sexuality and love must be free from all repression, for the only beautiful love is free love.
One of the speakers shared concerns, undoubtedly voiced by other individuals like him, that allowing people to use “privacy facilities” (e.g., locker rooms and restrooms) corresponding to the individuals’ gender identities would infringe on the rights of other presumably cisgender heterosexual individuals using those facilities. Do women not already use women’s restrooms? Do men not already use men’s restrooms? It seems sensible to allow a woman to use women’s facilities. It likewise seems sensible to allow a man to use men’s facilities. Yet, against basic reasoning, the speaker argued that transgender men (i.e., men) should use women’s facilities and that transgender women (i.e., women) should use men’s facilities. [5]
The concepts of “male” and “female” indeed rely on biological sex differences, but chromosomes, genitalia, and hormones do not control the concepts of “man” and “woman” in human perception. The perceiver considers the representation of another person’s gendered self. A transgender man looks like a man. He goes around being a man. He is a man. A transgender woman looks like a woman. She goes around being a woman. She is a woman. While biological sex differences can impact how an individual performs gender, how one performs gender is not biologically predetermined. Rather, one’s expression of the gendered self is a constant project. Typically, people understand the concepts of “man” and “woman” only in terms of visible appearances. As such, individuals continuously perform and express gender on a spectrum. [6]
Tradition and prejudice weigh heavily upon LGBT lives. I understand this weight since it almost crushed me. LGBT people fear conversion therapy. They fear being thrown out of their homes for their identities. They fear rejection from their families, churches, and communities. They fear that “justice” will overlook crimes committed against them. I want LGBT people to know that we must fight for the right to visibly exist. Although liberating, visibility hurts, but we must not retreat. We must remain vigilant.
If the status quo considers us a threat, then I think we should accept the challenge. We threaten existing assumptions about proper human sexuality. We threaten existing assumptions about proper gender performance. We threaten the ridiculous assumptions of heteronormativity and cisnormativity forcefully imposed upon all human bodies [7].
Oppressed people who reject oppression pose the ultimate threat to the powerful. Once we challenge all forms of supremacy, we will move closer to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness extended to all people. Equal treatment should mean equal treatment, regardless of one’s various identities, including race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, ability, and nationality [8]. After breaking the cage of tradition and prejudice, we will fly free if we so please, living our own truths while others choose to live their gay truths or their straight lies.
Notes
[1] While I do think that it is necessary for us to discuss suicidality among lesbian girls and gay boys, many of whom are gender nonconforming youth, I also think that we should be careful not to use suicide as a tool of coercion in pushing through policies. Threatening suicide in order to coerce somebody into submission to one’s demands is unethical. Engaging in psychological warfare, abusers use threats of suicide to terrorize their victims into submission. Abusers use many strategies of manipulation to achieve their aims. All that being said, still, we can speak honestly about how homophobia engenders and exaggerates depression and dissociation, which can cause lifelong psychological damage to lesbian women and gay men.
[2] This sentence indicates part of my earlier coming to consciousness about “gender identity” being eerily, queerly similar to “religious identity,” because both concepts are rooted in otherwise fantastical belief systems at odds with reality itself. Using the terms “sex” and “sexual orientation” would suffice, because, as I have said, most discrimination against “transgender” people is really a function of homophobia and not identifiable as “transphobia” except in an abstract sense. What someone is seen as in the world matters more than what one sees oneself as from the exclusive perspective of the self.
[3] See Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980). See also, generally, Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (1987).
[4] See Gloria Steinem, Audre Lorde, and Audre Lorde
[5] This passage indicates an oversight on my part, because I presumed that transgender people had always used the bathroom anyway in public, so it seemed a relatively trivial issue. However, female-only spaces do matter, primarily in response to the pervasive sexual harassment of women by men, whether those males wear pants or dresses. See the Black feminist Taunya Lovell Banks’ “Toilets as a Feminist Issue: A True Story,” which appeared in The Berkeley Women’s Law Journal in 1991. See also Sheila Jeffreys’ “The Politics of the Toilet: A Feminist Response to the Campaign to ‘Degender’ a Women’s Space,” which appeared in the Women’s Studies International Forum in 2014.
[6] If I was to respond to this paragraph now, then I would say that the core epistemological failure of “queer theory” is its grandiose posturing as if gender does not exist as a hierarchy and as if masculinity and femininity are not, in fact, part of male dominance and female subordination central to male-supremacist ideology. The idea that others’ perceptions determine us as “men” and “women” directly relies upon stereotypical masculinity and stereotypical femininity seen as the substance of “manhood” and “womanhood.” It becomes another kind of essentialism similar to the idea that male people must be masculine and female people must be feminine, except reversed to say, instead, that masculine people must be “male” and feminine people must be “female.” Reducing “gender” itself to an individualized performance, disconnected from its intimate relationship to gender hierarchy and the oppression of women under male supremacy, is also antifeminist.
[7] xxx
[8] xxx
Donovan Cleckley 