"International" day against homophobia and transphobia

[liv]

I have a feeling that IDAHO is one of those American events that people on the internet take to be international, but anyway, it's spread as far as my university at least. The university did a fairly big publicity campaign, which is positive, and a series of events targeted mainly at students. On the negative side, after making a big deal of it they shoved the whole event into a small classroom, which didn't really have room for the (not particularly startling) numbers who attended, even without the fact that half the space was taken up by stalls for various interest groups and tables of refreshments. It feel a bit of a mixed message: yay we're so inclusive and we love LGBT people, in fact we love you so much that you can have a whole day (during the period when most of the university is preoccupied with exams) and even a whole 10 square metres of space.

Anyway. I attended a really interesting talk by one of the lecturers, Dr Rosenfeld who is a sociologist of ageing who specializes in gay issues. Rosenfeld did a very credible job of presenting a large chunk of her life's work in a half-hour talk to non-experts, but be assured that any errors in reporting what she said are mine! Basically she did this ethnographic study of gay and lesbian people who were born in 1930 and earlier (a few years ago when a larger proportion of that cohort were alive and well to be able to talk to her). She's American originally and this portion of her work was done in the USA, but it seems some of it is more generally relevant.

Her theory was that, despite being roughly the same age, this group can be divided into two very distinct and even conflicting sub-groups in terms of how they see and perform gay identity. The first group, which apparently is fairly male-dominated, had distinct gay identities in the years between WW2 and the Stonewall uprising in 1969. The second, female-dominated but not exclusively female, group, only started seeing themselves as gay post-Stonewall and during the era between the "gay liberation" movement and the AIDS epidemic of the 80s.

The pre-Stonewall group saw being gay as a stigmatized character trait that was only revealed to a few trusted people if at all, and kept strictly to the private sphere. The post-Stonewall group believed in "gay pride" and saw being gay as an essential part of their identity. So there's an obvious moral clash here: you have some people who take pride in being as closeted and secret as possible, and see outness, even associating with other people who are out, as a massive (and absolutely real) threat to their safety. They have a subculture which allows them to meet likeminded people, but it's only possible if you are secret-agent level careful about not ever letting the wrong people find out. And then a bunch of people come along who take literal and metaphorical pride in being "loud and proud" and consider it cowardice, dishonesty and betrayal to try to pass. However even these people have to manage the process of coming out quite carefully; they don't just go around telling everybody how gay they are at every possible opportunity, it has to be in an appropriate context.

Very interesting stuff about the stigmatized trait people. Older gay men apparently had a degree of authority because they were the only people who could introduce new members into the underground gay networks and their hidden culture. Gay men and lesbians worked closely together out of necessity; they had joint meetings so that if the police raided their events they could swap partners and pretend to be het and thus avoid arrests, violence and punitive mental illness "treatments". They contracted lavender marriages to further aid their ability to pass. Apparently both of these things were rather lost for the essential identity, gay liberation people; gay men stopped having any kind of social or political contact with lesbians at least until the AIDS era, and there was a loss of generational continuity as the younger generation didn't need the elders so much.

What it reminds me of is the divisions within the trans community at the moment (and yes, I know that trans people were very much involved throughout 20^th century gay history and particularly in Stonewall and the gay liberation movement.) But currently you have people who think that the ideal of a successful trans person is one whose sex and gender are completely accepted by everybody around, so that the sex they were assigned at birth is no more than a quirk of their medical history. Versus people who are politicized about being trans and see it as an essential part of their identity and are willing to educate or at a last resort fight anyone who has a problem with that; their ideal trans person is one who is widely known to be trans and is completely out. (I suspect the ongoing imbroglio about whether you write "trans man / trans woman" with a space or "transman / transwoman" as a compound noun is related to this division.) Of course I wouldn't presume to express an opinion about which approach is better, especially as it's often not a matter of pure individual choice anyway, but it helps me understand where the battle lines come from.

That's just speculation but I do want to be part of the discussion that emphatically includes trans issues in IDAHO. There was one talk from a law lecturer who specializes in gender and transgender aspects of law, but I wasn't able to make it due to timing issues. I don't feel I need to complain about the omission, anyway.

Some people said on Twitter, perhaps ironically, that people should stop tweeting about IDAHO and actually do something about it. Writing a blog post isn't much of a step up, but it's something. And I made my face known at the events so that colleagues will see me as someone at least friendly to LGBT causes (I did get a couple of "oh, you're one of us?" glances.) I think the most useful thing I can do is advocate for one of our imaginary patients to have their biography slightly altered to include a same-sex partner. At the moment the students do have a module about sexualities and medicine but only in the third year, and at least mentioning a bit earlier on that not everybody is straight might be useful.

Anyway. I'm against homophobia and transphobia and every other type of discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Just in case anyone was confused in that regard!

Comments

[monanotlisa]

So confused. *g*

Thanks for this post. Is it really a US-American day, though? Seems pretty spread-out, at least by now, and its origins more French...

[marina]

It's definitely not made its way to around these parts.

[pne]

I haven't heard of most of the observances on this page, nor do they seem to have "made their way" to where I can see them.

Yet supposedly at least some of them were established by well-known international organisations such as UNESCO.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean that it's necessarily an American thing. (For all I know, it's just as unknown in the US outside certain circles, for that matter.)

[siderea]

I'd like to give you a gentle and minor privilege check. You're theorizing the Other (in this case transgender people) in a way which recapitulates a common *ist form, completely (I assume) unwittingly. As a bi woman, you probably don't think of yourself has having privilege in the GLBT movement that transpeople don't enjoy, especially considering how poorly bi people are often treated by the G&L part of the movement themselves.

Trans concerns are often minimized and marginalized in self-declared GLBT groups, in which the Gs and Ls running things don't particularly know or trouble to better educate themselves on how the T experience(s) differs from the G and L experience(s). In the vacuum of that knowledge, gays and lesbians -- and bisexuals following suit -- notoriously assume that trans people are just like them in their concerns; they generalize from their own experiences to the experiences of trans people. They also generalize across other forms of knowledge, such as generalizing from gay and lesbian history to trans history.

This post of yours is walking on that ground.

When you theorize that the conflict in the trans community around the meaning of being "out" maps to the generational differences in gay and lesbian history, you are inadvertently erasing the differentness of transgender experiences from gay and lesbian and bisexual experiences. That is to say, it proceeds in ignorance that, generally, people in sexual orientation minorities relate quite differently to their minority status than often do people in gender minorities.

Those transpeople who seek to "pass" are not typically primarily motivated out of a fear the consequences of being discovered to be in a gender minority; what they want is for their self-identified gender to be accepted without qualification. Their feelings about nondisclosure have more to do with authenticity than safety. They see in having to identify as "trans" an unjust double standard, where trans-born people have to mark themselves as gender deviant while cis-born people do not. People coming from that point of view see standing on the point that it's none of anybody else's business how their bodies were born, and refusing to divulge, as a principled political act.

There is a sense in which people in sexual orientation minorities want something quite opposite from what some people in gender minorities want. In a sense, what GLB people are fighting for is the right to be public, to not have to conduct their sexual and romantic lives in secret, from the right to hold hands in public with one's same-sex sweetie without having bricks thrown at one's head, to the right to be acknowledged their spouse before the law. In that same sense, what trans people are fighting for is the right to be private, the right to enjoy the same dignity and personal modesty cis people enjoy, to be allowed to leave their personal medical information behind closed doors, and not to have the historical configuration of their genitalia and chromosomes be casual public conversation with anyone they meet and the topic of gossip and idle speculation.

Thus for trans people the idea of being "out" has enormously different personal meaning, and a very different political context. Where coming out was, for gay men and lesbians since Stonewall, always a risk, it was a clear benefit to the movement; in contrast, for trans people, there is a very legitimate question of whether coming out is a short-term tactic with long-term strategic costs, ceding an important principle and undermining the movement.

Consequently, conflict in the trans community about the desirability of coming out as trans does not, in my limited experience, look anything like, e.g. the heated generational conflict among gay men (and now, I'm seeing it show up among bi activists.) In the trans community, there is much more nuance, and much more tolerance of other's differing choices. The conflict is less among people than within them. There is more understanding that this is hard, and that there are no foregone right conclusions.

[liv]

Very, very good points. I felt myself in a double-bind while writing about attending an LGBT event: I didn't want to ignore trans people and trans issues, or just tack them on as an afterthought, but I also didn't want to be an ignorant cis person appropriating trans concerns or theorizing about something I'm ignorant of. It seems I crossed the line in the latter respect. I probably should have just stuck to mentioning the trans talk and not tried to add anything of my own.

I very much do think of myself as having privilege relative to trans* people, but I guess the thing is that I also have incredible privilege relative to the people Rosenfeld was discussing. Mostly by reason of being born 50 years later, into a world that they'd already terraformed for me, but there are several other reasons too. So I'm not generalizing from my experiences of being bi in a safe, comfortable situation, I'm generalizing from what I learned from the talk (of course, we could talk about the privilege relationship between an academic and research subjects if nothing else!)

Absolutely, generalizing from one particular historical experience to a very different one is unhelpful and erasing. I was thinking on a more abstract level, but I think I didn't convey that very well and it seemed as if I was drawing more concrete, specific parallels than I intended. The things you're saying about passing or being out is more or less what I was trying to get at, but you have a lot more knowledge of the issue than I do and you're explaining it much better.

The key thing I learned from this talk was that privacy can be just as an important a right as the right to self-expression. If I implied that the pre-Stonewall, closeted group lacked nuance in their political expression, that was my inclarity; it's certainly not what the speaker was saying. I'm not sure she would agree with your analysis that, even in hindsight, gay liberation and the ability to come out was a clear benefit to the movement; the whole point of the talk was that people who wanted to preserve their privacy and keep what they regarded as a medical issue out of the public sphere had a completely reasonable and coherent moral position. They weren't just being cowards who sacrificed long-term benefits for the sake of avoiding risks.

Saying that homosexuality used to be classified as a mental illness is almost the gay equivalent of Godwin's law in internet discussions. What I hadn't thought of was the psychological consequence of that for gay people constantly told by the whole medical establishment that they had a terrible mental or personality disorder. At very best they probably regarded their proclivities as a sort of embarrassing paraphilia, not at all the sort of thing you'd want your friends, family or co-workers to know about, and the more so if they accepted the prevailing view that it was a dangerous deviance. So they had a genuine need for privacy and modesty, in the same way you describe trans people having that need and right.

But absolutely the generational conflict happened in a specific historical setting and isn't relevant to current divisions within the trans community. I shouldn't have written unclearly enough to imply that the two situations were parallel. But this is hard, and that there are no foregone right conclusions was more or less exactly how Rosenfeld summarized her research!

[liv]

Also, someone in an unrelated discussion linked to a Queer Secrets Tumblr, and right there on the first page I saw the following two images:
I came out, transitioned, against all odds, and I am still out and proud, even though I pass. I resent people who stay closeted or live stealth. my best friend is stealth and I think he's a coward

I have no desire to come out... not until I have someone to come out for. I am ok with this except I feel I'm betraying the LGBT community

The more general framing I took away from the talk is still deeply relevant (surfing Tumblr isn't research, but it looks to me like the people posting there skew young-ish, teenagers and college students I think). But that doesn't mean that everything can be explained by a single, simplistic model, of course.

[ajnabieh]

I've gotta say, I saw nothing about it (apart from a few status messages on FB) here in the US, but that the Lebanese queer groups I follow all had events and publications for today. I'd never heard of it until this year--and I originally found out about it from reading about the Lebanese groups. I wonder what IDAHO's history is...