Gay marriage is often used as a marker of how accepted LGBTQ people are in the US. As marriage rights are expanded state by state, as the media focuses more and more on queer couples being allowed to participate in the larger society much as straight couples have been able to all along, it’s easy to think that queer acceptance is on the rise. The issue of gay marriage is highly visible; it’s easy to count the states where it’s legal for (some) queer people to marry. The largest gay rights organizations trumpet each state which at last extends legal marriage for same-sex partners. It’s easy to point to gay marriage and say, “See, queer people are like us now, they can marry in many states.”
I understand, to a large degree, why the focus has been on gay marriage over the past decade or so. It’s shiny, it’s flashy, it’s sexy--and it is one of many important issues relevant to many queer people. When the state legally recognizes your partnership, you’re allowed to more fully participate in the greater society; you’re afforded more legal rights. It’s a certain kind of validation of your relationship, when the state allows you to create a legally binding contract with another person. And when you love that person, and when marriage is understood to be an expression of that love, it’s important to be able to marry.
The problem with gay marriage is that it’s not a marker for attitudes towards queer people among the general population. Whether a state allows for same-sex partnerships says nothing about whether queer people are at a greater risk for bullying, harassment, or other more subtle bigotries. Being able to marry someone with the same legal gender as myself will never be a protection from bigotry. Being able to marry someone with the same legal gender as myself doesn’t mean that I won’t ever be fired for being queer.
According to Wikipedia: “Twenty-one states, the District of Columbia, and over 140 cities and counties have enacted bans [on public sector employment discrimination based on sexual orientation] of one sort or another.” Keep in mind, too, that legal prohibition on discrimination isn’t a guarantee that employment discrimination doesn’t happen. As with gay marriage, it isn’t a preventative for other discriminations. The now infamous story about a bakery refusing to sell a cake to a same-sex couple occured in Oregon, which legalized gay marriage in 2014 and has prohibited employment discrimination on sexual orientation since 2008.
Queer people face discrimination in all aspects of their life. Some queer people are more susceptible to certain types of discrimination than others. Gay marriage is an issue that is of concern primarily to middle-aged, affluent, and white queer people. If you’re queer, poor, and not white, you face a completely different set of discriminations; and you’re probably more vulnerable to the consequences of these discriminations than someone who has more social privilege than you.
If you care about queer people, you need to support organizations which do more than push gay marriage. Queer kids often lack adequate access to basic mental health resources, yet are the most likely to need help. Queer kids often face housing discrimination, especially if they're openly queer, and especially if their parents are homophobic.
Legalizing gay marriage will not solve these problems. Legalizing gay marriage will not magically better the lives of queer kids living with bigoted parents; allowing gays to marry will not end the murder of trans women; being able to marry someone with the same legal gender as myself does not make it easier to accept that my actual gender isn’t even generally recognized, let alone legally recognized.
If you actually care about queer rights, find an organization with promotes more than itself and gay marriage. Find an organization which provides legal and mental health resources to queer people; find an organization which focuses on outreach. Find a local organization, one that will help queer people who have pressing and immediate problems, problems such as being evicted from their homes, being fired from their jobs, or being attacked in the streets. Don’t fall for the symbolic feel-goodness of gay marriage.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Friday, February 6, 2015
Non-consensual Labeling
There's a trend amongst liberal types where they like to guess at the sexuality of people they don't like--usually GOP senators or Christian fundamentalist preachers. I call this sort of thing non-consensual labeling (a term I may have picked up from Julia Serano's Excluded). It's a fancy-sounding term for "attributing to a person an identity label they wouldn't use to describe themselves." Senator Bigot McFuckface is caught in a consensual sexual act with someone of the same gender? He's clearly a closeted homosexual. (It's inevitably a "he", though whether this is due to the gender imbalance present in US politics or because we forget that men aren't the only ones who have sex, I'm not sure.)
On the surface of it, this doesn't sound all that bad. One could argue that it's merely applying a descriptor to a person based on a set of behaviors they exhibit. Person A performs Actions X, Y, and Z, therefore Person A is part of Category 1. It seems rather logical, after all, to describe people based on how they act; how else are we supposed to understand other people, if we don't attempt to describe them?
The logic, such that it is, falls apart when you pick apart at it, though. For one thing, sexual orientation is not primarily understood to be a set of behaviors. That is to say, you can be a gay man without ever having sex with men. You can be a lesbian even if you've had sex with men. You can be asexual even if you've had sex. You can even be straight if you've had sex with people of your own gender.
Sexual orientation is understood to be, for the majority of us, self-defined. Each of us examines our own desires and emotions, and settle on a descriptor to help facilitate social situations--after all, just because two people call themselves "gay" doesn't mean their sexual history or desires are identical; we use such labels as shorthand for conversations with people who we feel don't require an intimate knowledge of our wants and desires.
Well, you might be saying, if sexual orientation can't be deduced based on a person's behaviors (engaging in same-sex hanky-panky, for instance), how should one go about figuring out the sexual orientation of others? That's usually easy enough--assuming you have a sufficiently close relationship with the person (or are hoping to begin a close relationship with this person), it's customary to ask a person what their sexual orientation is instead of trying to apply a label to someone without their consent. Telling someone they're [insert sexual orientation here] without bothering to ask that person is much like assuming everyone you meet is named Bob. Depending on where you live, there very well may be a lot of Bob's, but it's generally understood that calling everyone you meet "Bob" is rude.
In addition to the rudeness implicit in calling people names that aren't theirs, applying descriptors to a person based on a behaviors you observe in them can also be called stereotyping. When one person comes up with a descriptor for another person, they are basing their description on a limited set of data, and run the risk of misapplying a descriptor. Stereotypes are often based on faulty observations and are generalizations our brains make in order to survive in a complex world; we can't help but make generalizations, but we can help how we use this information.
To go back momentarily to Bob, perhaps you've observed in your life that people with hair are often called "Bob", and every Bob you've met has had hair. Naturally, with every Bob you've met, your generalization ("people with hair are Bob") has been reinforced. But perhaps everyone you've met with hair has been too shy or intimidated to correct you when you call them "Bob"; maybe some of the people you've met and called "Bob" are, in fact, "Mary." You can't know until you bother to ask their name, of course.
There is a difference between self-identifying as, for instance, gay, and having someone tell you that you are gay. There is a feeling of loss of agency when someone tells you what you are--they are forcing you into a box, often without consulting you about the box. When someone tells you what you are, when they call you Bob without making the effort to find out if you're a Mary, or a Fred, or an Anne, they are denying you the chance to define yourself. They are asserting that they know you better than you know yourself.
When it comes to the sexual orientation of public figures such as Senator Bigot McFuckface, it's easy to overlook their basic humanity, as they are quite often publicly hostile to queer people. They aren't nice people. There's no reason to treat them with the same politeness you'd give people who aren't pile of horseshit masquerading as human. It may not seem like that big of a deal to speculate about the orientation of such people.
However, when we speculate about the orientation of people we don't like, there is implicit the idea that because they aren't good people, it's okay to non-consensually label them. This isn't as overt a homophobia as punching someone in the face because they're queer, but it's still troubling. Non-consensually labeling a person "gay" who is publicly vocal about their bigotry towards queers relies on the idea that being queer is something they should feel bad about. If we are actually concerned with making the world a safer place to be queer in, laughing at Senator Bigot McFuckface because he got caught having consensual sex is counterproductive to this end.
Deciding that someone is gay based on one sexual act, and using that act to trumpet their hypocrisy, actually works to foster a hostile environment for those who are still in the closet. Many queer people have engaged in sexual acts in their past, before they were out, that would seem counter to how they presently describe their sexual orientation. Sometimes the reason a lesbian has sexual relations with a man isn't because she's confused, but because she lives in a heteronormative society which doesn't allow her to honestly examine her own desires. And sometimes a person avoids using non-heteronormative labels because of the high social stigma associated with them (Roy Cohn, for example, was emphatically not a homosexual, despite the sex he had with men).
On the surface of it, this doesn't sound all that bad. One could argue that it's merely applying a descriptor to a person based on a set of behaviors they exhibit. Person A performs Actions X, Y, and Z, therefore Person A is part of Category 1. It seems rather logical, after all, to describe people based on how they act; how else are we supposed to understand other people, if we don't attempt to describe them?
The logic, such that it is, falls apart when you pick apart at it, though. For one thing, sexual orientation is not primarily understood to be a set of behaviors. That is to say, you can be a gay man without ever having sex with men. You can be a lesbian even if you've had sex with men. You can be asexual even if you've had sex. You can even be straight if you've had sex with people of your own gender.
Sexual orientation is understood to be, for the majority of us, self-defined. Each of us examines our own desires and emotions, and settle on a descriptor to help facilitate social situations--after all, just because two people call themselves "gay" doesn't mean their sexual history or desires are identical; we use such labels as shorthand for conversations with people who we feel don't require an intimate knowledge of our wants and desires.
Well, you might be saying, if sexual orientation can't be deduced based on a person's behaviors (engaging in same-sex hanky-panky, for instance), how should one go about figuring out the sexual orientation of others? That's usually easy enough--assuming you have a sufficiently close relationship with the person (or are hoping to begin a close relationship with this person), it's customary to ask a person what their sexual orientation is instead of trying to apply a label to someone without their consent. Telling someone they're [insert sexual orientation here] without bothering to ask that person is much like assuming everyone you meet is named Bob. Depending on where you live, there very well may be a lot of Bob's, but it's generally understood that calling everyone you meet "Bob" is rude.
In addition to the rudeness implicit in calling people names that aren't theirs, applying descriptors to a person based on a behaviors you observe in them can also be called stereotyping. When one person comes up with a descriptor for another person, they are basing their description on a limited set of data, and run the risk of misapplying a descriptor. Stereotypes are often based on faulty observations and are generalizations our brains make in order to survive in a complex world; we can't help but make generalizations, but we can help how we use this information.
To go back momentarily to Bob, perhaps you've observed in your life that people with hair are often called "Bob", and every Bob you've met has had hair. Naturally, with every Bob you've met, your generalization ("people with hair are Bob") has been reinforced. But perhaps everyone you've met with hair has been too shy or intimidated to correct you when you call them "Bob"; maybe some of the people you've met and called "Bob" are, in fact, "Mary." You can't know until you bother to ask their name, of course.
There is a difference between self-identifying as, for instance, gay, and having someone tell you that you are gay. There is a feeling of loss of agency when someone tells you what you are--they are forcing you into a box, often without consulting you about the box. When someone tells you what you are, when they call you Bob without making the effort to find out if you're a Mary, or a Fred, or an Anne, they are denying you the chance to define yourself. They are asserting that they know you better than you know yourself.
When it comes to the sexual orientation of public figures such as Senator Bigot McFuckface, it's easy to overlook their basic humanity, as they are quite often publicly hostile to queer people. They aren't nice people. There's no reason to treat them with the same politeness you'd give people who aren't pile of horseshit masquerading as human. It may not seem like that big of a deal to speculate about the orientation of such people.
However, when we speculate about the orientation of people we don't like, there is implicit the idea that because they aren't good people, it's okay to non-consensually label them. This isn't as overt a homophobia as punching someone in the face because they're queer, but it's still troubling. Non-consensually labeling a person "gay" who is publicly vocal about their bigotry towards queers relies on the idea that being queer is something they should feel bad about. If we are actually concerned with making the world a safer place to be queer in, laughing at Senator Bigot McFuckface because he got caught having consensual sex is counterproductive to this end.
Deciding that someone is gay based on one sexual act, and using that act to trumpet their hypocrisy, actually works to foster a hostile environment for those who are still in the closet. Many queer people have engaged in sexual acts in their past, before they were out, that would seem counter to how they presently describe their sexual orientation. Sometimes the reason a lesbian has sexual relations with a man isn't because she's confused, but because she lives in a heteronormative society which doesn't allow her to honestly examine her own desires. And sometimes a person avoids using non-heteronormative labels because of the high social stigma associated with them (Roy Cohn, for example, was emphatically not a homosexual, despite the sex he had with men).
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